Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight
Summary
A retrospective analysis of Project Xanadu, focusing on the practicality of transclusion, UI design, and the lesson that prototypes and concrete use-cases matter for real-world adoption. The piece leans into Gwern.net's own design choices and argues that Xanadu's ideas were ahead of their time but not usable at scale without thoughtful UX and semantics.