
Ted versus The Media Lab [video] - abtinf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH4Kr3Gsadc
======
xiaolingxiao
This is well known in academia and exist outside of Media Lab as well. For
example, I asked a professor (not associated with the Media Lab) about using
hype to get grants. He said: "It's just like the stock market right, money
goes here, it goes there, it's all story telling. I have to tell stories too
because if I don't, then other people will tell this story and get the money.
But I think I can use it better than other people." This is a very "well-
respected" Ivy League professor in applied machine learning.

As for the Media Lab, they're really selling the image of technological
progress. And Corporate entities find value in this exact _image_ because
they're just reselling it to their shareholders, many of whom are dumb money.
But the image is required to attract idealistic and clueless grad students
who'll sacrifice their lives and sanity to make demos. I know several people
who graduated from the Media Lab with masters/doctorates, and they are all of
this exact mold: taken captive by pipe dreams and their own delusions of what
this stuff could do, while their advisors are churning through students and
packaging new narratives.

~~~
diydsp
>they're really selling the image of technological progress.

That's such a broad brushstroke.

Consider, for example, Echo Nest's research in machine listening in Barry
Vercoe's Music, Mind and Machine group. This all made it into Spotify when
they acquired Echo Nest. His work led and pushed other researchers in the
field at ISMIR, etc. Hard to downplay the impact of Spotify on our culture.
This is not "hokum."

And as I shoulder-surfed the whole thing, I can tell you it started out as a
crazy dream. When Brian Whitman and Barry began it, CPU power was meager, GPUs
were scarcely recognized as general computation aids. It was mostly about
music similarity instead of social features. (I like to think I helped Brian
think that way, egoist I am). Even storing 1,000,000 songs was once difficult.
This was in the AJAX and perl days.

But like Brian's daydream, many other projects there are daydreams. That's the
point of the ML, to try the daydreams other people won't. Not to disrespect
others for taking on research more likely to result in tangible results. In
fact, that's very sane! So if you want to critique the place according to some
personally-applied standards, that's great, that's your opinion, next.

~~~
Chinjut
Spotify's impact on our culture is "People like to stream music. Here is a
service that lets them do so.". You didn't need the Media Lab to come up with
that idea, and indeed, it didn't.

~~~
Teever
Yeah OPs comment is some sort of idealistic historical revision that ignores
the fact that there were a myriad of streaming services that predated Spotify.

It's a pretty weird thing flex about too. Like isn't streaming music based on
preferences pretty easy?

~~~
nessus42
_> Yeah OPs comment is some sort of idealistic historical revision that
ignores the fact that there were a myriad of streaming services that predated
Spotify._

That may be true, but Negroponte was proselytizing streaming media back in the
early 90s, long before anything like Spotify or Netflix were actually
practical. Did all this hot air have any effect? I have no idea. But from
where I was sitting, he was definitely pushing hard for something that others
were not at the time.

Also, the first music recommendation service I ever heard of was started at
the Media Lab. It was called Ringo, and you'd email it a list of your favorite
bands, and it would then email you back recommendations for other music you
might like. Ringo was implemented using some sort of statistical correlation
amongst other people's lists of favorite bands.

Ringo was eventually spun off into a company called Firefly which ran a music
community website that used this technology. It didn't do so well, though, and
was eventually bought by Microsoft, which shut down the website about a year
later.

 _> Like isn't streaming music based on preferences pretty easy?_

Sure, but I don't think that doing it _very_ well is. I mean they typically do
an okay job, but I've yet to find one that just blows me away with its ability
to find music for me that I will love.

Yes, I'm introduced to some good new music this way. But I also have to listen
to a lot of dreck too.

~~~
saalweachter
In terms of mass-market success, goodness of recommendations is like, #12 on
the list of must-have features for a (streaming) music service.

#1 is "It must have all of the music", which is really a lawyer problem, not
an engineering problem.

(#2-#11 are just variations of "No no, I mean _all_ the music", "Does it have
really old music, like X?" "What about really niche music like Y?" "Oh, oh,
what about Z? I bet it doesn't have Z.")

