@@alamdaaliartes You nailed it. A lot of people assume this video is meant to lay out some sort of new UI paradigm, which is not at all what this series is about. It's about us being lost in the vestiges and placeholders of technology and other structures.
I’ve been programming since 1978 and I am always stunned at how users simply accept what is put in front of them. Even if the software is crappy, the only suggestions they ever make are related to other software they have seen or used. They rarely have any sense of what is possible and what would work better for them, or if they do, they are unable to express it.
I'm not 100% sure the point you are making here; that users are untrained in the inner workings of computers and their interfaces? It's probably also true that garbage collectors rarely have any insight into how to make the diesel engine in their garbage trucks more efficient or reliable, or the truck itself easier to maneuver. The end users aren't usually trained in the complexities of the machines and systems they use. That seems to be the entire point of building such things, so that others can use them to more efficiently to complete their tasks without having to build the thing from scratch themselves. I think it's safe to say that the physical parts of the PC and their programing and their interfaces are some of the most complex systems that humans have ever produced.
@@KJ-9-w2u It is possible you might be over-thinking this. As I understand the OP, and as someone who has to deal a fair amount of UX design in my own work, they are saying that the regular end-user of a product willy often tell you when the design something doesn't work for them but often fail to produce any concrete examples of how to improve it other than by copying design from something else they were already familiar with. UX design when it comes to computer interaction is dreadfully complex and something we're still trying to figure out today while working around established norms that most users are resistant to diverge away from, even when an alternative paradigm to computer interaction might be better on paper.
@@AndrewBoothOfficialWhat's really scary is the resurgence of the command-line among the younger generation of programmers. Many of them believe that it's the most productive way to use a computer. The belief has been instilled by the UNIX culture based around open source software.
@@bobweiram6321 The command line allows a much wider variety of actions with far fewer steps provided you are proficient in it. No clicking through multiple layers of menus or any such thing. It's generally not intuitive though which is different from how effective it is for a proficient user. Similar to learning how to use an application for the first time, versus someone who knows every single keybind and shortcut.
@@bobshenanigans4256 Not true. The command-line is inferior to the GUI for the vast majority of computing tasks. For CAD, graphics, video, and practically anything remotely visual and feedback oriented, the GUI wins hands down. A command-line is text only and provides no immediate feedback. Most people who prefer the command-line like it because it makes them look smart. The number of steps argument is fallacious. It depends on the design of the GUI. A poorly designed one can take more steps than needed, but in most cases a few extra clicks is still vastly better than typing long error-prone commands. Finally, most developers hate writing documentation and suck at it. Every command-line requires reading terribly written help or man pages. A GUI, on the other hand, any user with prior experience can hit the ground running. It's self-documenting. It's all WYSIWYG, or what you see is what you get.
Excited to see your journey on TH-cam. The GUI problem of replicating paper reminds me of the moog vs buchla rivalry, when they were developing the first synthesizers. Buchla was trying to create new interfaces that would invent new approaches to music, where moog just stuck a piano keyboard to their device. The moog won out and modular synths are the exclusive realm of autistic djs
Absolutely, successful paths from the past are just ensuring success in the future. It is our brains need to safe energy while working on solutions. And it hinders us in going new ways constantly.
It's rare that I know a video is going to be important to my life while I'm watching it rather than 3 years from now. I've been really interested in what VR has to offer and my excitement really bloomed when I read an article describing a meditation VR experience that transported you to an ethereal realm where all the visuals and physics were based around your voice. It ballooned in my brain all the ways we can interact in new spaces unconfined by Euclidean space/affordances. It's been like 10 years since and the most innovation we actually saw was using a pinch gesture instead of pulling a trigger. Even the keyboard on the phone that I'm typing this with. Early android days had so many wacky keyboards that all had their cool benefits. And now we're stuck with QWERTY and using a single finger to draw inefficient lines across the bottom of our screen. So glad for this algorithm blessing. I'm really excited to dive into the rest of the series and the book.
Part of why I use a TWM now I don't use my desktop, no files, no icons. I launch apps by pressing mod space and typing their name And my windows automatically arrange across my monitors, none of them will ever overlap unless I explicitly tell them to. I've yet to think of a better way to do files than a heiarchy
@@SolaceCafefor the uninitiated, is TWM “Timeless Windows Manager”? Seems based on your description and a quick Google that’s what you’re referring to; just wanted to double check
This is one of the most interesting series I've ever watched. Having studied Philosophy professionally for 7 years, being especially interested in phenomenology and mysticism, and have been working as a professional Software Developer for 15 years now and an AI researcher for 6 of those 15 years, and a "windows fanboy" (especially the betas, for everyday I'm on Linux, of course!), I can wholeheartedly say you have a great perspective on all of this, which is really enlightening. Really looking forward for the next part, and the arrival of your book! Very well researched, and presented in a really interesting way. Thanks for this!
I have a few thousand subscribers here on YT, not really much of course, but I've recommended this channel as a community post. Hopefully, it'll get you some new viewers. Really grateful for your work!
"This is mass madnass you maniacs. In Gods name you people are the real thing, we are the illusion." Network (1976) Thank you for this original and beautifully put-together work and fine thoughts and ideas. Truly enriching. Please watch the other videos and buy his book.
The Ted Nelson sentiment is an implementation of Marshall McLuhan's axiom that "... the new medium is at first filled with the content of the old medium" until a new grammar is produced for the use of the new medium in its own way. It is the same as when the early motion picture film pioneers pointed the camera at a Vaudeville stage. The closeup and parallel action editing (the new grammar) had not yet been discovered.
I am very happy to see you putting mystical and esoteric concepts into a more modern setting for the greater public to understand, there is so much knowledge that is very simple and fundamental to our existence of reality, yet not many seekers take the time to delve into it principles. Great job and blessings in your TH-cam channel my cosmic friend!
My dude, I am so excited for this. I've been getting into VR development as a hobby, and I needed to make a menu of some sort and immediately my eyes opened to the conundrum you're discussing here. "Wait a minute, why would I confine my menu to some 2D thing? I can literally do anything here." But then, I don't know what. I don't want to have to walk to another room to load a saved game, you know? Really excited to see where this series goes!
This sounds incredible--do it. If it's annoying, fix it later. But often the quirky bugs are the spirit of the software, the most captivating appeals to the real beauty--the soul of the creator. A game is a simple experience, and that can be whatever description you feel is the right shape for time well spent.
Why make it a separate thing that must be moved to and not body-referential gestures? Why not touch your head to and save, clench your hand to change contexts, whatever? Our bodies are the most familiar objects in three dimensions-and also the only subjects. Isn’t there a tighter linkage between ideation and action if the UI is gestural (if the abstraction doesn’t leak)?
