This request originated via recent discussions on HN, and the forming of HARC! at YC Research. I'll be around for most of the day today (though the early evening).
I've been constantly surprised about how what I called "object-oriented" and "system-oriented" got neutered into Abstract Data Types, etc., (I think because people wanted to retain the old ways of programming with procedures, assignment statements, and data structures. These don't scale well, but enormous amounts of effort have been expended to retain the old paradigms ...
I think another part of it was people wanted to go on using systems the way they had been, with the operating system being a base layer on which things happen, which does not exist as a foundation for building a different system. To create code, you put it in files, files go in directories, you compile it into a static executable, which becomes temporarily dynamic when executed, and then goes back to being static when it exits, because it was based on a static image. The OS makes it difficult for the executable to update the state of its own image, assuming that trying to do so is a mistake. You run it on top of the OS, not in the OS, not part of it. It's the recapitulation of the application metaphor, where the app. only exists while someone is using it, and then all its state goes away when they're done with it, unless a small piece of it is serialized (unpacked into raw bytes, with no meta-code) for later retrieval. With that kind of setup, the thinking is there's no need for inter-entity relationships that become part of the larger whole, though eventually people wanted applications systems with capabilities, and so more cruft got added onto the pile, trying to create versioned late-binding in the midst of a system designed for abstract data types.
When I talk to people about OOP, I explicitly try to distinguish it from ADTs and systems like I've described above, though I'm at a bit of a loss to come up with a phrase for what to call languages that people commonly call "OO." I've sometimes called them procedural languages, with an extra layer of scoping, or that work with ADTs, but that's a mouthful.
Have you spent any time studying machine learning and how it might affect the fundamental ways we program computers? Any thoughts on how the tooling of machine learning (TensorFlow, ad hoc processes, etc) could be improved?
"There aren't any really good ones" -- so computing major students especially should have to learn 4 or 5 very different ones and write fairly major systems in them.
We should take another pass at design for both majors and non-majors ...
Learn a lot of other things, and at least one real science and one real engineering. This will help to calibrate the somewhat odd lore aka "computing knowledge". I would certainly urge a number of anthropology courses (and social psychology, etc), theater, and so forth. In the right school, I'd suggest "media theory" (of the "Mcluhan", "Innis", "Postman" kind ...)
Whenever I've gone to an anime con, it seems like the older genre masters like Yoshiyuki Tomino (Gundam) were always urging the audience to get to know something besides anime/manga. Specifically to go out and get involved in something to create media about, so as to avoid producing something completely self-referential and navel-gazing. That also seems to apply to the medium of programming. (As in: Do we really need another To-Do app?)
It's also related to what Scott Adams urges. It's pretty hard to get to be in the top best 10% at a single field. It's much easier to be in the top 25% of two different fields, which would make you one of the top 10% of that interdisciplinary combination.
> It's also related to what Scott Adams urges. It's pretty hard to get to be in the top best 10% at a single field. It's much easier to be in the top 25% of two different fields, which would make you one of the top 10% of that interdisciplinary combination.
This is really great, I've been thinking about that for years. Which Scott Adams said this, and where is it from?
The best tech founders often seem to have this quality. They're by no means top 10% in any individual category, but they're strong in technology and in some specific non-tech-related domain. In the right setting, dividing your attention between tech and a non-tech-related domain can actually make you more specialized in a way, not less.
Just after college, I took my first airplane trip, destination California, in search of a job. I was seated next to a businessman who was probably in his early 60s. I suppose I looked like an odd duck with my serious demeanor, bad haircut and cheap suit, clearly out of my element. I asked what he did for a living, and he told me he was the CEO of a company that made screws. He offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was a continuing process.
This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are that the best job for you won't become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for a better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.
This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.
Do you think we're yet at a position where we could catalog a set of "primitives" that are foundational to programming systems? (Where "systems" are fundamentally distributed and independent of software platform, programming language or hardware implementation)
What turning points in the history of computing (products that won in the marketplace, inventions that were ignored, technical decisions where the individual/company/committee could've explored a different alternative, etc.) do you wish had gone another way?
Just to pick three (and maybe not even at the top of my list if I were to write it and sort it), are
(a) Intel and Motorola, etc. getting really interested in the Parc HW architectures that allowed Very High Level Languages to be efficiently implemented. Not having this in the 80s brought "not very good ideas from the 50s and 60s" back into programming, and was one of the big factors in:
(b) the huge propensity of "we know how to program" etc., that was the other big factor preventing the best software practices from the 70s from being the start of much better programming, operating systems, etc. in the 1980s, rather the reversion to weak methods (from which we really haven't recovered).
(c) The use of "best ideas about destiny of computing" e.g. in the ARPA community, rather than weak gestures e.g. the really poorly conceived WWW vs the really important and needed ideas of Engelbart.
I get (a) and (b) completely. On (c), I felt this way about NCSA Mosaic in 1993 when I first saw it and I'm relieved to hear you say this because although I definitely misunderstood a major technology shift for a few years, maybe I wasn't wrong in my initial reaction that it was stupid.
I didn't begin to get it until the industry started trying to use browsers for applications in the late '90s/early 2000's. I took one look at the "stateful" architecture they were trying to use, and I said to myself, "This is a hack." I learned shortly thereafter about criticism of it saying the same thing, "This is an attempt to impose statefulness on an inherently stateless architecture." I kept wondering why the industry wasn't using X11, which already had the ability to carry out full GUI interactions remotely. Why reject a real-time interactive architecture that's designed for network use for one that insisted on page refreshes to update the display? The whole thing felt like a step backward. The point where it clobbered me over the head was when I tried to use a web application framework to make a complex web form application work. I got it to work, and the customer was very pleased, but I was ashamed of the code I wrote, because I felt like I had to write it like I was a contortionist. I was fortunate in that I'd had prior experience with other platforms where the architecture was more sane, so that I didn't think this was a "good design." After that experience, I left the industry. I've been trying to segue into a different, more sane way of working with computers since. I don't think any of my past experience really qualifies, with the exception of some small aspects and experiences. The key is not to get discouraged once you've witnessed works that put your own to shame, but to realize that the difference in quality matters, that it was done by people rather like yourself who had the opportunity to put focus and attention on it, and that one should aspire to meet or exceed it, because anything else is a waste of time.
My reference to X11 was mostly rhetorical, to tell the story. I learned at some point that the reason X11 wasn't adopted, at least in the realm of business apps. I was in, was that it was considered a security risk. Customers had the impression that http was "safe." That has since been proven false, as there have been many exploits of web servers, but I think by the time those vulnerabilities came to light, X11 was already considered passe. It's like how stand-alone PCs were put on the internet, and then people discovered they could be cracked so easily. I think a perceived weakness was that X11 didn't have a "request-respond" protocol that worked cleanly over a network for starting a session. One could have easily been devised, but as I recall, that never happened. In order to start a remote session of some tool I wanted to use, I always had to login to a server, using rlogin or telnet, type out the name of the executable, and tell it to "display" to my terminal address. It was possible to do this even without logging in. I'd seen students demonstrate that when I was in school. While they were logged in, they could start up an executable somewhere and tell it to "display" to someone else's terminal. The thing was, it could do this without the "receiver's" permission. It was pretty open that way. (That would have been another thing to implement in a protocol: don't "display" without permission, or at least without request from the same address.) Http didn't have this problem, since I don't think it's possible to direct a browser to go somewhere without a corresponding, prior request from that browser.
X11 was not the best designed GUI framework, from what I understand. I'd heard some complaints about it over the years, but at least it was designed to work over a network, which no other GUI framework of the time I knew about could. It could have been improved upon to create a safer network standard, if some effort had been put into it.
As Alan Kay said elsewhere on this thread, it's difficult to predict what will become popular next, even if something is improved to a point where it could reasonably be used as a substitute for something of lower quality. So, I don't know how to "bring X11 back." As he also said, the better ideas which ultimately became popularly adopted were ones that didn't have competitors already in the marketplace. So, in essence, the concept seemed new and interesting enough to enough people that the only way to get access to it was to adopt the better idea. In the case of X11, by the time the internet was privatized, and had become popular, there were already other competing GUIs, and web browsers became the de facto way people experienced the internet in a way that they felt was simple enough for them to use. I remember one technologist describing the browser as being like a consumer "radio" for the internet. That's a pretty good analogy.
Leaving that aside, it's been interesting to me to see that thick clients have actually made a comeback, taking a huge chunk out of the web. What was done with them is what I just suggested should've been done with X11: The protocol was (partly) improved. In typical fashion, the industry didn't quite get what should happen. They deliberately broke aspects of the OS that once allowed more user control, and they made using software a curated service, to make existing thick client technology safer to use. The thinking was, not without some rationale, that allowing user control led to lots and lots of customer support calls, because people are curious, and usually don't know what they're doing. The thing was, the industry didn't try to help people understand what was possible. Back when X11 was an interesting and productive way you could use Unix, the industry hadn't figured out how to make computers appealing to most consumers, and so in order to attract any buyers, they ...
I had similar experience as yours and was comfortable coding web pages via cgi-bin with vi. :-)
That is why now I am very interested in containers and microservices in both local and network senses.
