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The Psychedelic Inspiration for Hypercard (2018)

229 points by bobbiechen 6y ago

aphroz 6y ago
It's funny how things makes sense when you are under influence, but it is less usual it becomes real. I guess drugs helps you to let go and be more imaginative. But, it does not mean you need to take LSD to have brilliant ideas.
- tanepiper 6y ago
  I watched this video the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbgDf4HCHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbgDf4HCHU It's Sir Roger Penrose & Dr. Stuart Hameroff talking about the physics of consciousness - for the first time I think a truly compelling idea of what consciousness is in a scientific way that could potentially be empirically measured. They mention the use of psychedelics to create more "conscious moments" - and funnily enough in this piece, Bill Atkinson talks about pockets of consciousness. I wonder if there is really an argument to say that A) We have conscious beings on Earth due to some kind of quantum effect in our space (that is we really are just the bi-product of the quantum process in our universe) and B) Psychedelics can make humans more in-tune to quantum effects that give rise to consciousness - but as to your point I agree you don't need them for brilliant ideas.
  - browsergap 6y ago
    This is a great point. I think hallucinogens might "turn the dial" on our quantum consciousness and "tune you in" to different parts of the signal, possibly meaning they can "entangle" the quantum structures in our minds with persistent information structures present somewhere. Maybe they do this randomly, or perhaps each drug is "frequency locked" to some particular part of the "spectrum" (not that I think it's anything so simple as a spectrum defined by a couple of parameters like 'virbation frequency' or whatever, but...), because there are often the same qualia reported for some chemicals independent of the person or setting (like DMT, apparently everybody on that saw an entity once). Maybe the way chems affect us like this, is the same with getting into altered states without drugs. Or, to take a line from the matrix, "disrupt your input/output carrier signal" (as the red pill did).
    - msla 6y ago
      > I think hallucinogens might "turn the dial" on our quantum consciousness and "tune you in" to different parts of the signal, possibly meaning they can "entangle" the quantum structures in our minds with persistent information structures present somewhere. I'd be interested in a quantum theory where this statement made sense, to be sure. Penrose's ideas about quantum consciousness are widely challenged and not the mainstream, and his basing it on the Incompleteness Theorems is especially problematic, as those only even make sense in the context of certain kinds of formal systems. The later Orch-OR theory has been falsified, in fact: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3049/ http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3049/ https://www.pnas.org/content/106/11/4219 https://www.pnas.org/content/106/11/4219
      - browsergap 6y ago
        :) Thank you for the links :P particularly 2nd one. seems very interesting. really appreciate! :P;) xx fascinating both :p ;)xxx
    - LocalH 6y ago
      I’ve smoked DMT several times, including one deep experience full of intense time loops. Never encountered any entities.
  - nicoffeine 6y ago
    There are a few trillion reasons the Orch-OR Theory [1] is unpopular. If there are incredibly dense quantum structures called microtubules [2] operating at room temperature within each neuron (and in almost all living things), right now AI may be close to approximating the brainpower of organisms a little smarter than bacteria. Consider the lifecycle of a butterfly: learn how to navigate as larvae/caterpillar, learn how to identify appropriate food, flee danger, find a place to build a cocoon, perform a metamorphosis, learn to fly, instinctively navigate across a continent - all with one million neurons. All on a trickle of electricity. Meanwhile, a self-driving car with laser arrays, cameras, GPS, and a quarter rack of computer equipment can't reliably move when the options are forward, reverse, turn left, turn right. Focusing the puny brainpower of something like a ringworm at a specific problem may result in some basic (as compared to a human brain) learning ability, navigation, and pattern matching, but there's a reason the "real" breakthrough is always just around the corner. No one in AI or neurology wants to admit that the traditional model of neurons and synapses could simply be wrong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti... [2] https://www.molbiolcell.org/doi/full/10.1091/mbc.e16-05-0271 https://www.molbiolcell.org/doi/full/10.1091/mbc.e16-05-0271
- diggan 6y ago
  The way I see it, psychedelics can be tools you can use to see things you don't normally see, but you still need to be sober afterwards to "clean up" the ideas to allow people who aren't tripping to understand what you mean. A conversation between someone on LSD with someone who is not, will often look like the one on LSD is talking non-sense. If they are both on LSD, they can usually understand each other. If the person on LSD would have gotten sober time before talking to the sober person, they could make the language and ideas more suitable for understanding. So while Hypercard was initially "invented" under the influence, if they would have kept being on LSD while developing at as, it would have been a mess.
  - hippich 6y ago
    If I understand it correctly, psychedelics come with the rapid increase of tolerance wich last days. So it is very different from let's say alcohol where you can stay in the state for days. So you are somewhat forced to clean up ideas while being sober
- GordonS 6y ago
  Story time. I recall one afternoon I took mushrooms, when I was perhaps 15 years old. Not a huge quantity, but enough for a mild, pleasant experience. That same evening I realised that I had to write an essay for school - it wasn't like me, but I'd completely forgotten about it, and now had a single evening to write a whole essay... bah, how could I possibly do that?! I sat down, and... it just flowed. Words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas, characters, just sprang to life on the page - and it was good, really good! My mind felt amazing - like my consciousness had been expanded. I'd never felt such pure imagination and joy of knowledge before. By the end of the evening I had unquestionably the best essay I'd ever written, and about twice the target length. A week or so later when I got the results, it was a B, and I was kind of shocked. But the teacher called me back after class - he told me what I submitted was way better than A+ work, more what would be expected at university level. He also asked who wrote it, because "it obviously wasn't you" - he didn't believe my insistence that I'd written it. He couldn't prove anything, so gave it a B and strongly warned me not to "pull a stunt like this ever again". Of course, people can have great ideas and do great work without hallucinogenic drugs - that should really go without saying. But the results with such drugs can be utterly incredible - Also keep in mind the effect is not only while using the drug, but afterwards too.
