Your remarks on the Wiki

[Brian T Rice]

I'm omitting the content of your really lengthy post, and I'll just
answer with finality.

Re: graphical analysis of channel kicks

I think this is an historic moment when a statistical trend study has been
performed at such a level for this kind of subject. :) I suppose it
usually indicates when I get "fired up" about some development, which
coincides with my dips in patience level. It is not dependent on my
career's state, though, and I see no reason for that to change.

Re: Community-Building

We are already stretched to our maximum capacity. Any further numbers of
voices will only repeat the same questions unless they have the education
and vision to see further, which probably reduces the possible population
of the whole earth to draw from down to perhaps a few thousand at the very
most. I would not expect the majority even of those people to have time
for this, especially since they are likely to have other irrelevant
projects which take up their time.

Fare and Tril hardly have enough time, and it's a considerable amount of
energy from me to keep this pace up. Since we're the "primary motivators"
here, I would implore you to consider our time first, and then secondarily
the time of others. Mostly I mean our attention span. The more email I
have to read and respond to which is not directly useful (I will point out
that this email fails to be useful in that sense), the less time I or we
have to accomplish something directly advancing TUNES. This reasoning
tells me to reject your proposal, and I do so.

Re: Dying Projects

No. Emphatically, no. comp.lang.lisp tries this with the similar example
of the LispOS project. It never ends. Forget it. Run away! :)

Re: TUNES administration

This is totally ad-hoc process. Basically if Tril, Fare, and I agree, it
seems to go without much further debate. The thumbrule could be "you
determine your own level of involvement", to re-use a phrase. And you
can't truly be involved if you don't know what's going on (understand the
ideas).

Re: Name Dilution

No, no, and no. I took painstaking care not to distort Fare's vision or
even his technical expression of the TUNES concept, which has no
particular necessary relation with his politics, and they are /his/
politics, regardless of the degree of overlap they have with others'.

For politics, see "Cybernethics". For OSes, panaceaos.org seems fine, but
do not re-use the TUNES name there. Perhaps I should apply for a trademark
for the expanded name. The name is horrible, by the way. I'd pick
"Solaris" for the appropriate literary reference, if only Sun's lawyers
wouldn't attack more quickly than we could change over the site.
Ironically, I have family members working at Sun.

In my opinion from having observed you and listened to your perspectives
and observations, you are too naive to be making judgement calls about the
distinction between my interpretation of Fare's material and his own.

Re: open discussions

The general idea of late has been to improve the web content enough that
people will naturally not show up here with false impressions, by actually
presenting a scientific formulation and sound reasoning on the site, which
previously were mostly absent. I am committed to contuing this strategy,
using the frequency of newbie joins and absurdly naive questions (like
"What is Lisp?") as my measurement of the success of this effort. No
signposts should be necessary or are desired.

Re: "Brian's TUNES"

This is a fallacy. For one, we can definitely say what Fare would have
done by measuring the efforts of 7 years. So this is a speculation bound
to failure in predictive capabilities. Second, the "configuration" term as
an example is very common (actually I just noticed that it's a datatype in
Maude's self-hosted interpreter... more later). The use of the HLL
meta-level architecture's terms are not entirely unkown, not incompatible
with either previous TUNES formulations and quite amenable to category
theory and logical design principles.

Just because I'm not emphasizing the same vocabulary as Fare, does not
indicate differing concepts. I can in fact show that Fare's vocabulary is
in fact due to his very particular background and was in fact part of the
problem.

Re: Panacea

Um... I'll pretend you didn't bring up theology. Actually, this argument
is fairly absurd. Fare's formulation arose historically, sure, but the
fact that enough other people (myself, Tril, Billy Tanksley, Jecel, and
others) with different historical backgrounds and reasons perceived this
as forming a general solution to the problem of how to organize computing
systems suggests that this has some true generality. By Fare's own
formulation, TUNES is about information in all it's forms.

The term "panacea" itself suggests "all ills", and TUNES is not oriented
towards ills. We had better not have a mindset to "solve all problems",
because not all problems (even with computing) are truly information-
technical. So this formulation says we must have a problem to solve, and
since we don't state it as such, it must be "all problems with computers",
and this is patently not so. TUNES is about a new architecture to deal
with information coming from a more enlightened perspective. You cannot
have ills in mind when you look at this. I'd say that this somehow
reflects back on the "useful, not expedient" formulation. If we wanted a
general way of organizing Fare's compact disc collection, we would have
done so and not having this discussion right now.

Re: Duplication of Effort

I'd rather not duplicate teaching effort which can be automated through
the Learning Lounge, Review, and general documentation. Obviously
questions arise which challenge the adequacy of these, but that's where we
just grow them to fit. What's more to the point is increasing the
visibility of these to the point that questions answered there very very
rarely arise here.

...

I finally shall just say that my general goal with TUNES' public
representation, including this forum, is to immediately give the sense of
honor in what is going on here, so much so that people no longer come here
looking to see how that honor can benefit them, but how they can work to
fulfill the promise of it. On the surface, this sounds like it's
encouraging people to join the list and keep writing "How can I help??? I
know some PHP and can hack assembly if need be!!".. instead my vision
involves people realizing at first glance how well-formed our plans and
code are, and to simply know when they can't add to it through such
approaches. To make the situation totally obvious to anyone in this way
would allow us to achieve all our goals without unneeded action.

This is the last reply I will make in this thread, regardless of the
poster at this point (notice that Tril hasn't publically responded; even
from him there's nothing worth noting now). This thread has met its end in
my eyes. Hopefully you will see the same. Start a new thread if you will,
but start it afresh, and be economical with your suggestions.

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
mailto:water@tunes.org
http://tunes.org/~water/