Post 2679310 by natecull@mastodon.social
(DIR) More posts by natecull@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #2650272 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-04T23:44:57Z
2 likes, 3 repeats
'User agent' is a great idea that has been weirdly perverted.Nobody these days (even highly technical people) has a user agent. (Maybe @drwho does.)A user agent is a piece of software controlled by the *user*, that performs the automatic tasks the *user* has instructed it to. It communicates with other user agents, automatically, on the user's behalf.Today, the term 'user agent' means 'long, misleading browser-lineage-identification string'. It identifies one of ~3 corporations.
(DIR) Post #2650508 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-04T23:47:32Z
0 likes, 5 repeats
Imagine if we actually *had* user agents.Like, imagine if our computers were doing things we wanted them to do, automatically, on the network. And, it was our computers doing these things, instead of a rental service like ifttt or google alerts that's selling info on the back end. Imagine if they stopped doing things when we told them to stop.Imagine if non-technical users had this too.
(DIR) Post #2650564 by 361.xj9@social.sunshinegardens.org
2019-01-04T23:57:47.574530Z
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@enkiv2 that’s the planhttps://heropunch.io/Grid
(DIR) Post #2651505 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-04T23:48:44Z
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'User agent' is basically 'daemon, but controlled by an end user'. And, it's a thing we really need & don't have.
(DIR) Post #2651506 by alcinnz@floss.social
2019-01-05T00:28:00Z
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@enkiv2 Well if we can convince webdevs to describe how they want their pages presented rather than dictate (ie move away away from JavaScript to declarative alternatives), I can make one. In fact I already am in order to help convince those webdevs to do so!
(DIR) Post #2651521 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-04T23:50:19Z
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@enkiv2 I remember I think it was the early 1990s, lots of talk about 'software agents'. They were sort of the buzzword term, the 'neural networks' of that decade.I don't really understand even now what lab that hype came from, and why it went away?
(DIR) Post #2651522 by brennen@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T00:02:48Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 i've never really found the "software agents" line of thinking very compelling, or at least it hasn't been very compellingly _presented_. it always felt like hype in much the way that VR or that weird brief period when XML was going to save the world did.on the other hand, if the idea is just that people should own and control computers which do things with their data in their interests, well, that sure does sound like a pleasant contrast to the status quo.
(DIR) Post #2651523 by erosdiscordia@radical.town
2019-01-05T00:09:16Z
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@brennen I can say that even the term "software agent" sounds sort of dull, uninterestingly hands-off, and like something the average person wouldn't think they needed or was qualified to mess with.Exactly the opposite of the hands-on, approachable, and self-ownership feel that future tech stuff needs to have.Meaning no offense. @natecull @enkiv2
(DIR) Post #2651524 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T00:12:05Z
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@erosdiscordia @brennen @enkiv2 Well, on the one hand, part of the 'software agent' fuss was sort of linked with, um, personal organizers, early handhelds, the idea of an 'electronic butler/secretary' and so there WAS quite a bit of that 'hands-on, approachable' hype about it? You'd have a personal 'Agent' who would be a sort of pseudo-personality in your computer? But then the other side of the 'software agents' thing was... mobile code, that you'd transmit? I guess 'cloud server' ate that?
(DIR) Post #2651525 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T00:14:35Z
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@erosdiscordia @brennen @enkiv2 and then the success of the 'search enginet' model, and Google with it, sort of led to the idea of the 'agent' being a personalised service provided by Extremely Large Corporations rather than an actual thing you'd own and controlso the 'agent' got replaced by the idea of 'portal', then 'portal' as a buzzword got replaced by 'app' after the iPhone got big and mobile became the interface to the same Extremely Large Corporation pretending to be your tiny friend
(DIR) Post #2651916 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-05T00:46:15Z
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@natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen @enkiv2 part of the issue is that "software agents" was used in the late 90s to mean a lot of different peripherally related things… mobile code, filtering rules, ifttt-type triggers, and I think even at one point program trading (of securities)
(DIR) Post #2651968 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T00:48:22Z
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@kragen @natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen I think they really are all user agents, because user agent is a term not specific to function.Anything that is automated but also controlled by a non-technical end user is a user agent.So the promise is that you can *use* a team of interacting user agents, and each one of them would do a different specific thing, in response perhaps to a user agent whose job was coordinating plans with the user.
(DIR) Post #2651990 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T00:49:03Z
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@kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen @enkiv2 oh, definitely!That's part of the weirdness around the term. It got generalised to the point where it meant 'any program doing anything' and at that point.... why even use it?
(DIR) Post #2652035 by drwho@hackers.town
2019-01-05T00:34:03Z
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@erosdiscordia @brennen @natecull @enkiv2 It does. Marketing's a big part of it. It has to be spun in such a way that people want to find uses for it. In a large part, names of products have been used to refer to what we'd think of as software agents (Alexa, Cortana).Also, pop culture needed to be infected with this meme. _Iron Man_ brought us JARVIS, and now everybody wants a JARVIS of their own. Or a Cortana. Or an Einstein.
