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Wow, this was calculated to make me feel old. I actually own some of the more speculative non-fiction books on "Cyberspace," in particular the representational

Wow, this was calculated to make me feel old. I actually own some of the more speculative non-fiction books on "Cyberspace," in particular the representational aspect. I did expect some higher levels of abstraction to be present when it comes to working with data, browsing file systems, making connections, and so on. I was not necessarily expecting wireframe graphics, but yes, more abstraction. The closest I have seen is something like WinDirStat when it comes to looking at a directory, and even that is just colored blocks. I knew the graphics processing would be intense to match the bandwidth of the human visual channel. I did see the Wild Wild West era of the Internet coming to a close, having donned white and grey hats myself off and on. The early Internet had security holes such you could drive a bus through them honking and dragging a bunch of rusty bikes behind you. The invention of the img tag more or less began the Advertising Era, whether they knew it or not. I did have an early suspicion about privacy, and permanence, so my Usenet posts from 1989 never had my name on them. So far this has remained a decent decision. I did not expect a trend in programming languages I have a hard time describing but can only sum as "yes, every programming paradigm and idiom will be crammed into that language over time if allowed." I have never expected VR to take off until other technologies are in place and cheap. They aren't here yet. I have never expected the "Fifth Generation" anyone-can-code drag-and-drop thing to happen and I believe that by the time such a thing is available (and effective at scale), it would be AI anyway. None of the approaches to AI have been promising to me, aside from Cyc, which I would describe as being necessary, but not sufficient.

Dracophoenix 5y ago
Which books would those be? What exactly was your part in your grey hat days?
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  I would have to dig through my boxes to find those books. They were rather dense and a little esoteric. The grey hat stuff consisted of things like breaking out of the restrictive policies of my campus to get onto the Internet proper, tricking the equivalent of the (yet to be dubbed) script kiddies to incriminating themselves, and sort of Robin-Hooding accounts back away from a gent who spent a lot of time hacking accounts of various campuses to cause havoc before tying everything up in a neat dossier for someone else to deal with -- there was eventual deportation involved, if I recall, but that may have been just rumor. I did rather discreetly inform the department of my major that their choices of passwords and PINs were not as clever as they thought they were.
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    This was in a university setting I take it? I wouldn't have thought the early Internet/NSFNET was exciting enough to hack into. Usenet, yes. But the Internet? Wasn't it just a document retrieval system for scientific work?
    - at_a_remove 5y ago
      Well, we couldn't get out to it to even see what was there, which, by then had IRC, gopher, archie, and so on. Usenet. It was all locked away and we were curious. We randomized the exchange listing, split up the results, and then proceeded to war-dial the entire exchange until we found a forgotten (and unprotected) modem line in the math department, which then hosted all of computer science. From there out to what were called "telnet gates," which were known only from rumor and just knowing of them was a commodity in and of itself.
      - Dracophoenix 5y ago
        "Telnet gates" being early form of a static proxy funneled through separate hardware? If so, I could see how they would valuable for ,say, the Kevin Mitnicks of the era.
        at_a_remove 5y ago
        It was valuable for us, as well, who just wanted to see what was out there.
rchaud 5y ago
This certainly takes me back. I was a wee teen in the late '90s, but I too remember so many commercials and movies that represented the Internet as a new paradigm for visually-oriented computing. Not really skeumorphic designs of file folders and desktops and 'My Briefcase' icons. I still think about that GUI Tom Cruise navigates in Minority Report. The film is almost 20 years old, and yet GUI design today seems to be focused on hiding more and more elements, instead of making the canvas bigger to display more info.
- at_a_remove 5y ago
  Exactly. I don't hate the general concepts or anything, they're obviously important for organizational structure, but the static and uninteresting representations do not take advantage of some of the rich bandwidth of the visual channel. We could see a lot of things about a directory, or at least have them hinted -- a sense of age of files, perhaps ... a collage of some oft-accessed files ... a TF-IDF for a document jutting forward only to be subsumed by a video segment washing over it, and so on. File sizes could be represented on some kind of log-scale. And you're so painfully spot-on about hiding with GUIs. Microsoft continues to wave the utterly unnecessary 3D Objects in my face, and My Videos, and so on and so forth. One Drive appears to jostle for my attention, but meanwhile I have to do additional work just to see where in a directory tree I am.

Dracophoenix 5y ago

Which books would those be? What exactly was your part in your grey hat days?

at_a_remove 5y ago
I would have to dig through my boxes to find those books. They were rather dense and a little esoteric. The grey hat stuff consisted of things like breaking out of the restrictive policies of my campus to get onto the Internet proper, tricking the equivalent of the (yet to be dubbed) script kiddies to incriminating themselves, and sort of Robin-Hooding accounts back away from a gent who spent a lot of time hacking accounts of various campuses to cause havoc before tying everything up in a neat dossier for someone else to deal with -- there was eventual deportation involved, if I recall, but that may have been just rumor. I did rather discreetly inform the department of my major that their choices of passwords and PINs were not as clever as they thought they were.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  This was in a university setting I take it? I wouldn't have thought the early Internet/NSFNET was exciting enough to hack into. Usenet, yes. But the Internet? Wasn't it just a document retrieval system for scientific work?
  - at_a_remove 5y ago
    Well, we couldn't get out to it to even see what was there, which, by then had IRC, gopher, archie, and so on. Usenet. It was all locked away and we were curious. We randomized the exchange listing, split up the results, and then proceeded to war-dial the entire exchange until we found a forgotten (and unprotected) modem line in the math department, which then hosted all of computer science. From there out to what were called "telnet gates," which were known only from rumor and just knowing of them was a commodity in and of itself.
    - Dracophoenix 5y ago
      "Telnet gates" being early form of a static proxy funneled through separate hardware? If so, I could see how they would valuable for ,say, the Kevin Mitnicks of the era.
      - at_a_remove 5y ago
        It was valuable for us, as well, who just wanted to see what was out there.

rchaud 5y ago

This certainly takes me back. I was a wee teen in the late '90s, but I too remember so many commercials and movies that represented the Internet as a new paradigm for visually-oriented computing. Not really skeumorphic designs of file folders and desktops and 'My Briefcase' icons. I still think about that GUI Tom Cruise navigates in Minority Report. The film is almost 20 years old, and yet GUI design today seems to be focused on hiding more and more elements, instead of making the canvas bigger to display more info.

at_a_remove 5y ago
Exactly. I don't hate the general concepts or anything, they're obviously important for organizational structure, but the static and uninteresting representations do not take advantage of some of the rich bandwidth of the visual channel. We could see a lot of things about a directory, or at least have them hinted -- a sense of age of files, perhaps ... a collage of some oft-accessed files ... a TF-IDF for a document jutting forward only to be subsumed by a video segment washing over it, and so on. File sizes could be represented on some kind of log-scale. And you're so painfully spot-on about hiding with GUIs. Microsoft continues to wave the utterly unnecessary 3D Objects in my face, and My Videos, and so on and so forth. One Drive appears to jostle for my attention, but meanwhile I have to do additional work just to see where in a directory tree I am.