[HN Gopher] Dynamicland 2024
___________________________________________________________________
Dynamicland 2024
Author : Pulcinella
Score : 545 points
Date : 2024-09-04 17:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dynamicland.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dynamicland.org)
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Home page has been updated as well, though I am unable to submit
| that as I have previously submitted the same URL when the site
| launched back in 2017.
|
| https://dynamicland.org/
| dang wrote:
| Fixed now. Thanks!
| kkukshtel wrote:
| Great to see this project continuing to progress!
| hasbot wrote:
| I watched the new intro video and I have no idea what this is
| other than lots and lots and lots of cards with dots on them. It
| looks soo complex!
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Some of the people in the video have that expression on their
| face too.
| gffrd wrote:
| I love the ambitions and values in this work: that programs are
| physical so are shared and discoverable, that things are
| learnable through play, that the goal is people together.
|
| It's as if you asked someone to redesign the computer (as a
| concept) based on the technology and knowledge we have now, and
| designed around the tasks most fundamentally human.
|
| Always inspiring, always a gut check if I'm doing work that's
| valuable.
| hemogloben wrote:
| Have they open sourced any of it?
| mintplant wrote:
| Only in the sense that you can walk into the space and check
| out the source in-person.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| ...if you know the right person and are invited.
| franklovecchio wrote:
| I remember this offshoot from a few years back:
| https://github.com/tinylanders/tinyland
| dcre wrote:
| https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/#Is_Realtalk_open_source
| skadamat wrote:
| Not yet. There are some offshoot projects if you want to play &
| experience:
|
| - https://folk.computer/
|
| - http://tablaviva.org/
| sanxiyn wrote:
| You can look at the code of a substantial project in text, as
| well as in action, here.
|
| https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
| acyou wrote:
| I love the bookshelf interface. It is as good as a regular
| bookshelf for browsing and inspires me to explore.
|
| However, I hit the back button as soon as I click a link, where
| with a physical bookshelf I would probably crack the book and
| flip through, no comparison there.
| kdamica wrote:
| Reminds me of the Packard Bell Navigator UI from the 90s:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell_Navigator
| miek wrote:
| Thanks for taking me back. This felt so futuristic at the
| time to my younger self.
| xipho wrote:
| Inspiring stuff. TLDR, AFAICT, no, you can not do this on your
| own without participating IRL and taking away what you learned.
| Am inspired that it keeps growing, am disappointed that an
| indoctrination of a sorts is the only (apparent) route in. That
| said, sign me up please.
| jedberg wrote:
| Can someone who has six minutes to watch the intro give those of
| us who don't a TL;DW?
| skadamat wrote:
| The analogy I use is pro cooking vs home cooking. We mostly
| only have professional cooking in the world of computing. What
| if we created tools and environments for everyone to become a
| home cook?
|
| - What types of things might a home cook compute-r create,
| share, and remix?
|
| - How can individual home cook compute-rs get more agency and
| freedom over their programs? What would that world look like?
|
| - What if we could incorporate all the ways we think when we
| compute? Our amazing skills in touching, feeling, grasping,
| moving, etc that we evolved
|
| Dynamicland (as I see it) is exploring & researching what that
| world look like by building increasingly more powerful and
| capable computing environments.
| jedberg wrote:
| Thank you. I still don't exactly get it though. What's with
| the books on a shelf?
| azeirah wrote:
| The books are the books that are recommended to read if you
| want to understand what they're doing and what prior work
| they're building on.
|
| Bret mentioned computer literacy on the website. The books
| you can consider as "the curriculum" or "the theory" or
| what have you.
| zamadatix wrote:
| It might be more time-understanding efficient to watch the
| video if/when you have enough time to mull what they show
| in it over. I'm not sure I would have gotten a useful take
| on this particular thing in a set of short text summaries
| and I'm usually one very biased towards that kind of
| consumption.
| jedberg wrote:
| Fair enough. I'll have to check it out later. Thank you
| for this perspective.
| Kerrick wrote:
| Related: "An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal"
| https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
|
| Discussed here on HN at least twice:
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629
|
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877423
| boojums wrote:
| "What if smart boards were actually good, could use the whole
| room, and track arbitrary physical objects?"
|
| combined with
|
| "What if you could create/edit a computer program like you
| rearrange furniture in a room?"
|
| appears to be the sales pitch.
|
| I would recommend watching the video though because there are
| few more pieces to it such as how it is programmed, etc.
| skadamat wrote:
| I have the physical 2017 zine and it's a beauty to have a giant
| folded sheet of poster paper you can expand and read on a table,
| like a newspaper
| dack wrote:
| i'm always super impressed by brett victor and highly admire his
| work.
|
| that said, I have to admit that it doesn't really feel "right"
| based on what I've seen. there's so many limitations to the
| physical world that a virtual space doesn't have. i get that
| physical objects can participate in the UI and that arranging
| things in 3D space is sometimes nicer than using a
| mouse/keyboard.
|
| However, the fact that there is still code written on pieces of
| paper, and that the projector can only show a 2D image (which is
| only primitively interactable) just looks super awkward. and the
| question of "what can you do" when you're staring at a blank
| table seems tough
|
| again, it's super cool research but i wonder if he has plans to
| resolve some of these fundamental issues with mixing real and
| virtual
| skadamat wrote:
| IMO the goal here isn't to replace traditional software
| engineering. It's to bring computing to spaces. Museums,
| classrooms, town halls, etc, which requires a different
| approach.
|
| The mental model I use is professional cooking in a kitchen vs
| home cooking. Different scale, tools, and approaches but some
| overlap in core ideas.
|
| A pro cook can criticize a home cook's workflow and tools, but
| the goals are different!
| bobajeff wrote:
| I think their goal is similar to what smalltalk's goal
| originally was: To allow for regular people to do complex
| things with a computer.
|
| Ultimately, it didn't succeed in that goal but I believe
| inventing the first spreadsheet software can be counted as
| achieving some success there.
|
| I admire this project and hope they can one day move beyond
| simply typing code on a sheet of paper to creating tools that
| actually make our compilers/IDEs look like using punch cards.
| samatman wrote:
| Without Smalltalk, there would have been no HyperCard, and
| HyperCard definitely succeeded in that goal to a
| significant degree.
|
| It's a pity there's never been a modern reboot with the
| right factors aligned to continue that work.
| daniel_grady wrote:
| https://www.beyondloom.com/decker/index.html
| samatman wrote:
| I think Decker is just wonderful, but it's retro. That
| isn't a criticism of it at all, that's what it wants to
| be and I don't think it should try to be something else.
|
| But it isn't what I meant. A HyperCard reboot would be a
| modern GUI builder with a deck-of-cards drag-drop
| metaphor, deployable as desktop, browser, and mobile apps
| for any platform. Mobile poses some problems,
| particularly iOS, but I don't think those are
| unsurmountable.
|
| Decker is a love letter to the HyperCard which was. But
| if HyperCard had survived as a product, today's version
| wouldn't look anything like that.
| RodgerTheGreat wrote:
| Decker runs natively on a variety of platforms as well as
| on web browsers, and it fully supports touch devices like
| tablets. It isn't designed with small cellphones in mind,
| but I'm told that it's quite usable on phones that
| include a stylus. Just as touch support has improved over
| time, I have some ideas for providing a degree of fluid
| layout in the future without onerous impositions on deck
| authoring.
|
| Decker is not a carbon-copy of HyperCard frozen in the
| past; it's a continuously evolving platform with many
| interesting innovations and experimental ideas. It has a
| distinct aesthetic, but I see this as a strength rather
| than a weakness: "modern" just means "in fashion", and
| fashions are always in flux.
| peebeebee wrote:
| I think the (interesting) output we see as the different UI is
| a side-effect of the actual research mentioned at the end of
| the video: how can we teach everyone how to do spatial
| programming, just like we teach everyone to write and
| calculate. The end result is not a finished product, but new
| knowledge about how to spread this new knowledge to everyone.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| I like the ideas around the interface where physical objects
| are part of the UX, but I think putting everything into paper
| takes it too far.
|
| Putting things on paper means you cannot share things outside
| of your immediate community which I think is one of the main
| advantages of computing and the internet.
|
| Creating a place for physical community is great, making a UX
| which allows sharing that experience is great. Firewalling your
| ideas off from the rest of the world, not so great.
|
| I could see a world where these communities are federated.