(DIR) Post #2652036 by erosdiscordia@radical.town
2019-01-05T00:36:25Z
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@drwho Here's a question -- in your opinion, do you think it would be better to use, or to get away from using, names for them? Like, instead of treating them as AIs/robot pals, to push the idea that it's an extension of the user's self?@brennen @natecull @enkiv2
(DIR) Post #2652532 by drwho@hackers.town
2019-01-05T00:36:02Z
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@natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen @enkiv2 How people think of something complex (like software agents) is to a large extent controlled by how they /can/ think of them. The cultural referent has to be there first, the framework for understanding what a thing is and what a thing can be.
(DIR) Post #2652534 by erosdiscordia@radical.town
2019-01-05T00:41:19Z
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@drwho Hmmm. Maybe they could be presented as assistants/agents, or also as a type of power that a user has.@natecull @brennen @enkiv2
(DIR) Post #2652535 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T00:43:08Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@erosdiscordia @drwho @natecull @brennen I think the most important thing about them is that they keep on doing things on the user's behalf when the user isn't there. This is something that end users aren't used to: that they can *control* an automated process.
(DIR) Post #2652536 by drwho@hackers.town
2019-01-05T00:56:06Z
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@enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @natecull @brennen Very true. Most users get really frustrated at automated processes because they tend to get in the way at the worst times, like antivirus scans in the middle of a game. That's a power dynamic issue.
(DIR) Post #2654808 by beadsland@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T00:19:09Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 That hype, I believe, was tied up in the hype of the "semantic web".The idea of agents that could do things on our behalf kinda went hand-in-hand with the idea of information about things that could be done with and to being encoded and addressable in machine-readable (and machine-comprehensible) form.In that sense, it was the latest twist on "neural networks"—that is, the promise of AI based on an naive idea of what it is for an agent to _know_ things.Cue Hubert Dreyfus.
(DIR) Post #2654809 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T00:22:44Z
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@beadsland @enkiv2 The Semantic Web hasn't entirely died. Wikipedia / Wikidata / the Linked Data community still have semantic concepts under the hood. also the corporate back end of Big Data analysis is very semantic-y. 'The social graph,' etc.But I think the Semantic Web vision was extremely incompatible with the desires of 1) large corporations and 2) the advertising industry, both of which wanted to control and exploit the user not empower them.
(DIR) Post #2654810 by sophieactual@occult.camp
2019-01-05T00:43:47Z
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@natecull @beadsland @enkiv2 Totally.Would also add on the semantic web front that the early syntaxes were appalling.Unstitching the whole RDF debacle, for example, to try to find a usable namespace structure, was only ever self-flagellation.Always liked where Dublin Core was heading, but then WHATWG screwed with profiles and people started growing old and tired of the constant battle with narcissism.
(DIR) Post #2654811 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T00:47:54Z
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@sophieactual @beadsland @enkiv2 hmm, what's your opinion of WHATWG?I haven't really paid attention myself. I don't find much in the way of the 'microsyntaxes' hype very interesting (put data on top of HTML? just... why??? put it on JSON if you have to put it on something) but mostly I just don't understand what problems they are trying to solve.
(DIR) Post #2654812 by sophieactual@occult.camp
2019-01-05T01:13:25Z
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@natecull @beadsland @enkiv2 Very opinionated about WHATWG, feel that hixie was going in the right direction at Opera, and maybe because of that had a huge impact but the whole org ended up too far on the backward compatible, attempt to parse anything, side of the HTML/XML wars.As for the microdata, microformat trash fire that microsyntaxes are genetically related to, feel they were only ever, and still are, too closely tied to market-ownership.
(DIR) Post #2654813 by sophieactual@occult.camp
2019-01-05T01:36:45Z
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@natecull @beadsland @enkiv2 just to make our position on the HTML/XML wars clear....
(DIR) Post #2655488 by alcinnz@floss.social
2019-01-05T02:50:32Z
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@enkiv2 @drwho Oh did I tell you how there's a large chunk of code in WebKitGTK spoofing those user-agent identifiers in it's communication with certain dominant (usually Google-owned) websites?
(DIR) Post #2659865 by drwho@hackers.town
2019-01-05T05:13:16Z
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@alcinnz @enkiv2 I didn't know that. I don't think I'm surprised, though. There are sites that block "non-standard" user-agents for bizarre reasons.
(DIR) Post #2665967 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T00:31:35Z
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@erosdiscordia @brennen @natecull I like the term 'software agent' because it's descriptive: it's an agent (your agent, as a user) who is a piece of software.It immediately makes me think of @drwho's exocortex implementation: a bunch of bots, each performing a specific function automatically, communicating with each other and with remote systems in order to get information or to perform tasks given to them by the user, in ways that the user has specifically configured.
