[HN Gopher] Bret Victor update
___________________________________________________________________
Bret Victor update
Author : dcre
Score : 316 points
Date : 2023-07-05 06:07 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (worrydream.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (worrydream.com)
| projectileboy wrote:
| We don't have enough long-term research these days. I wish Bret
| Victor well and am looking forward to future innovations from him
| and his crew.
| apu wrote:
| I think it's the worst indictment of our entire industry that
| Victor doesn't have oodles of funding for life.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Perhaps he doesn't want the stress from investors who only
| care about their ROI?
| SamBam wrote:
| Grant funding, I would have thought GP meant.
| coke12 wrote:
| I think he does? Has he indicated he doesn't have enough
| funding?
| ripley12 wrote:
| He has publicly lamented the lack of funding for long-term
| research many times, yes.
| picometer wrote:
| The optimist in me hopes that a UBI-like system would enable
| more people to tackle research, nonprofits, and other long
| term "social good" type projects.
| andrewgleave wrote:
| Anyone interested in Dynamicland may want to check out Paper
| Programs.
|
| It's been about 5 years since I last played with it.
|
| It's great fun and should be much more interactive with 5+ years
| of browser and hardware development.
|
| https://github.com/janpaul123/paperprograms
| picometer wrote:
| I had this set up on a vertical wall at my previous apartment
| and it was so much fun. I'm working on getting it set up in my
| current place, too, and I'd really like to get it projecting
| downwards so that I don't have to deal with taping things to
| the wall.
|
| Fyi for those interested: you need a color printer. You need a
| good projector. You need a good webcam. I already had the
| printer, got a projector as a hand-me-down, and shelled out the
| $ for a good webcam.
|
| It can be a little finicky if you don't have the perfect setup.
| For me, I got it to work in an hour or so, once I figured out a
| good mounting location for the projector. Then I had to
| periodically fiddle with the webcam settings as the light in
| the room changed. I'm considering investing in black fabric to
| improve the contrast.
|
| Also, I suspect much of Dynamicland's magic is in RealTalk,
| which is not open source. The Paper Programs repo uses
| Javascript with a realtalk-esque mini framework. This means
| that Paper Programs doesn't quite achieve the goals set out by
| Dynamicland, ie, that it spills be approachable and imminently
| learnable to all ages, backgrounds, skill levels. My partner
| and I are both programmers, and both patient, so we've been
| able to replicate a little bit of Dynamicland's social magic.
| randito wrote:
| I tried setting up Paper Programs in my office, and had
| similar issues trying to get it to work. Glad that you were
| able to play with it.
| DrScientist wrote:
| Reminds me of a demo of using MS hololens to tell a scientist
| where to pipette something.
|
| Just put the plates on a liquid handling robot - stop trying to
| treat the person as a robot.
|
| The other aspect - the human -> computer ( as oppose to the
| computer -> human ) interface is interesting - it sort of reminds
| me of the first multi-touch demos.
|
| ie exploring how best for humans to communicate intent to
| computers - though again - a bit like the example above around
| automation - in my view the best UI is no or less UI!
| iamcreasy wrote:
| Interesting. What are some good examples of computer -> human
| interface?
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I assume most wet labs have robots that do part of the
| workflow. But they are mostly useful for automating repetitive
| tasks, and need a lot of setup before they can get to work.
|
| For small experiments, when setup is 90% of doing the job, then
| you just don't win much by letting a robot do the remaining
| 10%.
| shadowfox wrote:
| From what I can tell, at least for academic wet labs, robots
| seem fairly unavailable/unaffordable.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| The university lab I interned in had a 96 well pipetting
| robot that was shared between a few research groups. I
| never used it. I think it was mostly useful if you wanted
| to do an experiment many times with varying parameters. But
| for most of the stuff we did, the steps were just not
| repetitive enough that programming a robot would make
| sense.
|
| Also, there are usually a lot of steps between the
| pipetting that the pipetting robot couldn't do like loading
| stuff in a centrifuge, checking DNA concentration, putting
| it in the PCR machine, etc.
| dataf3l wrote:
| dang, now inexplicably I need his opinion on things...
| smokel wrote:
| Haha, this reminds me of the Web 0.1 post on The Daily WTF
| (2006):
|
| https://thedailywtf.com/articles/web_0_0x2e_1
| silisili wrote:
| I love it. Only thing I'd change is it's a little too zoomed
| out...we don't need to see any background.
|
| Other than that, once zooming a hair, I found it extremely
| quick and easy to read. For whatever reason, moreso than if it
| were in a standard font. Three full paragraphs with zero
| scrolling.