  - 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
    Great story. thanks for sharing!
  - mudita 6y ago
    Did you ever try to reproduce this experience and experiment with writing under the of psychedelics?
    - GordonS 6y ago
      Well, there is another story there. Just some weeks later, I took mushrooms again - but this time we took way, way more. Hundreds of them. Shortly after the effects started coming on, I had a stupid argument with my friend and I was left alone for a while feeling bad. It all went down hill from there. I was disorientated and confused, lost all depth perception, and was seeing small monsters all over the place - I'd turn round and see one huddled in a corner, staring at me like it was planning an attack, then it was gone and I'd see another elsewhere. I was absolutely terrified; the whole experience was like the "essence" of terror. I seem to recall that in total the effects lasted for something like 12 hours. For the last few I was huddled up on a bed, shaking uncontrollably, thinking it would never end. Right at the end, another friend sat with me and talked about something terrible that had happened to her, getting it of her chest, perhaps thinking I wouldn't remember afterwards. I actually became quite lucid then, and felt such empathy and human understanding that I haven't felt before (some people think I'm autistic, so in retrospect it was particularly meaningful!). Anyway, that was the last time I ever took mushrooms, or any hallucinogen. Parts of the experience seem imprinted in my mind forever, and 20+ years on I'd still be really wary of taking hallucinogens again. I think hallucinogens can be extremely powerful, but must be used with care, and in the proper setting. I learned that the hard way.
- bookofjoe 6y ago
  I recall reading that once, when the Beatles took LSD, they wrote some songs while tripping that turned out to be complete garbage.
Gatsky 6y ago
Kary Mullis tells a similar story about inventing PCR (polymerase chain reaction), for which he won the Nobel prize in Chemistry.
ridiculous_fish 6y ago
Hypercard remains extraordinary. It anticipated the web, but have a taste of its scripting language: if the number of chars in field "Customer Code" is not 7 then ask "Please type in the 7-letter customer code" put it into field "Customer Code" end if This is a real language! 'ask' pops up a modal dialog. 'it' is a special identifier meaning "the last result", like Perl's context variables. But what is most lovely about this language is that it focused on users. As a user you could drag out a button, then double click and write some Hypertalk scripting. It was part of a vision where computing would empower amateurs to become desktop publishers or artists or programmers or... The web captured that magic for a time, when it was about HTML with light JS. But the modern web has advanced beyond the amateur.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  See, what I don't really understand is how people wrote Hypercard when AppleScript is so universally reviled. Was there anything different about how they worked?
  - FriendlyNormie 6y ago
    They don’t really compare. AppleScript was completely incomprehensible to me as a child, yet I was able to master HyperCard/HyperScript and create relatively complex games.
  - kalleboo 6y ago
    I was a user of both HyperTalk and AppleScript as a kid and I vividly remember how HyperTalk was easy and AppleScript was hell. I think the hardest thing about AppleScript was the strict typing system. Dealing with files and paths was nigh-impossible. AppleScript also had the unenviable task of wrangling this typed data between different applications each with their own dictionary.
    - protomyth 6y ago
      AppleScript really suffered if the dictionary provided by the app was ill thought out.
mcaswell 6y ago
I love how he was able to identify a problem of huge scale that truly mattered to him and was able to make a massive impact in solving that problem. Very inspiring. It feels very rare that all of those things line up (identifying a core problem, having the ability to solve it, and the time in which to do so), but this article gives me hope to keep striving for it
- masswerk 6y ago
  What's interesting is that the mission and its underlying question isn't that dissimilar from Doug Engelbart's, but the answer is completely different. Not a bootstrapping cyborg, but a friendly tool for recording and communicating data.
  - jes5199 6y ago
    Hypercard couldn’t exist without Englebart’s UI, though
pulkitsh1234 6y ago
I think most people (who have tried psychedelics) will have a story like this, but will never share it publicly because of the obvious stigma attached with these "drugs". Most people on HN will try to reduce these experiences and theory-craft over why/how, instead of giving in (and accepting the fact) that these things and experiences are something which have puzzled the human civilisation for ages, so instead just try it once and make your opinion then. Now obviously some of the psychedelic purists will claim to do a higher dose to see the full potential, but I would recommend to do just a very very light dose, such that effects are noticeable but not overpowering at all. My reasoning for a lower dose is that, our mind quickly starts craving the experiences of a higher dose (if the experience was good). Craving not in the sense of doing the psychedelics again, but craving in the sense that if-only-I-was-in-that-state-of-mind-all-my-problems-will-be-solved sense. Contrary, any bad experience(trip) can cause severe PTSD symptoms. If you see, both positive and bad trips have the same effect in some sense (just in opposite directions). Now, with a lower dose, the chances of bad trip happening is quite lower. A bad trip happens when you feel you are losing control, chances of that happening on lower dose is very very small. From a purist perspective the lower dose does not "unlock" the full potential of the psychedelic. Of course, there is always set-and-setting which also effect what you feel and how you integrate the experience later on. The effects of a lower dose are similar to just feeling "good" about yourself, like waking up after a good nights sleep and looking at a valley of colourful flowers without any sort of mental burden. You could be just looking at your room and feel the same way. The experience of lower doses, can also give you a window into how the affects of a good meditation session feels like. This is not the entire picture, but I suppose I should just stop writing.
