Mother of All Demos

February 7th, 2021

• co-watching / co-learning Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos with Qiaochu
  • > blank piece of paper
    • similar vibe to the daily notes in Roam
  • haha the collapse thing is kinda like workflowy/roam - I guess there were other collapsible trees early, but not for text editors?
  • grocery list demo
    • the basic puzzle of re-sorting a list
    • huh, the 2A, 2B thing has a zettelkasten vibe
    • maybe literally inspired by zettelkasten? "2B1" seems like it
    • yeah, lots of blockreffy stuff here
    • this basic structured list hasn't been adequately appreciated, maybe until Roam, maybe even still in some senses
      • (eg Roam doesn't have easy custom variables for blocks)
    • there are concepts that Doug is clearly employing in what he's doing that are just part of his frame, and he's not really explaining those concepts, just boldly using them
      • would probably take too long if he were trying to explain, tbh
      • helps that he's using data whose structure people can readily understand
    • right, and the integrated linkedness of the grocery list & map of stores, still basically doesn't exist
      • and barely needs to, in some ways, especially in the era of the original presentation, when people didn't have a computer in their pocket
    • "constructing a view that best suits our need at the time"
  • paused at 18:30
    • me to QC > there are concepts that Doug is clearly employing in what he's doing that are just part of his frame, and he's not really explaining those concepts, just boldly using them
    • QC > fully-frictionless product - omnitext
      • I want to type in text and I want that text to go where it's supposed to
      • and receive text that I want to read
        • Designing a better browser\workflow for Twitter & more
          • QC > sounds like pocket+anki with tuning
      • re tuning
        • • Qiaochu > I want my computer/browser to know where I'm at emotionally
            • 2 metaphors
              • tuning a radio
                • nice little analog metaphor
                • and lets
              • emotional attunement
                • Malcolm > this is you living in the future
                  • not with respect to ML / whether or not it's possible, per se
                  • but like, you know what it feels like to interact with a system that's attuned to you
                  • and you think it's reasonable to expect that of a computer
                  • (I think Nick Winter had an old piece of software that did webcam mood analysis)
            • this
        • • design metaphor of being able to specify something like a mood or
            • serves them to you at the right time
            • context-dependent
              • there should be a much richer way to describe you context to your browser
                • and then it goes to the giant repository of links that you have and serves you the right ones
                • M > relates to my concept of tags in optimal streaming-music player & organizer
                  • QC > like how spotify serves you a song and you like/dislike
                    • what if it, or twitter, could let you say "this is not the thing I'm in the mood for"
                    • QC > tiktok I think is good at this?
            • Malcolm > old blog post of mine
              • The Emotional Intelligence of a Smartphone
              • QC > "After some reflection, I concluded that how I really felt was misunderstood."
                • YES! I feel misunderstood
  • What if federated DMs that can be embedded inside any app that maintains user identity & relationships?
    • (Federated like email)
    • = an email-like standard for chat, that can route through any site's identity to whatever preferred chat manager each person likes to use
    • So the main thing that is good about Twitter DMs is that they let you message anyone(ish) that you find on Twitter. The medium itself is kinda shit, but why should Twitter invest in reinventing that wheel? What if embedded in Twitter was somehow like a button that's just like "I want to message twitter.com/QiaochuYuan" and that button is like a mailto: and Twitter routes that message to whatever server Qiaochu uses and then he gets to organize those messages how he wants"
    • opens up competition for designing chat systems
    • I think XMPP basically wanted to be this :(
      • goddamn incentives
  • QC > fully-frictionless product - omnitext / Conversation App Design ("slack but good")
    • I want to type in text and I want that text to go where it's supposed to
    • and receive text that I want to read
    • MO > Like what if I could send you a message that would only show up the next time you're thinking about topic X
      • who do you want to notify like "you'll want to eventually make sure you're caught up on this" (something that could perhaps be cancelled or redirected)
      • in relation to MK's Glue, what I want is something like being able to comment