Douglas Engelbart Interviewed by John Markoff of the New York Times

Just yesterday I watched an hour-long interview [0] from 2002 with Doug Engelbart. On finding a wife. Engelbart moves to a university town, ditches a male-focused hobby, and finds a more gender neutral hobby in folk dancing. Echoes of Noyce and choir. He turns down an offer from HP after asking whether he would be able to work on computers and being told "no". He claims during his 12 or so years working at SRI before the '68 demo that most of the support for his ideas came from outside of the institution. He says that later he learned about paradigms (but claims not from Kuhn), which allowed him to understand the resistance he kept facing. He gives credit to people with tangential skills that made the presentation possible: The machinist mouse-maker who was also a wood carver, the colleague's wife who was also a theater director. He laments the fact that the easiest-to-learn tools out-competed tools that gave the greatest return on learning. [0] ▶ this video

in “The 50th Anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Great Demo” · View on HN

> human-machine cooperation is probably where the big money will be. As it has been for as long as machines have existed, really. This reminds me of Douglas Engelbart and his vision for computers. I'll cite the section of his wikipedia page that paraphrases an interview with him from 2002[0][1]. > [Douglas Engelbart] reasoned that because the complexity of the world's problems was increasing, and that any effort to improve the world would require the coordination of groups of people, the most effective way to solve problems was to augment human intelligence and develop ways of building collective intelligence. He believed that the computer, which was at the time thought of only as a tool for automation, would be an essential tool for future knowledge workers to solve such problems. He was right of course, and his work lead to "The Mother of All Demos"[1]. Machine learning is the next step in using computers as thought enhancement tools. What we still need to figure out is an appropriate interface that is not as "black-boxy" as "we trained a neural net, and now we can put X in and get Y out". EDIT: Now that I read that quoted section of wikipedia again, it's funny to note that computers were "only seen as tools of automation", and how modern fears of AI are also about automation. Automation of thinking. [0] [link] [1] ▶ this video [2] [link]

in “A.I. Has Arrived in Investing, Humans Are Still Dominating” · View on HN

Well, some types of buildings are designed to be modular. Cows are not. I'm also in favor of a single system that solves a bunch of problems than a hodgepodge nightmare. That was the vision behind NLS, the Mother of All Demos, SmallTalk, Plan9 etc. And Doug Engelbart can be found favoring the easy to master but complex at first glance approach ▶ this video instead of the easy to get started approach of Mac GUIs that won out. The problem arises when the system makes too many weird decisions and people fork it to make their own all encompassing systems. Then it takes forever for crippled versions of these system to be adopted. It doesn't help when even the niche audience is divided. Things that can be disagreed on should be minimized. So there is no technical need to throw the complex at first glance syntax at new users these days. You could convert it to a more verbose syntax and back again. Terse syntax looks clean and easy to scan when you use it daily. But what if you don't? Then it's not self documenting, you have to look up commands to read code. If I don't use command line for a few months, I remember the basics like mkdir, ls, cd but I forget the nuances like ls -a and the billion other options. So it becomes a chore of looking things up constantly. Could be fixed with natural language autocomplete for writing code, but not reading. If you considered such use cases, you wouldn't be so sure about the terse syntax. So many made up words are also asking too much. They'll certai

in “Urbit: an operating function” · View on HN

You're thinking of Mother of All Demos. If you watch some interviews with Douglas Engelbart, the whole philosophy was to do away with the existing mediums of paper and video and embrace the new one possible only with computers, like wikis, simulations, etc. Instead we just put the old mediums on computers to make access more convenient. Doug ▶ this video Alan Kay addresses the matter [link] too. He worked on XEROX PARC, which inspired Steve Jobs to make the Mac. Brett Victor also leans in that direction [link] The printed book is a good fit here because it's a single perspective, best absorbed linearly. The more important question to ask is why are we reading a single person's perspective these days? Where are his simulations? How are they different from previous author's simulations? When people talk about complex systems, like battles, politics, etc. they're using simulations in their heads, which are only be described through words, maybe some edited videos. So to compare different author's perspectives we read their books and run a different, imprecise simulation in each of our heads. Why not just run a single precise simulation for each author? Well, most of society only uses computers to edit text. Same text that could have been written centuries ago, but now more conveniently. The possibilities of video have also been explored. I've watched many hours of good documentaries on the Battle of Waterloo. Also Gettysburg and many others. But a few plays of [link] explained things

in “The Battle of Waterloo: A Near-Run Thing” · View on HN

Sure but you can't re-allocate workers in a capitalist economy with a paper idea and a signature. You have to convince thousands of people. You have to convince investors to start new companies where new types of workers are doing something new on the web. You probably can't re-educate millions of the current designers, code monkeys, content farmers and clients to do new types of work that has nothing to do with their old work. There are plenty of these smartest and best people trying startups and they're not really measuring up to what computer pioneers imagined. Seems the best we can do for Engelbart's complex topic discussion systems are Wikipedia, Quora, Reddit and HN. HN's designer Paul Graham subscribes to Job's idea of simple, minimalist interfaces because they're easy to learn and get users fast. The old school of thought was programs and interfaces would do a lot, took a while to learn, but were worth it in the end. Today we assume only things that are worth learning on a computer are existing job skills. It's a Catch-22 and a hard sell. For reference ▶ this video [link]

in “This is a motherfucking website. And it’s fucking not completely perfect” · View on HN

This is along the lines of structured arguments [link] Doug Engelbart the creator of NLS and famous for Mother of All Demos talks about such systems [link] and ▶ this video etc. The general principle is we won't make much progress discussing complex issues by simply recreating the print world with increased convenience of a computer like we do now. The discussions have to take a fundamentally different form, possible only on computers, such as semantic argument maps, etc. Of course his perspective comes from 1950's when educated people had civil discussions that solved problems, or at least that's the modern nostalgia. He imagined a new class of "knowledge workers" moderating information. Instead we have voting rings and content farms. If anything, a structured argument map could shut down much of the attention seeking drivel surrounding every political/complex system issue.

in “Ask HN: Idea Sunday” · View on HN