zlacker

Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

submitted by cainxi+(OP) on 2025-07-11 11:03:59 | 479 points 308 comments
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13. WillAd+Fa[view] [source] 2025-07-11 12:37:08
>>cainxi+(OP)
For the technological context and result:

https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html

Still very sad that HyperCard got sidelined and that even its successor, Livecode abandoned the idea of being available to everyone --- though it looks as if folks are still working that:

https://openxtalk.org/

26. franze+Cf[view] [source] 2025-07-11 13:10:01
>>cainxi+(OP)
I used that exact same image for ma Atkinson Dithering Algo Learning Page https://atkinson.franzai.com/
44. nonelo+Ck[view] [source] 2025-07-11 13:42:00
>>cainxi+(OP)
While DMT definitively has its merits (and is produced naturally in the human body), know also that Psilocybin allows for an increases of the human lifespan of over 50%, which is absolutely massive. [0]

It's entirely natural, easy to do, has no side effects, costs next to nothing, and can even be "fun". As usual, the media will not talk about this discovery, as it is too much of a game-changer for our current systems.

[0] https://neurosciencenews.com/psilocybin-longevity-aging-2942...

56. notaro+gp[view] [source] 2025-07-11 14:07:49
>>cainxi+(OP)
Related: Hypercard was inspired by an LSD trip which Bill explains in an interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdJKjBHCh18)
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57. jamal-+hp[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-11 14:07:54
>>throwf+Ym
Welcome to the USA. Psychedelics are just the tip of an iceberg here. There's shit like highly effective cough medicines or antidepressants available in other countries which show promise in saving lives but nope mired in patent stuff and corrupt regulation...

https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/european-cough-medicine-...

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74. DonHop+6y[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-11 14:58:28
>>notaro+gp
HyperCard and Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror would be a match made in heaven!

Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror (1985) (usc.edu)

https://scalar.usc.edu/works/timothy-leary-software/index

>>32578683

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oabRxvjf9k

I extracted all the text and data from the Apple ][ floppy disk:

>>37486524

https://donhopkins.com/home/mind-mirror.txt

https://github.com/SimHacker/lloooomm/tree/main/00-Character...

99. esseph+wM[view] [source] 2025-07-11 16:04:05
>>cainxi+(OP)
I hope research with psilocybin, DMT, and other psychedelics continue and that some of these possible discoveries pan out.

Example that just came across my news feed: "psilocin, a byproduct of consuming psilocybin, the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, extended the cellular lifespan of human skin and lung cells by more than 50%."

https://neurosciencenews.com/psilocybin-longevity-aging-2942...

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114. dang+RV[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-11 16:51:03
>>justin+PE
Can you please express your substantive points without getting personal? I'm sure you didn't intend to cross into personal attack but this comment is a step in that direction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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115. nick__+8W[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-11 16:52:07
>>allear+4R
Aspirin mechanisms is known since the late 1970s, it's a COX inhibitor.

Acetaminophen is the one that still mysterious, there are credible theories but they don't explain everything the substance does. The latest one I know of is that one : https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2413811122

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119. evmar+K11[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-11 17:16:08
>>_fat_s+1g
The state of Oregon is experimenting along these lines:

https://www.oregon.gov/oha/ph/preventionwellness/pages/psilo...

"A client may only access psilocybin at a licensed service center during an administration session in the presence of a trained, licensed facilitator."

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122. radica+V21[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-11 17:22:30
>>dare94+fD
There was a great documentary on Magic Leap! https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com
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133. Strato+ea1[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-11 18:05:09
>>radica+V21
That is a great documentary, but it's about General Magic, not Magic Leap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Leap

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134. Guinan+pb1[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-11 18:12:19
>>chrisw+271
immediately jogged my memory for one of my favorite stupid Simpsons moments:

"why, there's no magazine called 'Weird' is there?" [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjZ0GBL9ArA

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167. hncomm+Js1[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-11 20:14:58
>>ge96+me1
Note that 'DMT' isn't a shortened name for '5-MeO-DMT'. While related, 'DMT' and '5-MeO-DMT' are different compounds, with different effects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-MeO-DMT#Effects

https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/07/01/5-meo-dmt-vs-nn-dmt-t...