| Maybe your local computing community is connected to other
| locales as well as somewhere else which is far away (like we do
| today with sister cities).
| akerr wrote:
| He worked on the Touch Bar for Apple so I guess ideas don't
| always work out.
| lloeki wrote:
| I find the Touch Bar to be a brilliant idea, but the released
| execution didn't live up to the potential.
|
| https://vas3k.com/blog/touchbar/
|
| https://pock.app
|
| https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-the-
| complete...
|
| https://github.com/niw/HapticKey
| modeless wrote:
| Very cool. I do believe physical embodiment of computers is the
| future and the current screen/GUI paradigm will decline, but the
| embodiment will be different. The physically embodied computer of
| the future will be a humanoid robot, and we will interact with it
| the same way we do with humans: by gesturing and speaking. There
| will always be a place for screens, just as there is still a
| place for books, but we will have less reason to use them when we
| can accomplish what we want to do in more natural collaboration
| with physically embodied computers in the form of humanoid
| robots, alongside other humans.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| I feel that mobile screens and AR are going to be the future
| modeless wrote:
| Mobile screens are the present, in the form of phones.
| Unfortunately there are fundamental physics problems that
| make AR too limited and too cumbersome to entirely replace
| screens for the foreseeable future. I highly recommend Karl
| Guttag's blog to learn about the problems that will hold back
| AR for a long, long time:
| https://kguttag.com/2023/06/03/slides-from-presentation-
| at-a...
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Yes, I think that mobile screens will continue to be our
| present, but in the future! I think that touch screens are
| the preferred medium for computation for technology users
| who started using computers regularly for personal use
| after c. 2011. Personally, I hate the things but I can see
| that for people who are not technical users, the mobile
| phone is a natural way to compute. I know of many people
| who don't even own a laptop or desktop; they just use their
| phone for all computation
| carlosneves wrote:
| One of the long-standing critiques I've heard from Alan
| Kay I think is that smartphone users can't use
| smartphones to create software for smartphones.
|
| There's no officially supported way of doing that I mean.
| You're required to have a desktop or laptop computer
| (keyboard & mouse) that runs XCode/Android Studio...
| spacebacon wrote:
| An interface makes programs more accessible to humans by
| placing them within a spatial field that's more familiar to
| our natural conditions.
|
| Most people with programming skills prefer the command line
| interface. The advantage of integrating computation and
| design into the real world is increased accessibility and
| ease of learning.
|
| However, after selling my LightForm projector and all AR/VR
| equipment in pursuit of similar novel solutions, I can
| confidently say I now prefer workflows that are contained
| within a small device I can carry in my pocket and stow away
| when done.
|
| My preferred interface is simply an easy button.
| azeirah wrote:
| Despite appearances, dynamicland isn't about any particular
| paradigm on its own. It's a set of values and a way of looking
| at media that come together to create computer-literate
| communities and even culture.
|
| This is obviously a bit vague, especially if you look at all
| the things they're doing with the cameras and the projectors
| and the dots and all that. There's nothing stopping anyone
| "running" dynamicland on anything else.
|
| It's a completely different way of looking at computers, and
| it's basically saying "monitors, keyboards, mice, projectors,
| smartphones, tablets, laptops, vr headsets and xr headsets are
| all different kinds of ways to experience computation in the
| flesh. We want to explore what happens when we change the
| fundamental assumptions that computing is something you do
| (alone) in front of 'a computer'. What could computing look
| like if it was reimagined from the ground up, and we used
| people instead of person as our target audience, space instead
| of product, extensions of existing media rather than inventing
| new media, literacy instead of profession".
|
| It's difficult to really explain in one go, I've been following
| Bret Victor since before he even started ok CDG
|
| Regardless, I think it's the future for precisely one reason;
| it's easier, cheaper and more powerful. People can and people
| will integrate it with all the high tech stuff that we already
| have, that includes powerful desktops, vr, smartphones etc.
| skadamat wrote:
| Hopefully my cooking analogy helps a tiny bit?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41448649
|
| Similar a bit to Maggie Appleton's barefoot developers vibe
| too: https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
| munificent wrote:
| _> The physically embodied computer of the future will be a
| humanoid robot, and we will interact with it the same way we do
| with humans: by gesturing and speaking._
|
| I disagree.
|
| First of all, there's nothing particularly "physically
| embodied" about talking and gesturing at a robot. You can do
| that just as well with a screen showing a virtual robot and a
| camera with gesture recognition. Unless you're _touching_ the
| robot, it doesn 't have a body that's meaningfully interactive.
|
| Second, for many human endeavors, social interaction is not the
| primary way most people pursue it or want to pursue it. Yes,
| there are definitely some people with, say, an "executive
| mindset" who love social interaction so much that they want
| that to be all they do all day every day.
|
| But for many people, the activities they enjoy most are ones
| that involve solitary direct manipulation. If I'm going
| fishing, I want to cast the lure myself and feel the snap of it
| thrum through the rod. I want to feel the tension on the line
| when a fish bites. Waving at a robot and asking it to catch me
| a fish would be a strictly, catastrophically inferior
| experience.
|
| What is gardening if your hands don't get dirty or woodworking
| if you don't come home smelling like wood shavings?
|
| Here's a way to look at it: When people retire and no longer
| need to choose their activities based on financial need, how
| much time to they often end up spending giving instructions to
| people? I hear a lot of retirees puttering in their garden,
| playing board games, tinkering on an old motorcycle, or getting
| better at guitar. Some definitely do join community
| organizations too, but humans are as much a tool-using species
| as a social one.
| reaperman wrote:
| I assume this hasn't been "released" yet, but still thought I'd
| ask if the source code for the operating system (or "computing
| environment", in Dynamicland-speak) is available anywhere and
| also if there yet exists any DIY hardware guides for building
| your own to play with at my own location (far from the
| Oakland/Berkeley Dynamicland facility).
|
| I believe the FAQ confirms that this is not possible at the
| moment:
|
| > Where can I get Realtalk?
|
| >> At present, Realtalk exists in Dynamicland spaces and in the
| spaces of our collaborators, where we can carefully grow and tend
| in-person communities of practice. In the short term, additional
| spaces will be started by people who have contributed
| significantly to an existing space and have internalized the
| culture and its values. Long term, we intend to distribute the
| ideas in the form of kits+games which will guide communities
| through building their own computing environments that they fully
| understand and control. Long long term, computing may be built
| into all infrastructure as electric light is today. This would
| also require an extensive network of educational support.
| asolove wrote:
| There are some similar-ish systems with alpha-level install
| instructions: https://folk.computer/pilot
| dingnuts wrote:
| >In the short term, additional spaces will be started by people
| who have contributed significantly to an existing space and
| have internalized the culture and its values
|
| there's something ominous, weird, and sort of damning about
| being protective of your "culture and values" in this way and
| to this extent. If Dynamicland offered a truly novel computing
| paradigm, it should be one that is accessible by other
| cultures. If it offers a valuable culture and worthwhile
| values, those values should be viral on their merits. They
| should be broadcast, rather than kept closely guarded.
|
| If you have to carefully indoctrinate new users into your
| culture in order to protect it and keep out the Others who
| might ruin your culture with wrongthink, maybe what you
| actually have is a cult.
| Juliate wrote:
| > there's something [...] about being protective of your
| "culture and values" in this way and to this extent
|
| Yes, AND it may also be because it's kind of innovation in
| the open, before it's really ready or that all the critical
| angles are fixed, and they might not want spoil specifics
| they would like to make flourish and present to the whole
| world, and see them ... let's say half-assed, or
| misunderstood enough that it does not "jell".
|
| In the end, it will be embraced in some way. But it's
| understandable that they have a specific idea in mind.
|
| See it as a trailer for a movie where post-prod is not yet
| fully done, perhaps.
| jkestner wrote:
| Ideas are fragile, etc. There's a point at which you want
| feedback, but not before you've built enough for people to
| see the vision. Depending on your audience, you may need to
| build more or less to get to that point.
|
| Still, they've been working on this for yeeeears.
| azeirah wrote:
| Yes-ish, I somewhat agree with your critique. I think it's a
| temporary measure though.
|
| It is very America-centric and that's very sad to me.
|
| I think Bret is a bit hesitant to share the stuff before
| people understand what it is, to prevent the same problem
| that happened when Jobs visited PARC and walked away with the
| idea of "we need to build computers with the desktop
| metaphor", without understanding at all that it was always
| meant to be about authoring and sharing, not about the visual
| metaphors.
