I humbly ask that the title phrase "Your Review" be re-thought. This post is no more "My Review" than anything else posted here is "My Anything Else". Moreover, it seems like the type of phrase an author would use rhetorically when something *actually was* his own work. But it's not.
**Since the substack owner also publishes reviews**, could you just title these "Review Contest: Project Xanadu..."? So much clearer! Every time I get these posts in email, "Your Review" makes me stop and think, "ok, this is ... not Scott... or is it?... no. And right, I decided I wouldn't read the review contest stuff."
This is a cool history story and I liked the writing. But the review sort of lost me in Part Eight, where it showed me a screenshot of a Xanadu browser, and it asked: "Why shouldn’t the internet look (and work) a little more like this?"
It's possible that this is the sort of thing that you have to use for ten minutes to understand. But it looked to me like a normal (image-less) browser with a bunch of tiny unreadable slices of text on either side, and I don't feel any particular need for the internet to look more like that.
I would agree with the author that there are a lot of problems with the internet, but I'm left with no idea how Xanadu thinks it's going to solve them.
Concretely: Xanadu offers "connection, accountability, verifiability", but it doesn't explain how it's going to get any of those things.
Verifiability: Is this going to be one of those Internet things where you have to upload a photo of your drivers license before you can post? If so, does it offer protection against getting doxxed? If not, how is anything verifiable?
Accountability: If you post something deliberately wrong on Xanadu, what specifically happens?
Connection: Can a spammer create a page about their new memecoin, and "connect" it to the most-used page on the Internet so that everyone in the world sees it? If not, why not?
There are a lot of people that want connection, accountability, and verifiability. But it's not enough to handwave saying "this project solves those problems". These are actually-hard problems and you have to explain how you solve them.
Tim Berners-Lee went on to propose and advocate the so-called Semantic Web, using RDF and OWL, which somewhat relates to Nelson's ideas. Although RDF and OWL are sometimes used for niche applications, it's safe to say that the Semantic Web never took off, in spite of full backing from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Perhaps the real lesson here is the bitter lesson. All of these rich hypertext approaches, whether Bush's, Nelson's, or Berners-Lee's, rely on sophisticated formalisms that require a degree of human effort at write-time. (OWL, for example, was derived from knowledge representation formalisms used in symbolic GOFAI.) Maybe that's just a mistake. Maybe the way to go is with general learning algorithms that compress knowledge into models. Maybe GPT-5 is better than what a fully developed Xanadu ever would have given us.
I think Gwern has some insightful commentary on why Xanadu failed: https://gwern.net/xanadu I would summarize it as:
1. Most of what it's trying to do, beyond what we got, just isn't that useful,
2. Its ideas about how to handle copyright were unworkable,
3. A public version would have had serious problems with spam and abuse.
Really, I'm not sure I buy this idea that this was all somehow contingent on Engelbart being discredited -- is it even really true that Engelbart was discredited? That's certainly not what I'd gathered from what I'd read elsewhere... it looks to me like there's so many reasons for its failure (the reasons Gwern mentions, the fact that the people making it didn't actually have a clear idea what they were making) that I'm not sure things could have gone hugely differently here.
Gwern explicitly writes: "Xanadu wasn’t the victim of 'Worse is Better'; it was just a solution in search of a problem." And makes a number of arguments to this effect. Worse-is-better isn't an iron law of nature; C++ and Java have had plenty of market success.
One question I have: Gwern writes, "Like Douglas Engelbart, Nelson enjoys (if that is the word) the honor of being a living embodiment of Cunningham’s Law: becoming one of those historic figures whose importance was that they were *so* wrong on *such* an important topic they helped popularize that they inspired others to become right."
Do you have any idea what he's talking about re: Engelbart? Is there an important respect in which the Mother of All Demos was conceptually flawed? I vaguely recall hearing allegations that Engelbart had some unworkable-in-retrospect Bush-esque ideas about how it should be used, but I can't find details and the demo looks fairly similar to how mainstream computer UIs ended up actually working (at least once Google Docs made multi-user editing a thing).
