Dynamicland 2024 • Hacker News Board

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#131

Post by rtkwe » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 3:52 AM UTC

jdboyd wrote: post #91

koolala wrote: post #71

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.

Why VR instead of projectors?

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.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#132

Post by rtkwe » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 3:58 AM UTC

sorrythanks wrote: post #95

Uehreka wrote: post #62

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 i…

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

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.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#133

Post by daniel_grady » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 5:50 AM UTC

samatman wrote: post #113

bobajeff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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.

https://www.beyondloom.com/decker/index.html

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#134

Post by justin66 » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 5:50 AM UTC

rtkwe wrote: post #123

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 p…

> 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.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#135

Post by notarobot123 » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:11 AM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #126

karaterobot wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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.

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...)

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#136

Post by dfex » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 6:37 AM UTC

reaperman wrote: post #26

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: > Wher…

Not quite Realtalk, but inspired by it:

http://paperprograms.org

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#137

Post by d--b » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 7:32 AM UTC

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.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#138

Post by subjectsigma » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 7:34 AM UTC

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.)

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#139

Post by dbspin » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 8:01 AM UTC

fjfaase wrote: post #94

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…

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...

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#140

Post by dbspin » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 8:06 AM UTC

dingnuts wrote: post #36

reaperman wrote: post #26

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: > Wher…

>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. I…

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.