~~~
nessus42
_> In terms of mass-market success, goodness of recommendations is like, #12
on the list of must-have features_

Well, maybe that's why they generally are not so great.

On the other hand, Pandora has traditionally existed with playing music that
you'll like, but didn't explicitly select, as its reason for existence. Maybe
that's why it seems to do a better job at this than other streaming services.

------
thesausageking
"If I hadn't snubbed Jobs and Woz, I might've been the Jef Raskin of Apple"

That quote made me look up who Ted Nelson was. His most notable project that I
see is Xanadu which Wired described as "the longest-running vaporware project
in the history of computing". Started in 1960, it didn't ship a working
version until 2014.

I don't disagree that the Media Lab often overhypes things. But you need to be
able to sell your ideas and get people excited about them to have an impact on
the world. That involves being positive and having genuine excitement for the
potential of something which today might be very hacky. I'm convinced this
positivity is a lot of what makes Silicon Valley work.

A long time after Xanadu was founded, a contractor at CERN put together a
basic, very imperfect way of publishing and connecting research papers on the
computer networks called the World Wide Web. The Xanadu team said he stole
their ideas and it was a "bizarre structure created by arbitrary initiatives
of varied people and it has a terrible programming language". Tim Berners-Lee
just kept shipping code and getting people to join his vision of the future
and so today his WWW is what we're all using.

~~~
wpietri
> But you need to be able to sell your ideas and get people excited about them
> to have an impact on the world.

This is true. But there's a notional dial I think about. It's labeled "effort
distribution". The left end says "substance" and the right end says "hype".

I've come to accept that 0% hype is a setting that mostly doesn't work. You
need to make some people aware of your work, or you'll never get word of
mouth. So let's say 5%. And really, you have to go higher than that, because
you need to compete some with other people's hype. So maybe 10%?

The trouble is that hype is an arms race. So if the Media Lab is hoovering up
money by overhyping things, then a) that money is being pulled from more
substance-focused efforts, and b) to compete, now everybody has to burn more
time on hype. Except funders, of course, who have to burn more time and money
hoping to see through hype.

I can almost accept this in commerce, where we burn hundreds of billions of
dollars per year on this arms race via advertising, PR, etc. But it makes me
especially sad to see it happening in research.

~~~
saalweachter
There is also a social equivalent, which is highly regional/cultural: How much
do we talk ourselves up, versus how modest are we?

If you talk like you're the hottest thing since sliced cheese in some places,
you're looked upon as an arrogant braggart; if you _don 't_ in other places,
it is assumed you are completely incompetent.

------
mtraven
I was a grad student at the Media Lab in its early days. I was attracted not
by Negroponte but by the people he managed to attract: at the time, that
included Marvin Minsky, Alan Kay, and Stewart Brand, as well as some less
famous but truly brilliant people from the arts (Ricky Leacock, Muriel Cooper)
and sciences (Steve Benton, inventor of white-light holography). It was an
exciting place, but there was a hollowness at the core and not just
architecturally (the shiny new IM Pei building was mostly empty space, since
filled in).

Negroponte himself has always been a politician, a hypester, and a sleaze. His
one true innovation was in fundraising – he was able to get industries that
weren՚t used to funding research (eg the newspapers) to pony up for industry
consortia. This was, maybe, better than the usual DoD funding that kept the AI
lab alive, but it came with constraints of its own, including trying to impose
IP agreements on the graduate students that made it difficult to open-source
software. And of course in later days (I was mercifully gone by then) the
creative approach to fundraising ran into even more serious issues with
Jeffrey Epstein.

