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Jaron Lanier on the Semi-Closed Internet
Will Wilkinson writes "Jaron Lanier's recent essay, The Gory Antigora: Illusions of Capitalism and Computers, kicks off a discussion of 'Internet Liberation: Alive or Dead?' at the Cato Institute's new blogazine, Cato Unbound. In Lanier's essay today, find out how the 'brittleness' of software has kept the Internet from realizing its potential as 'a cross between Adam Smith and Albert Einstein; the Invisible Hand accelerating toward the speed of light.' Also, find out why, upon meeting Richard Stallman, Lanier's reaction was: 'An open version of UNIX! Yuk!'"
I didn't understand one word of that.
That peer is the very sentance you are writing, correct?
This entire essay is bunk; every paragraph the author brings up a point that can quickly be refuted. He overgeneralizes issues and adds a big dollup of emotional appeal to make his points. And frankly, his points are just misguided, if not straight out wrong.
I'd vote for it being alive, but all these stupid discussions on if it's alive or dead are killing it. It's all this spam and nonsense and a lack of quality web design that's turning it into a bunch of useless junk.
There isn't much in TFA except a nice point about how we should be able to "browse" video games in the way we browse through books or newspapers. Which does, in fact, make me wonder why stores don't allow you to rent a copy of a game, bring it back and decide whether or not to buy it. I've been doing that for years, but never with one store.
Not much new here, especially if you look at this from a history of technology perspective. The same comments about "lock in" (a.k.a., capitalism is evil) apply to telephones, electricity, and the water wheel. Bottom line: Humans continue to get stuff done whether there is "lock in" or not.
How to Download YouTube Videos
I'm confused.
Dumbasses didn't put clicky links on their image. Why not? So that you can dig, dig, dig and find the long winded articles?
Maybe they haven't figured out the internet as well as they think. Blogs with 5000 word essays tend to be a pain in my ass. I'm barely literate. How much do they expect slitscan to read?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Film at 11.
Jaron Lanier... Cato Institute... 'blogazine'... Richard Stallman
After that summary, I can't decide whether I need to take an aspirin or a shower first.
If by that opening sentence he means that you have to believe what he is saying despite much observable evidence to the contrary, then yes, it is like religion. (Not a troll, I swear)
IMHO you should not even link to the site. Just the concept of open source software... the concept- is enough to refute his first arguement that software is inflexable and unable to adapt. What a totally moron thing to say. I actually am holding out hope for a supremely subtle jab at internet puditry. If this is it, I can't tell.
7h3$3 4r3n'7 7h3 Ðr01Ð$ ¥0 4r3 £00|{1n9 f0r. M0v3 4£0n9. --OB1
From the summary:
at the Cato Institute's new blogazine
Alarm bells are ringing, Willie:
Fluff topic? Check.
A grandiosely named organization? Check
A newly-coined, silly, and far-too-hip word modeled after another newly-coined, silly, and far-too-hip word? Check.
Also, find out why, upon meeting Richard Stallman, Lanier's reaction was: 'An open version of UNIX! Yuk!'
This part is probably true, although without the 'An open version of UNIX!' part.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
The Internet isn't going away unless we have some major power chrisis or something. People will always find a way to continue this now that we've reached the point-of-no-return, possibly even giving rise to a new hodge-podged network made without aid from corporations. Open source has proved that technology can manifest itself outside of corporate settings and that's why we'll always have the internet. We can't live without it anymore, so we will continue it ourselves if we must.
Another M$ paid stuff....move along.
But I just got a prescription for "blogazine", a topical ointment which alleviates muscle pain.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
I remember Jaron Lanier from the 1990s when he gained some fame from his pronouncements about virtual reality. Perhaps I'm ignorant of his real accomplishments, but Lanier, like Paris Hilton, seems to be famous as a result of self promotion, rather than anything he has achieved. In the world of pundits it appears that it is quite possible to create yourself from thin air (or perhaps hot air). Unless I'm simply ignorant of Lanier's accomplishments, why should we listen to anything he has to say?
"Also, find out why, upon meeting Richard Stallman, Lanier's reaction was: 'An open version of UNIX! Yuk!'" Richard Stallman has spent decades creating software used by millions of people. Jaron Lanier has created ummm...what again?