| djmips wrote:
| But per the Web 0.1 design style guide.
|
| "Though it may not seem to visible in the screenshot, the
| designer certainly went with the preferred technique of the
| wooden table / digital camera."
| matricaria wrote:
| A quick introduction of what this is about would be great!
| bagels wrote:
| I guess it's this?
|
| https://dynamicland.org/
|
| Some kind of paper computing collaborative art project?
| karaterobot wrote:
| Bret Victor is a programmer and programming communicator
| (because he makes really good videos and articles) who has, for
| a number of years, been working on a project involving
| programming using physical objects and image recognition. It's
| called DynamicLand. The latest demo video is linked throughout
| this thread. This appears to be a fairly standard progress
| update, but it being a photograph of paper on a table is very
| much in keeping with the idea of DynamicLand, which I guess is
| why it's been posted.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I still don't get what this is about
| squokko wrote:
| I wish more of this Dynamicland stuff was made available. I'd be
| happy to set up a projector and camera on my ceiling if my kids
| could play with some of this stuff.
| shanks512 wrote:
| I have a faint memory of watching a Youtube demo video couple
| years back of a concept similar to Bret Victor's DynamicLand
| where you connect lego-block-like things together and they do
| cool stuff. Does anyone remember what that product is, and what
| its current status is?
| bostonvaulter2 wrote:
| I don't know if this is it, but your description reminds me of
| HyperCubes which was a research project using AR:
| https://youtu.be/GnVp4hrQ7QU?t=82
| deosjr wrote:
| Glad to hear from Dynamicland; the last video got me so excited I
| decided to try and build a demo for tinkering with at home:
| https://github.com/deosjr/elephanttalk
|
| Only dependency is on openCV through GoCV, otherwise pure Go.
| Supports a webcam/beamer setup. Uses Lisp for scripting instead
| of Lua (see
| https://github.com/deosjr/elephanttalk/blob/main/cmd/elephan...).
|
| It's a lot slower/less mature than paperprograms, but it does
| attempt to implement the wish/claim/when model using a homebrew
| datalog implementation :)
| wes-k wrote:
| Much love for Bret Victor! I've been working on a project
| inspired by
| http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddend...
| which was released 10 years ago!
| 0xpgm wrote:
| I got the sinking feeling something might have happened to Bret
| Victor when I saw the title. Thankfully, its just an update about
| his project.
|
| Maybe it can be slightly edited to reflect that.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| Me too. "Short update from Bret Victor" would be less worrying
| :)
| unconed wrote:
| I am glad he's still doing it but I am not very optimistic that a
| tangible computer built for children and laymen will lead
| anywhere good.
|
| Even getting professional programmers to reason correctly about
| their program is hard. And getting them to not build "intuitive"
| tangles that devolve into complete spaghetti is even harder.
|
| Everything I know tells me that the software we consider good and
| intuitive actually requires an enormous amount of unintuitive
| design and engineering to pull off. Not appreciating this, and
| not knowing what you don't know, is a plague in modern
| application development, the kind which makes people boot up
| Windows 3.1/NT and remark how utterly instant everything is.
| dluan wrote:
| I don't like this.
|
| This reduces the scientist or designer to some small cog in the
| machinery, to the point where they are further alienated from
| their work.
|
| Remove the scientist and replace them with an algorithm doing
| some poor facsimile of gradient descent for some protein energy
| metric. Or make it multiplayer where some crowd is doing the
| depth first search. No individual.
|
| The only analogy I can think of is cooking. You can reduce all of
| the steps into a checklist, which can be optimized, but instinct
| is still the differentiating factor. Or rather, taste.
|
| Maybe this helps designers develop taste better, but imo the
| interface is not the problem. It's training scientists to have
| better sense of taste or smell. There's a dimension above all of
| this that is still yet to be tapped.
| svnt wrote:
| I am not in the field but I just felt trapped by the whole
| thing. To me it appears to be skeuomorphic design to the nth
| degree. Why would you create an entire system of artifacts in
| the real to replace something you could do more flexibly with
| higher resolution and better visualization in CAD?
|
| Like if these were real processes you were doing in the lab and
| they were somehow being captured more accurately or
| efficiently, I could see that perhaps making sense.
|
| But this just seems like extra steps and the novelty is you're
| working on a table. It feels claustrophobic somehow.