I՚d say evaluations of the Media Lab as an institution should be done
separately from evaluations of any particular program or researcher who may
have passed through there, because while the institution has some
fundamentally broken aspects, there has been a lot of good work done there.

~~~
xxcode
This is the best comment here. Would love to understand more about the
'hollowness'. FWIW, they have a nice new building there now (Maki).

------
hprotagonist
I don’t think i’ve ever taken Media Lab “seriously” — or if i did, my age
still started with a 1.

To take media lab seriously is to miss the point. They aren’t supposed to be
serious! If i may coin a term, they’re not even doing blue sky, they’re doing
crack-of-dawn. 99% of what they think about will turn out to be a funny shadow
on the wall from the laundry hamper that looked cool for a minute until the
room brightened up.

There’s nothing wrong with that per se, though we do have a narrative around
funding right now that discourages silliness.

Media Lab falls over when they try to sing the serious song instead of their
true one, and often falls over quite hard. They should not have to try, but
such is the way of the world right now.

~~~
cambalache
So what is its point?

~~~
jerf
A well-balanced research portfolio ought to include long shots. Sometimes they
come up big, big winners. But they spend a lot of time looking weird and
pointless.

Unfortunately, funding long-shots is really hard. I was going to write "in the
present environment", but then I realized that was too specific. It doesn't
really matter _where_ the money is coming from. Funding long shots is
fundamentally hard, whether it's from private investment, government,
commercial, or whatever else you can think of. But it's still a good idea to
put a small portion of the research resources into those long shots.

(Now, it may be the case that the Media Lab is a bad place to fund your
longshot, but I don't know enough to evaluate that.)

------
screye
MIT media labs does exactly what other academic labs do, just more visibly.

ie. go down promising areas, end up with no significant inferences and a lot
of utile effort, and in very rare cases, make breakthrough contributions.

The key difference being that the things Media labs work on is usually in
areas with underdefined academic landscapes, which makes it hard to make any
significant progress.

Media labs is not the frontier of academic research that some make it out to
be. Rather, it is just like other insignificant academic labs, in that they
mostly produce duds. Media labs is just higher risk and higher reward.

However, the amount of media hype they generate definitely belies the amount
of significant progress it produces.

------
Glyptodon
As a high school student I got a chance to visit MIT's CSAIL with some other
high school students and it killed all interest I had in attending MIT because
what I previously thought would be a total hacker and mad scientist sort of
place turned out to be a bunch of marketing gimmicks (with a couple carefully
managed demos of things that were "cool" more so than useful, new, or
innovative).

~~~
azinman2
First, you know that CSAIL is not the media lab, right? Secondly, there’s
nothing gimmicky about CSAIL. Perhaps nerds sitting around writing code or
proving lemmas on a whiteboard isn’t so “cool” to look at as a high schooler,
but that doesn’t mean it’s isn’t an exciting place when you’re old enough,
knowledgeable enough, and creative enough to enjoy it.

~~~
ip26
Ah, so your parent was just too young, dumb, and boring to appreciate the
magic. Subtle.

~~~
gugagore
well, no. It's just that what exactly does one expect to see at a research
lab? I don't think any scientific research would appear exciting if you had a
glimpse of it on a tour. The exciting things happen at different timescales! I
mean, this is literally one of the major problems grad students face. It's a
big change from school before, where you get a per-assignment or at least
semesterly signal about whether you're doing the "right" thing. Whereas an
entire grad student career (or more tragically, an entire academic career)
could lead to nothing exciting, just a bunch of "that didn't work".

Which is still progress for the research community, but not something that's
exciting.

I won't say there's absolutely nothing gimmicky about CSAIL. Maybe the parent
was more sophisticated than the tour's target demographic. But I also question
how much depth someone's perspective could have if it's based on a tour they
got in high school.

------
jffhn
I like his view on how interfaces should be self-revealing.