As a "consumer", I am also very comfortable to communicate with people via message apps like WeChat and passing wikipedia and GitHub links around. Some of them are JavaScript "web apps" written and published in GitHub by typing on my iPhone. Here is an example:
I don't think networked X11 is quite the web we'd want (it's really outdated), but it does seem better than browsers, which as you point out are so bad you want to stab your eyes out. Unfortunately, now that the web has scaled up to this enormous size, people can't un-see it and it does seem like it's seriously polluted our thinking about how the Internet should interact with end users.
Maybe the trick is something close to this: we need an Internet where it's very easy to do not only WYSIWYG document composition and publishing (which is what the web originally was, minus the WYSIWYG), but really deliver any kind of user experience we want (like VR, for example). It should be based on a network OS (an abstract, extensible microkernel on steroids) where user experiences of the network are actually programs with their own microkernel systems (sort of like an updated take on postscript). The network OS can security check the interpreters and quota and deal out resources and the microkernels that deliver user experiences like documents can be updated as what we want to do changes over time. I think we'd have something more in this direction (although I'm sure I missed any number of obvious problems) if we were to actually pass Alan Kay's OS-101 class as an industry.
We actually sort of very briefly started heading in this direction with Marimba's "Castanet" back at the beginning of Java and I was WILDLY excited to see us trying something less dumb than the browser. Unfortunately, it would seem that economic pressures pushed Marimba into becoming a software deployment provider, which is really not what I think they were originally trying to do. Castanet should have become the OS of the web. I think Java still has the potential to create something much better than the web because a ubiquitous and very mature virtual machine is a very powerful thing, but I don't see anyone trying go there. There's this mentality of "nobody would install something better." And yet we installed Netscape and even IE...
BTW, I do think the security problems of running untrusted code are potentially solvable (at least so much as any network security problems are) using a proper messaging microkernel architecture with the trusted resource-accessing code running in one process and the untrusted code running in another. The problem with the Java sandbox (so far as I understand all that) is that it's in-process. The scary code runs with the trusted code. In theory, Java is controlled enough to protect us from the scary code, but in practice, people are really smart and one tiny screw-up in the JVM or the JDK and bad code gets permissions it shouldn't have. A lot of these errors could be controlled or eliminated by separating the trusted code from the untrusted code as in Windows NT (even if only by making the protocol for resource permissions really clear).
I think all languages today annoy me -- just put me down as a grump. They seem to be at a very weak level of discourse for the 21st century. (But a few are fun when looked at from the perspectives of the past e.g. Erlang ...)
I would hope not. But, based on your work and other comments here, I think we'd agree that our collective sights have been set lower for no good reason. If the goals of the past cannot be fully realized, what hope can we have for those of today and tomorrow?
Concretely, I follow existing languages like Agda, Lean, Haskell, and Rust for pushing the envelope on language semantics, compiler ingenuity, and library abstractions; and http://unisonweb.org/ and http://www.lamdu.org/ for pushing the envelope on the programming workflow itself. While I don't believe editors and languages are orthogonal problems, I do believe there is enough independence to make pursuing these fronts separately in parallel worthwhile.
[Of all of those, http://unisonweb.org/ might especially fit your interests, if I understand them correctly.]
I tried to skim-read through the Unison About page, but all I saw was an under-designed variation of Jetbrains MPS for a single language. I assume you have spent longer with the project - do you care to summarize the differences?
-- I was surprised that the HN list page didn't automatically refresh in my browser (seems as though it should be live and not have to be prompted ...)
It certainly helps when reading long replies, that's for sure. I do think a mini-update box with "click here to load" like on stackoverflow for replies or edits would be an interesting idea.
Of course, the 90's style is pretty hacker-hipster as well...can't deny that.
Imagine:
1. trying to read something long, or
2. going off to a follow a link and to come back and respond,
only to find that the page has been refreshing while you looked away. Now you have to scroll about to find the place you were at in order to respond or to continue reading the comments.
This is maybe the most Alan-Kay-like response so far. Short, simple, but a tiny bit like a message from an alternate dimension. "No, no, I'm not asking you to build the also-wrong solution someone else has tried. I'm saying: solve the problem.
Also feels like worse-is-better vs. the right thing. How much engineering effort and additional maintenance would be required to develop and support such a time-model? A lot. Alas, let us re-create software systems to be radically simpler so that we can do the right thing! Still waiting for Urbit and VPRI's 10k line operating system ... but that's what Alan stands for in our industry: "strive to do the right thing," or as you put it, "solve the problem".
1. If you were to design a new programming paradigm today using what we have learnt about OOP what would it be?
2. With VR and AR (Hololens) becoming a reality (heh) how do you see user interfaces changing to work better with these systems? What new things need to be invented or rethought?
3. I also worked at Xerox for a number of years although not at PARC. I was always frustrated by their attitude to new ideas and lack of interest in new technologies until everyone else was doing it. Obviously businesses change over time and it has been a long time since Xerox were a technology leader. If you could pick your best and worst memories from Xerox what would they be?
Cheers for your time and all your amazing work over the years :)
Come to think of it, AltSpaceVR on the HTC Vive looks a lot like Croquet.
I think Google Glass should've been held back until VR/Augmented Reality gets established. Many Croquet style roving "viewports" projected from Google Glass feeds in an abstracted 3D model of a real world location would be a great way to do reporting on events.
HN is an excellent venue, but is necessarily text oriented, which is an OK tradeoff I think.
My next project after Stack Overflow, Discourse, is an 100% open source, flexible multimedia-friendly discussion system. It's GPL V2 on the code side, but we also tried to codify Creative Commons as the default license in every install, so discussion replies belong to the greater community: https://discourse.org
(Surprisingly, the default content licenses for most discussion software tend to be rather restrictive.)
Still there seems to be only a sandbox install. Why can't we have discourse just like stackoverflow just with technical discussions allowed instead of attacked by both mods and the rules.
Could you afterwards build a discussion Platform to find (partial) agreement in various political etc topics? That seems like it would have huge impact and is really missing.. thought about starting something like that but never got to it.
Could you afterwards build a discussion Platform to find (partial) agreement in various political etc topics? That seems like it would have huge impact and is really missing.. thought about starting something like that but never got to it.
If there are lots of resources more or less available, then a lot of "hunting and gathering" types can do things with them, and some other types can see about what it takes to make resources rather than just consume them. The former tends to be competitive, and the latter thrives on cooperation.
The biggest problems are that the "enterprisers" very often have no sense that they are living in a system that has many ecological properties and needs to be "tended and gardened".
Not an easy problem because we are genetically hunters and gatherers, we had to invent most of the actual sources of wealth, and these inventions were not done by the most typical human types.
Yet another thing where education with a big "E" should really make a difference (today American education itself has pretty much forgotten the "citizenship" part, which is all about systems and tending them.
Q: How do you think we can improve todays world (not just with technology)? What do you think is our species way forward? How as a civilization can we 'get to higher level'? Specifically, I'm interested in your views on ending poverty, suffering, not destroying the Earth, improving our political and social systems, improving education etc. I understand that these are very broad topics without definitive answers but I'd love to hear some of your thought about these.
Thank you and I just want to mention that I appreciate your work.
"What Fools these Mortals be!" Puck meant that we are easy to fool. In fact we like to be fooled -- we pay lots of money to be fooled!
One way to look at this is that the most important learning anyone can do is to understand "Human beings as if from Mars" -- meaning to get beyond our fooling ourselves and to start trying to deal with what is dangerous and counterproductive in our genetic (and hence cultural) makeups. This is quite different than what most schools think they are supposed to be about -- but the great Jerome Bruner in the 60s came up with a terrific curriculum for 5th graders that was an excellent start for "real anthroplogy" in K-5.
I was casting around recently looking for something to post to HN about it, but there's surprisingly little on the web. (I haven't yet watched the National Film Board documentary on it, which was the only substantive source I could find.)
For big problems, "finding the problem" is paramount -- this will often suggest representation systems that will help think and do better. A language that allows you to quickly make and refine your sense of the context and discourse -- i.e. to make languages as you need using tools that will automatically provide development environments, etc. and allow practical exploration and progress.
Many mainstream programming tools feel to be moving backwards. For example, Saber-C of the 1980s allowed hot-editing without restarting processes and graphical data structures. Similarly, the ability to experiment with collections of code before assembling them into a function was advance.
Do you hold much hope for our development environments helping us think?
You could "hot-edit" Lisp (1.85 at BBN) in the 60s (and there were other such systems). Smalltalk at Parc in the 70s used many of these ideas, and went even further.
Development environments should help programmers think (but what if most programmers don't want to think?)
Yes. I think they have been slowly getting better.
Visual Studio has let you do hot code editing for over a decade now, they call it "Edit and Continue"[0]. Only works for some languages (C#, Visual Basic/C++). It also lets you modify the program state while stopped on a break-point with code of your devising.
Most browsers also let you adhoc compose and run code without modifying the underlying programs.
Thanks to hardware performance counters, profilers are now able to profile code with much less impact on performance (eg: no more adjusting timeouts due to profiler overhead). Network debuggers are getting better at decoding traffic and displaying it in a more human readable format (eg: automatic gzip decompression, stream reassembly, etc).
