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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

news.ycombinator.com

361–370 of 931 posts

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#361
Hi Folks

Thanks for all your questions, and my apologies to those I didn't answer. I got wiped out from 4:30 of answering (I should have taken some breaks). Now I have to. I will look at more of the questions tomorrow.

Very best wishes

Alan

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this idea was originally Nicholas Negroponte's in the 70s. The Parc version was called "Ubiquitous Computing" and was led by Mark Wieser in the 80s ...

Thanks! This research was my first thought when I saw big companies starting to come out with things like smart watches, hyper-local beacons, and home automation products. But strangely, it seems like companies are still treating those all as separate lines. For example, Apple markets their home and watch projects totally independently of one another. But I have to think that they are working toward ubiquitous comput…

Didn't Apple just announced using your watch to unlock your computer for example?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#364
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me both acknowledge your questions, and also acknowledge that this forum (the media authoring tools) are not in scale with the needed answers ...

Perhaps a reddit AMA would be better? They have much more flexible/powerful comment system. Edit: Not sure why I am getting down voted for making a suggestion. Oh well.

Or maybe a Quora session.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#365

I remember a few weeks back, you said that you wanted to take a closer look at the Urbit project (www.urbit.org). Just wondering if you had gotten the chance to do so, and, if so, what your thoughts were.

Do you have a link to where he mentioned Urbit? I find the whole project (politics aside, though i wish this caveat was unnecessary) stunningly beautiful, especially the focus on verbalization (#spokenDSL), and having Alan Kay be interested in it is flattering even though I have no relation whatsoever :)

This subthread here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11810177

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#366
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about a little model of time in a GUI?

This is maybe the most Alan-Kay-like response so far. Short, simple, but a tiny bit like a message from an alternate dimension. "No, no, I'm not asking you to build the also-wrong solution someone else has tried. I'm saying: solve the problem.

Also feels like worse-is-better vs. the right thing. How much engineering effort and additional maintenance would be required to develop and support such a time-model? A lot. Alas, let us re-create software systems to be radically simpler so that we can do the right thing! Still waiting for Urbit and VPRI's 10k line operating system ... but that's what Alan stands for in our industry: "strive to do the right thing," or as you put it, "solve the problem".

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently aphantasia doesn't appear to affect dreams (from research I've read), when sleeping I do have visual dreams, but awake, nothing but black even with eyes closed no matter how hard I try to imagine a picture.

If you are not blind then you can see pictures. So this would be interesting to follow up ...

Not sure I understand what you're implying, I'm not blind, and only recently realized other people actually see pictures in their mind while awake. But dreaming while awake would be awesome if achievable.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#369

Hi Folks Thanks for all your questions, and my apologies to those I didn't answer. I got wiped out from 4:30 of answering (I should have taken some breaks). Now I have to. I will look at more of the questions tomorrow. Very best wishes Alan

Thanks a lot!!!

I know have some things to chew on :)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#370
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's a good non-UNIX open-source operating system that's useful for day-to-day work, or at least academically significant enough that it's worth diving in to?

SqueakNOS? http://squeaknos.blogspot.com ;-) It has a native TCP/IP stack in Squeak.

http://pillarhub.pharocloud.com/hub/mikefilonov/pharonos
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