Getting to Xanadu

No, it doesn't. But this does, kind of:

https://discourse.pijul.org/t/patching-patches/212

Not only that but thanks to simple regexp (such as 's/source/target/g/') it is much easier to replace copies of the same text. With proper tools (which Wikipedia undoubtedly has) it should be easy to change text with one click of a button.

Perhaps the tool-and-community bootstrap challenge is sufficient explanation?

It was clear for years that USENET news needed comment voting, but its community never really made the attempt. Progress came from moving elsewhere, eg HN.

Consider selective comment display as a limited form of transclusion. Why doesn't HN have more highly personalized views? Sometimes you want quality, but it's obscured by chatter. Sometimes you would like to chat, but that would obscure quality from others. So we're at very not 90% of benefit; not a security issue; and far more effort for both readers and mods. But the better code doesn't exist yet. And community expectations don't demand it -- users might abandon a "no comment voting? - so broken" site, but "I can't even do basic reputation filtering?" isn't an expectation yet.

Or consider the largely unsuccessful effort of the late-80's hypertext community to shape the development of the "that's not right" WWW. Including "this has become funny" multiple Xanadu attempts. Path-dependent local incentives seemed to dominate instead.

But if one bottleneck is ease of exploring non-linear information, perhaps help may come from VR's relaxing of screen real estate constraints, providing more elbow room for low-overhead speculative UI content and associated assistive agents?

If we look beyond cryptos to blockchain apps that store textual data (as they all really do), there might be a use case for blockchain with what we call canonical documents in Mimix. I'm not married to the idea and there's no buzzword fishing here. Mimix does not involve a token economy or altcoin.

I must disagree that linking is a 90% substitute for what Ted called tranclusion. Linking is nothing more than the electronic version of the library card catalog. Linking does not help the user find the context of the referenced material nor help him or her to "link" back to his or her own writing later from that reference material. These were the goals of Nelson's transclusion and they're also part of what we're building with Mimix.

As to the paucity of modern education, I agree with the results but not the reason. I don't think people prefer low-quality information. But I do think that corporations and governments prefer to supply that. We need tools to help us Think Better, as we have since Vannevar Bush first proposed his Memex in the 40's. The opportunity to give students and teachers more fine-grained and more accurate access to information can only help raise up the individual to a more powerful place in society.

You are 100% right about Wikipedia. It's low-hanging fruit for canon. Many other datasets are, too, such as the legal documents, free books, and artworks offered by academic institutions. The trick is to integrate those works into the Mimix users' new, original, writing and the purpose of Mimix is to enable and simplify that integration in a way that was never before possible.

I am aware of encryption before blockchain. The idea is mentioned simply because it meets the requirements of an write-only system with lots of backups that don't depend on a central source. It could be useful for storing and sharing canonical documents but it's not something I'm married to.

Which fail to provide the capability based security required for a Xanadu-like project.

You might want to read about the Confused Deputy Problem for starters:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confused_deputy_problem

There exist other approaches for avoiding the confused deputy problem, but these don't have mutual exclusivity with capability based security, one such approach consists of something like this:

https://github.com/phvogt/NoMoXSS

Which basically uses this concept:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_checking

However, that leads us right back into another Xanadu related problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_(computer_security)

Think about why we call this a "Trademark", and what that means for concepts like transcopyright licensing such as the one required for Xanadu.

If you look into who advised on & worked on Xanadu, you'll find names like Mark S. Miller:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_S._Miller

...whose name you'll find popping up all over the object capability security literature. That ain't a coincidence.

The shortcomings Xanadu tries to address and which conversely Xanadu requires to have addressed before it can come about pervade computer science, everywhere.

I'd more suggest something like pijul, since it soon will implement something transclusion-like natively:

https://discourse.pijul.org/t/patching-patches/212

A surprising amount of our everyday writing is comprised of these shared, canonical facts. Walt Disney's birthday will never change, and neither will Apple's market cap for November, 2018. When we write about those facts, we can rely on our own copy of correct, canonical data -- not a link to anything. An ideal research and writing program, as we aim Mimix to be, would also be able to alert you when and if your canonical information changes. In that case, you'll be able to retain and reference both versions in your writing. Most importantly, your future readers will, using the Mimix software, also be able to see where you got your facts. These capabilities simply don't exist in any of today's software.

No.

I suspect you have the kind of point of view where we might better first discuss the proposed data structure and THEN what we'll do with it. First, you'll want to learn about zzstructure/hyperthogonal structure:

http://xanadu.com/zigzag/

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=zzstructure

for a comparison of the above with Ubergraphs (a generalization of Ultragraphs, themselves a generalization of Hypergraphs), you'll want to check here:

https://github.com/JeffreyBenjaminBrown/digraphs-with-text/i...

Once you think you comprehend the above, consider spending some time thinking about how you could come up with a 'canonical', graphical user interface AND user experience for a Ubergraph that uses hyperthogonal structure.

Then imagine how you'd implement such a data structure in a distributed, peer to peer, UNCENTRALIZABLE (not just decentralized!), secure manner.

If you can imagine all of that and think you comprehend at least one tiny part of the implications of such a thing, then you comprehend about 1/10 of "the real goal" of Xanadu, and I invite you to consider continuing to ponder the possibilities.

Most importantly, Xanadu and Mimix are very different products. Nelson envisioned Xanadu as a publishing and copyright enforcement system. Mimix is aimed at the opposite group of users: those who create and consume textual content.

Mimix is about more than document versioning. In Mimix, there are no documents. There are only atoms and streams. A stream is a sequence of atoms which can be presented in its original order (chronologically, as it is created) or remixed or extracted without limitation. A "document" that you read in the wild and later write about is, in Mimix, a stream of unalterable atoms, recorded in a write-only database. This is vastly different from today's document and paper metaphor, which is really an artifact of the printing press that can be dispensed with.

Proper citation is half the goal of Mimix's implementation of what we call canonical data -- making sure that the reader knows what came from where. But the other half lies in assisting the writer in finding and organizing these sources in the first place. Today, research and writing are separate tools done in different programs. A great economy would be realized if these functions were intelligently combined.

And YES! to a better method of publishing (I would say "representing") text. Everything that happens during a Mimix session is recorded in MSL, the Mimix Stream Recording language. Instead of files of dumb data that get interpreted by different programs in different ways, MSL upgrades the data to include instructions about what's going on -- as it's being written. This allows the next user to rewind and fast-forward (as you would with a video) but also to extract and remix (which are not possible with video.)

Thanks for giving me a jumping-off point for discussion! :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion#History_and_imple...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3l7CpnpyGw

In Mimix, your writing is linked to your reference materials and these are available for your readers to see, too. But your writing is only linked back from those materials when you are viewing them -- not for anyone else in the world.

Ted's suggested system would have the Declaration of Independence linked to every schoolchild's paper that wrote about it. In Mimix, you would see the relationships only between your writing and the documents you referenced -- not anyone else's.

And none of them have certified deletion from untrusted devices.

JSON (which has its own problems) would be a more appropriate format.