HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

"Part of the myth is thinking that packaging is technology. [...] Microsoft Windows is packaging and conventions. The Macintosh is packaging and conventions. The World Wide Web is packaging and conventions. Underneath these wrappers are the real technologies: TCP/IP, DNS, graphical displays, [...] compression, payment mechanisms, encryption, and so on, but the wrapper is what people see." -Ted Nelson [1]

that being said, this is one bit of “packaging” im particularly grateful for -- by complete coincidence, i found it a few days ago, and the fact that the app is free* and available everywhere means i can finally use my phone as an audio receiver for any computer†. now i can listen to talks with slides on a big screen while i cook or clean at antisocial hours, and let the rest of the house sleep without having to buy a bluetooth DAC (or a pair of wireless headphones‡)

actually kind of funny -- other solutions to this exist on ios but they are in fact paid apps. same goes for various bits of “packaging” that solve similarly trivial problems, which was a part of growing up with apple stuff that was always deeply insulting to me. i recently came across someone singing the praises of a safari extension for user styles. it is two dollars and ninety nine cents on the mac app store. christ. i hope the grift goes well for the author, we've all got to get by somehow, but good fucking lord

* actually free, as in no strings attached, open source, not freemium adware, not sending 24kbps opus of everything that goes through it to some adtech firm's speech recognition neural net

† ive janked together things like an icecast instance -> mobile safari before, but good lord the latency is ass

‡ headphones are such amazing consumer tech. they do not go bad by default. cans from the 80s sound just as good in 2022. wireless headphones throw this out the window and slap an expiration date on. i categorically object on principle

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk

⬐ dwohnitmok

I'll the contrarian stance. Through a certain lens, packaging is technology, technology is packaging. The two are indistinguishable.

TCP/IP is merely a given package of conventions around how bytes should be ordered. Compression even more so! Encryption is likewise just a set of conventions and packaging around how to transmit bytes. So on and so forth.

In the physical domain this holds true as well. Any given piece of physical equipment is merely a packaging and rearrangement of other physical components together.

Okay so what's the upshot of all this besides word games? By thinking of technology as simply packaging, we can reuse a lot of the prior work that people use to create packaging in how we think about technology as well as explain a lot of technological trends by analogy with how packaging works. We also should realize the opposite direction as well: a lot of packaging concerns are fundamentally the same as technological concerns and many similar trade-offs are made.

⬐ 0x69420

i am in full agreement that, for instance, a shell script consisting of grep piped into sed is as deserving of being called a “program” as grep and sed themselves are

it does come down to where you draw the line, though -- is a PaaS subscription plan technology? not the infra behind PaaS firm's epic load balancer that lets them provision leanly and fatten their margins. not the javascript minifier that does its damned best to cut down time from link clicked to prices and features in browser viewport with animated gradients in background. not even the spreadsheet from the accountant who drafted up expected returns across a range of pricing schemes. but the subscription plan itself. that thing, which we conveniently refer to as a package pretty often. is it also technology?

⬐ dwohnitmok

> is it also technology?

In a very meaningful way yes! Business plans are a form of incentive bundling, which is itself an example of a social technology and social technologies are a thing and they follow much the same lifecycle and trade-offs as any other non-social technology. Indeed we can derive a lot of useful insights by using insights derived from looking at social technologies to examine non-social technologies and vice versa.

⬐ ilrwbwrkhv

turtles all the way down?

⬐ barrysteve

You guys are disappearing into word definitions. It's all technology or technique.

Ted Nelson's point was that the technology closest to bare metal was Real and that the shiny 'packaging' was what people see.

When it comes to economic activity, most people buy the 'packaging' tech they can see and the Real Tech nearest to silicon is negotiated between experts and businessmen.

Ted would want us to focus accordingly. If you want to make Real technological change at kernel level, you gotta change your business strategy from an app dev selling on the iPhone which people see the 'packaging' to something else like selling support to big business which few people see or know about.

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk

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!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GAicTW7MGo

This one ("moving away from defensive programming") justified strong typing in a pretty clear way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csj3lzsr0_I

Dan Dennett is just as relevant as Doug Hofstadter when it comes to metacognition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsD-3jtXz0

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ

Everybody should understand procedural generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WumyfLEa6bU

Likewise, since AI is hyped up right now, we should all remind ourselves that IA is a thing too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=narjui3em1k

More hypertext history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i67rQdHuO-8

Even more hypertext / UX stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrHkNgGQDs

A great explanation of Fourier transforms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY

Allison Parrish does mindblowing things with corpus statistics by treating term vector spaces as generalizations of 2d image formats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3D0JEA1Jdc

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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJNxgZyVo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4AzF6wEoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iAJPoc23-M

I love the Ted Nelson "Computers For Cynics" series - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk

He is kinda awesome in Herzog's recent 'Lo and Behold' too.

> 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". (https://youtu.be/KdnGPQaICjk?t=1m47s)

⬐ mikegerwitz

Please take a look at a brief history of the GNU Project:

https://gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.html

GNU is more than a collection of GNU programs; when free software existed, it was used. The result with a complete Unix replacement.

this is a Ted Nelon tribute event. so the title should name him first!

some lectures of his here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk

Ted Nelson created a YouTube series, Computers for Cynics, which is his history of modern computing technology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emDJTGTrEm0

http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/top-english.html http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~motizuki/papers-english.htm...

Ted Nelson: "EVERYBODY thinks they can design great interfaces and almost no one can (...)"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk&t=7m34s