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Alan Kay performs an improvisational avant garde layered audio feedback loop about Claude Shannon, live online during Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration.
Alan was scheduled to talk about how encountering Simula sparked his early thoughts about objects. During setup, somebody had the live stream playing out loud near an open Zoom mic, so his own voice kept arriving back in his ears about 21 seconds late, over and over.
What he said was not random: "Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels." And: "I think about that almost every day. I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing." Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem is the math for exactly the kind of channel that was garbling him as he praised it.
Alan joked it was "being rerouted to Mars and back." At the speed of light, a 21 second round trip is about 3 million km one way -- eight trips to the Moon and back, not even a twentieth of the way to Mars at closest approach.
This is an accidental Zoom performance of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969), where Lucier re-recorded his own voice in a room until only the room's resonance remained. Here what remains is the network: delay, compression, dropouts.
Bonus noise: YouTube's auto-transcript bleeps Alan's enthusiasm into [ __ ]. So the full chain is: Alan's voice, Zoom, stream, room, Zoom again times three, my screen recording, YouTube's speech recognizer, a censored transcript.
The fix: "Just turn off the audio at your end on Zoom."
This is an accidental Zoom performance of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969), where Lucier re-recorded his own voice in a room until only the room's resonance remained. Here what remains is the network: delay, compression, dropouts.
Bonus noise: YouTube's auto-transcript bleeps Alan's enthusiasm into [ __ ]. So the full chain is: Alan's voice, Zoom, stream, room, Zoom again times three, my screen recording, YouTube's speech recognizer, a censored transcript.
The fix: "Just turn off the audio at your end on Zoom."
I Am Sitting in a Room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
Alvin Lucier on "I am sitting in a room": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9XJWBZBzq4
The full talk seems to be at https://au.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=fe0..., but with a confusing interface (text chat flying by at speed, and no actual video of Alan, though you do get a prolonged view of a whiteboard). Maybe there's another copy that exists or will show up somewhere?
Aha i saw this video in a comment on another HN thread this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49791117 Avoiding the babbling-idiot failure in a time-triggered communication system
Can someone please explain to me what this is all about?
I've added an explanation to the toptext which is taken from a comment by DonHopkins, who recorded (but did not submit) the video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622607.
Hopefully Don won't mind!
The word "performs" is certainly doing something in this sentence (whether it belongs there or not is another matter):
Hm, yeah, sure, that's it. That's exactly what's going on.
It would have been kind of great to see an OOP language with Alan's design, but with a better syntax. I dislike smalltalk syntax. Barely anyone uses smalltalk today.
Even then, we'd also have an OOP language to be really really fast. Otherwise people will just use C.
Java itself is too verbose and has a rather boring OOP model.