4 ms·

I’m sad that we no longer have any Ted Nelson’s in the world of tech. There’s simply too much money now for smart people to waste their time on “interesting” th

I’m sad that we no longer have any Ted Nelson’s in the world of tech. There’s simply too much money now for smart people to waste their time on “interesting” things.

kastagg 4y ago
Not everyone is working at whichever shop offers the highest salary. There are many smart people who are willing to take a pay cut to work on interesting problems. There are some smart people who are already financially secure so that they could afford a pay cut.
openfuture 4y ago
Oh we definitely still have Ted Nelsons, what we don't have is a way to find them. Right now people are lost deep in some social media private groups and the surface level information is all war, disease and drugs.
carapace 4y ago
First off, we still have THE Ted Nelson! He's old but he ain't dead yet. (He might even read this thread!?) - - - - There are some modern day Ted Nelsons: Sean Mcdirmid comes to mind. (He's on HN. Dude, didn't you used to have a blog?) https://www.youtube.com/user/seanmcdirmid https://www.youtube.com/user/seanmcdirmid https://confengine.com/user/sean-mcdirmid https://confengine.com/user/sean-mcdirmid Or Jonathan Edwards https://www.subtext-lang.org/AboutMe.htm https://www.subtext-lang.org/AboutMe.htm There's the folks behind Enso/Luna https://enso.org/ https://enso.org/ among others. Jef Raskin's son Asa is still doing things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin
- Cupertino95014 4y ago
  Correct. Engelbart IS dead, RIP. If you get a chance to see Nelson, do it. You never know if you'll get another chance.
azeirah 4y ago
There's a whole subculture of super cool developers who take inspiration from the whole Ted Nelson, Alan Kay/PARC, Douglas Engelbart, Bret Victor branch of software history; ie, visionaries. Two are listed below, but there are many more. Nicky case is one of the most well known ones, Bret Victor himself is very well known and very active. There're also a lot of lesser known people in the space, - Patrick Dubroy: wrote Ohm, makes cool stuff - @azlenelza on Twitter - @codexeditor on Twitter: He's building by far the most professional, serious and very very inventive digitised text... system? I have no idea what to call it. It's far far beyond what Roam, Obsidian etc can do. I think Ted would love to have a conversation with this guy. It goes deep in all directions. - Andy Matuschak is worth mentioning. Goes deep into learning and memory research, and building tools around this. - Tudor Girba @girba on twitter, makes moldable software environments: Tl;dr, tools to make custom IDEs in seconds to minutes that fit your current task perfectly. Very interesting stuff built on Pharo smalltalk - Omar @rsnous on Twitter, posts thought experiments about weird interactions with computers multiple times per week. Sometimes cool ideas come out of it : Of course not all of these people are or will be visionaries of the same level as Ted, but these are all people working to experiment with the status quo, or step out of it completely.
- chillpenguin 4y ago
  Fitting with your list, I would add the Croquet team, who are continuing Engelbart's legacy of collaborative multi-user software. Some of them are on twitter as well.
verisimilitudes 4y ago
If I may nominate myself, take a look at my work, why not?
- stew-j 4y ago
  After a cursory look I found it interesting. Homoiconocity of assembly language isn't something I had thought of--although I have been working on a higher level S-expression based assembly that is lowered to more concrete assembly for Scheme86 microcoded emulation. I'm no genius for sure, but even when I do sometimes find myself ahead of the curve, I fall into Hamlet's dilemma: "...Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of Thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action." Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene I I wish I could explain why the best people and ideas are ignored, or bullied away, but I am at a loss. Best wishes.
  - verisimilitudes 4y ago
    I appreciate the praise. The base of much of my work involves removing what we currently consider to be text from computing, on both ends. An assembler with its language is inferior to my machine code development tool with an interactive interface filled with redundant information; on the other end, I don't believe we should store text as characters, and I'm currently making progress on that. I found no way to contact the author of this, as an example, but it's similar, except I'm making some progress: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32495133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32495133 I've largely given up on promoting my novel work here, as it never makes the front page, and none of my work ever gets any interesting comments whenever it does.
    - stew-j 4y ago
      > I don't believe we should store text as characters Could you briefly elaborate? [edit] I read the article on your HN link. I didn't quite "get it". Program text gets in the way, let's replace it with [?]. Dr. Strandh at U. of Bordeaux, et al., have argued that we shouldn't store programs as text files in an operating system--is that what you are advocating? An image based system, for example? > none of my work ever gets any interesting comments whenever it does Sorry for my part in that, most people don't find me interesting. :) My work doesn't get much attention either, even if someone else happens upon it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/ezruuc/tovero_a_3d_modeling_system_for_common_lisp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/ezruuc/tovero_... ---- I don't know why I keep quoting Shakespeare this week, I mostly slept through the Shakespeare module in high school English, but I guess some filtered through and maybe WRT promotion on the Internet: "Had I so lavish of my presence been, so common-hackneyed in the eyes of men, so stale and cheap to vulgar company, opinion, that did help me to the crown, had still kept loyal to possession and left me in reputeless banishment, a fellow of no mark nor likelihood." Henry IV, Part 1, Act 3, Scene 2 It seems to me like for the most part only the best connected, ruthless, garrulous, overly vocal people get their ideas heard. I've tried business development orgs (including personal connections), directly contacting relevant researchers or sources of funding, on and on. Mostly, the advice has been to throw the spaghetti on the wall (put up a Github project, e.g.) and see what sticks (yell on Twitter, try to get some users). Even one of the founders of this site had difficulty marketing his idea for a new variant of Lisp, you know.

