Clojurians Log v2

Morning. House to myself this weekend.

I wish it was in another few weeks so I could noodle around with a new pc build & Linux install.

Morning

@thomas how did the hinting go in the end?

Got it fixed in the end. Only to find out that someone else had a PR already that does the same.

But I learned something so that is good

😃

Congrats on the release @borkdude

I'm watching a 1990 documentary on hypertext with Douglas Adams and Tom Baker. The key underlying idea that seems missing from the implementation is backlinks from Xanadu. We seem to have filled that idea with search engines by allowing you to search any piece of text, but it's not really the same I guess.

Backlinks would be such an improvement over what we have now.

There was once a whole article about Xanadu in Wired years ago. facinating read

Seems to have been some serious vaporware

That documtary was responsible for started my journey into a career in software engineering. I have fond memories of it.

Woah. It's on http://archive.org if you fancy a rewatch.

What's your take on the whole backlink thing?

I guess the semantic web does some of this. I bet you can assert a backlink with OWL somehow, and you could collect these backlinks as you traverse the web. Although that kind of open-ended indexing would need to be outsourced to a google and lazily fetched, but it could be fairly distributed. Also we now have a standard, WebMentions, which helps here.

the ultimate vaporware

I was most curious about the interconnected nature of all the disparate information and an agent to bring it all together. I think we are still a long way from the experience that Douglas Adams dreamed of. I nearly did a phd on intelligent agents at University, partly because of this program. I think there is a lot of research into that which is still not part of the Internet experience.