The unfortunate Internet has only one peer when it comes to obfuscation due to an inundation of excessive punditry, and that peer is religion.
Translation - I've got nothing very interesting to say, but just look at the words I'm saying it with!!! Ain't I hip?
I'd be more scathing if it weren't for a nagging suspicion that the author is just taking the piss.
The word you want is intertia or momentum, not brittle. Software does not suffer from osteoporosis. "Help I've crashed and cannot boot up!"
The Gory Antigora
For those who don't know, this is what is known as a Chiasmus. That is, a sound pattern of ABBA. Other famous examples include, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" and "Never let a fool kiss you or a kiss fool you."
The reason I point this out is that of all the literary devices, the Chiasmus is probably both the coolest and also the most difficult to come up with. So props to Jaron for this one.
He is a true pioneer in virtual reality; everything that he has done remains virtual.
I don't know why he hasn't gone into politics or advertizing, as he is quite skilled at bloviating without actually saying anything.
Oh good god, they've managed to find a word even more annoying than blogosphere: blogozine :/
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
We aren't to the point of virtual citizenship, but we may be in the middle of a trend toward borderless loyalty. People are becoming less loyal to the nation-state and more loyal to ideas and movements (religions, software models, companies, professions). I hope that the trend doesn't result in a single world government before the individual borderless movements get powerful enough to keep one in check.
Untraceable electronic currency doesn't have any chance: the people issuing the currency want to know where it is. It's enough that numbers are inherently abstract, though. It will always be necessary to launder your funds if you want their movement kept discrete.
As far as the conciousness expansion of free information goes, that too is the wrong question. (Some) people will always choose to be blissfully ignorant about (some) things, and you can't force them to learn. The network makes it easy to find information, but it's always going to be more like fishing than a floodlight. People have to want the information you have.
In general, it's too soon for Utopia but the world is getting newer all the time.
sigs, as if you care.
I'm guessing he's working on creating a cult.
In this article the author appears to really be close-minded about *UNIX. Does anyone else notice this?
:=P
I bet he's a windows user
"Find out why, upon meeting Richard Stallman, Lanier's reaction was: 'An open version of UNIX! Yuk!'"
Because Jaron Lanier is an insufferable, pretentious, idiot. That's why.
He has a terminal case of verbal diarrhea!
Copyright law prohibits the rental of software, generally speaking, unless the software is specifically for video game machines (i.e. not for a general-purpose computer) or cannot be odinarily copied (e.g. a hardwarre game cartridge). See 17 USC 109(b). (This section was originally written to stop "record rental", but was later expanded to software.)
Nonprofit lending by libraries, however, is exempted from this prohibition.
Cato is infamous for questionable research that politicians have used to support some ridiculous claims. Nothing different from them here.
Yes, the article is full of bunk in every paragraph and then somewhere in it he claims some of it anyway is a farce. If you refer to his bio, there's a clue in there.
"Phenotropics," concerns rejecting traditional protocol-based approaches in favor of statistical and pattern-recognition techniques to bind software components together in order to improve large scale reliability.
The whole "software is brittle" agenda is cleary his own.
SLIGHTLY OT
I was watching a remake of "the music man" with my daughter yesterday and his whole "software is brittle" agenda reminds me of how the main character runs around the small town talking very nonsensically about how the new billiards hall is going to corrupt the citizens. Of course the citizens love controversy, so it becomes a "social problem." The main character has the solution, buy musical equipment from him. Now, if only Jaron would sing he can remake the Music Man... Again!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Right on.
We of like mind should form a Coalition. Make more noise!
Don't bother.
I find laziness to be an excellent motivator.
just as confused and painful
Lanier's claim to fame is that he "invented" virtual reality. or something like that. His real fame comes from being a huge fat guy with white boy dreads who has an unfounded reputation for being a "luminary". He cons people into paying him to write articles, speak, "conceptualize", and keeps the repuation going for more cons.
:)
I worked alongside him at Time Inc. New Media, back in the Pathfnder days. He kept on proposing one project after another that simply couldn't be done - the technology didn't exist. I called them "Flying Car Projects" - sounds good, but creating a Flying Car is tough once you start dealing with logistics of fueling, licensing, training, etc. etc.
