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Gemini is a fun alternative; it's not supposed to be an ideal to look towards. The nice thing about Gemini is not so much its aesthetic as its human focus. It l

Gemini is a fun alternative; it's not supposed to be an ideal to look towards. The nice thing about Gemini is not so much its aesthetic as its human focus. It leans away from automation. It sounds to me (and I may be wrong and picking up on the wrong things) that what you'd really like is something like Project Xanadu? Which is, unlike Web3, a reasonable position to hold, though it's one I strongly disagree with (I consider a fully realized and mainstream Xanadu as a Grim Meathook Future, though one not as thoroughly inhuman and extinctionist as Web3).

uniqueuid 5y ago
Got me there. What I secretly wish for is a reliable all-encompassing technical reservoir of information without all the cruft that used to be unavoidable (books, libraries, lending, paper copiers, fees etc.). And a working human language that allows for deterministic logic on top. Yes, it's impossible, but some nights I allow myself to dream Frege's dream [1]. So to be realistic, I don't even need this all-embracing technology to exist. I just want current technology to not prevent me from building my own tiny pocket of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begriffsschrift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begriffsschrift
jazzyjackson 5y ago
i’m currently reading Ted’s “literary machines” and fascinated by the description of xanadu, it lines up with a lot of my own intuition of the way things “should be” i’m curious what comes across as so grim to you
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  A lot of the assumptions of Xanadu are incompatible with an open world. For a trivial example, bidirectional links require either a central authority, a burn-the-forests blockchain solution, or acceptance of the fact that every document will consist entirely of links to Viagra pharmacies. Unbreakable links (no 404s, no link-rot) implies the inability to ever remove anything from the system, which means no right to be forgotten, your bad takes will haunt you forever. (This lovely feature is implemented as "content-adressing" in some Web3 protocols.) Transclusion and transcopyright mean the whole system has to be surveilled to enforce IP law, and all expression is potentially financialized. Basically, something like Xanadu would work very well as a personal system, or even a closed research system like a law library, but an open-world Xanadu would be even a worse hellscape than the Web-as-we-know-it.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    Thanks, I agree that blockchain-permenance is undesirable (not to mention illegal in EU !) Still, I do wish links were content-addressed to fight against link rot, but with individual users able to choose what files they want to keep seeding, as is the case now with torrents. I never saw the appeal of IPFS broadcasting every file I look at, but wouldn’t it be cool if archive.org’s job was made eaiser by a replication protocol, maybe something like Beaker’s Hyperdrive? The way I see it, if someone copies something I publish, they can’t prove it was me unless I choose to cryptographically sign it - the trouble with blockchain solutions is everything is signed by default and its hard to keep an alt account anonymous. More pressing than link rot tho, as you point out, is network spam, how to stay sane on a web that’s 90% bots posting markov-generated content. I’m interested in maintaining collections of data and their original context, so if someone shares a 5 second clip its trivial for me to pull up the file it was clipped from. This kind of searchability and back-linking is what I’m turning to xanadu for. [ I appreciate the opportunity to think “out loud” :) ]

uniqueuid 5y ago

Got me there. What I secretly wish for is a reliable all-encompassing technical reservoir of information without all the cruft that used to be unavoidable (books, libraries, lending, paper copiers, fees etc.). And a working human language that allows for deterministic logic on top. Yes, it's impossible, but some nights I allow myself to dream Frege's dream [1]. So to be realistic, I don't even need this all-embracing technology to exist. I just want current technology to not prevent me from building my own tiny pocket of it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begriffsschrift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begriffsschrift

jazzyjackson 5y ago

i’m currently reading Ted’s “literary machines” and fascinated by the description of xanadu, it lines up with a lot of my own intuition of the way things “should be” i’m curious what comes across as so grim to you

NoGravitas 5y ago
A lot of the assumptions of Xanadu are incompatible with an open world. For a trivial example, bidirectional links require either a central authority, a burn-the-forests blockchain solution, or acceptance of the fact that every document will consist entirely of links to Viagra pharmacies. Unbreakable links (no 404s, no link-rot) implies the inability to ever remove anything from the system, which means no right to be forgotten, your bad takes will haunt you forever. (This lovely feature is implemented as "content-adressing" in some Web3 protocols.) Transclusion and transcopyright mean the whole system has to be surveilled to enforce IP law, and all expression is potentially financialized. Basically, something like Xanadu would work very well as a personal system, or even a closed research system like a law library, but an open-world Xanadu would be even a worse hellscape than the Web-as-we-know-it.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Thanks, I agree that blockchain-permenance is undesirable (not to mention illegal in EU !) Still, I do wish links were content-addressed to fight against link rot, but with individual users able to choose what files they want to keep seeding, as is the case now with torrents. I never saw the appeal of IPFS broadcasting every file I look at, but wouldn’t it be cool if archive.org’s job was made eaiser by a replication protocol, maybe something like Beaker’s Hyperdrive? The way I see it, if someone copies something I publish, they can’t prove it was me unless I choose to cryptographically sign it - the trouble with blockchain solutions is everything is signed by default and its hard to keep an alt account anonymous. More pressing than link rot tho, as you point out, is network spam, how to stay sane on a web that’s 90% bots posting markov-generated content. I’m interested in maintaining collections of data and their original context, so if someone shares a 5 second clip its trivial for me to pull up the file it was clipped from. This kind of searchability and back-linking is what I’m turning to xanadu for. [ I appreciate the opportunity to think “out loud” :) ]