[hardwaregeek]

I have a blog post that I've been sketching out in my head about this whole area of Tools for Thought, future of computing, cybernetics, etc. Basically I find that the thoughtleaders of this space seem to always claim that the true manifestation of their ideas is just out of reach (Project Xanadu, memex, object oriented programming, etc.), but then never deliver this true manifestation.

Indeed it's rather remarkable how many of these figures like Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, etc., never actually shipped much. Now, you could argue that they were ahead of their time and couldn't ship, and for some of these people you would be right. But c'mon now, Alan Kay is still kicking, and still talking about how programming should be reinvented. Douglas Engelbart lived into the 2010's. It's more that these fantastical futuristic ideas, if they were released, would probably not live up to their sales pitches. They're all chasing the high of Engelbart's famous demo. And their followers, who are perpetually waiting, who attempt interpretations of these thoughtleaders ideas and get dismissed as flawed manifestations, well they are essentially the parish. They're waiting for the second coming.

This isn't to say that none of these people have accomplished stuff. They have accomplished an extraordinary amount. But they are fundamentally salesmen, salesmen for the future. And salesmen only have a job as long as they have something to sell.

[balsam]

You might have just stumbled upon the Ozic secret of the Silicon Valley. Most of the guys who have made it rich so far did so on the ideas of others (while those who had grand ideas didn’t ship them).

When a core tenet is making things other people want, you tend to uplift folks who have no great thoughts of their own to sell.

I can imagine an Orwellian doublespeakessay on Steve Jobs called, “Saying No As The Only Act of Creation”.

Manager, meet thy Master.

PS: Was reading some Thiel approved Girard today, he mentioned something about the nihilism in society in which the secret of success being all about signaling success.

[ssivark]

> PS: Was reading some Thiel approved Girard today, he mentioned something about the nihilism in society in which the secret of success being all about signaling success.

I'm curious to know the source/reference. Thanks!

[deafpolygon]

> the Ozic secret

Can you expand on the origin of this? I tried googling, but it failed me.

[cowabungamann]

wizard of oz?

[deafpolygon]

Is it?

[balsam]

Uh yeah.. also a hint of “Ozark” in there, to make it uh .. taste like nepotism

[ccorcos]

You make some good points in here, but I don't think it's the full story.

From my perspective (first eng at Notion), I think what the sales pitch that really captures people's imagination is these situations where "the whole is equal to more than the sum of it's parts". That's what Engelbart and Kay really demonstrated with their work. It preys on the Gambler's fallacy too, just like AI: building something hoping for an unexpected outsized reward.

Where these inspirations start to fall flat is when you start focusing on solving an actual problem. Notion, for example, didn't really solve any specific problems in the beginning that didn't already have a solution available. Most people are interested in solving a problem so they can move on and never return to it. They don't bother to sharpen their axe if they only have one tree to chop down, so they just get the job done and move on.

But what about the one person who tirelessly sharpens their axe so they can chop down a tree in one swipe? What is actually motivating this person to spend all of this effort just to chop down a single tree? Maybe this isn't the perfect analogy, but my point is that many of these ideas start out more like an art project than a startup company. Because too much focus on solving a problem leads "good enough is the enemy of great".

Going from art project to actual product requires a lot more work that people tend to realize. And in my experience, that process tends to siphon away a lot of inspirational energy. At least, this has been my personal experience. Having left Notion almost 2 years ago, I've been finding it hard to motivate myself to build another sausage factory.

[pnt12]

This sounds like the linked post: some people build the game engine, others build the game.

I think what happens is that people use a tool and they find a flaw, and they come up with an idea which will not have it. They build it, great! But then their tool also has flaws, due to things they didn't predict or trade offs - to make one part more elegant, maybe another part must suffer.

I feel often the most productive is to live with the flaws and do incremental improvements to reduce them. Creating a whole new tool is often futile - unless it's revolutionary, adopting won't be great, or won't boost your productivity that much to account for the time you sank building it.

[LunarAurora]

I don't agree.

Academics (and "Hackers"/Visionaries) in every field are doing the same thing every day. It is called (open) experimentation/Imagination/Theorisation.

Tools for thought are no different. Computers/HCI are still in their infancy and these ideas (xanadu…) are just not mature yet. What's the rush?

Even already mature paradigms are not easy to popularize in this domain. Take Obsidian. It is really just hyperlinked text files (at the core). Yet, most people, 30 pages after hyperlinks got popular, will fail to comprehend its utility.

We are still in the phase of tools of thought where even outliners are a novelty. Try adding a "semantic" DB on top of that outliner, and some will call it "a new fundamental model" [1].

My point is : For most (truly) new ideas/methods, it is normal that the manifestation is (ever) out of reach. It is like Charles Babbage reaching for the computer. It was completly out of his reach. Yet, his vision had value for the future.

[1] https://tana.inc/#:~:text=This%20is%20proposing%20a%20new%20... .

[Turing_Machine]

Kay and his collaborators shipped Smalltalk, which was pretty widely used at one time, and which was also highly influential on Objective-C, the language of choice for OS X/macOS and iOS from 1996 to the introduction of Swift in 2014 (many devs are still using Objective-C).

[singpolyma3]

Indeed. Claiming Kay never shipped anything to show what real OOP is like is just ignorant of the history.

[hardwaregeek]

That is fair, but why has he not shipped anything else? He's been content to sit back on his laurels for the past 40 years and make broad statements about OOP and the future of programming. Clearly Smalltalk was not the pinnacle of software development.

