The reason for the downfall of SRI, the company led by Engelbart to develop NLS, can be discovered in The Network Revolution – confessions of a computer scientist (1982) by Jacques Vallée, specifically in chapter 5, “Knowledge Workers of the World, link up!”: <https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PA97>
It contains a partial and anonymized (all names have been changed) retelling about the initial decline of SRI. To summarize, they all became entranced with the cult-like Erhard Seminars Training, except the smart people, who left because they didn’t like it.
engelbart was never the head of sri, and sri didn't have a downfall; they're still around and extremely highly respected. i worked on a darpa contract last year where sri was another performer on the contract, delivering http://spw20.langsec.org/papers/parsley-langsec2020.pdf and related work
Engelbart was the head of SRI's Augmentation Research Center. My understanding is that after the ARC was sold off in the mid 70s, the new corporate owner tried to commercialize the work, stopped funding new research, and most of the researchers left. Disclaimer: I know very little about this story.
Interesting! This is the same as the “EST” sessions depicted in the TV series The Americans, for those familiar with it. Didn’t realize it went back so far.
Interesting. The seminal personal computer history book __Fire in the Valley__ blames IMSAI’s downfall on EST. Basically substituting wishcasting for business sense.
Virtually all this type of nonsense goes back to a few places: New Thought, Norman Vincent Peale, and spinoffs like the I AM cult and prosperity gospel. The latest iteration is “The Secret” and all that woo you hear about “manifesting.”
Fun fact: Trump is a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale. This is why he constantly repeats superlatives and refuses to admit any form of failure or loss. He’s basically “manifesting.” You could sort of say he was our first New Age president. The mass conversion of a bunch of New Agers to the Q cult makes more sense if you look at it that way.
Also I highly recommend finding a good history of the I AM cult. It’s some of the most bonkers shit. This intellectual lineage gave birth to a bunch of looney cults like Church Universal and Triumphant, Synanon, EST, and some alien channeling cult I forget, but I AM was the OG. I think NXIVM belonged to the same family too.
It’s all this will creates reality stuff, sort of like a religion that worships con artistry as a holy path.
Doesn’t surprise me one bit to hear that this stuff was around SRI. It had a big moment in the 70s.
Oh wow, this is some really interesting stuff! Apparently, Trump used to regularly attend Peale's sermons as a child and Peale even was the priest at Trump's first wedding.
The story of Engelbart's group and EST also appears in the very detailed history of Engelbart's life and work, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing by Thierry Bardini [1].
I met Mr. Engelbart once as a child when my mother worked at SRI in the 90s/early 2000s. At the time I had seen the mouse prototype while wandering the halls and on some open house day I was introduced to him. He listened to me, a young kid, talk excitedly about technology for what must've been awhile and was very encouraging and kind. While I was excited about computers at the time I had no idea the significance of his ideas until I was an adult.
Looking back on it, I am awed by the kindness he showed to some random kid.
This is a trait of many great people. I guess they realise at some level that inspiring another generation helps carry the work forward than being dismissive and focusing on one's own work. This is also why I admire Andrew Ng.
There are so many systems thinkers from that time that basically understood how the world works and how it could or should work that basically no one today knows of or considers. It's a shame.
This demo us one of the most mindblowing things I've seen and especially so if you consider its date of arrival. I truly think the audience didn't really understand it.
My point was more that these people wrote about things that predicted where we were headed but no one listened to them then, and no one listens to them now.
Often, i will go to science fiction (Rudy Rucker) to "drink from the well" and generate some inspiration for new ideas, projects, etc. This is one of the real-life sources that gives me that same feeling.
It's just amazing and awe inspiring to see something that felt truly "out of the future". You can probably draw lines to existing inventions and research but to me, this felt like he lived in the world where this technology already existed and was giving us a glimpse.
It's interesting the amount of time technologies take to propagate. It seems to take about 5 years.
The Xerox Alto appeared in 1973. The first integrated microchip CPUs were created in 1969 and the Altair launched in 1974. The Web was created in 1989 and Netscape Navigator launched in 1994. GPT based LLMs began in 2017 and hit the mainstream last year...
