4 ms·

There are lots of "old and fundamental" ideas that are not good anymore, if they ever were. The point here is that you were able to find the interpreter of the

by alankay 10y ago

There are lots of "old and fundamental" ideas that are not good anymore, if they ever were. The point here is that you were able to find the interpreter of the sentence and ask a question, but the two were still separated. For important negotiations we don't send telegrams, we send ambassadors. This is what objects are all about, and it continues to be amazing to me that the real necessities and practical necessities are still not at all understood. Bundling an interpreter for messages doesn't prevent the message from being submitted for other possible interpretations, but there simply has to be a process that can extract signal from noise. This is particularly germane to your last paragraph. Please think especially hard about what you are taking for granted in your last sentence.

ontouchstart 10y ago
I think object is a very powerful idea to wrap "local" context. But in a network (communication) environment, it is still challenging to handle "remote" context with object. That is why we have APIs and serialization/deserialization overhead. In the ideal homogeneous world of smalltalk, it is a less issue. But if you want a Windows machine to talk to a Unix, the remote context becomes an issue. In principle we can send a Windows VM along with the message from Windows and a Unix VM (docker?) with a message from Unix, if that is a solution.
- ontouchstart 10y ago
  Alan, what is your view on Olive Executable Archive ?https://olivearchive.org/ https://olivearchive.org/
  - alankay1 10y ago
    Their larger goals are important.
    - ontouchstart 10y ago
      Do you think they are on the right path to their larger goals?
      - alankay1 10y ago
        I think for so many important cases, this is almost the only way to do it. The problems were caused by short-sighted vendors and programmers getting locked into particular computers and OS software. For contrast, one could look at a much more compact way to do this that -- with more foresight -- was used at Parc, not just for the future, but to deal gracefully with the many kinds of computers we designed and built there. Elsewhere in this AMA I mentioned an example of this: a resurrected Smalltalk image from 1978 (off a disk pack that Xerox had thrown away) that was quite easy to bring back to life because it was already virtualized "for eternity"). This is another example of "trying to think about scaling" -- in this case temporally -- when building systems .... The idea was that you could make a universal computer in software that would be smaller than almost any media made in it, so ...
        ontouchstart 10y ago
        I agree that the "image" idea is more powerful than the "data" idea. However since PC revolution, the mainstream seemed to take on the "data" path for whatever technical or non-technical reasons. How do you envision the "coming back" of image path via either bypassing the data path or merging with it in a not so faraway future?
        alankay 10y ago
        Over all of history, there is no accounting for what "the mainstream" decides to believe and do. Many people (wrongly) think that "Darwinian processes" optimize, but any biologist will point out that they only "tend to fit to the environment". So if your environment is weak or uninteresting ... This also obtains for "thinking" and it took a long time for humans to even imagine thinking processes that could be stronger than cultural ones. We've only had them for a few hundred years (with a few interesting blips in the past), and they are most definitely not "mainstream". Good ideas usually take a while to have and to develop -- so the when the mainstream has a big enough disaster to make it think about change rather than more epicycles, it will still not allocate enough time for a really good change. At Parc, the inventions that made it out pretty unscathed were the ones for which there was really no alternative and/or no one was already doing: Ethernet, GUI, parts of the Internet, Laser Printer, etc. The programming ideas on the other hand were -- I'll claim -- quite a bit better, but (a) most people thought they already knew how to program and (b) Intel, Motorola thought they already knew how to design CPUs, and were not interested in making the 16 bit microcoded processors that would allow the much higher level languages at Parc to run well in the 80s.
  - mmiller 10y ago
    The Internet Archive (http://archive.org http://archive.org) is doing the same thing. They have old software stored that you can run in online emulators. I only wish they had instructions for how to use the emulators. The old keyboards and controllers are not like today's.
    - ontouchstart 10y ago
      Here is another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155203
- alankay 10y ago
  This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can negotiate with other objects they've never seen. Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...
  - ontouchstart 10y ago
    Along this line of logic, perhaps the future of AI is not "machine learning from big data" (a lot of buzz words) but computers that generate runtime interpreters for new contexts.
    - yanivt 10y ago
      When high bandwidth communication is omnipresent, is "portability" of the interpreter really something to optimize for?
      - alankay1 10y ago