- jcun4128 6y ago
  Ha after watching Jobs I was like "will I be Steve Jobs if I try some LSD" but I did not do it.
  - trenchgun 6y ago
    You did not become Steve Jobs?
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chamberecho 6y ago
Psychedelics should be legalised and regulated. There are many social benefits we're missing out on, including the insights possible in the article, as well as promising results for depression and other mental health problems. Instead we have all the ill effects of criminalisation...
betamaxthetape 6y ago
The Internet Archive has a large collection[1] (3,500+) of HyperCard stacks that can be run directly in the browser (using in-browser emulation of an old Mac Plus). I've been "maintaining" this collection of stacks for around three years - keeping the uploader[2] running (yes, you can add your own stacks!), checking the stacks for bugs / errors in the emulation, etc... and the range and breadth of what was created in HyperCard is just amazing. You've got silly little animations[3], sound samplers[4], choose-your-own adventure stories[5], reference guides[6] and teaching materials[7] (that last one was added to the collection with the very kind help of someone at the USGS who mailed me a CD-ROM so I could add it). I thoroughly recommend that those unfamiliar with HyperCard have a browse of the collection and see what was made possible by this groundbreaking 1980s tool. [1] https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks [2] http://hypercardonline.tk/ http://hypercardonline.tk/ [3] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_computer_sind_doof https://archive.org/details/hypercard_computer_sind_doof [4] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_cheapsequencersit https://archive.org/details/hypercard_cheapsequencersit [5] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_inigo_gets_out https://archive.org/details/hypercard_inigo_gets_out [6] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_macprinters-11 https://archive.org/details/hypercard_macprinters-11 [7] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_usgs---teaching-earth-science https://archive.org/details/hypercard_usgs---teaching-earth-...
- jcun4128 6y ago
  Wow... I don't really understand to what extent the canvas emulator works [1] but I was in an old dotty Mac OS interface and was clicking through the file system inside. Crazy... K's of unused memory storage ha. Tried to open a read me file but I guess it didn't work.
  - betamaxthetape 6y ago
    It is a real, functioning emulator of the Macintosh Plus from 1986. See the webpage[1] of the James Friend, who ported the emulator to JavaScript, as well has his posts[2][3] explaining more detail behind the project. [1] https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ [2] https://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser https://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser [3] https://jamesfriend.com.au/porting-pce-emulator-browser https://jamesfriend.com.au/porting-pce-emulator-browser (As an aside, the Readme file probably didn't work because no text editor was installed - the items in the HyperCard stacks collection typically only include the OS, HyperCard and the stack itself. If you try opening the stack it should work just fine.)
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deleted 6y ago
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Stierlitz 6y ago
“Why Hypercard Had to Die .. The Apple of Steve Jobs needed HyperCard-like products like the Monsanto Company needs a $100 home genetic-engineering set.” http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568
fnord77 6y ago
> It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures. Are we any wiser today?
- jes5199 6y ago
  maybe. we’re more aware of the humanity of people in distant places. we’re more aware of the consequences of our societies’ choices. we experiment more, culturally. These are improvements in perspective. Some of the upheaval happening now might be the panic of the old frameworks trying to fight the changes that are coming. I don’t know, but I do hope.
- iamcasen 6y ago
  His invention allowed the easier transmission of knowledge, which is undoubtedly valuable. His mistake was in thinking that transmission of knowledge necessarily leads to wisdom. Wisdom comes from direct experience. Knowledge is knowing, wisdom is being. They are two sides of the same process, but people often get hung up on the knowledge part of it and never go out into the world and deeply live.
walterbell 6y ago
Hypercard lead to macOS Applescript, iOS Workflow and then iOS Shortcuts. An iOS shortcut can be executed when iPhone is touched to a piece of paper with an NFC tag, or a geofenced zone is entered. The script can manipulate apps in iOS, then SSH to a remote device, invoke Linux code or SaaS APIs, then pass that data back to iOS for local processing and presentation to the user. The iOS Shortcut language editor is free on hundreds of millions of iPhones. Sadly, there is little support for backup, restore, sharing, discovery, versioning or auditing.
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
I just finished reading "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry," which similarly covers how many of the computing pioneers were influenced by psychedelics.[0] [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OCXFYM https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OCXFYM
unchocked 6y ago
Seems like a pretty decent ideation process, and you can't argue with the result.
katsume3 6y ago
I never had a trip that inspired me to do something very creative. I mean the will to create something psychedelic was there, and I done some brightly colored doodles in my notebook, but that was about it. Also psychedelics for me rarely tried to make me push for a better future as discussed in the article. If anything, they thrust me directly into the present, 'the felt presence of direct experience' as McKenna called it. Trips for me, were always like dreams, in that they are ultra vivid and lucid, and worthy of remembering, but quickly fade away like RAM when a computer turns off. Kudos to the author for bringing something back from the trip, something I could rarely do. One insight I did have though is the importance of knowing the time[0], which is why I surround myself with several clocks, which are all synced together, and none of them would be fast or slow. That's the only insight I gained after 10+ powerful trips! [0] Anecdotally I once had a situation entirely absent of clocks which freaked me out whilst tripping. My phone was absent, I didn't own a wristwatch. The TV had only international stations with different time-zones, and there was no-one nearby that I could ask for the time. Lesson learned.
Wirerack 6y ago
