Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today • Hacker News Board

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#471

Post by tomp » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 12:14 PM UTC

di4na wrote: post #457

randomsearch wrote: post #454

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General question about this figure, which I've seen before: > read 23,000 books in a lifetime As a very conservative lower bound, a person who lives to the age of 80 would have to read 0.79 books per day, from the day they were born, to reach this figure. Or, to put it another way, who has read 288+ books in the last year? I'm quite sceptical about this figure. Any thoughts as to how this might be possible? Are the p…

AS someone that read at least one book per day if not more since the age of 6, yes it is possible. I can read between 100 to 200 page per hour, depending of the book. You reach a storage and money problem fast (Ebook are a savior nowadays). And you tend to have multiple books open at the same time. How does it work? There are several strategy. First i read fast. Experience and training make you read really fast. Seco…

What motivates you? Do you ever apply the knowledge you've gotten this way (do you even care)?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

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Post by datashovel » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 12:16 PM UTC

alankay wrote: post #249

ianbicking wrote: post #157

1. After Engelbart's group disbanded it seemed like he ended up in the wilderness for a long time, and focused his attention on management. I'll project onto him and would guess that he felt more constrained by his social or economic context than he was by technology, that he envisioned possibilities that were unattainable for reasons that weren't technical. I'm curious if you do or have felt the same way, and if hav…

It used to be the case that people were admonished to "not re-invent the wheel". We now live in an age that spends a lot of time "reinventing the flat tire!" The flat tires come from the reinventors often not being in the same league as the original inventors. This is a symptom of a "pop culture" where identity and participation are much more important than progress...

What steps would a group of people (civilization?) need to take in order to make progress here? When choices are abundant, the masses have been enabled, and yet knowledge is still at a premium?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

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Post by alankay1 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 12:18 PM UTC

astrobe_ wrote: post #455

alankay1 wrote: post #355

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Not proteins, but cell to cell (this is still an interesting mechanism to contemplate and develop ...

Do you believe in self-healing/self-repairing software?

This is a worthy goal, and I think quite possible. Note that Biology requires a lot of organization in order to do this, so it is likely not to be straightforward from where we are. But we had to make the Internet -- etc. -- self-healing in many respects (we had to go to dynamic stabilities rather than trying to make perfect machines ...)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#474

Post by tomp » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 12:18 PM UTC

heurist wrote: post #407

jbrennan wrote: post #334

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>I think most people grow up missing their actual potential as thinkers because the environment they grow up in does not understand these issues and their tradeoffs.... This is the meta-thing that’s been bugging me: how do we help people realize they’re “missing their actual potential as thinkers”? The world seems so content to be an oral culture again, how do we convince / change / equip people to be skeptical of th…

Marijuana helped me realize there was a lot about myself I didn't understand and launched my investigation into more effective thought processes. I've become much more driven and thoughtful since I began smoking as an adult.

What kinds of changes to your thought processes did you make?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

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Post by alankay1 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 12:20 PM UTC

calibraxis wrote: post #458

alankay wrote: post #130

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This is a tough question. (And always has been in a sense, because every era has had projects where the tool building has sunk the project into a black hole.) It really helped at Parc to work with real geniuses like Chuck Thacker and Dan Ingalls (and quite a few more). There is a very thin boundary between making the 2nd order work vs getting wiped out by the effort. Another perspective on this is to think about "not…

Could someone give hints/pointers that help me understand the following? "parsing non-command messages in each process ... not a strong attempt to intertwine a real language around the message structures (this very same thing happened with http" Does that mean the messages should have been part of a coherent protocol or spec? That there should have been some thought behind how messages compose into new messages?

Smalltalk was an early attempt at non-command-messages to objects with the realization that you get a "programming language" if you take some care with the conventions used for composing the messages.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#476

Post by alankay1 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 12:23 PM UTC

msdos wrote: post #461

alankay wrote: post #158

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There's coming up with ideas: learn to dream while you are awake, the ideas are there. There's coming up with a good idea: learn how to not get buried in your ideas (most are mediocre down to bad even for people who have "good idea skills"!) I write down ideas in notebooks to get rid of them. Every once in a while one will capture a different point of view. And, there's the Princeton Tea joke of scientists comparing…

How much impact have actual dreams had in your work? Have you ever gotten ideas or answers in dreams?

Bob Barton got most of his great ideas in sleeping dreams.

Most of my ideas come in "waking dreams" (this is a state that most children indulge in readily, but it can be retained in a more or less useful way -- I don't think you quite get into adulthood by retaining it, so it's a tradeoff).

Main thing about ideas is that, however they come, most of them are mediocre down to bad -- so steps have to be taken to deal with this major problem.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#477

Post by alankay1 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 12:26 PM UTC

olantonan wrote: post #465

alankay1 wrote: post #317

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It doesn't suck "getting old" -- and you only find out about stamina by trying to do things ... (We are fortunate that most of what is "new" is more like "particular 'news'" rather than actually "new". From the standpoint of actual categorical change, things have been very slow the last 30 years or so.)

About categorical change, I agree... seems like everybody is just busy optimizing stuff invented in the 70s.

Or less -- I think UIs have really gone downhill.

But, it's also worth looking at places where there's been enough change of one kind or another to constitute "qualitative". This has certainly happened in many areas of engineering and in science. How about in computering?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#478

Post by alankay » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 12:29 PM UTC

datashovel wrote: post #472

alankay wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It used to be the case that people were admonished to "not re-invent the wheel". We now live in an age that spends a lot of time "reinventing the flat tire!" The flat tires come from the reinventors often not being in the same league as the original inventors. This is a symptom of a "pop culture" where identity and participation are much more important than progress...

What steps would a group of people (civilization?) need to take in order to make progress here? When choices are abundant, the masses have been enabled, and yet knowledge is still at a premium?

All cultures have a lot of knowledge -- the bigger influences are contextual and epistemological (i.e. "points of view" and "stance", and "what is valued", etc.)

Self-awareness of what we are ("from Mars") is the essential step, and it's what real education needs to be about.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#479

Post by alankay1 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 12:34 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #331

alankay1 wrote: post #197

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I would work on the early grades for all students, especially gifted ones. The epistemological stance you wind up with gets set fairly early -- not in stone but also hard to work with -- and the early grades are where we should be putting our resources and efforts.

What topics, methods, or activities would you see more of? Which less? Is there any specific cognitive, childhood, intellectual, educational, etc., development model that this is based on? How would you account and adapt for different proclivities and/or interests?

So many of the questions point up the problems with the format and media for an AMA. So many of the best questions are out of the scope ...

But, let's just pick one biggie here: how about taking on "systems" as a lingua franca and set of perspectives for thinking about: our universe, our world, our cultures and social systems, our technologies, and the systems that we ourselves are?

This would be one very good thing to get 21st century children started on ...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#480

Post by alankay1 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 12:38 PM UTC

discreteevent wrote: post #360

alankay wrote: post #242

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Tricky question. One answer would be to ask whether there is an intrinsic difference between "computer science" and (say) physics? Or are the differences just that computing is where science was in the Middle Ages?

Thanks. I've been thinking about your questions. I might be misreading you but I think that the answer is probably yes to both. So we should try to get out of the middle ages by inventing new theories and criticising and testing them like physics. But maybe just the physicists should do that. In the meantime the engineers should focus on being able to communicate clearly with the best tools that are currently availab…

Engineering is wonderful -- but think of what happened after real science got invented!

Today's "computer science" is much more like "library science" than it should be on the one hand, and too much coincident with engineering on the other (and usually not great engineering at that).

It's way past time for our not-quite-a-field to grow up more in important ways.