AfterHIA

I can't concur enough. We don't teach, "how to design computers and better methods to interface with them" we keep hashing over the same stuff over and over again. It gets worse over time and the effect is that what Engelbart called, "intelligence augmenters" become, "super televisions that cause you political and social angst."

How far we have fallen but so great the the reward if we could, "lift ourselves up again." I have hope in people like Bret Victor and Brenda Laurel.

I can't edit my previous comment so I'll continue:

This isn't and has never been true in a universal sense. Athens was democratic plutocracy with slaves. The United States didn't have popular democracy until well until the 20th century and it's worth noting that it was the Southern Democrats which wanted to restrict the basic political rights of blacks in the name of, "popular sentiment." The Fukuyamist position which takes a naive view of western democracy as totalizing in a historical sense is being rapidly called into question all over the world. People (almost) universally want the expansion of the their quality of living and political autonomy in a sense which includes but also transcends the ability to cast a paper ballot. We see with Trump that this naive notion has, "serious flaws." In the 1930's the Nazis came to power under a democratically elected conservative government. Democracy means pragmatism. Pragmatism means something about, "having a superior conversation about what we would like to be." The ability to cast a vote is an extension of this sentiment-- it isn't its foundation. We see that in the general experience of the Chinese middle class. They live under a totality but neighborhood associations and not actively being managed by the CCP results in many reporting feeling freer under this system than under ancillaries geopolitically.

Define, "human nature." Don't compare me with an activist.

If I had children I would force them to sit and play this for an hour every day. Bravo pal.

It might be an aside but it would be, "really groovy" if the general public started to realize that, "democracy" is a way of life and a set of considerations that furthers an open public discourse and attempts to maximize human felicity and reduce cruelty. In an oxymoronic sense it's the public voting on things that actually kills real democracy.

https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/Antirepresentationa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Theory_of_Justice

John Von Neumann famously questioned the value of compilers. Eventually we get the keyboard kids that have dominated computing since the early 70's in some form or another whether in a forward thinking way like Dan Ingalls or in an idealic way like the gcc/Free Software crowd. In parallel to this you have people like Laurel, Sutherland, Nelson who live in lateral thinking land.

The real issue is that we've been in-store for a big paradigm shift in how we interact with computers for decades at this point. SketchPad let us do competent, constraints based mathematics with images. Video games and the Logo language demonstrate the potential for programming using, "kinetics." In the future we won't code with symbols we'll dance our intent into and through the machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6orsmFndx_o http://www.squeakland.org/tutorials/ https://vimeo.com/27344103

I just want competent search of my history. I just want some way of exporting my history in a visually appealing way so I can share my research paths with colleagues in a meaningful way. Vannevar Bush described features like this in 1949 and we still only have partially realized any of this.

As a Smalltalk dork (Jaya Dan Ingalls!) and a former UNIXtard this really gets me moist as hell.

Semi-related; anybody have an old NeXTcube they'd be willing to part with? I'm a student and I need it for school and things.

I wonder if the AI can teach you how to use commas correctly.

Hey Rick. Excuse me for the long reply time. Our cinema program at our local university has been eating up a lot of my HN time. I appreciate your response in turn.

1) The relevant portions come in 1973. By 1969 we see developments in this direction. I have links but thanks to the Peter Thiel shithead take over of search I'm finding it hard to find the relevant literature on the NSF website. I found this article informative:

https://goodscienceproject.org/articles/a-note-on-the-changi...

2) From what I've been able to gather most of the rationale of restricting research came in response to the Vietnam War. It was misguided but the idea was that the role of ARPA (to become DARPA) should be concentrated strictly on military projects to prevent waste and overspending. As, "lefty that likes psychedelic rock" I get how at the time this might have made sense. Mansfield was Senate majority leader and given the popular anti-war/military sentiment I can see how the, "hippies and beats" might have seen ARPA as a menace. It's worth noting that they didn't have the incredible hindsight at the time that would include seeing the ARPANET evolve into the Internet or Engelbart's project eventually becoming the Macintosh.

As for your last paragraph-- I agree. NSF should have a larger budget. Honestly I don't think that in today's political climate that, "restarting IPTO-ARPA like it was in the 1960s" is actually a good idea. Even the idea of creating a new Xerox PARC was tried by our namesake Y Combinator and from, "what I can gather" the project was a massive failure. Like I said-- we get to a point where discussing what motivates society to fund the education of the Paperts, Kays, Engelbarts, and Brenda Laurels of the world becomes a discussion about ideology. I'm with you for creating a, "NEF" or a peacetime OSRD. Honestly in some sense if critics are right about the United States being in a state of, "cold/pre civil war" this might become necessary. I'm with you in this regard. The issue is motivating the powers that be and those with the capital to realistically fund projects like this to do so. Historically this requires either a period of unprecedented peace or a war. Given the current situation I'm think that the later is more likely. This really pains me as a millennial but as a wise man once said, "we must deal with the world as it is not as we would like it to be."