While I was offered LSD before, I could never shake the feeling that somehow this was "doing drugs" and therefore wrong. Objectively I could sense that this didn't quite follow logically, but I guess it is hard to shake the conditioning? Anyone else felt this?
- pugworthy 6y ago
  There is a lot of misinformation for LSD and other psychedelics, going back to the 60's. I certainly remember all those whispered rumors of the kid that took some and though the could fly and jumped out the 6 story window. If you're looking for an objective (in my opinion) perspective on LSD and other psychedelics, consider getting a copy of How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. Definitely a good read.
zackmorris 6y ago
HyperCard was the single greatest inspiration in my programming career. I learned it when I was about 12, the age of the kids in The Wonder Years show. So it had a huge effect on my brain's development. It's a little hard to explain what's so great about it. What I remember is that it was my first real exposure to scripting vs systems programming. So for example, I played with the little MIDI-style music generator forever. It blew me away that such simple notation controlled the complexity of the music chip. I sort of knew that somehow computers used binary and converted bytes to the shape of sine waves and stuff, because I was also using an old program called SoundEdit to kind of draw sound using commands like "envelope" and "FM synthesis" if I remember correctly. But being able to command that complexity from a conversational or human standpoint really blew me away. And everything in HyperCard was like that. You could dial the modem, speak text, make your own calculator or rolodex, just on and on and on, in probably the smallest amount of code that I've ever encountered. And my parents could even read the code, without ever learning how to program! So what that ended up creating was a feeling that the computer was full of easter eggs. For example, I didn't have access to array functionality (or more accurately, wouldn't have known how to use such a construct). I needed it to store the piece locations for the walls in a Gauntlet-style game I was making. So I ended up storing the coordinates like (100,200) as lines in a text field, and then seeing if that text "contains" the coordinate I was trying to move onto. But see, the text search functionality even on an 8 MHz Mac Plus is so fast as to be effectively infinite from a human frame of reference. So even though I was full-text searching these text fields, the game ran in real time and was a lot of fun. I still use this technique today in languages like PHP, where I know that the language is slow, but I can call down to any system call or compiled C function, and it will generally be faster than I need it to be. The only downside is that it opened my eyes to how tech could serve humanity, only to see that vision inverted so that we ended up at the present day where humanity serves tech. I know that the direction that tech is going is wrong, but I have trouble articulating how or why. And it kind of haunts me that something as revolutionary as HyperCard could be written in the 80s in Pascal, such a primitive language by today's standards, but we keep missing the mark with all of our modern tools. What's the next tool like HyperCard that could free humanity from this tedious labor? I just don't know, and that bothers me. I think loosely that it will work like J.A.R.V.I.S. on Ironman, but I know that all of the current approaches like Alexa and Siri are coming at it from the wrong direction. They're trying to find use cases for consumers from a profit motive perspective. But digital assistants need to work more like wolframalpha.com, and give users access to all of the capabilities in their computer (only in a notation that isn't terrible, no offense to Wolfram Alpha). I do know that some of the prerequisites are blocked by corporations though, like we should have had a cross-platform scripting language like HTML/Javacript long before the arrival of the internet. Apple and Microsoft would never allow that though, obviously. It should have been more of a hybrid between AppleScript and VBScript, only not terrible. Even AppleScript is a profoundly worse language than HyperTalk, and I don't know why. These deep questions get glossed over by everyone, and I hear quips and solutions for this or that. But remarkably, everyone is wrong, or else we'd be using that next better thing.
remir 6y ago
I'm not American, but when I think of America, that is what comes to my mind: the optimism of creative thinkers. The way that folks at Apple thought about computer is beautiful: they could be much more than tools for technical people. I now someone may polarize what I said with some whataboutims, but I think it's good to focus on the positive once in a while.
- 09bjb 6y ago
  It's true; this yin-yang of "What if there's a better way?" / "Don't tell me what to do" is inseparable in America, and is at the root of so much of what makes it both great and terrible.
w0mbat 6y ago
Part of the genius of HyperCard was that it didn’t take long for someone to learn the whole language and all the things you could do. Once I hit the edges there were a few things I wanted to do that HyperCard didn’t support but I found I could write an XCMD (external command) in Pascal or C to add any feature I wanted. That involved buying a compiler and Inside Macintosh books, and learning a much harder language, but I was so enthused with what I’d created so far that I didn’t want to stop. Each individual XCMD I wanted seemed small enough that it seemed possible to write. Once an XCMD was done it was easy to use and reuse on different projects. As it turns out, I’m weird, and very few people made that jump to XCMDs and soon I had a full time job writing them. Eventually our products were so XCMD heavy that I started writing Mac apps from scratch in C. It was a nice gradual seduction into programming from the career I was originally trained for.
- betamaxthetape 6y ago
  If you still have any of those XCMDs lying around, it'd be great if you could upload them[1] to the HyperCard stacks collection[2] - particularly if you still have source code. (Of course, only if not covered under NDAs, etc...). If they're still on old media (floppy disks, SCSI hard drives, etc...) contact me[3] and I'll do by best to help get them transferred. [1] http://hypercardonline.tk/ http://hypercardonline.tk/ [2] https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks [3] HyperCardOnline@gmail.com
  - w0mbat 6y ago
    An example of the XCMD-heavy HyperCard stuff I worked on was the "Last Chance to See" Mac CD-ROM with Douglas Adams. A small team worked on it but the whole UI is done with XCMDs I wrote as is the audio streaming. I don't see an ISO for that online (well it would be two ISOs as it was a double-CD-ROM).
perl4ever 6y ago
Now I want to see some sort of functional language, without too many baroque features, with a Hypertalk-like veneer.