I used to feel dumb and waste time trying to figure things out, but then I
decided that if I wouldn't get something quickly enough, that's because it was
badly presented, and I had better discard it and move on. This approach saved
me both much ego and time. (This can be read as a joke, but I'm mostly
serious. I also use it when I design: I keep reworking things until they feel
as easy to grasp as possible, and then only I can start to really build on top
of them.)

~~~
vanderZwan
> _This approach saved me both much ego and time. (This can be read as a joke,
> but I 'm mostly serious._

As an interaction designer I cannot stress how right you are about this and
that it is no joke _at all_. There's a seven-year old comment here on HN[0]
that really drove home the importance of looking beyond the tech-savvy bubble
that we live in for me:

> _I look at UI changes in a totally different way now. My saw me come online
> on Skype, so she called me. There 's an ocean between us currently. She said
> she called me because she was writing an email to me, but couldn't find the
> Send button, so didn't know how to send it. Either it made her feel stupid
> or frustrated, or she felt so sad that she couldn't send an email to me that
> she had spent some time writing, or whatever, but she started crying. She
> was crying because she couldn't find the Send button in gmail._

It's fine to be proud of our ability to navigate technology, but to let that
become a form of gatekeeping due to carelessness is terrible. Whenever I'm
designing something now I try to think of my retired parents and wonder "will
they be confused by this?" as a basic smell-test. If an interface makes my
users feel intimidated rather than empowered, I have failed as a designer.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429848](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6429848)

~~~
invalidOrTaken
I read some of the context at your link, and, not having a heart of stone, I
can see why the desirability of changes isn't a sure thing.

However.

Balanced against that is the reality that those same users are often the most
entitled about it when something breaks. Tears to jeers in an instant.

So I don't know.

~~~
vanderZwan
Eh, I run Linux on my laptop so my first association with entitled users are
fellow Linux users who hate each and every kind of change to Gnome, KDE or
whatnot, not my parents, aunts and uncless who express genuine frustration
about being left behind.

Especially because a lot of interface changes that confuse the latter group
are really, _really_ hard to justify beyond "fashion", while genuinely causing
problems for them, whereas with the former group it's often an annoyance that
they know how to work around that is nevertheless blown up to epic
proportions, like Sayre's Law in action but for the graphic design of an
interface.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law)

------
azinman2
This is all baloney. First of all, the Media Lab isn’t Nicholas. Yes he had a
huge impact on it.... except he hasn’t lead it in 20 years. And he was a
visionary — he could see the tremendous diversities of roles computers would
play in ordinary lives back when few were convinced they’d ever need a
computer at all.

I’m not surprised Nicholas had a hard time defining media, as that was the
active question in the 70s that is still driving the lab now in 2020. What is
media? What does it touch and encompass? What are the forms of it still
unexplored? There are plenty of important books on many aspects of media, so
to expect an easy definition from an academic is silly, particularly when it
seemingly must fit your film-oriented framework.

He’s seemingly forgetting that the lab has several hundred more people at any
one time... all of which are doing their own vision to try and invent the
future in their own way. The Media Lab just provides a space for like minds to
explore. To focus on the fundraising is to miss the point of the lab, which is
who is there and what they attempt to do during their tenure. When your goal
is to invent the future that’s 10-20 years out, you’ll get a heavy mix of
output... some silly, some tedious, and some genius.

Mixing in a rant about the definition of interfaces and that you should have
replaced Raskin is both disrespectful to Raskin and his genius, and has all
the hallmarks of a “get off my lawn” style argument. There’s no teeth to it,
not all of computing can or should be like film (what’s film like about
satellites, networking, or data mining?), and it just takes away from the rest
of the argument.

I’d also like to note that in my experience working at Apple, no one has ever
advocated to make things more complicated so you’ll need a nearby expert (or
for any other reason). This smells of conjecture that’s so far removed from
the internal realities that I’m disappointing it’s made it to the front page
of HN.

------
bobosha
CSAIL alum here, at the risk of being accused of inter-lab rivalry, I have got
to say the Media lab has a reputation of being the "Marketing dept of MIT". A
Wired article a while back referred to them as "all icing and no cake". The
"sixth sense project" for example, was one I thought was more worthy of an
undergraduate project, than MIT Doctoral research.

I wish Media lab refocuses in enormous resources & talent on advancing
science, and significantly dial-down the show-biz aspects of the Media Lab.