(DIR) Post #2665968 by erosdiscordia@radical.town
2019-01-05T00:34:24Z
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@enkiv2 It's a fantastic idea, and there's nothing objectively wrong with the term. It's accurate. I'm just thinking that it might not catch on, if "catching on" was even important. I think at this point, with apps and Alexa, you'd be hard-pressed to differentiate the idea to the public without a more sparkly term.@brennen @natecull @drwho
(DIR) Post #2665969 by drwho@hackers.town
2019-01-05T00:38:04Z
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@erosdiscordia @enkiv2 @brennen @natecull It already has caught on, just not in the way we thought it would. People didn't want "software agents" because they couldn't wrap their heads around them. They had no frame of reference.But JARVIS? That's something they understand.Don't sell the tech, sell the cultural framework to intuitively understand the tech.
(DIR) Post #2665970 by brennen@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T00:42:42Z
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@drwho @erosdiscordia @enkiv2 @natecull the problem here is JARVIS is pretty sweet running on your personal badass mech or whatever (where "whatever" could maybe even be a democratically controlled and accountable shared resource!), and power-structure-wise a total nightmare running on somebody else's datacenter, and the distinction is largely illegible to everyone in the end user population.i'm not sure how to do anything about that.
(DIR) Post #2665971 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T00:45:12Z
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@brennen @drwho @erosdiscordia @natecull This is definitely a problem, but a solvable one.There's no particular reason an Alexa-type system *needs* to run on Amazon hardware, or *needs* to be connected to services running somewhere else.Stick a raspberry pi in a tube, run sphinx + flite for speech recognition & speech synthesis, have a non-centrally-controlled repo of 'skills', make it so it can do lots of things without even being hooked up to the internet.
(DIR) Post #2665972 by drwho@hackers.town
2019-01-05T00:56:45Z
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@enkiv2 @brennen @erosdiscordia @natecull That's Mycroft in a nutshell:https://mycroft.ai/https://github.com/MycroftAI/mycroft-core
(DIR) Post #2674819 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T00:58:01Z
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@drwho @brennen @erosdiscordia @natecull Yup. Mycroft is the most visible one I'm aware of (and irrationally I'm mad at it for taking the name of one of my bigger projects & being more famous). Seems like nobody's shipping mycroft units to end users in bulk or anything.
(DIR) Post #2674820 by drwho@hackers.town
2019-01-05T01:01:00Z
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@enkiv2 @brennen @erosdiscordia @natecull The Mycroft v2 hardware units are scheduled for delivery by this summer. I didn't get a v1 unit but I did get access to the source code.They're trying to grow to the point where you can basically click an installed and get your own Mycroft with as little friction as possible. It's going to take a while to get here, though.What was your project?
(DIR) Post #2674821 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T01:04:45Z
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@drwho My project was a prolog-inspired language that used implicit parallelization, memoization of results, and a cluster of nodes if available.It also supported expressing composite truth values -- basically, a fuzzy truth value and a fuzzy confidence value in a tuple.End goal was to put it on cheap wifi throwies (ex., espxx micros) and have a system that could join a cluster based on detecting a mesh network.
(DIR) Post #2678745 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T00:53:26Z
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@natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Something that got lost in translation is that user agents should be communicating with each other. I think if we had a "user agent communication standard", even if we just renamed jabber, it would be less of an issue.Download a new user agent from 'inhuman resources' or 'central casting' to do a particular job & it checks in with your assistant agent to plug into your planner system, whatever.
(DIR) Post #2678746 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-05T19:08:46Z
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@enkiv2 @natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen This is wrong, historically speaking. AFAIK the origin of the term "user agent" is in email; it's in e.g. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1341 from 1992. Also in POP3 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1081 from 1988. In hat context there was definitely not the idea that one user would usually have several agents or that the agents would talk to each other directly. In 1982 RFC 822 doesn't say "user agent" and uses "agent" in an incompatible way.
(DIR) Post #2678839 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T19:13:36Z
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@kragen @natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen That chronology can't be right. The term 'user agent' was used in science fiction in this way in the mid 80s, at the latest.I'll take a look, but I've got a sneaking suspicion that the idea of a user agent is about as old as the idea of the filter bubble (the 'Daily Me' proposed at Negroponte's lab in the late 70s) or the Internet of Things ('Ubiquitous Computing' at PARC around 1979).
(DIR) Post #2678929 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:14:13Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen 'Agent' has been a term of art in mail handling for a while, hasn't it? 'Mail User Agent' 'Message Transfer Agent' . Makes sense that HTTP inherited SMTP terminology.But where did that 'agent' terminology come from, I wonder? And when? Mid-1980s, I assume?
(DIR) Post #2678930 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-05T19:16:30Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @brennen Well, those RFCs suggest that it wasn't current in the Internet mail world in 1982, and in 1988 required explanation, so sometime between 1982 and 1988. I suspect they might be loanwords from OSI X.400.