229 points by bobbiechen 6y ago

It's funny how things makes sense when you are under influence, but it is less usual it becomes real. I guess drugs helps you to let go and be more imaginative. But, it does not mean you need to take LSD to have brilliant ideas.

tanepiper 6y ago
I watched this video the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbgDf4HCHU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbgDf4HCHU It's Sir Roger Penrose & Dr. Stuart Hameroff talking about the physics of consciousness - for the first time I think a truly compelling idea of what consciousness is in a scientific way that could potentially be empirically measured. They mention the use of psychedelics to create more "conscious moments" - and funnily enough in this piece, Bill Atkinson talks about pockets of consciousness. I wonder if there is really an argument to say that A) We have conscious beings on Earth due to some kind of quantum effect in our space (that is we really are just the bi-product of the quantum process in our universe) and B) Psychedelics can make humans more in-tune to quantum effects that give rise to consciousness - but as to your point I agree you don't need them for brilliant ideas.
- browsergap 6y ago
  This is a great point. I think hallucinogens might "turn the dial" on our quantum consciousness and "tune you in" to different parts of the signal, possibly meaning they can "entangle" the quantum structures in our minds with persistent information structures present somewhere. Maybe they do this randomly, or perhaps each drug is "frequency locked" to some particular part of the "spectrum" (not that I think it's anything so simple as a spectrum defined by a couple of parameters like 'virbation frequency' or whatever, but...), because there are often the same qualia reported for some chemicals independent of the person or setting (like DMT, apparently everybody on that saw an entity once). Maybe the way chems affect us like this, is the same with getting into altered states without drugs. Or, to take a line from the matrix, "disrupt your input/output carrier signal" (as the red pill did).
  - msla 6y ago
    > I think hallucinogens might "turn the dial" on our quantum consciousness and "tune you in" to different parts of the signal, possibly meaning they can "entangle" the quantum structures in our minds with persistent information structures present somewhere. I'd be interested in a quantum theory where this statement made sense, to be sure. Penrose's ideas about quantum consciousness are widely challenged and not the mainstream, and his basing it on the Incompleteness Theorems is especially problematic, as those only even make sense in the context of certain kinds of formal systems. The later Orch-OR theory has been falsified, in fact: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3049/ http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/3049/ https://www.pnas.org/content/106/11/4219 https://www.pnas.org/content/106/11/4219
    - browsergap 6y ago
      :) Thank you for the links :P particularly 2nd one. seems very interesting. really appreciate! :P;) xx fascinating both :p ;)xxx
  - LocalH 6y ago
    I’ve smoked DMT several times, including one deep experience full of intense time loops. Never encountered any entities.
- nicoffeine 6y ago
  There are a few trillion reasons the Orch-OR Theory [1] is unpopular. If there are incredibly dense quantum structures called microtubules [2] operating at room temperature within each neuron (and in almost all living things), right now AI may be close to approximating the brainpower of organisms a little smarter than bacteria. Consider the lifecycle of a butterfly: learn how to navigate as larvae/caterpillar, learn how to identify appropriate food, flee danger, find a place to build a cocoon, perform a metamorphosis, learn to fly, instinctively navigate across a continent - all with one million neurons. All on a trickle of electricity. Meanwhile, a self-driving car with laser arrays, cameras, GPS, and a quarter rack of computer equipment can't reliably move when the options are forward, reverse, turn left, turn right. Focusing the puny brainpower of something like a ringworm at a specific problem may result in some basic (as compared to a human brain) learning ability, navigation, and pattern matching, but there's a reason the "real" breakthrough is always just around the corner. No one in AI or neurology wants to admit that the traditional model of neurons and synapses could simply be wrong. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti... [2] https://www.molbiolcell.org/doi/full/10.1091/mbc.e16-05-0271 https://www.molbiolcell.org/doi/full/10.1091/mbc.e16-05-0271
diggan 6y ago
The way I see it, psychedelics can be tools you can use to see things you don't normally see, but you still need to be sober afterwards to "clean up" the ideas to allow people who aren't tripping to understand what you mean. A conversation between someone on LSD with someone who is not, will often look like the one on LSD is talking non-sense. If they are both on LSD, they can usually understand each other. If the person on LSD would have gotten sober time before talking to the sober person, they could make the language and ideas more suitable for understanding. So while Hypercard was initially "invented" under the influence, if they would have kept being on LSD while developing at as, it would have been a mess.
- hippich 6y ago
  If I understand it correctly, psychedelics come with the rapid increase of tolerance wich last days. So it is very different from let's say alcohol where you can stay in the state for days. So you are somewhat forced to clean up ideas while being sober
GordonS 6y ago
Story time. I recall one afternoon I took mushrooms, when I was perhaps 15 years old. Not a huge quantity, but enough for a mild, pleasant experience. That same evening I realised that I had to write an essay for school - it wasn't like me, but I'd completely forgotten about it, and now had a single evening to write a whole essay... bah, how could I possibly do that?! I sat down, and... it just flowed. Words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas, characters, just sprang to life on the page - and it was good, really good! My mind felt amazing - like my consciousness had been expanded. I'd never felt such pure imagination and joy of knowledge before. By the end of the evening I had unquestionably the best essay I'd ever written, and about twice the target length. A week or so later when I got the results, it was a B, and I was kind of shocked. But the teacher called me back after class - he told me what I submitted was way better than A+ work, more what would be expected at university level. He also asked who wrote it, because "it obviously wasn't you" - he didn't believe my insistence that I'd written it. He couldn't prove anything, so gave it a B and strongly warned me not to "pull a stunt like this ever again". Of course, people can have great ideas and do great work without hallucinogenic drugs - that should really go without saying. But the results with such drugs can be utterly incredible - Also keep in mind the effect is not only while using the drug, but afterwards too.
- 0xdeadb00f 6y ago
  Great story. thanks for sharing!
- mudita 6y ago
  Did you ever try to reproduce this experience and experiment with writing under the of psychedelics?
  - GordonS 6y ago
    Well, there is another story there. Just some weeks later, I took mushrooms again - but this time we took way, way more. Hundreds of them. Shortly after the effects started coming on, I had a stupid argument with my friend and I was left alone for a while feeling bad. It all went down hill from there. I was disorientated and confused, lost all depth perception, and was seeing small monsters all over the place - I'd turn round and see one huddled in a corner, staring at me like it was planning an attack, then it was gone and I'd see another elsewhere. I was absolutely terrified; the whole experience was like the "essence" of terror. I seem to recall that in total the effects lasted for something like 12 hours. For the last few I was huddled up on a bed, shaking uncontrollably, thinking it would never end. Right at the end, another friend sat with me and talked about something terrible that had happened to her, getting it of her chest, perhaps thinking I wouldn't remember afterwards. I actually became quite lucid then, and felt such empathy and human understanding that I haven't felt before (some people think I'm autistic, so in retrospect it was particularly meaningful!). Anyway, that was the last time I ever took mushrooms, or any hallucinogen. Parts of the experience seem imprinted in my mind forever, and 20+ years on I'd still be really wary of taking hallucinogens again. I think hallucinogens can be extremely powerful, but must be used with care, and in the proper setting. I learned that the hard way.
bookofjoe 6y ago
I recall reading that once, when the Beatles took LSD, they wrote some songs while tripping that turned out to be complete garbage.

