Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

What is HARC currently working on? Is it for now a continuation of the old CDG Labs / VPRI projects or are there already new projects planned / underway?

Also, how do you organize and record your ideas? Pen and paper? Some kind of software? What system do you use? I ask because I'm fascinated by the idea of software that aids in thought, collaboration, and programming - meshing them all together.

I've seen elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940007) that you agreed that many mainstream "paradigms" should be "retired". Retiring implies that you replace. In particular, I'm curious what you would like to see filesystems or the Unix terminal replaced with?

Whenever I've gone to an anime con, it seems like the older genre masters like Yoshiyuki Tomino (Gundam) were always urging the audience to get to know something besides anime/manga. Specifically to go out and get involved in something to create media about, so as to avoid producing something completely self-referential and navel-gazing. That also seems to apply to the medium of programming. (As in: Do we really need another To-Do app?)

It's also related to what Scott Adams urges. It's pretty hard to get to be in the top best 10% at a single field. It's much easier to be in the top 25% of two different fields, which would make you one of the top 10% of that interdisciplinary combination.

Alan, while trying come up with a good question, I learned you are a musician. Great! As a fellow musician (also jazz and classical) I'm curious whether you feel this has influenced your engineering.

Would you rather fight one horse-sized ducks, or one hundred duck-sized horses?

What do you think about a "digital Sabbath," [1] specifically in the context of touchstones like:

Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect [2] Edge's annual question, How is the Internet Changing the Way you Think? [3] Carr's Is Google Making Us Stupid? [4] ...and other common criticisms of "information overload"

[1] http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/ [2] http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html [3] https://www.edge.org/annual-question/how-is-the-internet-cha... [4] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-googl...