        How can you find it? The association between "patterns" and interpretation becomes an "object" when this is part of the larger scheme. When you've just got bits and you send them somewhere, you don't even have "data" anymore. Even with something like EDI or XML, think about what kinds of knowledge and process are actually needed to even do the simplest things.
    - alankay 10y ago
      It's not "Big Data" but "Big Meaning"
  - DigitalJack 10y ago
    It's hard for me to grasp what this negotiation would look like. Particularly with objects that haven't encountered each other. It just seems like such a huge problem. I don't really know anything at all about microbiology, but maybe climbing the ladder of abstraction to small insects like ants. There is clearly negotiation and communication happening there, but I have to think it's pretty well bounded. Even if one ant encountered another ant, and needed to communicate where food was, it's with a fixed set of semantics that are already understood by both parties. Or with honeybees, doing the communication dance. I have no idea if the communication goes beyond "food here" or if it's "we need to decide who to send out." It seems like you have to have learning in the object to really negotiate with something it hasn't encountered before. Maybe I'm making things too hard. Maybe "can we communicate" is the first negotiation, and if not, give up.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
panic 10y ago
Isn't the interpreter code itself data in the sense that it has no meaning without something (a machine) to run it? How do you avoid having to send an interpreter for the interpreter and so on?
- alankay1 10y ago
  Yes, so think about how to make this work "nicely" in an Intergalactic Network ...
  - jonathanlocke 10y ago
    It can't be turtles all the way down, so maybe set theory?
    - alankay1 10y ago
      A good question isn't it? For parallel ideas and situation, take a look at Lincos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_(artificial_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_(artificial_language)
      - mmiller 10y ago
        Thanks for the reference. I've been trying to think along these lines.
      - brutuscat 10y ago
        Thank you! I started to think on those lines too thanks to the Carl Sagan's Contact novel. That was the first thing that came to mind. Now the question is, what if there are "objects" more advanced than others and what if advanced-object sends a message concealing an trojan horse? I think this question was also brought up in the novel/movie too... I think this is a real life and practical show stopper to develop this concept...
      - jonathanlocke 10y ago
        Wow. Thanks.
richhickey 10y ago
Without the 'idea' of data we couldn't even have a conversation about what interpreters interpret. How could it be a "really bad" idea? Data needn't be accompanied by an interpreter. I'm not saying that interpreters are unimportant/uninteresting, but they are separate. Nor have I said or implied that data is inherently meaningful. Take a stream of data from a seismometer. The seismometer might just record a stream of numbers. It might put them on a disk. Completely separate from that, some person or process, given the numbers and the provenance alone (these numbers are from a seismometer), might declare "there is an earthquake coming". But no object sent an "earthquake coming" "message". The seismometer doesn't "know" an earthquake is coming (nor does the earth, the source of the 'messages' it records), so it can't send a "message" incorporating that "meaning". There is no negotiation or direct connection between the source and the interpretation. We will soon be drowning in a world of IoT sensors sending context-or-provenance-tagged but otherwise semantic-free data (necessarily, due to constraints, without accompanying interpreters) whose implications will only be determined by downstream statistical processing, aggregation etc, not semantic-rich messaging. If you meant to convey "data alone makes for weak messages/ambassadors", well ok. But richer messages will just bottom out at more data (context metadata, semantic tagging, all more data) Ditto, as someone else said, any accompanying interpreter (e.g. bytecode? - more data needing interpretation/execution). Data remains a perfectly useful and more fundamental idea than "message". In any case, I thought we were talking about data, not objects. I don't think there is a conflict between these ideas.
- alankay1 10y ago
  2nd Paragraph: How do they know they are even bits? How do they know the bits are supposed to be numbers? What kind of numbers? Relating to what? Etc
  - richhickey 10y ago
    It contravenes the common and historical use of the word 'data' to imply undifferentiated bits/scribbles. It means facts/observations/measurements/information and you must at least grant it sufficient formatting and metadata to satisfy that definition. The fact that most data requires some human involvement for interpretation (e.g. pointing the right program at the right data) in no way negates its utility (we've learned a lot about the universe by recording data and analyzing it over the centuries), even though it may be insufficient for some bootstrapping system you envision.
valarauca1 10y ago
>Please think especially hard about what you are taking for granted in your last sentence. Any Meaning can only be the Interpretation of a Model/Signal?