Maybe these are cherry picked examples, but it seems like a pattern.
Yes, you need time for hackers to hack on the new thing. 5 years from concept of the core thing, to production ready of the thing that depends on the core thing is pretty good.
There's a great book that details this event in one of the chapters, "What the dormouse said", iirc they used a television broadcast van sitting at the top of a hill to bounce the signal from where the machine sat and where the conference was.
Stewart Brand was also behind this demo and it was his idea to pipe audio from the machine to the conference, so that any UI lag was accompanied by all the disk seeking noise instead of awkward silence.
One fascinating thing to me is that he is explaining things with clarity that we take for granted - for example, the mouse - for the first time. He explains the mouse here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY#t=31m07s
"The tracking spot [cursor] moves in conjunction with the mouse. As it moves up and down and sideways so does the tracking spot."
The Future of Coding podcast reviews and discusses papers of past and present that imagine how computing could change. If you find the Mother of all Demos inspiring, you may find the podcast interesting, too. At the very least, the reading list is a great resource.
I've seen this several times, but what always struck me was how Doug's presentation style felt quite contemporary, as if he was at a modern-day conference.
You could also think of the early development of computers as the ultimate expression of the demoscene.
The thing to keep in mind is that computers originated as very experimental calculating machines for the military about twenty five years earlier. It would take years for people to imagine the true potential of these machine. The successive developments were not simply a matter of waiting until the underlying technology was good enough to implement preexisting ideas.
To put it in concrete terms: the concept of programming languages would have to wait until the development of the concept of stored program computers, since the notion of a programming language doesn't have much meaning in the world of plugboards (literally wiring subsystems together to tell the computer what to do). More relevant: the notion of interactive user interfaces would have been inconceivable when the sole means of interacting with a computer was via a teletype. Even once graphical displays were introduced, it would take time to go from simply representing something visually to conceiving of how the technology could facilitate HCI.
Even then my examples are highly simplified. We like to view the history of computers as a mostly linear progression. It wasn't. There were many twists and turns and abandoned paths as we learned how to make useful machines. (For fun, try researching computer memories.) A lot of the early work in computers was presented in demos that reflected the figuring out of things. While those demos may not appear as fun and the scene wasn't as culturally cohesive as the modern idea of the demoscene, the underlying spirit seems to be quite similar.
The DemoScene has existed forever... well before computers, lathes, etc... all the way back to "Look at the way these pictures come to life and dance around when the torch flickers inside this cave"
The "scene", no, but demos? Arguably, yes. The demo scene was little but the evolution of demonstrations of tech or art from doing it as e.g. part of a product demonstration or research to doing it as art or for reputation.
Also, in the scene events they often have ANSI art competitions on the program but even before colors and computers people were using typewriters to make character based artwork. So in a sense, the ANSI art art form predates computers. Somewhat.
Elon is smart enough and will make this work. Had it not been because of his purchase of Twitter, we would not have a free speech oriented social media in the world.
SolarCity ended up integrated in Tesla and the same could happen with Twitter.
> Had it not been because of his purchase of Twitter, we would not have a free speech oriented social media in the world.
What? There's Gab, Truth Social and a host of other places where crypto-fascists can spew their inane nonsense. Elon's purchase of Twitter may be many things, but "freedom of speech"-anything, it ain't.
That's not what we are talking about here. We are talking about Twitter's policies or community standards favoring certain points of view over others.
Under Elon Musk, while no moderation method is ever going to be perfect, more people can express their sincerely held views without fear of censorship than under the leadership of Parag Agrawal. That's just reality.
The First Amendment is one of America's distinctive feature vis a vis other countries. It guarantees the freest expression regime there is in the world.
Elon Musk, in acquiring Twitter and firing Parag Agrawal, restored the balance in the force.
Um... Twitter isn't bound by the First Amendment. That's a constraint on government, not corporations nor individuals. Which is fine.
