Phil Agre

Some of these comments, like attending to relative position in space, remind me of Phil Agre's fantastic "How to Help Someone Use a Computer" (1996) – https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html Phil's instructions mix some good influences and can be used when working with people in other mediated spot environments like interviews/discussions too.

> The article reads as if the WSJ just needs a pretense to push their social justice viewpoints. Yes. Since they used this author I would have assumed he was not worth the time but this article is solid - "How to help someone use a computer" https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html Perhaps this is why he disappeared, the people he railed against were using his work against his principals? Phil Agre's Wired articles - https://www.wired.com/author/phil-agre/ The 1995 "While the Left Sleeps" about the Left underestimating the Republicans is interesting.

Oh wow, I remember the author of this piece, Phil Agre. I used to subscribe to his email list, Red Rock Eater News Service, it was a frequent series of references to academic articles that had been published, pretty eclectic but pretty "sociology-y and political" too (claimed Red in the title had nothing to do with his pinko tendencies). UCLA keeps the archives up because... https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/ well, I don't want to label him in some way he might not want to be labelled, but if my life followed that trajectory... bit of a tragic life. He was a college professor, then he disappeared. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Agre#Disappearance >On October 16, 2009, Agre's sister filed a missing persons report for Agre.[6] She indicated that she had not seen him since the spring of 2008 and became concerned when she learned that he had abandoned his apartment and job sometime between December 2008 and May 2009.[6] Agre was found by the LA County Sheriff's Department on January 16, 2010, and was deemed in good health and self-sufficient.[7] Somebody later updated his whereabouts on wikipedia but it got deleted because "biography of a living person" and "original research/not reliable source" but I think it was accurate. You can probably guess. Police were able to find him, he at that time did not wish to be contacted. I'm not sure how different this link is, but it contains more links https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/rre.html

The funny thing is, I was a subscriber to Agre's mailing list (the archive of which is still at https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/rre.html) I was impressed by his methodical way of dissecting the design of information systems and how they interacted with the social context. The didactic brilliance was consistent with his (and David Chapman's) famous AAAI paper about the "Pengi" system https://aaai.org/Library/AAAI/1987/aaai87-048.php -- although I didn't realize at first that he was the Agre in "Agre and Chapman". Yet, somehow, I missed the importance of whatever he said about privacy. Like others I was more interested in what new things we could build if we were all as sharp as him. (The "Surveillance and Capture" paper mentioned by the Post seems to capture an important distinction between two modes of privacy invasion; even 20 years later I see attempts to discuss privacy concerns founder on a failure to reckon with this distinction. I will now read.)

I don't think programming is something binary - either obvious or inscrutable - but there are certainly environments which make programming seem more like one or the other to the vast majority of people who would fall in between those two extremes on the spectrum. One such finding by Cantwell Wilson and Schrock: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.88.4671&r… Math background and formal programming classes before their CS101 class helped, but the dominant factor was "comfort level" * how they perceived the difficulty of the course * how they perceived the difficulty of completing the assignments * how they perceived understanding the concepts of the course compared to their classmates * asking questions in class, in labs, and in office hours Students who felt "comfortable" in these areas compared to those who did not had a strong positive correlation with grade performance. From my own experience you get a looooot of mileage when teaching others programming or even basic computer literacy skills out of: * making "mistakes" yourself to show them the machine won't (literally or figuratively) break * tell them that error messages are actually the wise words of a sherpa left behind by the developers to help you up the mountain * Following all the awesome advice in Phil Agre's How to help someone use a computer ( https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html ) I studied chess quite a bit, and one time I complained to my…

Since there is no other discussion, I'll try to start. I posted this today because someone else has posted one of Phil's 2002 essays: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808425. Phil was a professor at UCLA, and wrote early and presciently about the social aspects of the internet, and how it was going to change society. Then eventually he went silent, and in 2009 he was reported by a relative as "missing". He was reported as "found" a few months later, but in a way that left a lot of mystery as to what had actually happened. I have no personal knowledge, but my impression from the outside is that his work made him so depressed that he gave up on society and just dropped out. I'm sure there were other psychological factors involved, but also at least some elements of a cautionary tale. I learned about Phil from his Red Rock Eater News Service (https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/rre.html) which I subscribed to in the mid to late 90's. RRE was a curated collection of links, with commentary and occasionally essays. While I don't know of any direct link, I think of RRE as being one of the philosophical ancestors of Hacker News. Thus since you are reading this on HN, whether you've heard of him or not, you might in some small way owe a small thanks to Phil.