His biggest "idea" was called GigaJam, where we'd have millions of surfers hit virtual keys, somehow turning that into music, and streaming it back to them. In realtime. That'd be difficult to do today, but totally impossible back in 1996. Moreover, I'm not sure that there would have been much of a point to devote resources to something like that. To a user, that would have been fun for about 2 minutes.
Rumor was that he was boinking one of the head honchos at TINM, which is likely how he got the job. He was likely getting paid an assload of money to do nothing but bother people with his silly notions. After a year, he had contributed NOTHING. Not one of his projects was ever adopted in any fashion. And I heard that he had difficulty using a Macintosh to do things like, say, copy files.
So here's a guy that has fed (and rather overfed) himself on being a technology pundit, who doesn't understand the first thing about technology. Plus he's fat and smelly. So take his opinions with a huge chunk of salt.
All the above opinion, rumor, innuendo
This is the same loose affiliation that will scream about "liberal media" until their noise drowns out any other signal. And the Cato Institute is the "section" that sets up the "information" that is going to be sited.
My big concern here is that this is the beginning of the hard core lock down of the internet. Their typical tactic is to chip away until nothing is left. Think imperialist presidency, with their "Us" in control. It almost sounds like fascism, remember, Hitler was elected too.
Go ahead, mark this as a troll, but the Libertarians should be just as scared as the Liberals.
I've seen more coherent and well thought-out writing from my teenage son. This guy starts right off admitting that he's one of the pundits whose opinions I should almost discard out of hand; I still haven't figured out why I didn't stop reading right there. Senility, perhaps; oh, well.
I found the blog to be quite annoying. Shame he put his name on it or I'd consider having him arrested.
Oh, but you know the rest.
What happened to the cool AI tech that was going to revolutionize and synergize our digital lifestyle?
Just because homeboy has dreadlocks doesn't mean anyone cares about him.
I'd prefer to think of the internet as semi-open, you pessimists.
He's one of the guys that ignorant authors, mostly of gloss pieces about Cyberspace and the Information Super Highway, penned as some sort of prophet or pioneer back when VR was the tech du jour, and the Internet was a gigantic probability.
Maybe that went to his head?
I've had it. I'm through with this whole Internet thing. Limitless porn and amazon coupon codes are no longer worth it. I'm going back to writing checks, using stamps, and gaming using my console.
The first real annoyance was "boxen". Sure, it's pretty gay, but I can live with the occasional geek using it. (Actually, the first annoyance I remember was the green card spam, but that's going back a bit far). Then came "google" as a verb. Such nonsense, but trivial. The rise of the "blog" is easy to ignore - I don't care what most people think in person, so at least if they're busy typing their thoughts they're won't be able to tell them to me.
But now..."blogazine"? Blogazine. Lord, help me.
Now I've got to finish downloading the Internet's porn collection and burning it to DVD. You can't expect me to go cold turkey!
Why is a right-wing propaganda machine like the Cato Institute being given a forum here? At least be honest and put it in the politics forum.
Every computer user spends astonishingly huge and increasing amounts of time updating software patches, visiting help desks, and performing other frustratingly tedious, ubiquitous tasks
Define huge. Hundreds of hours? Double-digit percentage of all time spent using the computer? He doesn't say, and I doubt it's close to either metric for all but the most inept of users. For the average person *any* amount of time spent doing *any* one of these tasks is, in their opinion, too much. Time spent doing basic maintenance is one of the most overstated stats thrown around.
The biggest point he comes close to touching but then completely misses is with the language analogy. The informational content of language is almost entirely context sensative. For example, I can make the statement "I'm blue", and without context, you don't know if I'm refering to the color of the clothes I'm wearing, my emotional disposition, me political affiliation, if I'm pretending to be a cartoon dog while playing with my kids, or any other reference for which the word "blue" might apply.
Langauge has the the immediate context of the conversation in which it is occuring, and the ultimate context of the physical world. What he misses is that not only does computer software have to be precise, it has to supply it's own virtual context; i.e. your web browser exists in the virtual context of the network, which connects it to an application which exists in a vitual context of a combination of, for example, a java environment on top of a database on top of an operating system. All the underlying layers provide a context for the next layer above in which to exist and interact. And we had to create every single layer from scratch!
