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Comment by october_sky | Hacker News Reader

Do you have other examples we can look at?

The original goal of the Media Lab was to explore the impact of having access to far more computing power than you could possibly have access to today (for whatever is the current value of today). Not "more than most people have", but more than you could have that point in time. That's an important and valid subject to research (eg they did lots of work on understanding the impact of speaker-independent voice recognition long before we could really even do speaker-dependent voice recognition reliably) but almost by definition the only way you can study it is via rigged demos.

I would follow up by saying that from 2004-2010, while I was a researcher there, the emphasis was on mixing ideas from places as far flung as possible. There was no need to fake a demo, as the ideas were not impossible, just uncanny.

Once someone like e.g. Saul Griffith came up with the idea of Kinematic Replication [1], others could easily replicate it (or at least anyone with a laser cutter at that time). Same goes for my projects. [1.25] For goodness sake, the source code and build instructions are published so that people can replicate it. These ideas are not like Caleb Harper's claims of high productivity versions of existing processes. They're fresh formulations of concepts one might not ordinarily have had the notion and resources to combine. Just look at Hiroshi Ishii's work! [1.5] That stuff is not hard to do once you've seen it done once- but try to be the originator of some of that stuff. That's where the magic is!

Take a look at my pal Brian Whitman's work [2] which was the basis of Echo Nest and eventually Spotify's recommendation engines. These algorithms are published at conferences and in journals so anyone can go in and replicate them. Brian's work isn't remarkable because it's so unbelievable it can hardly be true - it's remarkable because it dares to combine machine learning with signal processing and social media. These were all new ideas at the time and and it was up in the air whether they could work. Now they're the bread and butter of many peoples' commercial and personal activities. Anyone saying these demos are rigged is revealing their own shallowing understanding of what takes place there.

I don't know much about how the culture of the lab changed after I left and Ito became the directory almost immediately after... I do know while I was there, it was actually a bit scrappy. The original "shop" in 2004 was...a 10x20 room with a single laser cutter, single waterjet cutter, a drill press, a Bridgeport-like mill and a CNC lathe. There were tools hanging over a tattered wooden workbench. When the second building was constructed around 2008(?), shop size expanded about 10x. It went from a four floor building to 6 story building with maybe 8x the space. Ito was a kind of cult figure. I felt out of the loop bc ppl talked about him like an angel but couldn't explain to me what he'd done.

[1] https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~saul/PhD/index.html

[1.25] https://web.archive.org/web/20100627183050/http://web.media....

[1.5] https://www.media.mit.edu/people/ishii/projects/

[2] https://alumni.media.mit.edu/~bwhitman/

You just perfectly described the problem with many universities nowadays. The way to advance your career in academia is to build a shiny new building and kick off an initiative or institute or something real you can put on your resume.

We have a lot of shiny new half empty buildings in all the colleges, and a lot of very well paid "administrators" trying to get their name on some project. Tuition and fundraising demands are skyrocketing decade after decade and there is very little to show in real benefits for students or researchers.

Compare the over-the-top media hype around the announcement of OLPC with the overpriced, underpowered netbooks they ultimately shipped.

1. This has nothing to do with whether demos where rigged or not.

2. OLPC is an education program, not a hardware program. netbooks don't have the educational software, the user-editable OS, etc. that netbooks had.

2.5 The netbooks came out after the OLPC's XO-1. They were a response to it. [0]

3. If you want to talk about hardware power, the Asus EEE had the 630 MHz Intel Celeron processor [1] where the XO-1 had the Geode LX700 [2] running at 667 MHz [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO

4. The original Asus EEE netbook retailed for around $300, costlier than XO-1's $200. [4][2]

[0][1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLPC_XO

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geode_(processor)

[4] https://gigaom.com/2008/09/01/choosing-a-netbook-a-guide/

So maybe there was hype and maybe it was deserved because it was cheaper, faster, and earlier than the netbook and because it included an educational curriculum?

And your claim of rigged demos beyond this Caleb Harper dingbat remains standing on nothing but a piece of dirt.

You're correct that the OLPC came before and spawned the whole netbook thing.

Also, the OLPC's hybrid monochrome/color display that Mary Lou Jepsen designed was truly innovative, power saving, easily manufacturable, green electronics, and it was even quite efficient and crisply legible and under direct sunlight (requiring no backlight for the high resolution 200 dpi reflective grayscale LCD pixels, which could stay on while the CPU was asleep).

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

She's written honestly about the Epstein situation, too:

https://medium.com/@maryloujepsen

John Perry Barlow typing away on his OLPC:

https://imgur.com/gallery/ogE9y

Here's an excerpt from a technical summary I wrote up in November 2008 about the OLPC display, and the problems and successes of the project:

https://donhopkins.com/home/documents/OLPC-Notes.txt

[...]

