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Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

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Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#101

Post by barrkel »

_dps wrote: post #85
DonbunEf7 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deconstruction is a way of viewing reality which comes naturally equipped with a process for disassembling ideas (the "deconstructive process") as well as a process for viewing ideas as the synthesis of other ideas (the "constructive process"). The core is this: all semantics are relative, all observations surface-level, and all truths buried in the raw materials. But since the materials are themselves relative, all…

I am far from an expert in Deconstruction, but I am an expert in mathematics and have read a fair amount on the foundations of mathematics. I find your description technically correct, but highly misleading. The vast majority of mathematicians will agree with "no one true foundation". However, unlike the bulk of postmodern/deconstructive work, they are then perfectly happy to say "this particular foundation is good e…

It's given us a framework to understand what's going on in a world with fake news. Arguably, Deconstructionists made Trump possible.

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#102

Post by mkhalil »

I don't buy it that everyone would be a digital creative if they just had the right tools. To make quality content, whether it be apps/music/movies/etc..it requires much more than tools.

I respect Alan Kay, but I don't understand the need to bash on modern day technology.

Have we really come along way in terms of general computing? Maybe not [Example: 0]. But in terms of the digital world, I can take a video of my parents and send it to my cousin who lives 10,000 miles away and he can respond in a matter of seconds.

I can literally meet people in remote areas of the world. I can interact with people who barely have food but somehow can get cell phone access and now they are learning and communicating with everyone else. I can't imagine a better way to level the playing field (socioeconomically) globally then how we have it.

Do we have a lot more work to do? Sure. But Rome wasn't built in a day.

The future of the internet & technology, the direction it's headed, is going to come from small contributions from millions across the world.

What people will need will turn into what we have and use. And there won't be some magical device that just pops out of nowhere that will change everything.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#103

Post by a_dev_123 »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #78
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, the STEPS project I mentioned above¹ doesn't count? Bret Victor's work wouldn't count? That's incredibly short sighted. It is incredibly short sighted to make an assumption about what I said and criticize on that wrong assumption. There's a term for this logical fallacy but i forget. Anyway, there's a huge difference between coming up with an idea/prototype and turning it into a product that's meant for mainstr…

> It is incredibly short sighted to make an assumption about what I said and criticize on that wrong assumption. Are you saying I was mistaken and the STEPS project and Bret Victor's demos do count after all? Even though they're prototypes that haven't been "productised and distributed"? I merely assumed you meant what you wrote. If you didn't, don't complain. > What I'm criticizing is his comments on Apple's impleme…

What part of "if you see a style, they blew it" is hard for you to understand?

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#104

Post by ktRolster »

p1esk wrote: post #96
runevault wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actually I'd argue he understands the problem pretty well. He talks about needing to offer something SO compelling they cannot help but interface with it, in spite of their desire for things that do not push them.

I'm not sure if there's a problem at all. Learning how to do anything is much easier today than ever. Just type "how to do X" in google, and you will probably see a nice YouTube video, or a tutorial. If you get stuck, there are online forums with people willing to help for free, 24/7. Has the number of people who want to learn decreased? If so, was it because of iPhones/iPads?

It's not a problem. It's a way things can be better.

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#105

Post by scroot »

mkhalil wrote: post #102

I don't buy it that everyone would be a digital creative if they just had the right tools. To make quality content, whether it be apps/music/movies/etc..it requires much more than tools. I respect Alan Kay, but I don't understand the need to bash on modern day technology. Have we really come along way in terms of general computing? Maybe not [Example: 0]. But in terms of the digital world, I can take a video of my pa…

> "I don't buy it that everyone would be a digital creative if they just had the right tools."

That is not Kay's argument. Not everyone who scribbles notes or draws something on a piece of paper is a "creative" or artist. Not all who write at all are professional writers. But we do not have the computing equivalent of paper for everyone. Sure, someone can write in a word processor or draw in a drawing program, but that's not all that a computer is for -- that's just imitating paper. The outstanding question is: can we make something that is as extensible as pen and paper and literacy for aiding human thought for the next level, the computing level? All we have now are stiff applications. Saying that such things make people literate in computing is like writing by filling out forms.