Kind of, but it was clunkier. You could Break out of an executing program, edit the code you wanted, and then type CONT to continue execution from the break point. The state from that point forward might not be what you want, though. At least inside VS it tries to revert state so that the revision executes as if the state came into it "clean."
I don't know in what context "hot editing" was used to start this thread, but what I read in it is the idea that you can change code while it's running. Edit and continue has a different feel to it, because it works by a different method, by literally patching memory that the suspended thread is going to execute. It has the convenience of stopping the execution of the program before the patch is done. What "hot editing" in, say, Smalltalk has been able to do is you can have a live program running, you can call up a class that the thread uses, change the code in a method, compile it, while the thread is still running, and instantly see the change take effect. The reason it can do this is that method dispatch is late-bound. In .Net it's bound early. Late binding allows much more of a sense of experimentation. You don't have to stop anything. You just change it like you're changing a setting in an app., and you can see the change instantly. This gives you the feel that programming is much more fluid than the typical "stop, edit, compile, debug" cycle.
Hot-editing updates behavior while keeping state, causing wildly unpredictable behavior given the way objects are constructed from classes in today's languages. The current approach to OO is to bootstrap fresh state from an external source every time the behavior changes so guarantees can be made about the interaction between behavior and state. It seems to me the equivalent of using a wheelchair because you might stumble while walking, the concern is genuine, but the cure is possibly worse than the affliction.
I don't know what the solution is. Perhaps a language with a fundamentally different view of objects, maybe as an ancestry of deltas of state/behavior pairings, somewhat like prototypes but inheriting by versioning and incrementally changing so that state and behavior always match up but still allowing you to revert to a working version. Likely Alan has some better ideas on what sort of language we need.
I use hot-editing in python by default and I find it incredibly useful (now I feel crippled when I'm on a system without it). There are times when I need to reload the state completely but it's pretty rare (changing something that uses metaclasses, like sqlalchemy, is one such place).
Maybe there's something about the style I've adopted that lends itself more to hot-editing but it's definitely a tool I'd hate to be without.
It's pretty poor quality listening but you should get the point. You can send me an email (see my profile) if you wanted to go through it in more detail.
Do you believe everyone should be thought, or exposed to, programming in school? I'm afraid that universal inclusion of programming in the curriculum would have an opposite effect and make the next generation despise programming, in the same way some people feel about math today.
Everyone should get fluent in "real science" and many other things come along very nicely with this -- including the kinds of programming that will really help most people.
When you were envisioning today's computers in the 70s you seemed to have been focused mostly on the educational benefits but it turns out that these devices are even better for entertainment to the point were they are dangerously addictive and steal time away from education. Do you have any thoughts on interfaces that guide the brain away from its worst impulses and towards more productive uses?
We were mostly thinking of "human advancement" or as Engelbart's group termed it "Human Augmentation" -- this includes education along with lots of other things. I remember noting that if Moore's Law were to go a decade beyond 1995 (Moore's original extrapolation) that things like television and other "legal drugs" would be possible. We already had a very good sense of this before TV things were possible from noting how attractive early video games -- like SpaceWar -- were. This is a part of an industrial civilization being able to produce surpluses (the "industrial" part) with the "civilization" part being how well children can be helped to learn not to give into the cravings of genetics in a world of over-plenty. This is a huge problem in a culture like the US in which making money is rather separated from worrying about how the money is made.
Then what do you think about the concept of "gamification?" Do you think high densities of reward and variable schedules of reward can be exploited to productively focus human attention and intelligence on problems? Music itself could be thought of as an analogy here. Since music is sound structured in a way that makes it palatable (i.e. it has a high density of reward) much human attention has been focused on the physics of sound and the biomechanics of people using objects to produce sound. Games (especially ones like Minecraft) seem to suggest that there are frameworks where energy and attention can be focused on abstracted rule systems in much the same way.
I certainly don't think of music along these lines. Or even theater. I like developed arts of all kinds, and these require learning on the part of the beholder, not just bones tossed at puppies.
I just tried, albeit slightly unsuccessfully, to describe the philosophy of the Montessori system to someone. Your answer, learning on the part of the beholder, sums it up beautifully. Thank you for that.
I've been playing traditional music for decades, even qualifying to compete at a high level at one point. There is a high density of reward inherent in music, combined with variable schedules of reward. There is competition and a challenge to explore the edges of the envelope of one's aesthetic and sensory awareness along with the limits of one's physical coordination.
Many of the same things can happen in sandbox style games. I think there is a tremendous potential for learning in such abstracted environments. What about something like Minecraft, but with abstracted molecules instead of blocks? Problems, like the ones around portraying how molecules inside a cell are constantly jostling against water molecules, could be solved in such environments using design. Many people who play well balanced games at a high level often seem to be learning something about strategy and tactics in particular rule systems. I suspect that there is something educationally valuable in a carefully chosen and implemented rule system.
Also perhaps, it's so much easier to exploit such mechanisms to merely addict people, that overwhelms any value to be gained.
The way you describe music here sounds a lot like how Steve Pinker has described music: as a mental equivalent of cheesecake; something that just happens to trigger all the right reward systems (the ones based on our love of patterns and structure, and exploiting the same biological systems we use for language) but isn't necessarily nutritious itself.
However, all evidence points to him being wrong about this, making the mistake of starting with language as the centrepiece and explaining everything around it. Human music likely predates human speech by hundreds of thousands of years, and is strongly tied to social bonding, emotions and motor systems in ways that have nothing to do with the symbolic aspects of language.
The way you describe music here sounds a lot like how Steve Pinker has described music: as a mental equivalent of cheesecake;...isn't necessarily nutritious itself.
Note that I didn't mean that in a negative way. Also, if you want to consume macro-nutrients, cheesecake is a pretty effective way to get simple carbs and dairy fat.
is strongly tied to social bonding, emotions and motor systems in ways that have nothing to do with the symbolic aspects of language.
I think there is something akin to this that can be found in games, and that there is something particularly positive that can be found in well constructed games.
Yes, sorry: I could have been more clear that the what I described was Steve Pinker's judgement, not yours.
And I tried to stay neutral towards games on purpose - I have taught game design myself ;). Having said that, a lot of real-world attempts at gamification are pretty banal carrot/stick schemes.
I think games are more like instruments than they are like music. The game itself isn't as interesting as the gameplay you can perform inside it. Speedrunning in particular has a lot in common with musical performance.
I guess in the use of technology one faces a process rather similar to natural selection, in which the better the user's ability to restrict his use to what he has to do, the more likely the survival, i.e. the user will not procrastinate and get distracted. The use of computers for entertainment is unstoppable, it's nearly impossible to not allow the kids find and play those games, chat with friends on WhatsApp, and be exploited otherwise by companies that make money from that sort of exploitation, even though that's at the cost of their psychological health and future success. People spend every single second of the day connected and distracted, and this seems irreversible. I wonder if you have any practical thought on how this can be remedied.
My friend Neil Postman (our best media critic for many years) advocated teaching children to be "Guerilla Warriors" in the war of thousands of entities trying to seize their brains for food. Most children -- and most parents, most people -- do not even realize the extent to which this is not just aggressive, but regressive ...
Neil's idea was that all of us should become aware of the environments we live in and how our brain/minds are genetically disposed to accommodate to them without our being very aware of the process, and, most importantly, winding up almost completely unaware of what we've accommodated to by winding up at a "new normal".
The start of a better way is similar to the entry point of science "The world is not as it seems". Here, it's "As a human being I'm a collection of traits and behaviors, many of which are atavistic and even detrimental to my progress". Getting aware of how useful cravings for salt, fat, sugar, caffeine, etc., turn into a problem when these are abundant and consumer companies can load foods with them....
And, Neil points out -- in books like "Amusing Ourselves To Death" and "The End Of Childhood" -- we have cravings for "news" and "novelty" and "surprise" and even "blinking", etc. which consumer companies have loaded communications channels with ...
Many of these ideas trace back to McLuhan, Innis, Ong, etc.
Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century.
> Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century.
Most children meet entertainment technology as early as before the first birthday, though. Many pre-teens that I see around possess smartphones and/or tablets. Most of the early teenagers possess multiple devices. None of these will be able to judge what's is beneficial to their future and well-being, and opt for it rather than what is immediately fun and pleasing. Just like most of them will live on chocolate bars and crisps if let to do so. The burden falls on the parents, a burden they don't take.
I myself can't think of a future other than one full of device addicts, and a small bunch that managed to liberate themselves from perennial procrastination and pseudo-socialisation only in their twenties. And while my country can prohibit certain products (food, etc.) from import and production within its own borders (e.g. genetically modified, chemically engineered to be consumed greedily), this can't be done with websites, because (a) it's technically impossible and (b) it 'contradicts freedom of speech'. I'll ask the reader to philosophise over (b), because neither the founding fathers of the US nor the pioneers of the french revolution, nor most of the libertarian, freedom-bringing revolutionists had a Facebook to tag their friends' faces.
(edit: I don't want to get into a debate over freedom of speech, and don't support any form of cencuring of it, tho I don't want freedom of speech at the cost of exploitation of generations and generations by some companies that use it as a shelter for themselves.)
> Kay: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century.
> Gkya: I myself can't think of a future other than one full of device addicts, and a small bunch that managed to liberate themselves from perennial procrastination and pseudo-socialisation only in their twenties.
