Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

You invented a lot of what I'm using this very instant to compose this message.

I yearn to do great works of engineering and art, which I consider what you have done.

How do you come up with ideas?

There's coming up with ideas: learn to dream while you are awake, the ideas are there.

There's coming up with a good idea: learn how to not get buried in your ideas (most are mediocre down to bad even for people who have "good idea skills"!)

I write down ideas in notebooks to get rid of them. Every once in a while one will capture a different point of view.

And, there's the Princeton Tea joke of scientists comparing what they did for ideas. One says "I have them in the middle of the night so I have a pad by my bed". Another says "I have them in the shower so I have a grease pencil to write them on the walls". Einstein was listening and they asked him about his ideas. He said "I don't know, I've only had two!"

(Some people are better at filtering than others ...)

> There's coming up with ideas: learn to dream while you are awake, the ideas are there.

Any advice on how to do that, especially for those of us who are completely non-visual thinkers (aphantasia)?

Dreaming can work without images. What are your sleeping dreams like?

Apparently aphantasia doesn't appear to affect dreams (from research I've read), when sleeping I do have visual dreams, but awake, nothing but black even with eyes closed no matter how hard I try to imagine a picture.

Try doing some after images and see what happens ...