|
| Regardless, I hope to see more actual standalone
| instances/offshoots of dynamicland.
| the_other wrote:
| > to prevent the same problem that happened when Jobs
| visited PARC and walked away with the idea of "we need to
| build computers with the desktop metaphor", without
| understanding at all that it was always meant to be about
| authoring and sharing, not about the visual metaphors
|
| Can you expand on this, or share some links so I can learn
| about it? I've not heard the story framed like this before.
| I'm interested to learn "what we missed out on" as a result
| of "visual metaphors" becoming overemphasised in the public
| mind.
| bmitc wrote:
| I think he's afraid, and rightly so, of it getting adopted
| without being understood but then getting more popular than
| the original idea and drowning it out. It's the same reason
| people speak against introducing Douglas Engelbart as the
| "inventor of the mouse" when he was so much more than that.
| Look at Scratch. I think it's a pretty objectively a bad way
| to introduce programming systems to children, especially over
| something like Logo, but it is incredibly popular. And I'm
| not referring to the so-called visual aspect of it. I think
| it's just fundamentally a very uninteresting permutation and
| medium of teaching.
| dbspin wrote:
| I think you're missing that this is as much a social
| technology as a computing technology. Immediate analogy would
| be stuff like the 'open space' model adopted from anarchist
| organising into design thinking. Which unfortunately lost its
| function in the transition. Moving from being a way of
| generating and consolidating multiple perspectives / ideas /
| intentions, into a way of generating engagement without
| influence on a projects direction.
|
| It doesn't seem like the effort here is to keep out any
| group, but rather to maintain a cohesive structure to the
| technical and group work aspects of it. Social technologies
| can be as brittle as they are useful, and abstracting /
| commodifying them can often make them work in a way that
| directly undermines their creators intentions.
| a-saleh wrote:
| This is how most hacker spaces and fab-labs and even
| community gardens I know operate.
|
| Rule 0: "Behave in a way that lets us not need to make
| additional rules" and things like that.
|
| And I can doubly see it, if you have something ~new, and I
| could very well see that this is the thing that works if and
| only if you play along.
| breck wrote:
| Now that we know the term to search for "RealTalkOS" we can see
| at least one person tried to build an implementation last year
| https://github.com/deosjr/elephanttalk
|
| "Our goal is to invent a form of computation which local
| communities of non-specialists can make for themselves. From
| the ground up, for their own needs, which they fully understand
| and control."
|
| I'm LiveStreaming building a RealTalkOS implementation now.
| Come join and let's build together!
| https://youtube.com/live/02-wJ7Od9Bo?feature=share
| dfex wrote:
| Not quite Realtalk, but inspired by it:
|
| http://paperprograms.org
| skadamat wrote:
| The best thing about this website is that it was made in
| Dynamicland, which is the most bootstrapp-y & Dynamicland thing
| ever:
|
| https://x.com/worrydream/status/1831035663703212350
| latexr wrote:
| I'm surprised Bret is still on Twitter, which is an ever more
| closed non-communal system. It's values seem to go against
| everything Dynamicland upholds.
| infinite8s wrote:
| I think he just used it as a place to announce the new site.
| If you look at his posting history he's only made 1 per year
| for the past few years.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| The intro video looks very cool! I would love to try it but I
| doubt that'll be possible.
| hazn wrote:
| whenever i'll teach newcomers computing, i will now adopt the
| approach laid out here. it's easy to forget how painful learning
| computing is, how much you need to know about the internet to
| make a single http request and read out it's response. user
| @simonw talked about this recently on twitter [0][1]
|
| absolute beautiful point about needing a different kind of
| literacy in the modern age at the end of the video.
|
| i wish, with all my heart, that this and similar projects develop
| a loving community which will enable other communities to learn
| computing in an accessible, cheap and memorable way.
|
| [0] https://x.com/simonw/status/1829195655006531661 (original
| twitter link)
|
| [1] https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01j6z4cj87f5ky3c6ese0thscw
| (backup because twitter is not the future of computing)
| bsimpson wrote:
| I had the good fortune of taking a field trip there in 2018.
|
| The video is a very good overview of the project.
|
| One interesting artifact of "the real world simulates itself" is
| version control. At Dynamicland, each version of a program is a
| sheet of paper (with a unique set of fiducials along the edges).
| If you want to edit a program, you grab a keyboard and point it
| at the program. A text editor comes up; you make your changes,
| and hit commit. When you do, it spits out a new piece of paper
| with your changes. Put it in the view of the camera to use the
| new version. Take it away and use the old paper to roll the
| change back.
| breck wrote:
| > with a unique set of fiducials along the edges
|
| I suspect each piece of paper, if examined with a good enough
| camera, has a unique fingerprint, like a snowflake, and perhaps
| this could be used in the future for an "Isomer Addressed
| Filesystem". In other words, all pieces of paper ship with a
| UUID already, woven into their atoms.
| shoxidizer wrote:
| I would suggest instead convincing every printer manufacturer
| to embed in every printer a routine that encodes a unique
| identifier on every print and then reading that using more
| typical cameras. The hard part has already been done.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
| jf wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that I mentioned the printer tracking dots
| to the researchers at the lab and certainly mentioned
| DataGlyphs. So they were aware of alternatives. The trick
| is to get a workable system with cameras that have the
| resolution to pick out those details from a dozen feet
| away, as well as a software stack that can recognize them
| at ~60fps.
|
| The goal has always been to move away from the dots, you
| can see this in the progress report:
| https://dynamicland.org/2019/Progress_report/
|
| That said, and this is purely my opinion, the system works
| well enough as it is, and there is so much fun stuff to
| build on top of what works, that it's hard to prioritize a
| better object recognition system over the myriad of other
| interesting things to be done.
| shoxidizer wrote:
| I imagine it would very difficult to read these dots from
| a distance and dynamically. I just mention it because
| most printed documents already have indentifiers printed
| on them that don't require seeing individual fibers.
| jf wrote:
| Ah, noted! With that in mind, did you know that those
| printer dots are what the team that won the 2011 DARPA
| Shredder Challenge used to win?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Shredder_Challenge_20
| 11
|
| Fun fact: Otavio Good, who led the winning team, learned
| about the printer dots on this very site. As I recall, he
| said that the dots were like a map that let them
| reconstruct the shredded documents.
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| I would had thought, even then, that this was not only
| commonly known, but not the sole only annulment/rule
| among a generally "rules-free" competition, having been
| rather obvious, especially to the audience these
| competitions attract.
|
| Thank you for reminding me, and others, how immediate and
| obvious success can be.
| cma wrote:
| Is there a better source that talks about it? Didn't see
| it mentioned on that page.
| jf wrote:
| I'm not sure if there's a source online as I learned
| about it from Otavio directly. The slightly longer story,
| as I recall it, is that their team basically built a
| "game" to help humans unshred documents, and was using
| that approach until Otavio happened to read about the
| printer dots on HN. He updated his code to take those
| into account and was astonished at how helpful they were.
| sedatk wrote:
| Oh, that's why my HP inkjet refuses to print a black &
| white page when it's low on yellow.
| jf wrote:
| Woah! I never considered that until now. I'll bet you're
| right.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Not entirely it also uses bits of color ink to make the
| black and white page look better, at least according to
| the printer companies who conveniently also benefit by
| selling you more ink.
| sedatk wrote:
| How can it make black look better by adding yellow to it?
| max-ibel wrote:
| If you are happy to live with B&W printing for your
| untraceable printing needs, maybe you can fill the yellow
| cartridge with clear ink (not sure if water is OK).
|
| But then, how do B&W laser printer allow for tracing ?
| Jerrrrrrry wrote:
| There is a few bits you can flip on the Firmware side to
| fix that.
| d--b wrote:
| Can you "pipe" the results of one paper onto one of the inputs
| of the next?
|
| That'd be pretty funky.
| jf wrote:
| Yes. Though not in the traditional way that we think of
| "pipe" working. A good example of this was the "zoom lens" in
| Omar Rizwan's Geokit: https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-
| dynamicland-geokit/
| rtkwe wrote:
| Anything on the table is open to reference by anything else
| on the table afaik. Direct references are usually done as
| cursors projected off the page so you can "point" and "click"
| on other objects to control precisely what you reference or
| select with the other tool.