As a infovore this worries me. If we cannot control ourselves and come up with better solutions for self control then the authoritarian minded are likely to do it for us.
The Net is addictive and all those people pretending it ain't so are kidding themselves.
It's easy to imagine anti-Net campaigners in the same way as we see anti-globalization activists today.
I myself have seen the effects of good diet, exercise and meditation on a group of people, and it is quite remarkable how changed for the better people are. So there is hope!
I believe that social change, example: phubbing being widely regarded as taboo, isn't fast enough to keep with the Net's evolution. By the time a moral stance against phubbing is established mobile phones probably won't exist. For this I think we need a technological solution which is as adaptive as an immune system, but also one which people can opt in to. Otherwise eventually people will demand governments do things like turn off the Net at certain times during the day or ban email after 6pm and so on.
The introduction to technology, well, essentially I'm talking about internet, is so early on a kids life that we can't just say "we should control ourselves". You can't put your kid in a room full of crisps, sweets, alcohol, drugs, pornography, and expect it to come out ten, fifteen years later as a healthy individual that is not an addict to none of them. This is what we essentially do with the internet.
> I myself have seen the effects of good diet, exercise and meditation on a group of people, and it is quite remarkable how changed for the better people are. So there is hope!
You're an adult, I am too. We can realize: this is stealing my life. But a kid can't. And stolen days don't return. This is why I'm commenting: we'd rather raise better individuals than letting them do wtf they want and hoping they'll fix themselves later.
Just yesterday before this thread even started (I work as part-time cleaner) I was polishing a window. Through it I saw some children in a sitting room, one of who was literally standing centimeters away from a giant flat screen television. Glued to it.
I thought: "Fuck, they don't have a chance". Their attention spans will be torn to pieces like balls of wool by tiny kittens. Now multiply that effect with the Net + VR and you have an extraordinary psychological effect best compared to a drug.
I didn't have a television in my childhood. I read countless books, and without them, I wouldn't be sitting here, I wouldn't have done any of the things I could reasonably consider inventive or innovative. They might not be world changing things, but they were mine and my life was better for doing so.
I was speaking to a friend who has children a few months ago. He was in the process of uploading photos of his family to Facebook. I asked him whether he considered what he was doing to be a moral act, since he is for practical purposes feeding his children's biometrics into a system that they personally have not, and could not, opt in to. He was poleaxed by the thought. He was about to say something along the lines of 'well everybody's doing this' but I could visibly see the thought struck him that "wow, that's actually a really bad line of reasoning I was about to make". Instead he agreed with me, uncomfortably, but he got it.
I don't know how you get millions of people to have that kind of realization. I do think parental responsibility has a huge role though. My parents got rid of the television in the 80s. It was the right thing to do.
The thing that disturbs me about this argument is that IMHO it's a slippery slope towards "back in my day, we didn't have this new-fangled stuff". We have to be extremely careful that our arguments have more substance than that. That requires a lot of introspection, to be honest.
See, my grandparents worried that the new technology that my parents grew up with would somehow make them dumber (growing up with radio, parents getting television); my parents' generation worried that the technology we grew up with would be bad for us (too much computer, too much gaming, too much Internet). The upcoming generation of parents will grow up wondering whether VR and AR is going to ruin their kids' chances.
Yet kids ALWAYS adapt. They don't view smartphones or tablets as anything particularly out of the ordinary. It's just their ordinary. I'm certain their brains will build on top of this foundation. That's the thing - brains are extremely adaptable. All of us adapted.
There's a term for this worry - it's called 'Juvenoia':
Now, I'm not saying that this is a discussion that shouldn't be had - it certainly should. I just think we all need to be mindful about where our concerns might be coming from.
I never said myself that tech per se will make kids dumber. What I say is, there should be measures governing their exposure, just like there are for other things.
Just like an alcohol drinker and an alcohol addict are different, an internet user and an internet addict are different too. Just because some or most are not addicts, we can't dismiss the addiction altogether.
It's just that it seems a bit unfair to decry (or place undue burdens upon) the vast majority of responsible alcohol drinkers because we've found a few people who have an unhealthy relationship with it.
Recognizing potential dangers is a far cry from saying that there's a risk of "losing the century" because of easy access to technology and entertainment, and it strikes me as rather belittling to the younger generation.
Millennials and their children are still humans, after all, and are just as intelligent, motivated, and adaptable as every generation before them.
Who are responsible alcohol drinkers? In my country the minimum age for consummation of alcoholic products is 18. What would you think of a 10 or 15 years old kid that's a responsible drinker?
What I'm arguing is against an analogue of this in tech. There is a certain period during which the exposure of a minor to technological devices should be governed by parents.
What do you think of adolescents which get recorded nude on chatrooms? Some of them commit suicide. What do you think of children victim to bullying online? What do you think of paedophiles tricking kids online? Isn't a parent responsible of protecting a minor from such abuses?
My general argument on this thread is that we should raise out children as good as we can. Protect them from danger that they cannot be conscious of. We can't certainly place burdens on adults, but we can try to raise adults that are not inept addicts with social deficiencies. And because most of the worlds population is tech-illiterate, it falls on governments to provide education and assistance to parents, just like they do so with health and education.
Most of the counter-arguments here has been strawmans, because while I'm mostly targeting children, I've been countered with arguments about adults.
> The thing that disturbs me about this argument is that IMHO it's a slippery slope towards "back in my day, we didn't have this new-fangled stuff".
> I just think we all need to be mindful about where our concerns might be coming from.
Basically we're on the same page.
Here is proposition. I'll steelman the Conservative view and you tell me what you think. I promise not to claim vidya causes violence or D&D is a leading cause of Satanism.
My proposition is that television media has meaningfully worsened our society by making it dumber. This is an artifact of the medium itself, rather than an issue with any specific content on it. To explain what I mean by dumber I must elaborate.
The television is a unidirectional medium. It contains consensus on various intellectual issues of the day and gives a description of the world I'd call received opinion. There exists no meaningful difference between the advertising that tranches people into buying products and the non-advertising that tranches people into buying ideas. Most ideas that are bought are not presented as items to be sold, they are pictured as 'givens', obvious. Most lying is done by omission. Even were all information presented truthfully, we have a faux sense of sophistication about our awareness which is a problem. When you buy prepackaged meals at a store you are not in the makings of becoming a chef, and in that way you are not chewing over the ideas presented to you, you do no mental cognition. Your state is best described as, and feels like, a hypnotic trance.
One of the problems with this is that television creates a false sense of normalcy that has no objective basis. It asks the questions and provides the answers. All debate is rhetorical debate.
It's the cognitive equivalent of 'traffic shaping' that Quality of Service mechanisms do on routers. In a way that is a much bigger lie. This concept is very similar to Moldbug's Cathedral concept. The people who work for the Cathedral don't realize they represent a very narrow range of thought on the spectrum. Their opinions cannot plausibly be of their own manufacture because one arbitrary idea is held in common with another arbitrary idea and they all hold them.
The key to understanding this is very real and not at all abstract, is that millions of people have synchronized opinions on a range of issues without any other discernible cause other than the television (or radio). Why do populations of teenagers become anorexic after the introduction of television where they did not suffer before it? Synchronized opinion is always suspicious. It defies probability theory to think my grandmother and millions of others suddenly came to the conclusions for example, that gay marriage was a positive idea? Why do millions of conservatives think buying gold is a good idea? It is not that there is something wrong with gay marriage or buying gold. It's that there is no genuine thinking going on about about any of this. There many ways to hedge against inflation that don't involve buying gold. Why is gay marriage the morality tale of the age, and not, say, elder abuse in nursing care facilities.
Why do some things become 'issues' and not a myriad of others? How directed this is is up for debate, but what is not is that the selectivity and constraints of the medium have narrowed our perception of the world, and that has led to the thing that made us dumber: it stunted our native creativity and curiosity.
> Yet kids ALWAYS adapt. They don't view smartphones or tablets as anything particularly out of the ordinary. It's just their ordinary. I'm certain their brains will build on top of this foundation. That's the thing - brains are extremely adaptable. All of us adapted.
There does exist a series of schools in Silicon Valley. The software engineers at Google and Facebook and other firms send their children to them, and they strictly contain no computing related devices. Instead it...
Thank you, this was a wonderfully thought-provoking response (also, the first season of Connections is probably my favourite documentary of all time!).
One thing I will offer is that in my household growing up, television was positive because it was an experience that we shared as a family. We would watch TV shows together, talk about them together, laugh at them together, etc. In that sense, television brought outside viewpoints into our household and spurred conversation. I think that is one of the key factors that may differentiate between TV having good effects and TV having bad effects on different people.
In a sense, I think that although television itself isn't interactive, you could say that our family was 'interactive about' television. So we got the benefits of being able to use television in a positive way.
Thanks for reminding me of how important that was for me :)
By the way, on the limitation of television being a passive medium.... This reminds me of something I read back when I was a kid that was very profound for me. I can't recall exactly now, but I think it was in a Sierra On-Line catalogue where Roberta Williams said something about wanting her children to play adventure games rather than watch television as with adventure games, they had to be actively engaged rather than passive. This really resonated with me at the time, given that I was really getting into the Space Quest & other 'Quest games :)
> Thank you, this was a wonderfully thought-provoking response (also, the first season of Connections is probably my favourite documentary of all time!).
