131–140 of 162 posts
"Ted Nelson: For 30 years, MIT Media Lab has used hype and hokum to raise money"
This title is taken from the first sentence of the video description, edited to fit the character limit.
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I believe that they wanted to hire you. There were a ton of music recommendations available at the time. Every music service had them: Rhapsody, Yahoo! Music Unlimited, Last.fm, Mog, iTunes, Grooveshark... Echo Nest's weren't even that good. I don't think they had song level recommendations iirc.
EchoNest's were the best at the time because they added social data into the mix. They analyzed people's playlists/libraries to generate recommendations when everyone else was using descriptive metadata, audio comparison, or manual curation.
Pot, meet kettle. Ted's been banging on the Xanadu drum for 50 years... if he'd have just bothered to learn to program, he could have implemented it himself, but it seems he'd rather give interviews about it than sit down at a keyboard.
~25 years ago, when the web was pretty new, I saw Ted Nelson give a talk about it. He was angry that it took so long for the world to wake up and hear the gospel of hypertext. And he was outraged and disappointed that the web didn't implement his vision of hypertext. Links should be two-way! The platform should treat intellectual property as a first-class concept! There should be attributions or royalties (or somethi…
Surely once the number of hyperlinks grew past the thousand mark (in 1991?), their further exponential growth made it clear that the manual curation of link semantics of any kind was hopelessly infeasible. Some 30 years hence, I'm surprised such windmills are still tilted at.
I don't think many people would argue that Nelson isn't a visionary, but when push comes to shove, there is an uncomfortable amount of truth in Steve Jobs's oft-cited quip, "Real artists ship." After 50 years, Project Xanadu not only isn't in a production-ready state, the "best demo" available is described on the xanadu.com web site as "beyond fixing." The sample EDL documents on the site do a good job of demonstrati…
Ted's original vision for Xanadu was fairly complete. As I recall, documents would have been effectively immutable; every change you made would publish a new version, and all old versions would remain accessible. Every link and transclusion went to a specific version, so they would never break. If the page you were transcluding changed, you could obviously opt to update your own page to transclude the new version, if…
And, yes, the mandatory identity for all users sounds like a potential privacy nightmare.
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no, it means that the 'kettle' is a hypocrite. There is another saying, 'practice what you preach'. Don't hold people to a higher standard than you hold yourself
> no, it means that the 'kettle' is a hypocrite Correct. > Don't hold people to a higher standard than you hold yourself I disagree. Of course it's best to practice what you preach. But failing that, if you can't or won't reform yourself (and Ted obviously won't; old dog, new tricks, etc) being accurate in your criticism of other people is better than saying nothing, which in turn is better than defending the bad beh…
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...I really hesitated to reply to your latest post but: I was a high school kid with dial up internet that I had to ask permission to use and computer time that was rationed (not trying to portray this as a hardship - it wasn't). While I was the one kid in my class who enjoyed programming a graphing calculator, it's not like I was super "internet native," and liking programming already didn't mean that I knew it was…
I don't understand your points then. You being sheltered or not has no bearing on lumping together CSAIL & ML, nor does it mean that CSAIL has the right or wrong marketing to high schoolers. Clearly they take in a lot of students every year, so it can't be all wrong. I'm sorry it wasn't done in an appealing way to you, and maybe they're missing others. Regardless, whomever is doing that is (for better or worse) quite…
I'm not lumping CSAIL and ML together, I'm ascribing common aspects to the way things at MIT get hyped, marketed, promoted, and portrayed, and pointing out that even if there's a nucleus of whatever is really being done that is significant, it's kept under a thick shell of a modern PR/marketing engine and fundraising apparatus. I'm suggesting that aspects of things across the institution might have similarities, because nearly everything these days pretty much has the same similarities. And that you could see it coming ever a dozen years ago as this aspect of marketing schlock isn't just centric to MIT.