| mst wrote:
| I've seen molecular chemists and biologists (and even for a
| weird set of 3d shapes mathematicians) experiment with
| physical stuff before transferring the ideas elsewhere - the
| tactile aspect and the ability to intuitively rotate a 3d
| shape while visually perceiving it directly rather than as a
| translation of something else can be a really helpful tool
| for thought, so snap together molecule sets seem to be a
| pretty common posession - perhaps it'll never catch on
| amongst younger scientists but I can certainly see
| practitioners who're currently, say, 30-35+ getting a blast
| out of using it at least sometimes.
| svnt wrote:
| I dunno, now you've got a bin of parts to store, and what
| happens if they get lost or damaged? You order more and
| wait for shipping? Print more and have grad students glue
| magnets in? The mean-time-to-kitchen-drawer seems low.
|
| I wonder if someone needs to better introduce the
| SpaceMouse to this crowd.
| mst wrote:
| One would anticipate the people who've already owned snap
| together molecule sets for years have either already
| figured out a good way to make sure a bin of parts stays
| where it's put or accepted that it's their fate to order
| more of things sometimes.
|
| Similar to teaching yourself to always put tools back in
| the toolbox immediately after use lest they go for a
| walk, really.
|
| I mean, I do see your point about -you- not wanting to
| deal with a bin of parts, I'm not sure I would either -
| but for the people who've already encountered that
| problem and found a way to deal with it that works for
| them, it doesn't seem like it'd be an obstacle.
| dekhn wrote:
| I can't really visualize complex shapes in 3D and so
| molecular graphics (like pymol) is really important to me.
| Even in other areas, like math shape viz (which I do for
| "fun") and various other 3D modelling, it's really key that
| I have a quick way of assembling things and rotating them
| around.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think spatially, which I 1) did not recognize that I was
| doing for a long time, and 2) thought was much more common
| than it is.
|
| For years I tried to figure out why my short term memory
| seemed so good even though I'm neuroatypical in a way
| that's usually associated with _reduced_ working memory.
| Turns out I 've been building mind palaces basically for
| longer than I can remember, but not with images, which is
| why none of the descriptions ever resonated for me. Mind
| palaces with a blindfold on, if you will.
|
| Being able to rotate items in my brain sure came in handy
| as a bike mechanic. I'm also handy in a move when you have
| one box that won't fit in your car/truck. But it also led
| to arguments with my father about whether I was turning a
| bolt the wrong way, when wrenching a bolt that is on the
| back side of something.
| ehnto wrote:
| In regards to the specific UI concern around it feeling
| claustrophobic, I can see that but I feel like there are many
| use cases where focus via constraints is very useful.
| Analyzing abstract ideas into a real thing can be powerful at
| helping humans see the connections and hidden relationships
| that are sometimes difficult to see in the digital realm.
|
| That is essentially the AR value proposition in it's entirety
| in my opinion. Meeting the human experience half way, so we
| can use our immense spatial reasoning skills in an
| environment that supports them.
| hinkley wrote:
| I have another take on this but I think we end up at the same
| place.
|
| Someone once said that Civilization is defined by our ability
| to think in the abstract.
|
| Scientists spend most of their time thinking in the abstract.
| Philosophers too. Designers and teachers are translators from
| the abstract to the real and back, or at least the good ones
| are.
|
| Giving scientists 'tools' that reduce abstract thought is a
| crutch, that when overused will lead to injury.
|
| I don't think that's who Bret is targeting, but if it is I hope
| he goes back to his first principles soon and doesn't end up
| where many of us are, working to create something and finding
| we contributed to the creation of something a lot darker.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Great to see he's still around. Bret Victor's post on abstraction
| and his visualization of Strogatz classic paper on networks are
| two of my favorite pieces posted on the internet.
|
| http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
|
| http://worrydream.com/#!/ScientificCommunicationAsSequential...
| bjornasm wrote:
| Oh, thanks for bringing that up. That network visualization is
| just so simple, so good and so inspiring. What a great way to
| convey research.
| isaacfung wrote:
| His talk on "Inventing on Principle" and Randy Pausch's "The
| Last Lecture" are two videos I recommend every student to
| watch.
| jononomo wrote:
| Is this someone we are supposed to know about?
| ulkesh wrote:
| If you haven't yet seen this video, please do:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4 (Bret Victor The
| Future of Programming)
|
| This won't tell you who he is, exactly, but it does give
| insight into how he thinks. And it's a pretty great talk, in my
| opinion.
| jononomo wrote:
| I'm afraid I don't have time to watch some video -- please
| provide a 3-sentence synopsis here.
| retromario wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Victor
| ulkesh wrote:
| Thanks for posting this. I was not inclined to respond
| after already providing information that he could have
| viewed when time afforded him. Here's hoping he has time
| to read a Wikipedia article instead of having people do
| the work for him.
