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

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#841

Post by alankay1 » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 1:27 AM UTC

collinmanderson wrote: post #838

alankay wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do get depressed -- how could one not? -- the trick with depression is to not allow it to take you into in-action. Re: Unix etc. try to imagine computer systems without "operating systems" as they are thought of today (hint: look at the Internet, etc.). The basic heuristic here is to avoid the "when you criticize something you are implicitly buying into it's very existence!". First try to see if there is anything w…

> OSs are not necessary Is this because web browsers are all we need? (I'm about thinking ChromeOS as an example.) Currently, OSs are needed to create web browsers. Do you think there will be a time when a web browser will be able to compile itself (without requiring an "OS")? Also, will the web servers also not require an "OS"?

It's worth pondering the real implications of real objects as real virtual machines intercommunicating by messages (they were inspired in part by the pervasive world-wide networking that was part of Licklider's vision).

One way to think about this is that "hardware objects" are merely caches for the software objects that will embody the processes and intents.

As a cache, each computer needs a small amount of code to deal with resources of time and space and i/o to and from the net. This could be called a "micro-kernel", but in an object world, it is also objects, not a "stack". For "doing things", we can imagine a system of "real objects" residing on one or more of the hardware caches. What mix depends on the individual resources of the caches.

The wonderful Gerry Popek did a first pass at this kind of caching architecture that worked over a mixture of machine types in the 1980s -- it was called LOCUS -- and there is an excellent book from MIT Press that explains the issues and how it works.

Its main limitations were that it was made as an extension of Unix processes, but it definitely proved the concept of how this part of really distributed "objects" with cached resources worked. (I tried to get Apple to buy this system when I first got there in 1984.)

Bottom line is that there is nothing that resembles any of the huge monolithic OSs of today that "try" to make software dependent on them rather than to allow software to run everywhere and move everywhere.

So "OSs are not necessary".

(Smalltalk at Parc did not run on top of an OSs ... etc.)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

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Post by yawaramin » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 1:30 AM UTC

DigitalJack wrote: post #778

alankay wrote: post #622

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This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can negotiate with other objects they've never seen. Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...

It's hard for me to grasp what this negotiation would look like. Particularly with objects that haven't encountered each other. It just seems like such a huge problem. I don't really know anything at all about microbiology, but maybe climbing the ladder of abstraction to small insects like ants. There is clearly negotiation and communication happening there, but I have to think it's pretty well bounded. Even if one a…

Well, there's the old Component Object Model and cousins ... under this model an object a encountering a new object b will, essentially, ask 'I need this service performed, can you perform it for me?' If b can perform the service, a makes use of it; if not, not.

Another technique that occurs to me is from type theory ... here, instead of objects we'll talk in terms of values and functions, which have types. So e.g. a function a encountering a new function b will examine b's type and thereby figure out if it can/should call it or not. E.g., b might be called toJson and have type (in Haskell notation) ToJson a => a -> Text, so the function a knows that if it can give toJson any value which has a ToJson typeclass instance, it'll get back a Text value, or in other words toJson is a JSON encoder function, and thus it may want to call it.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#843

Post by ontouchstart » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 1:37 AM UTC

alankay wrote: post #840

ontouchstart wrote: post #837

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Thank you Alan for your deep wisdom and crystal vision. It is the best online conversation I have ever experienced. It also reminded me inspiring conversations with Jerome Bruner at his New York City apartment 15 years ago. (I was working on some project with his wife's NYU social psychology group at the time.) As a Physics Ph.D. student, I never imaged I could become so interested in Internet and education in the sp…

You probably know that our mutual friend and mentor Jerry Bruner died peacefully in his sleep a few weeks ago at the age of 100, and with much of his joie de vivre beautifully still with him. There will never be another Jerry.

Indeed, there will never be another Jerry.

