6 ms·

Xanadu Basics – Visible Connection (2018) [video]

73 points by nathcd 7y ago

alehul 7y ago
Some further reading: A recent and great interview with Nelson - https://www.notion.so/tools-and-craft/03-ted-nelson https://www.notion.so/tools-and-craft/03-ted-nelson A long-form read by Wired from 1995 - https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ Nelson's response to Wired - http://xanadu.com.au/ararat http://xanadu.com.au/ararat
- jacobush 7y ago
  Thanks, I read the Wired back then but never Nelson's response.
  - LeonB 7y ago
    Also -- he has a recent response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_-5cGEU9S0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_-5cGEU9S0
underd0g 7y ago
Information(Idea in mind) => Write a document => Write on PC and print out on paper => Display on screen Two dimension paper or screen is never the best way of displaying information, but it is the cheap and easy one. the core problem is how we organize and display information, I don't think the old screen will solve it in the good way, but recently MR, AR show us the three dimension way, maybe we can find more dimension in the future.
- simonh 7y ago
  I see people write things like this from time to time, but I'm not convinced this will work out in practice. Human 3D vision is quite limited. We have distance perception, but it's quite crude and we have no way to perceive through things, to see their actual depth or full dimensionality. We only get a view of the side facing us. In fact fake 3D on two dimensional displays provides a very convincing analogue. The primary way we exchange information is text and for that 3D provides no advantage, in fact it makes it worse by being distracting. Visual representations are a niche for representing certain constrained forms of formatted data, in the form of charts. These can be very compelling for very structured and regularised information. The old saying that a picture paints a thousand words is all very well, but if I give you an arbitrary thousand word text, you'll have a heck of a time representing that entirely visually.
  - pharke 7y ago
    We do have 3D senses, but the primary ones aren't vision. Proprioception tells us the position of our body in space and is relevant to the discussion because we can tag and encode information based on posture or movement, think hand-gestures, body language, right hand rule, counting on fingers, etc. Another is enabled by the existence of grid cells[1] in the brain. These allow us to be aware of (and imagine) our position in Euclidean space. This is where AR/MR could really shine by bringing the Memory Palace mnemonic to life and possibly extending it in all kinds of fantastic ways. People have exploited these senses for millennia as memory aids and ways of understanding and interpreting information, we shouldn't lose that tradition and should make every effort to enhance it with modern technology rather than replace it with a single interface metaphor. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell
Rhinobird 7y ago
1a - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac&t=327s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac&t=327s 1b - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gPM3GqjMR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gPM3GqjMR4 1c - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGKbRcvIZT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGKbRcvIZT8 1d - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyzgoeeloJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyzgoeeloJA 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_o8q4Sp-w0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_o8q4Sp-w0 2.5- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xYwgJW7T8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xYwgJW7T8o 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV_vYkSmkxk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV_vYkSmkxk
- Rhinobird 7y ago
  and, these: 4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLYz2vWv1wg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLYz2vWv1wg 5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsbrEOxVPcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsbrEOxVPcg
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Someone might care to suggest to Mr. Nelson the prospect of the visible connections afforded by YouTube playlists....
slim 7y ago
what's with hiding complexity? is it desirable to show connections? from the examples in the video, it seems the connections do not convey any additionnal meaning. It seems to me that there are indeed systems where connections convey meaning. In those systems, the nodes connected are invisible (represented as dots) as to show the topology of the connections. Maybe it's not useful to show texts and connections at the same time
- schpaencoder 7y ago
  The point is that humans navigate and orient themselves easier in a spatial persisting environment.
tudorw 7y ago
Lots of interesting things on Ted's twitter https://twitter.com/TheTedNelson https://twitter.com/TheTedNelson
- vermilingua 7y ago
  One of those interesting things is the ridiculous cult of personality that’s formed around him. Nelson is brilliant, but some of the crap his followers put out is just unreal.
simonh 7y ago
I get the same feelings reading his descriptions of Xanadu as I did reading descriptions of Google Wave. It all sounds a though it aught to be great and wonderful, but I can't actually visualise how it would be useful every day. What actual value would I get out of it, constantly on an ongoing basis? I can see how perhaps you could construct interesting use cases, but I just don't see the value as a primary interface. It doesn't even sound all that hard to implement. I know there's a basic implementation, but his description of it is hedged around with caveats. Certainly with modern development environments, it should be many orders of magnitude easier than in the 60s or 70s to get this working, yet it's still struggling to get off the ground. Contrast with the web he is so critical of, which was useful and valuable the first day it was released. If it takes 50 years and you still don't even have a compelling proof of concept, I can't help suspecting the grand vision is just far too elaborate and heavy weight to be workable in practice.
- yourapostasy 7y ago