|
| You could also implement input and output piping between
| programs in a more organized way where their physical
| orientation isn't as critical as most page references seem to
| be. eg: Put a tag on a sticky note that represents a pipe,
| put it close enough to the 'output' of one page then stick it
| to the input of another compatible page.
|
| Not sure how protected the individual pages are from outside
| modification because real details are quite thin on the
| ground. I think right now you could probably turn every
| display page into a rick roll if you wanted.
| abeppu wrote:
| I think the overall idea here is really cool. But ... to me the
| idea of printing stanzas of code onto paper and then putting them
| on a board so they can be OCRed back into text and then re-parsed
| seems circuitous. Like as a demonstration that in principle you
| _can_ work this way on code as well as on more spatially-native
| concepts, it seems fine, but is that actually the best way for
| all kinds of work? Or can we acknowledge that this makes more
| sense for some things than for others?
| bsimpson wrote:
| It's not OCR. Those colored dots along the periphery are
| fiducials. They're how Realtalk recognizes a program.
|
| Every object that you can interact with in Realtalk has a
| unique set of fiducials. When the camera sees one, it looks up
| its behavior and projects it accordingly.
| modeless wrote:
| So if you physically copy and paste code, or edit it with a
| pen, that won't work, right? The embodiment feels
| superficial.
| jf wrote:
| Correct, that doesn't work in the system as implemented.
| But my understanding is that there has been a goal from the
| start to _eventually_ get physical code editing to work. I
| recall hearing the researchers talking about wanting to
| eventually get handwriting recognition working, so you
| could edit code by hand.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Cameras good enough to do that kind of work aren't really
| available right now. It does still make the code more
| accessible by making it immediately visible on the object
| so if you want to know how a thing works you can just pick
| it up.
| abeppu wrote:
| ... so in the intro video at like 2:37, it says that a
| program can be in language, or an arrangement of components,
| or a hand-drawn diagram, because anything you can write an
| interpreter for is a program. The "arrangement of components"
| and the "hand-drawn diagram" shots show stuff drawn on a
| whiteboard, which seems like it can be edited by redrawing.
| Are you saying that a hand-drawn diagram program can be
| freely edited by changing the diagram, but a language-based
| program cannot be edited by changing the representation of
| its code? That seems ... worse.
|
| I would think that you'd want a fiducial marker on code-
| printouts to identify that a piece of code has a language and
| a namespace perhaps (i.e. "this page contains a kotlin
| definition that lives in com.acme.foo"), but that the
| contents should be modifiable. Otherwise, what's the point?
| If to edit the code you're gonna pull up a keyboard and
| screen (or project an editor window) ... then this seems like
| what we already have, plus you have to print stuff out.
| bsimpson wrote:
| It's been 6 years since I've been there. I'm sure they've
| made developments since then.
|
| I also think these comments along the lines of "what about
| X" are unhelpfully reductivist/dismissive. The whole point
| is that it's a research project. If you can think of a
| better way to make ephemeral room-sized computing work -
| cool, let's try that! Just because it worked some way when
| I was there in 2018 or some way in the video doesn't mean
| that's the end vision for how it will always be.
|
| This isn't a product. It's a vision for the future.
| abeppu wrote:
| > The whole point is that it's a research project.
|
| > It's a vision for the future.
|
| Neither of these mean we can't or shouldn't be able to
| have discuss whether parts of it are good or bad, make
| more or less sense. Is it a vision of a future you'd want
| to work with/in?
|
| > I also think these comments along the lines of "what
| about X" are unhelpfully reductivist/dismissive.
|
| My first statement was "I think the overall idea here is
| really cool". The intent is not to be dismissive. But if
| you think the only acceptable reaction is unalloyed
| praise ... then why even have it on a discussion-oriented
| site?
|
| I think the way of working being demonstrated seems like
| a great fit for _some kinds of work_ and that trying to
| awkwardly shoehorn software-development to happen in
| their system detracts rather than adds to it.
|
| > If you can think of a better way to make ephemeral
| room-sized computing work
|
| ... I think an IDE, a keyboard, and a projector are
| better than printing code blocks at a specific revision
| which is identified by a computer-readable id, and which
| must be given a new ID and a new printed page every time
| you want to try executing a new version.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Yours wasn't the only comment along those lines, and I
| was replying to the class of them rather than yours
| specifically.
|
| I don't mean to curtail discussion or say that only
| praise is allowed. I just want to steer away from
| "gotcha" energy on a research project.
|
| Ideas/discussion/critique are welcome! "This project is
| dumb because it does things differently than I'm used to"
| or "because it currently only supports digital changes to
| the physical paper" are less helpful. Part of the fun of
| a research project is trying weird stuff to see what
| feels better and what doesn't.
|
| Again, none of this is directed at you personally or
| about your specific comment. I just noticed a trend of
| comments about the code editing experience that felt more
| like trying to dunk on the concept than promoting curious
| discussion.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| biot wrote:
| _> I think an IDE, a keyboard, and a projector are better
| than printing code blocks at a specific revision which is
| identified by a computer-readable id, and which must be
| given a new ID and a new printed page every time you want
| to try executing a new version._
|
| You're making several incorrect assumptions here:
|
| 1. That you can't interactively try out the code as
| you're editing it.
|
| 2. That the system as implemented is the final vision of
| how the system ought to work forever.
|
| From https://youtu.be/5Q9r-AEzRMA?t=150 "Anyone can
| change any program at any time and see the changes
| immediately", which demonstrates live editing the code
| and seeing the projected flow lines change color. So you
| can keep editing and iterating on the program, trying out
| your changes without ever having to print anything. Once
| you are satisfied with your improvements, you then
| "commit" the code, which results in the system printing
| out a new page with its new identifier.
|
| And if any part of your expectations isn't how things
| work, it's likely because this is a research project and
| nobody has written the code to make it behave the way
| you'd like. Since Realtalk is built on itself, one would
| only need to make the appropriate changes to improve the
| system.
| bsimpson wrote:
| For those unfamiliar, the founder is Bret Victor. He made a name
| for himself working on human interfaces at Apple in the Steve
| Jobs iPad era. In 2012, he gave a couple of influential talks:
| Inventing on Principle, and Stop Drawing Dead Fish.
|
| Bret's take on being a visionary/futurist is fascinating. He
| imagines the near-future world he wants to live in, prototypes
| enough of it to write a talk about, and gives the talk with the
| hopes that someone in the audience will be inspired to make it a
| reality. He gives ideas away with the hope that he'll be paid
| back with a world where those ideas have been realized.
|
| https://worrydream.com/
| sigmonsays wrote:
| that approach seems so off... i'm curious how it's justified.
|
| like countless hundreds of quotes on execution vs ideas, here
| is one: "Ideas don't make you rich. The correct execution of
| ideas does."
|
| anyways, i'm gonna spend a little more time this evening to
| really dig in.
| jacobolus wrote:
| It's pretty hard for one person or even one small team to
| both (a) do advanced green-field research in whichever
| uncertain direction they feel most exited to explore, and (b)
| make a complete and polished saleable product which best
| meets the needs of a well-defined set of customers.
|
| The skills, personalities, organizing principles, and methods
| involved are substantially different, and focusing on making
| a product has a tendency to cut off many conceptually
| valuable lines of inquiry based on financial motivations.
|
| Notice that Bret Victor's goal (like most researchers) is not
| to become as rich as possible.
|
| Whether researchers or product developers ultimately have
| more leverage is something of a chicken-and-egg question. To
| make an analogy, it's like asking who was more influential,
| Karl Marx or Otto von Bismarck.
| skadamat wrote:
| The world needs powerful new ideas and people willing to
| bring those ideas to everyone through creation of products
| and services. We need BOTH but it's getting harder to build
| a career focusing on inventing and discovering new ideas
| nowadays unfortunately.
|
| This is documented super well in this book (published by
| Stripe Press!): https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Freedom-
| Civilization-Donal...
| infinite8s wrote:
| I don't think he's trying to be rich (except maybe to provide
| self-funding for his research).
| tikhonj wrote:
| Well, Bret Victor presumably isn't _rich_ rich.
