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Enfilade.py isn't an enfilade #4

Open jdougan opened 2 years ago

jdougan commented 2 years ago

While it appears to be an excellent example of how to work with tumbler addressing, ds-lib/Enfilade.py isn't an enfilade,. At least according to the description of enfilades at https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/201904240732/Xanadu%20Hypertext%20Documents.html#enfilade . Perhaps it should be renamed?

enkiv2 commented 2 years ago

Hmm... I was modeling it off the descriptions in udanax green's FeBe document, but I haven't seen this more detailed document before. I'll look into it.

On Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 8:51 PM John Dougan @.***> wrote:

While it appears to be an excellent example of how to work with tumbler addressing, ds-lib/Enfilade.py https://github.com/enkiv2/misc/blob/master/ds-lib/Enfilade.py isn't an enfilade,. At least according to the description of enfilades at https://sentido-labs.com/en/library/201904240732/Xanadu%20Hypertext%20Documents.html#enfilade . Perhaps it should be renamed?

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jdougan commented 2 years ago

It's an 1984 grant proposal and pretty much covers everything they were thinking in 1984 including the trade secret stuff. Chip Morningstar found it in a box when he was moving a few years ago.

Is there any chance you could split out ds-lib into it's own repo? Edit: Also, I have some questions to ask you about Xanadu stuff, what is the best way to contact you with them?

enkiv2 commented 2 years ago

Sure, I can do that.

On Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 10:00 PM John Dougan @.***> wrote:

It's an 1984 grant proposal and pretty much covers everything they were thinking in 1984 including the trade secret stuff. Chip Morningstar found it in a box when he was moving a few years ago.

Is there any chance you could split out ds-lib into it's own repo?

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jdougan commented 2 years ago

Also, I have some questions to ask you about Xanadu stuff, what is the best way to contact you with them?

enkiv2 commented 2 years ago

Right now, this is.

On Fri, Dec 10, 2021, 10:38 PM John Dougan @.***> wrote:

Also, I have some questions to ask you about Xanadu stuff, what is the best way to contact you with them?

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jdougan commented 2 years ago

Right now, this is.

Ok. First set, as I work my way through stuff I'll probably generate more questions.

In your Engineers Guide... you use the acronym ODL without ever expanding it. What does ODL stand for? Could you be more explicit on how it's contents work as it seems to handle both links and masking the text and that leaves me unclear.

Do you have any sense on how you'd structure the text/link architecture for an outliner or other structured document format inside the Xanadu approach?

There was a claim in Literary Machines 92.1 that there were technical deficiencies in xu88 that necessitated a redo as xu92. At any point in your sojourn in Xanadu-land did anyone ever tell you what those issues were? Ted has disowned the xu92 effort and he appears to get grumpy if anyone mentions it, which is probably why I've not been able to find the claimed technical justification for the rewrite.

Have you looked at Mimix at all? I'm really not sure how David Bethune gets to his solution from where he starts, though it's a not terrible description of the 17 rules of Xanadu.

Since I/we don't have proper xanalogical anything at present, do you have any suggestions on what to use in the meanwhile? Preferably to minimize pain and agony in a later conversion as well as something useful now. I'm currently using Obsidian in combination with an orgmode extension, which isn't brilliant, but at least the documents are in open formats. (WTB orgmode extension for github comments)

Thoughts on this "Grim meathook future" and Xanadu? It seems somewhat overblown to me but... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29380769

enkiv2 commented 2 years ago

ODL stands for Overlay Decision List, and is just a file containing links or references to links. (At a certain point we were calling links "overlays" in order to avoid confusion over the link mechanism being used for things like formatting.) There's a unified format for both EDL & ODL content & so links could always (in xanaspace & xanaduspace, at least) be included notionally with a document, but we wanted to highlight the way that links applied to the original source content & therefore could apply to documents they were not made for. Of course, that's not so useful when it comes to formatting links! So after 2014, the emphasis changed & official Xanadu documentation stopped talking about ODLs in favor of a single unified format that had both transclusions and links, representing a single self-contained document. (Post-xanaspace demos that were released only supported transclusions & thus far those & xanaspace also only support a single document anyway, though we were always going to move past that.)

Regarding xu88 vs xu92:

I wasn't there during the XOC era, & I have most of my insider info from Ted who also wasn't there during the XOC era, so my familiarity with xu88 and xu92 mostly comes from documents available publicly before 2010 (like FeBe). I'm aware of a couple things xu92 notionally did better than xu88, like handling multiple edit requests for the same document, but nothing that would be deal-breaking. As a hypertext system (though not as an application platform, which is the way webtech is used today) udanax green (i.e., the xu88 prototype abandoned at xoc in 1987 and released as open source in 1999) is way ahead of anything commercially available today, let alone in the 80s, so the switch to xu92 still strikes me as a political feud between Mark and Roger rather than something based on true design flaws (even though the xu92 design introduces a lot of stuff, some of which is definitely useful). Former XOC people would be better equipped to answer this, though (especially Mark Miller, who was the driving force behind the ent).

Regarding outliners: I would create a custom link type for stretchtext. (This has always been a part of the todo list for Xanadu implementations, but generally pretty low priority.)