Thank you. I hope to meet or communicate with Mr Burke at some point soon, I know Dan Carlin had a podcast with him a little while back if you're interested in his new take on the world. Connections remains the high water mark for documentary making and it is worth reading the books. If you want to watch a documentary in a similar style I suggest The Ascent of Man.
> In a sense, I think that although television itself isn't interactive, you could say that our family was 'interactive about' television. So we got the benefits of being able to use television in a positive way.
I believe you, I am mainly thinking of the average 5 hours per day the average American (or European) spends in front of the television. The dose makes the poison!
> This really resonated with me at the time, given that I was really getting into the Space Quest & other 'Quest games
Yes, it is clear that videogaming can provide for a shared community and culture, most obviously the MMORPGS. This is not something television achieves, or if it does, it is rare, like fans of Mythbusters or Connections. In the present we are concerned with developing the foundations of the Net, like commerce or the law. But ultimately I think a Net culture will be the most valued feature we ascribe to the Net.
You can't put your kid in a room full of crisps, sweets, alcohol, drugs, pornography, and expect it to come out ten, fifteen years later as a healthy individual that is not an addict to none of them
I know this is bandied about a lot, but is this actually proven? With the exception of drugs, all of those you mention have been within easy reach for me (actually, as a Dutchman, even softdrugs were just one step away if I'd wanted to). Yet I don't consider myself addicted to any of those.
I'm not a native speaker of English, so I wonder: does kid not mean person not yet adolescent? I'm referring to 0-14 yrs olds when I say kid. If we agree on that, and you still say, it's not proven, we can try, well then I can't do much than hoping you either don't have children or no child's responsibility is on you otherwise.
Reading his post I believe he meant the above mentioned things were within reach of him as a child (I don't believe he meant now as an adult).
" I can't do much than hoping you either don't have children or no child's responsibility is on you otherwise."
That's a strong statement to make. Implying he's unable to raise children because he'd like to see evidence that the internet actually has a negative influence on children.
I interpreted his message as he did not only want evidence for the internet, but also the other stuff I mentioned, and their effects on kids. I'm sorry if that wasn't the case.
No, I did not mean I wanted evidence of their effect on kids. I want evidence that "putting your kid in a room full of $bad_stuff" always leads to addiction, since that strikes me as nothing more than scare stories.
Good parents can raise their children correctly even with $bad_stuff present around them, that was the point I was trying to make.
> Good parents can raise their children correctly even with $bad_stuff present around them, that was the point I was trying to make.
I concur. But the internet exposure of kids is mostly not governed by parents. They either are alone with the connected device in their rooms, away from them, or with a mobile device out of their home. The best the parents can do is to educate the kids, but the public lacks the knowledge to effectively do so. They should be given the formation to be able to educate their children, and furthermore schools should educate minors on the use of tech.
"putting your kid in a room full of $bad_stuff" will mostly lead to addiction if the parent is not there to teach the kid: this is harmful to you; not you think?
Mostly agreed, yes. But I would rephrase it as "introducing kids to $bad_stuff without guidance is a bad idea": I don't think that permanent supervision should be required. Once the novelty wears off, and the parent is confident that the kid can behave themselves even in the presence of $bad_stuff, even "putting your kid in a room full of $bad_stuff" can be fine.
And I don't mean that in the sense of "the kids are fine with their heroin syringes", but in the sense "I can leave the cookie jar on the counter and it will still be there when I leave the room".
I think there exist records of hospital mix-ups with babies, with pretty profound differences changing them depending on what environment they wound up in, but this may be mostly anecdotal. One case in Japan like this but it illustrated wealth difference as opposed to what we're looking for here.
Provocative but not evidence. I did look up some twin studies but I can't find one with a clear vice/virtue environment study. Gwern is good at ferreting out this kind of information if you ask him.
Neil's idea was that all of us should become aware of the environments we live in and how our brain/minds are genetically disposed to accommodate to them without our being very aware of the process, and, most importantly, winding up almost completely unaware of what we've accommodated to by winding up at a "new normal".
The start of a better way is similar to the entry point of science "The world is not as it seems". Here, it's "As a human being I'm a collection of traits and behaviors, many of which are atavistic and even detrimental to my progress". Getting aware of how useful cravings for salt, fat, sugar, caffeine, etc., turn into a problem when these are abundant and consumer companies can load foods with them....
And, Neil points out -- in books like "Amusing Ourselves To Death" and "The End Of Childhood" -- we have cravings for "news" and "novelty" and "surprise" and even "blinking", etc. which consumer companies have loaded communications channels with ...
Many of these ideas trace back to McLuhan, Innis, Ong, etc.
Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century.
Hi Alan, If you are familiar with Go, what do you think about it's simplicity as a language? It's something other languages should start thinking about in their design?
I would take a different perspective that puts as "higher forces" things like:
-- what helps thinking about things in general, about problems, and resolving them (epistemological concerns, which include the whole environment as intrinsic to "langauge")
-- representational matchups to what we are trying to model and create dynamic inference processes for (mathematical concerns -- this is why "mathematics" is a plural, in real math you invent maths when needed ...)
-- orthogonal axes for many areas, including meaning and optimizations, including definitions and meta definitions, debugging, reformulation, etc. (pragmatic concerns for eventually winding up with workable artifacts)
Too weak a model of meaning on all counts. Not a new idea, and still they did it again. (This is not an easy problem, and machine learning won't do the job either.)
Semi-offtopic: I've always been fascinated by the origins of religions, their evolution, potential re-definitions and conflicts with other ideas. Specifically, I like thinking about how the founding members of a set of ideas, might retrospectively analyze the entire history of their ideas, and the "idea set"'s metamorphosis into a religion whose followers now treat it as dogma.
I have this, entirely unprovable, theory that most founders of these types of "idea sets" are actually poly-ideological, i.e. giving weight to all possible ideas, and just happened to be exploring ideas which made the most sense at the time.
While I enjoy your thoughts on "object oriented", "functional", etc, I'd love to hear your thoughts about philosophy of religion and its origins (i.e. a slightly meta version of the conversation around "object oriented", "functional", etc). You may be one of a handful of humans able to provide me more data. Is this a topic that interests you, and is it something you think about? If it is something you think about, regarding the dogma you potentially accidentally helped instigate,
Did you and your peers intend for it to become dogma? The rest of my questions sorta assume you did not.
Retroactively, do you feel it was inevitable that these ideas, i.e. popular / powerful / effective ideas, which were espeically extremely effective at the time, became dogma for certain people, and potentially the community as a whole?
Either retroactively or at the time, did you ever identify moments when the dogma/re-definitions were forming/sticking? If so, did you ever want to intervene? Did you feel you were unable to?
Do you have any lessons learned about idea creation/popularization without allowing for re-definitions / accidentally causing their eventual turn into dogma?
Again, if this type of conversation doesn't interest you, or because it cloud potentially be delicate, you'd rather not have it in public, I'd understand.
Bob Barton once called systems programmers "High priests of a low cult" and pointed out that "computing should be in the School of Religion" (ca 1966).
Thinking is difficult in many ways, and we humans are not really well set up to do it -- genetically we "learn by remembering" (rather than by understanding) and we "think by recalling" rather than actual pondering. The larger issues here have to do with various kinds of caching Kahneman's "System 1" does for us for real-time performance and in lieu of actual thinking.
1. Spaced repetition can make the recalling - and thus the thinking and pondering - easier. It can certainly make one more consilient, given the right choice of "other things to study" e.g. biology or social psychology, as you've mentioned in an earlier comment.
2. It takes quite a bit of training for a reader to detect bias in their own cognition, particularly the "cognition" that happens when they're reading someone else's thoughts.
What to do about System 1, though? Truly interactive research/communication documents, as described by Bret Victor, should be a great help, to my mind, but what do you think could be beyond that?
I think that the "training" of "System 1" is a key factor in allowing "System 2" to be powerful. This is beyond the scope of this AMA (or at least beyond my scope to try to put together a decent comment on this today).
There's a recursive sense in which "training" "System 1" involves assimilating more abstractions, through practice and spaced repetition, such as deferring to the equations of motion when thinking about what happens when one throws a ball in the air. Going as far as providing useful interfaces to otherwise difficult cognitive terrain (a la Mathematica) is still part of this subproject. The process of assimilating new abstractions well enough that they become part of one's intuition (even noisily) is a function of time and intense focus. What do you see as a way to aggregate the knowledge complex and teach further generations of humans what the EEA couldn't, fast enough that they can solve the environmental challenges ahead? What's HARC's goal for going about this?
Personally, I've found that discovering "hazy" intuitive connections between otherwise dissonant subjects/ideas (such as the mentioned physics example) cements new concepts at a System 1 level quickly if done early in the learning process. It's also surprising how far one can go on such noisy assimilations alone as well, before needing to dig deeper.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 344 ms ] threadI think another part of it was people wanted to go on using systems the way they had been, with the operating system being a base layer on which things happen, which does not exist as a foundation for building a different system. To create code, you put it in files, files go in directories, you compile it into a static executable, which becomes temporarily dynamic when executed, and then goes back to being static when it exits, because it was based on a static image. The OS makes it difficult for the executable to update the state of its own image, assuming that trying to do so is a mistake. You run it on top of the OS, not in the OS, not part of it. It's the recapitulation of the application metaphor, where the app. only exists while someone is using it, and then all its state goes away when they're done with it, unless a small piece of it is serialized (unpacked into raw bytes, with no meta-code) for later retrieval. With that kind of setup, the thinking is there's no need for inter-entity relationships that become part of the larger whole, though eventually people wanted applications systems with capabilities, and so more cruft got added onto the pile, trying to create versioned late-binding in the midst of a system designed for abstract data types.
