Hello World!
_with my ACM #sigweb interview on Cultural Computing.
📰 https://mprove.de/script/24/sigweb/index.html

@sigweb #hypertext #culturalcomputing #interfaceculture #openglam #iiif #iiifviewer @IIIF
@chronohh #AlgorithmicPhilosophy #digitalhumanities

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it”*…

Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI purveyor Anthropic, has recently published a long (nearly 20,000 word) essay on the risks of artificial intelligence that he fears: Will AI become autonomous (and if so, to what ends)? Will AI be used for destructive pursposes (e.g., war or terrorism)? Will AI allow one or a small number of “actors” (corporations or states) to seize power? Will AI cause economic disruption (mass unemployment, radically-concentrated wealth, disruption in capital flows)? Will AI indirect effects (on our societies and individual lives) be destabilizing? (Perhaps tellingly, he doesn’t explore the prospect of an economic crash on the back of an AI bubble, should one burst– but that might be considered an “indirect effect,” as AI development would likely continue, but in fewer hands [consolidation] and on the heels of destabilizing financial turbulence.)

The essay is worth reading. At the same time, as Matt Levine suggests, we might wonder why pieces like this come not from AI nay-sayers, but from those rushing to build it…

… in fact there seems to be a surprisingly strong positive correlation between noisily worrying about AI and being good at building AI. Probably the three most famous AI worriers in the world are Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk, who are also the chief executive officers of three of the biggest AI labs; they take time out from their busy schedules of warning about the risks of AI to raise money to build AI faster. And they seem to hire a lot of their best researchers from, you know, worrying-about-AI forums on the internet. You could have different models here too. “Worrying about AI demonstrates the curiosity and epistemic humility and care that make a good AI researcher,” maybe. Or “performatively worrying about AI is actually a perverse form of optimism about the power and imminence of AI, and we want those sorts of optimists.” I don’t know. It’s just a strange little empirical fact about modern workplace culture that I find delightful, though I suppose I’ll regret saying this when the robots enslave us.

Anyway if you run an AI lab and are trying to recruit the best researchers, you might promise them obvious perks like “the smartest colleagues” and “the most access to chips” and “$50 million,” but if you are creative you might promise the less obvious perks like “the most opportunities to raise red flags.” They love that…

– source

In any case, precaution and prudence in the pursuit of AI advances seems wise. But perhaps even more, Tim O’Reilly and Mike Loukides suggest, we’d profit from some disciplined foresight:

The market is betting that AI is an unprecedented technology breakthrough, valuing Sam Altman and Jensen Huang like demigods already astride the world. The slow progress of enterprise AI adoption from pilot to production, however, still suggests at least the possibility of a less earthshaking future. Which is right?

At O’Reilly, we don’t believe in predicting the future. But we do believe you can see signs of the future in the present. Every day, news items land, and if you read them with a kind of soft focus, they slowly add up. Trends are vectors with both a magnitude and a direction, and by watching a series of data points light up those vectors, you can see possible futures taking shape…

For AI in 2026 and beyond, we see two fundamentally different scenarios that have been competing for attention. Nearly every debate about AI, whether about jobs, about investment, about regulation, or about the shape of the economy to come, is really an argument about which of these scenarios is correct…

[Tim and Mike explore an “AGI is an economic singularity” scenario (see also here, here, and Amodei’s essay, linked above), then an “AI is a normal technology” future (see also here); they enumerate signs and indicators to track; then consider 10 “what if” questions in order to explore the implications of the scenarios, honing in one “robust” implications for each– answers that are smart whichever way the future breaks. They conclude…]

The future isn’t something that happens to us; it’s something we create. The most robust strategy of all is to stop asking “What will happen?” and start asking “What future do we want to build?”

As Alan Kay once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Don’t wait for the AI future to happen to you. Do what you can to shape it. Build the future you want to live in…

Read in full– the essay is filled with deep insight. Taking the long view: “What If? AI in 2026 and Beyond,” from @timoreilly.bsky.social and @mikeloukides.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy.

[Image above: source]

* Alan Kay

###

As we pave our own paths, we might send world-changing birthday greetings to a man who personified Alan’s injunction, Doug Engelbart; he was born on this date in 1925.  An engineer and inventor who was a computing and internet pioneer, Doug is best remembered for his seminal work on human-computer interface issues, and for “the Mother of All Demos” in 1968, at which he demonstrated for the first time the computer mouse, hypertext, networked computers, and the earliest versions of graphical user interfaces… that’s to say, computing as we know it, and all that computing enables.

https://youtu.be/B6rKUf9DWRI?si=nL09hD5GQD670AQO

@mrdk @mjd
Thanks! A great reference on the history and evolution of indices, and its relation to sequential printing technology.

The classical structure and organization of the Talmud might be another early example of a “spatial hypertext”—organized by alternative principles of adjacency and context—to reduce page flipping by the scholar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmudical_hermeneutics?wprov=sfti1#

#hypertext #history #talmud
Spatial hypertext: https://cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/37.html

@mjd “Was the alphabetic index invented before the scroll was superseded by the codex?” — Not really. Plinius' “Natural History“ has an index and he tells in his preface about another work with an index, but that seem to be the only cases. The problem is that with a scroll, you cannot actually use the index, because “leafing” through the pages (or better, “scrolling”?) would be too much effort.
It is also said that the introduction of Christianity was the reason why in later times, codices were much more popular than scrolls. The problem was the Bible: To work as a theologian, you have jump backward and forward between gospel and prophet books, between different gospels, and so on — much too much work if you have scrolls. The Bible was the first hypertext!