| StevenOtto wrote:
| His latest demo of Realtalk, Biomolecular design in Realtalk,
| showcases the strenghts of Dynamicland. Really impressive stuff,
| as usual. https://youtu.be/_gXiVOmaVSo?t=865
| deng wrote:
| This looks super impressive, but at the same time, I'd really
| like to hear someone actually working in molecular biology what
| they think of this. While I am working in this field, I only
| deal with software, not molecular design and wetlab stuff. But
| I see how people there currently work and have a very hard time
| imagining them fiddling with pieces of paper and origami blocks
| on a desk, looking at poor quality images and awkwardly move
| stuff with a laser pointer. I like the physicality, but at the
| same time, it seems very limiting to me in terms of scope.
| beefman wrote:
| This is very impressive work and I'm glad people are doing it.
| For any billionaire, funding it would be a no-brainer.
|
| That said, it makes more salient for me the dichotomy between
| demos and reality. This demo looks very much like molecular
| biology does in the movies.
|
| But what is it to look like something "in the movies"? I don't
| know exactly... All tools have overhead, no matter how cleverly
| designed. Maybe "the movies" is what you get when you ignore
| this overhead.
|
| There's a clear phenomenon in looking back on old demos and
| concluding we must have taken a wrong turn because our systems
| are still not as good. This is true of Victor's own demos from
| a decade ago, and many well-known demos from decades earlier.
|
| But rewatching a Victor demo earlier this year, which had blown
| my mind when I saw it live, it seemed full of a kind of naivety
| (and a bit of sleight of hand). Of course, he made clear it was
| only a demo. It was meant to inspire. But now I feel that's an
| easy excuse for not investigating what really advances our use
| of tools - and what holds it back.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > For any billionaire, funding it would be a no-brainer.
|
| Billionaires still want ROI.
| thuuuomas wrote:
| You can just say "Worse Is Better".
|
| > ...what really advances our use of tools - and what holds
| us back.
|
| It's money! It's cost! The cheaper tool wins.
|
| "Worse Is Better"
| thom wrote:
| What do you think will be the keys to any future battle between
| this, something like Apple Vision Pro, and traditional desktop
| metaphors? I have to admit, on first viewing every single
| component of this looks unbearably clunky but presumably it's
| going somewhere, and I can't say I want to live in a future
| where I have to strap on a headset either.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| The tree of Spatial Computing has many branches. The use of
| Tangible User Interface mechanics in a super specific
| application like this is a perfect bottom up design from
| function approach and I love it. He has all the building
| blocks, no pun intended, to reshape the same experience
| deeply customized for any number of domains like digital twin
| monitoring of manufacturing plant lines or dynamic ERP
| dashboards or K-12 like the original Dynamic Land work.
| Looking forward to whatever he is getting ready to reveal.
| HammadB wrote:
| I have become convinced that the only mass-marketable form of
| spatial computing is a neural implant or contact lens.
| thom wrote:
| Feels like that's the endgame, even if it's decades away.
| Being able to arbitrarily address a human's supposed
| 576-megapixel visual resolution trumps basically anything
| else. Don't think this is relevant for this next generation
| of UIs though (if that generation does indeed materialise).
| dekhn wrote:
| all your resolution is clumped up in the middle (around
| the fovea), and generally, nobody treats vision as being
| a rectangular grid of pixels (for many reasons).
| tlb wrote:
| The numbers I'm familiar with are: 120M rods and 6M cones
| (each eye). What's the derivation for your number? Is it
| projecting the rod density at the fovea over the whole
| visual field?
| thom wrote:
| Ahem, my calculation was that I once googled it and
| remember the number. My point's more about having
| complete control of your vision rather than the specific
| number, but I assume that will one day be strictly better
| than any possible screen.
| MikeSchurman wrote:
| from: https://clarkvision.com/articles/eye-
| resolution.html
|
| How many megapixels equivalent does the eye have?
|
| The eye is not a single frame snapshot camera. It is more
| like a video stream. The eye moves rapidly in small
| angular amounts and continually updates the image in
| one's brain to "paint" the detail. We also have two eyes,
| and our brains combine the signals to increase the
| resolution further. We also typically move our eyes
| around the scene to gather more information. Because of
| these factors, the eye plus brain assembles a higher
| resolution image than possible with the number of
| photoreceptors in the retina. So the megapixel equivalent
| numbers below refer to the spatial detail in an image
| that would be required to show what the human eye could
| see when you view a scene.
