Xanadu was waiting for agents(zed.dev) |
Xanadu was waiting for agents(zed.dev) |
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
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.
I studied Xanadu a lot for this analysis because the system would need huge amounts of annotated text so it was requirement that "any" document could be marked up with commentary or structured markup turning the "explainable" idea bidirectionally so that humans could explain to the system what and why it is and the system could "talk back" in the same "language". Practically "any" reduced to HTML + PDF.
Transclusion was important to the vision because if, say, constants in a source code file came out of a standards document the link between the two ought to be preserved.
I can't say the internals would have looked like Xanadu at all and there wouldn't have been those micropayments.
This has more to do with the economy than ego. When one's ability to eat and have shelter relies on "inventing" the inventor will invent a new wheel to sell to a tribe that's pre-wheel.
This no longer works as well in software given the number of people who code, and the various forms of automation (AI or design tool that emits code, etc) to assist those who do not.
No pulling the wool with a fancy abstraction alone. It's just math relative to a matrix of desirable values loaded in memory.
The normal progression of technology coupled to economic models written down by long dead who were too busy enslaving people to invent indoor plumbing.
Also it's a feature, not a bug. If we were all pragmatists ...
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.
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
Previously, "Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer" <https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer>
I like that.
I'm beginning to think that this sort of behavior is actually an inverted counter-signal. The average person attuned to LLM's markings may find these things distasteful. But certain individuals or organizations may feel right at ease seeing them.
Skimmed the article, saw this, and then my AI fatigue closed the tab.
I don't think he's waiting for agents.
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
Warning: this repo likely contains everything that you should not do.
https://gitworkshop.dev/npub17g32uxml7y4rf4jwlju6fd58nhzaafd...
developers bypassed - Really not a fan of phrases like these from a CEO.
Usually developers have to work within an organisational hierarchy that doesn't grant them infinite time or money.
Then agents arrived.
So, with just that we went from 1990s early internet to AI agents.
That's a time jump so jarring that it makes heavily-modified '81 DeLorean owners jealous.
Powerful concept but impractical and far too unscalable to be used globally.
Most of the Xanadu data structure implementations, like ZigZag, just don't perform well enough at web scale.
For anyone else that's been thinking a lot about Ted this year, I recommend this (weird) youtube series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGpBQgZ5IsI&list=PLsfH1Ahi4S...
Doesn’t structured data work best with symbolic not statistical AI?
It seems that the user wanted to say something like "DeltaDB is a DAG" and then replaced the DAG part with some obscure graph-based project that the LLM had suggested, but otherwise has no connection to agentic development.
Does it splice the agents thinking process into the commits or what?
Maybe it needs a demo video or something.
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.
A more complicated program that is built and maintained with LLM assistance is cheaper and faster to build and fix than even a less complicated program built without. It's even the same without LLMs: once React achieved critical density and "won" the JS framework wars, building React apps became cheaper and faster even than building plain HTML/JS apps.
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.
Was this jargon normal in 1984 because we hadn't invented words like "addresses" and "structs" yet?
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.
Also, they had no idea how to deal with either images or distributed systems.
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.
i guess I'm saying it in a funny way because my brain has always thought about semantic space (and the act/object of conversation itself) in a very spatial way, and it seems that LLMs have a similar tendency
to elaborate: "unable to use metaphor effectively" seems to have multiple dimensions of failure, in which I find the distance metaphor to make easier to explore. A mind-like thing can (1) not know how to make the leaps (and so never try to make them), or (2) it can leap too ambititously and land in faraway places that don't have any deep symmetry in meaning... it can (3) also maybe "not stick the landing" while jumping someplace that theoretically might have merit (in a sense of global vs local scale, maybe being ok at the global scale orienting, but not local scale)...
So in my defence, I think there are failure modes of "being ineffective at metaphor" that are masked by speaking in plainer language :)
What would make images harder than anything else? My naive self thinks, "hey, isn't that just one long base64-encoded word?" Apparently not, or they would've done it and moved on.
And why do you say that about distributed systems? What I've read of Xanadu (primarily the Wired article) made it sound like there'd be a relatively small number of commercial servers everyone else would subscribe to. Cue IBM's "five computers are enough" apocrypha. Is that what you mean?
I find everything about Xanadu fascinating, in kind of a slow-moving train crash sort of way, and would love hearing more bystander takes!
Because diffs of image files are not very useful. Nelson's thing was very fine-grained tracking of who wrote what. That doesn't map well to images or video.
Images wouldn't work unless you made a "Xanalogical image editor" that stores a list of edits and references to source images as you made or imported them. The tumbler number structure would have to be extended to include rectangular references into image files. It would work in theory, but in practice would probably bog down every computer that needed to load an image, and you'd get hit with shittons of fees for each one.
I can only imagine audio having to be stored as some kind of standardized DAW project file, with transcluded sample packs that would get you micro-transactioned for each one.
Man, this was a really silly idea...
Xanadu as a DAW might look a lot like that, except with explicit and documented reuse of another person’s samples.