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- Hacker News
- Nelson was a pioneer of computing? No, he is a pioneer of computing.by loevborg
- My Claude session must have been busy writing this as this article was being written.
Warning: this repo likely contains everything that you should not do.
https://gitworkshop.dev/npub17g32uxml7y4rf4jwlju6fd58nhzaafd...
by thatguy89 - Tell me you use an LLM to write everything without telling me...
A clock for a world with no center.
Names that can't lie.
Convergence without coordination.
Storage too cheap to delete.
Machines summoned in milliseconds.
OK, got it.
I wish someone here could introduce me to Ted Nelson, I would have loved to interview him! And yes, I've been building the "Xanadu" vision since 2011:
https://github.com/Qbix <-- hosting and editing your own websites
https://github.com/Intercoin <-- blockchain since 2018
https://github.com/Safebots <-- AI agents since 2026
https://github.com/Safebots/Safecloud <-- for example, micropayments
by EGreg - I'm not so sure the article is written with AI. I'd love to hear from the author on that.by e12e
- Interview him while you still can. I encourage you to seek out whoever Ted's contact people are and try to get that interview in. Make it long and thorough, and put it on YouTube and archive it.
- Reading this makes me wish someone would really try to make Project Xanadu a reality. A network built on Content Addressable Storage and a Version Control System is some thing I'd really like to see invested in.by bobajeff
- You’ll hear/read many people opining that it actually wasn’t a good idea.
I counter that it’s a great idea for many things. The problem is that something good enough and far cheaper is already all over the Earth: the web.
Just like Hurd and Minix might have technical merit that’d make them “better” than Linux, Linux is good enough and already here.
by BirAdam - Check out IPLD (the model that powers IPFS), which translates hash-linked DAGs and handles merkle DAGs (git) natively. There's been several attempts to build Xanadu'ish things on various types of networks, web2, web3, p2p, etc, but it just doesn't seem to be what the majority wants. Maybe someday...by chickensong
- It's not a reality for a lack of trying. Multiple people have spent (literal!) lifetimes working on Xanadu and multiple businesses poured a great deal of money and effort into it way back in the day.
It continues to not be a thing because, even though the idea is superficially appealing to a certain engineer mind and that's why people get sucked into the cult, in reality it's not something anybody wants and it's solving a problem nobody has.
by Analemma_ - The spec was kept proprietary and patented until about 2019. All you had before that was ramblings by an eccentric character who was 100% sure he was correct.
https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/201904240732/Xanadu%20Hy...
Now that we can actually read it, it's pretty much Urbit levels of kookiness all over.
There's implementations. They're not very useful to a layperson.
by yencabulator - How awful. And AI-generated. There must be a disclaimer - too many websites steal time now via agents.by shevy-java
- Ummet Ozcan - Xanadu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uMtnH7cABg
I don't think he's waiting for agents.
by pocksuppet - A system that never forgets is not always a good thing. I'm not sure what the maximal scope (beyond editors) the author wishes this applied to is, but there are many cases where it is a positive for things to be erased. Privacy concerns is one example.by eureka7
- > Xanadu had a final failure mode, this one self-inflicted
Skimmed the article, saw this, and then my AI fatigue closed the tab.
by jumploops - One of my favorite LLM-smells to train myself to sniff out is how well the author can tie two seemingly disparate ideas together into something compelling or novel. The more ambitious the synthesis and the less impressed I am the more likely I am to assume it was at least partially the work of an LLM.
Previously, "Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer" <https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer>
by tolerance - The content was clearly AI written. It made no sense. Even crazy humans such as Terry Davis made more sense than such AI slop generated "blog" entries.by shevy-java
- Ah, so like the distance between ambition and impact in metaphor/synthesis?
I like that.
by patcon - This sounds like one agent at each junction point, that may or may not be running the same model and architecture as the previous one, and they need to constantly crawl each other or just a protocol to call each other. But then you have a million of then constructing a docuverse web all having an agent who all need to know each other and its all connections and each a database repository.
Well you only need links that exist, and those that are created.
In a paragraph it may exist in one node that is referenced and that node may be a collection of other nodes, or each sentence or even each word points to other nodes, how much does each model know and what does it keep in its database. A point to the next node is not necessarily durable or versioned, and that goes for each node is connects to.
A single paragraph could have thousands or more sources, references, and each source would need versioning and depending on version it may well point to different nodes in prior or future versions.
A proper version of a paragraph would then need to know this, or expect that all nodes with an agent will be durable and rational and interoperable but if you build on that premise it will not work in the real world.