Small but kind of glaring error: the proximity fuse wasn't an anti-tank weapon in World War II, it was mostly used against air targets and secondarily against infantry. When you're trying to destroy a tank you want your shell to be intact when it impacts so it can penetrate the armor, not explode next to the target.
This is general for many of these reviews, but I feel a lot of them aren't even reviews, more like a summary of some interesting history. There's subjectivity at what, two points ("Xanadu looks cool" and "Nelson seems annoying")?
many book reviews are reviews of histories or biographies, and are mostly summarizations of the stories within, sprinkled with some author commentary, who hopefully drags in other points of view, etc. this review seems like mostly a fairly standard book review of Nelson's autobiography, in this way, and i think if it were presented as such it wouldn't stand out as not being a "review"
I have a little bit of a personal connection to Ted, as I was his neighbor in Sausalito for a bit. I moved onto a ferry boat called the Vallejo in 1994. You can see it clearly in this home video walkthrough by Ted and his son, near the end. https://archive.org/details/SouthFortyPier1988
He may have even come over for one of our infamous parties.
Not only is Elon not insane, but he is one of the most accomplished human beings on this planet, and in fact in history. Putting him alongside Edison, ... is entirely appropriate.
I got a weird sense of deja vu reading this, I think dating back to a science fiction story probably 30 years old by this point, by an author that may well have been inspired by that WIRED article.
This bit especially: "Simply put a royalty on the links. If you want to reference a copyrighted New York Times article, then you’ve got to pay the author a little bit. And if someone else links to what you’ve written, then you get a small payout."
Except when I checked the series I was thinking of (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Teacher_Is_an_Alien) it seems like they came out well before that article...so probably not. Either I'm thinking of a wholly different book or Bruce Coville is just a well connected guy, both seem possible.
I humbly ask that the title phrase "Your Review" be re-thought. This post is no more "My Review" than anything else posted here is "My Anything Else". Moreover, it seems like the type of phrase an author would use rhetorically when something *actually was* his own work. But it's not.
**Since the substack owner also publishes reviews**, could you just title these "Review Contest: Project Xanadu..."? So much clearer! Every time I get these posts in email, "Your Review" makes me stop and think, "ok, this is ... not Scott... or is it?... no. And right, I decided I wouldn't read the review contest stuff."
At least to me it is clear that "your review" means "a review by one of this substack's readers" - otherwise Scott would have written "thy review".
This is a cool history story and I liked the writing. But the review sort of lost me in Part Eight, where it showed me a screenshot of a Xanadu browser, and it asked: "Why shouldn’t the internet look (and work) a little more like this?"
It's possible that this is the sort of thing that you have to use for ten minutes to understand. But it looked to me like a normal (image-less) browser with a bunch of tiny unreadable slices of text on either side, and I don't feel any particular need for the internet to look more like that.
I would agree with the author that there are a lot of problems with the internet, but I'm left with no idea how Xanadu thinks it's going to solve them.
Concretely: Xanadu offers "connection, accountability, verifiability", but it doesn't explain how it's going to get any of those things.
Verifiability: Is this going to be one of those Internet things where you have to upload a photo of your drivers license before you can post? If so, does it offer protection against getting doxxed? If not, how is anything verifiable?
Accountability: If you post something deliberately wrong on Xanadu, what specifically happens?
Connection: Can a spammer create a page about their new memecoin, and "connect" it to the most-used page on the Internet so that everyone in the world sees it? If not, why not?
There are a lot of people that want connection, accountability, and verifiability. But it's not enough to handwave saying "this project solves those problems". These are actually-hard problems and you have to explain how you solve them.
Tim Berners-Lee went on to propose and advocate the so-called Semantic Web, using RDF and OWL, which somewhat relates to Nelson's ideas. Although RDF and OWL are sometimes used for niche applications, it's safe to say that the Semantic Web never took off, in spite of full backing from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Perhaps the real lesson here is the bitter lesson. All of these rich hypertext approaches, whether Bush's, Nelson's, or Berners-Lee's, rely on sophisticated formalisms that require a degree of human effort at write-time. (OWL, for example, was derived from knowledge representation formalisms used in symbolic GOFAI.) Maybe that's just a mistake. Maybe the way to go is with general learning algorithms that compress knowledge into models. Maybe GPT-5 is better than what a fully developed Xanadu ever would have given us.