[iamwil]

Like I said earlier, you probably haven't looked at Alan Kay's work in depth.

What did he do after Smalltalk? If it seems like nothing, it may be because you weren't the target demographics. He cared about teaching children computational thinking. Squeak, Etoys, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay#Subsequent_work

[igouy]

What makes you think you know what role he has played?

[carapace]

Sounds to me like a lazy and, frankly, disrespectful take.

Take Alan Kay. Smalltalk shipped. It's still shipping to this day. Right up until 2018 he was working: http://www.vpri.org/ Is it his fault that Smalltalk didn't conquer the world?

Is it Engelbart's fault his demo hasn't been taken seriously for fifty-four years?

[iamwil]

> Indeed it's rather remarkable how many of these figures like Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, etc., never actually shipped much. Now, you could argue that they were ahead of their time and couldn't ship, and for some of these people you would be right.

No, I'd argue, they were able to ship. To a surprising degree, given what they had at the time. Perhaps you know who they are and what their influences are, but I don't think you've looked at their work in depth if that's what you came away with.

Alan Kay et al shipped Smalltalk and the Alto machines at a time when personal computers weren't even a thing. That means inventing all the hardware and the software concepts.

Engelbart et al. Shipped all the modern ideas of computing that you take for granted today--networking, mouse, bitmap displays. In 1963, six years before people landed on the moon.

"We had to make our own computer display. You couldn’t buy them. I think it cost us $90,000 in 1963 money. We just had to build it from scratch. The display driver was a hunk of electronics 3 feet by 4 feet."

> But c'mon now, Alan Kay is still kicking, and still talking about how programming should be reinvented. Douglas Engelbart lived into the 2010's. It's more that these fantastical futuristic ideas, if they were released, would probably not live up to their sales pitches.

I have a more generous take on this. They talk about these things still, because deep ideas are hard to convey. We've copied some of the surface ideas, but we still are missing some things. I thought I knew what OOP was from my experience with C++, Java, Objective C, and Ruby, but it wasn't until I looked at Smalltalk that I saw the ideas were actually quite different.

All this to say that, we agree they're visionaries, but I disagree that they didn't ship. They did indeed ship, at a time when they had to invent the tools and concepts to build what they built.

[danking00]

I wonder if the trouble is not whether or not they are salesman but whether or not they are effective “managers,” for want of a better word. Many of the products we use today are built by companies of tens of thousands of people. Realizing Bush’s, Englebart’s, or Kay’s visions demands motivating and orchestrating armies of people with diverse skill sets.

Are any of these three known for their skill at orchestrating teams or organizations? Compare to some of the more famous scientists, engineers, etc., they’ve led large organizations. Like, Jeff Dean, Steve Jobs, J. Robert Oppenheimer, etc.

[simonster]

A brief look at the first few paragraphs of Vannevar Bush's Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush) would clearly establish that the answer to your question is yes.

[hardwaregeek]

Yeah Vannevar Bush is maybe an unfair example because he was truly before his time and he did build some stuff. I just felt he was worth pointing out as one of the originators of the whole knowledge graph tool for thought movement. I don’t know if he would have actually executed in modern times.

[hardwaregeek]

I think this is true to an extent. Some of these people did start out as managers but I think they realized whether consciously or not that the selling of ideas was far more beneficial than actually creating software.

[justin66]

> Indeed it's rather remarkable how many of these figures like Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Douglas Engelbart, etc., never actually shipped much.

Your beliefs about what a researcher ought to "ship" and what researchers are actually responsible for delivering are definitely at odds.

> But they are fundamentally salesmen

Even speaking colloquially that statement represents a major misunderstanding of what a researcher (or a salesman?) is responsible for.

[jimbokun]

Real Artists Ship.

[ethbr0]

+1! The danger of not shipping is not that it allows you to demand purity of vision, but that it completely removes any user feedback mechanism.

And no one, no matter how brilliant, is right about 100% of things, 100% of the time. Reality is simply too complex.

Real Artists Ship.

Truly Great Artists Ship, Listen, and Adapt.

[balsam]

I am glad that Van Gogh didnt have a user feedback mechanism? Or maybe God was his only User?

[Karrot_Kream]

Van Gogh didn't develop in an artistic or cultural vacuum. He received lots of criticism over the years and worked with the Parisian avant garde. He had peers to receive feedback from.

[balsam]

True artists ship to real artists..“Make things that people who’d like to make things people want want” (Like this Website). The unreasonable effectiveness of higher order recommendations.

[sizzle]

Didn’t he cut his ear off after fighting with his roommate

[balsam]

His roommate the successful artist Paul Gauguin? Tried to borrow Sunflowers but

“Van Gogh was upset and replied that Gauguin had absolutely no right to make this request: "I am definitely keeping my sunflowers in question. He has two of them already, let that hold him. And if he is not satisfied with the exchange he has made with me, he can take back his little Martinique canvas, and his self-portrait sent me from Brittany, at the same time giving me back both my portrait and the two sunflower canvases which he has taken to Paris. So if he ever broaches this subject again, I've told you just how matters stand".

[wizzwizz4]

Interactive art is different to non-interactive art.

[funcDropShadow]

> Truly Great Artists Ship, Listen, and Adapt.

Many great artists, think painters, couldn't care less whether other people liked their works or not.