> And disappearing is the default, natural state of things.
Books, clay tablets, scrolls, engraved stone, to which humans owe their entire knowledge of their premodern history, seem to have put up pretty well against entropy. The same is not the case for information disseminated in a controlled manner from privately owned servers.
> If I see some people playing music on a corner and return the next night to see they've left, I may be wistful, but it would be silly to argue "playing live music is broken and we should fix it".
> If you think of web sites as performances put on for a limited time by the server, it doesn't seem so terrible that they disappear after a while.
Thankfully, the generations who produced and preserved knowledge on paper, clay and stone before the onset of digital technology - that is, every generation of humans that has ever lived, except ours - did not think of books and libraries as throwaway pamphlets. And it would take more than an arbitrary interchange of modes of cultural production to argue that we should be doing otherwise in the technological circumstance we find ourselves in.
The "tyrants of the server" are not thinking of server-centric aggregation and dissemination of as a performance put on for a limited time: they are betting on it as the future of all human literary activity. Google doesn't want to read you a paragraph, take your money and say goodbye; it wants to swallow all the world's books and information, chop it to tiny pieces, store and own it forever, and extract the maximum profit from each tiny piece, without having you pay a penny. And it wants you to come back for more. The persistence of the server-centric model of content dissemination is not an accident; it is dictated by the political economy of the web brought about by the Googles of the world.
Yes, the specific example scenarios that Victor has used are hard to directly reconcile with what SICP is doing. But, that the examples are oriented towards graphics and animation has only to do with the fact that the immediate target of his critique in the essay is Processing and a particular live coding implementation of it. I was thinking more in terms of applying the principles of learnability that he has put forward, and are manifest in the examples he has cited (Logo, Smalltalk, etc.), "how exactly" admittedly being an open question.
One thing I'm more or less certain about is that it would entail less live coding, and more stepping through visualized execution states (perhaps similar to pythontutor.com's visualizer).
I will be going through SICP with these in mind in the following weeks/months; I will keep you posted if I end up with notes that I think you might find useful.
I wonder if you are familiar with Bret Victor's elaborate criticism of Khan Academy's live coding environment. This effort looks like it could really benefit from its insights.
While an inline interactive Scheme interpreter does make the SICP examples easier to follow and play with, it doesn't by itself make the content more understandable and learnable.
A "learning environment for SICP", with the principles of learnability and understandability in Victor's article applied, would be very beneficial for present day learners. It surely is a lot of work, but would be an interesting route for your project to take.
No, there aren't "people"; there is "a person", me. Just one person.
Everyone else is speculating on how the poor little "Googler"'s life is destroyed by a naive peaceful protest, derailing the issue with anti-left wing jokes, suggesting that "Googlers" carry weapons, and so on.
HN at its best: when its ideological toe is stepped on. popcorn
When people block Google busses, and break one window of one bus, it's inappropriate violence on par with barbarism [1].
When people peacefully protest a Google employee and try to raise awareness in his neighborhood of his activities that they disagree with, it's individual harassment.
Isn't that just lovely? Hacker News: privileged technologists setting the standards for techno-skeptical protest. Tell us what the proper way to go about it (outside the established means of the sham that is representative parliamentary democracy, of course) is, then.
Excellent. If engineers and technologists refuse to take personal political and ethical responsibility for the future they help build, they need to be reminded to do so.
"It's not true. It's not true. It's not true.
"...
"It's old news."
This also sums up how the underhanded defense of the status quo by hiding behind Hanlon's razor has worked in much internet discourse, including HN discussions, on mass surveillance and cryptography so far.
It's not a race issue; it's a class issue. The non-white people that SV companies employ tend not to be the underprivileged people that are driven out of metropolitan areas due to gentrification.
It doesn't take an overtly political article to upset ideological sensibilities. Since technology is inherently intertwined with ideology, it's not possible to have a fruitful discussion on any topic concerning technology (perhaps aside from certain pure technicalities) without stepping on any ideological toes.
I'm one of those people: I submit that throwing a brick through the back of a bus window is ethically superior to voting or circulating a petition. Please skim my comment history.
It doesn't take a vast conspiracy to rid prospering metropolitan areas of working class non-white people; it's the business-as-usual of capitalist growth.
In "Pandora's Hope", Bruno Latour goes to great length to attack the artificial subject-object and nature-culture separations that are the legacy of the Cartesian paradigm. It's a highly intriguing book. Here's the foreword, which deals directly with the brain-in-a-vat:
The author has been writing / working on the implications of drone technologies regularly in various contexts for the past few years. He didn't dedicate a separate piece to the Amazon news at the time, and the political underpinnings of drones (which he has most often dealt with in the military context) and extraordinary / unjust rendition are not at all unrelated.
I was commenting in a general sense, on the notion I quoted, of which the current discussion is a mere symptom; not specifically about Amazon or package delivery. Yet the point is: when a technology giant talks about delivering packages in a new and technologically novel, yet questionable way, we shouldn't be talking about delivering packages; we should be talking in a broader sense about the political and economical implications of that new way, and how it's going to affect people in the foreseeable future.
The notion of being unquestioning "champions of the future" is a general trait of most HN participants, and in direct contrast to what you problematize, what I find problematic is the great wave of instant enthusiasm we're seeing among so-called "hackers" for Amazon's stated intentions.