All unless you keep the docuverse limited in scope to a few data stores and agents who comprehend that spatial universe, and it is a form of an intranet
by ThinkBeat - Interesting. This and the other posts I've seen about Delta seems to exist in that liminal space, were it's difficult to tell if the author has had a brilliant insight, that they struggle to convey to anyone who's not yet had the same insight; or if they've simply gone slightly mad.
It's a similar sense I get with reading Nelson (after being able to think about his ideas for a while, I'm quite certain it was mostly genius and only a little bit of lunacy).
It remains to see how Delta will turn out.
On a side-note; my initial reaction to the headline was; no. Xanadu wasn't missing agents.
I do think I see where the author is going, though; and I think I agree that agents might be a new tool that might facilitate some hypertext ideas. Not Xanadu perhaps. But some other, more pragmatic and less magic place - but a place that is a little more magical than where we are now.
And it intersects a bit with an experiment we started at work; migrating our modest web site from WordPress to a static site combining 11ty (https://11ty.dev) (we already lean heavily on typescript for our application development) and visual studio code with frontmatter cms (https://frontmatter.codes) - and AI/LLMs.
AI helps with making a static page version of our site, and adopting to 11ty.
The idea is that with trivial push-to-deploy setup, our business people, with the help of AI in vs code, will be able to work directly with 11ty and git to make changes, do reviews and publish changes.
A hill that would probably have been too steep for them to climb just six months ago.
So in reference to the theme of realizing a better hypertext system with the help of AI, we're sort of doing the same thing, it turns out: mix solid, boring tools (static site gen, typescript, editor, version control, CI, static hosting) and some AI - to hopefully allow more users leverage both tooling and AI in an empowering way.
We've just stated the experiment - we may yet fly too close to the sun, and end up falling back to a traditional CMS.
by e12e - Well it unironically takes a thousand years to integrate the ideas revealed in a single acid trip. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try!by andai
- One reason I have some hope for this approach is that we start by removing complexity by going to a static web site first.
We remove WordPress, database, configuration, templates - a lot of cruft.
Then we can add it back as needed for keeping edits and publishing simple. It might turn out we hardly need anything from 11ty, thanks to AI making editing more automatic.
I think (the collective) we, are (mostly by accident) building systems that are at least one dimension or level of higher abstraction than before AI.
Unfortunately with AI, higher abstraction doesn't automatically mean less complexity, or better managed complexity.
I think 95% of systems being built now with Al and on top of - or including Al - will turn out to be highly complected mountains of madness.
by e12e - I think not are the same the only thing that differentiates them is adoption. If people show interest in the thing you are a genius if they don't you are mad/crazy.by alex7o
- This post buys into the common narrative about Xanadu, that it was a fundamentally good idea that failed due to some combination of poor execution, being too far ahead of its time, and the market not caring about quality (with this post in particular focusing mostly on the second thing).
In my view, Gwern makes a compelling counterargument: Xanadu was a fundamentally bad idea. The parts of it that weren't incorporated into the World Wide Web either solved problems no one actually had, or couldn't have constituted a stable equilibrium between users and publishers (i.e., even if it'd been magically willed into existence, it'd have quickly fallen apart). https://gwern.net/xanadu
- This was my feeling trying to grok why I want or need Delta.by segfaltnh
- This economic equilibrium reality kills so many cool-sounding ideas. Someone has to actually run them, and if it's more soul-sucking than soul-giving (for some definition of "soul" which may include money) it won't happen. It's not always money, sometimes it's just really hard to keep the service up or to block spam.by pocksuppet
- I agree with Gwern. And also Nelson kind of lost my respect after he spend the rest of his life bashing and complaining on how bad the WWW is compared to his ideas.by kabes
- Ted is super specific and inflexible about lots of technical details that just don't work. I don't want to air out dirty laundry here but it's non-existence in any robust state wasn't for lack of trying.
Also it's a feature, not a bug. If we were all pragmatists ...
by kristopolous - Great post, as a fan of Gwern and Nelson I wonder how I missed it (and how I didn’t get an invite to the party :’)
The “too genius, too early” is a common trope in the tech industry, but it rarely stands scrutiny. When you inspect the claim up close you almost inevitably find out a variation of that “bad design/solves a problem no one really has/does not create the virtuous cycles needed for success”.
But as an inventor it might be easier for one’s ego to tell yourself “i was just ahead of my time” than “my judgement was completely off”.
If you’re an inventor of any kind, the “try lots of small things, see which ones seem to stick, narrow down on those” approach seems preferable to “commit your entire identity to one big thing”, but there is a certain siren song to the latter.
by gyomu