Gatsky 6y ago

Kary Mullis tells a similar story about inventing PCR (polymerase chain reaction), for which he won the Nobel prize in Chemistry.

ridiculous_fish 6y ago

Hypercard remains extraordinary. It anticipated the web, but have a taste of its scripting language: if the number of chars in field "Customer Code" is not 7 then ask "Please type in the 7-letter customer code" put it into field "Customer Code" end if This is a real language! 'ask' pops up a modal dialog. 'it' is a special identifier meaning "the last result", like Perl's context variables. But what is most lovely about this language is that it focused on users. As a user you could drag out a button, then double click and write some Hypertalk scripting. It was part of a vision where computing would empower amateurs to become desktop publishers or artists or programmers or... The web captured that magic for a time, when it was about HTML with light JS. But the modern web has advanced beyond the amateur.

saagarjha 6y ago
See, what I don't really understand is how people wrote Hypercard when AppleScript is so universally reviled. Was there anything different about how they worked?
- FriendlyNormie 6y ago
  They don’t really compare. AppleScript was completely incomprehensible to me as a child, yet I was able to master HyperCard/HyperScript and create relatively complex games.
- kalleboo 6y ago
  I was a user of both HyperTalk and AppleScript as a kid and I vividly remember how HyperTalk was easy and AppleScript was hell. I think the hardest thing about AppleScript was the strict typing system. Dealing with files and paths was nigh-impossible. AppleScript also had the unenviable task of wrangling this typed data between different applications each with their own dictionary.
  - protomyth 6y ago
    AppleScript really suffered if the dictionary provided by the app was ill thought out.

mcaswell 6y ago

I love how he was able to identify a problem of huge scale that truly mattered to him and was able to make a massive impact in solving that problem. Very inspiring. It feels very rare that all of those things line up (identifying a core problem, having the ability to solve it, and the time in which to do so), but this article gives me hope to keep striving for it

masswerk 6y ago
What's interesting is that the mission and its underlying question isn't that dissimilar from Doug Engelbart's, but the answer is completely different. Not a bootstrapping cyborg, but a friendly tool for recording and communicating data.
- jes5199 6y ago
  Hypercard couldn’t exist without Englebart’s UI, though

pulkitsh1234 6y ago

I think most people (who have tried psychedelics) will have a story like this, but will never share it publicly because of the obvious stigma attached with these "drugs". Most people on HN will try to reduce these experiences and theory-craft over why/how, instead of giving in (and accepting the fact) that these things and experiences are something which have puzzled the human civilisation for ages, so instead just try it once and make your opinion then. Now obviously some of the psychedelic purists will claim to do a higher dose to see the full potential, but I would recommend to do just a very very light dose, such that effects are noticeable but not overpowering at all. My reasoning for a lower dose is that, our mind quickly starts craving the experiences of a higher dose (if the experience was good). Craving not in the sense of doing the psychedelics again, but craving in the sense that if-only-I-was-in-that-state-of-mind-all-my-problems-will-be-solved sense. Contrary, any bad experience(trip) can cause severe PTSD symptoms. If you see, both positive and bad trips have the same effect in some sense (just in opposite directions). Now, with a lower dose, the chances of bad trip happening is quite lower. A bad trip happens when you feel you are losing control, chances of that happening on lower dose is very very small. From a purist perspective the lower dose does not "unlock" the full potential of the psychedelic. Of course, there is always set-and-setting which also effect what you feel and how you integrate the experience later on. The effects of a lower dose are similar to just feeling "good" about yourself, like waking up after a good nights sleep and looking at a valley of colourful flowers without any sort of mental burden. You could be just looking at your room and feel the same way. The experience of lower doses, can also give you a window into how the affects of a good meditation session feels like. This is not the entire picture, but I suppose I should just stop writing.

jcun4128 6y ago
Ha after watching Jobs I was like "will I be Steve Jobs if I try some LSD" but I did not do it.
- trenchgun 6y ago
  You did not become Steve Jobs?

