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Comment by gyomu | Hacker News Reader

Great post, as a fan of Gwern and Nelson I wonder how I missed it (and how I didn’t get an invite to the party :’)

The “too genius, too early” is a common trope in the tech industry, but it rarely stands scrutiny. When you inspect the claim up close you almost inevitably find out a variation of that “bad design/solves a problem no one really has/does not create the virtuous cycles needed for success”.

But as an inventor it might be easier for one’s ego to tell yourself “i was just ahead of my time” than “my judgement was completely off”.

If you’re an inventor of any kind, the “try lots of small things, see which ones seem to stick, narrow down on those” approach seems preferable to “commit your entire identity to one big thing”, but there is a certain siren song to the latter.

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I went down a rabbit hole circa 2015 sketching out a system which was going to solve the language + world model problem which of course only needed to be partially implemented to solve a specific family of problems. In a broad sense think Palantir but with 20x the TAM because it is also an application builder.

I studied Xanadu a lot for this analysis because the system would need huge amounts of annotated text so it was requirement that "any" document could be marked up with commentary or structured markup turning the "explainable" idea bidirectionally so that humans could explain to the system what and why it is and the system could "talk back" in the same "language". Practically "any" reduced to HTML + PDF.

Transclusion was important to the vision because if, say, constants in a source code file came out of a standards document the link between the two ought to be preserved.

I can't say the internals would have looked like Xanadu at all and there wouldn't have been those micropayments.

> But as an inventor it might be easier for one’s ego to tell yourself “i was just ahead of my time” than “my judgement was completely off”.

This has more to do with the economy than ego. When one's ability to eat and have shelter relies on "inventing" the inventor will invent a new wheel to sell to a tribe that's pre-wheel.

This no longer works as well in software given the number of people who code, and the various forms of automation (AI or design tool that emits code, etc) to assist those who do not.

No pulling the wool with a fancy abstraction alone. It's just math relative to a matrix of desirable values loaded in memory.

The normal progression of technology coupled to economic models written down by long dead who were too busy enslaving people to invent indoor plumbing.

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