|
| Some ideas--key novel concepts and conceptual frameworks, for
| example--absolutely have value, but they're not valuable in
| the way a _business_ is valuable. You won 't become business-
| owner rich just by coming up with the right concept, but you
| can have a successful research career, get enough funding to
| run a small research group, win a Nobel/etc prize... etc. But
| that says more about how our society and economy are
| organized than it does about the inherent value of ideas
| _qua_ ideas.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I assume his point is that he's not going to be able to
| execute on all his ideas anyway, so why not make them free to
| people who might? If the idea succeeds, the benefit to him is
| a better world, while the cost is nothing. It's a positive-
| sum proposition, what's not to like?
| andsoitis wrote:
| > If the idea succeeds, the benefit to him is a better
| world, while the cost is nothing. It's a positive-sum
| proposition, what's not to like?
|
| I am unaware of any of the ideas having been picked up and
| productized. I might be mistaken.
|
| However, if I'm correct, then the thing that could be
| better is picking ideas that have a high chance of being
| selected, everything else being equal.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| While turning ideas into products isn't the benchmark for
| a successful idea, there are countless product folk who
| have definitely been inspired by Bret's work.
|
| For example, this is Vlad Magdalin, one of the founders
| of Webflow:
|
| > But I won't claim credit that it was some magical
| insight that I had. It was a specific video that I saw
| that I think every maker and every creator should see
| called "Inventing on Principal" by Bret Victor. Seeing
| that talk, it's a maybe 50-minute talk around creating
| games and doing animation and this broader concept of
| direct manipulation, but more importantly the principal
| behind why you do the work you do, what drives you.
|
| > Seeing that video and being a designer and a 3D
| animator and a developer all at once, it just sparked
| that idea of, "holy crap." The kinds of tools that we can
| have in animation land, the kind of tools we already have
| for game design and level design, the tools we have in
| digital publishing, all those things can be married
| together to front end and back end development and make
| it a much more human type of interface. That's when it
| was boom, this has to be a product and a thing.
|
| (source: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/144-vlad-
| magdalin-of-we...)
| bjourne wrote:
| You are incorrect. Many if Bret's ideas have been
| implemented - "productized".
| bbor wrote:
| The question is, what do you want more: to live in a good
| world, or be rich?
|
| As the ancients said: A wise man plants trees
| he won't live to see fully grown, and a greedy man
| overfertilizes trees in a mad dash to get the tree purchased
| by a faceless investor before anyone notices it's sick.
| noahtarr wrote:
| > He imagines the near-future world he wants to live in,
| prototypes enough of it to write a talk about, and gives the
| talk with the hopes that someone in the audience will be
| inspired to make it a reality.
|
| What makes you think this?
| bsimpson wrote:
| I was in the audience for Stop Drawing Dead Fish and talked
| to him about his approach afterwards.
| bbor wrote:
| Every time I try to quit hacker news, I get pulled back in
| by threads like this one. Seriously, thanks for sharing
| your knowledge! Talk about a trump card in any argument,
| lol
|
| Substantively: more people should do that. Especially the
| wildly-insanely-unimaginably rich ones.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Victor's previous work has all been huge inspirations to me, but
| after many years of this project that I initially was hyped for
| there are just some big red flags to me that this isn't the way
| forward really or even a good use of his talent.
|
| Big talk about solving the worlds problems out in the room and
| not on the phone I agree with in sentiment but I feel all that
| big talk falls completely flat on it's face when the project
| you're pouring money and most importantly time only exists in one
| space and only benefits a small group of academics and then that
| issue being gushed over as if its a benefit when really it just
| means you're not actually building in the real world at all
| you're building a fake thing in a fake world for the 0.01% of
| people to larp with.
|
| Think the world of computing could greatly benefit from Brett but
| almost in his success it means he'll just be able to play pretend
| in the world of "non-profit"/academia meaning the output will be
| citations + grants not value and there will be no real benefit to
| computing from that work.
|
| Maybe I'd feel different if the intro video ended with a repo and
| a list of hardware to build your own Dynamicland, I almost think
| the fact it doesn't is a tactic for the project to never have to
| really prove its value...
| breck wrote:
| I'm building my own implementation to understand how this works.
|
| No idea what I'm doing yet. Let's build together!
|
| I'm livestreaming here:
| https://youtube.com/live/02-wJ7Od9Bo?feature=share
|
| (Warning: I have yet to shower today).
| Uehreka wrote:
| As cool as Dynamicland is, I still don't get why they won't open
| source it or at least release it in some form.
|
| I've heard various people give roundabout excuses, but none of
| them hold water. They often fall into one of the following
| categories:
|
| - "People won't get the core ideas and will use it to make things
| that go against the core ideas" -- People who care about Bret
| Victor's work will take the time to learn the ideas. People who
| don't might try and make something Bret doesn't like, but
| currently the world is full of things Bret doesn't like, so I
| don't get how that would be different than the status quo.
|
| - "It's actually 'anti-internet', reimagining computers as
| objects in physical space, without the intangible connections
| provided by the internet" -- Cool! I'd like to use it to make an
| airgapped little lab thing for people in my city to play and
| experiment in, but I can't do that unless it's released to the
| community.
|
| - "Yeah but remember it's 'anti-internet', releasing it open
| source on the internet would violate the core principles." --
| This feels too cute by half. I don't consider this a legitimate
| objection.
|
| - "Just come to Oakland, you'll understand when you get here and
| use it." -- That's way out of many people's budgets. I also get
| the feeling that I wouldn't come around just by seeing it, I
| think I'd want one in my city even more.
|
| - "You're not entitled to other people's work." -- True, but most
| stuff done in this sort of research space is done with the intent
| of spreading an idea or increasing the public good. It seems kind
| of odd that the Dynamicland folks keep talking about what a
| revolutionary concept it is while preventing 99.9% of people from
| actually experiencing it.
|
| Overall it just seems like such a weird attitude. I get that
| they're worried about the world misunderstanding their ideas, but
| at this point there are tons of people who have been eating up
| Bret Victor's work and have immense respect for his ideas, and
| would gladly watch, listen to or read whatever instructions would
| be necessary to help someone who's already bought in "play by the
| rules" and get the best possible experience.
| jdougan wrote:
| > - "People won't get the core ideas and will use it to make
| things that go against the core ideas" -- People who care about
| Bret Victor's work will take the time to learn the ideas.
| People who don't might try and make something Bret doesn't
| like, but currently the world is full of things Bret doesn't
| like, so I don't get how that would be different than the
| status quo.
|
| I think the problem is like what happened to "agile" after the
| manifesto. People took a term with a meaning, and ignored that
| meaning in promoting their own stuff, thus confusing the
| terminology and messing up discussion of the concepts.
| Uehreka wrote:
| So their antidote is just preventing the idea from gaining
| traction in the first place? Like, that will certainly
| prevent it from being misinterpreted the way Agile has been,
| but it will also ensure no one can use their idea at all.
| cbreynoldson wrote:
| They aren't trying to "gain traction" right now. They are
| nurturing a beautiful little flame of a vision and
| documenting it for the world to learn from, and possibly be
| inspired by, along the way -- someday it will be more
| publicly available, but for now it functions, to the
| general public, more as art than utility.
|
| The typical themes of things that get posted on HN are not
| compatible with this idea, which is why it comes across so
| jarringly to many. They aren't selling, prescribing,
| recruiting, etc. They are sharing a vision, and to deeply
| understand and appreciate the vision you have to get your
| hands dirty and do some digging into what they've prepared
| for us to see thus far.
| sorrythanks wrote:
| I think you can look at some of the other replies in this
| thread to see how deeply this can be misunderstood. And I think
| the fear is more about losing the meaning of dynamicland.
|
| The source code isn't the idea, the idea is. That's what needs
| to be communicated.
|
| The web page is huge, though, with an unbelievable amount of
| information if you want to build your own.
|
| https://dynamicland.org/archive/2023/Front_shelf
| sorrythanks wrote:
| there's also a much deeper explanation of the why here:
| https://dynamicland.org/2024/Is_Realtalk_open_source/
| Uehreka wrote:
| I don't like the answers they give on that page. Every
| single one feels like a dodge.
| sorrythanks wrote:
| It seems to me less that they are a "dodge" and more that
| the two of you have philosophical disagreements.
|
| If have taken the time to understand what he means when
| he says "Realtalk is not made of source code", and
| disagree with his conclusions, that's not quite the same
| as him being dishonest.
| lproven wrote:
| I read your comment, then I read the page.
|
| I disagree on every single line.
|
| This is not about software. Having the software on its
| own won't help you.
