5 ms·

The prior art section should be a reminder that we haven’t progressed as far as some might think. I’ll watch Doug Engelbart’s demo every year or so to remind my

by adfm 4y ago

The prior art section should be a reminder that we haven’t progressed as far as some might think. I’ll watch Doug Engelbart’s demo every year or so to remind myself of that.

belugacat 4y ago
I don’t see Engelbart’s work - and all other similar pioneering work that routinely gets brought up anytime HCI folks get together to wax poetic about what could be - as reminder of how much more progress lies ahead of us. In fact, most of the things shown in those demos can be done today - perhaps in more narrow ways, but fundamentally we have collaborative document editing, video chat, complex live drawing tools, multi stream video editing, handwriting recognition, etc etc etc. All operating at scales that could only be dreamt of in these early days. What it brings to my mind though is that software doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Writing software requires many hours of human effort, maintaining it even more so. Sustained, focused, organized human effort requires funding of some sort [0]. Software exists to solve problems, and in our globalized capitalistic economies, it means the value of software does not lie in reaching some paragon of pure academic composability/extensibility, but in solving concrete problems for people while meeting some arbitrary costs/tradeoffs. This is why those “tools for thoughts” demos seem to always rehash the same ideas and get stuck circling around the same drain that Engelbart & Kay & friends charted 50 years ago; in the meantime, some industrial company you’ve never heard of is paying a few consultants big bucks to come up with “boring” Excel spreadsheets that are just as much “tools for thought” as anything else that humans use. Now, am I satisfied with this state of affairs, and would I love to see what models for writing and maintaining software could exist in a non capitalistic culture? Absolutely not, and absolutely. But that seems to me to be more the root cause of why we’re still chasing the Engelbart mirage over half a century later, rather than some fundamental/conceptual “progress” to be made. [0] and speaking of funding, it is interesting to look at what funding environments those open ended “tools for thought” projects tend to come from; more often than not academia, or in the case of ink and switch, an independently wealthy PI. Places directly connected to money making ventures, like Xerox PARC or MSR, are short lived, and few and far between.
- imiric 4y ago
  > In fact, most of the things shown in those demos can be done today That's not a coincidence, as modern OSs were inspired by those demos. But isn't it a sign of a lack of progress the fact that the pinnacle of modern technology is the fact we can do the same things shown 50 years ago _slightly better_? Why haven't there been equally revolutionizing ideas in HCI since then? We have better screens on smaller computers, perfected tapping on glass and haptic feedback, but what we can do with all this technology is awfully limiting. Add to that the invasion of advertising in every facet of computing, perversing incentives for companies to develop technology that benefit humanity instead of exploiting it, and in many ways we've regressed. XR seems to be the next step forward (itself not a novel idea either), but so far it seems that it will be ruled by the current tech giants, which is far from enticing.
  - adfm 4y ago
    > isn't it a sign of a lack of progress the fact that the pinnacle of modern technology is the fact we can do the same things shown 50 years ago _slightly better_? This was implied, but thank you for capturing the spirit succinctly. I've got an old Mac II ci that I picked up at a thrift store for $12 that came with an old version of Photoshop and an ethernet card that I keep around to remind myself of how little we've progressed. For a machine manufactured in 1989 with performance measured in MHz, it may be noticeably slower, but that's not the point. It's that we're doing the same tired twentieth century stuff we were doing 33 years ago, just slightly faster. XR does seem a path forward, but the so-called giants you mention are selling subsidized prototypes you can't even take outside without a stern warning that you may brick the device. It's been close to a decade since the DK1 came out. You'd think they'd be past the point where legs are a new feature.
    - belugacat 4y ago
      > I've got an old Mac II ci that I picked up at a thrift store for $12 that came with an old version of Photoshop and an ethernet card that I keep around to remind myself of how little we've progressed. For a machine manufactured in 1989 with performance measured in MHz, it may be noticeably slower, but that's not the point. It's that we're doing the same tired twentieth century stuff we were doing 33 years ago, just slightly faster. On a computer the size and weight of a paper notebook, with all day battery life, a display whose color quality/resolution/refresh rate were utterly unimaginable 33 years ago, I can have dozens of layers that are up to tens of thousands of pixels in edge size, use advanced AI to generate textures like grass/clouds/etc. or segment arbitrary objects from the background, recomposite all that in real time, etc. etc. etc... If you haven't used a computer since 33 years ago I highly recommend doing so. If your argument is that we're still making 2D pictures, well we've been making that for a few thousands (if not tens of thousands) of years. If you want to be making weird experimental 3D/4D/nD VR/AR/xR art stuff there's lots of great tooling for that too (but it won't run on your 1989 Mac...)
imiric 4y ago
Modern operating systems are missing a monumental opportunity for turning computers into transformative educational tools. Not only have we not progressed since the visions of Engelbart and Alan Kay, we've regressed in many ways. Mobile OSs are walled gardens mainly suited for content consumption and mining user data to sell to advertisers. This is now even spreading to desktop OSs, where most of the time it feels like the computer is using you, rather than the other way around. Despite of how much computers have revolutionized every aspect of our lives, they're awfully primitive at being educational. Think about it: our best online knowledge resource is the equivalent of a classic encyclopedia, with static text, and some multimedia features. There are plenty of free lectures available, but they're limited to video recordings and text. Content is rarely interactive, or presented in a way to guide learning via experimentation. There are some worthwhile resources that do this right, but they're either not very accessible or mainstream. Imagine where we could be as a civilization if operating systems were built with education in mind. I'm not smart enough to design such systems, but having seen what some of the brightest minds in our industry have come up with decades ago, I can't help but feel underwhelmed, to say the least, by what we have today.
- belugacat 4y ago
  I've worked in education (as a teacher), and in edtech, trying to build such systems. I used to share some of your views and frustrations. Your post brings 2 thoughts to my mind: 1) I disagree with your characterization of "our best online knowledge resource". I assume you're talking about Wikipedia, sure that's one way to characterize it (albeit not the most genuine IMO). But Wikipedia is a tiny part of the picture; we also have YouTube (with millions of creators from all cultures/languages/fields), Khan Academy, the Internet Archive, your local library, and countless other resources. That's the beauty of the internet: it's decentralized. No centralized service can fulfill every single knowledge need because knowledge gets formed when an individual has to integrate multiple sources of information and reconcile it with their experience of the world (sorry, fans of Young Lady's Illustrated Primer; it was always a literary illusion). Otherwise it's not much more than just regurgitating propaganda. 2) Ultimately, software doesn't really matter for education. What matters is that kids have a physically safe (heated/cooled, with access to food, clean restrooms, etc) facility, and are under the guidance of teachers who are in an environment conducive to quality teaching (eg classes of reasonable sizes, administrators that don't micromanage them, etc). I've seen this "we just need the right interactive software to fix education!" fallacy so many times amongst tech people. Sure, in the hands of competent teachers who have the above, tech & software can enhance learning. But it's not the fundamental piece. And many, many schools (in the US and in many "developed" countries) lack those fundamentals. If you want to "imagine where we could be as a civilization", that's where you have to improve things. Sorry, I know "it's not about the tech, it's about the people and basic physical environment" is a terribly boring answer for a hacker. But spend some time teaching, or building fancy software that ultimately doesn't do much for student outcomes, and I suspect you will observe the same.