(DIR) Post #2678971 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-05T19:18:14Z
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@enkiv2 @natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen The term "agent", I think, but I can't think of any examples of "user agent" from science fiction from that time. Maybe I'm just not well-read enough, though; I look forward to your citations!Certainly the *concept* of software agents, if not the term, is from the 70s or earlier, as you say.
(DIR) Post #2678986 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:17:24Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen As kragen said, RFC 822 (1982) uses the term agent:'AGENT (person, system or process)'which makes sense that it was an abstracted concept for 'person or system' in, I guess, DARPA systems thinking around then?
(DIR) Post #2678987 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-05T19:19:09Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @brennen Read it more carefully, though; it's talking about secretaries or people loaning you their terminals, not Rmail.
(DIR) Post #2679034 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:21:18Z
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@kragen @enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @brennen Person *or* program. << The Sender mailbox specification includes a word sequence which must correspond to a specific agent (i.e., a human user or a computer program) rather than a standard address. ... For example in the case of a shared login name, the name, by itself, would not be adequate. >>
(DIR) Post #2679056 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T19:21:56Z
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@natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Wikipedia is claiming that the concept of the software agent has its origin in the actor model (so, early 1970s). This makes sense: 'agent' and 'actor' share etymology, & 'agent' is a less misleading way to express 'one who performs actions' -- particularly 'one who acts on behalf of another'.Actor model has, inside it, the assumption that agents communicate with other agents.
(DIR) Post #2679057 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-05T19:22:38Z
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@enkiv2 @natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen That's probably a rogue edit by Carl before he got banned from Wikipedia for claiming everything cames from acors
(DIR) Post #2679306 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:23:01Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Note that 'Wikipedia' in this case is Carl Hewitt, who tends to spam references to his Actor model *everywhere* and annoys the editors by doing so.I would take all references to the Actor model as having priority with a grain of salt.
(DIR) Post #2679307 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:25:53Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen But here's another reference to 'agent' in RFC 822, suggesting it was in use in 1981 to mean 'automated computer system process'Not in the early-90s sense of the agent-hype phase, no. But presumably all terms originate somewhere.<< Oppen, D.C. and Dalal, Y.K. "The Clearinghouse: A Decentralized Agent for Locating Named Objects in a Distributed Environment," OPD-T8103. Xerox Office Products Division: Palo Alto, CA. (October 1981).
(DIR) Post #2679308 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:27:24Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen oh hey Bitsavers !http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/OPD-T8103_The_Clearinghouse.pdf
(DIR) Post #2679309 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:28:38Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen << Binding is an important architectural component of a distributed system, and the clearinghouse serves the role of "glue" that binds together the many loosely-coupled, network·visible objects. >>huh is that why Novell Netware always called its 'registry' equivalent 'the bindery'? Always thought that was a weird name.
(DIR) Post #2679310 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:32:58Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen But I assume that 'agent' must have been a term in use in network thinking in military/science thinking in 1981 to mean 'anything that acts on the system', ie a person, an organisation, an automated system.A 'software agent' would then specifically be an agent which was software, so, not hardware and not a person. Talk of *software* agents then would have arisen in a later environment where software was more decoupled from hardware.
(DIR) Post #2679336 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T19:35:37Z
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@natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen There are hits for both 'software agent' and 'user agent' in literature from before 1980, though (as you'd expect) not many:
(DIR) Post #2679502 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T19:40:17Z
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@natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen From:Rule-directed Interactive Transaction Agents: An Approach to Knowledge Acquisition : a Report Prepared for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency by Donald Arthur Waterman, 1978:"A user agent is a program that can act as an interface between the user and [...]"https://books.google.com/books?id=3obsAAAAMAAJ&q=%22user+agent%22&dq=%22user+agent%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjngof3sdffAhXwhOAKHQaTCtkQ6AEILjAB
(DIR) Post #2679503 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:42:10Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Makes sense! DARPA terminology and framing of the problem would always precede use of the term in a DARPA product (eg SMTP)So 'user agent' in 1978, but as a broader clas of 'transaction agent'?I guess 'transaction' was a very common term then for 'activity on a computer system'. On-Line Transaction Processing.
(DIR) Post #2679522 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:43:14Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen It's interesting that we've moved from 'user agent' to 'user INTERFACE', a subtle shift that downgrades the abilities of the agent to just... something like a control panel for a machine.
(DIR) Post #2680270 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:45:28Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen It's interesting that we've moved from 'user agent' to 'user INTERFACE', a subtle shift that downgrades the abilities of the agent to just... something like a control panel for a machine.Though an app today is still a kind of user agent (has credentials to do things on the user's behalf) but we don't tend to use that term...
(DIR) Post #2680271 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T19:47:50Z
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@natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen It's too bad I can't tell what this book is, because it looks like a fascinating read & a clear example of the 90s use of 'user agent'.https://books.google.com/books?id=IGsqAAAAMAAJ&q=%22user+agent%22&dq=%22user+agent%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjngof3sdffAhXwhOAKHQaTCtkQ6AEIVzAJIt may not be 1977 (just like the title probably isn't "P") but it's clearly pre-90s & probably pre-80s based on the typeface.