The problem is not what is possible, but what users expect. Also user proficiency (for professional uses, APM is important as it relates to productivity)
Nowadays a person is not truly thoughtful, or they have intelligence limiting presuppositions, if they don't include any esoteric/mystical aspects into their presentations of reality. Theoretical science has come far enough to push at the boundaries of the everyday sensory experience. Look at the work of Michael Lavin or Iain McGilchrist. It's time the rest of the world caught up with their notions of "sensible" academics. Really excited to continue this series! It's a great piece of work ❤
Fascinating video. Reminds me of a video Ross Scott made years ago called "The Interface Could Be Better" which eventually ended with Ross lamenting the uncreative and limited software/computer mindset we have,
As someone who has been thinking hard about what future computing looks like (especially on the programming and networking side), I truly wish there was a place where all the visionary met and worked to deconstruct the status quo and follow for the crazy ideas. You know, a modern Xerox PARC in the digital space. I'm looking forward to the rest of your series. (Bought the book)
what an original series idea, love it! about 20 years ago my master thesis was on comparing linear and non-linear representation of information and you echo a lot of my own thinking not only about interacting with computers, but interacting with information in general. GUI inherited all the limitations of paper, without any of its advantages. However, the most limiting factor is indeed the informational hierarchy built into computers from the very start going back to Turing machines. Excited to see what you cook up next!
binge-watched this whole series, and you've essentially realized a kind of mixture that I've been trying to formulate: occultism/metaphysics and computer science/programming. excited for the fifth edition
I watched all of your currently released videos last night and am currently watching through them again. I am struggling to find the words but I have big big feelings about everything you have said. These are thoughts that I've had in my time of growing up with computers, working with systems, and contemplating the nature of reality and consciousness. I am incredibly grateful that there are people like you out there that not only share my thoughts, but have taken the time and read the literature to properly communicate and philosophize on. I've essentially lived on the computer since I was a kid, and spent most of my 20s experimenting with psychedelics and understanding the nature of reality itself. The fact that you've drawn a through-line through these feels vindicating in a way I can't properly articulate. I am very appreciative for this work and look forward to more videos in the future. I am not as much of a reader as I'd like to be, but I want to buy your book, and look deeper into this stuff and use it as a starting point to get back on the metaphysical train. This has my brain lighting up like a christmas tree. Thank you so much for making this series.
Im onboard with the fact that computer UI is just a 2D version of office objects but I have never seen any alternatives to this idea that liberate people how Ted Nelson describes it. It feels to me there is a visionary genius that points to the obvious and all its limitations without offering alternatives. A frustrating exercise
Valid frustration for sure. The important note that Nelson hits is that we've given up even thinking about breaking through the limitations. I think we need to expand our ideas about what's possible and exercise our imaginations to transcend the status quo. The more people get on board with the project, the faster those alternatives will begin to surface.
@@liber-indigo I don't think that we gave up on anything. How I see it, from reading Memory Machine, Nelson is mad that things developed not according to his master plan. Web was and is a feasible path to break limitations one by one, not all at once as Xanadu intended. Anyhow, i'm getting the book, and in for a journey.
@@liber-indigo we also need to consider that the desktop/office representation was potentially easier to describe/teach to new users of the era when office jobs were mostly paperwork related. Also, the "desktop" experience/use have been shifting a little bit (for better or worst), I have seen kids not knowing the concept of "folders" as all they use/create/store is available via some local or remote search dialog. Very keen on learning what other potential alternatives could exist, although I'm a little bit exceptic.. sometimes an invention is just good enough and does not need to be re invented until the environment changes (we will have hammers while need for nails exist and we will have digital representation of paper while real paper exists)
Ted Nelson invented hypertext, which is designed to allow interactivity and connection between text, images, video etc. by default and is probably the only reason the internet was any good lol. His alternative never became a dominant paradigm because most people just use hypertext transfer protocol to display more paperlike scrolling pages of text :D I saw him give a talk and he's still working on alternatives, though getting them to be widely adopted is imo impossible under capitalism. changing the interface would require changing work itself, and that might put a dent in profits. changing work would require changing our entire political economy, which requires revolution. this reminds me of the Apple designer I met who explained he had painstakingly over 3 years built an OS for the new Apple smartphone (the first iPhone) which allowed users to manipulate apps in tandem or even triplet/quad views and transfer data between them by sliding it across (among other amazing features). This beautiful interface, so much more powerful than the clumsy one window at a time imitation of a desktop without it's core features we never got. His version was cancelled and we got silo'd apps with no way to work with each other. There's still a few people, including that person, working on alternative visions of technology, but increasingly the one we've gotten reflects an ever more dystopic social vision which sees only the same future, burning oil to power an in-person silicon office that actually uses more paper to display how much wealth we can acquire while destroying the world.
Thank you for combining some of my greatest interests: computers, the limits of knowledge, the nature of reality and Adam Curtis documentaries. Book is on its way!
"The enemy's gate is down" This video and series feels like the type of thing I've been questioning about our assumptions in how things "should" work. Looking forward to the rest, and to reading your book.
Wow, you got me looking up shipping options in the middle of the night for that book! Great video! As someone who works in software and have touched upon AR-applications, I know the frustration of falling back to "2D in 3D" in that space too well. Funnily enough we might stand at edge of a coming 'paradigm avalanche' as kids these days don't necesarily grow up with a desktop/laptop at home, and thus don't have the same innate understanding of the desktop metaphor, or files and directories for that matter.
The algorithm brought me here tonight. Such an amazibg video, briefly tying together so many threads of the history of computing as I have studied it on and off for the past 2 decades. Love the nod to Lakoff and Johnson near the end, and I can't wait to see the rest of the series. I will say thogh that part of the problem with Ted Nelson's vision is that, unlike those he criticizes, he lacked the technical skills to make it a practical reality.
What I have been wanting to see is a “discoverable” keyboard driven interface. One of the best aspects of of the window menu and mouse driven interface is the discoverability of it, but if you’ve ever gotten good at a fully keyboard driven interface you know that keyboard shortcuts or 10key input is monumentally faster. What would be nice is a user interface primarily designed around keyboard input with optional mouse usage, but with heavy behavioral cues on how to use the keyboard shortcuts to navigate, to ease the learning curve
@ no I’m talking about a GUI (preferably with tiling) that is built around a core design philosophy of keyboard usage with visual context clues designed to make the keyboard shortcuts to things more discoverable. Modern microsoft office products do this now actually (if you hold one of the meta keys for a keyboard shortcut it highlights the next key you’d need to press on the ribbon). In other words this sort of design language for window management, application launching, etc.
wow. just stumbled across this and I can't quite express how excited I am by everything you've pulled together here. I'm a game designer/therapist currently focusing on how to help people learn to connect with strangers in ways that create supportive relationships, because we all desperately need belonging in this divided world. literally it's one of the single biggest things you can do in terms of mental health stuff, and games offer an amazing medium for learning new skills, new UI, and relational interactions with self and others and environment. anyways, I'm extremely excited to look into your book and see the rest of your videos as starting points for inspiration and conversation. imagine a digital space with UI paradigms that foster social connections and belonging, that help you learn how to be humane with another human. and you know, make it a fun game so you actually want to engage with all of that. if anyone else is looking into this stuff I'd love to connect
I bought your book as soon as I finished watching this video. It’s been a while since I’ve wanted to find this kind of thinking. It remembers me the ideas of Lev Manovich in “The Language of New Media”.
As a software engineer who meticulously records and organizes my ideas this is an exciting series to start. I-too-have found the directory-based organizational system to be limiting to the point of severe frustration, and am making great effort in my own system to rewrite how ideas are recorded, manipulated, and consumed. I’m looking forward to inspiration from your ideas!