Lanier then makes the usual eglatarian conceit with the statement "Only culture is rich enough to fund the Antigora." The Internet is its own culture, which both incorportates and yet transends mutiple, different national, tribal, and social cultures. Lanier and all the other Internet pundits need to recognize that, get the hell over it, and move on.
However I digress, and would like to add that he does make some good points: 1) Files are crap and they will and should go away. 2) Computing is being held back by vendor lock in, punditry and religion. 3) Linux/BSD/other free UNIXs are not the end all be all of computing(although I disagree that they are contributing to the problem, they are just solving a different problem than the one he is trying to answer).
DISCLOSURE: My primary OS is Linux and I use DragonFlyBSD/Mac OS X/Solaris/Win XP on a day to day basis.
I thought John Nash had pretty well debunked most of Adam Smith's theories, so even if they were pro-AS, they're pro an idea that has been discredited anyway.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Or when did he ever say something useful that made sense?
News at 11!
Shut The Fuck Up.
At the moment the thing that occupies me the most is a program that will create a peer-2-peer network including tunnels that will connect all my friends with me and their friends and their friends. A long time ago I've lost hope in the Internet that I once saw for opportunity, maybe this step will be that opportunity that I was looking for. I'm looking for a spam-free, everyone wins solution where noone is left out in terms of fairness. Also in the new network that I'm building there will be zero tolerance for spam. If you spam you're out, simple as that.
If you needed a "text file" in the Tandem world, it was treated as a big object (a BLOB) in the database, and handled as a unit. THis seems wierd, but it allowed program development on Tandem machines. Storing a file was, of course, an atomic operation; you never had a truncated file.
Apple's "resource fork" was a step in the right direction, but the implementation of updates in the classic MacOS was so unreliable that it was hopeless as a data-storage mechanism. Apple backed off from the resource fork when they went to a UNIX-type file system after the NeXT acquisition. Now it's making a comeback in a minor way.
Early visions of Microsoft's Longhorn seemed to be moving in that direction, but Microsoft couldn't bring it off.
UNIX/Linux has terrible file reliability semantics. Locking is an afterthought. File transactions aren't atomic. (Even lock file creation isn't atomic if the the file system is on NFS.) Nobody understands two-phase commit, the technique that keeps your bank account from being debited twice if the ATM loses power during a transaction. There have been attempts to fix these problems (see UCLA Locus), but they never caught on.
The most likely company to fix this problem is Google. Google's own machines are full of databases of text, not "files". In a sense, we're all using a system that's not file-based - we just don't see it.
And as for a Luddite revolution:
So robots build vast volumes of cheap goods and thus the value of a dollar relative to the cost of goods declines to the point where even the poor can afford automated health care. Or new computers, or HDTVs, and other technology. Except it ignores the stagnant and high cost of necessary goods: energy, food and shelter being the most obvious examples. Even assuming automated food production - robots ploughing the fields - there is only so much land. Maybe building housing will be cheap with robots, but we'll still need to heat or cool it depending on the climate. Providing these basic necessities cannot be automated away because they rely on fixed and limited resources. The best we can do increase the efficiency of utilization, or find a radical and unknown new method for creation.
But - unlike slashdot conventional wisdom in this forum - I thought the essay was well written and highly contemplative. A good read. Thanks Jaron!
...just a few days ago. I remember the promise of the virtual world back in the late 80s and early 90s. Whatever happened to the neo-hippy, VR enhanced, smart drug world that I was promised almost 20 years ago???
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
big words = cruise control for smarter than thou amirite.
In Columbia? Why would that be necessary? Plenty o' hot babes, though.
Ed Crane, President of the Cato Institute had this to say about Bill Gates and Microsoft:
"Our auditorium is named after the great Nobel Laureate, F. A. Hayek, whose last book was entitled The Fatal Conceit, by which he referred to politicians and bureaucrats who had the lack of humility to think they could order societal affairs better than the spontaneous order of the marketplace.
Today, Bill Gates is in a battle with an entire department of the federal government that suffers from a terrible case of the fatal conceit. We wish him well in that battle and congratulate him on the incredible success story that Microsoft Corp. is."