|
| If in 2006, the year before the iPhone came out, you had
| the software as FOSS, would that help? There was no
| hardware yet. There was nothing even with a capacitative
| touch screen with multitouch yet. The whole point of the
| design was to do away with styli, but all extant
| touchscreen devices needed styli back then.
|
| I was implementing corporate networks in 1991. I built
| them with NetBEUI for PC-to-PC comms, and IPX/SPX or
| DECnet for talking to servers. Occasionally all 3.
|
| If I gave 1991 me the source of timbl's WorldWideWeb, it
| would be no use. I didn't have NeXTstep. My corporate
| workstation ran X11 and talked to servers over it but it
| didn't run TCP/IP. I had no TCP/IP in the building.
|
| The point of the Web is the protocol, having clients and
| servers. Having docs is much more use than having code.
| Code is useless fragile stuff.
|
| Android reproduces a lot of the interaction model of the
| iPhone but it came from seeing iPhones and trying
| iPhones. It did not come from getting source. Nobody ever
| got the source.
|
| Forget the source. Source code doesn't matter. It's an
| irrelevant distraction.
|
| Source code is not the big deal here. Inventing a new way
| to interact with computers is the big deal here. Getting
| at the software _does not matter_.
| jryan49 wrote:
| So if I want to do this I have to invent everything from
| scratch like he did?
| enneff wrote:
| You have to create a space and find collaborators and
| build it together from scratch, yes.
| Uehreka wrote:
| So like, if they want me to reverse engineer Dynamicland and
| make my own, fine. But I'm WAY more likely to misunderstand
| what it's about through reverse engineering it than I would
| be if I had actual source code I could study. I'm sure
| there's some truly revelatory stuff in the architecture of
| RealTalk OS, and a reimplementation would be missing all
| that.
|
| If what they want is for people to try and reimplement
| Dynamicland without their guidance, then they're certainly
| doing the right things. But if their goal is to convert
| people to a new way of thinking about computing, this is not
| a great approach.
| justin66 wrote:
| > But I'm WAY more likely to misunderstand what it's about
| through reverse engineering it than I would be if I had
| actual source code I could study.
|
| What a low opinion you have of yourself. On the contrary,
| you're likely to learn a lot more (and of course, spend
| orders of magnitude more time) recreating something
| interesting from the ground up than you are simply copying
| the source code.
|
| The source code isn't the interesting part.
| enneff wrote:
| Hell you might even make something better, which is I
| suspect one of the unstated reasons why the source is not
| released.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I get that impulse because Bret's pretty good about
| communicating his whole vision and it definitely has a large
| amount of philosophy attached to it beyond just the tech, but
| I fear it's more likely to smother the technology and the
| idea and ensure it doesn't get much adoption. Right now
| there's not even a space I could go to to check it out it
| sounds like because the old physical space was shutdown
| during COVID and the only implementations now are in a
| handful (or one?) lab. Much less if I had a space and was
| interested in trying the exploratory computing ideas for
| museums and education out before building a larger space I've
| got nothing to work with.
|
| Ultimately trying to tightly control a technology because he
| wants it to have a particular impact seems like it's just
| going to ensure it stays a niche demo instead of making and
| impact at all. If the idea is strong enough people will adopt
| and adapt it for themselves because it's good.
| sorrythanks wrote:
| It would be easier to agree with you if there were no
| examples of closed source software, or even non-software
| ideas (such as libraries), spreading and having huge
| impact.
|
| Bret is also in no rush here, the plan has taken a decade
| so far and has milestones ahead of it for a decade more.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Not trying to say it's inevitable but it's way riskier.
| There's usually a company behind that selling the
| software making money to continue the process. Bret has a
| non-profit and now no physical location to evangelize
| from. Libraries are an exact counter example to this
| actually, first the idea doesn't require software and
| hardware, and second the concept is all there really is
| to it. Making a DynamicLand clone is clearly possible
| without access to the code but you have to do a lot of
| blind reverse engineering working backwards from the
| implementation.
|
| Maybe this is also a little frustration that it's been 10
| or so years and there's not actually much new news, it
| looks better but I'm seemingly further than ever from
| being able to experiment with it.
| infinite8s wrote:
| He's thinking 50 years out, not 5 years...
| interneterik wrote:
| As far as I can see, Dynamicland is not open-sourced because
| it's a building and community exploring new ways of thinking
| and learning collaboratively. These collaborations involve
| novel interactions with physical things. So far, this has
| nothing to do with something that could be open-sourced on
| GitHub. It just so happens that this new way of collaborating
| with physical things involves giving them access to
| computation.
|
| I know this comment will seem pedantic, but I hope it also
| communicates that the goals of this research project are
| different than you seem (at least to me) to consider. Bret
| Victor's goal isn't to design a system of projectors and
| cameras that run code on pieces of paper (just like Engelbart's
| goal wasn't to design the mouse). At a certain level, Bret
| Victor wants to explode our concept of computing.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Wow I really like my keyboard
| geraldalewis wrote:
| This seems to me like the apotheosis of Jef Raskin's Humane
| Interface - super cool!
| koolala wrote:
| I'm hopeful VR programming with standardized programming
| languages and AI will create a Dynamicland-like software
| environment one day. Social spatial programming just needs to be
| made fun like building in a game.
| jdboyd wrote:
| Why VR instead of projectors?
| koolala wrote:
| Hehe because VR is unlimited. It's only recently the
| resolution of VR displays is even good enough for text. The
| final need is comfort. I'm currently trying to figure out a
| efficient text rendering algorithm designed for 3D.
| rtkwe wrote:
| VR comes with the person using it instead of needing many
| projectors to cover a room at sufficient resolution to
| display text. There are an open projects that is trying to
| recreate Dynamicland and their numbers are 50-200 per square
| foot of covered area between the cameras, projectors and
| compute required. It doesn't take much space to make
| equipping multiple people with VR with good pass through
| competitively priced.
| Philpax wrote:
| Have you seen Resonite? That's probably the closest to that
| today.
| rparet wrote:
| I was fortunate enough to visit back in 2018. It's so nice to see
| this persevere.
| thatguymike wrote:
| I spent quite a lot of time at Dynamicland Oakland. It's great
| fun and the people are just wonderful. I think of Realtalk as
| adding another layer to programs, the Physical Layer. Program
| behavior can be determined and controlled by physical layout as
| well as code. It's not completely unlike a frontend/backend
| distinction, and in fact you could make a Realtalk simulator
| using a javascript canvas much more easily than building the
| camera/projector setup.
|
| Just like building full stack software, there's a large amount of
| nonobvious skill in dictating your separations of concerns
| between the physical layer and software layer. Good programs are
| flexible, remixable, modular, intuitive, and let non-programmers
| make nontrivial interactions and enhancements via the physical
| layer. Bad programs require you to have the physical objects in a
| particular configuration, or break completely if one piece of
| paper is lost. I found these programming design questions a
| really interesting part of playing at Dynamicland.
|
| A solid limitation of the system is that the pieces of programs
| aren't actually modular. You can't take a Cat from one program
| and a Dog from another program and have the dog interact with the
| cat. This is obvious in software - that's why we design APIs -
| but it's frustrating when all your programs exist in the same
| space (that's the whole selling point) and when bringing part of
| Program A into Program B is so intuitive and, when you have
| dozens of these programs lying around the room, inevitable.
|
| I'd love to see them explore (wait for it...) using AI.
| Incorporating object recognition could remove the need for
| pasting dots onto every object by defining rules like "when you
| see a car, color it Red". It could allow for inter-program
| interoperability via the shared language of object recognition.
| And it could even determining logical interactions in a fun and
| surprising way: what _should_ happen when I take the cactus from
| this program and put it on top of the balloon from that program?
| jes5199 wrote:
| it should be possible to make objects that are general-purpose,
| you end up with a bunch of low-code reusable things like "dog"
| or "car", and they have stable representations than can be used
| as data in multiple other programs
| miffing wrote:
| related:
| https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/#What_is_Realtalks_relation...
| jf wrote:
| > You can't take a Cat from one program and a Dog from another
| program and have the dog interact with the cat. This is obvious
| in software - that's why we design APIs - but it's frustrating
| when all your programs exist in the same space
|
| I also thought this, but learned that what I needed was an Alan
| Kay style "change of perspective".