I'm in a similar boat. My hope is to make an operating system whose basic storage interface is more like a relational database than a hierarchical file-system. My go to example for explaining this for non-technical people is if you were trying to make a repository of music to play for certain occasions. If you were trying to sort this into a hierarchical file system you'd very quickly run into the problem of overlapping hierarchies: you might have music with a 'winter' feel to it you want to play during winter, but some, but not all, of those songs might be 'Christmas' songs, and some but not all of those might be 'religious', or 'pop/rock/jazz/etc'. To put the solution to a word, we need a comprehensive system of 'tags'. Of course this isn't new technology. Relation databases have been around for a while. But they're an organizational system which is deemed complicated and difficult even among technically savvy people, and the general public doesn't touch them and relies on application developers to create each niche software products that try to (quite literally from the technical meaning of the term in software) reduce that complexity into a hierarchical view(s). And each product uses its own database system, and there has been an accelerating tendency over the years for those databases to be offloaded and owned by some big data company(think Spotify for music, or TH-cam for videos, or various social media platforms like Reddit or Facebook for textual comments). You could look at this as technically un-savvy people relying on technically savvy people to build platforms for them, but I think it's more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.: the technically un-savvy people were never really incapable, it just that the desktop operating system, the basic platform they were given to work with, was never designed to manage information the way information actually exists in the real world(as a non-hierarchical directed graph of concepts and data). So, not being programmers(or rather believing that programming isn't something they're able to do), they're forced to rely on programmers to build systems that actually can handle information properly, and the companies that hire those programmers increasingly want control over that information, and for their users to not have any control over the software which they use. I guess what would be new technology is a graphical user interface that would be intuitive/effortless/enjoyable for the average person to interact with a relational data system that encompasses all of their computing needs. This is hard, because currently the average person's computing needs are much larger than they used to be, and split across multiple platforms/vendors. You'd basically have to compete with every large platform/vendor at the same time, including professional software like various audio/graphics tool-kits and niche commerical applications (like medical records systems, which I work on) , and beat each of them at the game they've spent decades honing, hopefully with the intention to not make the same trap for users which they're already in.
@@peterhodgson3696 I'm pro hierarchical file-systems. I have never seen a folder inside a folder inside a folder in real life. So it's already metaphysically. Use a link if there is a strong overlap. Tags are only as good as they are maintained. If every Tag is just "new" or "unnamed" the user will win nothing. Can you put "Backup old PC" inside "Backup old PC" with Tags? I try to stay open minded and will watch the series. But it looks like OP is behind the curve. At the beginning I though he talks about Windows 8. He said explaining the Desktop is like explaining water. But many young people think in terms of Apps and have trouble with the mouse, multiple windows and file folders.
@@thomasbohl6924 I'm pro graph filesystems. The graph is the most fundamental model, as it can easily model hierarchies (every node has a parent), but more powerfully (every node can have multiple parents, a node can be in multiple places at the same time). It could even be both a hierarchy _and_ something else at the same time, just by having different edges (connections). You (or the developer of your interface) choose how you want to see it. Now that's metaphysics for you. I'm not a fan of tags either, but I am a big fan of labeled edges. I also fully agree with what you said about apps and young people. While apps are frustratingly limited and dumbing, they have some redeeming qualities. Smartphones have done away with the filesystem and to some degree the desktop metaphor. But I think we also need to do away with apps, at least how they are today, as walled gardens that don't communicate with eachother. How stupid is that. Of course, it's driven by a desire to lock people in to extract their valuable data and metadata. Greed and a desire for control, in other words. We need to away with that.
I went down a rabbit hole of retro cyber punk videos and this was recommended, I am so glad , enraptured, I love youtube, this was first class, what a great time to be alive
I'm so happy to have found this! What a great introduction that I can share with other to wake them up from the hierarchical office metaphor. I'll be buying your book and look forward to the rest of the series. Great stuff!
Thank you very much. I've been lucky to have enough time and space to think about those things too, and you are doing wonderful job explaining all this, connecting dots, filling in gaps in knowledge (extremely satisfying feeling, learning new things) and inspiring people :)
love that word curmugeon! i wish it got used more often and yes i class myself as one of those. The ideas you hint at here are something i've wondered about for a long time. I think somethings can't be easily done with flat surfaces or holographic interfaces but might need direct connections with our brains so that all our processing functions can be involoved. This would allow things we can't do today such as interfaces that use smell and taste which are all part of the real world. When we interact with the world we typically do it through all of our senses. But what is also missing is the intuitive connection that we often get. In my experience, so called "intuitive" interfaces are anything but.
Finally! Someone I agree with on the current state of human computer interfaces. I have Computer Lib Dream Machines by Ted Nelson (1974) framed on my wall.
As someone who started playing around with computers from the TRS-80 days and worked in the computer field all my life I find this video one of the best I have seen on this topic. Man I hope you stick to making videos like this you will go far on here.
OMG FUN!!! Its your book!! You are taking me through your brain now on video!!! Ho lee shit. I adore your mind. This is as delightful as reading liber indigo was!!! SERIOUSLY people. This video series is gonna be lit 🔥 subscribe now. Immediately. You won’t be sorry. Also. Buy the book. #notKidding.
12:45 -- no, McLuhan's book is 'The Medium is the Massage'. Massage, not message. 'The medium is the message' is a phrase he coined in an earlier work, and he altered the phrase for the book title to emphasise the point that the medium does not merely convey information in and of itself, but rather that it *actively affects* the recipient.
all these aspects of PARC and default design and paper are very important. I'm glad this video goes hard into this stuff. it's affecting everything now
This happens in a lot of things, even genre's of music, or when a new game comes and people try things before figuring out the "meta". I love those early moments where everyone is just doing whatever comes to mind, sometimes with a vague awareness of some cohesiveness to it, all before it becomes a documented "standard" and everything else it built on that "standard".
@@CheapSushi Wonderful point. Beginner's Mind can be a beautiful thing. As Orson Welles once said about where his filmmaking genius came from: "Ignorance. There's no confidence to equal it."
I spent a lot of time in college excited for the virtual reality HMD reemergence of the 2010s to change computing. Nearly ten years on, I think more than anything else what surprised me was the fact that not even Apple could make a good enough pitch. I spent a lot of time thinking about a world beyond screens, but it doesn't feel like a world people want. Obviously people have real concerns about physical comfort and price, but of the computer hardware of the past is any indication, good or useful enough software would override those. Maybe this series will help crystalize some ideas about that...
I almost didnt click on this; but I am happy that I did. You've earned a new subscriber, at least! I'm looking forward to the next video in the series.
Really excited to see the rest and read the book because I am tackling a very similar problem with a game that I am making rn. I start to think about the game more and more as an interface into an abstract world that I've invented. Very cool that you've put names to some concepts that I've been using in my head. Keep it up!
This is an AMAZING concept. I think what Xerox was doing back then so brilliant and I do wonder about the advances in art and digital design would have been like if Xerox continued to conquer. It's crazy to me, because I have been living and seeking the purpose of my life on the canvas or piece of paper and I very often have felt the restriction of the 4 borders that make up said canvas or paper but, never once had i considered it a prison or even thought of it in a metaphorical or metaphysical way.
You know, it's small-time stuff, but BASH always gave me some sense of what you're talking about here. The way you can just _do stuff_ with text that doesn't really involve interfacing with "files" in the way we typically think of them. A lot of "terminal" tools really just don't care about metaphor and create something infinitely more powerful as a result (git comes to mind).