My favorite quote:
The all or nothing quality of digital code (as we currently know how to make it) trickles down into all systems we build with it.
What he seems to ignore is that there's a very good reason things have evolved the way they did. He whines about the command line, but given the power of systems at the time, there was no way to do some intuitive graphical interface. Would he have preferred punch cards?
Arguably the openness he seems to crave is a direct cause for the brittleness he decries. It's because the systems we used today went through an evolutionary process where things that were useless died and things that were useful got locked in. Command lines might be complex and unintuitive but damned if they aren't amazingly efficient when you need them.
Computer language cannot be like human language because the interpretation he values requires vast amounts of processing power. It's as though he'd just like to pretend that there's not a practical physical reality that we have to deal with. The command line might seem ugly but it's way better than punch cards, non? Sure the interfaces we have today could be better, but in time they will be better. Some day we may be able to interact with computers in a more natural language way like they do on Star Trek, but it will be because the physical hardware has developed sufficiently to support it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I clicked on the "reply essay by ESR" link, and I got a scary picture (as all pictures are) of ESR, and a short bio on him. But not his reply. That website sucks, regardless of the content.
So now we know where he's at and what he's up to these days, how about you gutter boy? Where you at and what are you up to?
Sounds like NEET.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
ice ice baby!
The problem is that databases and other non-file data stores are more brittle than files. The more complexity there is in the metadata, the easier it is to lose information, and the more you're locked in to one specific form of metadata.
And databases came first. back in the 60s and even well into the 70s, a "file" was seen as a column in a table, or a table, in a database. As databases became more powerful, data stores tried to follow... you had RMS on DEC operating systems, "typed" data sets and files, systems like Pick, Apple's "resource forks", and Be's BeFS. No matter how the data's stored, eventually anything more than a shopping list (oh, yes, there are very complex shopping lists: address books, customer databases, and lots and lots of indexes into collections of flat files like Harvest and Spotlight and Google) becomes a flat block of text with embedded links to other blocks of text.
Whether those links are "see chapter 10" or "#include stdio.h" or "import io"... those links are not links to databases, they're links to files.
---
The idea that an unstructured block of data was the default was a breakthrough. The idea that a command line interface could be relatively terse and simple so that mere humans could learn to use it, that was a breakthrough too. UNIX cut through an enormous amount of user interface trash and laid bare what was, for the end of the '60s, at least as dramatic an improvement in UI design as GUIs were for the '70s. It's a linguistic interface, not a gestural one, but the first linguistic interface that provided concurrency (through the & background scheme, then through shell layers and job control) and the complete OPPOSITE of the normal "user submits a command, user waits for a response" that every other system in the world used.
I implemented a UNIX shell with explicit backgrounding on RSX-11 and showed it to my boss, and he was astonished. Even though RSX has an ability to hit return and get a new prompt at any time, so you already have the ability to "interrupt" a program and do something else, he'd never used that other than to treat that MCR prompt as an "I'm still busy" message. But being able to take something that was going to take a long time and throw it off into the background under his control was great.
Given the hardware limitations of the time, I submit that the UNIX shell and the UNIX plain-text-file pipes-and-filters job-control environment is close to the very best user interface that could be developed. It's the "tabbed browser" of the command line world. Alas, X-Windows came along and people stopped really using and understanding the shell, and X11's high-latency message based interface became the standard for the UNIX world.
It's really X11, a non-UNIX-like window system developed for UNIX and VMS at MIT in the '80s, that Lanier should be complaining about. Because UNIX itself doesn't suffer from the flaws that he's attributing to it. UNIX is small, tight, fast, responsive, and concurrent, a UNIX shell is a team of willing slaves that does WHAT you want WHEN you want it, and you NEVER have to wait for them unless you choose to.
---
File systems with UNIX semantics, by the way, work well. That's the problem with NFS. NFS is *not* a UNIX file system, and its semantics make it a huge nightmare for applications developed on REAL UNIX file systems. It was a hack-job designed to make it possible to implement a reasonably fast and efficient file system in the kernel on a 68000-based Sun workstation in the '80s. It should have been turfed long since and again IT'S NOT UNIX, IT'S NOT UNIX FAULT.