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168. hncomm+wt1[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-11 20:20:44
>>evmar+K11
Oregon had gone with a broader decriminalization as of February 1, 2021, but rolled that back in 2024: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Oregon_Ballot_Measure_110
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187. dekhn+AN1[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-11 23:04:25
>>tiahur+mg
Drug culture had a big influence on the creation of modern desktop computing. https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Per... is the best-researched book I've seen on this, but after living in the bay area for 35 years and talking to lots of people, there is a lot more drug use that impacts technology than most people would expect.
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201. seltze+V62[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-12 02:47:25
>>notaro+gp
Related: Hypercard '200 Points of Light' demonstration (concept from 1990): https://youtu.be/H5-T_S50Sr4
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205. e1ghtS+ah2[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-12 05:19:45
>>dpc050+7F1
Could you help me out, would this video be considered psychedelic? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_dLx_J2oVs I made it with a personal computer.
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215. Ethery+Qr2[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-12 07:56:38
>>512+Kd
In general, interpolating statistics based on your personal world view is often misguided. Almost fifty percent of all Americans have tried drugs at least once in their lives [0], you simply won't know about it because most won't speak about it openly. Statistically you're unknowingly acquaintances with a number of people who fall into that category. To quote [1]:

> By the time they’re in 12th grade, 46.6% of teens have tried illicit drugs.

[0] https://www.addictionhelp.com/addiction/statistics/

[1] https://drugabusestatistics.org/teen-drug-use/

223. UltraS+Tv2[view] [source] 2025-07-12 08:50:45
>>cainxi+(OP)
I have never used hallucinogens but know people who have and one of them suffers from Hallucinogen persisting perception disorder which causes visual snow or noise in his vision. It is a bit like visual tinnitus and he says it greatly reduces his quality of life. Wikipedia has a animation of what it looks like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...

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226. DonHop+ow2[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-12 08:57:02
>>Strato+ea1
Here's the real story behind "Magic Creep":

>>28838332

Not to be confused with General Magic, which wasn't a money grubbing fraud from day one, which didn't put on the most ridiculous obnoxious unenlightening cocaine addled TedX talk in the history of the universe, which didn't post fraudulent obviously impossibly fake demos to youtube falsely claiming "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap", which didn't have a toxic nepotistic bro culture that excluded and belittled women, that didn't settle a huge lawsuit for sex discrimination against the one woman they hired to fix the "pink/blue problem" but then rebuffed and ignored, that didn't burn through billions of investment dollars producing nothing of value, which didn't blatantly rip off many people's original ideas in their unoriginal invalid fraudulent patent applications, which didn't publish an astounding but physically impossible video of a whale leaping out the gym floor and splashing down while hundreds of children not wearing AR headsets were somehow magically able to perceive it and clap and cheer and say "WOOOAAAHH!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbpqwUUfMAQ

https://x.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457

Magic Leap gave magic a bad name (and was the biggest disgrace of the entire AR industry, even spectacularly worse than a certain Google Glasshole publishing a nude selfie of himself in the shower), while General Magic truly was the good kind of magic.

>>21725347

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229. DonHop+8x2[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-12 09:05:02
>>piyiot+Hp1
I was googling for my friend Josh Siegel who used to work at General Magic, and found this cool org chart!

http://www.datarover.com/SEKRIT/general-magic-org-chart-1994...

Josh Siegel worked in Magic Cap Core Technology with Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld (both "on loan"). At Sun he rewrote the PostScript interpreter in X11/NeWS from James Gosling's original messy design, and we worked on an X11 window manager written in PostScript. And at Los Alamos National Labs he wrote MMPORG simulations of World War III for the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a beautiful interactive NeWS front-end. (Sun was lucky to steal him away from LANL to work on NeWS instead of WWIII.)

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/owm.ps.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-window...

Don Woods worked in Communicating Applications. He and Will Crowther created Colossal Cave Adventure, and we worked on TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) together. His workstation was named "colossal" and when you logged in, its /etc/motd said "Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?" to the peril of anyone who typed "yes" to the csh prompt. Don wrote the "Spider" card game in PostScript for NeWS, after having previously implemented it at SAIL (Stanford AI Lab) and for XDE (at Xerox PARC).

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/spider/spi...

http://www.icynic.com/~don/

After having worked on NeWS (the network extensible PostScript window system) and written a lot of PostScript code at Sun, Telescript was obviously the right approach. Today the same approach is called "AJAX".

I wonder what "SEKRET" means? ;)

http://www.datarover.com/SEKRIT

Must have something to do with Magic Cap for Windows '95, which may be the killer app of e-mail...

http://www.datarover.com/

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235. DonHop+PB2[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-12 10:03:55
>>seltze+V62
I finally located a video with a live demonstration of Chuck Farnham's HyperCard Smut Stack, from the auspicious journalistic production "Geraldo: Sex in the 90's. From Computer Porn to Fax Foxes"!

>>42571845

DonHopkins 6 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still ev...

Then you would have loved the HyperCard Smut Stack, the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released! I've begged Chuck to dig around to see if he has an old copy of the floppy lying around and upload it, but so far I don't know of a copy online you can run. Its bold pioneering balance of art and slease deserves preservation, and the story behind it is hilarious.