It's the whole modern world, where every university has named institutes funded by donor dalliances, where every startup has been mentioned in the Washington Post, New York Times, NBC, and everywhere else, even though the banners usually don't link through. And where those mentions get inserted by professional networks where you know or even pay somebody who knows the right person to get the name drop for you (I've witnessed this) so that whatever flavor of the month some startup is pushing can get just the right nudge to take off, or at least get VC. It's kind of like TED like Talks and everything else positive, vacuous, and modern: that the world will be revolutionized by finding the perfect news feed algorithm, just like in another era snake oil would cure all ills.
It should hardly be surprising that ML happens when everything everywhere operates in the same way. It just had worse luck because its patron was Epstein instead of or not just Bezos or Bill Gates or whatever other person or entity with money to burn, and because its leader was ironically unusually adept at navigating the modern schlock culture.
Of course there are real people doing real and amazing work underneath this humongous and self-sustaining shell (and sometimes they break through enough for us to notice). Maybe you are or were one of them. But trying to tell is usually kind of like trying to look through a periscope that's filled with trick mirrors, and is part of the way it sometimes feels like the world is on the verge of descent into ruin.
So that was what I was originally getting at in a much less exhausting and overstated way.
What I also was addressing is that your responses to my comments implied a number of things that I think weren't realistic or germane.
For example, the implication that teenage me could just disabuse myself of whatever "mistaken" notions I got from my visit to MIT by exploring a department web page that in general I would barely have known about nor had much chance to access.
Or that because my experience wasn't your experience it's "wrong," even though it didn't really intersect a ton with what a graduate student might encounter.
When I referred to your website mention of getting a Mac at age 5, I wasn't meaning that having a computer was bad. What I was attempting to imply is that your comments assume an amount of convenience and access that didn't exist, and I was pointing out that your experience wasn't normative despite your presumption.
The only reason for the comment about being a bit sheltered is I think a certain type of background would have understood the game already: as you say "it's important to market yourself," but I've always despised self-marketing anyway.
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I've never seen any indication that Ted has implemented any of his own projects. ZigZag's first demo appears to have been built by Andrew Pam, and a later Java implementation was done by some others.[1] The page for the Xanadu demo a sibling comment mentions says "The enthusiastic and talented programmer, Rob Smith, of Manchester England, did a beautiful job combining a lot of our ideas" but "Unfortunately this made…
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…
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Ted Nelson is one of the most important figures in computing history. Everything on the web prefixed with the word "hyper" is his invention. It saddens me that he doesn't get the recognition he deserves. He wrote a couple of very influential books on what computing would be as early as the sixties. Very notable people have gone on record saying he was one of the most important inspirations for their work: Alan Kay, T…
> Everything on the web prefixed with the word "hyper" is his invention He coined the terms, but didn't invent the concepts. Memex was much more important in that regard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ted Nelson is one of the most important figures in computing history. Everything on the web prefixed with the word "hyper" is his invention. It saddens me that he doesn't get the recognition he deserves. He wrote a couple of very influential books on what computing would be as early as the sixties. Very notable people have gone on record saying he was one of the most important inspirations for their work: Alan Kay, T…
> Everything on the web prefixed with the word "hyper" is his invention He coined the terms, but didn't invent the concepts. Memex was much more important in that regard.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/in-se...
I like his view on how interfaces should be self-revealing. I used to feel dumb and waste time trying to figure things out, but then I decided that if I wouldn't get something quickly enough, that's because it was badly presented, and I had better discard it and move on. This approach saved me both much ego and time. (This can be read as a joke, but I'm mostly serious. I also use it when I design: I keep reworking th…
> This approach saved me both much ego and time. (This can be read as a joke, but I'm mostly serious. As an interaction designer I cannot stress how right you are about this and that it is no joke at all . There's a seven-year old comment here on HN[0] that really drove home the importance of looking beyond the tech-savvy bubble that we live in for me: > I look at UI changes in a totally different way now. My saw me…