kwatsonafter

a quote from the system: "Adam and Lilith began to fight. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while am to be in the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth."

That's just a few seconds of clicking around in systems like this. It's like surfing with a fucking jetpak.

Spend a few minutes with the demo and try to, "feel" the concept. I would pay huge amounts of money to have all my research materials, "Xanadu'd." (Anyone looking to be hired?)

There's a fine line between schizophrenia and creative genius and Nelson walks that line enormously all things considered. Project Xanadu aside Computer Lib and his work on HyperText systems in the 1960's are still incredibly ahead their time. Nelson is a pioneer on the same level as McCarthy, Kay, or Minsky but he didn't come up the way that they did. He's firstly a filmmaker; I think a lot of people miss this.

It's worth noting that Brenda Laurel, Alan Kay, Nelson, and Seymour Papert had, "art" backgrounds. The future of computing will effectively be led by people with these cross-sectional skills. There's a reason programmers are shitty at designing software.

A very informative post. I think a lot of the young people hip to Nelson miss this point. I'm no longer a, "free and open everything" kind of person but Nelson is far more of a BioShock character than you'd think. He's not a baby boomer in any sense; he's a child of Welles, Hawks, and Howard Hughes. I could see him being old enough not to freak out over Birth Of A Nation.

God bless that crazy bastard. We used to make Americans so well.

Legend is that at CERN they flipped a coin to decide whether they would choose Xanadu or Tim Berner Lee's WWW as their Hypertext system.

That day coins failed us.

Massive! Take an upvote.

You don't. Power Law distributions will create situations where-in the Ricks are doing 90% for the real work when they're not deliberately surrounded by other/better Ricks. This is what made Xerox PARC the most productive computer company of all time; great thinkers playing together with little interference.

You can't maintain a SaaS application this way though. The issue isn't management or Ricks; it's the lousy business infrastructure that's privatized science and technology in the United States and kept the Ricks from doing their natural work so that 90 untalented people can have jobs in the software industry.

The oxymorony is that the growth that we create from letting the normie douchebags have their salaries and cargo shorts actually is a net win for society from a macroscopic perspective. It's a societal con but it's a con that keeps families fed; and there can't be, "Ricks" without, "stable societies." Also worth considering!

This is, "why all the elves have left Middle Earth;" The software industry is just about the only industry where a basically smart person can work and end up making as much as a doctor or lawyer. This results in power law/pareto distributions of talent. Due to the fact that 80-90% of the workforce is technically incompetent from a, "went to school and learned vetted skills and disciplined critical thinking" perspective you end up with a kind of paradox where-in innovation is stifled through toxic democratization. Creative genius doesn't manifest, "good employees." Sorry.

Consider that he might be right from his perspective; he's probably just a douchebag. Either/or (remembering dear Kirkegaard and saintly James) this is partially and mostly why computers suck in 2022, Google doesn't work anymore, and user interface design is suffering as there aren't enough people with cross-sectional culture skills (consider Brenda Laurel: PhD in Theatre; Alan Kay was a competent jazz guitarist before Xerox PARC) + necessary computing expertise to design useable software and as a result our technical infrastructure has suffered immensely despite gains made from Moore's Law and data collection (I'm looking at you ML geeks)

This is going to get worse before it gets better.

I was going to link to this; top form fellow Engelbartian!

I love how nobody commented.

AI, new tools, and globalization is going to destroy the software developer class. Alright, great. I'm now the 3000th person since the late 80's to predict this!