Regarding the mimix essay: he doesn't seem to recognize the importance of the ability to transclude arbitrary parts of a data stream, which is why he thinks duplicated storage is acceptable. This is the same mistake that led TBL to consider the tree structure of html acceptable. I'm in agreement that ideally, transcopyright would be unnecessary (and I'll discuss that more in the grim-meathook-future portion).

Regarding new hypertext systems: roam and obsidian are, like a lot of hypertext systems, not-quite-xanadu in ways that will ultimately limit their utility. (Roam is also stupidly expensive for what it is.) The technical problems involved in implementing a real Xanadu that could slot into the workflow of a Roam or Obsidian are trivial, if you leverage tech like IPFS for storage, so I'd rather see somebody do that: a dev of average capabilities who was already familiar with Xanadu could probably build that if they worked on it full time for a month or two, assuming they didn't use a webtech stack (as both Roam & Obsidian do). Alternately, it might be worth forking & updating udanax green for this purpose -- it has some glitches last I checked (but Roger Gregory has been working to identify & fix those on and off for some years, so his repo may be substantially more stable than the official udanax tarball).

Regarding the grim meat hook future:

Ted still sees Xanadu as a business venture (though from the beginning he thought of it as one where an IP firm developed a flagship version & licensed their technology to others as part of a federation of diverse but compatible implementations). XOC spun off from Xanadu proper in the first place because he thought being a publishing middleman / liason would be more interesting than the technical side. This is sort of a precursor to what Facebook did with Facebook News & Google did with AMP so it's at least potentially successful as a strategy.

I do not see Xanadu as a business, and would not like to see it become a behemoth middleman (even though I would stand to profit financially from that). I'd rather see it as something like Mastodon -- i.e., a piece of open source software that becomes the basis for an official standard by becoming a de-facto standard on a federated network of independent nodes, supplanted by compatible but totally independent projects when it is outcompeted.

That said, I still think transcopyright is useful & powerful, basically because it creates an incentive for large rightholders to give up content control.

Right now, copyright (in all its complexity) is used as a weapon between large firms who have exclusive or geographically-locked licenses to whole catalogs, and with copyright lifetimes at nearly 100 years (and copyright registration optional, and infringement vs fair use decided subjectively by courts in expensive drawn-out affairs) basically everything is under threat of being shut down by a possibly-bogus claim. DMCA safe harbor provisions make it worse, since the way to avoid liability is to immediately remove anything that might constitute derivative work.

Transcopyright basically says "put your entire catalog on here and you'll actually make more money in total, because derivative works become a source of income rather than a potential income sink". This is the same kind of deal that iTunes, Spotify, and Pandora made with record companies, but substantially sweeter. It also obviates a lot of the bureaucratic machinery necessary to deal with rights issues, so long as you do things on the platform: rather than a musical artist navigating the complex laws and norms around licensed sampling, they just build a new track through transclusion & have the customer pay for the sample; rather than settling for stock photos or navigating a complex chain of partial rights & licensing, an author uses exactly the photo they want to illustrate their point, because the reader buys the photo and puts it into the book at purchase time, which also allows the publishing company to lay off half their legal dept because they have fewer rights issues to clear.

I don't particularly want to live in a future where I'm constantly making micropayments for image macros, but I also don't like living in a present where Google shuts down my YouTube account because some dim bulb claimed to have an exclusive copyright on white noise, or because somebody with an LLC downloaded my video and re-uploaded it and now Google trusts them more because they're not a natural person. I think that transcopyright could be a kind of bait and switch, where we end up transitioning away from copyright entirely because a mechanically smooth distribution of license fees might end up having nearly equal flows in all directions once everybody's on board.

That said, a single monolithic Xanadu owning exclusive rights to the distribution of all books, music, and video (and taking a cut from every microtransaction) certainly counts as a "grim meat hook future" in my book. The only thing keeping Google from doing that is the fact that webtech sucks at partial transclusions, and so only purchases of "whole" (pre-cut portioned) works can be monetized.

On Sat, Dec 18, 2021, 1:54 AM John Dougan @.***> wrote:

Right now, this is.

Ok. First set, as I work my way through stuff I'll probably generate more questions.

In your Engineers Guide... you use the acronym ODL without ever expanding it. What does ODL stand for? Could you be more explicit on how it's contents work as it seems to handle both links and masking the text and that leaves me unclear.

Do you have any sense on how you'd structure the text/link architecture for an outliner or other structured document format inside the Xanadu approach?

There was a claim in Literary Machines 92.1 that there were technical deficiencies in xu88 that necessitated a redo as xu92. At any point in your sojourn in Xanadu-land did anyone ever tell you what those issues were? Ted has disowned the xu92 effort and he appears to get grumpy if anyone mentions it, which is probably why I've not been able to find the claimed technical justification for the rewrite.

Have you looked at Mimix at all? I'm really not sure how David Bethune gets to his solution from where he starts, though it's a not terrible description of the 17 rules of Xanadu.

Since I/we don't have proper xanalogical anything at present, do you have any suggestions on what to use in the meanwhile? Preferably to minimize pain and agony in a later conversion as well as something useful now. I'm currently using Obsidian in combination with an orgmode extension, which isn't brilliant, but at least the documents are in open formats. (WTB orgmode extension for github comments)

Thoughts on this "Grim meathook future" and Xanadu? It seems somewhat overblown to me but... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29380769

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