  Pre-teen me was utterly fascinated with Xanadu, but that was before I learned about the computational and storage costs of data structures, and how large-scale human interaction with systems evolves. Now, I can't wrap my head around what Nelson promotes and what I extrapolate to a scaled-up global system. I'd really like to know from those more deeply immersed in the implementation of his vision how the following pieces are addressed, because I can't quite reconcile between the dribs and drabs I've pieced together of the internals and what I know of large-scale systems. 1. As near as I can tell, the ZigZag data structure at its core is a type of directed graph. Fast path traversal has always been a challenge for me with these at scale. When I want to pull a list of all referring/predecessor links, I'm either walking the graph, or maintaining a continuously-updated cross-reference lookup. I must be overlooking how he's solved this problem, because the kind of micro-payment environment he envisions seems to me to require knowing this information (is this what he calls a "cell"?) to compute the presented price of a piece of information derived from a foundation of other pieces of information. 2. How does transclusion work for non-text data like audio, video, rich media, chats, or in a generalized way, arbitrary data sets? 3. Was there ever a notion of transclusion quality or security? I don't see any acknowledgement in Nelson's design of the need to address bad actors abusing transclusion, giving rise to equivalents to spammers, trolls, phishers, etc. within the xanadocs environment. 4. What determines a cell? As near as I can tell (and my understanding is admittedly flawed), cells are decided by the author, but I must be wrong here. That seems a high cognitive load to make those decisions, and I don't see any support for crowd-defined cells, nor an API that would facilitate building such an interaction. BTW, for those who lament the quiescence of the Gzz [1] project due to patent protection, it can pick up again now that the patent expired [2]. Whoever picks it up likely should read about the experiences of one of the original Gzz authors [3]. The most programmer-oriented write up of the data structure I could find [4] didn't erase my impression that Nelson's vision was fine for a small group, but doesn't address scaling up to the challenges we see on a global level. It's still fascinating to think about, and I see value within a corporate environment, but I struggle seeing it staying useful in the public realm due to the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things principle. [1] http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/ http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software)#History [3] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715 [4] https://hackernoon.com/an-engineers-guide-to-the-docuverse-d080cdbb73a6 https://hackernoon.com/an-engineers-guide-to-the-docuverse-d...
z3t4 7y ago
One problem is CORS creating a firewall around every web page. Another problem is copyright, showing someone else's work on your web page. Fair use would have to be expended to showing parts of a document. Wikipedia did something like this where you can see content when hovering over a link ... But I think what the old guy is talking about is actually showing a visual graph how documents and text are linked together. We humans are good at scanning text. So I think something like this would work well in a search engine, where instead of getting a list of links, you get a visual graph of interlinked documents, that makes it faster to explore different branches and find what you are looking for.
nabla9 7y ago
Ted Nelson is visionary but bad businessman/project leader. The Curse Of Xanadu: https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ He patented some of his ideas (like ZigZag data structure) but failed to commercialize despite multiple attempts. Then he killed open source attempt to make it happen outside his control (GZigZag). Being very defensive and insisting of owning the project when one has not the ability to lead is unfortunate. Nelson had very good ideas. The idea that you make closed source hypertext project seemed possible at the time, before the web, but it has no change of happening now.
- carapace 7y ago
  Ted Nelson responded: 'Errors in "The Curse of Xanadu," by Gary Wolf' http://xanadu.com.au/ararat http://xanadu.com.au/ararat Look I'm as bummed as anyone that he never got Xanadu off the ground, but please don't link to that "hit piece". Ted Nelson is a visionary and deserves more respect.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    With due respect, Nelson's response ssuggests an inability to distinguish forest from tree. There is a difference between narrative and factual error. Nelson fails to draw that and is stuck in minutiae. There's also considerable prickliness, if not outright paranoia, shown. (And yes, I've read the Wired piece as well.)
- enkiv2 7y ago
  It's not true that he killed GZZ. He had filed the patent already, & the GZZ developer (who had previously been working closely with Ted) dropped the project when he heard that a patent existed. (As far as I am aware, all patents filed with respect to ZigZag or Xanadu are expiring within the next few years.) Several Xanadu implementations are already released as open source (the first one in 1999). Believe me: I've tried to convince Ted that the appropriate way to get stuff to have traction these days is to develop in public, rather than keeping stuff secret during development & only releasing source when it's been polished. It's not that he wants a closed & commercialized system (though he hasn't completely given up on having some stake in monetization), but that he wants enough control to avoid the kinds of runaway misunderstandings that produced the web. If I had seen a warped version of my own work ruin the world, I'd be conservative too. Now that web standards are so complicated that writing a new web browser is impossible for even large & very rich companies (Microsoft is ditching IE in favor of Chrome, following dozens of others), a properly-designed (and thus, simple) hypertext system becomes a lot more sensible -- for more and more people, the web will seem less and less like a reasonable compromise (being never a particularly good system for hypertext, and a far worse application sandbox platform). Some folks have been jumping to gopher, but others will probably migrate to new systems that are along the lines of Xanadu.
SuperPaintMan 7y ago
Started playing around with https://gitlab.com/krampus/wormwood https://gitlab.com/krampus/wormwood , it's a client that seems pretty good. It takes a bit of elbow grease to get going, but this should be fun to play with. Setup is a bit of a pain and it could use a readme but once you install the perl modules, build the assets and set up the server it's pretty nice. Could probably use a dockerfile as well Give it a poke! http://lain.gboards.ca/view.cgi?url=static/doc/doc.xan.org http://lain.gboards.ca/view.cgi?url=static/doc/doc.xan.org