I own a mastodon node. If I authorize a member to post from my node, and they start spewing pro-Nazi shit? I can and will cut them off my node. It's mine, not theirs. They can go start their own if they want to spew that shit. Otherwise, people can and will assume I'm comfortable with that signal coming from something with my name on it, and they will be right. If you, personally, think that's wrong of me, you are under absolutely no obligation to appear to my node or relay my content. It's a very free country.
We constrain the government from stopping speech because it has the power of violence to do so. Individuals and corporations do not. Indeed, the case can be made that when somebody who owns a forum or message board moderates the community, they're exercising their freedom of the press. Same amendment, cuts both ways.
... And your conclusion doesn't follow from the previous statements. Regardless of the beliefs of the previous ownership, musk claimed he was "liberating" Twitter, but that didn't prove out. He basically just replaced one idea of what content isn't allowed with another idea of what content isn't allowed. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Don't get lost in technicalities and don't impute me what I never said. I never claimed that Twitter is, from a legal standpoint, bound by the First Amendment. What I said is that Parag Agrawal and team made the conscious decision to institute censorship policies incompatible with the First Amendment.
Obviously, the First Amendment case law only applies to public entities -originally only to federal entities and since the passage of the 14th amendment due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_of_the_Bill_of_R... also to states and municipalities- and certain private entities that receive public money such as universities.
While how these latter policies apply to social media companies such as X/Twitter is part of ongoing debate and litigation, private social media companies, irrespective of the law cases, can decide what kind of censorship regimes they like to have.
Under Parag Agrawal and team, Twitter was a far left platform.
Under Elon Musk and team, Twitter/X is a centrist platform, meaning that neither the far right nor the far left have a free reign and the big middle is pretty much free to say anything they want as long as the First Amendment is not violated.
> What I said is that Parag Agrawal and team made the conscious decision to institute censorship policies incompatible with the First Amendment.
You actually said they don't believe in the First Amendment, but I'll take you at your word regarding what you meant. And I'd agree. They didn't run the platform in a way that gave people as much liberty as the First Amendment guarantees them (qua government).
They were running a social media platform. It's best practice when running one to not grant 1A-level privileges; doing so makes it way more likely you'll hit an actual legal snag like "this site was complicit in planning an insurrection."
Your claim basically boils down to "I like the new censorship regime; it's better than the old one." Sure; everyone has a preferred flavor of online community. But as I noted in a peer thread: Twitter does, if anything, more censorship now than it used to.
It just no longer actively pushes Nazi shit off the platform as often, and my opinion of it reflects that new reality. So does its advertising base.
(Hey, while we're on the subject: how do you feel about what it says regarding Musk's version of the First Amendment that he's suing reporters for reporting true facts?)
I think this is about the stage we are at in regard to decentralized finance at the moment.
I often think about how strangely archaic our financial system is.
For example when you start a new job and the first payment comes in after 4 weeks on the job. In the future, the payments will flow realtime.
Or when I want to check the price of some stock and the stock market is closed, like it is most of the time. In the future, prices will be set on a global market with no downtime.
Or when I talk to people who run online businesses and the plethora of problems they have with credit card payments. Because a credit car payment is not a payment. It's a something where the receiver of the money is held responsible when the one who pays plays dirty tricks on them. In the future, an electronic payment will be simply a payment.
Let's hope we don't need over 40 years from theory to reality like it took for the internet.
speaking more broadly than defi, there is an intrinsic tradeoff between decentralization and efficiency that is probably something like natural law or tautology. the promise of decentralized tech built on cryptography, to me at least, is that it offers a working alternative where there previously was none at all; almost everyone will probably end up using centralized and custodial systems due to their benefits, but the breakthrough is that you don't have to. you can always choose to trust in the presence of trustless system, but you can't choose trustlessness in its absence.
The internet didn't exist then, and it's still an Apples and oranges. Billions of people have access to crypto technology now, and there are no gatekeepers preventing them form participating.
Arpanet was started 1969 and you had to be part of a small number of institutions to have access.
Most businesses have loans from banks and have some sort of line of credit (a business credit card, if not an actual line of credit at a bank) to draw from that could be used to pay employees from.