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chamberecho 6y ago

Psychedelics should be legalised and regulated. There are many social benefits we're missing out on, including the insights possible in the article, as well as promising results for depression and other mental health problems. Instead we have all the ill effects of criminalisation...

betamaxthetape 6y ago

The Internet Archive has a large collection[1] (3,500+) of HyperCard stacks that can be run directly in the browser (using in-browser emulation of an old Mac Plus). I've been "maintaining" this collection of stacks for around three years - keeping the uploader[2] running (yes, you can add your own stacks!), checking the stacks for bugs / errors in the emulation, etc... and the range and breadth of what was created in HyperCard is just amazing. You've got silly little animations[3], sound samplers[4], choose-your-own adventure stories[5], reference guides[6] and teaching materials[7] (that last one was added to the collection with the very kind help of someone at the USGS who mailed me a CD-ROM so I could add it). I thoroughly recommend that those unfamiliar with HyperCard have a browse of the collection and see what was made possible by this groundbreaking 1980s tool. [1] https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks [2] http://hypercardonline.tk/ http://hypercardonline.tk/ [3] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_computer_sind_doof https://archive.org/details/hypercard_computer_sind_doof [4] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_cheapsequencersit https://archive.org/details/hypercard_cheapsequencersit [5] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_inigo_gets_out https://archive.org/details/hypercard_inigo_gets_out [6] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_macprinters-11 https://archive.org/details/hypercard_macprinters-11 [7] https://archive.org/details/hypercard_usgs---teaching-earth-science https://archive.org/details/hypercard_usgs---teaching-earth-...

jcun4128 6y ago
Wow... I don't really understand to what extent the canvas emulator works [1] but I was in an old dotty Mac OS interface and was clicking through the file system inside. Crazy... K's of unused memory storage ha. Tried to open a read me file but I guess it didn't work.
- betamaxthetape 6y ago
  It is a real, functioning emulator of the Macintosh Plus from 1986. See the webpage[1] of the James Friend, who ported the emulator to JavaScript, as well has his posts[2][3] explaining more detail behind the project. [1] https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ [2] https://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser https://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser [3] https://jamesfriend.com.au/porting-pce-emulator-browser https://jamesfriend.com.au/porting-pce-emulator-browser (As an aside, the Readme file probably didn't work because no text editor was installed - the items in the HyperCard stacks collection typically only include the OS, HyperCard and the stack itself. If you try opening the stack it should work just fine.)

murphy5678 6y ago

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deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Stierlitz 6y ago

“Why Hypercard Had to Die .. The Apple of Steve Jobs needed HyperCard-like products like the Monsanto Company needs a $100 home genetic-engineering set.” http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568 http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568

fnord77 6y ago

> It occurred to me the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem, but we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures. Are we any wiser today?

jes5199 6y ago
maybe. we’re more aware of the humanity of people in distant places. we’re more aware of the consequences of our societies’ choices. we experiment more, culturally. These are improvements in perspective. Some of the upheaval happening now might be the panic of the old frameworks trying to fight the changes that are coming. I don’t know, but I do hope.
iamcasen 6y ago
His invention allowed the easier transmission of knowledge, which is undoubtedly valuable. His mistake was in thinking that transmission of knowledge necessarily leads to wisdom. Wisdom comes from direct experience. Knowledge is knowing, wisdom is being. They are two sides of the same process, but people often get hung up on the knowledge part of it and never go out into the world and deeply live.

walterbell 6y ago

Hypercard lead to macOS Applescript, iOS Workflow and then iOS Shortcuts. An iOS shortcut can be executed when iPhone is touched to a piece of paper with an NFC tag, or a geofenced zone is entered. The script can manipulate apps in iOS, then SSH to a remote device, invoke Linux code or SaaS APIs, then pass that data back to iOS for local processing and presentation to the user. The iOS Shortcut language editor is free on hundreds of millions of iPhones. Sadly, there is little support for backup, restore, sharing, discovery, versioning or auditing.

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

I just finished reading "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry," which similarly covers how many of the computing pioneers were influenced by psychedelics.[0] [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OCXFYM https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000OCXFYM

unchocked 6y ago

Seems like a pretty decent ideation process, and you can't argue with the result.

katsume3 6y ago

I never had a trip that inspired me to do something very creative. I mean the will to create something psychedelic was there, and I done some brightly colored doodles in my notebook, but that was about it. Also psychedelics for me rarely tried to make me push for a better future as discussed in the article. If anything, they thrust me directly into the present, 'the felt presence of direct experience' as McKenna called it. Trips for me, were always like dreams, in that they are ultra vivid and lucid, and worthy of remembering, but quickly fade away like RAM when a computer turns off. Kudos to the author for bringing something back from the trip, something I could rarely do. One insight I did have though is the importance of knowing the time[0], which is why I surround myself with several clocks, which are all synced together, and none of them would be fast or slow. That's the only insight I gained after 10+ powerful trips! [0] Anecdotally I once had a situation entirely absent of clocks which freaked me out whilst tripping. My phone was absent, I didn't own a wristwatch. The TV had only international stations with different time-zones, and there was no-one nearby that I could ask for the time. Lesson learned.

