I'm always a fan of Zed blogs but this one I hope is just for attracting investors
Xanadu was waiting for agents
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#32Xanadu sounds like it would work well with git and absolutely abysmal with LLMs. Doesn’t structured data work best with symbolic not statistical AI?
Why would anyone want to put out accurate structured data in the AI era where unpoisoned data is worth a hard drive's weight in gold? Structured data will all be like: we open on Friday
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#33One 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 >
Ah, so like the distance between ambition and impact in metaphor/synthesis?
I like that.
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#34One 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 >
Ah, so like the distance between ambition and impact in metaphor/synthesis? I like that.
Exactly.
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Have you read Nelson?
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#36A system that never forgets is not always a good thing. I'm not sure what the maximal scope (beyond editors) the author wishes this applied to is, but there are many cases where it is a positive for things to be erased. Privacy concerns is one example.
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#37Reading this makes me wish someone would really try to make Project Xanadu a reality. A network built on Content Addressable Storage and a Version Control System is some thing I'd really like to see invested in.
You’ll hear/read many people opining that it actually wasn’t a good idea.
I counter that it’s a great idea for many things. The problem is that something good enough and far cheaper is already all over the Earth: the web.
Just like Hurd and Minix might have technical merit that’d make them “better” than Linux, Linux is good enough and already here.
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 numbe…
> What would make images harder than anything else?
Because diffs of image files are not very useful. Nelson's thing was very fine-grained tracking of who wrote what. That doesn't map well to images or video.
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#39Don’t Lamport timestamps require all nodes to be known in advance?
Powerful concept but impractical and far too unscalable to be used globally.
Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 numbe…
> What would make images harder than anything else? Because diffs of image files are not very useful. Nelson's thing was very fine-grained tracking of who wrote what. That doesn't map well to images or video.
Ah, got it. That makes sense from what I casually know about the project.