~~~
sgt101
I'm genuinely shocked to hear you characterize Sixth Sense in that way - to me
it was a striking new idea. And the research - do you feel it was poor because
it was HCI? What was the lack that you saw?

~~~
bobosha
HCI & gestural computing is a very important and active area of research. BTW
it's also my field of work. I was taking issue with what I (and quite a few of
my colleagues) felt was a demo cobbled together using existing technologies
for applause lines. There was nothing novel in it, except that it was
presented as a "package".

It'd have been great if Pranav had researched a completely new modality of
recognizing gestures, using Wi-Fi signals for example, or EMG - and that would
have been befitting of an MIT Ph.D!

My 2 cents worth.

~~~
sgt101
Interesting, I will take another look at the thesis with this in mind.
Evaluating work is hard with limited context!

------
floren
Pot, meet kettle. Ted's been banging on the Xanadu drum for 50 years... if
he'd have just bothered to learn to program, he could have implemented it
himself, but it seems he'd rather give interviews about it than sit down at a
keyboard.

~~~
tudorw
This is the most ridiculous recurring accusation against someone who has
championed the human-oriented use of computers since day one and it's partly
his work that means we have PCs at all. So, firstly, Ted can program,
secondly, there are versions of Xanadu and ZigZag you can download and try.

Bill Lowe of IBM fame on Ted;
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kasu0BhRFGo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kasu0BhRFGo)

A zigzag demo:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yFcJXBMGQQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yFcJXBMGQQ)

Finally, the man is 82, and deserving of respect, not some flippant,
inaccurate, badly argued and frankly idiotic comment.

~~~
floren
I've never seen any indication that Ted has implemented any of his own
projects. ZigZag's first demo appears to have been built by Andrew Pam, and a
later Java implementation was done by some others.[1]

The page for the Xanadu demo a sibling comment mentions says "The enthusiastic
and talented programmer, Rob Smith, of Manchester England, did a beautiful job
combining a lot of our ideas" but "Unfortunately this made it a very
complicated package, eventually too tangled to improve further, and Rob had to
get on to other things. John Ohno and Jonathan Kopetz, in Connecticut, spent
several years trying to refactor it, but it's beyond fixing" [2]. I read this
as 1) someone implemented a demo for Ted, 2) some other people tried to fix it
but gave up, but 3) there's no sign of Ted actually doing any of the work.

If there's proof Ted has actually implemented his own ideas in the past, I'll
retract my criticism and refrain from posting it further. I certainly don't
argue that the man has been influential, in any case!

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_\(software\))
[2] [http://xanadu.com/xuspViewer.html](http://xanadu.com/xuspViewer.html)

~~~
kristopolous
Ted's needlessly authoritarian on implementation details, down to very
specific details in file formats and how the components interact with each
other using protocols that simply do not work.

For instance, he was insisting on ASCII only, byte addressed implementation of
a cross referencing system with me in 2014 for the Xanadu implementation you
mentioned. I couldn't convince him that multibyte encoding systems were worth
considering or that offsets would change leading to fundamental data
inconsistencies, thus corrupting formats...the rabbit hole gets deep. He gets
very opinionated on details that don't matter and frankly don't work.

Thus it could _only_ ever be a demo because you can't just feed open formats
from the open internet it in any dynamic organic way. Everything would have to
be curated, filtered, and babysat. That's not memex, that's some digital form
of Pearson publishing with some proprietary e-reading system. Which is fine,
but TBLs W3 system of intentionally leaving things open ended so every step
becomes a potential platform for the next is _so_ _much_ _dramatically_ better
then just a cathedral cross referential monolith hybrid of hypercard and pdf.
The brilliance of TBL is the W3 is half assed in just the right ways to make
it not yet another unused visual language or mind map format. Should more be
done? Sure, of course.

You may think it sounds absurd that Ted thinks there will be manual publishing
under some private company's direction in the new format and not automated
machine transliteration, I agree, it sounds like an archaic museum piece at
the living computer museum in Seattle and not a future oriented system of
thought. Well here we are anyway.

He needs to cede ground and intentionally leave pieces open ended so that
other groups, in other cultures, with other priorities can fit in their
specialized pieces into the puzzle. He apparently is still unwilling.

He's a brilliant philosopher but a classically toxic engineer. Usually that
second group is full of people with bad ideas. His are undoubtedly
revolutionary and profound, but the delegation of other thought systems to
other humans and then interacting with them is like Drucker management 101 and
he's just not onboard.

Also, without going into detail Andrew is a backstabbing ass. I hope he reads
this and I'll state that publicly.

PS: In case Ted sees this (he probably still doesn't browse hn, but he gets
forwarded things), I love you, you know this. You know my criticisms comes
from a desire to make the acts as revolutionary as the thought and I want it
to happen as much as you do. Hope to hear from you and hope all is well.

