kwatsonafter

He was a good man in lieu of western propaganda. Read his speeches on nuclear war.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/kim-il-sung/index.htm

a quote from the system: "Adam and Lilith began to fight. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while am to be in the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the earth."

That's just a few seconds of clicking around in systems like this. It's like surfing with a fucking jetpak.

Spend a few minutes with the demo and try to, "feel" the concept. I would pay huge amounts of money to have all my research materials, "Xanadu'd." (Anyone looking to be hired?)

There's a fine line between schizophrenia and creative genius and Nelson walks that line enormously all things considered. Project Xanadu aside Computer Lib and his work on HyperText systems in the 1960's are still incredibly ahead their time. Nelson is a pioneer on the same level as McCarthy, Kay, or Minsky but he didn't come up the way that they did. He's firstly a filmmaker; I think a lot of people miss this.

It's worth noting that Brenda Laurel, Alan Kay, Nelson, and Seymour Papert had, "art" backgrounds. The future of computing will effectively be led by people with these cross-sectional skills. There's a reason programmers are shitty at designing software.

A very informative post. I think a lot of the young people hip to Nelson miss this point. I'm no longer a, "free and open everything" kind of person but Nelson is far more of a BioShock character than you'd think. He's not a baby boomer in any sense; he's a child of Welles, Hawks, and Howard Hughes. I could see him being old enough not to freak out over Birth Of A Nation.

God bless that crazy bastard. We used to make Americans so well.

Legend is that at CERN they flipped a coin to decide whether they would choose Xanadu or Tim Berner Lee's WWW as their Hypertext system.

That day coins failed us.

Massive! Take an upvote.

You don't. Power Law distributions will create situations where-in the Ricks are doing 90% for the real work when they're not deliberately surrounded by other/better Ricks. This is what made Xerox PARC the most productive computer company of all time; great thinkers playing together with little interference.

You can't maintain a SaaS application this way though. The issue isn't management or Ricks; it's the lousy business infrastructure that's privatized science and technology in the United States and kept the Ricks from doing their natural work so that 90 untalented people can have jobs in the software industry.

The oxymorony is that the growth that we create from letting the normie douchebags have their salaries and cargo shorts actually is a net win for society from a macroscopic perspective. It's a societal con but it's a con that keeps families fed; and there can't be, "Ricks" without, "stable societies." Also worth considering!

This is, "why all the elves have left Middle Earth;" The software industry is just about the only industry where a basically smart person can work and end up making as much as a doctor or lawyer. This results in power law/pareto distributions of talent. Due to the fact that 80-90% of the workforce is technically incompetent from a, "went to school and learned vetted skills and disciplined critical thinking" perspective you end up with a kind of paradox where-in innovation is stifled through toxic democratization. Creative genius doesn't manifest, "good employees." Sorry.

Consider that he might be right from his perspective; he's probably just a douchebag. Either/or (remembering dear Kirkegaard and saintly James) this is partially and mostly why computers suck in 2022, Google doesn't work anymore, and user interface design is suffering as there aren't enough people with cross-sectional culture skills (consider Brenda Laurel: PhD in Theatre; Alan Kay was a competent jazz guitarist before Xerox PARC) + necessary computing expertise to design useable software and as a result our technical infrastructure has suffered immensely despite gains made from Moore's Law and data collection (I'm looking at you ML geeks)

This is going to get worse before it gets better.

I was going to link to this; top form fellow Engelbartian!

...and then this happens.

https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/bhopal/madhya-prade...

I love how nobody commented.

AI, new tools, and globalization is going to destroy the software developer class. Alright, great. I'm now the 3000th person since the late 80's to predict this!

Agreed.

If you broaden the historical context the result has been an advanced economy with computers and high speed communication. It's going to be this kind of anti-intellectual, pseudo-populist rhetoric that ends up killing innovation in the United States.

We're rich enough (for now) to import innovation; we don't need an educated populace. We have a robust military that makes us untouchable geopolitcally.

Do you see how dangerous this kind of bullshit is? Do you see what happens when enough of the people in your country don't value things like degrees and institutions of higher learning? The Athenians fell because of their hubris; not because they valued poetry and art.

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

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

http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/thucydides.html

This is going to turn our country backwards. We're the richest country in the world. We should be training our citizens to be PhDs and exporting innovation and culture. The standard for "skilled trade" should be world-class skills (Hyperbaric Welding, Robotics, Civil Engineering; ie. "skills an advanced society would export") and not work that can be exported to the developing world. These, "advanced skills" require a level of critical thinking that requires college education. We're beginning to forget that we can't have an advanced society without a well-educated and informed voting populace.

Relevant:

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

Consider though that, "consumerism" is a very important part of modern economies. People tend to buy things that send social signals to other people (conspicuous consumption) which in turn drives demand for high quality items (hopefully) which creates real incentives for innovation and growth. At the same time I can agree that, "keeping up with the Joneses" has created a social nightmare for many.