>Or when I talk to people who run online businesses and the plethora of problems they have with credit card payments. Because a credit car payment is not a payment. It's a something where the receiver of the money is held responsible when the one who pays plays dirty tricks on them. In the future, an electronic payment will be simply a payment.
That last sentence indicates you have failed to understand the problems. A payment that is "simply a payment" is a huge step backwards from those credit card systems. If fraud prevention and legal recourse to undo fraudulent payments is not baked directly into your system, that system is worthless.
You mean worthless like those trillions of dollars worth of cash out there?
Worthless like anything people used to trade for thousands of years before credit cards arrived?
Oh, and there is no fraud prevention baked into credit cards. That's what I said. Sellers hate credit cards because they have to deal with all that fraud:
> You mean worthless like those trillions of dollars worth of cash out there?
...which is getting used less and less in the developed world. In an increasing number of countries, carrying cash is a thing of the past, or done as a rarely-used backup.
> Worthless like anything people used to trade for thousands of years before credit cards arrived?
And which have fallen or are falling out of use when competing with systems that better serve the needs of the users. And safety from fraud and theft is a pretty big need.
> Oh, and there is no fraud prevention baked into credit cards.
Admittedly it's more bolted on than baked into (since the system is so old), but it most certainly is there.
> Sellers hate credit cards because they have to deal with all that fraud
Which doesn't mean there's not fraud prevention, just that it often fails. As it always will in every system, because it's a really hard problem. And a human problem, not a technical problem.
Crypto thinking is always basically some version of how modern finance is broken, yet the solution is basically “hey consumers, whenever you buy something you’re at risk that you could have no recourse.”
Of course individual merchants dislike cards, they create a wedge between consumer and merchant -/ but that wedge also enables people to freely spend more than they’ll ever extract from falsifying things, thereby benefiting all merchants.
Crypto logic ignores that the modern banking system is actually far more logical than it sounds at first blush when you just take the perspective that not everyone should be trusted all the time.
As an example, let's start with the very first step of a transaction.
The payer puts some "secret" numbers into the website of the payee.
With those "secret" numbers, the payee contacts some middleman and says "Heyho, your customer agreed to pay $12345 to me. Here is proof of this: The secret numbers". This is already absurd, as the payer gives those "secret" numbers our all the time. So they are not secret. And the $12345 could be completely made up.
The way this is handled is that the middle man tries to cope with the clusterfuck that is the result of this. And everybody suffers along the way.
The payer has a bad user experience. What is the latest UX ploy to get fraud under control? Was it 3D-Secure-Name-Your-First-Dog-Name-Plus-Another-Secret-Number-Or-Hey-We-Have-An-App-For-You-That-Creates-Random-Card-Numbers-Each-Time-You-Pay-Oh-And-Hello-Do-You-Support-Apple-Pay? I lost track.
The payee has to constantly tinker with fraud detection and fraud handling.
Just like the middleman, although the middle man likes it this way because they get paid for it.
"Sellers hate credit cards ..."
That's news to me. The truth is that sellers hate cash. So much so that around here several establishments display "card only" at the entrance, even though cash is legal tender - i.e. they can't by law refuse cash. And still: They do. (And "card", in this context, includes debit as well as credit cards, but as credit cards are so extremely common.. I, for one, haven't dealt in my native country's cash in some twenty years, and that's pretty common.).
At least where I live, legal tender means that you cannot refuse cash for settlement of an already existing debt, but you can definitely say you don't want to accept cash for transactions that haven't yet occured.
So a "card only" announcement at a shop is perfectly legal.
Well, not here it isn't. These establishments have been fined several times. They still don't buckle.
As for the reason they do it - it's because it's more expensive handling cash than handling cards, and much more hassle (i.e. the opposite of what the comment I originally replied to was alluding to). So, by accepting cards only they cut costs, and by that they also gain an unfair advantage to competing establishments, which is why they want to continue despite being fined, though this is of course not liked much by said competitors.
This is straining away from the original thread, but the essence is that cards are considered a pretty efficient and safe payment method. Crypto I wouldn't touch. It's got everything wrong.
> In the future, the payments will flow realtime.
Aside from not having to wait four weeks before the first payment, what would be the advantage of that?
