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Portaltext, grand strategy-style recursive tooltips for the web

Portaltext, grand strategy-style recursive tooltips for the web

by alaskahoffman·Jun 16, 2026·1 point·0 comments

AI Analysis

●●●BangerRabbit HoleBig BrainZero to One

Grand strategy game tooltips for the web—hover any link and fall down contextual rabbit holes.

Strengths
  • Context-aware: reads both your current page and the hovered page to prevent hallucination.
  • Recursive nesting lets you explore knowledge gaps without losing your reading thread.
  • Native support for academic citations like DOI, arXiv, and PMID is genuinely useful.
Weaknesses
  • Chrome-only for now; Firefox and Safari users are left out.
  • Depends on Wikipedia coverage and LLM quality for accuracy in niche topics.
Category
Target Audience

Researchers, students, and curious readers who encounter unfamiliar terms while browsing

Similar To

Wikipedia Preview extensions · Link Preview tools · Project Xanadu

Post Description

Hi HN! I built a Chrome extension that generates recursive/nested "tooltips" upon hovering over links, images, pdfs, and unlinked citations like DOI, arXiv, PMID, etc.. I was playing Europa Universalis V and realized I could implement the same system but for everything just by using Wikipedia as a truth-source and pairing it with an LLM. It works especially well on hackernews itself, I frequently will hover an article about something I don't understand, and I can fill in all my knowledge gaps just by following the thread of nested keywords. It reads the page you're on, and the page you're hovering over, and then acts as a gel between them so the tooltip is always contextualized and doesn't need to hallucinate new information.

It's free and open-source in lineage with Ted Nelson and Project Xanadu's hyperlinks, I think eventually this UX mechanism could be an open web standard with sufficiently democratized compute/inference. https://github.com/alaskahoffman/portaltext

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