~~~
jtmcmc
wow posts like this are what make HN still valuable. This was a really
interesting look into this situation.

------
picklesman
My response: Maybe, but so what?

This was rambling and smelled of bitterness. I especially didn’t like his
suggestion that he “could have been” Jef Raskin because their viewpoints were
“essentially the same” or whatever. Really?

~~~
gfodor
I like Ted, and enjoy watching his rants, but when hearing that I couldn't
help but think of Uncle Rico: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL-
VX3WbA9U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL-VX3WbA9U)

~~~
picklesman
Yeh yep indeed. I didn’t make that connection, but for me what came to mind
was Dustin Hoffman’s failed artist character in the Meyerowitz Stories. Not
identical but he too laments “not playing the game”. The scene at the
beginning where he simultaneously disdains his more successful colleague while
also relishing being mentioned by him is just great.

And while I’m on the topic of Baumbach movies, there’s a scene in the Squid
and the whale where the kid gets in trouble for performing a Pink Floyd song
at a high school talent show and claiming it as his own. When he’s rightly
brought to task for it, he says something like “I could have written it, it’s
a simple song” to which he is told “but you didn’t” (paraphrasing, it’s been a
while). There’s an echo of that here too.

------
kuu
First time I listen the word "hokum"

"If you describe something as hokum, you think it is nonsense. " [0]

[0][https://www.collinsdictionary.com/es/diccionario/ingles/hoku...](https://www.collinsdictionary.com/es/diccionario/ingles/hokum)

------
kabes
Says the guy who's been hyping Xanadu for tens of years but never made a
workable product and now spend the last 20 years of his life bitching on the
work of others.

~~~
michannne
This is a strawman argument that does nothing to deflect anything he is saying

------
Donald
What's up with these research institutes attached to universities running
schemes for grant dollars? Maybe across the board incentive structure reform
should be mandated by accreditation bodies.

Another recent case: the University of Central Florida is the news this
morning for their research institute professors running a "grants for PhD"
quid-pro-quo program where grant funders were receiving PhDs in exchange for
continued funding. Other students funded by these grants were writing the
grant-funders' theses.

[https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2020/01/27/ucf-
facul...](https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2020/01/27/ucf-faculty-
helped-student-obtain-phd-in-quid-pro-quo-for-grant-funding-report-shows/)

~~~
azinman2
It’s not a scheme. It’s how you pay for research that’s on the edge enough to
not be a viable grant, because grants are all about incrementalism.

------
soapboxrocket
Just for those more interested in Ted here is a free book
[https://smile.amazon.com/Intertwingled-Influence-Nelson-
Hist...](https://smile.amazon.com/Intertwingled-Influence-Nelson-History-
Computing-
ebook/dp/B010WNK220/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=ted+nelson&qid=1580234245&sr=8-2)

------
bobochan
Whoa! My uncle was the curator of that exhibition, Software, at the Jewish
Museum of NY. Fun fact, that exhibit lost so much money that the museum
stopped doing art exhibitions for a long time. I believe they only resumed
doing them in the past few years.

