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).
Dynamicland 2024
51–60 of 202 posts
Re: Dynamicland 2024
#52For 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…
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.
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.
Re: Dynamicland 2024
#53Can someone who has six minutes to watch the intro give those of us who don't a TL;DW?
"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.
Re: Dynamicland 2024
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
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…
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...
Re: Dynamicland 2024
#55For 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…
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.
I don't think he's trying to be rich (except maybe to provide self-funding for his research).
Re: Dynamicland 2024
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you. I still don't exactly get it though. What's with the books on a shelf?
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.
Fair enough. I'll have to check it out later. Thank you for this perspective.
Re: Dynamicland 2024
#57For 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…
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Re: Dynamicland 2024
#58For 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…
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.
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.
Re: Dynamicland 2024
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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...
Re: Dynamicland 2024
#60I 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 acknow…
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.
... 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.