Wirerack 6y ago

While I was offered LSD before, I could never shake the feeling that somehow this was "doing drugs" and therefore wrong. Objectively I could sense that this didn't quite follow logically, but I guess it is hard to shake the conditioning? Anyone else felt this?

pugworthy 6y ago
There is a lot of misinformation for LSD and other psychedelics, going back to the 60's. I certainly remember all those whispered rumors of the kid that took some and though the could fly and jumped out the 6 story window. If you're looking for an objective (in my opinion) perspective on LSD and other psychedelics, consider getting a copy of How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. Definitely a good read.

zackmorris 6y ago

HyperCard was the single greatest inspiration in my programming career. I learned it when I was about 12, the age of the kids in The Wonder Years show. So it had a huge effect on my brain's development. It's a little hard to explain what's so great about it. What I remember is that it was my first real exposure to scripting vs systems programming. So for example, I played with the little MIDI-style music generator forever. It blew me away that such simple notation controlled the complexity of the music chip. I sort of knew that somehow computers used binary and converted bytes to the shape of sine waves and stuff, because I was also using an old program called SoundEdit to kind of draw sound using commands like "envelope" and "FM synthesis" if I remember correctly. But being able to command that complexity from a conversational or human standpoint really blew me away. And everything in HyperCard was like that. You could dial the modem, speak text, make your own calculator or rolodex, just on and on and on, in probably the smallest amount of code that I've ever encountered. And my parents could even read the code, without ever learning how to program! So what that ended up creating was a feeling that the computer was full of easter eggs. For example, I didn't have access to array functionality (or more accurately, wouldn't have known how to use such a construct). I needed it to store the piece locations for the walls in a Gauntlet-style game I was making. So I ended up storing the coordinates like (100,200) as lines in a text field, and then seeing if that text "contains" the coordinate I was trying to move onto. But see, the text search functionality even on an 8 MHz Mac Plus is so fast as to be effectively infinite from a human frame of reference. So even though I was full-text searching these text fields, the game ran in real time and was a lot of fun. I still use this technique today in languages like PHP, where I know that the language is slow, but I can call down to any system call or compiled C function, and it will generally be faster than I need it to be. The only downside is that it opened my eyes to how tech could serve humanity, only to see that vision inverted so that we ended up at the present day where humanity serves tech. I know that the direction that tech is going is wrong, but I have trouble articulating how or why. And it kind of haunts me that something as revolutionary as HyperCard could be written in the 80s in Pascal, such a primitive language by today's standards, but we keep missing the mark with all of our modern tools. What's the next tool like HyperCard that could free humanity from this tedious labor? I just don't know, and that bothers me. I think loosely that it will work like J.A.R.V.I.S. on Ironman, but I know that all of the current approaches like Alexa and Siri are coming at it from the wrong direction. They're trying to find use cases for consumers from a profit motive perspective. But digital assistants need to work more like wolframalpha.com, and give users access to all of the capabilities in their computer (only in a notation that isn't terrible, no offense to Wolfram Alpha). I do know that some of the prerequisites are blocked by corporations though, like we should have had a cross-platform scripting language like HTML/Javacript long before the arrival of the internet. Apple and Microsoft would never allow that though, obviously. It should have been more of a hybrid between AppleScript and VBScript, only not terrible. Even AppleScript is a profoundly worse language than HyperTalk, and I don't know why. These deep questions get glossed over by everyone, and I hear quips and solutions for this or that. But remarkably, everyone is wrong, or else we'd be using that next better thing.

remir 6y ago

I'm not American, but when I think of America, that is what comes to my mind: the optimism of creative thinkers. The way that folks at Apple thought about computer is beautiful: they could be much more than tools for technical people. I now someone may polarize what I said with some whataboutims, but I think it's good to focus on the positive once in a while.

09bjb 6y ago
It's true; this yin-yang of "What if there's a better way?" / "Don't tell me what to do" is inseparable in America, and is at the root of so much of what makes it both great and terrible.

w0mbat 6y ago

Part of the genius of HyperCard was that it didn’t take long for someone to learn the whole language and all the things you could do. Once I hit the edges there were a few things I wanted to do that HyperCard didn’t support but I found I could write an XCMD (external command) in Pascal or C to add any feature I wanted. That involved buying a compiler and Inside Macintosh books, and learning a much harder language, but I was so enthused with what I’d created so far that I didn’t want to stop. Each individual XCMD I wanted seemed small enough that it seemed possible to write. Once an XCMD was done it was easy to use and reuse on different projects. As it turns out, I’m weird, and very few people made that jump to XCMDs and soon I had a full time job writing them. Eventually our products were so XCMD heavy that I started writing Mac apps from scratch in C. It was a nice gradual seduction into programming from the career I was originally trained for.

betamaxthetape 6y ago
If you still have any of those XCMDs lying around, it'd be great if you could upload them[1] to the HyperCard stacks collection[2] - particularly if you still have source code. (Of course, only if not covered under NDAs, etc...). If they're still on old media (floppy disks, SCSI hard drives, etc...) contact me[3] and I'll do by best to help get them transferred. [1] http://hypercardonline.tk/ http://hypercardonline.tk/ [2] https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks https://archive.org/details/hypercardstacks [3] HyperCardOnline@gmail.com
- w0mbat 6y ago
  An example of the XCMD-heavy HyperCard stuff I worked on was the "Last Chance to See" Mac CD-ROM with Douglas Adams. A small team worked on it but the whole UI is done with XCMDs I wrote as is the audio streaming. I don't see an ISO for that online (well it would be two ISOs as it was a double-CD-ROM).

perl4ever 6y ago

Now I want to see some sort of functional language, without too many baroque features, with a Hypertalk-like veneer.