This essay resonates as it touches upon many long conversations I've had with a friend around our attempts to create a postmodern PKM system strung together wit

This essay resonates as it touches upon many long conversations I've had with a friend around our attempts to create a postmodern PKM system strung together with glue code, duct tape, and bailing wire while juggling chainsaws and bowling balls as GPT infrastructure exploded in the post-COVID era. In particular, I've found myself drawn to my early enculturation around the dichotomy of control implied by the mouse's Cartesian implications on what has increasingly been a 3-dimensional or n-dimensional thought space in the spectrum from API to GUI to HCI. LSS: the faster I type the slower the distraction of mousing becomes - mentally and physically! If only more people read Fitts! In my journey, this has involved everything from Microsoft and IBM's early joint venture work around CUA in OS/2, MAYA Design's introduction of mouse-manipulating Z-order (zooming) in DEC Workscape (noted by Mary Czerwinski of Microsoft Research... I'm not certain whether this was before, during, or after Bederson's work on Zoomable UI at U Maryland), Synergy's liberating the mouse's physical computer-monitor confines between Linux, Mac, and Windows twenty years ago, to tmux, tiling windows managers such as hyprland and the combo of sway and the Logitech multi-platform keybaords and mice on which I'm typing, Oh, I forgot my daily usage of helix. But I digress. The guys who wrote the post-modern computing tongue-in-cheek paper twenty years ago in Canada (IIRC) weren't wrong, at least satirically. This has all served the quest to find a spatiality of computing that mirrors and moves at the speed of thought. I've come close, but none of these has really worked in the holistic and integrated way that I've sought. Time will tell whether Brett Victor or the like has a beyond-Englebart-or-Kay moment. I'm hopeful while remaining cautiously optimistic. Sway and hyprland could certainly benefit from integration with software like synergy, hardware like the logitech devices, or any notion of "beyond Cartesian" at the keyboard. The obvious challenge is scaling usability in light of exploding complexity of the controls, mechatronics of control, and targets of control, both mental and physical - literally the origin story of the mouse itself. In much the same way that AI divides the room, so did the need for metrics that could start with Fitts while crossing the mental and physical chasm from API to GUI to HCI. Sadly, we're not there yet.