The best way to predict the future is to look at the past. Humans have been living and working in the 3-D world since the dawn of time, we’ve worked with paper for thousands of years, we’ve only been working at screens for about 40 years. Technology to remove technology, such as this, is brilliant.

Unfortunately, I don’t this will work until we have robot secretaries that can automate updating paper wall calendars and documents and books scattered around a room.

The only compromise would be a limited area like a physical desktop that had affordances like an overhead camera and some form of paper output.

We are doing something related; taking the TipToi tech and getting it with our own pen to turn paper into interfaces that can control remote systems. See Https://papiro.press (the pages are still being redesigned, but we needed some placeholders to be able to talk to Chinese factories)

How about hacking a remarkable e-ink tablet as an easy prototype? The remarkable is basically a "better paper" already.

> they have the problem that they make it difficult to just use your calendar, todo list, or map—or even just respond to a friend's message—without encountering something else along the way, like a social network, short-form video, Slack, the news, or some other notification.

I see this seemingly everywhere. People are looking for these extreme solutions to solve the problem of getting distracted by an app like Instagram or TikTok on their phone. Wouldn’t uninstalling the app, and going a step further, deleting the account, be the more pragmatic solution here? We control what is installed on our devices, what accounts we have, and which notifications we receive. If someone has enough agency to move to a pen and paper, surely they can uninstall some apps?

While I like the idea of having a magic paper notebook that would somehow interact with computer systems, that idea seems like mostly science fiction without having significant levels of technology all around you (cameras, projectors, etc) which would kind of defeat the purpose imo.

I watched the first video on Dynamic Land and I think I’d feel very uncomfortable in a room like that. Look the wrong way and catch a projector’s light in the eye, and once big tech gets into the game, who knows what happens with all the data from the cameras. I’ve grown rather paranoid.

A phone with just utilities installed, no social media, or going a step further to something like an e-ink tablet (something like Remarkable), seems like it would get most of the way there and actually work today. The biggest concern then becomes the web browser, but the big tech companies do most of the work for us by making sites insufferable to use while logged out and without an app.

Something might be able to get rigged up with RocketBook as well, for an actual pen on paper experience, but having to take a picture of the pages is kind of a pain. I have one and the novelty wore off very quickly; it has sat in a drawer for years now.

I’ve struggled with this idea a bit myself, as I sometimes romanticize the idea of using analog tools, but when they exist alone on an island, that seems to come with some considerable downsides in the modern world.

Apple Notes can be good for some of this too. Instead of using ChatGPT, Apple Notes can use the phone camera to do live OCR on text and add it into a note. I’ve used it a couple times and it’s pretty handy, when I remember it.

This article tries so very hard to avoid confronting reality - going back to analog proves its inherent advantage over AI. There’s boatloads of research proving mind-hand-writing tool engagement is superior to voice recording or typing notes. I’m going to cite this in the future as a testament against AI, because that’s exactly what it is when seen through an academic lens.

This is similar to how movies and tv show productions are timed out over days of production.

See also -- The Screenless Office: http://screenl.es/

(On HN 2017, 138 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15960056)

cool idea