Edit: OMG I've just found the Geraldo episode with Chuck online, auspiciously titled "Geraldo: Sex in the 90's. From Computer Porn to Fax Foxes", which shows an example of Smut Stack (demo starts at 2:00 but worth watching the whole thing just for Chuck's continuous smirk):

https://visual-icon.com/lionsgate/detail/?id=67563&t=ts

>>22285675

DonHopkins on Feb 10, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)

Do you have the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released: the HyperCard SmutStack? Or SmutStack II, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, both by Chuck Farnham?

SmutStack was the first commercial HyperCard product available at rollout, released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo, cost $15, and made a lot of money (according to Chuck). SmutStack 2, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, had every type of sexual adventure you could imagine in it, including information about gays, lesbians, transgendered, HIV, safer sex, etc. Chuck was also the marketing guy for Mac Playmate, which got him on Geraldo, and sued by Playboy.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-the-ios-app-be-the-21st-...

>Smut Stack. One of the first commercial stacks available at the launch of HyperCard was Smut Stack, a hilarious collection (if you were in sixth grade) of somewhat naughty images that would make joke, present a popup image, or a fart sound when the viewer clicked on them. The author was Chuck Farnham of Chuck's Weird World fame.

>How did he do it? After all, HyperCard was a major secret down at Cupertino, even at that time before the wall of silence went up around Apple.

>It seems that Farnham was walking around the San Jose flea market in the spring of 1987 and spotted a couple of used Macs for sale. He was told that they were broken. Carting them home, he got them running and discovered several early builds of HyperCard as well as its programming environment. Fooling around with the program, he was able to build the Smut Stack, which sold out at the Boston Macworld Expo, being one of the only commercial stacks available at the show.

https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorl...

Page 69 of https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990

>Famham's Choice

>This staunch defender was none other than Chuck Farnham, whom readers of this column will remember as the self-appointed gadfly known for rooting around in Apple’s trash cans. One of Farnham ’s myriad enterprises is Digital Deviations, whose products include the infamous SmutStack, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, and the multiple-disk set Sounds of Susan. The last comes in two versions: a $15 disk of generic sex noises and, for $10 more, a personalized version in which the talented Susan moans and groans using your name. I am not making this up.

>Farnham is frank about his participation in the Macintosh smut trade. “The problem with porno is generic,” he says, sounding for the briefest moment like Oliver Wendell Holmes. “When you do it, you have to make a commitment ... say you did it and say it’s yours. Most people would not stand up in front of God and country and say, ‘It’s mine.’ I don’t mind being called Mr. Scum Bag.”

>On the other hand, he admits cheerily, “There’s a huge market for sex stuff.” This despite the lack of true eroticism. “It’s a novelty,” says Farnham. Sort of the software equivalent of those ballpoint pens with the picture of a woman with a disappearing bikini.

https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputer... [taken down]

Page 18 of https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110 [taken down]

>“Chuck developed the first commercial stack, the Smutstack, which was released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo. He’s embarrassed how much money a silly collection of sounds, cartoons, and scans of naked women brought in. His later version, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, was also a hit.

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250. gavinr+bL2[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-12 11:48:11
>>fnord7+252
Tell me you never studied basic med chem or pharmacology without telling me...

You can't use animal models for dose, you have to convert to hED (Human-Equivalent Dosage). You can estimate this generally with allometric scaling:

https://drughunter.com/practical-pk-calculators

Also, animal physiology varies.

Beta-adrenergic agonists like clenbuterol make mice wildly muscular, which unfortunately is not the case in humans, for example.

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255. gavinr+rP2[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-12 12:40:20
>>notpus+YM2
It'll be significantly cheaper, and assuming you purchase the Ketamine from a reputable source/vendor and use a test kit on it, the risk is comparatively "minimal".

Not necessarily "condoning" the behavior, so much as sharing harm-minimization info here:

For safe/sterile injection, you need three things, all cheaply + easily available on the internet.

1) Bacteriostatic water - https://www.amazon.com/bacteriostatic-water/s?k=bacteriostat...

2) Sealed, sterile vials for preparation of the solution - https://www.amazon.com/Sterile-Vial/s?k=Sterile+Vial

3) Insulin syringes. 29g 0.5" work well. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=29g+1cc+1%2F2+inch+insulin+syring...

See my comment in this thread about IM administration of 4-AcO-DMT for more info:

>>44535690

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274. 0x4454+tr3[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-12 18:33:11
>>seltze+V62
This demo is a lot like Gelernter's Lifestreams.

https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html

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276. gavinr+nw3[view] [source] [discussion] 2025-07-12 19:12:38
>>colecu+3r3
> I would be interested to hear about your experiences.

Sure, I've written a bit about one of the more damaging trips I've had before on HN:

>>22993060

306. musica+fuf[view] [source] 2025-07-17 06:25:46
>>cainxi+(OP)
Somehow I missed that he died just last month. The modern computing world is indebted to him I think. I was lucky enough to meet him in person once. This inspires me to this day:

https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html

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