(DIR) Post #2680272 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:50:36Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen "A user agent is a relatively small program that can reside in a user's terminal (or in a portion of a remote timesharing system) to act as an interface between the user and..."So also 'user interface' being born around here.C-3P0 in Star Wars ("human-cyborg relations") I think is an example of a reflection in art of what was being actively discussed around then.The idea that computers would be so complex we'd need other computers to talk to them.
(DIR) Post #2680600 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T19:51:26Z
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@natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Correction: 'P' appears to be a corrupted duplicate copy of "Exemplary Programming in RITA" by Waterman again.Looks like Waterman at RAND either invented or popularized the idea of a user agent as a software agent sitting between the user & other 'agent'-style programs, in the mid-70s.https://books.google.com/books?id=UJXsAAAAMAAJ&q=%22user+agent%22&dq=%22user+agent%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjkqvb4s9ffAhWwmuAKHRHKBAg4ChDoAQgpMAA
(DIR) Post #2680601 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:54:50Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen ha, Waterman also wrote a 1986 'Guide to Expert Systems' so he was in on all the buzzword loops
(DIR) Post #2680602 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T19:57:20Z
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@natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Well, there's a sensible connection here.His model of a user agent is clearly a planner system with an ontology about how other agents work -- like an expert system for writing shell scripts.(In fact, I think that's the main part of 'user agent' that we're missing: what we call user agents are not expert systems anymore, so they don't do anything more than provide new handles for existing functions.)
(DIR) Post #2680603 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T19:59:17Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Right!It appears that around the same time and place and set of people who were building out Internet email, this 'agent' thinking was taking shape.Some of it maybe turned into 'object' thinking and just changed names...... or what's now called Service Oriented Architecture?But some of it maybe got lost in, I dunno, the AI Winter at the end of the 80s or something?
(DIR) Post #2680604 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T20:00:24Z
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@natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen That'd be my guess.I found some actual PDFs though:https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2005/R1809.pdfhttps://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1976/5084/00/50840501.pdfhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020737378800285
(DIR) Post #2680605 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T20:02:51Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Very cool!Production systems in 1978, hmm. I think that's where expert systems developed from? Which would explain Waterson being into both.
(DIR) Post #2680606 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T20:12:25Z
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@natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen I always thought that the idea of expert systems developed naturally out of work on planners like prolog, planner, & shrdlu. What is an expert system but a planner with rules designed to model an expert's thinking? -- and we have some of these way back in the 60s with medical expert systems like CASNET & DENDRAL.
(DIR) Post #2680607 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T20:12:57Z
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@natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen There's definitely a canon of expert system hype though, & I wouldn't be surprised if some of it was very strongly influenced by RAND.
(DIR) Post #2680608 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T20:21:37Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen This is where I find The Two Faces of Tomorrow fascinating because of its glimpse into DARPA culture circa 1979. What the then-enthroned AI experts saw as the obvious next phase of the Internet, which was all going to be planners, 'parallel logic programming', semi-autonomous goal-directed agents scheduling large projects...... and maybe a lot of that exists still, in corporate logistics, but it didn't kind of become the 'face' of the Internet.
(DIR) Post #2680609 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T20:25:09Z
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@natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen It's one of the many paths I wish the internet *had* taken, tbh.We don't have real hypertext. We don't have real personal computing. We don't have anti-hierarchical distributed computing of *any* kind. And, nobody does logic programming anymore. All we've got is slightly more interactive television & slightly flashier timesharing.
(DIR) Post #2682279 by 9796.msmouse@s.dc919.org
2019-01-05T20:36:07Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/agent defines agent as(2) a person or thing that takes an active role or produces a specified effect.which seems to fit the plain language here...
(DIR) Post #2682280 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T20:41:53Z
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@msmouse @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Correct. But there was a certain very specific DARPA culture which seemed to be very interested in what it meant for a program to be an agent in a network of interconnected computers, to the point that when SMTP was developed (early through late 1980s) the 'agent' terminology is used everywhere.In the same way that, say, 'endpoint' is the current buzzword du jour in antivirus.Buzzwords usually reflect some fashionable systemic theory.
(DIR) Post #2682281 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T20:44:31Z
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@msmouse @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Eg you have one group talking about 'agents'. Another talking about 'objects'. Another about 'daemon processes'. Another about 'clients and servers'. Another, slightly later, about 'components'All of these subtly different terms reflect different theoretical backgrounds and sometimes the differences in viewpoint and assumptions are important.
(DIR) Post #2685947 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T20:48:51Z
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@natecull @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Right. Even the word choice, outside of the specific technical context, illuminates assumptions & tendencies.For instance, 'agent' foregrounds the autonomy & the idea of an 'intelligent agent' becomes obvious -- while objects are a much more mechanical frame. Agent & object feel less hierarchical than client & server -- it's natural to expect a difference between client & server in terms of role or power relationship.