My point here is that even following a big Kuhnian paradigm shift you're still going to have the same human psychologies to deal with and that's precisely where, "consumerism" lives-- in consumers; the idea that, "consumerism" is somehow driven by ideology or how capitalism structures society seems to be naive in my view. Conspicuous consumption still takes place in supposedly, "destratified" societies-- see the Kim family of North Korea or rich Saudis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_thrift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Clas...

I disagree. It's worth remembering that current trends in AI are taken from taking a model from the 1970's and adding huge amounts of data and compute power to make these models robust enough to classify high resolution photographs. It isn't the necessary outgrowth of the cognitive science(s) as is commonly touted.

It's a magic trick which preys on a person's lack of scientific understanding; neural networks seem to anticipate, "brains in vats" but we're still in the midst of learning what, "brains" "people" and, "minds" are and nothing in ML space seems to shed any meaningful light on these pressing questions. This might be partially because the questions of Mind(s) and Self(s) are open philosophical problems.

An easy refutation that, "ML can model meaning" from recent Chomsky talks: consider that a neural network can be trained on any statistically meaningful corpus of text; this includes Klingon and Elven; it also includes jibberish'. It also includes semi-random presses of a key by a person typing with their dick or the like; nothing meaningful is being captured. We have a machine that is capable of statistical analysis. This isn't a new invention.

This too is hype.

I'll make you a bet that in the next 5 years we have high resolution video generation through DALL-E or the like and it's primary use case is going to be auto-generating pornographic advertisements. The Internet was developed with lofty ideals in mind; what is AI's lofty ideal? The end of labor? The end of creativity? The commodification of innovation?

You've got 50 meaningful social problems you've got to solve (education, inequality, globalization, power laws) before you've got a kind of society that can integrate automated systems into itself without creating easy to predict problems. Given historical realities it's far more likely that the great wealth created by a theoretical, "AI Summer" will be unevenly enjoyed by most people; again this is the historical norm.

The invention of the tractor didn't liberate farmers from labor. The Phoebus Cartel, "invented" planned obsolescence in modern design and we still consume, "limited life" lightbulbs partially as a result of their thinking, and for the most part the Internet hasn't fostered a generation of scientists and engineers by, "democratizing" information.

Yeah, "guys who work at software companies that don't have degrees in engineering but get to call themselves engineers."

Let's put them in charge.

You're missing an important caveat of your own argumentation; if you believe in Liberalism you must by extension have some skepticism concerning the ability of authoritarian states to, "keep up" with freer states in terms of innovation and cultural robustness. Otherwise you're arguing for an arbitrary terminal struggle between competing world cultures. (try reading history). You're basically scared by the current war in Ukraine and are willing to take on an ugly foreign policy position to feel safe.

It's going to be a bunch of software developers wearing t-shirts and shorts that eventually bring us to nuclear war. You know, "to keep their daughters safe."

Fuck all of you.

I think it would do well for America's national security if non-experts didn't give their opinions publicly and this was enforced through our legal system.

You might find this interesting:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/ukraine-ru...

because either you get a groovy bathroom wall or you get a heavily moderated bathroom wall.

You need populaces with higher than 86% literacy to make things like, "Internets" work.

It's a rhetorical point about the degradation of our social economy. I shouldn't have to explain poetry.

Fuck off dude. I'll come off however I like.

I like the cut of your jib mister.

Adding the breath to the equation is really smart. Thanks for sharing. Brion Gysin is one of my favorite artists.

Man Rube. I really hope you never, ever have to live around working class people. They'll literally tear you apart.

Thank god for inequality keeping these little anime dorks safe. God bless America.

In training academic Pedagogist here: It may be worthwhile to take a two or day three reading of Rousseau's classic, "Emile; or On Education." It gives tremendous insight into how it is that adults can have positive relationships with the children that they might be governing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile%2C_or_On_Education

Rousseau recommends: Night games, obstacle courses, Natural Method (Parkour), but in short the idea is to let the child be self-directing in their activities. In Rousseau's words, "to gain time by losing it." ie. don't try to direct their activities. Do what is necessary and dutiful in your own regard and teach through example and necessity; never through imposition unless absolutely necessary.

Hey there! I was in a similar boat. This might not be a popular solution but what got me, "out of the poverty trap" was going back to school. I have high ACT scores so I can get all my housing, meals, transport, paid for by grants and scholarships and what's left over I can always manage with student loans. I keep a part-time (Wednesday and Thursday) job so I have modest disposable income. I'm still in the thick of it; I won't receive full financial aid until the fall so family's helping out.

Don't lose hope! There are workable solutions to social problems.

Man this is getting so goddamned ridiculous.

Try to remember why Socrates cursed books. Oh, yes I'll wait while you navigate to, "Socrates-Books" in your Zettelkasten.