words are the worst :(
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but yeah, i really wish there were better patterns for how to talk about these kinds of domains. “superimposed distributions” kinda gets at it.
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I often think in terms of trying to decompose a high-dimensional space into ~principal components, and then describing the principal components in isolation. E.g. in social situations, there’s the prestige component, the dominance component, the coalition politics component, etc.
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Each is best understood by thinking about it by itself, as a pure vector unadulterated with the other components. But then any real-world example is a data point that mixes everything together. And of course the vectors aren’t orthogonal, and they mix chaotically....
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This is what hypertext was supposed to be for—“everything is deeply intertwingled” was Ted Nelson’s slogan. I persist in writing hypertext books even though no one can make sense of the format. His vision had level-of-detail sliders and other mechanisms not yet available.
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler and
It's odd that no one has made a go at fully implementing Nelson's vision. One would think that modern web frameworks (React, etc.) would make it petty straightforward.
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Replying to @StephenPiment @KevinSimler and
Yes… although a problem is that he was never able to clearly explain what his vision was/is. Xanadu was funded for a while and I was one hop from some of the key implementors (may have met them, I forget) and this was the main obstacle.
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Replying to @Meaningness @StephenPiment and
Also, much of the work is in the backend ontology. A critical piece was bidirectional links into the middle of documents. It’s hard/impossible to reconcile this with versioning.
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Replying to @Meaningness @KevinSimler and
Right, one would need further design to carve out a "maximal consistent subset" of the vision. But that doesn't seem too hard.
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Replying to @StephenPiment @KevinSimler and
That would be great… I’ve thought about building tools specifically for making hypertext books. There’s a few around but none are adequate for even basic functionality like on http://meaningness.com . (So I’ve done some minimal hacking but it’s not a good solution.)
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There’s a chicken-and-egg issue: no one understands what a hypertext book is, because there are so few of them; there are few because the tools are inadequate; there’s no demand for better tools because no one wants to write hypertext books, because no one can read them….
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Replying to @Meaningness
I have some domain expertise that may be of use in this context, and I’d be happy to chat about it sometime if you like. My DMs are open.
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