4 ms·

Do you think Xanadu would have had a chance if it had been built with today's technology?

kryptiskt 1mo ago
The world is too mutable for it to exist as a decentralized system, you can set up all these permascrolls and enfilades and tumblers and stuff. But someone is going to see profit in making two-way links one-way or altering the permanent record, so they will. Not to mention what happens just by entropy, servers will get turned off because companies go under or people lose interest. You could make it everybody's problem with something like IPFS, you still would have to solve spammers exploiting the commons. And it only makes sense for a place where documents are approximately equally popular. If the canonical Harry Potter contained links to all places referring or citing it, it would be one overloaded document. And then the whole micropayments thing would make it a non-starter, since that have failed badly just about every time it has been tried.
huurtehoog 1mo ago
Xanadu suffered from the same disease as the world building hobby of amateur writers. In the absence of adversarial dynamics, anything you dream up seems possible. But reality is bound by predator-prey dynamics that sap the free energy from any high energy configuration. Good writers and good engineers understand that your design must settle into some low energy configuration, otherwise it won't be feasible or competitive. "Worse-is-better", as the original author puts it, is an ambiguous position at best: "You might think that by the year 2000 I would have settled what I think of worse is better - after over a decade of thinking and speaking about it, through periods of clarity and periods of muck, and through periods of multi-mindedness on the issues. But, at OOPSLA 2000, I was scheduled to be on a panel entitled "Back to the Future: Is Worse (Still) Better?" And in preparation for this panel, the organizer, Martine Devos, asked me to write a position paper, which I did, called "Back to the Future: Is Worse (Still) Better?" In this short paper, I came out against worse is better. But a month or so later, I wrote a second one, called "Back to the Future: Worse (Still) is Better!" which was in favor of it. I still can’t decide." https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html Undecidability at play I guess. We can't precompute every possible future and know which algoriths terminate. We must search, and a local minimum might be in fact high energy after all. Better and worse are judgement calls, and "the right thing" depends on your choice of definitions. Congruence with reality always wins and reality appears to be made of distributed intelligence, despite the hard problem of the mind precluding a final answer.
deleted 1mo ago
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The world is too mutable for it to exist as a decentralized system, you can set up all these permascrolls and enfilades and tumblers and stuff. But someone is going to see profit in making two-way links one-way or altering the permanent record, so they will. Not to mention what happens just by entropy, servers will get turned off because companies go under or people lose interest. You could make it everybody's problem with something like IPFS, you still would have to solve spammers exploiting the commons. And it only makes sense for a place where documents are approximately equally popular. If the canonical Harry Potter contained links to all places referring or citing it, it would be one overloaded document. And then the whole micropayments thing would make it a non-starter, since that have failed badly just about every time it has been tried.

huurtehoog 1mo ago

Xanadu suffered from the same disease as the world building hobby of amateur writers. In the absence of adversarial dynamics, anything you dream up seems possible. But reality is bound by predator-prey dynamics that sap the free energy from any high energy configuration. Good writers and good engineers understand that your design must settle into some low energy configuration, otherwise it won't be feasible or competitive. "Worse-is-better", as the original author puts it, is an ambiguous position at best: "You might think that by the year 2000 I would have settled what I think of worse is better - after over a decade of thinking and speaking about it, through periods of clarity and periods of muck, and through periods of multi-mindedness on the issues. But, at OOPSLA 2000, I was scheduled to be on a panel entitled "Back to the Future: Is Worse (Still) Better?" And in preparation for this panel, the organizer, Martine Devos, asked me to write a position paper, which I did, called "Back to the Future: Is Worse (Still) Better?" In this short paper, I came out against worse is better. But a month or so later, I wrote a second one, called "Back to the Future: Worse (Still) is Better!" which was in favor of it. I still can’t decide." https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html Undecidability at play I guess. We can't precompute every possible future and know which algoriths terminate. We must search, and a local minimum might be in fact high energy after all. Better and worse are judgement calls, and "the right thing" depends on your choice of definitions. Congruence with reality always wins and reality appears to be made of distributed intelligence, despite the hard problem of the mind precluding a final answer.

deleted 1mo ago

[deleted]