---
For structured data, databases are great. Using a file system for database operations was a result of UNIX coming from an era before there was a really common way to talk about relational operations linguistically. Bad as SQL is, at least it gives us a framework to deal with the problem. But for hierarchical randomly interrelated data the filesystem model works well.
Google is an index, it's not the data itself. The data that gives google its value is in a file system.
Is this the same Cato institute that supports Wal-Marts idea of free trade? I would find this article highly suspect if I were you. Take it with a rock quary of salt.
What we have here is one part non-linear musing, one part book proposal, and one part total bullshit. I'm seeing one or two solid lines of reasoning with a liberal sprinkling of jargon and some nasty linguistic preservatives. In short, exactly what we used to get from people like Jaron back during the 90's. Pardon me if I take the following quotes out of context but from what I could see, there wasn't much context to begin with.. I quote
"There could be no Google without an Internet"
Uh.huh..
"If that author, by the grace of fate, happens to have good taste, as in the case of Steve Jobs, an Antigora can deliver extraordinary value"
Like NEXT, say?
"Perhaps customers can live in little pods in the big box stores"
Well, okay, but my fort is in the washing machine aisle, Jaron can go hang out with the other band geeks in electronics!
"I argued with a guy named Richard Stallman"
The persistant name-checking doesn't help his case.
Cato usually is better than this, though many liberal leaning slashdotters will argue otherwise. I think they decided they'd get up to speed with the "blogosphere" and got put over by Lanier's patented "Cliff Stohl" absent-minded genius hippy act.
Oh yeah, and memo to Mr. Lanier, Rob Zombie wants his hair back.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
It's true. A small random change generally breaks it. Also, it is infexible, and unchanged software doesn't deal well with changed data or changed requirements.
It's very unlike life or DNA. Life handles small, random changes. Most of the time they don't affect it. Sometimes they hurt it. Sometimes they improve it.
This pliability and flexibity is the polar opposite of software.
Lanier is looking for (and promoting) ways to make software more like life.
I don't know if his "solutions" are viable, but I completely agree with his premise that "sofware is brittle". (By the way, I have done computer programming for nearly 30 years, starting with FORTRAN and lately in C#.)
(Of course, one other side of this coin is that evolution as a method of sofware development would probably be glacially slow compared to current methods. So the statement "sofware is brittle" does not contain any indication of the solution. It's kind of like making a statement that the number xyz is composite. It is often a lot easier to say a number is composite than it is to actually factor the number.)
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
That sums this article up well. Could you guys imagine Katz and Lanier getting together and pumping out some bullshit about the next big thing while elevating themselves to gods in the same breath?
35 years on drugs and I could write like that too :-)
Actually its more like ADHD. Jaron has so many idea pouring out that the next invades before he can finish with the current one. Some of the ideas are very interesting.
The whole "software is brittle" agenda is cleary his own.
Generally it's a lot easier for people to write about subjects that they are interestested in, and on opinions they hold. Why the surprise?
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Veell Veelkinsun vreetes "Jerun Luneeer's recent issey, Zee Gury Unteegura: Illooseeuns ooff Cepeetelism und Cumpooters, keecks ooffff a deescoossiun ooff 'Internet Leebereshun: Eleefe-a oor Deed?' et zee Cetu Insteetoote's noo blugezeene-a, Cetu Unbuoond. In Luneeer's issey tudey, feend oooot hoo zee 'breettleness' ooff sufftvere-a hes kept zee Internet frum reeleezing its putenteeel es 'a cruss betveee Edem Smeet und Elbert Ieenstein; zee Infeesible-a Hund eccelereteeng tooerd zee speed ooff leeght.' Elsu, feend oooot vhy, upun meeteeng Reecherd Stellmun, Luneeer's reecshun ves: 'Un oopee ferseeun ooff UNIX! Yook!'"
He seems to be extending the command line concept to GUI and hypertext interfaces, which is fine for me, but I dont see him raising any genuinely new UI concepts apart from touching on Virtual Reality.
