>Ted Nelson has been on my mind a lot this year.
For anyone else that's been thinking a lot about Ted this year, I recommend this (weird) youtube series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGpBQgZ5IsI&list=PLsfH1Ahi4S...
Xanadu was waiting for agents
21–30 of 63 posts
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#22One of my favorite LLM-smells to train myself to sniff out is how well the author can tie two seemingly disparate ideas together into something compelling or novel. The more ambitious the synthesis and the less impressed I am the more likely I am to assume it was at least partially the work of an LLM. Previously, "Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer" https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer >
The content was clearly AI written. It made no sense. Even crazy humans such as Terry Davis made more sense than such AI slop generated "blog" entries.
That this is published by the lead of a pretty popular piece of software is disconcerting. The UI for the IDE itself and the web design for Delta even have that Claude Code "Claudhaus" look to them.
I'm beginning to think that this sort of behavior is actually an inverted counter-signal. The average person attuned to LLM's markings may find these things distasteful. But certain individuals or organizations may feel right at ease seeing them.
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#23>Flat was good enough.
Then agents arrived.
So, with just that we went from 1990s early internet to AI agents.
That's a time jump so jarring that it makes heavily-modified '81 DeLorean owners jealous.
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a reality for a lack of trying. Multiple people have spent (literal!) lifetimes working on Xanadu and multiple businesses poured a great deal of money and effort into it way back in the day. It continues to not be a thing because, even though the idea is superficially appealing to a certain engineer mind and that's why people get sucked into the cult, in reality it's not something anybody wants and it's solv…
Right. I knew those people back when Autodesk owned Xanadu. The fundamental problem was that tracking and paying for text ownership and viewing down to the word level isn't really very useful. The Xanadu people were libertarians into micropayments. Everything is pay per view in Xanadu. Not cheap views, expensive ones, like Lexis/Nexis. Also, they had no idea how to deal with either images or distributed systems.
> Also, they had no idea how to deal with either images or distributed systems.
What would make images harder than anything else? My naive self thinks, "hey, isn't that just one long base64-encoded word?" Apparently not, or they would've done it and moved on.
And why do you say that about distributed systems? What I've read of Xanadu (primarily the Wired article) made it sound like there'd be a relatively small number of commercial servers everyone else would subscribe to. Cue IBM's "five computers are enough" apocrypha. Is that what you mean?
I find everything about Xanadu fascinating, in kind of a slow-moving train crash sort of way, and would love hearing more bystander takes!
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#25Xanadu sounds like it would work well with git and absolutely abysmal with LLMs.
Doesn’t structured data work best with symbolic not statistical AI?
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#26This post buys into the common narrative about Xanadu, that it was a fundamentally good idea that failed due to some combination of poor execution, being too far ahead of its time, and the market not caring about quality (with this post in particular focusing mostly on the second thing). In my view, Gwern makes a compelling counterargument: Xanadu was a fundamentally bad idea. The parts of it that weren't incorporate…
Great post, as a fan of Gwern and Nelson I wonder how I missed it (and how I didn’t get an invite to the party :’)
The “too genius, too early” is a common trope in the tech industry, but it rarely stands scrutiny. When you inspect the claim up close you almost inevitably find out a variation of that “bad design/solves a problem no one really has/does not create the virtuous cycles needed for success”.
But as an inventor it might be easier for one’s ego to tell yourself “i was just ahead of my time” than “my judgement was completely off”.
If you’re an inventor of any kind, the “try lots of small things, see which ones seem to stick, narrow down on those” approach seems preferable to “commit your entire identity to one big thing”, but there is a certain siren song to the latter.
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#27This post buys into the common narrative about Xanadu, that it was a fundamentally good idea that failed due to some combination of poor execution, being too far ahead of its time, and the market not caring about quality (with this post in particular focusing mostly on the second thing). In my view, Gwern makes a compelling counterargument: Xanadu was a fundamentally bad idea. The parts of it that weren't incorporate…
Great post, as a fan of Gwern and Nelson I wonder how I missed it (and how I didn’t get an invite to the party :’) The “too genius, too early” is a common trope in the tech industry, but it rarely stands scrutiny. When you inspect the claim up close you almost inevitably find out a variation of that “bad design/solves a problem no one really has/does not create the virtuous cycles needed for success”. But as an inven…
> But as an inventor it might be easier for one’s ego to tell yourself “i was just ahead of my time” than “my judgement was completely off”.
This has more to do with the economy than ego. When one's ability to eat and have shelter relies on "inventing" the inventor will invent a new wheel to sell to a tribe that's pre-wheel.
This no longer works as well in software given the number of people who code, and the various forms of automation (AI or design tool that emits code, etc) to assist those who do not.
No pulling the wool with a fancy abstraction alone. It's just math relative to a matrix of desirable values loaded in memory.
The normal progression of technology coupled to economic models written down by long dead who were too busy enslaving people to invent indoor plumbing.
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#28Ummet Ozcan - Xanadu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uMtnH7cABg
I don't think he's waiting for agents.
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#29This post buys into the common narrative about Xanadu, that it was a fundamentally good idea that failed due to some combination of poor execution, being too far ahead of its time, and the market not caring about quality (with this post in particular focusing mostly on the second thing). In my view, Gwern makes a compelling counterargument: Xanadu was a fundamentally bad idea. The parts of it that weren't incorporate…
This economic equilibrium reality kills so many cool-sounding ideas. Someone has to actually run them, and if it's more soul-sucking than soul-giving (for some definition of "soul" which may include money) it won't happen. It's not always money, sometimes it's just really hard to keep the service up or to block spam.
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#30Tell me you use an LLM to write everything without telling me... A clock for a world with no center. Names that can't lie. Convergence without coordination. Storage too cheap to delete. Machines summoned in milliseconds. OK, got it. I wish someone here could introduce me to Ted Nelson, I would have loved to interview him! And yes, I've been building the "Xanadu" vision since 2011: https://github.com/Qbix https://gith…
I'm not so sure the article is written with AI. I'd love to hear from the author on that.
If not, someone is a native in LLMese. Conveys little about what it actually is, or connected to how Delta works and is mostly talking about some abstract metaphoric relation. I remember some article on how LLMs throw in identifiers without much understanding of the indetified, other than its similiarity to another thing in text (methaphoric speech).