For more about indices, see “Index, A History of the” by David Duncan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index,_A_History_of_the).

#Index #Scroll #Codex #Hypertext

📢 Hypertext 2026 is officially open! 📢

The website and Call for Papers for #HT2026 are now LIVE.

Join us for the latest in hypertext research, social media dynamics, and beyond.

📍 London
🗓️ September 14-18
📝 Deadlines and details:

https://ht.acm.org/ht2026/

#ACM #Hypertext #Research #TechConference #CFP

Just published on Medium- Leopardi was a great Italian poet: a few people know that he invented the first hypertext
https://medium.com/philosophytoday/the-first-hypertext-was-italian-9162a41d902a

#hypertext #poetry #leopardi #Italy #thinking #intelligence #AI

I'm building an online #NortonGuide collection, in the hope of preserving all those handy help files we used to work with back in the #MSDOS days. Can you help? blog.davep.org/2025/12/12/n... #help #hypertext #clipper #caclipper #xbase

A Norton Guide collection

I'm building an online #NortonGuide collection, in the hope of preserving all those handy help files we used to work with back in the #MSDOS days. Can you help?

https://blog.davep.org/2025/12/12/norton-guide-collection.html

#help #hypertext #clipper #caclipper #xbase

#FotoVorschlag

Werkzeug >> Tool

Light pen, colorized photo
IBM 2250 vector CRT display
Hypertext Editing System (1969)
Brown University
Providence RI USA

#photography #hypertext #FilmPhotography

OK, so @milliesquilly gave a shoutout to Beny Danette which helped me discover this #HyperText competition winner made in a 12 hour creative sprint!
https://benydanette.itch.io/computer

Meanwhile, in a testament to the versatility of #Decker, @ribose created this science themed deck:
https://ribozone.itch.io/cell-culture
(do check out their equally gorgeous website https://ribo.zone/)

Inspired by the prodigious self-titled #decker zine queen @milliesquilly:
https://zine.milliesquilly.com/

@noracodes made a #zine in Decker:
https://nora.codes/post/infrastructure-photography-manifesto-and-decker-in-html/

which got shared by @alcinnz and that’s where I discovered Decker, a platform that builds on the old-school interactive feel of #Hypercard and rocks that Classic MacOS look:
https://beyondloom.com/decker/

There's even a #Twine integration! Time for some non-linear, interactive #storytelling, #HyperText style.

What is Gemini?

https://tilvids.com/w/tTtZuBfmWbvRtk4TqZUJpc

I made a zine in Decker, about why taking pictures of "ugly" things like power lines and train tracks feels meaningful to me. Also, I figured how to embed a Decker deck in a web page without an iframe!

https://nora.codes/post/infrastructure-photography-manifesto-and-decker-in-html/

#decker #hypertext #photography #infrastructurePhotography

For me the Bible is the original hyper text. Thomas Pynchon works is linear but becomes a hypertext in how the reader relates to it. Hopscotch is structured like a tree with optional fruit and choose your path game books have problem of character by the interaction of choice but have a nice complex shape in time showing complex structure.

My current idea involves a collection Pynchon like short stories but in Bible like library for a complex shape in time.

#hypertext

"A List Of Text-Only & Minimalist News Sites" is like a peek into an alternate timeline, where the web evolved in a different direction. Where it became functional and friction-free instead of bloated and annoying.

https://greycoder.com/a-list-of-text-only-new-sites/

#web #hypertext #oldschool

The pre-TRAC book, Wanted: A Reactive Typewriter
https://archive.org/details/DTIC_AD0400349

Which is SUPER hyper-texty, Vannevar Bush's Memex kinda thing.

And you realize Mooers is a total fruitbat when you read this. Good grief the man would do numbers on fedi or tumblr.
#retrocomputing #hypertext #trac

"PREPARE TO ENTER #HYPERTEXT."

(From an #ad on p30 of #MacWorld issue July 1987, via @johnblood's "Computer Ads from the Past" blog)

https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/vote-for-the-october-2025-post-topic

https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_8707_July_1987

#html #web #webdev

We retrieved from an old archive "NoteCards User’s Guide" V2.0 and added it to the source tree. Published in 1991, this manual better matches the NoteCards code that comes with Medley Interlisp but some of the information the document provides is now only of historical value.

https://files.interlisp.org/medley/notecards/docs/user-guide-v2.0

#interlisp #NoteCards #hypertext #retrocomputing

This is neat, hyperlinks in terminals:
https://github.com/Alhadis/OSC8-Adoption

It works in iTerm2, but you have to hold Cmd down while mousing over to see the link, otherwise it's just underlined.

#hypertext #terminal #unix #vt100

In NoteCards a "tabletop card" is an arrangement of cards (hypertext nodes) on the screen, such as the 3 cards at the center.

A "guided tour" is a graph whose nodes are tabletop cards (table icons) and whose edges are links connecting the cards. You traverse a guided tour with the control panel at right and the result is a "slide show" of tabletops.

For more on tabletop cards and guided tours see:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/58566.59299

#NoteCards #interlisp #hypertext #retrocomputing