The first web pages and the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, were published December 1990. Mosaic launched in 1993 and became the first commercial web browser in 1994.
I made my first e-commerce purchase in 1997 maybe 98. It was a crazy heavy resin gargoyle, mentioned here, and the way I bought it was I browsed the website and then sent an email saying what I wanted to buy and giving my credit card number.
7 years in and it wasn’t obvious yet that you could type your credit card number in an input field.
Amazon filed their 1-Click patent in September 1997. It was granted in 1999. Here it is: Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network
The idea is that you have previously put your credit card number in an input field. And then using a cookie, the website remembers who you are. Then you can hit Buy Now without having to re-enter your details.
Apple paid $1m to license 1-Click in 2000 (Wikipedia).
Look, it was kinda obvious then, the people who sold me my gargoyle aside. The patent being granted was a little controversial. But as an idea it was not obvious obvious.
Even being conservative about the timespan, from 1994 when the web became the most popular service on the internet, to 1997 when the patent was granted, that’s three years and still the idea of “putting your credit card number in a box and the server remembers it” was novel enough to allow for a patent.
I was still buying software in a box off a shelf into the 2000s. Software was still a business with inventory; it was measured in terms of stock, not in terms of customer acquisition cost and retention. How long did it take for the web to replace boxed software with SaaS? 15 years? And we’re still figuring out the best ways to make a pricing page.
All I mean is that it takes a while to figure things out.
With the web, all the pieces were there from the early 90s.
We didn’t get Blogger.com till 1999. That’s when the idea of UGC - “user-generated content” - started going mainstream. Blogs themselves didn’t go mainstream till, what, 2001? 2004?
OpenAI released GPT-3 in June 2020. That was good enough for chat. The interface wasn’t cracked until November 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT. 2 years!
The technique behind chat agents is called Retrieval-Augmented Generation, RAG. It was invented in May 2020 (arXiv). It’s a fundamental building block, dead simple: you concatenate the prompt with a relevant document retrieved from a database using vector search (which is surprisingly good). But it wasn’t well known until mid 2023.
Inventing takes time!
I keep coming back to this tweet from Nat Friedman, ex CEO of GitHub and now deep into AI.
The multiple cantilevered AI overhangs:
Compute overhang. We have much more compute than we are using. Scale can go much further.
Idea overhang. There are many obvious research ideas and combinations of ideas that haven’t been tried in earnest yet.
Capability overhang. Even if we stopped all research now, it would take ten years to digest the new capabilities into products that everyone uses.
And you know what, that tracks for me.
So I don’t feel I’m ever in a hurry with new technology. I’m not saying don’t do the work. Do the work like crazy.
Because we are imagination bottlenecked.
Share techniques and ideas widely.
Demo freely.
Get the obvious ideas out of the way and together we’ll come up with the good ones.
This, by the way, is why London is such a great scene right now.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it by email or on social media. Here’s the link. Thanks, —Matt.