by alankay 10y ago

ontouchstart 10y ago

I think object is a very powerful idea to wrap "local" context. But in a network (communication) environment, it is still challenging to handle "remote" context with object. That is why we have APIs and serialization/deserialization overhead. In the ideal homogeneous world of smalltalk, it is a less issue. But if you want a Windows machine to talk to a Unix, the remote context becomes an issue. In principle we can send a Windows VM along with the message from Windows and a Unix VM (docker?) with a message from Unix, if that is a solution.

ontouchstart 10y ago
Alan, what is your view on Olive Executable Archive ?https://olivearchive.org/ https://olivearchive.org/
- alankay1 10y ago
  Their larger goals are important.
  - ontouchstart 10y ago
    Do you think they are on the right path to their larger goals?
    - alankay1 10y ago
      I think for so many important cases, this is almost the only way to do it. The problems were caused by short-sighted vendors and programmers getting locked into particular computers and OS software. For contrast, one could look at a much more compact way to do this that -- with more foresight -- was used at Parc, not just for the future, but to deal gracefully with the many kinds of computers we designed and built there. Elsewhere in this AMA I mentioned an example of this: a resurrected Smalltalk image from 1978 (off a disk pack that Xerox had thrown away) that was quite easy to bring back to life because it was already virtualized "for eternity"). This is another example of "trying to think about scaling" -- in this case temporally -- when building systems .... The idea was that you could make a universal computer in software that would be smaller than almost any media made in it, so ...
      - ontouchstart 10y ago
        I agree that the "image" idea is more powerful than the "data" idea. However since PC revolution, the mainstream seemed to take on the "data" path for whatever technical or non-technical reasons. How do you envision the "coming back" of image path via either bypassing the data path or merging with it in a not so faraway future?
        alankay 10y ago
        Over all of history, there is no accounting for what "the mainstream" decides to believe and do. Many people (wrongly) think that "Darwinian processes" optimize, but any biologist will point out that they only "tend to fit to the environment". So if your environment is weak or uninteresting ... This also obtains for "thinking" and it took a long time for humans to even imagine thinking processes that could be stronger than cultural ones. We've only had them for a few hundred years (with a few interesting blips in the past), and they are most definitely not "mainstream". Good ideas usually take a while to have and to develop -- so the when the mainstream has a big enough disaster to make it think about change rather than more epicycles, it will still not allocate enough time for a really good change. At Parc, the inventions that made it out pretty unscathed were the ones for which there was really no alternative and/or no one was already doing: Ethernet, GUI, parts of the Internet, Laser Printer, etc. The programming ideas on the other hand were -- I'll claim -- quite a bit better, but (a) most people thought they already knew how to program and (b) Intel, Motorola thought they already knew how to design CPUs, and were not interested in making the 16 bit microcoded processors that would allow the much higher level languages at Parc to run well in the 80s.
- mmiller 10y ago
  The Internet Archive (http://archive.org http://archive.org) is doing the same thing. They have old software stored that you can run in online emulators. I only wish they had instructions for how to use the emulators. The old keyboards and controllers are not like today's.
  - ontouchstart 10y ago
    Here is another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155203
alankay 10y ago
This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can negotiate with other objects they've never seen. Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...
- ontouchstart 10y ago
  Along this line of logic, perhaps the future of AI is not "machine learning from big data" (a lot of buzz words) but computers that generate runtime interpreters for new contexts.
  - yanivt 10y ago
    When high bandwidth communication is omnipresent, is "portability" of the interpreter really something to optimize for?
    - alankay1 10y ago
      How can you find it? The association between "patterns" and interpretation becomes an "object" when this is part of the larger scheme. When you've just got bits and you send them somewhere, you don't even have "data" anymore. Even with something like EDI or XML, think about what kinds of knowledge and process are actually needed to even do the simplest things.
  - alankay 10y ago
    It's not "Big Data" but "Big Meaning"
- DigitalJack 10y ago
  It's hard for me to grasp what this negotiation would look like. Particularly with objects that haven't encountered each other. It just seems like such a huge problem. I don't really know anything at all about microbiology, but maybe climbing the ladder of abstraction to small insects like ants. There is clearly negotiation and communication happening there, but I have to think it's pretty well bounded. Even if one ant encountered another ant, and needed to communicate where food was, it's with a fixed set of semantics that are already understood by both parties. Or with honeybees, doing the communication dance. I have no idea if the communication goes beyond "food here" or if it's "we need to decide who to send out." It seems like you have to have learning in the object to really negotiate with something it hasn't encountered before. Maybe I'm making things too hard. Maybe "can we communicate" is the first negotiation, and if not, give up.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