The problem, as I see it, is that there are many critics of the "Desktop metaphor" and hypertext as implemented in HTML, but there are very few proposals of what to use instead
The reason is that the UIs today are based on what we find natural. First, we had the spoken word to use for storytelling. Then came along "documents", which sparked bureaucracy - kings could now use records for debts and stocks. Then came the books that allowed stories to "settle", the most prominent example being the Bible, which acted as a distributed storage of an ideology. Then computers came along, and now documents and books are digital. Everything related to documents and books is, in its essence, "bureaucratic" in its conception. Therefore, we need a completely new paradigm to replace this. Otherwise, I don't see any significant change to the computer as a tool. Even LLMs are bureaucratic - consider it a giant (limited) book a highly specialised guide can look into for you. The closest thing I can imagine happening to the computer is embedding the PARA method deeply into a kind of AI-driven feedback interface. But this is still yet another way of manipulating bureaucracy. To escape from this, we have to escape bureaucracy, and then what are we left with?
HyperText and Apps are amazing, the problem with the HTML and the Web, is that HTML is used to create Apps, which is horrible. Also, HTML/CSS/JS are horrible implementations. Hypertext should have never been used to make applications. The real killer feature of the Web is deploying things at scale, being able to run software without installing should have been the default, that's a failure of operating systems. Why do we have to "load" code, as if we still used magnetic tapes, why do we have "files" as if we still used paper filling in office cabinets, or magnetic tapes. On the other hand, phones pretend those don't exist but still uses them internally, which is bad. The real problem with the Hypertext metaphor is that it was confined into a box called browser when it really should have been implemented at the machine level, everything that can be used should have been a link, even "files".
Wanted to second the OP. Most of the alternatives real or imagined that I've seen still require organized metadata and user entry of that data to retain any sort of integrity. Yes, files and folders can suffer from lack of organization, but worst case scenario you can traverse though a tree and find things.
@@monad_tcp If you allow all software to reside on the cloud, then you don't own anything. You would be forced to use the current thing, and there wouldn't be any other options. I'd rather have all of my software installed. For example - documentation. Unix man-pages are awesome - you don't need to open browser, just open terminal and type whatever you need. So, you can read it without an internet connection.
Plan 9 is still the future OS we never got. A research operating system that had a GUI in only 7k lines, it had per-process namespaces, it was transparently networked, it could do distributed work across different computers, using each computer as if they were threads. Sadly, we're still here with Windows and Unix clones that keep imitating the mistakes of the past for compatibility reasons.
Totally wanted to see a take like this on the metaphor simulatrix, praise be the almighty YT algorithm! 😄 I enjoyed that footage of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad and VR headset didn't know he also worked on something like that! Amazing! 🤯
Well I like the way this is going. I've been trying to make my own UI for decades, only partial success. haha I think it's safe to say that something is going to happen with computing that will basically erase the desktop metaphor, and it will just be used for managing some machines. It feels like the way we use computers is ready to flip towards something else.
It's about time! A fresh start is so liberating and exciting, I think it can have a profound impact on society. This time, not a hierarchical and business/managerial one.
I just need to say thanks to the algorithm god for your video, you are amazing, already one of the best content creators in the plataform! Cheers from brazil!
thank you for this. i’ve been having these frustrations for a long while. the limiting structure that really pisses me off the most is that of the “app”.
Folders is just an easy concept, not best, just simple. Good enough. Also, folders were before the graphical user interface, soo... Alternative would be links and yep, we have it in web... Or automatic collections. But here we come with an issue of interoperability and additional complexity (circular links, updating different versions, making copies and versioning - they all would have to be solved and sometimes already solved, but not became the mainstream). For example, google docs or wiki pages use different set of concepts. Also, who actually said hierarchical view is actually bad in any way? it is pretty good mapping. But yea, we kinda starting to loosing old interfaces nowadays (flat folders on the phones? no safe button?), and it is not always good. Sometimes an old trusted interface feels more comfy (colourful icons vs flat grayscale minimalist icons?).
@@user0K All good points. My primary rallying cry is that good enough for now should never be good enough forever. We should realize that we're swimming in water before we concede that there's no other medium that might elevate and liberate us to a degree that water cannot.
.."I don't know why we called it a mouse... Sometimes I appologize it.. It started this way, we never changed it" So what this video is about.
@@alamdaaliartes You nailed it. A lot of people assume this video is meant to lay out some sort of new UI paradigm, which is not at all what this series is about. It's about us being lost in the vestiges and placeholders of technology and other structures.
"Do you remember this thing I experienced in a dream once?"
Yeah man, I was there.
@@wickybugger *gulp*
very wax or the invention of the tv among the bees
Read “The Lathe of Heaven” by Ursula K. Le Guin!!
this is fantastic, for once the algorithm suggested me something awesome!
Same here. also very good music bruv
Same.
no fucking way vr??? this like a crossover episode off a show i've never seen moment for me rn hahaha
i'm happy i share an algorithm with you hahaha my sounds are sounding better
what a small world :o
I don't copy and paste, I establish a paradigm for creation
@@dudeawsomeness1 🤣
I'm prone to transclusion myself
reminds me of tom lehrer's song "Lobachevsky"
I’ve been programming since 1978 and I am always stunned at how users simply accept what is put in front of them. Even if the software is crappy, the only suggestions they ever make are related to other software they have seen or used. They rarely have any sense of what is possible and what would work better for them, or if they do, they are unable to express it.
I'm not 100% sure the point you are making here; that users are untrained in the inner workings of computers and their interfaces? It's probably also true that garbage collectors rarely have any insight into how to make the diesel engine in their garbage trucks more efficient or reliable, or the truck itself easier to maneuver. The end users aren't usually trained in the complexities of the machines and systems they use. That seems to be the entire point of building such things, so that others can use them to more efficiently to complete their tasks without having to build the thing from scratch themselves. I think it's safe to say that the physical parts of the PC and their programing and their interfaces are some of the most complex systems that humans have ever produced.
@@KJ-9-w2u It is possible you might be over-thinking this. As I understand the OP, and as someone who has to deal a fair amount of UX design in my own work, they are saying that the regular end-user of a product willy often tell you when the design something doesn't work for them but often fail to produce any concrete examples of how to improve it other than by copying design from something else they were already familiar with. UX design when it comes to computer interaction is dreadfully complex and something we're still trying to figure out today while working around established norms that most users are resistant to diverge away from, even when an alternative paradigm to computer interaction might be better on paper.
@@AndrewBoothOfficialWhat's really scary is the resurgence of the command-line among the younger generation of programmers. Many of them believe that it's the most productive way to use a computer. The belief has been instilled by the UNIX culture based around open source software.
@@bobweiram6321 The command line allows a much wider variety of actions with far fewer steps provided you are proficient in it. No clicking through multiple layers of menus or any such thing. It's generally not intuitive though which is different from how effective it is for a proficient user. Similar to learning how to use an application for the first time, versus someone who knows every single keybind and shortcut.
@@bobshenanigans4256 Not true. The command-line is inferior to the GUI for the vast majority of computing tasks. For CAD, graphics, video, and practically anything remotely visual and feedback oriented, the GUI wins hands down. A command-line is text only and provides no immediate feedback. Most people who prefer the command-line like it because it makes them look smart.
The number of steps argument is fallacious. It depends on the design of the GUI. A poorly designed one can take more steps than needed, but in most cases a few extra clicks is still vastly better than typing long error-prone commands.