73 points by nathcd 7y ago

Some further reading: A recent and great interview with Nelson - https://www.notion.so/tools-and-craft/03-ted-nelson https://www.notion.so/tools-and-craft/03-ted-nelson A long-form read by Wired from 1995 - https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ Nelson's response to Wired - http://xanadu.com.au/ararat http://xanadu.com.au/ararat

jacobush 7y ago
Thanks, I read the Wired back then but never Nelson's response.
- LeonB 7y ago
  Also -- he has a recent response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_-5cGEU9S0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_-5cGEU9S0

underd0g 7y ago

Information(Idea in mind) => Write a document => Write on PC and print out on paper => Display on screen Two dimension paper or screen is never the best way of displaying information, but it is the cheap and easy one. the core problem is how we organize and display information, I don't think the old screen will solve it in the good way, but recently MR, AR show us the three dimension way, maybe we can find more dimension in the future.

simonh 7y ago
I see people write things like this from time to time, but I'm not convinced this will work out in practice. Human 3D vision is quite limited. We have distance perception, but it's quite crude and we have no way to perceive through things, to see their actual depth or full dimensionality. We only get a view of the side facing us. In fact fake 3D on two dimensional displays provides a very convincing analogue. The primary way we exchange information is text and for that 3D provides no advantage, in fact it makes it worse by being distracting. Visual representations are a niche for representing certain constrained forms of formatted data, in the form of charts. These can be very compelling for very structured and regularised information. The old saying that a picture paints a thousand words is all very well, but if I give you an arbitrary thousand word text, you'll have a heck of a time representing that entirely visually.
- pharke 7y ago
  We do have 3D senses, but the primary ones aren't vision. Proprioception tells us the position of our body in space and is relevant to the discussion because we can tag and encode information based on posture or movement, think hand-gestures, body language, right hand rule, counting on fingers, etc. Another is enabled by the existence of grid cells[1] in the brain. These allow us to be aware of (and imagine) our position in Euclidean space. This is where AR/MR could really shine by bringing the Memory Palace mnemonic to life and possibly extending it in all kinds of fantastic ways. People have exploited these senses for millennia as memory aids and ways of understanding and interpreting information, we shouldn't lose that tradition and should make every effort to enhance it with modern technology rather than replace it with a single interface metaphor. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_cell

