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A recent NYT piece argued we need a mental fitness revolution to combat the cognitive decay caused by algorithmic feeds and generative AI. It's an efficient one-two punch. If you're not brainrotting on short form video content, you're outsourcing all of your thinking to an LLM. The result is a kind of cognitive strip-mining. What's left requires active defense. For me, one way of defending that capacity for deep work is with a pen on e-ink. Whether it's annotating a paper or starting a sketch from scratch, I'm intentionally making room for focused thought. My army of clawed Claudes and Codexes will just have to wait.
Introducing Alloy, a local-first AI workbench app for macOS.
• Own your history & memory: plain text files you control.
• Orchestrate: parallel agents, swap models mid-thread.
• Flow: riff to co-create with an AI & triggers as proactive monitors.
No lock-in, BYO-keys. https://smus.com/alloy-local-first-ai-workbench/
My e-ink tablet's built-in handwriting recognition has a 27% error rate. So I benchmarked local VLMs against cloud models:
Claude Opus 4.5: 3% error, 6 seconds
qwen3-vl:8b (local): 5% error, 74 seconds
A 2% accuracy hit to keep my journal entirely on-device? I'll take that trade.
https://smus.com/notes/2025/local-e-ink-handwriting-recognition-with-on-device-vlms/
For decades, I've carried a Field Notes notebook and a pen. I mainly used them to capture ideas on the go, but it would also be great to sketch out a diagram, or to journal a little bit, especially while traveling. Fast note-taking via the iPhone's action button has alleviated a lot of my need for quickly capturing ideas. But nothing can replace pen and paper for long form stream-of-consciousness writing or diagramming. I wanted to give my writing a digital life alongside the rest of my notes. So a year ago, I bought an A5 e-ink writer called Supernote. I really like it so far: it's a good size, input latency is reasonable, and the overall writing experience is fine. The device provides real-time text recognition on-device and a modest cloud syncing service. I've been using their unofficial API to sync notes and bring them into my Obsidian inbox. But then something happened...