I think Gwern has some insightful commentary on why Xanadu failed: https://gwern.net/xanadu I would summarize it as:
1. Most of what it's trying to do, beyond what we got, just isn't that useful,
2. Its ideas about how to handle copyright were unworkable,
3. A public version would have had serious problems with spam and abuse.
Really, I'm not sure I buy this idea that this was all somehow contingent on Engelbart being discredited -- is it even really true that Engelbart was discredited? That's certainly not what I'd gathered from what I'd read elsewhere... it looks to me like there's so many reasons for its failure (the reasons Gwern mentions, the fact that the people making it didn't actually have a clear idea what they were making) that I'm not sure things could have gone hugely differently here.
The WWW succeeded because it was simpler than Xanadu. Worse is better: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
Gwern explicitly writes: "Xanadu wasn’t the victim of 'Worse is Better'; it was just a solution in search of a problem." And makes a number of arguments to this effect. Worse-is-better isn't an iron law of nature; C++ and Java have had plenty of market success.
Worse-is-better might not have been why Xanadu failed, but it was why WWW succeeded.
Wow, this is great, thanks for linking!
One question I have: Gwern writes, "Like Douglas Engelbart, Nelson enjoys (if that is the word) the honor of being a living embodiment of Cunningham’s Law: becoming one of those historic figures whose importance was that they were *so* wrong on *such* an important topic they helped popularize that they inspired others to become right."
Do you have any idea what he's talking about re: Engelbart? Is there an important respect in which the Mother of All Demos was conceptually flawed? I vaguely recall hearing allegations that Engelbart had some unworkable-in-retrospect Bush-esque ideas about how it should be used, but I can't find details and the demo looks fairly similar to how mainstream computer UIs ended up actually working (at least once Google Docs made multi-user editing a thing).
Small but kind of glaring error: the proximity fuse wasn't an anti-tank weapon in World War II, it was mostly used against air targets and secondarily against infantry. When you're trying to destroy a tank you want your shell to be intact when it impacts so it can penetrate the armor, not explode next to the target.
This is general for many of these reviews, but I feel a lot of them aren't even reviews, more like a summary of some interesting history. There's subjectivity at what, two points ("Xanadu looks cool" and "Nelson seems annoying")?
I guess the question is, does that matter?
many book reviews are reviews of histories or biographies, and are mostly summarizations of the stories within, sprinkled with some author commentary, who hopefully drags in other points of view, etc. this review seems like mostly a fairly standard book review of Nelson's autobiography, in this way, and i think if it were presented as such it wouldn't stand out as not being a "review"
Yeah next year might as well just call it a generic essay contest. Only maybe 2 of the 10 finalists so far have actually been reviews.
"The WWW had a number of advantages over Xanadu..."
I think this is important, but misses the most important advantage that the WWW had over Xanadu: Starting in 1993 people could actually use the WWW.
Followed quickly by: People were actually using the WWW.
Things that exist are more useful than vaporware.
I have a little bit of a personal connection to Ted, as I was his neighbor in Sausalito for a bit. I moved onto a ferry boat called the Vallejo in 1994. You can see it clearly in this home video walkthrough by Ted and his son, near the end. https://archive.org/details/SouthFortyPier1988
He may have even come over for one of our infamous parties.
This is basically how I like to use llms to explore topics
Highlight text and either expand or navigate
"a baby-faced non-insane Elon Musk"
Not only is Elon not insane, but he is one of the most accomplished human beings on this planet, and in fact in history. Putting him alongside Edison, ... is entirely appropriate.
I got a weird sense of deja vu reading this, I think dating back to a science fiction story probably 30 years old by this point, by an author that may well have been inspired by that WIRED article.
This bit especially: "Simply put a royalty on the links. If you want to reference a copyrighted New York Times article, then you’ve got to pay the author a little bit. And if someone else links to what you’ve written, then you get a small payout."
Except when I checked the series I was thinking of (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Teacher_Is_an_Alien) it seems like they came out well before that article...so probably not. Either I'm thinking of a wholly different book or Bruce Coville is just a well connected guy, both seem possible.
Anyone else got a better lead?