Thread by @IntuitMachine

Is it not strange that for some, the significant events of history occurred in a virtual world? I actually wasn't aware of this posting, rather, I was aware when Linux was announced by Torvalds (which came 15 days later).

https://twitter.com/MIT_CSAIL/status/1423675242250125314

Social networking was primarily on Gopher at that time. Perhaps the only reason I was interested in Linus announcement was that I was taking an OS course at that time and we were playing around with Minix. I never was an OS aficionado though.

I left university shortly after and the corporate world. There I was actually cut off from the goings-on in the internet for about a year. It was only when I joined IBM did I got exposed to the WWW.

At IBM at that time, you would log into a mainframe machine to access the internet. A lot of IBM work revolved around SGML (precursor to HTML). So there was interest in transitioning what they learned to this new WWW.

The NCSA Mosaic browser was available in beta form 2 years after the announcement. At that time, beta products were not taken seriously. The browser was subsequently followed by Java and Javascript.

I created a javascript version of the visual basic app that we created for our product. That shocked the entire organization. However, javascript was buggy as hell, so my creation never made it in production. It was a concept that was at least a decade before its time.

At that time, a lot of the crazy things you could do with javascript were done by kids (many were still in high school). There was a lot of trial and error and you really had no idea as to what would or would not work. A lot of those hackers are middle-aged men now.

Java however took over most of application development. It was a much richer and consistent environment than C++. We were all so fascinated as to how Java was able to run in the browser. But Java didn't take off in the browser, it took off in serverside applications.

This is of course very strange because the original idea of Java was to run on any platform. C++ programmers however recognized that Java had other features that made it valuable in the serverside context.

My software engineering career ended with Java. In the last decade there have been many alternative languages that were introduced with a similarly rich ecosystem. It's a ton more diverse today and expertise is spread thinly across too many ecosystems.

In the old days, there was a lot less to focus on. There were very few mature platforms. The emerging ones were extremely unstable or unusable in the context they were designed for. If you were an uncompromising engineer, you would have never built on these emerging platforms.

It was only the people with faith that these new technologies were going to lead to a paradigm change that reaped the benefits. If you were there at that time, you know that the browser and javascript were just toys and very far from being industrial grade.

So it really was vision and faith that pushed people to the current heights that the WWW has reached. History also keeps repeating itself. The pioneering stuff is always not something you can build any serious product out of. It is so easy to criticize the new stuff.

I was there when they criticized HTML. I was there were they were criticizing packet based TCP/IP versus the switched network of telco. I was there when they were comparing the performance of C++ with Java. I was there when Javascript was a tool that only high school kids love.

At the edge of innovation, the stuff looks like toys. The lesson learned here for anyone who prioritizes innovation rather than getting things done is that the stuff that can very easily be intellectually torn down is in fact the stuff that'll change the world.

The biggest mistake in the world is to buy into a reasoned and rational argument as to why a certain technology is not ready for prime-time and will never be. It is a historical fact that every technology that dominates the world today had critics in droves tearing them down.

The problem with the critics is that they base their arguments based on the paradigms of the past. They fail to recognize the paradigm shift that is occurring. I've been there also at the losing end many times.

Javascript is one of those technologies that I've never gotten the hang of. Yeah, I've looked into Angular and React. Yes, you can create nice nifty UIs with them. But I've always felt that they were gratuitously complicated. I still think that nobody can maintain this stuff!

But maybe perhaps, UIs in the future aren't stuff that's maintained by humans. The entire UI paradigm is broken because UIX designers focus too much on the wrong things. Style isn't as important as utility.

But I digress. The greatest thing since sliced-bread that has come out is recently is deep learning. Yes, it's got all sorts of warts and isn't as robust as it need be. But that's the same with any new emerging technology. What did Gandhi say?

New paradigms appear to look like a joke until instantly it's just the winner and it's everywhere! But what is different now is that the leading giant companies are not completely clueless about paradigm shifts.

It's not the high-schoolers that are tinkering in the basement. It's the PhDs with ginormous amounts of computing power that are doing the tinkering. This stuff, when it hits the streets, hits people who haven't got the memo like a ton of bricks.

It's kind of like when you get the newest version of your favorite app. The new features are too overwhelming to be absorbed in a single sitting. There's stuff being created today that most people cannot comprehend for a long time when released.

Honestly, I think GPT-3 is one of these things. Yes, it has all its warts that can easily be exposed. It surprisingly has a ton of critics too. But this kind of technology is going to change the world in a manner faster than anyone can predict.

Time flies when you are in a pandemic. Wasn't GPT-3 made available in 2020? Anyway, I actually made a mistake about it a year ago. It's the same mistake that those who criticized the web, tcp/ip etc. I focused on warts and not the potential paradigm shift.

I concluded that it was not ready for prime-time. Wrong!!! The web browser wasn't close to prime time when it was announced. It took several years for Mosaic to get out of beta. Let's not make the same mistake again.

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