Thanks for the worthwhile exchange. Wishing you and yours the best this evening ricksunny.

A few more that young developers need to read:

Computer Lib by Ted Nelson. This used to be the, "Bible" before Nelson fell into relative obscurity. Ted Nelson was the first to coin the term, "Hypertext" in the 1960s after reading a famous article by Vannevar Bush

https://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson_T_1974_-_Computer_Lib,_Dr...

Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. Introduction to, "interfaces as pedagogy." This lays a foundation for, "what computer interfaces look like when you can use human intuition to work through them."

https://worrydream.com/refs/Papert_1980_-_Mindstorms,_1st_ed...

Jef Raskin was the original head of the Macintosh team. This treatise on humane design is invaluable and has been largely ignored. Any person that takes these ideas and makes them work will be a proverbial father of, "the next generation of computing."

https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask

Douglas Engelbart who is often regard as, "the inventor of the mouse" founded his working philosophy by describing an operation paradigm for continued exponential improvement in groups. In some sense it's a masterwork in, "computer ethics."

https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engel...

Early article describing Hyperlinking and aspects of the Internet some of which haven't been or have been under-realized. Imagine what, "social histories for extending research" would look like if taken seriously.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

Computers As Theatre by Brenda Laurel; "think of the computer not as a tool but a medium." Brenda is an actress that applied Aristotle's Poetics to computer design. An absolute foundational classic.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~social/reading/Laurel-ComputersAsThe...

Worthy mention: Alan Kay's Quora. This is a literal goldmine of insights into the history of programming languages and computing paradigms. He'll answer your question if it's meaningful.

https://www.quora.com/profile/Alan-Kay-11

Remember: computer paradigms have changed every few decades. We started with pontifications by philosophers about the foundations of mathematics to mechanical machines to vacuum tube machines to (skipping some things) huge mainframes to mini-computers to linked personal computers (Engelbart) to the Xerox Alto. We now live in a world of castrated, linked post-Altos and a failed realization of portable computers in the form of b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶w̶a̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶-̶o̶u̶t̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶m̶a̶c̶h̶i̶n̶e̶s̶ smartphones. Ask yourself-- what comes next? How can we significantly improve computers for human beings?

As pointed out by Scotty Kilmer on YouTube we currently lack the infrastructure both in terms of mechanics trained to work on EVs and the necessary electricity infrastructure to make a full transition possible. The answer isn't, "new types of cars" it's building the, "you don't necessarily need a car" society the Europeans and the Japanese enjoy.

Yes we're doomed is what I mean.

What is going on good cats! Mah kittahs; you are some good ass men I am thinking. :3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_of_Damocles

The issue is that law enforcement personnel are going to do combinations of both. Corruption is real and companies are just made of people. Things can be done in relative secret without arousing controversy. This is the same logic libertarian shitheads use for why we shouldn't provide kids a school lunch.

Human nature doesn't follow your shitfuck ideal driven rules friend. I guarantee some day you'll find that out the hard way.

Going into the specifics of what motivated Mike Mansfield requires going beyond the conversation we're having about R&D into the domain of politics and ideology. I want to stick to relevant realities related to people in technology:

1) This killed research in the United States. This killed the program that paid for Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart's PhDs. This has led to or is at least heavily correlated with the decline in technology and science innovation that has occurred since the beginning of the neoliberal assault. In 1961 we get SketchPad at the University of Utah. In 1968 we get the Mother Of All Demos. What's been developed since with the same kind of impact? I'd argue, "not a whole lot."

2) This has inevitably led to a decline in the public's enthusiasm for technical innovation. I remember the early 1990's World Wide Web. I remember the feeling that a non-marginally better future was, "months away." Now the government and Google collude to spy on me and my family. Now I have a short-form video feed that is paid to deliver content meant to extremize me as a young adult.

The Mansfield Amendment is the technical glitch that may have cancelled a better future for technologists and especially technology literate young adults. It's difficult to say and we may never know. My feeling is that some day some country might achieve a level of social democracy where-in, "we get back to that." Time will tell. The irony is that it's the Adam Smith Societies pushing the hyper, "privatize everything agenda" that reifies the problem. Adam Smith actually advocated for strong public institutions- especially educational institutions.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x

https://knowledge.essec.edu/en/innovation/the-worrisome-decl...

