Creative Prompt Engineering for GPT-3 I’ve been playing and talking with GPT-3, and learning the fine art of Prompt Engineering. It’s not too expensive unless you’re using it in bulk, and it’s a lot cheaper per minute of fun than stuffing quarters into video games. Here’s one experiment that went quite well: I found something…

Sung to the tune of “I Wanna Be Sedated”, with apologies to The Ramones. Twenty-twenty-twenty four escapes to go, I wanna be <![CDATA[ Nothin’ to markup and no where to quo-o-ote, I wanna be <![CDATA[ Just get me through the parser, put me in a node Hurry hurry hurry before I go inline I…

Back in 1997, I wrote a few web pages about Stanislaw Lem, with some reviews of his books, including his delightful collection of short stories “The Cyberiad”. Inspired by his fictitious criticism of non-existent books, I wrote some fictitious home pages in the first person of his brilliant but braggadocios…

by Don Hopkins, Kaleida Labs, 1995 Note: This all seems pretty obvious now, but I wrote it in 1995, before the appearance of Java and JavaScript. Of course the links don’t work any more (except to the arpanet map), and unfortunately kaleida.com didn’t get snapshot by archive.org, but this is…

This is a transcript of a video taped demonstration of SimCity on HyperLook in NeWS. — HyperLook SimCity Demo Video This video was badly compressed a long time ago, and was recorded in the Exploratorium so there are kids screaming maniacally and people laughing uproariously in the background! It was a pretty insane demo and the camerawoman almost dropped the camera, but I’m glad I got it all on tape…

Timeline of pie menu development by Don Hopkins. ** 1968–12–09: The Mother of All Demos PEOPLE HAVE GOT TO BECOME MORE EFFECTIVE AT HANDLING COMPLEX PROBLEMS--AT THEIR DAILY STRUGGLE WITH COMPLEX AND URGENT ISSUES. THE SURVIVAL OF MAN SEEMS DEPENDENT UPON IT. ANY REASONABLE POSSIBILITY SEEN BY SOCIETY FOR INCREASING THAT EFFECTIVENESS SHOULD WARRANT SERIOUS INVESTIGATION — Doug Engelbart (1968) The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)

Date: April 10, 1988 To: Members of the Technical Writing Class From: Don Hopkins Subject: Proposal to investigate interaction techniques and display styles appropriate for the application of pie menus to window management. Pie menus are a fast, accurate way of selecting commands from a list of options shown on the…

Techniques for the Design of Circular Menus By Don Hopkins, October, 1987. Abstract Pie menus are used for making selections from items displayed on the computer screen, by pointing and clicking at the desired one with a mouse. …

As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to “put a bullet in OpenDoc’s head”. — Jobs explained (and performed) his side of the story in this fascinating and classic WWDC’97 video: “Focusing is about saying no.” Transcript: Q: What about OpenDoc? Jobs: What about OpenDoc??! (nods) Q: Yeah. Jobs: Yeah. (sips) (smirks) (leans) What about it? (laughter)