Ted versus The Media Lab [video]

Ted's needlessly authoritarian on implementation details, down to very specific details in file formats and how the components interact with each other using protocols that simply do not work.

For instance, he was insisting on ASCII only, byte addressed implementation of a cross referencing system with me in 2014 for the Xanadu implementation you mentioned. I couldn't convince him that multibyte encoding systems were worth considering or that offsets would change leading to fundamental data inconsistencies, thus corrupting formats...the rabbit hole gets deep. He gets very opinionated on details that don't matter and frankly don't work.

Thus it could only ever be a demo because you can't just feed open formats from the open internet it in any dynamic organic way. Everything would have to be curated, filtered, and babysat. That's not memex, that's some digital form of Pearson publishing with some proprietary e-reading system. Which is fine, but TBLs W3 system of intentionally leaving things open ended so every step becomes a potential platform for the next is so much dramatically better then just a cathedral cross referential monolith hybrid of hypercard and pdf. The brilliance of TBL is the W3 is half assed in just the right ways to make it not yet another unused visual language or mind map format. Should more be done? Sure, of course.

You may think it sounds absurd that Ted thinks there will be manual publishing under some private company's direction in the new format and not automated machine transliteration, I agree, it sounds like an archaic museum piece at the living computer museum in Seattle and not a future oriented system of thought. Well here we are anyway.

He needs to cede ground and intentionally leave pieces open ended so that other groups, in other cultures, with other priorities can fit in their specialized pieces into the puzzle. He apparently is still unwilling.

He's a brilliant philosopher but a classically toxic engineer. Usually that second group is full of people with bad ideas. His are undoubtedly revolutionary and profound, but the delegation of other thought systems to other humans and then interacting with them is like Drucker management 101 and he's just not onboard.

Also, without going into detail Andrew is a backstabbing ass. I hope he reads this and I'll state that publicly.

PS: In case Ted sees this (he probably still doesn't browse hn, but he gets forwarded things), I love you, you know this. You know my criticisms comes from a desire to make the acts as revolutionary as the thought and I want it to happen as much as you do. Hope to hear from you and hope all is well.

well, no. It's just that what exactly does one expect to see at a research lab? I don't think any scientific research would appear exciting if you had a glimpse of it on a tour. The exciting things happen at different timescales! I mean, this is literally one of the major problems grad students face. It's a big change from school before, where you get a per-assignment or at least semesterly signal about whether you're doing the "right" thing. Whereas an entire grad student career (or more tragically, an entire academic career) could lead to nothing exciting, just a bunch of "that didn't work".

Which is still progress for the research community, but not something that's exciting.

I won't say there's absolutely nothing gimmicky about CSAIL. Maybe the parent was more sophisticated than the tour's target demographic. But I also question how much depth someone's perspective could have if it's based on a tour they got in high school.

Um, no, I'm saying that around 15 years ago they pretty much had a giant marketing front wrapping whatever actually was happening a different one of their units/institutes.

This is all baloney. First of all, the Media Lab isn’t Nicholas. Yes he had a huge impact on it.... except he hasn’t lead it in 20 years. And he was a visionary — he could see the tremendous diversities of roles computers would play in ordinary lives back when few were convinced they’d ever need a computer at all.

I’m not surprised Nicholas had a hard time defining media, as that was the active question in the 70s that is still driving the lab now in 2020. What is media? What does it touch and encompass? What are the forms of it still unexplored? There are plenty of important books on many aspects of media, so to expect an easy definition from an academic is silly, particularly when it seemingly must fit your film-oriented framework.

He’s seemingly forgetting that the lab has several hundred more people at any one time... all of which are doing their own vision to try and invent the future in their own way. The Media Lab just provides a space for like minds to explore. To focus on the fundraising is to miss the point of the lab, which is who is there and what they attempt to do during their tenure. When your goal is to invent the future that’s 10-20 years out, you’ll get a heavy mix of output... some silly, some tedious, and some genius.

Mixing in a rant about the definition of interfaces and that you should have replaced Raskin is both disrespectful to Raskin and his genius, and has all the hallmarks of a “get off my lawn” style argument. There’s no teeth to it, not all of computing can or should be like film (what’s film like about satellites, networking, or data mining?), and it just takes away from the rest of the argument.

I’d also like to note that in my experience working at Apple, no one has ever advocated to make things more complicated so you’ll need a nearby expert (or for any other reason). This smells of conjecture that’s so far removed from the internal realities that I’m disappointing it’s made it to the front page of HN.