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Xanadu was waiting for agents

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Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#41

Post by bitwize »

e12e wrote: post #9
e12e wrote: post #6

Interesting. This and the other posts I've seen about Delta seems to exist in that liminal space, were it's difficult to tell if the author has had a brilliant insight, that they struggle to convey to anyone who's not yet had the same insight; or if they've simply gone slightly mad. It's a similar sense I get with reading Nelson (after being able to think about his ideas for a while, I'm quite certain it was mostly g…

One reason I have some hope for this approach is that we start by removing complexity by going to a static web site first. We remove WordPress, database, configuration, templates - a lot of cruft. Then we can add it back as needed for keeping edits and publishing simple. It might turn out we hardly need anything from 11ty, thanks to AI making editing more automatic. I think (the collective) we, are (mostly by acciden…

Complexity in itself is not an interesting measure but it's a proxy for an interesting measure: time and cost to build/maintain.

A more complicated program that is built and maintained with LLM assistance is cheaper and faster to build and fix than even a less complicated program built without. It's even the same without LLMs: once React achieved critical density and "won" the JS framework wars, building React apps became cheaper and faster even than building plain HTML/JS apps.

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#42

Post by realityfactchex »

EGreg wrote: post #3

Tell 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…

Interview him while you still can. I encourage you to seek out whoever Ted's contact people are and try to get that interview in. Make it long and thorough, and put it on YouTube and archive it.

http://www.thetednelson.com/contact.php

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#43

Post by kmeisthax »

Animats wrote: post #38
kstrauser wrote: post #24

Earlier 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.

I just finished writing a long rant on the other Project Xanadu related submission today where I specifically noted that Xanadu has a feature called a "permascroll" where everything you publish gets written into the permascroll and then transcluded into actual documents. This is a very "video editor" concept. Actually, the Xanadu model of transclusions and history would translate extremely well into nonlinear video editing; it's arguably better for video than it is for text.

Images wouldn't work unless you made a "Xanalogical image editor" that stores a list of edits and references to source images as you made or imported them. The tumbler number structure would have to be extended to include rectangular references into image files. It would work in theory, but in practice would probably bog down every computer that needed to load an image, and you'd get hit with shittons of fees for each one.

I can only imagine audio having to be stored as some kind of standardized DAW project file, with transcluded sample packs that would get you micro-transactioned for each one.

Man, this was a really silly idea...

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#45

Post by gritzko »

Animats wrote: post #14
Analemma_ wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

A complex system cannot be "made" to work. It either works or it does not. A simple system, designed from scratch, sometimes works. Some complex systems actually work. A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. One has to start over, beginning with a working simple system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#46

Post by kabes »

ameliaquining wrote: post #19

This 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…

I agree with Gwern. And also Nelson kind of lost my respect after he spend the rest of his life bashing and complaining on how bad the WWW is compared to his ideas.

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#47

Post by kstrauser »

kmeisthax wrote: post #43
Animats wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I just finished writing a long rant on the other Project Xanadu related submission today where I specifically noted that Xanadu has a feature called a "permascroll" where everything you publish gets written into the permascroll and then transcluded into actual documents. This is a very "video editor" concept. Actually, the Xanadu model of transclusions and history would translate extremely well into nonlinear video e…

Huh, that 2nd to last article almost sounds like Amiga mod files. You pieced together samples, often, um, “borrowed” from other mods, into song-specific selection, then included a list of which samples to trigger at which frequency at which time. For example, you’d include one bass drum and one snare drum, and instructions on how to arrange them into rhythms.

Xanadu as a DAW might look a lot like that, except with explicit and documented reuse of another person’s samples.

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#48

Post by chickensong »

bobajeff wrote: post #5

Reading 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.

Check out IPLD (the model that powers IPFS), which translates hash-linked DAGs and handles merkle DAGs (git) natively. There's been several attempts to build Xanadu'ish things on various types of networks, web2, web3, p2p, etc, but it just doesn't seem to be what the majority wants. Maybe someday...

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#49

Post by supriyo-biswas »

I regret to say that this is well polished slop, but ultimately slop at the end of the day.

It seems that the user wanted to say something like "DeltaDB is a DAG" and then replaced the DAG part with some obscure graph-based project that the LLM had suggested, but otherwise has no connection to agentic development.

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#50

Post by m12k »

alex7o wrote: post #8
e12e wrote: post #6

Interesting. This and the other posts I've seen about Delta seems to exist in that liminal space, were it's difficult to tell if the author has had a brilliant insight, that they struggle to convey to anyone who's not yet had the same insight; or if they've simply gone slightly mad. It's a similar sense I get with reading Nelson (after being able to think about his ideas for a while, I'm quite certain it was mostly g…

I think not are the same the only thing that differentiates them is adoption. If people show interest in the thing you are a genius if they don't you are mad/crazy.

The madman and the genius are similar in that they disagree with the world at large/prevailing wisdom. Where they differ is that the madman loses the fight while the genius (eventually) wins.
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