by adfm 4y ago

The prior art section should be a reminder that we haven’t progressed as far as some might think. I’ll watch Doug Engelbart’s demo every year or so to remind myself of that.

belugacat 4y ago

I don’t see Engelbart’s work - and all other similar pioneering work that routinely gets brought up anytime HCI folks get together to wax poetic about what could be - as reminder of how much more progress lies ahead of us. In fact, most of the things shown in those demos can be done today - perhaps in more narrow ways, but fundamentally we have collaborative document editing, video chat, complex live drawing tools, multi stream video editing, handwriting recognition, etc etc etc. All operating at scales that could only be dreamt of in these early days. What it brings to my mind though is that software doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Writing software requires many hours of human effort, maintaining it even more so. Sustained, focused, organized human effort requires funding of some sort [0]. Software exists to solve problems, and in our globalized capitalistic economies, it means the value of software does not lie in reaching some paragon of pure academic composability/extensibility, but in solving concrete problems for people while meeting some arbitrary costs/tradeoffs. This is why those “tools for thoughts” demos seem to always rehash the same ideas and get stuck circling around the same drain that Engelbart & Kay & friends charted 50 years ago; in the meantime, some industrial company you’ve never heard of is paying a few consultants big bucks to come up with “boring” Excel spreadsheets that are just as much “tools for thought” as anything else that humans use. Now, am I satisfied with this state of affairs, and would I love to see what models for writing and maintaining software could exist in a non capitalistic culture? Absolutely not, and absolutely. But that seems to me to be more the root cause of why we’re still chasing the Engelbart mirage over half a century later, rather than some fundamental/conceptual “progress” to be made. [0] and speaking of funding, it is interesting to look at what funding environments those open ended “tools for thought” projects tend to come from; more often than not academia, or in the case of ink and switch, an independently wealthy PI. Places directly connected to money making ventures, like Xerox PARC or MSR, are short lived, and few and far between.