I’m sad that we no longer have any Ted Nelson’s in the world of tech. There’s simply too much money now for smart people to waste their time on “interesting” things.

kastagg 4y ago

Not everyone is working at whichever shop offers the highest salary. There are many smart people who are willing to take a pay cut to work on interesting problems. There are some smart people who are already financially secure so that they could afford a pay cut.

openfuture 4y ago

Oh we definitely still have Ted Nelsons, what we don't have is a way to find them. Right now people are lost deep in some social media private groups and the surface level information is all war, disease and drugs.

carapace 4y ago

First off, we still have THE Ted Nelson! He's old but he ain't dead yet. (He might even read this thread!?) - - - - There are some modern day Ted Nelsons: Sean Mcdirmid comes to mind. (He's on HN. Dude, didn't you used to have a blog?) https://www.youtube.com/user/seanmcdirmid https://www.youtube.com/user/seanmcdirmid https://confengine.com/user/sean-mcdirmid https://confengine.com/user/sean-mcdirmid Or Jonathan Edwards https://www.subtext-lang.org/AboutMe.htm https://www.subtext-lang.org/AboutMe.htm There's the folks behind Enso/Luna https://enso.org/ https://enso.org/ among others. Jef Raskin's son Asa is still doing things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin

Cupertino95014 4y ago
Correct. Engelbart IS dead, RIP. If you get a chance to see Nelson, do it. You never know if you'll get another chance.

azeirah 4y ago

There's a whole subculture of super cool developers who take inspiration from the whole Ted Nelson, Alan Kay/PARC, Douglas Engelbart, Bret Victor branch of software history; ie, visionaries. Two are listed below, but there are many more. Nicky case is one of the most well known ones, Bret Victor himself is very well known and very active. There're also a lot of lesser known people in the space, - Patrick Dubroy: wrote Ohm, makes cool stuff - @azlenelza on Twitter - @codexeditor on Twitter: He's building by far the most professional, serious and very very inventive digitised text... system? I have no idea what to call it. It's far far beyond what Roam, Obsidian etc can do. I think Ted would love to have a conversation with this guy. It goes deep in all directions. - Andy Matuschak is worth mentioning. Goes deep into learning and memory research, and building tools around this. - Tudor Girba @girba on twitter, makes moldable software environments: Tl;dr, tools to make custom IDEs in seconds to minutes that fit your current task perfectly. Very interesting stuff built on Pharo smalltalk - Omar @rsnous on Twitter, posts thought experiments about weird interactions with computers multiple times per week. Sometimes cool ideas come out of it : Of course not all of these people are or will be visionaries of the same level as Ted, but these are all people working to experiment with the status quo, or step out of it completely.

chillpenguin 4y ago
Fitting with your list, I would add the Croquet team, who are continuing Engelbart's legacy of collaborative multi-user software. Some of them are on twitter as well.

verisimilitudes 4y ago

If I may nominate myself, take a look at my work, why not?

stew-j 4y ago
After a cursory look I found it interesting. Homoiconocity of assembly language isn't something I had thought of--although I have been working on a higher level S-expression based assembly that is lowered to more concrete assembly for Scheme86 microcoded emulation. I'm no genius for sure, but even when I do sometimes find myself ahead of the curve, I fall into Hamlet's dilemma: "...Thus conscience does make cowards of us all, and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of Thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action." Wm. Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene I I wish I could explain why the best people and ideas are ignored, or bullied away, but I am at a loss. Best wishes.
- verisimilitudes 4y ago
  I appreciate the praise. The base of much of my work involves removing what we currently consider to be text from computing, on both ends. An assembler with its language is inferior to my machine code development tool with an interactive interface filled with redundant information; on the other end, I don't believe we should store text as characters, and I'm currently making progress on that. I found no way to contact the author of this, as an example, but it's similar, except I'm making some progress: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32495133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32495133 I've largely given up on promoting my novel work here, as it never makes the front page, and none of my work ever gets any interesting comments whenever it does.
  - stew-j 4y ago
    > I don't believe we should store text as characters Could you briefly elaborate? [edit] I read the article on your HN link. I didn't quite "get it". Program text gets in the way, let's replace it with [?]. Dr. Strandh at U. of Bordeaux, et al., have argued that we shouldn't store programs as text files in an operating system--is that what you are advocating? An image based system, for example? > none of my work ever gets any interesting comments whenever it does Sorry for my part in that, most people don't find me interesting. :) My work doesn't get much attention either, even if someone else happens upon it: https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/ezruuc/tovero_a_3d_modeling_system_for_common_lisp/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Common_Lisp/comments/ezruuc/tovero_... ---- I don't know why I keep quoting Shakespeare this week, I mostly slept through the Shakespeare module in high school English, but I guess some filtered through and maybe WRT promotion on the Internet: "Had I so lavish of my presence been, so common-hackneyed in the eyes of men, so stale and cheap to vulgar company, opinion, that did help me to the crown, had still kept loyal to possession and left me in reputeless banishment, a fellow of no mark nor likelihood." Henry IV, Part 1, Act 3, Scene 2 It seems to me like for the most part only the best connected, ruthless, garrulous, overly vocal people get their ideas heard. I've tried business development orgs (including personal connections), directly contacting relevant researchers or sources of funding, on and on. Mostly, the advice has been to throw the spaghetti on the wall (put up a Github project, e.g.) and see what sticks (yell on Twitter, try to get some users). Even one of the founders of this site had difficulty marketing his idea for a new variant of Lisp, you know.