(DIR) Post #2685948 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T21:21:20Z
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@enkiv2 @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen 'Agent' makes sense when you're thinking from an overall networks or systems perspective (as many of these DARPA people were).I think the vision right from the beginning of DARPA was that there would be humans and machines cooperating across a vast series of linked organisations (ie: the US military-industrial complex) to achieve a goal (ie: to win the Cold War). All of these cooperating entities would be 'agents'.
(DIR) Post #2685949 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T21:22:41Z
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@natecull @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen And some of them would be secret ;)
(DIR) Post #2685950 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T21:28:23Z
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@enkiv2 @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Secret Mail Transfer ManSecret Mail Transfer ManThey've given you a fillterAnd taken away your spam
(DIR) Post #2685951 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T22:52:49Z
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@natecull @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen "We therefore view our initial RITA system as an intelligence analyst's workstation, and characteristics of this group (e.g., well-educated and requiring a variety of text manipulation tools and access to external information resources) have influenced our design decisions."From page 19
(DIR) Post #2685952 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T22:54:41Z
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@enkiv2 @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen ooooooooohfrankly I think designing personal computing tools as if they were for intelligence analysts would be greatsince basically if you have an internet connection in 2018 you are dealing with multiple information feeds many of which are probably disinformation from actual national intelligence agencies
(DIR) Post #2685953 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T22:58:30Z
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@natecull @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Absolutely.Other user bases we should focus more on: scholars, paralegals. (You know, folks who need to pick apart & quote other sources yet have citations. Folks who need to be able to read footnotes without losing their place or task-switching. Folks who need to compare different information streams to look for hidden similarities, collaboratively.)
(DIR) Post #2685954 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T23:05:50Z
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@enkiv2 @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen oh, you mentioned Minsky's Society of Mind earlier...<< The M System. Based on Minsky’s Society of Mind (SOM) theory (Minsky 1986), the M system (Riecken 1997) is designed to provide intelligent assistance in a broad range of tasks through the integration of different reasoning processes(societies of agents)>>"Software Agents", page 27
(DIR) Post #2685955 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T23:11:49Z
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@enkiv2 @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen << In the Virtual Meeting Room (VMR) application, participants collaborate using pen-based computers and a telephone.... M dynamically generates, ranks, and modifies simultaneous theories about what is going on in the VMR world. As a faithful implementation of SOM theory, M provides for an I/O system, a spreading activation semantic network (to implement Minsky’s K-lines/polynemes)...>>I feel like they missed 'be useful' here
(DIR) Post #2685956 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T23:16:04Z
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@enkiv2 @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Also on agents and OOP, yeeeeep. page 28:<<Agent-oriented programming (AOP) is a term that Shoham (1977) has proposed for the set of activities necessary to create software agents. What he means by ‘agent’ is “an entity whose state is viewed as consisting of mental components such as beliefs, capabilities, choices,and commitments.” >>
(DIR) Post #2685957 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T23:16:36Z
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@enkiv2 @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen << Agent-oriented programming can be thought of as a specialization of object-oriented programming approach, with constraints on what kinds of state-defining parameters, message types, and methods are appropriate. From this perspective, an agent is essentially “an object with an attitude.” >>
(DIR) Post #2685958 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T23:20:19Z
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@enkiv2 @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Yoav Shoham, "Agent Oriented Programming", 1991http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~imas/readings/shoham93.pdfI think '1977' must be a mistake though, he was only 21 then and hasn't apparently published anything before 1984. http://robotics.stanford.edu/~shoham/
(DIR) Post #2685960 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T23:48:43Z
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@enkiv2 @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Shoham's 'Agent Oriented Programming' as a restriction/subset of Object Oriented Programming is maybe a useful idea.We need *some* way of restricting method calls to actually doing what they say they will. Absent that, restricting them to exchanging transparent data structures (that can be checked by other systems for correctness/ non-evilness) seems required.
(DIR) Post #2738300 by 9796.msmouse@s.dc919.org
2019-01-06T16:37:00Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen I kinda figure that a lot of the best goals of it are 1) A Lot Harder than they thought and b) really hard on UI (for example modern "clean" UI is about the furthest thing from explaining as you can get) ... so I feel like a lot of it got brushed aside in favor of quick cheap software
(DIR) Post #2738301 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-07T15:28:12Z
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@msmouse @natecull @enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @brennen Not just cheap to write — also cheap to learn to use. Innovations that demand less of the adopter get adopted more easily.I think there may also be an aspect of naïve anthropomorphization in the 1970s vision of intelligent software agents — it was easier for a professor then with a secretary to imagine a robotic secretary than to imagine, say, shitposting, spam, otherkin, Bitcoin, Tor, Facebook, Tinder, and Twitter?