|
| Based on the above data for the resolution of the human
| eye, let's try a "small" example first. Consider a view
| in front of you that is 90 degrees by 90 degrees, like
| looking through an open window at a scene. The number of
| pixels would be 90 degrees * 60 arc-minutes/degree *
| 1/0.3 * 90 * 60 * 1/0.3 = 324,000,000 pixels (324
| megapixels). At any one moment, you actually do not
| perceive that many pixels, but your eye moves around the
| scene to see all the detail you want. But the human eye
| really sees a larger field of view, close to 180 degrees.
| Let's be conservative and use 120 degrees for the field
| of view. Then we would see 120 * 120 * 60 * 60 / (0.3 *
| 0.3) = 576 megapixels. The full angle of human vision
| would require even more megapixels. This kind of image
| detail requires A large format camera to record.
| roflyear wrote:
| Going to be great to have to get a neural implant to get a
| job.
| shash wrote:
| First problem: power and connectivity - you can't have
| wires dangling from inside your skull or eyes.
|
| Second, that _completely_ ignores touch, which is the
| largest of the senses. There's a reason car companies are
| going back to knobs!
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Third problem, all devices produce heat. Lasers, LEDs,
| and cameras. There's a hard limit to how much heat you
| want to conduct into the cornea.
| agentultra wrote:
| Fourth problem: it will all be used for advertising,
| surveillance and disinformation anyway. Beamed directly
| into your skull and eyes so you can't avoid it? Awesome.
| layer8 wrote:
| The sunglasses form factor would be more mass-marketable
| than contact lenses, I believe.
| pixelatedindex wrote:
| My only concern is for people like me who already have
| really poor eyesight (mine is -9 on one and -11 on the
| other). I am envious of people who can wear sunglasses,
| and the only option I have is to get contacts and that
| doesn't seem very pleasant. Also why I never fully came
| around to VR/AR because it felt like I'm wearing double
| goggles, but I acknowledge that there are others who wear
| glasses and don't share the same concerns.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Is it the idea of contacts that you don't like? My wife
| is in the -15 to -16 range with astigmatism and has worn
| contacts for 25 years. She doesn't have any abnormal
| trouble with VR when wearing them. At -11 you can still
| get glasses lenses at all the budget places, 1.74
| refractive index even!
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I used to absolutely dead contact lenses and not
| understand how anyone could choose to wear them. Then I
| got diagnosed with keratoconus and had to wear rigid
| contact lenses. It turns out it's not that bad,
| especially with hybrid or sclerals. I imagine entirely
| soft ones are even more pleasant if that's an option for
| you. It's gonna be weird the first few hours or and it
| will take a few days to get comfortable handling them,
| but it's really convenient. You don't have to clean them
| throughout the day like glasses, you can wear sunglasses
| over them etc. I recommend you try them for a few days
| and see how you actually like it. It's not a scary as it
| sounds.
| capr wrote:
| I've put lenses on all my sunglasses. Works great, except
| when I go into a store and I have to lift my sunglasses
| and suddenly it's all blurry.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I would expect the second / third generation of
| sunglasses form would be showing you a high quality video
| display instead of seeing "through" it - so I suppose
| correcting for vision problems would be zooming or other
| effects on the video. This of course is my expectation
| based on no knowledge in the field and probably sounds
| silly to those with that knowledge.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Don't worry. I'm blind and I'm totally fucked in a 3d
| first ux. :)
| coldtea wrote:
| What does the poor eyesight have to do with not being
| able to wear sunglasses?
|
| There are prescription sunglasses for shortsightness,
| astigmatism, etc.
|
| So the sunglasses-form VR would just have to cater for
| that. Apple's headset-form VR already does (offers the
| option to have prescription lenses in it).
| rtkwe wrote:
| With extreme corrections it get harder to put that into
| anything other than flat lenses and a lot of sun glasses
| aren't that shape. I recently went through getting
| perscription safety glasses and had to get special
| inserts to flatten out the lens profile to make my
| relatively minor -3.75 to -4 prescription. I was able to
| get some relatively normal Oakleys in my script for
| sunglasses though.
| mindslight wrote:
| Also you generally want sunglasses to be much wider and
| taller than prescription glasses, because otherwise you
| get too much light bleed around the sides. Making large
| lenses is when the thickness takes off, especially for
| nearsightedness where the thickness ends up at the edges
| of the lens.
| fragmede wrote:
| Or just find a pair that fits over the prescription pair
| and wear them both.
| coldtea wrote:
| Not easy to wear two pairs at the same time, and not
| convenient either.
| jfoutz wrote:
| I have a matched set of -9, so I don't really have to
| track left/right with contacts. Which is kind of nice.
