I really must try to find a new name for this Archive . It is far beyond a new medium by this time.
Today, Mr Fahiminia who has been the head of a very famous school in ████ for around 15 years, had invited us (me, and Zea ) to a close gathering of some of the big names in education in ████ for connecting. It was a very lovely gathering.
There I talked about First Island and what we’re doing there—I always look at it as a very basic and not great work as the first step in the Threshold of The Reverse Viewpoint —and what happened was they were fully fascinated.
I’m happy, even the most basic MVP of my ideas a thousand thresholds before is way better than almost all that is been happening and that gives me so much joy and happiness.
Chuck Lorre’s “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” is usually very great. I did not expect an spinoff to be this genius, but he has done an amazing work, taking the side characters, and putting them in a very different story line, real genius.
One of the worse things about First Island is not having any documentation. The next time I’ll hiring a team the first thing I’ll look for will be proof of documenting.
This is written in continuation of my Inventing The True Augmentation Of Human Mind essay, as no LLM understood what it meant.
Yesterday I was thinking about my models and theories, and I remembered portions that I myself had not fully realized. So you could say the theories have grown so fast, my own full comprehension cannot have it all loaded into my context window. But guess what? I can feed it into you and you see the whole shape. So while Maestro Engelbart thought augmenting human intellect is having everyone work on hyper-documents, and where Maestro Kay thought it would be a dynamic medium, and Maestro Victor to externalize the simulation from the mind into the paper. My new medium makes it possible for me to have fragments of my own mind loaded in my mind, have the whole graph somewhere else, running in full.
This is the true super human moment, this is where my own intelligence might have failed and I have created a kind of exoskeleton for the mind. Not only I have a memory bigger than mine, I can think of theories that my own mind could not fully keep in itself, and had only fragments of it touch the surface. But by collecting this fragments, I could construct the full picture in you, and look at it in full. If I had thought archive is only a medium that contains graphs and reversed the compression law, now I see that the message of that medium is far far beyond that (while that itself could be one of the greatest things in history)
The en-shittification angle is maybe too cynical, too simplistic. Maybe this really is the natural progression of trying to make search better. At some point, relevance became more useful than literal matching for most people and the defaults followed the metrics. The problem is that there’s increasingly no mode for people who know exactly what they’re looking for and want just that.
Sakamura received the Takeda Prize jointly with Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman, for spreading open architecture worldwide.
The character encoding system, TRON Code, was arguably the most ambitious part. It supported multi-plane character switching via 0xFE escape codes, with 31 defined planes of 48,400 characters each, giving a theoretical capacity of 1,500,400 characters. By 1999, B-right/V R2 shipped with roughly 130,000 characters across 14 defined planes, covering JIS levels 1 and 2, Chinese GB 2312, Korean KS C 5601, Unicode’s non-CJK range, and the Mojikyo collection of rare historical characters, and users could register new characters for free through the TRON Character Resource Center. To put that in perspective, Unicode 1.0 in 1991 defined 20,902 unified CJK ideographs, and TRON’s CJK coverage exceeded Unicode’s for well over a decade. A large part of that count came from Mojikyo, though, which separately encodes variant glyphs that Unicode unifies into single code points.
Search these days though is a bit of a dumpster fire. It has shifted from just retrieval towards relevance and recommendation and it sucks. I’m not just talking about web search, which has oscillated between “help me find the link for this product” to “somewhat useful if you can ignore the SEO spammers” [1]. No, I’m lamenting how poor search has gotten inside emails, online marketplaces, and messaging apps. I’m lamenting that the user has progressively lost control over what constitutes a search.
That project was TRON (The Real-time Operating system Nucleus), a real, government-backed Japanese computing initiative whose desktop variant, BTRON, was named in a US trade barrier report and effectively killed before it could reach schools nationwide. Meanwhile, its embedded counterpart, ITRON, quietly became one of the most deployed operating systems in history.
There’s a version of computing history where the desktop OS that won wasn’t Windows. Not because the alternative was Unix-based or because Apple pulled off something different, but because an operating system designed at the University of Tokyo in 1984 was ambitious enough to try to replace the file system with a hypermedia document model, run on a custom Japanese CPU architecture, and encode 1.5 million characters, only to have a US trade report single it out as an unfair trade barrier in 1989.
Searching on YouTube means scrolling over two entire rows of Shorts,“People also watched”, “Explore more”, with your actual results somewhere in between [1]. Time related filters have gotten lost too: not being able to choose a date range (unless you manually enter date operators into the search field), not able to sort by date at all, or just videos from the last hour for breaking news.
Without CIA funding that helped keep NeXT afloat in the ’80s, Steve Jobs might not have made a triumphant return to Apple—and the iPhone might not have its foundational operating code.
What actually concerns me most isn’t the quality of individual search results, it’s what this shift is doing to the underlying skill of research itself. Holding a real question in your head, forming a hypothesis, checking it against multiple sources, and noticing when two sources disagree is a skill that gets sharper with practice and duller with disuse, the same as anything else.
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TRON’s history has since attracted some genuinely wild conspiracy theories, including one claiming that Japan Airlines Flight 123 was deliberately crashed in order to target the TRON developers on board, despite there being no evidence that any TRON developers were even on the flight. But the strangest part of the story isn’t even a conspiracy theory: BTRON’s hypermedia desktop was decades ahead of what the market could support, and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son may have helped sink it from the inside.
