141–150 of 202 posts
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.
Reminds me of the Packard Bell Navigator UI from the 90s: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packard_Bell_Navigator
"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!
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 stil…
He worked on the Touch Bar for Apple so I guess ideas don't always work out.
https://vas3k.com/blog/touchbar/
https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-the-complete...
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…
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.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
there's also a much deeper explanation of the why here: https://dynamicland.org/2024/Is_Realtalk_open_source/
I don’t like the answers they give on that page. Every single one feels like a dodge.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
there's also a much deeper explanation of the why here: https://dynamicland.org/2024/Is_Realtalk_open_source/
I don’t like the answers they give on that page. Every single one feels like a dodge.
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.
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 Realta…
> 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.