When I talk to people about OOP, I explicitly try to distinguish it from ADTs and systems like I've described above, though I'm at a bit of a loss to come up with a phrase for what to call languages that people commonly call "OO." I've sometimes called them procedural languages, with an extra layer of scoping, or that work with ADTs, but that's a mouthful.
We should take another pass at design for both majors and non-majors ...
It's also related to what Scott Adams urges. It's pretty hard to get to be in the top best 10% at a single field. It's much easier to be in the top 25% of two different fields, which would make you one of the top 10% of that interdisciplinary combination.
This is really great, I've been thinking about that for years. Which Scott Adams said this, and where is it from?
The best tech founders often seem to have this quality. They're by no means top 10% in any individual category, but they're strong in technology and in some specific non-tech-related domain. In the right setting, dividing your attention between tech and a non-tech-related domain can actually make you more specialized in a way, not less.
The Dilbert guy. It's from: https://amzn.com/1591847745
Just after college, I took my first airplane trip, destination California, in search of a job. I was seated next to a businessman who was probably in his early 60s. I suppose I looked like an odd duck with my serious demeanor, bad haircut and cheap suit, clearly out of my element. I asked what he did for a living, and he told me he was the CEO of a company that made screws. He offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was a continuing process.
This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are that the best job for you won't become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for a better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.
This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.
Do you think we're yet at a position where we could catalog a set of "primitives" that are foundational to programming systems? (Where "systems" are fundamentally distributed and independent of software platform, programming language or hardware implementation)
(a) Intel and Motorola, etc. getting really interested in the Parc HW architectures that allowed Very High Level Languages to be efficiently implemented. Not having this in the 80s brought "not very good ideas from the 50s and 60s" back into programming, and was one of the big factors in:
(b) the huge propensity of "we know how to program" etc., that was the other big factor preventing the best software practices from the 70s from being the start of much better programming, operating systems, etc. in the 1980s, rather the reversion to weak methods (from which we really haven't recovered).
(c) The use of "best ideas about destiny of computing" e.g. in the ARPA community, rather than weak gestures e.g. the really poorly conceived WWW vs the really important and needed ideas of Engelbart.
Or shall we reboot good ideas with IoT?
X11 was not the best designed GUI framework, from what I understand. I'd heard some complaints about it over the years, but at least it was designed to work over a network, which no other GUI framework of the time I knew about could. It could have been improved upon to create a safer network standard, if some effort had been put into it.
As Alan Kay said elsewhere on this thread, it's difficult to predict what will become popular next, even if something is improved to a point where it could reasonably be used as a substitute for something of lower quality. So, I don't know how to "bring X11 back." As he also said, the better ideas which ultimately became popularly adopted were ones that didn't have competitors already in the marketplace. So, in essence, the concept seemed new and interesting enough to enough people that the only way to get access to it was to adopt the better idea. In the case of X11, by the time the internet was privatized, and had become popular, there were already other competing GUIs, and web browsers became the de facto way people experienced the internet in a way that they felt was simple enough for them to use. I remember one technologist describing the browser as being like a consumer "radio" for the internet. That's a pretty good analogy.
Leaving that aside, it's been interesting to me to see that thick clients have actually made a comeback, taking a huge chunk out of the web. What was done with them is what I just suggested should've been done with X11: The protocol was (partly) improved. In typical fashion, the industry didn't quite get what should happen. They deliberately broke aspects of the OS that once allowed more user control, and they made using software a curated service, to make existing thick client technology safer to use. The thinking was, not without some rationale, that allowing user control led to lots and lots of customer support calls, because people are curious, and usually don't know what they're doing. The thing was, the industry didn't try to help people understand what was possible. Back when X11 was an interesting and productive way you could use Unix, the industry hadn't figured out how to make computers appealing to most consumers, and so in order to attract any buyers, they ...
That is why now I am very interested in containers and microservices in both local and network senses.
As a "consumer", I am also very comfortable to communicate with people via message apps like WeChat and passing wikipedia and GitHub links around. Some of them are JavaScript "web apps" written and published in GitHub by typing on my iPhone. Here is an example:
http://bigdata-mindstorms.github.io/d3-playground/ontouchsta...
Hope I can help more people to "hear the music" and _make_ and _share_ their own.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11965253
Maybe the trick is something close to this: we need an Internet where it's very easy to do not only WYSIWYG document composition and publishing (which is what the web originally was, minus the WYSIWYG), but really deliver any kind of user experience we want (like VR, for example). It should be based on a network OS (an abstract, extensible microkernel on steroids) where user experiences of the network are actually programs with their own microkernel systems (sort of like an updated take on postscript). The network OS can security check the interpreters and quota and deal out resources and the microkernels that deliver user experiences like documents can be updated as what we want to do changes over time. I think we'd have something more in this direction (although I'm sure I missed any number of obvious problems) if we were to actually pass Alan Kay's OS-101 class as an industry.
We actually sort of very briefly started heading in this direction with Marimba's "Castanet" back at the beginning of Java and I was WILDLY excited to see us trying something less dumb than the browser. Unfortunately, it would seem that economic pressures pushed Marimba into becoming a software deployment provider, which is really not what I think they were originally trying to do. Castanet should have become the OS of the web. I think Java still has the potential to create something much better than the web because a ubiquitous and very mature virtual machine is a very powerful thing, but I don't see anyone trying go there. There's this mentality of "nobody would install something better." And yet we installed Netscape and even IE...
BTW, I do think the security problems of running untrusted code are potentially solvable (at least so much as any network security problems are) using a proper messaging microkernel architecture with the trusted resource-accessing code running in one process and the untrusted code running in another. The problem with the Java sandbox (so far as I understand all that) is that it's in-process. The scary code runs with the trusted code. In theory, Java is controlled enough to protect us from the scary code, but in practice, people are really smart and one tiny screw-up in the JVM or the JDK and bad code gets permissions it shouldn't have. A lot of these errors could be controlled or eliminated by separating the trusted code from the untrusted code as in Windows NT (even if only by making the protocol for resource permissions really clear).
Concretely, I follow existing languages like Agda, Lean, Haskell, and Rust for pushing the envelope on language semantics, compiler ingenuity, and library abstractions; and http://unisonweb.org/ and http://www.lamdu.org/ for pushing the envelope on the programming workflow itself. While I don't believe editors and languages are orthogonal problems, I do believe there is enough independence to make pursuing these fronts separately in parallel worthwhile.
[Of all of those, http://unisonweb.org/ might especially fit your interests, if I understand them correctly.]
Of course, the 90's style is pretty hacker-hipster as well...can't deny that.
Most things around here are not how they should seem.
I have three questions -
1. If you were to design a new programming paradigm today using what we have learnt about OOP what would it be?
2. With VR and AR (Hololens) becoming a reality (heh) how do you see user interfaces changing to work better with these systems? What new things need to be invented or rethought?
3. I also worked at Xerox for a number of years although not at PARC. I was always frustrated by their attitude to new ideas and lack of interest in new technologies until everyone else was doing it. Obviously businesses change over time and it has been a long time since Xerox were a technology leader. If you could pick your best and worst memories from Xerox what would they be?
Cheers for your time and all your amazing work over the years :)
I think Google Glass should've been held back until VR/Augmented Reality gets established. Many Croquet style roving "viewports" projected from Google Glass feeds in an abstracted 3D model of a real world location would be a great way to do reporting on events.
Edit: Not sure why I am getting down voted for making a suggestion. Oh well.
HN is an excellent venue, but is necessarily text oriented, which is an OK tradeoff I think.
My next project after Stack Overflow, Discourse, is an 100% open source, flexible multimedia-friendly discussion system. It's GPL V2 on the code side, but we also tried to codify Creative Commons as the default license in every install, so discussion replies belong to the greater community: https://discourse.org
(Surprisingly, the default content licenses for most discussion software tend to be rather restrictive.)
The biggest problems are that the "enterprisers" very often have no sense that they are living in a system that has many ecological properties and needs to be "tended and gardened".
Not an easy problem because we are genetically hunters and gatherers, we had to invent most of the actual sources of wealth, and these inventions were not done by the most typical human types.
Yet another thing where education with a big "E" should really make a difference (today American education itself has pretty much forgotten the "citizenship" part, which is all about systems and tending them.
Q: How do you think we can improve todays world (not just with technology)? What do you think is our species way forward? How as a civilization can we 'get to higher level'? Specifically, I'm interested in your views on ending poverty, suffering, not destroying the Earth, improving our political and social systems, improving education etc. I understand that these are very broad topics without definitive answers but I'd love to hear some of your thought about these.
Thank you and I just want to mention that I appreciate your work.