imiric 4y ago
> In fact, most of the things shown in those demos can be done today That's not a coincidence, as modern OSs were inspired by those demos. But isn't it a sign of a lack of progress the fact that the pinnacle of modern technology is the fact we can do the same things shown 50 years ago _slightly better_? Why haven't there been equally revolutionizing ideas in HCI since then? We have better screens on smaller computers, perfected tapping on glass and haptic feedback, but what we can do with all this technology is awfully limiting. Add to that the invasion of advertising in every facet of computing, perversing incentives for companies to develop technology that benefit humanity instead of exploiting it, and in many ways we've regressed. XR seems to be the next step forward (itself not a novel idea either), but so far it seems that it will be ruled by the current tech giants, which is far from enticing.
- adfm 4y ago
  > isn't it a sign of a lack of progress the fact that the pinnacle of modern technology is the fact we can do the same things shown 50 years ago _slightly better_? This was implied, but thank you for capturing the spirit succinctly. I've got an old Mac II ci that I picked up at a thrift store for $12 that came with an old version of Photoshop and an ethernet card that I keep around to remind myself of how little we've progressed. For a machine manufactured in 1989 with performance measured in MHz, it may be noticeably slower, but that's not the point. It's that we're doing the same tired twentieth century stuff we were doing 33 years ago, just slightly faster. XR does seem a path forward, but the so-called giants you mention are selling subsidized prototypes you can't even take outside without a stern warning that you may brick the device. It's been close to a decade since the DK1 came out. You'd think they'd be past the point where legs are a new feature.
  - belugacat 4y ago
    > I've got an old Mac II ci that I picked up at a thrift store for $12 that came with an old version of Photoshop and an ethernet card that I keep around to remind myself of how little we've progressed. For a machine manufactured in 1989 with performance measured in MHz, it may be noticeably slower, but that's not the point. It's that we're doing the same tired twentieth century stuff we were doing 33 years ago, just slightly faster. On a computer the size and weight of a paper notebook, with all day battery life, a display whose color quality/resolution/refresh rate were utterly unimaginable 33 years ago, I can have dozens of layers that are up to tens of thousands of pixels in edge size, use advanced AI to generate textures like grass/clouds/etc. or segment arbitrary objects from the background, recomposite all that in real time, etc. etc. etc... If you haven't used a computer since 33 years ago I highly recommend doing so. If your argument is that we're still making 2D pictures, well we've been making that for a few thousands (if not tens of thousands) of years. If you want to be making weird experimental 3D/4D/nD VR/AR/xR art stuff there's lots of great tooling for that too (but it won't run on your 1989 Mac...)

imiric 4y ago

Modern operating systems are missing a monumental opportunity for turning computers into transformative educational tools. Not only have we not progressed since the visions of Engelbart and Alan Kay, we've regressed in many ways. Mobile OSs are walled gardens mainly suited for content consumption and mining user data to sell to advertisers. This is now even spreading to desktop OSs, where most of the time it feels like the computer is using you, rather than the other way around. Despite of how much computers have revolutionized every aspect of our lives, they're awfully primitive at being educational. Think about it: our best online knowledge resource is the equivalent of a classic encyclopedia, with static text, and some multimedia features. There are plenty of free lectures available, but they're limited to video recordings and text. Content is rarely interactive, or presented in a way to guide learning via experimentation. There are some worthwhile resources that do this right, but they're either not very accessible or mainstream. Imagine where we could be as a civilization if operating systems were built with education in mind. I'm not smart enough to design such systems, but having seen what some of the brightest minds in our industry have come up with decades ago, I can't help but feel underwhelmed, to say the least, by what we have today.

belugacat 4y ago
I've worked in education (as a teacher), and in edtech, trying to build such systems. I used to share some of your views and frustrations. Your post brings 2 thoughts to my mind: 1) I disagree with your characterization of "our best online knowledge resource". I assume you're talking about Wikipedia, sure that's one way to characterize it (albeit not the most genuine IMO). But Wikipedia is a tiny part of the picture; we also have YouTube (with millions of creators from all cultures/languages/fields), Khan Academy, the Internet Archive, your local library, and countless other resources. That's the beauty of the internet: it's decentralized. No centralized service can fulfill every single knowledge need because knowledge gets formed when an individual has to integrate multiple sources of information and reconcile it with their experience of the world (sorry, fans of Young Lady's Illustrated Primer; it was always a literary illusion). Otherwise it's not much more than just regurgitating propaganda. 2) Ultimately, software doesn't really matter for education. What matters is that kids have a physically safe (heated/cooled, with access to food, clean restrooms, etc) facility, and are under the guidance of teachers who are in an environment conducive to quality teaching (eg classes of reasonable sizes, administrators that don't micromanage them, etc). I've seen this "we just need the right interactive software to fix education!" fallacy so many times amongst tech people. Sure, in the hands of competent teachers who have the above, tech & software can enhance learning. But it's not the fundamental piece. And many, many schools (in the US and in many "developed" countries) lack those fundamentals. If you want to "imagine where we could be as a civilization", that's where you have to improve things. Sorry, I know "it's not about the tech, it's about the people and basic physical environment" is a terribly boring answer for a hacker. But spend some time teaching, or building fancy software that ultimately doesn't do much for student outcomes, and I suspect you will observe the same.