|
| The key for me was understanding the "wish" and "claim"
| concepts in Realtalk. In your example above, you would need to
| separate your "Dog" program into two programs: One that was
| simply a program claiming "I am a dog" and another that would
| encode dog behavior, something like "I wish that a bark sound
| would play when a dog is near a house" - then you'd leave it up
| to Realtalk to make that happen. Adding "Cat" behavior would
| mean adding two new programs: one to claim "I am a cat" and
| another "I wish that a meow sound would play when a cat is near
| a house". To make the "Dog" and "Cat" interact, you'd add a
| program that said "I wish that a growl sound would play when a
| dog is near a cat" and so on.
|
| Another example that might help is how I learned this myself: I
| made a set of playing cards. What I ended up with was 52 pieces
| of card stock, each one had a program that was simply "Claim
| that I am card X" - and then I made separate programs the give
| those cards meaning. For example a program to give the cards a
| style would be something like "I wish that card 1 will have the
| Ace of Spaces printed on it, etc" and another program would be
| something like "I wish that the sum of all face values of the
| cards on this line is printed next to the line"
|
| It took me several days to internalize this, but once I did
| things started getting fun pretty quickly. For example, I was
| able to make a program to "clone" a real world image onto a
| playing card by having Realtalk take a picture of a rectangle
| and then always project that image onto a particular card when
| it was face up. Because the cards just made claims about their
| identities, this let me separate the designs on the cards from
| the rules as well as add "training mode" programs to help teach
| basics. And they were all decoupled!
| lproven wrote:
| > I'd love to see them explore (wait for it...) using AI.
|
| Well, you know what, whenever someone invents such a thing, it
| would be great. But it doesn't exist yet and there's good
| reason to think it never will.
|
| What is 100% certain is that LLMs are not intelligent and never
| will be. They are just very good at producing totally stupid,
| mindless output that convinces some people it's real and was
| produced by humans.
|
| It isn't, and it won't be.
| justusthane wrote:
| I'm not sure how that's related to the parent comment? What
| he's suggesting can certainly be accomplished easily by LLMs.
| _dain_ wrote:
| Alright someone has to be the skeptic: there's no fucking god
| damned way this works as well as the video suggests. There has to
| be enormous amounts of behind-the-scenes work to support this
| thing; the idea that it's self-hosting all in one room is an
| absolutely extraordinary claim. It's a big red flag that they
| only invite specific people who are good "culture fits", and
| don't have any public code. They can't risk people seeing the
| puppet wires.
|
| It's some Wizard of Oz / Potemkin village / confidence trick.
| That's why nothing has been released after a decade -- there's
| nothing _to_ release. It 's vapor, this generation's Xanadu.
| rtkwe wrote:
| They ran an open space for a few years. The things being done
| aren't that wild. You have cameras tracking fiducials, running
| an associated script every frame that can either just be text
| or can pull from the computer to act on things not explicitly
| on a page in a frame. None of that is conceptually that wild or
| heavy and people have made versions of this that you can
| actually see the source of. PaperPrograms is one and Folk
| Computer is another.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| This is a pretty neat idea. Watched through a few talks. I love
| cyberphysical programming, live programming, involving the
| audience in the computation, so Bret's work with Dynamicland
| speaks to me. I do however think the card system could use a
| rethink in terms of ergonomics.
|
| Wish I still lived in California so I could check out the system
| in person! Watching the development of this project with keen
| interest... sure, a lot of the ideas might not end up catching
| on, but that's the nature of research.
| tgbugs wrote:
| One of the most striking things about this for me is how clearly
| it demonstrates the fact that community and sharing are not the
| same thing.
|
| Building tools that enable communities to share effectively seems
| like another additional challenge, and the fact that virtual
| spaces and digital spaces are dismissed seems like it might prove
| a major roadblock to connecting and sharing in a larger inclusive
| community.
|
| Given the interest in leveraging this for doing science it also
| seems that this is at risk for empowering individual labs while
| leaving all interfaces to the rest of the larger scientific
| community dependent on the current utterly broken system of
| publication.
| fjfaase wrote:
| I wonder whether someone already has build away to create modular
| synthesizer using block with knobs on the table. A line on the
| top of the knob would signal its position. (In the video I saw
| some shots that looked like sequencers.) You would also need some
| mechanism to connect the modules together. I played around with
| VCV Rack [1], but adjusting knobs with a mouse feels very
| different than using your hands to turn a physical knob. Also, I
| would like to have more freedom in arranging modules more freely
| as you could do on a table, instead of using patch cables that go
| into all kinds of directions. Especially for newbies, it would be
| an interesting way to see if they want to go into real modular
| synths based on Eurorack [2], AE Modular [3] or microrack [4].
|
| [1] https://vcvrack.com/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurorack
|
| [3] https://www.tangiblewaves.com/
|
| [4] https://microrack.org/
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Reactable's main use seemed to be as a synth. Different effort
| but related, predates. https://www.dancemusicnw.com/awesome-
| instrument-youve-never-...
| miffing wrote:
| related: https://dynamicland.org/archive/2023/MIDI
| dbspin wrote:
| Patchblocks used to exist (and have a very cool party house in
| Belfast) - but looks like their IP was acquired
|
| http://patchblocks.com/page2.html
|
| Roli Blocks is also somewhat similar
|
| https://midi.org/roli-blocks-modular-wireless-midi-touch-sys...
| hulium wrote:
| I think the cool part about this is that you can easily build a
| user interface from physical objects, so you can skip some of the
| digital frontend and design and focus more on the computational
| backend. This frees you up for more explorative, improvised
| coding, which is great for research and art but maybe also many
| other situations where fixed user interfaces get into the way too
| much. Based on what they show about their biology lab project, it
| seems to be surprisingly useful.
| teleforce wrote:
| Kudos to Bret and all the best to the communal computing
| community (pun intended) hopefully this takes the cyber physical
| system including IoT and machine-to-machine to another (useful)
| level.
|
| >Anyone can change any program at any time, and see the changes
| immediately
|
| Not sure what programming language Bret implementing the system
| but recently there's discussion how difficult and how slow to
| parse/compile some of the popular programming languages including
| C++ and Rust. In this case D is a unique anomaly where it has
| immediate rdmd REPL facility although it's a complex and a
| compiled language [1].
|
| For creative, inventive, intuitive and comprehensive programming
| cyber physical system that involve hardware with fast sensing,
| control and immediate responses, D language is hands down the
| best programming there is [2]. The D authors however don't
| believe in any killer applications but this Dynamicland of
| communal computing most probably the niche that D is looking for
| to propel it for more wider adoption.
|
| [1] Parsing Awk Is Tricky:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41422283
|
| [2] D Features Overview:
|
| https://dlang.org/comparison.html
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Smalltalk. I used to run a server in Smalltalk and if it had an
| error it would halt, I could debug where it halted, I could
| change the code and restart. The client would not know, unless
| my fixing it took too long.
| cyberax wrote:
| I hate that website design. It doesn't answer the basic question:
| WTF is "dynamicland"?
| nsonha wrote:
| I used to think Bret Victor's work is cool but how exactly do we
| build all these seemingly ad-hoc interactions into systems? one-
| by-one? Maybe generative code AI can do it on-demand one day?
| cbreynoldson wrote:
| For those criticizing, think of this updated website more from
| the lens of art, less pragmatics. The Doug Engelbart "Mother of
| All Demos" functioned in this way as well. Can you imagine
| scoffing at Engelbart in the same way? There are quite a few deep
| ideas in this presentation of Dynamicland, many of which are
| subtle and take some effort to find and appreciate, much like
| art.
|
| Yes, it is intended to be useful to many one day, and they claim
| it "actually works" _now_, but if you read carefully (and you
| should!), they are trying very hard to maintain (and gradually
| grow) a beautiful little flame of a vision. PARC, on the other
| hand, had 10 years. Afterwards, industry ran with the ideas they
| wanted, and Alan Kay has been beating the "you missed the big
| ideas!" drum since. The Dynamicland group is trying to learn from
| this lesson of history.
|
| Kudos to the group.
| motohagiography wrote:
| what an important set of ideas. if I'm interpreting correctly
| it's an instance of a pattern language for organizing people
| aided by tech. the idea seems to have moved past the constraints
| of goal oriented methodologies and on to modular blocks of logic
| for coordination.
|
| i wonder if a coarse analogy for it might include roberts rules
| in a related category of ideas, and then with some concepts from
| tech around versioning and then it's something else entirely, but
| they seem to approach some of the same coordination problems.