One way to look at this is that the most important learning anyone can do is to understand "Human beings as if from Mars" -- meaning to get beyond our fooling ourselves and to start trying to deal with what is dangerous and counterproductive in our genetic (and hence cultural) makeups. This is quite different than what most schools think they are supposed to be about -- but the great Jerome Bruner in the 60s came up with a terrific curriculum for 5th graders that was an excellent start for "real anthroplogy" in K-5.
Was that the MACOS program?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man:_A_Course_of_Study
I was casting around recently looking for something to post to HN about it, but there's surprisingly little on the web. (I haven't yet watched the National Film Board documentary on it, which was the only substantive source I could find.)
There is actually quite a lot of stuff on MACOS on the web, most of the materials, etc.
Bruner wrote a number of outstanding essays as part of the MACOS design project ...
Do you hold much hope for our development environments helping us think?
Development environments should help programmers think (but what if most programmers don't want to think?)
Visual Studio has let you do hot code editing for over a decade now, they call it "Edit and Continue"[0]. Only works for some languages (C#, Visual Basic/C++). It also lets you modify the program state while stopped on a break-point with code of your devising.
Most browsers also let you adhoc compose and run code without modifying the underlying programs.
Thanks to hardware performance counters, profilers are now able to profile code with much less impact on performance (eg: no more adjusting timeouts due to profiler overhead). Network debuggers are getting better at decoding traffic and displaying it in a more human readable format (eg: automatic gzip decompression, stream reassembly, etc).
[0]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bcew296c.aspx
I don't know what the solution is. Perhaps a language with a fundamentally different view of objects, maybe as an ancestry of deltas of state/behavior pairings, somewhat like prototypes but inheriting by versioning and incrementally changing so that state and behavior always match up but still allowing you to revert to a working version. Likely Alan has some better ideas on what sort of language we need.
Maybe there's something about the style I've adopted that lends itself more to hot-editing but it's definitely a tool I'd hate to be without.
It's pretty poor quality listening but you should get the point. You can send me an email (see my profile) if you wanted to go through it in more detail.
Many of the same things can happen in sandbox style games. I think there is a tremendous potential for learning in such abstracted environments. What about something like Minecraft, but with abstracted molecules instead of blocks? Problems, like the ones around portraying how molecules inside a cell are constantly jostling against water molecules, could be solved in such environments using design. Many people who play well balanced games at a high level often seem to be learning something about strategy and tactics in particular rule systems. I suspect that there is something educationally valuable in a carefully chosen and implemented rule system.
Also perhaps, it's so much easier to exploit such mechanisms to merely addict people, that overwhelms any value to be gained.
However, all evidence points to him being wrong about this, making the mistake of starting with language as the centrepiece and explaining everything around it. Human music likely predates human speech by hundreds of thousands of years, and is strongly tied to social bonding, emotions and motor systems in ways that have nothing to do with the symbolic aspects of language.
Note that I didn't mean that in a negative way. Also, if you want to consume macro-nutrients, cheesecake is a pretty effective way to get simple carbs and dairy fat.
is strongly tied to social bonding, emotions and motor systems in ways that have nothing to do with the symbolic aspects of language.
I think there is something akin to this that can be found in games, and that there is something particularly positive that can be found in well constructed games.
And I tried to stay neutral towards games on purpose - I have taught game design myself ;). Having said that, a lot of real-world attempts at gamification are pretty banal carrot/stick schemes.
The start of a better way is similar to the entry point of science "The world is not as it seems". Here, it's "As a human being I'm a collection of traits and behaviors, many of which are atavistic and even detrimental to my progress". Getting aware of how useful cravings for salt, fat, sugar, caffeine, etc., turn into a problem when these are abundant and consumer companies can load foods with them....
And, Neil points out -- in books like "Amusing Ourselves To Death" and "The End Of Childhood" -- we have cravings for "news" and "novelty" and "surprise" and even "blinking", etc. which consumer companies have loaded communications channels with ...
Many of these ideas trace back to McLuhan, Innis, Ong, etc.
Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century.
Most children meet entertainment technology as early as before the first birthday, though. Many pre-teens that I see around possess smartphones and/or tablets. Most of the early teenagers possess multiple devices. None of these will be able to judge what's is beneficial to their future and well-being, and opt for it rather than what is immediately fun and pleasing. Just like most of them will live on chocolate bars and crisps if let to do so. The burden falls on the parents, a burden they don't take.
I myself can't think of a future other than one full of device addicts, and a small bunch that managed to liberate themselves from perennial procrastination and pseudo-socialisation only in their twenties. And while my country can prohibit certain products (food, etc.) from import and production within its own borders (e.g. genetically modified, chemically engineered to be consumed greedily), this can't be done with websites, because (a) it's technically impossible and (b) it 'contradicts freedom of speech'. I'll ask the reader to philosophise over (b), because neither the founding fathers of the US nor the pioneers of the french revolution, nor most of the libertarian, freedom-bringing revolutionists had a Facebook to tag their friends' faces.
(edit: I don't want to get into a debate over freedom of speech, and don't support any form of cencuring of it, tho I don't want freedom of speech at the cost of exploitation of generations and generations by some companies that use it as a shelter for themselves.)
> Gkya: I myself can't think of a future other than one full of device addicts, and a small bunch that managed to liberate themselves from perennial procrastination and pseudo-socialisation only in their twenties.
As a infovore this worries me. If we cannot control ourselves and come up with better solutions for self control then the authoritarian minded are likely to do it for us.
The Net is addictive and all those people pretending it ain't so are kidding themselves.
It's easy to imagine anti-Net campaigners in the same way as we see anti-globalization activists today.
I myself have seen the effects of good diet, exercise and meditation on a group of people, and it is quite remarkable how changed for the better people are. So there is hope!
I believe that social change, example: phubbing being widely regarded as taboo, isn't fast enough to keep with the Net's evolution. By the time a moral stance against phubbing is established mobile phones probably won't exist. For this I think we need a technological solution which is as adaptive as an immune system, but also one which people can opt in to. Otherwise eventually people will demand governments do things like turn off the Net at certain times during the day or ban email after 6pm and so on.
> I myself have seen the effects of good diet, exercise and meditation on a group of people, and it is quite remarkable how changed for the better people are. So there is hope!
You're an adult, I am too. We can realize: this is stealing my life. But a kid can't. And stolen days don't return. This is why I'm commenting: we'd rather raise better individuals than letting them do wtf they want and hoping they'll fix themselves later.
Just yesterday before this thread even started (I work as part-time cleaner) I was polishing a window. Through it I saw some children in a sitting room, one of who was literally standing centimeters away from a giant flat screen television. Glued to it.
I thought: "Fuck, they don't have a chance". Their attention spans will be torn to pieces like balls of wool by tiny kittens. Now multiply that effect with the Net + VR and you have an extraordinary psychological effect best compared to a drug.
I didn't have a television in my childhood. I read countless books, and without them, I wouldn't be sitting here, I wouldn't have done any of the things I could reasonably consider inventive or innovative. They might not be world changing things, but they were mine and my life was better for doing so.
I was speaking to a friend who has children a few months ago. He was in the process of uploading photos of his family to Facebook. I asked him whether he considered what he was doing to be a moral act, since he is for practical purposes feeding his children's biometrics into a system that they personally have not, and could not, opt in to. He was poleaxed by the thought. He was about to say something along the lines of 'well everybody's doing this' but I could visibly see the thought struck him that "wow, that's actually a really bad line of reasoning I was about to make". Instead he agreed with me, uncomfortably, but he got it.
I don't know how you get millions of people to have that kind of realization. I do think parental responsibility has a huge role though. My parents got rid of the television in the 80s. It was the right thing to do.
See, my grandparents worried that the new technology that my parents grew up with would somehow make them dumber (growing up with radio, parents getting television); my parents' generation worried that the technology we grew up with would be bad for us (too much computer, too much gaming, too much Internet). The upcoming generation of parents will grow up wondering whether VR and AR is going to ruin their kids' chances.
Yet kids ALWAYS adapt. They don't view smartphones or tablets as anything particularly out of the ordinary. It's just their ordinary. I'm certain their brains will build on top of this foundation. That's the thing - brains are extremely adaptable. All of us adapted.
There's a term for this worry - it's called 'Juvenoia':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD0x7ho_IYc
http://time.com/19818/whats-really-wrong-with-young-people-t...
Now, I'm not saying that this is a discussion that shouldn't be had - it certainly should. I just think we all need to be mindful about where our concerns might be coming from.
Just like an alcohol drinker and an alcohol addict are different, an internet user and an internet addict are different too. Just because some or most are not addicts, we can't dismiss the addiction altogether.
Recognizing potential dangers is a far cry from saying that there's a risk of "losing the century" because of easy access to technology and entertainment, and it strikes me as rather belittling to the younger generation.
Millennials and their children are still humans, after all, and are just as intelligent, motivated, and adaptable as every generation before them.
What I'm arguing is against an analogue of this in tech. There is a certain period during which the exposure of a minor to technological devices should be governed by parents.
What do you think of adolescents which get recorded nude on chatrooms? Some of them commit suicide. What do you think of children victim to bullying online? What do you think of paedophiles tricking kids online? Isn't a parent responsible of protecting a minor from such abuses?