    + Display

      + Designed by Mary Lou Jepsen.
      + 1200x900, 200 dpi, 6x4 inch (152.4x101.6 mm), 6 bits (262k colors).
      + Pixel size 0.127 mm, about 1 arc minute. 
      + You can always see 200 dpi grayscale, even in direct sunlight. 
        (reflective layer)
      + You can get color from the LED backlight. 
      + Colors wash out as the sunlight gets brighter.
      + The backlight uses power (though not nearly as much as cold cathode
        fluorescent backlight).
      + You can turn the backlight down or off to conserve power. 
      + Turning off the backlight tells screen to give slightly higher 
        resolution, to make reading comfortable. 

      + Display Design Goals: 
        + Maximize the number hours of ebook reading.
        + Minimize the power consumption.
        + Maximize the resolution and readability.
        + Mesh with how human perception works.
        + Display sharp high quality text, that's easy on the eyes 
          during the day (reflective) and night (backlight).

      + Critical design innovations:
        + Remove the subtractive color filters that absorb 85% of the light.
        + Replace them with plastic diffraction gratings and lenses, 
          stamped like DVDs. 
        + Much brighter display for a given amount of backlight.
        + Can be manufactured with existing technologies and processes. 
        + Uses efficient environmentally friendly LEDs,
          instead of fragile, expensive, high voltage, cold cathode 
          fluorescent lamp backlights.

      + Combination of two separate screens: sharing an LCD glass. 
      + One normal backlit screen.
      + Another normal reflective screen. 
      + LCD is 1200x900 square grid, with 64 gray levels (6 bits).
      + Off pixels transparent, on pixels opaque. 

      + Backlit screen shines through a color filter on the 1200x900 grid. 
      + Filter gives each pixel just one color: red, green, blue. 
      + Individual grayscale pixels behave like sub-pixels of a normal 
        backlit display. 

      + Reflective screen has reflector behind LCD grid. 
      + Room light passes through grayscale LCD and bounces off of back
        reflector. 
      + 1200x900 pixels depending on ambient outside light to display. 

      + The light the user sees comes from both sources (reflected outside 
        light plus filtered backlight).
      + Color filters use fresnel prisms to pass most light, instead of 
        color filters that absorb most light, wasting less energy. 

      + The amount of color and perceived resolution depends on backlight
        brightness and outside light level. 
      + The ambient light level of the room changes the perceived 
        resolution of the display.
      + In direct sunlight you see the reflective screen (exactly 1200x900, 
        200 dpi),
      + In a dark room you see the backlit screen (approx. 800x600 
        perceived, 133 dpi), 
      + In between you see both (approx. 1024x768 perceived).
      + The "official story" is "1200x900 mono resolution, 
        693x520 color resolution". 

      + Screen layers:
        + LED backlight.
        + 1200x900 grid of color filters (fresnel prisms).
        + Semi-reflective layer.
        + 1200x900 LCD.
        + Each pixel has a single color behind it.
        + Colors are arranged in a diagonal pattern.
        + Each pixel has:
          + Fixed hue (r, g or b).
          + 6 bits (64 gray levels) of luminance.
          + Chrominance depends on relative strength of room light 
            to backlight.

      + DCON screen driver chip
        + The screen can stay on while the processor is turned off. 
        + Automatically interpolates ("swizzles") lower resolution color 
          pixels, so the unusual screen format is invisible to software. 
        + Looks just like a regular 1200x900 color framebuffer to software. 
        + DCON has different modes:
          + Monochrome.
          + Color swizzled antialiased.
          + Color swizzled not antialiased.
          + Video pass through.

      + Power saving techniques
        + Uses low power LEDs instead of high voltage cold cathode 
          fluorescent backlights. 
        + Turns off processor while leaving the screen and wireless 
          network on. 
        + Uses fresnel prisms to split most white light into primary 
          colors, instead of color filters to throw away most light. 
        + Turn down refresh rate.
        + Dynamically turn off sections of the screen.

    + Green Electronics

      + Order of magnitude less power consumption. 
      + Designed to use as many environmentally friendly components 
        as possible. 
      + Fully compliant with EU's Restriction of Hazardous Substances 
        Directive (RoHS). 
      + One of eight laptops to receive EPEAT's Gold rating for 
        environmental performance.

[...]

      + Successes
        + Two good things have happened to the project in the broader sense:

        1) Spawned this whole netbook thing. 
           + Nobody was doing that before.
           + Now 15 different major companies are doing the same thing. 
           + Finally people are exploring the low cost low power end 
             of the laptop spectrum. 
           + OLPC is still unique in that it was ruggedly designed to be
             dropped and survive. 
           + Other companies have not figured that out yet, and are still
             making cheap low quality laptops.

        2) The free software community is widely in favor of the project. 
           The deal with Microsoft got bad press, and most people in the
           free software community mistakenly think the free software part
           is over, and OLPC is now shipping laptops with Windows. 
           But actually they are not.

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