Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Xanadu was waiting for agents

zed.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 63 posts

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#51

Post by kristopolous »

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…

Ted is super specific and inflexible about lots of technical details that just don't work. I don't want to air out dirty laundry here but it's non-existence in any robust state wasn't for lack of trying.

Also it's a feature, not a bug. If we were all pragmatists ...

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#52

Post by ulbu »

bitwize wrote: post #41
e12e wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

calling what someone else finds interesting “not an interesting measure” is itself something that calls for an interested measure.

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#54

Post by andai »

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…

Well it unironically takes a thousand years to integrate the ideas revealed in a single acid trip. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try!

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#55

Post by more-coffee »

patcon wrote: post #33
tolerance wrote: post #15

One 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.

Do you mean that LLMs are unable to use metaphors effectively? (Just clarifying because English is not my first language)

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#56

Post by segfaltnh »

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…

This was my feeling trying to grok why I want or need Delta.

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#57

Post by segfaltnh »

tolerance wrote: post #22
shevy-java wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

And funding them.

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#58

Post by PaulHoule »

gyomu wrote: post #26
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…

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…

I went down a rabbit hole circa 2015 sketching out a system which was going to solve the language + world model problem which of course only needed to be partially implemented to solve a specific family of problems. In a broad sense think Palantir but with 20x the TAM because it is also an application builder.

I studied Xanadu a lot for this analysis because the system would need huge amounts of annotated text so it was requirement that "any" document could be marked up with commentary or structured markup turning the "explainable" idea bidirectionally so that humans could explain to the system what and why it is and the system could "talk back" in the same "language". Practically "any" reduced to HTML + PDF.

Transclusion was important to the vision because if, say, constants in a source code file came out of a standards document the link between the two ought to be preserved.

I can't say the internals would have looked like Xanadu at all and there wouldn't have been those micropayments.

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#59

Post by e12e »

bitwize wrote: post #41
e12e wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

I strongly disagree. Incidental complexity is the enemy good emergent properties of a system; security, auditability, stability, testability, maintainability...

Re: Xanadu was waiting for agents

#60

Post by yencabulator »

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.

The spec was kept proprietary and patented until about 2019. All you had before that was ramblings by an eccentric character who was 100% sure he was correct.

https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/201904240732/Xanadu%20Hy...

Now that we can actually read it, it's pretty much Urbit levels of kookiness all over.

There's implementations. They're not very useful to a layperson.

http://www.open.xanadu.com/

Post reply on HN