------
chipotle_coyote
I don't think many people would argue that Nelson isn't a visionary, but when
push comes to shove, there is an uncomfortable amount of truth in Steve Jobs's
oft-cited quip, "Real artists ship." After 50 years, Project Xanadu not only
isn't in a production-ready state, the "best demo" available is described on
the xanadu.com web site as "beyond fixing." The sample EDL documents on the
site do a good job of demonstrating what Nelson had in mind with
"transclusion" and two-way links, but it is _much_ harder to tell at a glance
what the relationship of the source is to the output than it is with HTML, and
at least as implemented, EDLs look awfully brittle.

Maybe Xanadu as envisioned would have been better than the web we have now,
but what we have as ostensible working proof of that isn't incredibly
convincing. Okay, I could link to any text on another web page, not just text
with "anchor" links, and the text I linked to would be highlighted. That's
nice, but is it essential? And I can transclude text from any other page,
which is coo, but _man,_ Nelson seems to stubbornly ignore the ramifications
-- or perhaps think commerce and law will rearrange itself suitably to
accommodate his vision. "Publishers of original content are free to require
payment, or not"; what's the mechanism? What if I just don't want you to
transclude text from my document, or only want to allow transcluding certain
parts? How are EDLs updated when transcluded documents change? How come, after
fifty years, these fundamental questions are still answered with lines like
"[Page and document logic] is defined by the data structure, which we will
publish when ready"? Has anyone associated with Xanadu considered even basic
HTML 2.0-level presentation aspects like tables, images and fonts?

I can't help but think Ted Nelson is the archetypal poster child for "the
perfect is the enemy of the good." He's not the Jef Raskin of Apple because,
at the end of the day, Raskin was willing to work with other people and make
compromises to get _some_ of his vision out the door. Xanadu's failure -- and
by all practical measures, it is indeed a failure -- isn't due to the MIT
Media Lab, or Tim Berners-Lee, or Apple, or Microsoft, or its variously
brilliant-slash-flaky development teams. It's because they never. Ever.
Shipped.

~~~
db48x
Ted's original vision for Xanadu was fairly complete. As I recall, documents
would have been effectively immutable; every change you made would publish a
new version, and all old versions would remain accessible. Every link and
transclusion went to a specific version, so they would never break. If the
page you were transcluding changed, you could obviously opt to update your own
page to transclude the new version, if you wanted. The exact details for
payments were never worked out as far as I know, but they would have required
every user and every publisher to have a single specific identity which would
be transmitted along with every document and request for a document. I'm
fairly glad that didn't happen, at any rate.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
The versioning makes sense -- but it seems like it could get unwieldy pretty
quickly. (I'm thinking of the technical documentation site I actually work on,
with thousands of pages, several of which get minor-to-significant updates on
a weekly basis!) It also sounds like a design particularly ill-suited to, say,
a news site with a front page that changes several times a day -- or, for that
matter, a site like Hacker News -- although I suppose the notion of one-way
"jump links" might have been the intended answer?

And, yes, the mandatory identity for all users sounds like a potential privacy
nightmare.

~~~
db48x
It would have been different, no doubt about that. However, it's not like we
don't already version everything internally. Wikis keep every edit in the
revision history, we put all our code in git, etc. Even back in the day VMS
systems had a version number as part of every file name, with the OS
automatically keeping past versions of every file. It's just that there's no
version field in our standard url syntax, so there's no standardized way of
using retrieving those versioned documents.

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mknocker
Hype, pipe dreams, hokum... I am wondering at what point do these stories
become fraud ? Telling stories about your technology that are not true to gain
a financial advantage.

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kilo_bravo_3
As far as I can tell, from a outsider layman's perspective, the Media Lab
exists only to marry "artists who aren't good at technology (but think they
are)" and "technologists who aren't good at art (but think they are)" so that
they can get together and set large piles of cash on fire and call it
research.