| rtkwe wrote:
| This feels like something you could get a whole lot more traction
| and experimentation in quickly if it also existed as a room in
| something like VRChat or added to people's rooms in a VR
| passthrough mode. You'd lose some of the benefits of being in a
| shared physical space but you would also lose some of the
| limitations around the tracking resolution and stability of the
| fiducial markers on the page and open it up to people who can't
| make it to the location in person.
|
| A 2.0 version could even merge the two versions slightly,
| tracking irl people into the virtual space (with pose and
| position estimates?) and programs (? I don't know the lingo off
| hand, but I mean the paper sheets everything revolves around) and
| in the opposite direction project the programs from VR onto the
| real table.
|
| I've been interested in it for years so I'm very glad to see it's
| still moving forwards and alive. There were years where I
| couldn't find any actual new information coming out of the
| project.
| i_am_jl wrote:
| > if it also existed as a room in something like VRChat or
| added to people's rooms in a VR passthrough mode
|
| I dunno. Someone in VR can't manipulate the same physical
| objects that people in the real world can. You are forced to
| compromise physicality so that VR users aren't second-class
| users, or you build two different experiences for VR and non-VR
| users which goes against the idea of a shared experience.
|
| I think what you're describing has value, but I also think
| you're removing the fundamental piece of what makes this unique
| and special.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Yeah the VR to physical is a limitation for sure, there are
| things like omnidirectional conveyors [0] that could make it
| possible for virtual users to move the physical program
| cards, at least around a flat table. It's also not a problem
| in a purely virtual version.
|
| I do get that it's a bit of a side step but it's also
| currently completely inaccessible unless you happen to be a
| part of one of the labs it's moved to since the other public
| space closed during the COVID shutdowns. Right now there's
| not even a physical space one could go to if they could make
| the trek out, unless I'm misreading the intro video.
|
| Also I hate to see the neat idea of RealTalkOS locked into
| probable obscurity because Bret's wholistic vision requires
| very expensive physical spaces when we could build and
| improve the tech at the core of it until projectors and
| cameras get cheaper than the 50-200 USD per sq foot some more
| open implementations estimate for costs.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAokGOEjAFs
| infinite8s wrote:
| Wait till you realize the projectors and cameras are
| incidental to the whole thing...
| rtkwe wrote:
| What do you mean? They're critical to making the physical
| version of DL work. They could be supplanted in VR of
| course but I don't see how you make an IRL DL without
| them.
| infinite8s wrote:
| What if eInk paper was as cheap as paper and each sheet
| had a small processor and could mesh network? What if
| computing was so cheap you could toss it out when you
| were done with it like a Kleenex (not a big stretch - an
| electronic toothbrush has a 3 cent chip which has more
| computing power than what the Apollo moon shuttle had
| onboard). Bret is thinking in decades, not years.
| justin66 wrote:
| > This feels like something you could get a whole lot more
| traction and experimentation in quickly if it also existed as a
| room in something like VRChat or added to people's rooms in a
| VR passthrough mode.
|
| That would be something entirely different.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I don't believe that honestly. There's many facets of what
| Bret is making here. Not all of them require a physical
| presence, the COVID lockdown and years of internet
| communities before that have shown you can build vibrant
| communities online.
|
| Many of the ideas can be worked on and improved without
| requiring the expensive physical space so the OS and the
| concepts of the composed tools they talk about for the future
| of the project can all be improved and played with in a
| virtual space too separate from the physical presence.
| justin66 wrote:
| I did not intend to discourage the idea! I think it sounds
| very cool and potentially worthy of study. But I really do
| think you're underestimating the difference.
| d--b wrote:
| This has gone a long way from the first demos, but in a way it
| kind of fell back to a fairly standard model of computing: ie
| this looks like a reactive visual programming environment with a
| real-world user interface sitting on top of it.
|
| Looking at the demos, the real world objects look mostly like
| standard user input on a computer (knobs, buttons, textarea,
| pointers, etc.) - using actually 3d printed models of houses in a
| wind simulation is fun, but would you print another house for
| each iteration of the design? what's the point here? - and the
| papers laid out really are Observable cells.
|
| This aimed to be some kind of paradigm change, but it just ends
| up being Excel-on-a-table.
|
| Being a fan of Excel/Observable myself, I see it as something
| great though, just not ground-breaking.
| subjectsigma wrote:
| I really like Bret's talks and I think Dynamicland is a great
| experiment which I'm happy to see moving forward. However in this
| video he came off less as an engineer and designer and more of a
| preacher. He seemed to care more about convincing people that his
| politics and ideas are just so gosh darn great without talking
| about any specifics. (When I say "politics" I mean more like "the
| nature of reality and the role of humans", not Red vs Blue.) I
| would really like to hear more about how Realtalk actually works.
| It seems like there are several glaring problems that Bret has
| either solved or is at least working on, but he doesn't talk
| about the solutions much. (Indicator collision, portability of
| indicators between Dynamicland instances, and debugging are just
| a few off the top of my head.)
| Aardwolf wrote:
| I didn't want to watch videos while at work so had to do it with
| the text, and trying to figure out what it was was hard. First
| thing I encountered a few times was this sentence:
|
| "An independent nonprofit research lab, whose mission is to
| enable universal literacy in a humane dynamic medium."
|
| That said literally NOTHING about what this project is.
|
| Only later on I found this text:
|
| "The entire website is made in Realtalk, which means that
| everything on it physically exists. (Even this sentence.) It's
| not a rendering of a virtual space -- it's a real place."
|
| And FINALLY I sort of understood what the interesting thing here
| is!
| latexr wrote:
| > "An independent nonprofit research lab, whose mission is to
| enable universal literacy in a humane dynamic medium."
|
| > That said literally NOTHING about what this project is.
|
| That's a strange complaint. The sentence _wasn't meant to_ say
| what the project is but to _present the mission_ of the
| organisation which guides the project.
|
| The mission describes the core _values_ of the organisation.
| The project can change or be replaced.
|
| For another example, the Mozilla foundation describes itself as
| "a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation
| and participation on the Internet". That doesn't say "we make a
| web browser", which would be too limiting.
| vellum wrote:
| I had always been curious as to what his thoughts were on
| generative AI, but he stopped posting a while back. Now, you can
| find his thoughts in the Dynamicland FAQ. tl;dr - he's not a fan.
| https://dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/
| https://dynamicland.org/archive/2017/Is_this_the_civilizatio...
| https://worrydream.com/quotes/?search=kerosene
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Pleasantly surprised to see a video with footnotes. Up until
| today, I'd only encountered this practice on A Capella Science:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObvxPSQNMGc
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| If you're looking for something like this that's under more
| active development, (and with available source code,) check out
| Folk [0]. It's being developed by some folks who visited/worked
| at Dynamicland but this is entirely in the open. They even have
| an open house in Brooklyn monthly where you can visit and check
| everything out!
|
| [0]: https://folk.computer
| infinite8s wrote:
| Slight correction - Omar (one of the main developers of folk)
| worked at DynamicLand for a few years.
| AlphaWeaver wrote:
| Thanks! My mistake.
| randito wrote:
| There's also:
|
| Paper Programs:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkwSoJrVWAY
|
| https://github.com/janpaul123/paperprograms
|
| There's also a dead-project: Tiny lands
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26751374
|
| Here are some of my notes for Dynamicland:
|
| https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
|
| https://twitter.com/redblobgames/status/907253802931126272
|
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DJc2esBVwAAnj4X?format=jpg
|
| https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/nic...
| teucris wrote:
| That Bret keeps Dynamicland and Realtalk so closed to others
| while touting it as "more open than open source" is really
| frustrating.
|
| I get it. Opening it up means losing control. I really appreciate
| the desire to specifically not share it on traditionally
| engineer-centric spaces like GitHub as that will skew the vision
| towards engineering and possibly shut out non-programmers. I even
| get that Dynamicland isn't really code that can be shared anyway.
|
| But you have to give people something more than a general
| description and a vague invitation to visit your space. Otherwise
| it isn't really open at all.
|
| Some ideas:
|
| - A document for how to experiment with domain exploration using
| tangibles and people in a way that leverages insights gleaned
| from Dynamicland
|
| - A codebase for a "toy" computational system (named completely
| differently from Realtalk/Dynamicland so it's clear that it is
| not actually part of Dynamicland) that shows how it's possible to
| link physical properties to computational agents
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