|
| Day to day, I wear glasses, and have no plans to change
| that. If I'm going to a show or a movie, or if I'm
| planning on spending a lot of time outside, I wear the
| contacts. The contacts are set up for distance not
| reading. and that's becoming more important as I get
| older.
|
| It can be disorienting for a few minutes, I forget how
| much glasses distort peripheral vision.
|
| I get a small supply of daily disposables. I keep a pair
| in my laptop bag. With vision as poor as ours, you know
| how difficult it is if your glasses are lost or damaged.
| It's not life changing, but it is a genuine quality of
| life improvement for me.
|
| I encourage you to get a contact exam, to verify you can
| wear contacts. They should teach you how to put them in
| and take them out. It can be stressful, but you never
| touch your eye. The doctor or assistant can answer any
| questions you have. They're not particularly expensive
| (in the US anyway). You don't have to wear them. Try them
| out, they might have some benefits you haven't realized.
|
| That said, I don't think i'd wear contacts just for
| AR/VR. The headsets already seem like a hassle, and extra
| tooling to make my eyes use them effectively, even more
| of a hassle.
| mattkevan wrote:
| A lot of online glasses places do two-for-one deals so I
| just get two of the same frames, one with normal lenses
| and one with tinted. That way I know the lenses will fit
| the frame.
| david2ndaccount wrote:
| There are sunglasses (normally worn by older people) that
| are meant to be worn over your normal glasses.
| EricRiese wrote:
| Transcribed for accessibility. (Google Lens did a really good job
| but I cleaned up what I noticed.)
|
| July 4, 2023
|
| Hi
|
| Dynamicland is still going, just quietly. We closed the Oakland
| space for covid, but Realtalk development and collaborations have
| continued basically as originally planned, if more slowly due to
| our small size.
|
| I'm hoping to spend the summer working bionano, and get back to
| preparing new on the Dynamicland website in the fall. It might be
| ready by the end of 2023? It'll have everything.
|
| I'll try posting at @bret@dynamic.land (currently Mastodon until
| we have time to do our own thing in Realtalk). Id appreciate if
| you don't ask for my Opinions about things.
|
| Thanks, Bret
| ontouchstart wrote:
| This is a copy of that element, you don't need Google Lens. :-)
|
| <img width="1056" height="792" src="July2023.jpg" alt="Hi,
|
| Dynamicland is still going, just quietly. We closed the Oakland
| space for covid, but Realtalk development and collaborations
| have continued -- basically as originally planned, if more
| slowly due to our small size.
|
| I'm hoping to spend the summer working on bionano, and get back
| to the new Dynamicland website in the fall. It might be ready
| by the end of 2023? It'll have everything.
|
| I'll try posting at @bret@dynamic.land (currently Mastodon
| until we have time to do our own thing in Realtalk). (I'd
| appreciate if you don't ask for my opinions about things.)
|
| Thanks, -Bret">
| OzzyB wrote:
| Semantic Web FTW xD
| jakemauer wrote:
| Quick link to his Mastodon: https://posts.dynamic.land/@bret
| dontlaugh wrote:
| The image is clickable.
| davidcollantes wrote:
| Right now (2023-07-05T13:35:45-0400), and for me, it is not.
| davidcollantes wrote:
| I stand corrected. I see the link to his Mastodon instance
| is! Wow, completely missed it.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| It's an overly cute trick with poor ergonomics :)
| brendanyounger wrote:
| Can we all take a moment and appreciate that Bret Victor's
| natural handwriting is good enough to make a typeface from?
| the-printer wrote:
| > I'd appreciate if you don't ask for my opinions about things.
|
| I feel this.
|
| Nice looking web page also.
| adbachman wrote:
| That line was my favorite.
|
| It's challenging to be a public figure, present yourself on
| contemporary social media, and not be pressured (implicitly or
| explicitly) to speak up on everything.
|
| Though I don't read this as being about political or social
| issues. How else would you have someone politely say, "I'd like
| to be left alone to do my work, but I'd also like to share with
| you what I'm working on."
| piuantiderp wrote:
| What do you mean? "Though I don't read this as being about
| political or social issues."
| SamBam wrote:
| People are more likely to ask Bret about computing issues.
| dmazin wrote:
| I just made the mistake of reading a few recent DHH blog posts,
| and I really appreciate the difference between these two
| people. Both have a large following, but one sits down and does
| his work, while the other owns a company and seems physically
| unable to stop opining.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| The crown of thought leadership is heavy and full of thorns.
| randito wrote:
| In defense of DHH, a lot of the things he blogs about are
| completed and successful (to him) company open-source
| projects. He's sharing what they have done. It's not all bad.