(DIR) Post #2738304 by drwho@hackers.town
2019-01-05T23:53:07Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Oh - here's a link to those notes I mentioned yesterday.https://drwho.virtadpt.net/files/HOPE_XI-constructing_exocortices.html#slide4
(DIR) Post #2738433 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-07T15:37:05Z
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@natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen I think the RFC-821/822 sense of "agent" is the thing you put in the MAIL FROM: field, i.e. where you want the bounces to go. It might be Nate or it might be Nate's secretary or it might be LISTSERV, but it won't be Eudora/Rmail/Elm/PINE/trn, which is the 1988 MIME sense of "user agent". The 1978 Waterman book looks like the modern sense of "user agent" and may be its origin; great scholarship, @enkiv2!
(DIR) Post #2738449 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T20:04:49Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen How many of our modern apps meet these criteria, I wonder?
(DIR) Post #2738450 by cadadr@mastodon.sdf.org
2019-01-05T22:02:22Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen So, I came across this via a boost. I think Emacs satisfies all of those to some extent. Sadly, though, one can't really fit *all* their computing into Emacs unless they live in a computational vacuum.
(DIR) Post #2738451 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T22:11:32Z
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@cadadr @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen My big problem with Emacs is that it is based on then-fashionable 1970s ideas of how we should interact with computers, and it completely ignores our existing real 1980s-2010s desktops and four decades of key/mouse conventions.There's gotta be a way to square that circle... surely?
(DIR) Post #2738452 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T22:13:01Z
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@cadadr @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen I mean just little things like the Ctrl and Alt key possibly being caught by your desktop OS and doing Very Bad Things if there's a collision between the OS and Emacs.That's just... something that really shouldn't happen in a modern piece of software that understands that it does not have 100% control of a text terminal.
(DIR) Post #2738453 by cadadr@mastodon.sdf.org
2019-01-05T23:04:31Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Key interference is theoretically a problem but often you don't encounter big clashes (a notorious one is Alt+Tab, which can be worked around by ESC TAB, also bound to C-M-i), possibly b/c Emacs devs trying to avoid them. My biggest problem is hitting C-q and the app closing, no warnings. It's horrible design to close app w/o confirmation, and the OS needs to ensure that.
(DIR) Post #2738454 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T23:07:53Z
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@cadadr @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen I really like the idea of a configurable anything-environment, but I just have never got the vibe from Emacs that it cares about me or my wants in the slightest.
(DIR) Post #2738455 by cadadr@mastodon.sdf.org
2019-01-05T23:19:34Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Yeah, it takes quite some work to make Emacs address your wants, but it is possible to make it do what you want, exactly. I would love to have an OS w/ a similar env, but a modern UX. Say rightclick the clock & edit/eval the source. Midclick and get its docs. Connect apps randomly. Eg when I mail someone, add some stats to a spreadsheet. In Emacs could do it w/ Rmail&Org.
(DIR) Post #2738501 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-07T15:40:32Z
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@cadadr @natecull @enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @brennen One of the things I've been thinking of for BubbleOS is a generalized OS-level undo facility that is capable of undoing "close app" actions without any special effort on the app's part; not sure if that's going to work out.
(DIR) Post #2738522 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T21:38:21Z
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@enkiv2 @msmouse @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen << Alan Kay, a longtime proponent of agent technology, provides a thumbnail sketch tracing the more recent roots of software agents:“The idea of an agent originated with John McCarthy in the mid-1950’s, and the term was coined by Oliver G. Selfridge a few years later, when they were both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology... >>
(DIR) Post #2738629 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-07T15:49:22Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @brennen Some of that is also mainstream today under other names: a browser layout engine is a planner, for example, and a spam filter, HFT trading engine, or ad server is a semi-autonomous goal-directed agent, though mostly not doing scheduling as such. The normal algorithms used in robotics for pointcloud coregistration are iterative optimization algorithms, too. I think this stuff is growing rapidly, just 4 decades late. :)
(DIR) Post #2738642 by er1n@social.mecanis.me
2019-01-05T20:24:43Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen i'm still surprised how big weird alt-history-of-computing dataflow programming is in corp logistics
(DIR) Post #2738643 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T20:28:27Z
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@er1n @natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Isn't it sort of natural? All the folks who are doing data flow programming now were getting consultations from Stafford Beer in the 70s (or wishing they were).
(DIR) Post #2738644 by popefucker@cybre.space
2019-01-05T20:29:30Z
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@enkiv2 @er1n @natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen isnt hadoop basically dataflow programming?