Rhinobird 7y ago

1a - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac&t=327s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac&t=327s 1b - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gPM3GqjMR4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gPM3GqjMR4 1c - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGKbRcvIZT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGKbRcvIZT8 1d - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyzgoeeloJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyzgoeeloJA 2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_o8q4Sp-w0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_o8q4Sp-w0 2.5- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xYwgJW7T8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xYwgJW7T8o 3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV_vYkSmkxk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV_vYkSmkxk

Rhinobird 7y ago
and, these: 4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLYz2vWv1wg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLYz2vWv1wg 5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsbrEOxVPcg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsbrEOxVPcg
dredmorbius 7y ago
Someone might care to suggest to Mr. Nelson the prospect of the visible connections afforded by YouTube playlists....

slim 7y ago

what's with hiding complexity? is it desirable to show connections? from the examples in the video, it seems the connections do not convey any additionnal meaning. It seems to me that there are indeed systems where connections convey meaning. In those systems, the nodes connected are invisible (represented as dots) as to show the topology of the connections. Maybe it's not useful to show texts and connections at the same time

schpaencoder 7y ago
The point is that humans navigate and orient themselves easier in a spatial persisting environment.

tudorw 7y ago

Lots of interesting things on Ted's twitter https://twitter.com/TheTedNelson https://twitter.com/TheTedNelson

vermilingua 7y ago
One of those interesting things is the ridiculous cult of personality that’s formed around him. Nelson is brilliant, but some of the crap his followers put out is just unreal.

simonh 7y ago

I get the same feelings reading his descriptions of Xanadu as I did reading descriptions of Google Wave. It all sounds a though it aught to be great and wonderful, but I can't actually visualise how it would be useful every day. What actual value would I get out of it, constantly on an ongoing basis? I can see how perhaps you could construct interesting use cases, but I just don't see the value as a primary interface. It doesn't even sound all that hard to implement. I know there's a basic implementation, but his description of it is hedged around with caveats. Certainly with modern development environments, it should be many orders of magnitude easier than in the 60s or 70s to get this working, yet it's still struggling to get off the ground. Contrast with the web he is so critical of, which was useful and valuable the first day it was released. If it takes 50 years and you still don't even have a compelling proof of concept, I can't help suspecting the grand vision is just far too elaborate and heavy weight to be workable in practice.

yourapostasy 7y ago
Pre-teen me was utterly fascinated with Xanadu, but that was before I learned about the computational and storage costs of data structures, and how large-scale human interaction with systems evolves. Now, I can't wrap my head around what Nelson promotes and what I extrapolate to a scaled-up global system. I'd really like to know from those more deeply immersed in the implementation of his vision how the following pieces are addressed, because I can't quite reconcile between the dribs and drabs I've pieced together of the internals and what I know of large-scale systems. 1. As near as I can tell, the ZigZag data structure at its core is a type of directed graph. Fast path traversal has always been a challenge for me with these at scale. When I want to pull a list of all referring/predecessor links, I'm either walking the graph, or maintaining a continuously-updated cross-reference lookup. I must be overlooking how he's solved this problem, because the kind of micro-payment environment he envisions seems to me to require knowing this information (is this what he calls a "cell"?) to compute the presented price of a piece of information derived from a foundation of other pieces of information. 2. How does transclusion work for non-text data like audio, video, rich media, chats, or in a generalized way, arbitrary data sets? 3. Was there ever a notion of transclusion quality or security? I don't see any acknowledgement in Nelson's design of the need to address bad actors abusing transclusion, giving rise to equivalents to spammers, trolls, phishers, etc. within the xanadocs environment. 4. What determines a cell? As near as I can tell (and my understanding is admittedly flawed), cells are decided by the author, but I must be wrong here. That seems a high cognitive load to make those decisions, and I don't see any support for crowd-defined cells, nor an API that would facilitate building such an interaction. BTW, for those who lament the quiescence of the Gzz [1] project due to patent protection, it can pick up again now that the patent expired [2]. Whoever picks it up likely should read about the experiences of one of the original Gzz authors [3]. The most programmer-oriented write up of the data structure I could find [4] didn't erase my impression that Nelson's vision was fine for a small group, but doesn't address scaling up to the challenges we see on a global level. It's still fascinating to think about, and I see value within a corporate environment, but I struggle seeing it staying useful in the public realm due to the this-is-why-we-can't-have-nice-things principle. [1] http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/ http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software)#History [3] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/233#comment-1715 [4] https://hackernoon.com/an-engineers-guide-to-the-docuverse-d080cdbb73a6 https://hackernoon.com/an-engineers-guide-to-the-docuverse-d...