Finally, most developers hate writing documentation and suck at it. Every command-line requires reading terribly written help or man pages. A GUI, on the other hand, any user with prior experience can hit the ground running. It's self-documenting. It's all WYSIWYG, or what you see is what you get.
Excited to see your journey on TH-cam. The GUI problem of replicating paper reminds me of the moog vs buchla rivalry, when they were developing the first synthesizers. Buchla was trying to create new interfaces that would invent new approaches to music, where moog just stuck a piano keyboard to their device. The moog won out and modular synths are the exclusive realm of autistic djs
Lol that's a brilliant comparison
Amazing, I'd never thought of this before
I feel so called out, and yet you're kinda not wrong
"Video killed the radio star" or each new medium is trapped in the uses of its predecessor
this made me think so much thank you
Absolutely, successful paths from the past are just ensuring success in the future. It is our brains need to safe energy while working on solutions. And it hinders us in going new ways constantly.
and yet... will his video novel be remembered like mine?
I came here for this comment
Marshall McLuhan, the "father of media studies” was a prominent exponent of these ideas. I recommend reading up.
This is the most intellectually stimulating content I’ve come across in years - and that’s no hyperbole! Thank you.
Hey Moot! Good to see we still share tastes!
@ Indeed, my friend! Good to see you here 😎
‘Cow Tools’ woulda gonna crazy at the end.
It's rare that I know a video is going to be important to my life while I'm watching it rather than 3 years from now.
I've been really interested in what VR has to offer and my excitement really bloomed when I read an article describing a meditation VR experience that transported you to an ethereal realm where all the visuals and physics were based around your voice. It ballooned in my brain all the ways we can interact in new spaces unconfined by Euclidean space/affordances. It's been like 10 years since and the most innovation we actually saw was using a pinch gesture instead of pulling a trigger.
Even the keyboard on the phone that I'm typing this with. Early android days had so many wacky keyboards that all had their cool benefits. And now we're stuck with QWERTY and using a single finger to draw inefficient lines across the bottom of our screen.
So glad for this algorithm blessing. I'm really excited to dive into the rest of the series and the book.
do you recall the article? super interested in this space as well
User interfaces, desktop computers and the occult. I'm so in
Funny thing is a computer is not designed around what we do with a computer now but what we did with it 40 years ago
@@fischX 💯
40 years ago we designed computers around us and now we design ourselves around them. we tend to do that with the machines we create lol
Part of why I use a TWM now
I don't use my desktop, no files, no icons.
I launch apps by pressing mod space and typing their name
And my windows automatically arrange across my monitors, none of them will ever overlap unless I explicitly tell them to.
I've yet to think of a better way to do files than a heiarchy
@@SolaceCafefor the uninitiated, is TWM “Timeless Windows Manager”? Seems based on your description and a quick Google that’s what you’re referring to; just wanted to double check
@@chrislauber Tiling
This is one of the most interesting series I've ever watched. Having studied Philosophy professionally for 7 years, being especially interested in phenomenology and mysticism, and have been working as a professional Software Developer for 15 years now and an AI researcher for 6 of those 15 years, and a "windows fanboy" (especially the betas, for everyday I'm on Linux, of course!), I can wholeheartedly say you have a great perspective on all of this, which is really enlightening. Really looking forward for the next part, and the arrival of your book! Very well researched, and presented in a really interesting way. Thanks for this!
I have a few thousand subscribers here on YT, not really much of course, but I've recommended this channel as a community post. Hopefully, it'll get you some new viewers. Really grateful for your work!
@@normansbucherei393 So kind, thanks for that. Thrilled to hear this feedback from a developer.
"This is mass madnass you maniacs. In Gods name you people are the real thing, we are the illusion." Network (1976)
Thank you for this original and beautifully put-together work and fine thoughts and ideas. Truly enriching. Please watch the other videos and buy his book.
i am SO GLAD i clicked this!!! this is exactly the kind of content i want to see
Bless the algorithm for leading me here.
The Ted Nelson sentiment is an implementation of Marshall McLuhan's axiom that "... the new medium is at first filled with the content of the old medium" until a new grammar is produced for the use of the new medium in its own way. It is the same as when the early motion picture film pioneers pointed the camera at a Vaudeville stage. The closeup and parallel action editing (the new grammar) had not yet been discovered.
Great comparison!
I am very happy to see you putting mystical and esoteric concepts into a more modern setting for the greater public to understand, there is so much knowledge that is very simple and fundamental to our existence of reality, yet not many seekers take the time to delve into it principles.
Great job and blessings in your TH-cam channel my cosmic friend!
My dude, I am so excited for this. I've been getting into VR development as a hobby, and I needed to make a menu of some sort and immediately my eyes opened to the conundrum you're discussing here. "Wait a minute, why would I confine my menu to some 2D thing? I can literally do anything here." But then, I don't know what. I don't want to have to walk to another room to load a saved game, you know?
Really excited to see where this series goes!
This sounds incredible--do it. If it's annoying, fix it later. But often the quirky bugs are the spirit of the software, the most captivating appeals to the real beauty--the soul of the creator. A game is a simple experience, and that can be whatever description you feel is the right shape for time well spent.
Don't you? What about Quake? Or hubworld in Crash Bandicoot?
Why not make the menu a 3D object? Instead of a desktop metaphor, use a tools metaphor? Have a tool for saving and reloading games.
Why make it a separate thing that must be moved to and not body-referential gestures? Why not touch your head to and save, clench your hand to change contexts, whatever? Our bodies are the most familiar objects in three dimensions-and also the only subjects. Isn’t there a tighter linkage between ideation and action if the UI is gestural (if the abstraction doesn’t leak)?
The problem is not what is possible, but what users expect. Also user proficiency (for professional uses, APM is important as it relates to productivity)
Nowadays a person is not truly thoughtful, or they have intelligence limiting presuppositions, if they don't include any esoteric/mystical aspects into their presentations of reality.
Theoretical science has come far enough to push at the boundaries of the everyday sensory experience. Look at the work of Michael Lavin or Iain McGilchrist. It's time the rest of the world caught up with their notions of "sensible" academics.
Really excited to continue this series! It's a great piece of work ❤
I'll check them out today - thanks for the tip!
I second those recommendations!
Fascinating video. Reminds me of a video Ross Scott made years ago called "The Interface Could Be Better" which eventually ended with Ross lamenting the uncreative and limited software/computer mindset we have,
Thank you, Krkwd. Thank you algorithm. Bought the book and will begin reading Wednesday. Looking forward to the rest of the videos.
Same, we can discuss the topics, will check back after finishing Liber Indigo
How was it for you? I got wildly confused after anulus. Jumping between topics per paragraph without much detail on the sudden shift
How was it?
As someone who has been thinking hard about what future computing looks like (especially on the programming and networking side), I truly wish there was a place where all the visionary met and worked to deconstruct the status quo and follow for the crazy ideas. You know, a modern Xerox PARC in the digital space. I'm looking forward to the rest of your series. (Bought the book)
Good dtuff. Looking forward to the further episodes.
Unreal first episode. Can't wait for the whole series
what an original series idea, love it! about 20 years ago my master thesis was on comparing linear and non-linear representation of information and you echo a lot of my own thinking not only about interacting with computers, but interacting with information in general. GUI inherited all the limitations of paper, without any of its advantages. However, the most limiting factor is indeed the informational hierarchy built into computers from the very start going back to Turing machines.