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/12/03/survey-shows-...

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56eddde762cd9413e151a...

Dichotomizing the world as either UNIX based or Windows is pretty myopic. I want the computer architecture Douglas Engelbart dreamed of. I want a realization of the ideas of Seymour Papert and Brenda Laurel.

We're still after 50 years using Xerox Alto clones fundamentally. What would a, "modern Alto" play like? What if we spent X,XXX,XXX's of dollars to create a, "in to the future time machine" like they did at PARC? What if the project had the high ethics of Bush and Engelbart as an operational paradigm?

...and yes Lisp is the best programming language. Suck it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JCR_Licklider

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield

If you know; you know. #ARPA

UNIX is for dorks. We needed a Smalltalk style, "everything is an object and you can talk to all objects" but thankfully we got Java and, "object oriented" C++. The Alto operating system was leaps and bounds ahead of the Mac and Windows 3.1 system and it took Steve Jobs a decade to realize, "oh shit we could have just made everything an object." Then we get WebObjects and the lousy IPod and everything is fascist history.

#next #never #forget #thieves

Ubiquity for Firefox/Chrome.

Hit, "ctrl + spacebar to search for anything with simple typed parameters for search" was a killer product in 2005 and now Microsoft finally got wise to copy it in 2025.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin

The people that are proprietors of these institutions count for less than 1% of the social economy in a large state where guns are legal.

Please keep being greedy. You know where this is going.

You're doing God's work. I used to use my white noise generator for a lot of things-- not just, "creating blinding noise" but sampling authentic pink and white noise had applications where having this over an aux cable was pretty handy.

...now my buttfucking IPhone has no aux out and the app I use charges 6.99 to access the mixer. Go figure.

I'm going to laugh and shit my pants in that or some order when we realize the models that produced ALL the code has sleeper protocols built into the code that's now maintained by AI agents that might also be infected with sleeper protocols. Then later when 50 messages on Claude costs 2,500$ every company in the world is either going to experience exponential cost increases or spend an exponentially large amount of capital hiring and re-hiring engineers to, "un-AI'ify" the codebase.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL22URoMZjo

Language models have limited use in many well established domains like the humanities, literature, and art. The reason "AI" isn't being used to build, "the future we always wanted" is that even before LLMs innovation and incremental improvement weren't, "hard;" it takes a significant financial infrastructure to market products and create, "new, better norms" and given that software has moved from, "sell people useful tools and support" to, "collect and sell massive amounts of data; engage in behavior modification" there's no real reason to create better tools even if Claude can exponentially reduce development costs and time to working prototypes. We're living beyond the scope of market capitalism. We now live in pre-technofeudalism so all non-marginal gains are going serve the oligarch's potential for rent-collection. They aren't for you and I.

Real innovation looks like this: https://worrydream.com/ and https://archive.org/details/humaneinterfacen00rask and https://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engel...

Why the fuck did you capitalize, "emo?" You've got a tremendous writing style. It's like Thomas Pynchon if he capitalized the word, "emo" in his books.

Thanks for the coherent response jayw_lead! I too dislike the term but I'm coming from the Noam Chomsky, "language models are a nothingburger in terms of applied linguistics" angle. As far as I can see this still seems like , "secular post-Enlightenment science culture dreams up the Millennium" and given Peter Thiel's recent commentary about the, "anti-christ" I'm terrified to the point of thinking it would be wise to buy an assault rifle.

https://wiki.evageeks.org/S%C2%B2_Engine

My feeling is that the tech industry has been in, "hot water" since at least 2018 and has been using private equity and bullshit hype-trains to garner interest in new technologies in lieu of the public getting hip to the fact that mostly computers are spying on you, making you mentally ill, and stealing your data in exchange for, "being able to participate." As pointed out by others OpenAI and the rest of the AI ecosystem will need a financial miracle to stay afloat and offer their products for a competitive price.

There's so much of what, "AI" is becoming that just seems like a massive psy-op to breathe one last breath of life into what is the skeleton of the old Silicon Valley. Innovation is possible but if the future really is liberal authoritarianism/oligarchy there's no room in the contrived market for, "innovative products that greatly improve human life."

There's hope in: https://worrydream.com/

Explain to me how the, "Technological Singularity" isn't just Christian eschatology for dorks? As a Neon Genesis Evangelion fan this really gets me going but that's kind of why I ask.

This is the kind of thing I've always thought, "man you could totally do this if you needed to" and you did and here take your damned upvote. Rock on doener.

I know your type.