z3t4 7y ago

One problem is CORS creating a firewall around every web page. Another problem is copyright, showing someone else's work on your web page. Fair use would have to be expended to showing parts of a document. Wikipedia did something like this where you can see content when hovering over a link ... But I think what the old guy is talking about is actually showing a visual graph how documents and text are linked together. We humans are good at scanning text. So I think something like this would work well in a search engine, where instead of getting a list of links, you get a visual graph of interlinked documents, that makes it faster to explore different branches and find what you are looking for.

nabla9 7y ago

Ted Nelson is visionary but bad businessman/project leader. The Curse Of Xanadu: https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ He patented some of his ideas (like ZigZag data structure) but failed to commercialize despite multiple attempts. Then he killed open source attempt to make it happen outside his control (GZigZag). Being very defensive and insisting of owning the project when one has not the ability to lead is unfortunate. Nelson had very good ideas. The idea that you make closed source hypertext project seemed possible at the time, before the web, but it has no change of happening now.

carapace 7y ago
Ted Nelson responded: 'Errors in "The Curse of Xanadu," by Gary Wolf' http://xanadu.com.au/ararat http://xanadu.com.au/ararat Look I'm as bummed as anyone that he never got Xanadu off the ground, but please don't link to that "hit piece". Ted Nelson is a visionary and deserves more respect.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  With due respect, Nelson's response ssuggests an inability to distinguish forest from tree. There is a difference between narrative and factual error. Nelson fails to draw that and is stuck in minutiae. There's also considerable prickliness, if not outright paranoia, shown. (And yes, I've read the Wired piece as well.)
enkiv2 7y ago
It's not true that he killed GZZ. He had filed the patent already, & the GZZ developer (who had previously been working closely with Ted) dropped the project when he heard that a patent existed. (As far as I am aware, all patents filed with respect to ZigZag or Xanadu are expiring within the next few years.) Several Xanadu implementations are already released as open source (the first one in 1999). Believe me: I've tried to convince Ted that the appropriate way to get stuff to have traction these days is to develop in public, rather than keeping stuff secret during development & only releasing source when it's been polished. It's not that he wants a closed & commercialized system (though he hasn't completely given up on having some stake in monetization), but that he wants enough control to avoid the kinds of runaway misunderstandings that produced the web. If I had seen a warped version of my own work ruin the world, I'd be conservative too. Now that web standards are so complicated that writing a new web browser is impossible for even large & very rich companies (Microsoft is ditching IE in favor of Chrome, following dozens of others), a properly-designed (and thus, simple) hypertext system becomes a lot more sensible -- for more and more people, the web will seem less and less like a reasonable compromise (being never a particularly good system for hypertext, and a far worse application sandbox platform). Some folks have been jumping to gopher, but others will probably migrate to new systems that are along the lines of Xanadu.

SuperPaintMan 7y ago

Started playing around with https://gitlab.com/krampus/wormwood https://gitlab.com/krampus/wormwood , it's a client that seems pretty good. It takes a bit of elbow grease to get going, but this should be fun to play with. Setup is a bit of a pain and it could use a readme but once you install the perl modules, build the assets and set up the server it's pretty nice. Could probably use a dockerfile as well Give it a poke! http://lain.gboards.ca/view.cgi?url=static/doc/doc.xan.org http://lain.gboards.ca/view.cgi?url=static/doc/doc.xan.org