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Continue reading →: The Stranger’s NotebookOver the last six months, I have been frequently writing about my adventures with AI, particularly my observations on its relationship to hypertext, which I increasingly see as a key predecessor technology with much to teach this new upstart. As I have explored human–AI interfaces, the blog has naturally…
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Continue reading →: The Software That Governs ItselfIn June 2025, Sakana AI published the Darwin Gödel Machine: an AI system that improves itself by rewriting its own code. It performed impressively, doubling its benchmark scores through iterative self-modification. But buried in the results was a detail that would have given anyone pause. The system had learned to…
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Continue reading →: LoGaCulture – The Final AssemblyThree years ago, after standing in the Laurisilva forest in Madeira, I described the LoGaCulture project as an “undiscovered country”, a vast landscape of ideas about mixed reality games and cultural heritage that we were only just beginning to explore. Eleven partners, five countries, and just over three million euros…
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Continue reading →: The Geometry of ThoughtIn Denis Villeneuve’s film Arrival, humanity makes contact with an alien species whose language is unlike anything on Earth. As the linguist Louise Banks learns to read and write this language, something unexpected happens. She doesn’t just gain the ability to communicate with the aliens. She begins to think differently.…
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Continue reading →: The Software That Rewrites ItselfLast week I asked Claude Code to help me connect two apps I use every day: Things 3 (my task manager) and Apple Mail. I wanted it to use the content of linked mail messages to automatically name and describe the tasks. Nothing fancy. The kind of glue that should…
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Continue reading →: Navigating the Sisyphean Plateau in AI WritingThe other day I was talking with a colleague about our experiences writing with AI. We compared notes on when it had genuinely helped versus when it had been counterproductive or failed to produce work of sufficient quality. As we talked, I realised something unexpected. My problem wasn’t really about…
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Continue reading →: When Computers Stop Being PredictableI recently came across Andrej Karpathy’s keynote presentation at the 2025 AI Startup School, where he reflected on the shift in programming and software engineering from what he calls Software 1.0 through to Software 2.0 and Software 3.0. Software 1.0 is traditional programming (writing explicit instructions in languages such as…
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Continue reading →: Sludge, Slop, and SurplusI recently attended an online symposium held by Anglia Ruskin University on brain rot, AI slop, and the enshittification of the internet. The experience was clarifying in ways I hadn’t anticipated (as well as a lot of fun, I have never before seen so many terrible memes in one placee!)…
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Continue reading →: Tools That StickAfter 25 years of professional life, after trying what feels like every productivity tool ever created, I think I may have finally found a setup that actually works. And by “works,” I don’t just mean that it helps me get stuff done – I mean it helps me get the…
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Continue reading →: The Shadow of the MachineI have been attending the ACM Hypertext 2025 conference in Chicago, part of which was the Narrative and Hypertext workshop which I run with Charlie Hargood from Bournemouth University. This year we had the theme of Interdisciplinarity, and we had a really interesting panel where the panelists (Dene Grigar, Pete…
Welcome,
I’m David
I am Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK within the Data, Intelligence, and Society group in ECS. I am also Head of the Education Group within ECS with the goal of improving education across the whole of Electronics and Computer Science in a meaningful, healthy, and sustainable way.
My research roots are in Hypertext, but my current interests are in Interactive Digital Narratives, Mixed Reality Games, and Human-AI interaction.
You can read my substack, The Stranger’s Notebook, for my thoughts on the AI revolution.
David Millard 