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Interesting. This and the other posts I've seen about Delta seems to exist in that liminal space, were it's difficult to tell if the author has had a brilliant
by e12e 1mo ago
Interesting. This and the other posts I've seen about Delta seems to exist in that liminal space, were it's difficult to tell if the author has had a brilliant insight, that they struggle to convey to anyone who's not yet had the same insight; or if they've simply gone slightly mad.
It's a similar sense I get with reading Nelson (after being able to think about his ideas for a while, I'm quite certain it was mostly genius and only a little bit of lunacy).
It remains to see how Delta will turn out.
On a side-note; my initial reaction to the headline was; no. Xanadu wasn't missing agents.
I do think I see where the author is going, though; and I think I agree that agents might be a new tool that might facilitate some hypertext ideas. Not Xanadu perhaps. But some other, more pragmatic and less magic place - but a place that is a little more magical than where we are now.
And it intersects a bit with an experiment we started at work; migrating our modest web site from WordPress to a static site combining 11ty (https://11ty.dev https://11ty.dev) (we already lean heavily on typescript for our application development) and visual studio code with frontmatter cms (https://frontmatter.codes https://frontmatter.codes) - and AI/LLMs.
AI helps with making a static page version of our site, and adopting to 11ty.
The idea is that with trivial push-to-deploy setup, our business people, with the help of AI in vs code, will be able to work directly with 11ty and git to make changes, do reviews and publish changes.
A hill that would probably have been too steep for them to climb just six months ago.
So in reference to the theme of realizing a better hypertext system with the help of AI, we're sort of doing the same thing, it turns out: mix solid, boring tools (static site gen, typescript, editor, version control, CI, static hosting) and some AI - to hopefully allow more users leverage both tooling and AI in an empowering way.
We've just stated the experiment - we may yet fly too close to the sun, and end up falling back to a traditional CMS.
- alex7o 1mo agoI think not are the same the only thing that differentiates them is adoption. If people show interest in the thing you are a genius if they don't you are mad/crazy.
- m12k 1mo agoThe madman and the genius are similar in that they disagree with the world at large/prevailing wisdom. Where they differ is that the madman loses the fight while the genius (eventually) wins.
- e12e 1mo agoOne reason I have some hope for this approach is that we start by removing complexity by going to a static web site first. We remove WordPress, database, configuration, templates - a lot of cruft. Then we can add it back as needed for keeping edits and publishing simple. It might turn out we hardly need anything from 11ty, thanks to AI making editing more automatic. I think (the collective) we, are (mostly by accident) building systems that are at least one dimension or level of higher abstraction than before AI. Unfortunately with AI, higher abstraction doesn't automatically mean less complexity, or better managed complexity. I think 95% of systems being built now with Al and on top of - or including Al - will turn out to be highly complected mountains of madness.
- bitwize 1mo agoComplexity in itself is not an interesting measure but it's a proxy for an interesting measure: time and cost to build/maintain. A more complicated program that is built and maintained with LLM assistance is cheaper and faster to build and fix than even a less complicated program built without. It's even the same without LLMs: once React achieved critical density and "won" the JS framework wars, building React apps became cheaper and faster even than building plain HTML/JS apps.
- ulbu 1mo agocalling what someone else finds interesting “not an interesting measure” is itself something that calls for an interested measure.
- e12e 1mo agoI strongly disagree. Incidental complexity is the enemy good emergent properties of a system; security, auditability, stability, testability, maintainability...
- andai 1mo agoWell it unironically takes a thousand years to integrate the ideas revealed in a single acid trip. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try!