Excited to see what you cook up next!
WOW what a great start of the series. Really excited to watch them all and after buy the book.
binge-watched this whole series, and you've essentially realized a kind of mixture that I've been trying to formulate: occultism/metaphysics and computer science/programming. excited for the fifth edition
I watched all of your currently released videos last night and am currently watching through them again. I am struggling to find the words but I have big big feelings about everything you have said. These are thoughts that I've had in my time of growing up with computers, working with systems, and contemplating the nature of reality and consciousness. I am incredibly grateful that there are people like you out there that not only share my thoughts, but have taken the time and read the literature to properly communicate and philosophize on. I've essentially lived on the computer since I was a kid, and spent most of my 20s experimenting with psychedelics and understanding the nature of reality itself. The fact that you've drawn a through-line through these feels vindicating in a way I can't properly articulate. I am very appreciative for this work and look forward to more videos in the future. I am not as much of a reader as I'd like to be, but I want to buy your book, and look deeper into this stuff and use it as a starting point to get back on the metaphysical train. This has my brain lighting up like a christmas tree. Thank you so much for making this series.
Finally, something on TH-cam worth taking a chance on.
Im onboard with the fact that computer UI is just a 2D version of office objects but I have never seen any alternatives to this idea that liberate people how Ted Nelson describes it. It feels to me there is a visionary genius that points to the obvious and all its limitations without offering alternatives. A frustrating exercise
Valid frustration for sure. The important note that Nelson hits is that we've given up even thinking about breaking through the limitations. I think we need to expand our ideas about what's possible and exercise our imaginations to transcend the status quo. The more people get on board with the project, the faster those alternatives will begin to surface.
@@liber-indigo I don't think that we gave up on anything. How I see it, from reading Memory Machine, Nelson is mad that things developed not according to his master plan. Web was and is a feasible path to break limitations one by one, not all at once as Xanadu intended. Anyhow, i'm getting the book, and in for a journey.
@@liber-indigo we also need to consider that the desktop/office representation was potentially easier to describe/teach to new users of the era when office jobs were mostly paperwork related. Also, the "desktop" experience/use have been shifting a little bit (for better or worst), I have seen kids not knowing the concept of "folders" as all they use/create/store is available via some local or remote search dialog.
Very keen on learning what other potential alternatives could exist, although I'm a little bit exceptic.. sometimes an invention is just good enough and does not need to be re invented until the environment changes (we will have hammers while need for nails exist and we will have digital representation of paper while real paper exists)
Ted Nelson invented hypertext, which is designed to allow interactivity and connection between text, images, video etc. by default and is probably the only reason the internet was any good lol. His alternative never became a dominant paradigm because most people just use hypertext transfer protocol to display more paperlike scrolling pages of text :D I saw him give a talk and he's still working on alternatives, though getting them to be widely adopted is imo impossible under capitalism. changing the interface would require changing work itself, and that might put a dent in profits. changing work would require changing our entire political economy, which requires revolution.
this reminds me of the Apple designer I met who explained he had painstakingly over 3 years built an OS for the new Apple smartphone (the first iPhone) which allowed users to manipulate apps in tandem or even triplet/quad views and transfer data between them by sliding it across (among other amazing features). This beautiful interface, so much more powerful than the clumsy one window at a time imitation of a desktop without it's core features we never got. His version was cancelled and we got silo'd apps with no way to work with each other. There's still a few people, including that person, working on alternative visions of technology, but increasingly the one we've gotten reflects an ever more dystopic social vision which sees only the same future, burning oil to power an in-person silicon office that actually uses more paper to display how much wealth we can acquire while destroying the world.
Videogames.
(Apropos: that's the original conceptualization of cyber-space in 'Neuromancer'...).
Very original video, glad I stumbled on your channel.
Oooooh fresh sorbet for my brain! Thank you for creating, can’t wait to watch 🥰🔥✨😻
holy this, i cannot WAIT to follow along with this, THANK YOu- there is SO much to unpack here
serendipity brought me here. i'm super excited about the future of this series, thanks for putting it out here
Holy moly! Putting words to my thoughts and so much more! So looking forward to the series. Thank you so much!!
Thank you for combining some of my greatest interests: computers, the limits of knowledge, the nature of reality and Adam Curtis documentaries. Book is on its way!
"The enemy's gate is down"
This video and series feels like the type of thing I've been questioning about our assumptions in how things "should" work. Looking forward to the rest, and to reading your book.
Very intriguing! Very happy TH-cam recommended me this, and I very much look forward to the upcoming videos
Wow, you got me looking up shipping options in the middle of the night for that book! Great video!
As someone who works in software and have touched upon AR-applications, I know the frustration of falling back to "2D in 3D" in that space too well.
Funnily enough we might stand at edge of a coming 'paradigm avalanche' as kids these days don't necesarily grow up with a desktop/laptop at home, and thus don't have the same innate understanding of the desktop metaphor, or files and directories for that matter.
Amazing video!
Loved how you explain the idea of affordances.
very interesting stuff man, will be keeping up with this 👍 thanks in advance
I've literally never clicked "subscribe" so fast while watching a random video
This video is exactly what I've been looking for.
The algorithm brought me here tonight. Such an amazibg video, briefly tying together so many threads of the history of computing as I have studied it on and off for the past 2 decades. Love the nod to Lakoff and Johnson near the end, and I can't wait to see the rest of the series.
I will say thogh that part of the problem with Ted Nelson's vision is that, unlike those he criticizes, he lacked the technical skills to make it a practical reality.
What I have been wanting to see is a “discoverable” keyboard driven interface. One of the best aspects of of the window menu and mouse driven interface is the discoverability of it, but if you’ve ever gotten good at a fully keyboard driven interface you know that keyboard shortcuts or 10key input is monumentally faster.
What would be nice is a user interface primarily designed around keyboard input with optional mouse usage, but with heavy behavioral cues on how to use the keyboard shortcuts to navigate, to ease the learning curve
that's it, man
That what dos was
@ no I’m talking about a GUI (preferably with tiling) that is built around a core design philosophy of keyboard usage with visual context clues designed to make the keyboard shortcuts to things more discoverable. Modern microsoft office products do this now actually (if you hold one of the meta keys for a keyboard shortcut it highlights the next key you’d need to press on the ribbon).
In other words this sort of design language for window management, application launching, etc.
wow. just stumbled across this and I can't quite express how excited I am by everything you've pulled together here.
I'm a game designer/therapist currently focusing on how to help people learn to connect with strangers in ways that create supportive relationships, because we all desperately need belonging in this divided world. literally it's one of the single biggest things you can do in terms of mental health stuff, and games offer an amazing medium for learning new skills, new UI, and relational interactions with self and others and environment.
anyways, I'm extremely excited to look into your book and see the rest of your videos as starting points for inspiration and conversation. imagine a digital space with UI paradigms that foster social connections and belonging, that help you learn how to be humane with another human. and you know, make it a fun game so you actually want to engage with all of that. if anyone else is looking into this stuff I'd love to connect
This is incredible. I feel like i've just seen the world outside the cave for the first time lol
I bought your book as soon as I finished watching this video. It’s been a while since I’ve wanted to find this kind of thinking. It remembers me the ideas of Lev Manovich in “The Language of New Media”.
dude, Doom and that Storm Trooper falling down the steps!! 🙌🏾😂
As a software engineer who meticulously records and organizes my ideas this is an exciting series to start. I-too-have found the directory-based organizational system to be limiting to the point of severe frustration, and am making great effort in my own system to rewrite how ideas are recorded, manipulated, and consumed. I’m looking forward to inspiration from your ideas!