> "Do we have a lot more work to do? Sure. But Rome wasn't built in a day."

Kay is your ally here, a constant gadfly putting the lie to all the hype and BS. He's a constant reminder that we shouldn't feel so satisfied with our mud huts. He's reminding us to build Rome at all.

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#106

Post by [deleted] »

dkarl wrote: post #94

If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar. That’s the simple long and the short of it. Some kids learn guitar. Some kids fantasize about learning guitar. Apple makes machines that en…

[deleted]

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#107

Post by DonbunEf7 »

_dps wrote: post #85
DonbunEf7 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deconstruction is a way of viewing reality which comes naturally equipped with a process for disassembling ideas (the "deconstructive process") as well as a process for viewing ideas as the synthesis of other ideas (the "constructive process"). The core is this: all semantics are relative, all observations surface-level, and all truths buried in the raw materials. But since the materials are themselves relative, all…

I am far from an expert in Deconstruction, but I am an expert in mathematics and have read a fair amount on the foundations of mathematics. I find your description technically correct, but highly misleading. The vast majority of mathematicians will agree with "no one true foundation". However, unlike the bulk of postmodern/deconstructive work, they are then perfectly happy to say "this particular foundation is good e…

"Deconstructionists, having discovered that such faith acts are necessary, then refuse to engage with any particular choice made by people who want to discuss pragmatic meaning." I'm perfectly happy to have such discussions, as long as it's understood that, regardless of the beliefs brought to the table, the idea of "good enough" is not set in stone and itself is a perspective that is also brought to the table. I'm also not a Deconstructionist, whatever that is.

I find that most arguments that I have had with people usually end with them implying that their epistemology is rooted in something that is "good" or "reasonable" or "close enough" without any explanation of why it is that their chosen way of looking at the world must necessarily be beneficial. Indeed, you have pointed out that maths is a source of "important and valuable things", which I could agree with, but only with the understanding that our agreement is bound to the reality defined by our joint observations, and not a universal truth.

My point was not about choosing axioms, but about incompleteness, undefinability, uncomputability, etc., which cut short any attempts to bless a particular set of axioms as uniquely correct. You are only seeing the surface level so far; I assure you that it all deconstructs. (Be careful when looking directly at The Void.)

Finally: Where does meaning come from when having dialogues? Hofstadter explains it well: We constantly exchange deeply-coded messages with recursive layers of meaning, trying to reflect the symbols in our mind into words which we think will reconstruct those symbols in the minds we talk to. The "mooring of their meaning" is a fascinating illusion based on the inherent difficulty of stepping outside ourselves to examine where our own sense of meaning comes from.

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#108

Post by scroot »

dkarl wrote: post #94

If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar. That’s the simple long and the short of it. Some kids learn guitar. Some kids fantasize about learning guitar. Apple makes machines that en…

The topic is Apple because the interviewer is a journalist who was writing a book about the iPhone. Plenty of other resources online show him praising work he likes (Bret Victor, for example) and systems that he thinks are in the right direction. It just wasn't in the bounds of the interview topic.

As for the "not turning all readers into writers," well, what can we say? One would hope that all readers are literate enough to write. Now, we don't expect all literate people to be professional writers, but this is not in line with what Kay is arguing anyway. He's saying that being literate in computing should mean being able to wield computing in order to aid human thinking -- for everyone. He's calling out our current systems, saying that their availability and use, though ubiquitous, do not constitute such literacy.

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#110

Post by mncharity »

theoh wrote: post #36
mncharity wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone in the Boston area is interested in whiteboarding high-skill software development environments in the context of 2018/2019 hardware, I'd be interested. So: continuous speech recognition; hand tracking, controllers, and haptic exoskeletons, but still keyboards; HMDs with 30+ px/deg, and eye tracking, but still screens. Dynabook was a nice vision. As always, society executed poorly, and failed to realize much…

When you say society always executes poorly, what alternative social reality are you comparing it with?

I don't understand - are you suggesting the only way to know you could have done something better, is to see someone else doing the same thing for comparison? That's certainly one way. Others include... all the ways you evaluate the execution of a company or project, when you don't have a direct competitor to compare it with, no?
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