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abtinf
For posterity, here is the original title I submitted:

"Ted Nelson: For 30 years, MIT Media Lab has used hype and hokum to raise
money"

This title is taken from the first sentence of the video description, edited
to fit the character limit.

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bytebuster
Me: Most probably, <insert any lab name here> has used hype and hokum to raise
money.

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yters
What isn't these days?

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DonHopkins
Ted mentioned "self revealing" interfaces and attributed the term to Klaus
Landsberg. Who is that? Did I hear the name wrong, or misspell it? Is this
him?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Landsberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Landsberg)

I agree 100% with Ted's take on self revealing user interfaces:

>Now, I happen to be in the school of Jeff Raskin, you know. As I said, my
interface slogan was "Making things look right, feel good, and come across
clearly." And if I hadn't snubbed Jobs and Woz and, uh, what's his name at PC
'76, I might have been the Jeff Raskin of Apple, instead of Jeff Raskin.
Because essentially, Jeff Raskin and I have the same point: making things look
clean, and simple, and self revealing. That's a term I got from Klaus
Landsberg (sp?) by the way. The term "self revealing". The term "intuitive" is
stupid. Because, is a mouse "intuitive"? You look at it, and oooh, oooh, oooh.
But the moment you see it work, it has revealed itself. So it's "self
revealing", is the term. Pac-Man is another very nice example of a "self
revealing" piece of software. I've often used it as an example of how software
ought to work. Because you learn the rules within three quarters, putting
three quarters into the machine. That was then. And could, after then,
gradually pick up on other aspects. Whereas, it is in the interest of
companies like Microsoft, and alas now Apple, to make things entangling and
unclear, because that way you become committed to them. Like Microsoft Word.
There has to be a Microsoft Word expert in your office in order to do all the
dingy little things that people want to do: formatting text.

That’s the perfect term to describe how self revealing pie menus support
rehearsal: by popping up to lead the way when you click without moving, and
then follow you when you mouse ahead after clicking, and finally get out of
your way when you gesture quickly without pausing.

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-design-and-
implementation...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-design-and-
implementation-of-pie-menus-80db1e1b5293)

>The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus

>They’re Fast, Easy, and Self-Revealing.

>Originally published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 1991.

>For the novice, pie menus are easy because they are a self-revealing gestural
interface: They show what you can do and direct you how to do it. By clicking
and popping up a pie menu, looking at the labels, moving the cursor in the
desired direction, then clicking to make a selection, you learn the menu and
practice the gesture to “mark ahead” (“mouse ahead” in the case of a mouse,
“wave ahead” in the case of a dataglove). With a little practice, it becomes
quite easy to mark ahead even through nested pie menus.

>For the expert, they’re efficient because — without even looking — you can
move in any direction, and mark ahead so fast that the menu doesn’t even pop
up. Only when used more slowly like a traditional menu, does a pie menu pop up
on the screen, to reveal the available selections.

>Most importantly, novices soon become experts, because every time you select
from a pie menu, you practice the motion to mark ahead, so you naturally learn
to do it by feel! As Jaron Lanier of VPL Research has remarked, “The mind may
forget, but the body remembers.” Pie menus take advantage of the body’s
ability to remember muscle motion and direction, even when the mind has
forgotten the corresponding symbolic labels.

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-
menus-936fed383ff1](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1)

>Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective

>By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018.

>Pie menus should support an important technique called “Mouse Ahead Display
Preemption”. Pie menus either lead, follow, or get out of the way. When you
don’t know them, they lead you. When you are familiar with them, they follow.
And when you’re really familiar with them, they get out of the way, you don’t
see them. Unless you stop. And in which case, it then pops up the whole tree.

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thrower123
The Epstein connections are deeply concerning.

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jstewartmobile
It's ok to take the convicted pedophile's money. Just don't put his name on
any buildings! _That_ would cross the line.