panic 10y ago

Isn't the interpreter code itself data in the sense that it has no meaning without something (a machine) to run it? How do you avoid having to send an interpreter for the interpreter and so on?

alankay1 10y ago
Yes, so think about how to make this work "nicely" in an Intergalactic Network ...
- jonathanlocke 10y ago
  It can't be turtles all the way down, so maybe set theory?
  - alankay1 10y ago
    A good question isn't it? For parallel ideas and situation, take a look at Lincos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_(artificial_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_(artificial_language)
    - mmiller 10y ago
      Thanks for the reference. I've been trying to think along these lines.
    - brutuscat 10y ago
      Thank you! I started to think on those lines too thanks to the Carl Sagan's Contact novel. That was the first thing that came to mind. Now the question is, what if there are "objects" more advanced than others and what if advanced-object sends a message concealing an trojan horse? I think this question was also brought up in the novel/movie too... I think this is a real life and practical show stopper to develop this concept...
    - jonathanlocke 10y ago
      Wow. Thanks.

richhickey 10y ago

Without the 'idea' of data we couldn't even have a conversation about what interpreters interpret. How could it be a "really bad" idea? Data needn't be accompanied by an interpreter. I'm not saying that interpreters are unimportant/uninteresting, but they are separate. Nor have I said or implied that data is inherently meaningful. Take a stream of data from a seismometer. The seismometer might just record a stream of numbers. It might put them on a disk. Completely separate from that, some person or process, given the numbers and the provenance alone (these numbers are from a seismometer), might declare "there is an earthquake coming". But no object sent an "earthquake coming" "message". The seismometer doesn't "know" an earthquake is coming (nor does the earth, the source of the 'messages' it records), so it can't send a "message" incorporating that "meaning". There is no negotiation or direct connection between the source and the interpretation. We will soon be drowning in a world of IoT sensors sending context-or-provenance-tagged but otherwise semantic-free data (necessarily, due to constraints, without accompanying interpreters) whose implications will only be determined by downstream statistical processing, aggregation etc, not semantic-rich messaging. If you meant to convey "data alone makes for weak messages/ambassadors", well ok. But richer messages will just bottom out at more data (context metadata, semantic tagging, all more data) Ditto, as someone else said, any accompanying interpreter (e.g. bytecode? - more data needing interpretation/execution). Data remains a perfectly useful and more fundamental idea than "message". In any case, I thought we were talking about data, not objects. I don't think there is a conflict between these ideas.

alankay1 10y ago
2nd Paragraph: How do they know they are even bits? How do they know the bits are supposed to be numbers? What kind of numbers? Relating to what? Etc
- richhickey 10y ago
  It contravenes the common and historical use of the word 'data' to imply undifferentiated bits/scribbles. It means facts/observations/measurements/information and you must at least grant it sufficient formatting and metadata to satisfy that definition. The fact that most data requires some human involvement for interpretation (e.g. pointing the right program at the right data) in no way negates its utility (we've learned a lot about the universe by recording data and analyzing it over the centuries), even though it may be insufficient for some bootstrapping system you envision.

valarauca1 10y ago

>Please think especially hard about what you are taking for granted in your last sentence. Any Meaning can only be the Interpretation of a Model/Signal?