RIP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Bruner

http://www.law.nyu.edu/news/in-memoriam-jerome-bruner

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#844

Post by nickpsecurity » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 2:58 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #808

This is one of the best threads HN has ever seen and we couldn't be more thrilled to have had such an interesting and wide-ranging discussion. I know I'm not the only one who will be going back over the wealth of insights, ideas, and pointers here in the weeks to come. Alan, a huge and heartfelt thanks from all of us. The quality and quantity (over 250 posts!) of what you shared with the community surpassed all expec…

I agree. Alread read several hundred of them. Looks like I gotta come back for anotger 200 or so. Just so many interesting subthreads here with who knows what impact waiting to happen. Thanks to you and HN for arranging it.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

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Post by valarauca1 » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 3:35 AM UTC

alankay wrote: post #610

richhickey wrote: post #603

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Data without an interpreter is certainly subject to (multiple) interpretation :) For instance, the implications of your sentence weren't clear to me, in spite of it being in English (evidently, not indicated otherwise). Some metadata indicated to me that you said it (should I trust that?), and when. But these seem to be questions of quality of representation/conveyance/provenance (agreed, important) rather than criti…

There are lots of "old and fundamental" ideas that are not good anymore, if they ever were. The point here is that you were able to find the interpreter of the sentence and ask a question, but the two were still separated. For important negotiations we don't send telegrams, we send ambassadors. This is what objects are all about, and it continues to be amazing to me that the real necessities and practical necessities…

>Please think especially hard about what you are taking for granted in your last sentence.

Any Meaning can only be the Interpretation of a Model/Signal?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#846

Post by technomancy » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 3:37 AM UTC

Crespyl wrote: post #802

gkya wrote: post #730

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I never said myself that tech per se will make kids dumber. What I say is, there should be measures governing their exposure, just like there are for other things. Just like an alcohol drinker and an alcohol addict are different, an internet user and an internet addict are different too. Just because some or most are not addicts, we can't dismiss the addiction altogether.

It's just that it seems a bit unfair to decry (or place undue burdens upon) the vast majority of responsible alcohol drinkers because we've found a few people who have an unhealthy relationship with it. Recognizing potential dangers is a far cry from saying that there's a risk of "losing the century" because of easy access to technology and entertainment, and it strikes me as rather belittling to the younger generati…

So by that logic, would you say that the only reasons children should not be allowed to buy alcohol are biological development reasons?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

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Post by mmiller » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 3:39 AM UTC

ontouchstart wrote: post #621

ontouchstart wrote: post #616

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I think object is a very powerful idea to wrap "local" context. But in a network (communication) environment, it is still challenging to handle "remote" context with object. That is why we have APIs and serialization/deserialization overhead. In the ideal homogeneous world of smalltalk, it is a less issue. But if you want a Windows machine to talk to a Unix, the remote context becomes an issue. In principle we can se…

Alan, what is your view on Olive Executable Archive ? https://olivearchive.org/

The Internet Archive (http://archive.org) is doing the same thing. They have old software stored that you can run in online emulators. I only wish they had instructions for how to use the emulators. The old keyboards and controllers are not like today's.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#848

Post by mmiller » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 4:04 AM UTC

syngrog66 wrote: post #311

alankay1 wrote: post #224

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Yikes!

possible takeaway: even Alan Kay knows not to wade into the religious war that is vi-or-emacs ;-)

I think one thing that scared him away was the word "relevant"... VIM might have as well (very primitive). Emacs tries to do some things that are worth doing, but it brings the user into "textland," not "systemland."

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

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Post by jsprogrammer » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 4:30 AM UTC

richhickey wrote: post #684

alankay wrote: post #669

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2nd Paragraph: How do they know they are even bits? How do they know the bits are supposed to be numbers? What kind of numbers? Relating to what? Etc

It contravenes the common and historical use of the word 'data' to imply undifferentiated bits/scribbles. It means facts/observations/measurements/information and you must at least grant it sufficient formatting and metadata to satisfy that definition. The fact that most data requires some human involvement for interpretation (e.g. pointing the right program at the right data) in no way negates its utility (we've lea…

Your selection of data is arbitrary.

Not only is your perception based on an interpreter, but how can you be sure that you were even given all of the relevant bits? Or, even what the bits really meant/are?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#850

Post by panic » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 4:46 AM UTC

InquilineKea wrote: post #825

stcredzero wrote: post #606

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The way you describe music here sounds a lot like how Steve Pinker has described music: as a mental equivalent of cheesecake;...isn't necessarily nutritious itself. Note that I didn't mean that in a negative way. Also, if you want to consume macro-nutrients, cheesecake is a pretty effective way to get simple carbs and dairy fat. is strongly tied to social bonding, emotions and motor systems in ways that have nothing…

What are some examples of such well-constructed games?

I think games are more like instruments than they are like music. The game itself isn't as interesting as the gameplay you can perform inside it. Speedrunning in particular has a lot in common with musical performance.