My general argument on this thread is that we should raise out children as good as we can. Protect them from danger that they cannot be conscious of. We can't certainly place burdens on adults, but we can try to raise adults that are not inept addicts with social deficiencies. And because most of the worlds population is tech-illiterate, it falls on governments to provide education and assistance to parents, just like they do so with health and education.
Most of the counter-arguments here has been strawmans, because while I'm mostly targeting children, I've been countered with arguments about adults.
> I just think we all need to be mindful about where our concerns might be coming from.
Basically we're on the same page.
Here is proposition. I'll steelman the Conservative view and you tell me what you think. I promise not to claim vidya causes violence or D&D is a leading cause of Satanism.
My proposition is that television media has meaningfully worsened our society by making it dumber. This is an artifact of the medium itself, rather than an issue with any specific content on it. To explain what I mean by dumber I must elaborate.
The television is a unidirectional medium. It contains consensus on various intellectual issues of the day and gives a description of the world I'd call received opinion. There exists no meaningful difference between the advertising that tranches people into buying products and the non-advertising that tranches people into buying ideas. Most ideas that are bought are not presented as items to be sold, they are pictured as 'givens', obvious. Most lying is done by omission. Even were all information presented truthfully, we have a faux sense of sophistication about our awareness which is a problem. When you buy prepackaged meals at a store you are not in the makings of becoming a chef, and in that way you are not chewing over the ideas presented to you, you do no mental cognition. Your state is best described as, and feels like, a hypnotic trance.
One of the problems with this is that television creates a false sense of normalcy that has no objective basis. It asks the questions and provides the answers. All debate is rhetorical debate.
It's the cognitive equivalent of 'traffic shaping' that Quality of Service mechanisms do on routers. In a way that is a much bigger lie. This concept is very similar to Moldbug's Cathedral concept. The people who work for the Cathedral don't realize they represent a very narrow range of thought on the spectrum. Their opinions cannot plausibly be of their own manufacture because one arbitrary idea is held in common with another arbitrary idea and they all hold them.
The key to understanding this is very real and not at all abstract, is that millions of people have synchronized opinions on a range of issues without any other discernible cause other than the television (or radio). Why do populations of teenagers become anorexic after the introduction of television where they did not suffer before it? Synchronized opinion is always suspicious. It defies probability theory to think my grandmother and millions of others suddenly came to the conclusions for example, that gay marriage was a positive idea? Why do millions of conservatives think buying gold is a good idea? It is not that there is something wrong with gay marriage or buying gold. It's that there is no genuine thinking going on about about any of this. There many ways to hedge against inflation that don't involve buying gold. Why is gay marriage the morality tale of the age, and not, say, elder abuse in nursing care facilities.
Why do some things become 'issues' and not a myriad of others? How directed this is is up for debate, but what is not is that the selectivity and constraints of the medium have narrowed our perception of the world, and that has led to the thing that made us dumber: it stunted our native creativity and curiosity.
> Yet kids ALWAYS adapt. They don't view smartphones or tablets as anything particularly out of the ordinary. It's just their ordinary. I'm certain their brains will build on top of this foundation. That's the thing - brains are extremely adaptable. All of us adapted.
There does exist a series of schools in Silicon Valley. The software engineers at Google and Facebook and other firms send their children to them, and they strictly contain no computing related devices. Instead it...
One thing I will offer is that in my household growing up, television was positive because it was an experience that we shared as a family. We would watch TV shows together, talk about them together, laugh at them together, etc. In that sense, television brought outside viewpoints into our household and spurred conversation. I think that is one of the key factors that may differentiate between TV having good effects and TV having bad effects on different people.
In a sense, I think that although television itself isn't interactive, you could say that our family was 'interactive about' television. So we got the benefits of being able to use television in a positive way.
Thanks for reminding me of how important that was for me :)
By the way, on the limitation of television being a passive medium.... This reminds me of something I read back when I was a kid that was very profound for me. I can't recall exactly now, but I think it was in a Sierra On-Line catalogue where Roberta Williams said something about wanting her children to play adventure games rather than watch television as with adventure games, they had to be actively engaged rather than passive. This really resonated with me at the time, given that I was really getting into the Space Quest & other 'Quest games :)
Thank you. I hope to meet or communicate with Mr Burke at some point soon, I know Dan Carlin had a podcast with him a little while back if you're interested in his new take on the world. Connections remains the high water mark for documentary making and it is worth reading the books. If you want to watch a documentary in a similar style I suggest The Ascent of Man.
> In a sense, I think that although television itself isn't interactive, you could say that our family was 'interactive about' television. So we got the benefits of being able to use television in a positive way.
I believe you, I am mainly thinking of the average 5 hours per day the average American (or European) spends in front of the television. The dose makes the poison!
> This really resonated with me at the time, given that I was really getting into the Space Quest & other 'Quest games
Yes, it is clear that videogaming can provide for a shared community and culture, most obviously the MMORPGS. This is not something television achieves, or if it does, it is rare, like fans of Mythbusters or Connections. In the present we are concerned with developing the foundations of the Net, like commerce or the law. But ultimately I think a Net culture will be the most valued feature we ascribe to the Net.
I know this is bandied about a lot, but is this actually proven? With the exception of drugs, all of those you mention have been within easy reach for me (actually, as a Dutchman, even softdrugs were just one step away if I'd wanted to). Yet I don't consider myself addicted to any of those.
" I can't do much than hoping you either don't have children or no child's responsibility is on you otherwise."
That's a strong statement to make. Implying he's unable to raise children because he'd like to see evidence that the internet actually has a negative influence on children.
Good parents can raise their children correctly even with $bad_stuff present around them, that was the point I was trying to make.
I concur. But the internet exposure of kids is mostly not governed by parents. They either are alone with the connected device in their rooms, away from them, or with a mobile device out of their home. The best the parents can do is to educate the kids, but the public lacks the knowledge to effectively do so. They should be given the formation to be able to educate their children, and furthermore schools should educate minors on the use of tech.
"putting your kid in a room full of $bad_stuff" will mostly lead to addiction if the parent is not there to teach the kid: this is harmful to you; not you think?
And I don't mean that in the sense of "the kids are fine with their heroin syringes", but in the sense "I can leave the cookie jar on the counter and it will still be there when I leave the room".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1048109...
Provocative but not evidence. I did look up some twin studies but I can't find one with a clear vice/virtue environment study. Gwern is good at ferreting out this kind of information if you ask him.
The start of a better way is similar to the entry point of science "The world is not as it seems". Here, it's "As a human being I'm a collection of traits and behaviors, many of which are atavistic and even detrimental to my progress". Getting aware of how useful cravings for salt, fat, sugar, caffeine, etc., turn into a problem when these are abundant and consumer companies can load foods with them....
And, Neil points out -- in books like "Amusing Ourselves To Death" and "The End Of Childhood" -- we have cravings for "news" and "novelty" and "surprise" and even "blinking", etc. which consumer companies have loaded communications channels with ...
Many of these ideas trace back to McLuhan, Innis, Ong, etc.
Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century.
relationships
time
I would take a different perspective that puts as "higher forces" things like:
-- what helps thinking about things in general, about problems, and resolving them (epistemological concerns, which include the whole environment as intrinsic to "langauge")
-- representational matchups to what we are trying to model and create dynamic inference processes for (mathematical concerns -- this is why "mathematics" is a plural, in real math you invent maths when needed ...)
-- orthogonal axes for many areas, including meaning and optimizations, including definitions and meta definitions, debugging, reformulation, etc. (pragmatic concerns for eventually winding up with workable artifacts)
-- and so forth ...
Should AP's new "CS Principles" course count towards the math requirement for college admission?
I have this, entirely unprovable, theory that most founders of these types of "idea sets" are actually poly-ideological, i.e. giving weight to all possible ideas, and just happened to be exploring ideas which made the most sense at the time.
While I enjoy your thoughts on "object oriented", "functional", etc, I'd love to hear your thoughts about philosophy of religion and its origins (i.e. a slightly meta version of the conversation around "object oriented", "functional", etc). You may be one of a handful of humans able to provide me more data. Is this a topic that interests you, and is it something you think about? If it is something you think about, regarding the dogma you potentially accidentally helped instigate,
Did you and your peers intend for it to become dogma? The rest of my questions sorta assume you did not.
Retroactively, do you feel it was inevitable that these ideas, i.e. popular / powerful / effective ideas, which were espeically extremely effective at the time, became dogma for certain people, and potentially the community as a whole?
Either retroactively or at the time, did you ever identify moments when the dogma/re-definitions were forming/sticking? If so, did you ever want to intervene? Did you feel you were unable to?
Do you have any lessons learned about idea creation/popularization without allowing for re-definitions / accidentally causing their eventual turn into dogma?
Again, if this type of conversation doesn't interest you, or because it cloud potentially be delicate, you'd rather not have it in public, I'd understand.
Thanks regardless
Thinking is difficult in many ways, and we humans are not really well set up to do it -- genetically we "learn by remembering" (rather than by understanding) and we "think by recalling" rather than actual pondering. The larger issues here have to do with various kinds of caching Kahneman's "System 1" does for us for real-time performance and in lieu of actual thinking.
What to do about System 1, though? Truly interactive research/communication documents, as described by Bret Victor, should be a great help, to my mind, but what do you think could be beyond that?