TECH Signal 243 2 feeds carried it
Agents reportedly make Ted Nelson’s xanalogical docuverse feasible after sixty years
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Project Xanadu’s vision of lossless hypertext and versioned documents may now be viable due to agent-driven systems that can track and traverse every reference and revision
The shift from human-scale to agent-scale hypertext changes what infrastructure must provide. If agents can reliably follow every link and audit every source, the cost of maintaining those links moves from users to the system. That trade-off only makes sense if the system can actually deliver it at scale.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
Xanadu’s core rules, transclusion and versioning, require storage and naming schemes that only recently became practical
Agents can exploit xanalogical structure in ways humans cannot, making the overhead of lossless references worthwhile
Modern primitives like CRDTs, Merkle trees, and Lamport timestamps supply the missing pieces Nelson lacked in the 1960s
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