I wish he would, because we do need new ideas. Basically he seems to be saying that everything is a dialog at the moment (commands and responses). Well OK but anything we develop is going to go that way in any event.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You mean like, "In America, you watch television. In Russia, television watches you!!!!!!1111eleven"?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
Internet pundits have been a rather self-satisfied and well-paid class for over a decade and a half
Yeah, he should know, given that punditry is all Lanier does.
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
When the salesman on TV tells you that it's a once in a life time
oppportunity to buy his slightly used automobile, do you rush
down to his auto lot to check it out ?
The act of talking about issue A and not issue B can be deliberate.
Some people want to talk about bringing democracy to the people,
but don't want to talk about the cost (# of people killed in the process).
It's simple common sense to take into account the speaker's
views and motivations in order to understand what IS said and
what ISN'T being said.
Jaron vision is about as stale as civil war cookies left in a damp basement: the computer science community has been abuzz for several years now with notions of "organic computing" and "autonomic computing", and even those are fads that reflect an obsession with biologically inspired computer science that goes back half a century.
Of course, little has come of it so far: as it turns out, merely applying ideas of biology to computer science does not lead to robust systems. And non-biologists tend to overestimate how good biology actually is--biological systems have high failure rates and lots of trouble spots.
What I can't figure out is whether people like Jaron are simply deluding themselves into thinking that they have come up with a novel vision, or whether they actively scour the world for on-going trends and deliberately plan a strategy to make it appears that it is "their" vision.
That's what I want to say whenever I read one of Jaron Lanier's nonsensical bloviations.
Ideas are great, but any asshole can have them. Accomplishments matter. If "phenotropics" really is the way to go, produce a working implementation and if it really is something special, engineers will go "hey, that's cool" and implement it. You won't win terribly many competent converts to your cause if all you've to show for it are a bunch of Mondo 2000 style essays.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
You could never post this with your real name, because it would tarnish your reputation worse than your words tarnish Lanier's. This post is the embodiment of an "anonymous coward". It's not an expression of supressed political dissent, but personal hatred. This crap is why anonymity on the net is in jeopardy. Asshole. You offer no criticism of the article in question and instead simply insult the author and present innuendo and rumor. These words are libel and slander, since verification is impossible and they serve no relevance to the topic at hand. May karma catch up with you in hell.
His post is a great example why we need anonymity. It's great to hear peoples real authentic opinions, which wouldn't be possible if they felt they could be persecuted/prosecuted. *-)
But he's correct here:
"The wild card is the core nature of software. If someone can figure out a way to get rid of brittleness, then the scenario I sketched becomes possible, or even normative. (Don't believe every computer scientist who claims to already know how to get rid of brittleness. It's a hard problem that perversely yields a lot of promising partial results that are ultimately useless, fooling many researchers.)"
Conceptual processing IS that way. And yes, it IS hard.
The rest of his article is not worth discussing, and can be summed up with his phrase (which is correct): Software sucks.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Lanier cites life as an example of a system without "lock-in". Eh? Life on earth is the product of billions of years of backwards compatibility, and the human body is full of lousy "good enough" design compromises that natural selection is unlikely to change because most of the time, people manage to reproduce despite them.
Most of the time, I can read most of the comments on this site and forget that I'm surrounded by a bunch of whiteboys. Then, there are the times that the sad truth comes bubbling furiously to the surface.
(Score:5, Funny)
That's just...sad. That being said, I'm certain that I will now be modded down into oblivion. Goodbye cruel world. I hardly knew ye.
Or is it the Cato revolution?
I nstitute
"But the discussion only begins at Cato Unbound. It ends, if it ends at all, with you. Cato Unbound readers are encouraged to take up our themes, and enter into the conversation on their own websites, blogs, and even in good old-fashioned bound publications. "Trackbacks" will be enabled."
-- So... uhmmm. I may dicuss and Cato "enables" talkbacks.
Cato Unbound will scour the web for the best commentary on our monthly topic, and, with permission, publish it alongside our invited contributors. We also welcome your letters. (Send them to wwilkinson@cato.org.)
--- Ehemm. yieemm. eheemm: Never pay for comments. You are a thinktank, you are paid for propaganda but you cannot buy the blogger community.