‘Yes, we’ll see them together some Saturday afternoon then,’ she said. ‘I won’t have any hand in your not going to Cathedral on Sunday morning. I suppose we must be getting back. What time was it when you looked at your watch just now?’ "In China and some other countries it is not considered necessary to give the girls any education; but in Japan it is not so. The girls are educated here, though not so much as the boys; and of late years they have established schools where they receive what we call the higher branches of instruction. Every year new schools for girls are opened; and a great many of the Japanese who formerly would not be seen in public with their wives have adopted the Western idea, and bring their wives into society. The marriage laws have been arranged so as to allow the different classes to marry among[Pg 258] each other, and the government is doing all it can to improve the condition of the women. They were better off before than the women of any other Eastern country; and if things go on as they are now going, they will be still better in a few years. The world moves. "Frank and Fred." She whispered something to herself in horrified dismay; but then she looked at me with her eyes very blue and said "You'll see him about it, won't you? You must help unravel this tangle, Richard; and if you do I'll--I'll dance at your wedding; yours and--somebody's we know!" Her eyes began forewith. Lawrence laughed silently. He seemed to be intensely amused about something. He took a flat brown paper parcel from his pocket. making a notable addition to American literature. I did truly. "Surely," said the minister, "surely." There might have been men who would have remembered that Mrs. Lawton was a tough woman, even for a mining town, and who would in the names of their own wives have refused to let her cross the threshold of their homes. But he saw that she was ill, and he did not so much as hesitate. "I feel awful sorry for you sir," said the Lieutenant, much moved. "And if I had it in my power you should go. But I have got my orders, and I must obey them. I musn't allow anybody not actually be longing to the army to pass on across the river on the train." "Throw a piece o' that fat pine on the fire. Shorty," said the Deacon, "and let's see what I've got." "Further admonitions," continued the Lieutenant, "had the same result, and I was about to call a guard to put him under arrest, when I happened to notice a pair of field-glasses that the prisoner had picked up, and was evidently intending to appropriate to his own use, and not account for them. This was confirmed by his approaching me in a menacing manner, insolently demanding their return, and threatening me in a loud voice if I did not give them up, which I properly refused to do, and ordered a Sergeant who had come up to seize and buck-and-gag him. The Sergeant, against whom I shall appear later, did not obey my orders, but seemed to abet his companion's gross insubordination. The scene finally culminated, in the presence of a number of enlisted men, in the prisoner's wrenching the field-glasses away from me by main force, and would have struck me had not the Sergeant prevented this. It was such an act as in any other army in the world would have subjected the offender to instant execution. It was only possible in—" "Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble." RE: Fruyling's World "MACDONALD'S GATE" "Read me some of it." "Well, I want something better than that." HoME大香蕉第一时间
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The first web pages and the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, were published December 1990. Mosaic launched in 1993 and became the first commercial web browser in 1994.
I made my first e-commerce purchase in 1997 maybe 98. It was a crazy heavy resin gargoyle, mentioned here, and the way I bought it was I browsed the website and then sent an email saying what I wanted to buy and giving my credit card number.
7 years in and it wasn’t obvious yet that you could type your credit card number in an input field.
Amazon filed their 1-Click patent in September 1997. It was granted in 1999. Here it is: Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network
The idea is that you have previously put your credit card number in an input field. And then using a cookie, the website remembers who you are. Then you can hit Buy Now without having to re-enter your details.
Apple paid $1m to license 1-Click in 2000 (Wikipedia).
Look, it was kinda obvious then, the people who sold me my gargoyle aside. The patent being granted was a little controversial. But as an idea it was not obvious obvious.
Even being conservative about the timespan, from 1994 when the web became the most popular service on the internet, to 1997 when the patent was granted, that’s three years and still the idea of “putting your credit card number in a box and the server remembers it” was novel enough to allow for a patent.
I was still buying software in a box off a shelf into the 2000s. Software was still a business with inventory; it was measured in terms of stock, not in terms of customer acquisition cost and retention. How long did it take for the web to replace boxed software with SaaS? 15 years? And we’re still figuring out the best ways to make a pricing page.
All I mean is that it takes a while to figure things out.
With the web, all the pieces were there from the early 90s.
We didn’t get Blogger.com till 1999. That’s when the idea of UGC - “user-generated content” - started going mainstream. Blogs themselves didn’t go mainstream till, what, 2001? 2004?
OpenAI released GPT-3 in June 2020. That was good enough for chat. The interface wasn’t cracked until November 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT. 2 years!
The technique behind chat agents is called Retrieval-Augmented Generation, RAG. It was invented in May 2020 (arXiv). It’s a fundamental building block, dead simple: you concatenate the prompt with a relevant document retrieved from a database using vector search (which is surprisingly good). But it wasn’t well known until mid 2023.
Inventing takes time!
I keep coming back to this tweet from Nat Friedman, ex CEO of GitHub and now deep into AI.
And you know what, that tracks for me.
So I don’t feel I’m ever in a hurry with new technology. I’m not saying don’t do the work. Do the work like crazy.
Because we are imagination bottlenecked.
Share techniques and ideas widely.
Demo freely.
Get the obvious ideas out of the way and together we’ll come up with the good ones.
This, by the way, is why London is such a great scene right now.