"One of the most important patterns of conservative message-making is projection. Projection is a psychological notion; it roughly means attacking someone by falsely claiming that they are attacking you. Conservative strategists engage in projection constantly." Source: " What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?", by Philip E. Agre. (https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/conservatism.html)

> On what basis are you saying that? This is a longstanding critique of GOFAI; see Hubert Dreyfuss and Phil Agre. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/critical.html > I have a model in my head mapping out the world around me, so I know where things are etc and what I can do with all those things. No you don't; a map is not the territory, and is necessarily wrong, which means that if you had such a model and were actually relying on it you wouldn't be able to do things you obviously can do in real life. You have an inaccurate memory of the world and you update it, only as much as you need to[0], as you go, in order to do a specific task. [0] probably a little less than you need to, because you want to save thinking energy

Phil Agre's homepage at UCLA is still alive and has numerous of his writings: https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/ Previous HN posts on Agre: Phil Agre Missing (Nov 26, 2009) http://chronicle.com/article/FriendsColleagues-Search/49222/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=962065 Missing Internet Pioneer Phil Agre Is Found Alive (Feb 1 2010) http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/01/missing_internet_pi… https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093773 He's mentioned in several HN comments as well, though suprisingly few: Recommended writings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21818796

Don't overlook books that are critical of engineering as it is often practiced and how it fits into our society: Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum (1976). Weizenbaum wrote Eliza, the first AI chatbot, almost sixty years ago and was appalled at the reception. This book is still very pertinent, especially the Introduction, Chapter 1 On Tools, chapter 9, Incomprehensible Programs, and chapter 10, Against the Imperialism of Instrumental Reason. Chapter 4, Science and the Compulsive Programmer, is one of the first written accounts of the hacker culture. Weizenbaum's original paper on Eliza (1966) [0] is still very pertinent to the present generation of chatbots, especially the introduction and discussion. Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich (1973) [1]. Influenced recent work by the computer scientists Steven Kell [2],[3] and Kartik Agaram [4]. Computation and Human Experience, Phil Agre (1997) (excerpt at [5]). Agre got a PhD in AI at MIT in the 80s and 90s and became very critical of the field. I think his shorter writings [6][7] are a better introduction, especially the personal memoir at [6]: "about how I became (relatively speaking, and in a small way) a better person through philosophy." 0. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168 1. http://akkartik.name/illich.pdf 2. https://www.humprog.org/~stephen//research/talks/kell19de-escalating-i… 3. https://www.humprog.org/~stephen//research/talks/kell19software-slides… 4.…

I want to build a browser that captures everything I saw on the internet, allows me to search it, run graph algorithms (like PageRank). Improves navigation (by showing trails as tree instead of tabs). Heavily offline focused (Backend only for updates, maybe for analytics). Difference with rewind.ai: linkkraft does not have funding, i'm solo, no apps & image/video/audio recognition. Focus on web, trails, research and using web copies, selections/highlights as part of your notes & whiteboards. Preserving all possible graphs. My inspirations: https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/berrypicking.html, https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html, Jeff Raskin (Global Search, Zoom UI) https://linkkraft.com/notes/backstory I've built a prototype with trails tree & HTML snapshoting. For each my step even inside SPA linkkraft creates HTML snapshot. https://arestov.github.io/linkkraft-notes/comparing/linkkraft-vs-chrom… https://arestov.github.io/linkkraft-notes/trails-tree-plus-offline-for… Across similar software ("too many tabs" solvers, snapshoters) combination of trails tree & snapshots that reinforces is unique in linkkraft. To make snapshot it takes current state of DOM, current state of styles (to capture CSSinJS stuff), take resources like font/images from network storage (Chrome Dev Tools protocol) and saves it as HTML on disk. I've been developing created frontend in-memory graph DB / state manager for 1) replication 2)…