Computers for Cynics 0 - The Myth of Technology

Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics probably doesn't contain technical information that's new to any of you, but Ted has a knack for reframing things in ways that make the arbitrariness of certain historical decisions clear: ▶ this video On the subject of hypertext, The Web That Wasn't gives a nice history of the idea (for anybody who thinks it starts with TBL -- surprisingly many people!): link Another reframing-oriented talk is Clay Shirky's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure", which ultimately leads to Shirky suggesting the kinds of user-oriented filtering features that Mastodon has implemented: link At the intersection of neurology and information science, Peter Watts always has something interesting to say, and as a former marine biologist focusing on the nervous system of starfish, this is absolutely in his wheelhouse: link This one ("moving away from defensive programming") justified strong typing in a pretty clear way: link Dan Dennett is just as relevant as Doug Hofstadter when it comes to metacognition: link Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science starts slow, but if you don't have much of a historical background (like, if you're only vaguely aware of what happened in CS in the 70s), it's a laundry list of things you should look up and be aware of before you start your next project: link Everybody should understand procedural generation: link Likewise, since AI is hyped up right now, we should all remind ourselves that IA is a thing too: link More hypertext history: link Even more hypertext / UX stuff: link A great explanation of Fourier transforms: link Allison Parrish does mindblowing things with corpus statistics by treating term vector spaces as generalizations of 2d image formats: link Finally, these aren't tech talks but instead UI demo reels. If you have any interest in UI or UX, you should watch them. They are wonderfully cheesy, mostly doable, and despite being more than 20 years old, nobody has bothered actually implementing the useful features shown: link link link

> The OS without kernel is called "GNU" But that's the thing, nobody other that the GNU people called that an OS worth of a name. I suspect what people call an OS is an standalone set of conventions and packaging that can actually be used to interface between the hardware and the user [0]; so I think Debian is more worth of being called an OS on its own than "GNU userspace - kernel". Same with any other Linux distribution, *BSD variant, Windows and OSX. It was the linux project that made those OSes viable as standalone things (to be fair, the GNU userspace made them viable as usable working platforms for early adopters - but nowadays the role of GNU software in the OS is less central), and people place more weight to that. [0]: I pretty much agree with Ted Nelson about the distinction between "technology" and "packaging". (▶ this video)

Ted Nelson created a YouTube series, Computers for Cynics, which is his history of modern computing technology. ▶ this video In one amusing video, he proposes that Satoshi Nakomoto, the creator of Bitcoin, is a pseudonym used by Shinichi Mochizuki, the mathematician who found a proof for the abc conjecture with his inter-universal geometry. link link link