I'm in a similar boat. My hope is to make an operating system whose basic storage interface is more like a relational database than a hierarchical file-system. My go to example for explaining this for non-technical people is if you were trying to make a repository of music to play for certain occasions. If you were trying to sort this into a hierarchical file system you'd very quickly run into the problem of overlapping hierarchies: you might have music with a 'winter' feel to it you want to play during winter, but some, but not all, of those songs might be 'Christmas' songs, and some but not all of those might be 'religious', or 'pop/rock/jazz/etc'. To put the solution to a word, we need a comprehensive system of 'tags'.
Of course this isn't new technology. Relation databases have been around for a while. But they're an organizational system which is deemed complicated and difficult even among technically savvy people, and the general public doesn't touch them and relies on application developers to create each niche software products that try to (quite literally from the technical meaning of the term in software) reduce that complexity into a hierarchical view(s). And each product uses its own database system, and there has been an accelerating tendency over the years for those databases to be offloaded and owned by some big data company(think Spotify for music, or TH-cam for videos, or various social media platforms like Reddit or Facebook for textual comments). You could look at this as technically un-savvy people relying on technically savvy people to build platforms for them, but I think it's more like a self-fulfilling prophecy.: the technically un-savvy people were never really incapable, it just that the desktop operating system, the basic platform they were given to work with, was never designed to manage information the way information actually exists in the real world(as a non-hierarchical directed graph of concepts and data). So, not being programmers(or rather believing that programming isn't something they're able to do), they're forced to rely on programmers to build systems that actually can handle information properly, and the companies that hire those programmers increasingly want control over that information, and for their users to not have any control over the software which they use.
I guess what would be new technology is a graphical user interface that would be intuitive/effortless/enjoyable for the average person to interact with a relational data system that encompasses all of their computing needs. This is hard, because currently the average person's computing needs are much larger than they used to be, and split across multiple platforms/vendors. You'd basically have to compete with every large platform/vendor at the same time, including professional software like various audio/graphics tool-kits and niche commerical applications (like medical records systems, which I work on) , and beat each of them at the game they've spent decades honing, hopefully with the intention to not make the same trap for users which they're already in.
@@peterhodgson3696 Make some new frontends for Arch and Sell it. Steam is already doing it.
@@peterhodgson3696 I'm pro hierarchical file-systems. I have never seen a folder inside a folder inside a folder in real life. So it's already metaphysically. Use a link if there is a strong overlap. Tags are only as good as they are maintained. If every Tag is just "new" or "unnamed" the user will win nothing. Can you put "Backup old PC" inside "Backup old PC" with Tags?
I try to stay open minded and will watch the series. But it looks like OP is behind the curve. At the beginning I though he talks about Windows 8. He said explaining the Desktop is like explaining water. But many young people think in terms of Apps and have trouble with the mouse, multiple windows and file folders.
@@thomasbohl6924 I'm pro graph filesystems. The graph is the most fundamental model, as it can easily model hierarchies (every node has a parent), but more powerfully (every node can have multiple parents, a node can be in multiple places at the same time). It could even be both a hierarchy _and_ something else at the same time, just by having different edges (connections). You (or the developer of your interface) choose how you want to see it. Now that's metaphysics for you. I'm not a fan of tags either, but I am a big fan of labeled edges.
I also fully agree with what you said about apps and young people. While apps are frustratingly limited and dumbing, they have some redeeming qualities. Smartphones have done away with the filesystem and to some degree the desktop metaphor. But I think we also need to do away with apps, at least how they are today, as walled gardens that don't communicate with eachother. How stupid is that. Of course, it's driven by a desire to lock people in to extract their valuable data and metadata. Greed and a desire for control, in other words. We need to away with that.
Use Obsidian. Properly configured and you can arrange your ideas and notes in any way you want.
I went down a rabbit hole of retro cyber punk videos and this was recommended, I am so glad , enraptured, I love youtube, this was first class, what a great time to be alive
This is a great intro, already stoked for more.
I'm so happy to have found this! What a great introduction that I can share with other to wake them up from the hierarchical office metaphor. I'll be buying your book and look forward to the rest of the series. Great stuff!
Thank you very much. I've been lucky to have enough time and space to think about those things too, and you are doing wonderful job explaining all this, connecting dots, filling in gaps in knowledge (extremely satisfying feeling, learning new things) and inspiring people :)
Looking forward to watching the rest of these, nice work mate
I'm so glad TH-cam brought me this content, first time in a while I've found something esoteric but sensible and curious. Nice, man.
love that word curmugeon! i wish it got used more often and yes i class myself as one of those. The ideas you hint at here are something i've wondered about for a long time. I think somethings can't be easily done with flat surfaces or holographic interfaces but might need direct connections with our brains so that all our processing functions can be involoved. This would allow things we can't do today such as interfaces that use smell and taste which are all part of the real world. When we interact with the world we typically do it through all of our senses. But what is also missing is the intuitive connection that we often get. In my experience, so called "intuitive" interfaces are anything but.
Excellent work! I can tell this is going to go deep.
Awesome! I teach media studies and will be showing this to my students in class. Thank you! ❤😊
this is true quality and revolutioanary content, earned a well deserved subscriber and should earn much more
Finally! Someone I agree with on the current state of human computer interfaces. I have Computer Lib Dream Machines by Ted Nelson (1974) framed on my wall.
Esto que ud está haciendo en esta serie de videos es EL ESOTERISMO DE LA COMPUTACION!!! Saludos desde Chile
As someone who started playing around with computers from the TRS-80 days and worked in the computer field all my life I find this video one of the best I have seen on this topic.
Man I hope you stick to making videos like this you will go far on here.
OMG FUN!!! Its your book!! You are taking me through your brain now on video!!! Ho lee shit. I adore your mind. This is as delightful as reading liber indigo was!!!
SERIOUSLY people. This video series is gonna be lit 🔥 subscribe now. Immediately. You won’t be sorry. Also. Buy the book. #notKidding.
So glad to have you aboard for this ride
How are you not famous? Amazing content, wish you all the success!
This video is the best thing I've seen on YT in a long long time
@@nakatash1977 Take that, Mr. Beast Whoever he is. Idk, I hear the kids love him
12:45 -- no, McLuhan's book is 'The Medium is the Massage'. Massage, not message. 'The medium is the message' is a phrase he coined in an earlier work, and he altered the phrase for the book title to emphasise the point that the medium does not merely convey information in and of itself, but rather that it *actively affects* the recipient.
all these aspects of PARC and default design and paper are very important. I'm glad this video goes hard into this stuff. it's affecting everything now
This happens in a lot of things, even genre's of music, or when a new game comes and people try things before figuring out the "meta". I love those early moments where everyone is just doing whatever comes to mind, sometimes with a vague awareness of some cohesiveness to it, all before it becomes a documented "standard" and everything else it built on that "standard".
@@CheapSushi Wonderful point. Beginner's Mind can be a beautiful thing. As Orson Welles once said about where his filmmaking genius came from: "Ignorance. There's no confidence to equal it."
