Long overdue in my opinion.
Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
211–220 of 305 posts
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
#212Key quote (for me) from the interview: "A social network is disempowering because you put a lot of energy into it, all your personal data out there, and tell it who your friends are. You can only use that information inside the silo of that particular social network." source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-tim-...
This is why I'm a fan of the indie web ( https://indieweb.org/ ).
I like indieweb but I'm not on board with their 'design first' slogan. I think to be most effective such a thing should be 'content first'.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
>For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don't understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google. Kay's criticism of the Web is very well justified and (like most of his high-level criticisms) typically misunderstood. He doesn't criticize it as a repository of…
I think people understand the argument, they just don't fully agree with it. Personally, while I agree that we have ended up with a fairly poor universal VM, I find it to be a fascinating example of path dependency. Maybe we would be better off with one repository of hypertext and one well designed universal VM, but what path would we have taken to get there? The hypertext repository was so compelling that everyone i…
Well said. Kay's misunderstanding is that it could have been any different.
He thinks that you can just design something nice from whole cloth and people will use it. That's why his designs aren't deployed.
I've been looking at projects like OOVM and going back in history to Self and SmallTalk, and there's a reason that those things aren't deployed. Don't get me wrong -- they're certainly influential and valuable.
But he's basically confusing research and engineering, as if engineering wasn't even a thing, and you can just come up with stuff and have people use it because it's good. You need a balance of both to "change the world", and TBL has certainly done that.
Another analogy I use is complaining about the human body. Like "who designed this thing there there trachea and esophagus are so close together?!? What an idiot!!!" Or "why are all these people mentally ill and otherwise non-functional members of society? Who designed this crap?"
The point is that it couldn't have been any different. It wasn't designed; it was evolved.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to detract from TBL's accomplishments, especially on this occasion but, he didn't solve the hypertext problem insomuch as he decided that the really hard things like provenance and bidirectional linkages weren't important. Google and Facebook did solve those problems, but only for commercial benefit. Moreover, it's clear that TBL regrets that early decision to the degree that he rails against the walled…
>Moreover, it's clear that TBL regrets that early decision to the degree that he rails against the walled gardens. he rails against the walled gardens while at the same time putting things into the standard, like EME, they powers them.
I think the EME thing is a symptom of a worse problem, which is that the internet is very much controlled by a handful of commercial interests. Whoever controls browsers can become a bad actor and you either go along with it or end up with a broken system (this site only works in IE).
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's Sir Tim(othy) . The "Sir" attaches to the given name, not the surname.
I've never quite figured out how sirs work. I know Knights were addressed with sirs and the Queen had something to do with it, but how does it work in a multicultural UK?
I've never understood why people (particularly outside UK) care about some "sirs" at all. "Mr. Tim Berners-Lee" sounds just fine to me.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
History should be decentralized too, then. Who remembers RSS feeds? I miss those days. We should have some superior spin on that but for social networks. Imagine Facebook, but your history/data were your own property. A friend would find you on Facebook, or Ello, or AnythingAnyWhereBook ... add your feed, and done. Then it is up to the Social Networks to make a superior product for you to enjoy your friends data and…
What do you miss about RSS feeds? They're still there... It's very rare that I come across a blog that doesn't have one, even now...
You're right, of course. It's possible I'm still pining for my perfectly set-up Google Reader account which I cannot quite replicate. That still hurts! RSS felt ubiquitous (to me) back then.
Anyway, to the point, try using RSS with facebook in the above context.
I hate being locked in - hence I gave up on FB. It's trash to me until it solves this issue.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case scarcity correlates to value. Given a choice I think I would take the Turing Award. :)
Same here. I will rather win that prestigous award.
I'd take the money. You can't take either with you and with a billion dollars I could get more than a few things named after me.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
#218Key quote (for me) from the interview: "A social network is disempowering because you put a lot of energy into it, all your personal data out there, and tell it who your friends are. You can only use that information inside the silo of that particular social network." source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-tim-...
This is why I'm a fan of the indie web ( https://indieweb.org/ ).
I'm sorry if this has to do with my sleepiness, but from that page I don't understand at all what this is. A kind of social CMS? A bloggers community? The page is rich in word count but poor in being informative. I'd be very grateful if somebody could give a little explanation of what this is, because, it seems to be an interesting thing.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not contribute to the conversation and tell us why what we're reading is incorrect?
He did: Gopher also does hyperlinking, and was a contemporary (1991 public releases) The still-used command line browser Lynx was first made for Gopher in fact, before being adapted for HTTP, which it still does.
Gopher were not hypertext. It had hierarchical menus which were separate from the plain text files.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." -- Alan Kay That quote is pretty unfortunate. I guess nobody's perfect.
Kay is bang on. 1. http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/ 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot 3. Comment elsewhere in this thread about how we have been forced into turning a document system into a VM.
He's absolutely right, and also completely wrong. It's like listening to the blind men argue about the elephant. "It's a particle!" "No, it's a wave!" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119057