|
| A lot of views are contrary and he presents his views
| strongly, so it's kind of off-putting.
| bjornasm wrote:
| I feel that as well. I'm at the point where I am knee deep in
| my PhD work, and I see that my commitment to that work makes me
| want to remove myself from other stuff. I just don't want to
| use any of my energy on anything else, and especially dealing
| with people in anything but an uncomplicated manner is the last
| thing I want to do. I am sure it must be doubly so if there is
| an audience to whatever you say and end up regret.
|
| I have often envied how (I romanticize) it was before social
| media and hyper-connectivity, where you might be able to just
| fade out a little bit to focus on a project. Its a bit hard to
| get that long term focus when people expect you to be available
| and able to reply within the hour. Just saying "no" drains
| enough as it is. I don't have the backbone to put out that
| message though.
| OmarShehata wrote:
| I've echoed this sentiment from time to time and someone
| recently asked me "Why don't you just disconnect and
| apologize later?"
|
| Might not work for you, but I found this surprisingly
| liberating: allowing myself to just drop the ball, not
| respond, or just say "Sorry I can't" with no justification,
| so I can focus my energy where I need it
| swyx wrote:
| look i'm as much of a bret victor fanboi as the next guy, but
| that one felt a little like "whoa ok you're too cool for school
| now huh"
| justin66 wrote:
| Formulating an opinion worth sharing takes _work._
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Tech is extremely boring on social media because there are
| many more opinions than those truly dedicated to the craft.
|
| You can argue that it shouldn't be zero sum. But time and
| attention both are, and you can't focus fully if you're
| trying to "grow an audience."
| indigochill wrote:
| I vaguely recall a meme somewhere about how ridiculous it is
| to ask, say, a sports or movie star their opinion on politics
| or something else that isn't their field just because they're
| famous.
|
| Heck, even within one's field, Bret may have neat ideas about
| interfaces for programming and attained a sort of celebrity
| status for some of us, but that doesn't mean he can
| confidently answer random questions from strangers. He's a
| researcher, not a guru.
| the-printer wrote:
| That last part stands out to me, him being a researcher,
| that is. I wonder if there is any detriment to the idea of
| researchers or other "knowledge workers" who use social
| media at the risk of exposing new developments or ideas to
| people who may be uninformed or unqualified in regard to
| whatever the individual is exposing publicly. Could/does
| this affect what they share or how they/others perceive
| their work that is shared?
| gsatic wrote:
| Sure does. Faraday stopped his EM experiments, not cuz of
| ignorant ppl, but "great" mathematicians of the day were
| mocking him for his lack of math skills. Without those
| experiments, no one would have ever dreamt up
| electromagnetism. And on the flip side, "qualified" ppl
| who couldnt grok the math of Maxwell or Heaviside, would
| dismiss the math as just too complex. This type of stuff
| happens all the time. Social media amplifies it. But you
| just have to find good ppl and ignore the herd to make
| progress. And dont mistake capturing Attention on Social
| Media or HN for progress.
| sitkack wrote:
| Discoveries are always preceded by a long string of "No"
| and why would you do this?
|
| Use good science, but run weird experiments!
| sph wrote:
| > I vaguely recall a meme somewhere about how ridiculous it
| is to ask, say, a sports or movie star their opinion on
| politics or something else that isn't their field just
| because they're famous.
|
| Jurgen Klopp when asked about this opinion on COVID?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZ4bKnpxbYc -- great answer
| in a time where every-fucking-body had to share their
| opinion on it, and still do.
| wpietri wrote:
| That's so great. Thank you for sharing it.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Those are the whites white teeth I have ever seen,
| incredible.
|
| Also the message was great, the combination rarely
| happens!
| the-printer wrote:
| I think it conveys a sense of dedication to his work that is
| at odds with the ever-looming desire to pontificate than it
| does aloofness toward others.
|
| I'm not familiar with him or his work beyond the cursory
| glance at his Wikipedia page that I made after recognizing
| the homepage from marginalia.nu binges, but I associated the
| statement with a certain level of exhaustion, or
| disinclination rather, from the desire to publicly comment on
| whatever bleeding edge or attention-grabbing topic a man of
| his profession and experience may encounter. I have no clue
| what this guy does with certainty, it sounds sort of Alan
| Kay-like? But based off this post it sounds like there's a
| lot of ground he intends to cover with whatever he's got
| going on that requires a lot of thought. Thought that he is
| reluctant to share at a toot's notice.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| If you're not familiar with him, you could watch his _"
| Inventing on Principle"_ talk [1] from 11 years ago.
| Starting at around the 12 minute mark should get you right
| to the good stuff (though it's all worth watching and
| thinking about). This is the talk that made him famous.
|
| Unfortunately, the demo he showed in that talk never really
| turned in to a product or movement that revolutionized
| programming as at the time many of us hoped it might.