What is funny is you don't even break out of it with the command line. You are still forced to deal with folder structures and POSIX
I spent a lot of time in college excited for the virtual reality HMD reemergence of the 2010s to change computing. Nearly ten years on, I think more than anything else what surprised me was the fact that not even Apple could make a good enough pitch. I spent a lot of time thinking about a world beyond screens, but it doesn't feel like a world people want. Obviously people have real concerns about physical comfort and price, but of the computer hardware of the past is any indication, good or useful enough software would override those. Maybe this series will help crystalize some ideas about that...
I feel lucky to see your star rise. Subscribed and look forward to more.
I'm happy just being a firefly bumping into the side of a house. But thanks so much!
@@liber-indigo You're a bright firefly, and I'm glad you bumped into my house :) That's much better than a star IMO.
It's like I've been waiting for this series my whole life
I almost didnt click on this; but I am happy that I did. You've earned a new subscriber, at least! I'm looking forward to the next video in the series.
Really interesting stuff! This kind of video is exactly why I watch TH-cam
7:20 wow. In just a few sentences this man concentrates and explains my entire, nearly lifelong frustration with computers. Brilliant.
Really excited to see the rest and read the book because I am tackling a very similar problem with a game that I am making rn. I start to think about the game more and more as an interface into an abstract world that I've invented. Very cool that you've put names to some concepts that I've been using in my head.
Keep it up!
I think this series might change my life
This is an AMAZING concept. I think what Xerox was doing back then so brilliant and I do wonder about the advances in art and digital design would have been like if Xerox continued to conquer.
It's crazy to me, because I have been living and seeking the purpose of my life on the canvas or piece of paper and I very often have felt the restriction of the 4 borders that make up said canvas or paper but, never once had i considered it a prison or even thought of it in a metaphorical or metaphysical way.
You know, it's small-time stuff, but BASH always gave me some sense of what you're talking about here. The way you can just _do stuff_ with text that doesn't really involve interfacing with "files" in the way we typically think of them. A lot of "terminal" tools really just don't care about metaphor and create something infinitely more powerful as a result (git comes to mind).
Git is a good example. It's super powerful, but very few people actually manage to truly understand it.
7:51 "... he still grieves so deeply for a future which never came."
We're _all_ still mourning Firefly.
that was actually super interesting from so many perspectives
This is incredible
@3:19 this is one the best pitches for a book I've ever heard. Sold.
The problem, as I see it, is that there are many critics of the "Desktop metaphor" and hypertext as implemented in HTML, but there are very few proposals of what to use instead
The reason is that the UIs today are based on what we find natural. First, we had the spoken word to use for storytelling. Then came along "documents", which sparked bureaucracy - kings could now use records for debts and stocks. Then came the books that allowed stories to "settle", the most prominent example being the Bible, which acted as a distributed storage of an ideology. Then computers came along, and now documents and books are digital.
Everything related to documents and books is, in its essence, "bureaucratic" in its conception. Therefore, we need a completely new paradigm to replace this. Otherwise, I don't see any significant change to the computer as a tool. Even LLMs are bureaucratic - consider it a giant (limited) book a highly specialised guide can look into for you. The closest thing I can imagine happening to the computer is embedding the PARA method deeply into a kind of AI-driven feedback interface. But this is still yet another way of manipulating bureaucracy. To escape from this, we have to escape bureaucracy, and then what are we left with?
HyperText and Apps are amazing, the problem with the HTML and the Web, is that HTML is used to create Apps, which is horrible. Also, HTML/CSS/JS are horrible implementations. Hypertext should have never been used to make applications.
The real killer feature of the Web is deploying things at scale, being able to run software without installing should have been the default, that's a failure of operating systems.
Why do we have to "load" code, as if we still used magnetic tapes, why do we have "files" as if we still used paper filling in office cabinets, or magnetic tapes.
On the other hand, phones pretend those don't exist but still uses them internally, which is bad.
The real problem with the Hypertext metaphor is that it was confined into a box called browser when it really should have been implemented at the machine level, everything that can be used should have been a link, even "files".
Wanted to second the OP. Most of the alternatives real or imagined that I've seen still require organized metadata and user entry of that data to retain any sort of integrity. Yes, files and folders can suffer from lack of organization, but worst case scenario you can traverse though a tree and find things.
@@monad_tcp we have to load code cos we have to program them unless we can understand 01s
@@monad_tcp If you allow all software to reside on the cloud, then you don't own anything. You would be forced to use the current thing, and there wouldn't be any other options.
I'd rather have all of my software installed.
For example - documentation. Unix man-pages are awesome - you don't need to open browser, just open terminal and type whatever you need. So, you can read it without an internet connection.
Wow
Just superb
Keep going I will be enthusiastically waiting for the next part.
i have been haunted with this idea ever since i saw interface studies' video a year ago. it's amazing that more people are talking about it.
Interesting. Looking forward to Part Two! 😸
Also, Merry Christmas!
Plan 9 is still the future OS we never got. A research operating system that had a GUI in only 7k lines, it had per-process namespaces, it was transparently networked, it could do distributed work across different computers, using each computer as if they were threads.
Sadly, we're still here with Windows and Unix clones that keep imitating the mistakes of the past for compatibility reasons.
These liber indigo vids are pretty trippy bro
Totally wanted to see a take like this on the metaphor simulatrix, praise be the almighty YT algorithm! 😄 I enjoyed that footage of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad and VR headset didn't know he also worked on something like that! Amazing! 🤯
Yeah, absolutely lew my mind when I learned about the headset
1968 was an incredible year, the peak of our civilization IMO. 57 years ago.
Such an intriguing title that I even searched it up when youtube feed reloaded
Well I like the way this is going. I've been trying to make my own UI for decades, only partial success. haha
I think it's safe to say that something is going to happen with computing that will basically erase the desktop metaphor, and it will just be used for managing some machines. It feels like the way we use computers is ready to flip towards something else.
It's about time! A fresh start is so liberating and exciting, I think it can have a profound impact on society. This time, not a hierarchical and business/managerial one.
I just need to say thanks to the algorithm god for your video, you are amazing, already one of the best content creators in the plataform! Cheers from brazil!
I didn't know this was your first video until gave us the warning, but by that point i was already subscribed. Looking forward to the ride
thank you for this. i’ve been having these frustrations for a long while. the limiting structure that really pisses me off the most is that of the “app”.
I've been considering writing an operating system based on new ideas like this!
I'm on board with that
Keep it up very toughtfully provoking, never heard about the fella and his almost occult sounding title
Folders is just an easy concept, not best, just simple. Good enough.
Also, folders were before the graphical user interface, soo...
Alternative would be links and yep, we have it in web... Or automatic collections. But here we come with an issue of interoperability and additional complexity (circular links, updating different versions, making copies and versioning - they all would have to be solved and sometimes already solved, but not became the mainstream).
For example, google docs or wiki pages use different set of concepts.
Also, who actually said hierarchical view is actually bad in any way? it is pretty good mapping.
But yea, we kinda starting to loosing old interfaces nowadays (flat folders on the phones? no safe button?), and it is not always good. Sometimes an old trusted interface feels more comfy (colourful icons vs flat grayscale minimalist icons?).
@@user0K All good points. My primary rallying cry is that good enough for now should never be good enough forever. We should realize that we're swimming in water before we concede that there's no other medium that might elevate and liberate us to a degree that water cannot.