(DIR) Post #2738645 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-07T15:50:05Z
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@popefucker @enkiv2 @er1n @natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen Hadoop doesn't impose a programming paradigm on you, although Hadoop MapReduce does (and it isn't really dataflow)
(DIR) Post #2738655 by Shamar@mastodon.social
2019-01-05T20:09:27Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Interesting conversation.On #Plan9 based operating systems there are at least 2 user agents of note: the #plumber (for automation) and the #factotum (for authentication).http://man.cat-v.org/9front/4/plumberhttp://man.cat-v.org/9front/4/factotum
(DIR) Post #2738668 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-05T19:54:57Z
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@natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen Here's the email connection:The example user agent in the RITA documentation was for email.Looks like RITA was a general purpose system for building interactive autonomous agents that could communicate, & that this example influenced mail programs on platforms that weren't built around this model.https://books.google.com/books?id=fZTsAAAAMAAJ&q=%22user+agent%22&dq=%22user+agent%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjkqvb4s9ffAhWwmuAKHRHKBAg4ChDoAQhEMAY
(DIR) Post #2738681 by popefucker@cybre.space
2019-01-05T19:51:23Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen hahahaha"relatively small"browsers are the biggest pro grams around
(DIR) Post #2738682 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-07T15:52:08Z
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@popefucker @natecull @enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @brennen Browsers are humongous, but Linux is still bigger
(DIR) Post #2738747 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-07T15:55:18Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @brennen Also e.g. the CDC 6600 had small computers to let you talk to the big computer (I forget if they were called "peripheral processors" but that's what, e.g., the chip in the BeagleBoard Black calls them). The Cray-1 was designed with a similar idea, and of course the VT100 and all of DEC's later terminals were actually computers. Other companies did this too; e.g., the HP 3000 terminals had command-line editing and dynamically-allocated scrollback buffers.
(DIR) Post #2738749 by drwho@hackers.town
2019-01-05T19:42:46Z
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@natecull @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen It was proposed as an alternative to the word daemon, because it made some people uncomfortable.
(DIR) Post #2738801 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-07T15:59:12Z
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@natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen I should amend this toot so it doesn't mislead anyone else: downthread, @enkiv2 did in fact find a 1978 reference ("RITA", Waterman & Gillogly) showing "user agent" used to mean specifically this kind of intelligent rule-directed planning agent, and it looks like the circa-1988 adoption of the term for more limited email programs derived from this. So I was wrong!
(DIR) Post #2738907 by edheil@dice.camp
2019-01-07T16:05:15Z
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@cadadr @natecull @enkiv2 @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen re: "right click a thing and view/edit its source" that's kinda how smalltalk worked/works. At least that's how I remember it last time I was messing with Squeak (a long time ago)
(DIR) Post #2738908 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-07T16:06:17Z
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@edheil @cadadr @natecull @enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @brennen Yeah, Morphic in Squeak can do this. It's pretty awesome! MVC doesn't let you do this in Smalltalk, though.
(DIR) Post #2743862 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-07T19:18:00Z
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@kragen @natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen Planners have become seen as magic, which sucks.Icon demonstrates how backtracking & pattern matching can be injected into an ordinary imperative language. Planning should be the same: mock up features declaratively & replace them with efficient implementations as necessary.
(DIR) Post #2748637 by natecull@mastodon.social
2019-01-07T21:54:29Z
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@kragen @msmouse @enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @brennen Easier even in the 1979s for a professor or CEO to imagine talking to an intelligent computer than *learning to type*, because, typing was this weird specialised rote mechanical thing that only secretaries did, not Visionary Men Of Ideas
(DIR) Post #2748922 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-07T22:04:56Z
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@natecull @msmouse @enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @brennen For some of them, but Engelbart's 1962 vision framed engineers and scholars typing on a keyboard as the commonplace thing and the chording keyset and light pen as the unusual thing — maybe CEOs, but I think many professors were already typing then
(DIR) Post #2756295 by ente@chaos.social
2019-01-08T01:53:18Z
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@enkiv2 @natecull @kragen @erosdiscordia @brennen FWIW mail-user-agents still do just that.
(DIR) Post #2756296 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-08T02:59:48Z
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@ente no
(DIR) Post #2866103 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-11T13:56:43Z
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@kragen @cadadr @natecull @enkiv2 @erosdiscordia @brennenWere you in on the discussions here last september re: VM-level undo as backtracking & unification for implementing capability-based security & related ideas? My summary here: https://medium.com/@enkiv2/today-i-was-in-couple-good-threads-on-programming-metaprogramming-and-on-the-design-of-universal-781982ba69d ; Thread: https://retro.social/@freakazoid/100760945401213374
(DIR) Post #2872465 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-11T17:55:50Z
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@enkiv2 @cadadr @natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen No! That sounds awesome!
(DIR) Post #2872476 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-11T14:15:20Z
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@enkiv2 @kragen @cadadr @natecull @erosdiscordia @brennenApparently both threads have been lost already?! (Does anybody have a cache of them? They were wonderful & so much good discussion didn't make it into my summary.)
(DIR) Post #2872477 by kragen@nerdculture.de
2019-01-11T17:56:20Z
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@enkiv2 @cadadr @natecull @erosdiscordia @brennen Maybe ActivityPub isn't good for archival?