Just look at the success of the Campaign for Creativity.... (see: http://www.eulobbyaward.org/)
"Protection . . . against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough," wrote John Stuart Mill; "there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling." Here at Cato Unbound, we aim to do our part. "
--- So Cato wants to balance propaganda with Cato unbounc. Nice. Very Nice. A Think tank donates flowers to slashdot. They let a hippie write weird stuff because they thought we were like-minded.
http://www.cato-unbound.org/about-cato-unbound/
http://www.sourcewatch.org/wiki.phtml?title=Cato_
It's Schrodinger's Internet!
Please don't forget that the Cato Institute is a bunch of self-aggrandizing nitwits who play "we're smarter than everyone else" waving their "invisible hands" to explain everything away. Nobody really understands how the "Invisible Hand" works. It's friggin' magic! Adam Smith used it to obfuscate a bunch of obtuse macroeconomics in a way that made people feel like they understood what he was saying. The bottom line of Adam Smith's economics NEVER materializes because you can never account for all of the costs. It's a teleology, and there IS NO telos. Adam Smith has some ideas about how to shoot yourself in the foot trying to manipulate an economic system, but lassais faire is really just a cop-out.
On one side of this asshole, you can hear him say "open unix yuk" and the other side he whines about viruses and lack of automation. Somehow, in his world, "the poor" are getting so much better off, completely independant of the rich (who are getting even better off), that they don't bother to revolt. This guy's favorite newspaper is written on lint inside his navel. He also likes to pretend he isn't insular. He thinks it would be a good idea for (other) people to live in pods at WalMart.
He also thinks he invented "Virtual Reality" by coining the term. Never mind the GUI version of VR is an embarassing failure. The most successful VR systems are texty MUD systems or even more texty books, or even less interactive films, or video games (which only have a gloss of continuous movement). WTF do you think we should be doing?
It's easy to *seem* smart if one only raises questions and never ventures an idea that can be attributed critically to oneself. On the writing style: I have an obligatory Nietzsche quote. "The poet who is in love with the superlative wants more than he is capable of."
Some people like this though. If you decide that this guy is smarter than you, you might also decide to agree with him, and sneer together at the things and people he insults. Then you can be in the smart club of winners instead of the dumb club of losers. Here's another obligatory Nietzsche quote: "You seek followers? Seek zeroes!"
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
It would've been nice to see some kind of note that this was a Cato blog thing. Believe it or not, there are some of us who don't think the Randian or Libertarian vision of the world, even in their ideals, makes for a good society.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
In the narrowest since, unix doesn't require the command line: there is simpley the kernel and it's processes, and the shell is just one of those processes. In practice, however, the shell has become so entrenched that it is hard not to use it.
A completely open system is also easy to design. The original Napster was an example. Completely open systems have their own problems. The usual criticism is that content creators are disincentivized, but the deeper problem is that their work is decontextualized. Completely open music distribution systems excel at either distributing music that was contextualized beforehand, such as classic rock, or new music that has little sense of authorship or identity, like the endless Internet feeds of bland techno mixes.
...because he obviously was either on drugs when he wrote that or has gone mad from seclusion.
What the HELL was that, anyway? "Brittleness" of software? What the HELL does he mean? Software can be brittle or robust depending on how it is written; the Linux kernel certainly isn't "brittle". And the whole concept of an "antigora" sounds like something a 13-year old philosopher pulled out of his backside. My time would have been better spent had I skipped the article and read Markov chain-based computer generated nonsense. "Sloppy thinking" doesn't even begin to describe how asinine that "essay" was. Holy crap, I must have temporarily lost 15 IQ points just reading that. I feel so dirty now; I think I need to restudy predicate calculus or something to purge my thinking of that humanities-like bullsh*t. Eww, I feel so violated. Why couldn't the link have been to Goatse instead? At least that's only a desecration of the body and not the mind! AAAAAAH!
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Thanks Jaron!
quote "Computer code, by contrast, is perfectly precise and therefore immune to influence from context;" has he ever met a coder?
Wait, I'm sorry, what? Huh? No, rewind that. Blogazine? Seriously, WTF? This single invention makes me think of all the credability of Vanity Fair with the writing and editorial staff replaced by the collective force of AOL's cat ladys.
There are some people that try way too hard to get one step ahead of the crowd, but then fail to realize that everyone sees through their attempt...
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