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This post buys into the common narrative about Xanadu, that it was a fundamentally good idea that failed due to some combination of poor execution, being too fa

This post buys into the common narrative about Xanadu, that it was a fundamentally good idea that failed due to some combination of poor execution, being too far ahead of its time, and the market not caring about quality (with this post in particular focusing mostly on the second thing). 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 https://gwern.net/xanadu

gyomu 13d ago
Great post, as a fan of Gwern and Nelson I wonder how I missed it (and how I didn’t get an invite to the party :’) 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.
- EyeEmOe 13d ago
  > 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”. 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.
- PaulHoule 12d ago
  I went down a rabbit hole circa 2015 sketching out a system which was going to solve the language + world model problem which of course only needed to be partially implemented to solve a specific family of problems. In a broad sense think Palantir but with 20x the TAM because it is also an application builder. 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.
pocksuppet 13d ago
This economic equilibrium reality kills so many cool-sounding ideas. Someone has to actually run them, and if it's more soul-sucking than soul-giving (for some definition of "soul" which may include money) it won't happen. It's not always money, sometimes it's just really hard to keep the service up or to block spam.
kabes 13d ago
I agree with Gwern. And also Nelson kind of lost my respect after he spend the rest of his life bashing and complaining on how bad the WWW is compared to his ideas.
kristopolous 12d ago
Ted is super specific and inflexible about lots of technical details that just don't work. I don't want to air out dirty laundry here but it's non-existence in any robust state wasn't for lack of trying. Also it's a feature, not a bug. If we were all pragmatists ...
segfaltnh 12d ago
This was my feeling trying to grok why I want or need Delta.

gyomu 13d ago

Great post, as a fan of Gwern and Nelson I wonder how I missed it (and how I didn’t get an invite to the party :’) 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.

EyeEmOe 13d ago
> 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”. 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.
PaulHoule 12d ago
I went down a rabbit hole circa 2015 sketching out a system which was going to solve the language + world model problem which of course only needed to be partially implemented to solve a specific family of problems. In a broad sense think Palantir but with 20x the TAM because it is also an application builder. 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.

pocksuppet 13d ago

This economic equilibrium reality kills so many cool-sounding ideas. Someone has to actually run them, and if it's more soul-sucking than soul-giving (for some definition of "soul" which may include money) it won't happen. It's not always money, sometimes it's just really hard to keep the service up or to block spam.

kabes 13d ago

I agree with Gwern. And also Nelson kind of lost my respect after he spend the rest of his life bashing and complaining on how bad the WWW is compared to his ideas.

kristopolous 12d ago

Ted is super specific and inflexible about lots of technical details that just don't work. I don't want to air out dirty laundry here but it's non-existence in any robust state wasn't for lack of trying. Also it's a feature, not a bug. If we were all pragmatists ...

segfaltnh 12d ago

This was my feeling trying to grok why I want or need Delta.