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
| Alex3917 wrote:
| > This is the talk that made him famous.
|
| He was already pretty famous before that from Magic Ink,
| if not even earlier work.
| syntheweave wrote:
| A pitfall of "Inventing on Principle", one which I
| believe Victor himself later noted, is that the talk is
| really a modest statement on what bringing some
| philosophy into your work could do, but it has an
| overwhelmingly engaging demo. Everyone tried to copy the
| demo in a kind of "wave of the future next gen
| programming" hype cycle instead of taking home the
| concept and trying to put that into work they were
| already doing.
|
| And, having been one of those impressed with the demo,
| now I look back on it thinking "this business of software
| is cargo-culting the whole way down, isn't it."
| brandall10 wrote:
| Light Table was the only real attempt I'm aware of. Any
| other notables?
| iamwil wrote:
| Swift creator also influenced though i don't remember
| where i heard or read that.
| gnramires wrote:
| Yes! I've seen first hand how much it helps (is it just
| me in particular? maybe not everyone needs it?)
| programming things I can visualize (in a literal sense of
| seeing, but I think the essence is really being in close
| contact with intermediate results). So, I just make ways
| to visualize things :)
|
| A particularly simple and amazing tool for this is p5.js,
| with an editor that, to me, enables exactly the kind of
| workflow shown here: editor.p5js.org
|
| Whatever you are going to do, you can draw alongside to
| help you make sense of it better. I do this on my own
| mind sometimes, but for example visualizing and small
| neural networks (which I have been messing around with)
| can't be done on my imagination alone.
|
| I think the important is just that you have some library
| that makes drawing easy, and put it alongside your work.
| Of course, it's extra work to make diagrams of
| everything. But sometimes they really help. I think it's
| important to simply have this possibility in mind.
|
| (maybe it should have a name? Visualization-enhanced
| programming? Print-programming? I think (e.g. jupyter)
| notebooks strive toward this, although tbh I prefer the
| p5js environment without a linear format)
|
| It should be up to us to decide if and when this extra
| work is worthwhile. I think really _designing_ (and
| discovering) things is what benefits the most from this
| style (i.e. game design, product design, scientific
| experimentation). So you need programmers working on a
| design problem and /or designers working on a programming
| problem; or you could have them side-by-side
| collaborating (and not just a designer imagining things,
| and a programmer following specifications to the letter).
|
| It also requires a kind of artistic taste to make things
| look good, but of course that's something you can
| develop.
|
| It's a really enjoyable process to be able to get a feel
| for what you're doing!
|
| (See here: https://editor.p5js.org/gustavo.nramires/sketc
| hes/sLA07wpa_ for some personal experiments in
| visualizing graphs and sparse neural nets, https://editor
| .p5js.org/gustavo.nramires/sketches/1Bb5VIHi2 for
| designing an algorithm to efficiently make a roguelike
| map)
|
| I think you're saying is that we don't get this for
| 'free'. There's probably no tool (although maaaybe AI
| could help?) that just instantly visualizes anything you
| could do. Instead it's up to us to do it :) (although
| good graphics libraries and a tool that encourages you to
| recompile often is almost essential imo!)
|
| And here's the kind of art I could likely never just
| simply imagine to existence, experimentation is
| essential! https://editor.p5js.org/gustavo.nramires/sketc
| hes/pVFFT_8E5
| MikeSchurman wrote:
| I've used this technique quite a bit in the past, but
| often not enough. I work in games so a lot of problems
| are actual visual 2d or 3d problems. Things like: finding
| the closest valid object I can target at my given
| heading. Simple enough, but as things get complicated
| it's often the simple things that trip you up, and
| visualizations can often make the problem obvious.
|
| That p5 editor looks nice for this sort of thing. It's
| important to be able to get the visualizations in
| quickly, otherwise you risk wasting time.
|
| A tool I've dreamed up, that I never seem to have time to
| implement, is to send debug information to some form of
| database, and then being able to query and render that
| data as you like (from another client). To see bar/line
| charts of data, spatial visuals, more abstract graphs
| like in your examples, timeline scrubbers, etc... maybe
| some day I'll get around to making it.
|
| Anyway, thanks for your comment. I'm interested in this
| kind of thing.
| arc-in-space wrote:
| When I first saw Dynamicland I assumed it'd quietly evaporate
| within a month, I'm glad to hear it's still being built.
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