Dynamicland 2024 • Hacker News Board

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#161

Post by rtkwe » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 1:23 PM UTC

sorrythanks wrote: post #147

rtkwe wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#162

Post by infinite8s » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 1:32 PM UTC

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #156

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

Slight correction - Omar (one of the main developers of folk) worked at DynamicLand for a few years.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#163

Post by AlphaWeaver » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 1:33 PM UTC

infinite8s wrote: post #162

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #156

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

Slight correction - Omar (one of the main developers of folk) worked at DynamicLand for a few years.

Thanks! My mistake.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#164

Post by jryan49 » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 1:52 PM UTC

lproven wrote: post #149

Uehreka wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t like the answers they give on that page. Every single one feels like a dodge.

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 exta…

So if I want to do this I have to invent everything from scratch like he did?

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#165

Post by cma » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 2:23 PM UTC

jf wrote: post #85

shoxidizer wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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_2011 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.

Is there a better source that talks about it? Didn't see it mentioned on that page.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#166

Post by rtkwe » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

justin66 wrote: post #134

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.

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.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#167

Post by randito » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 2:47 PM UTC

AlphaWeaver wrote: post #156

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

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...

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#168

Post by justin66 » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 3:43 PM UTC

rtkwe wrote: post #166

justin66 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

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.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#169

Post by interneterik » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 3:47 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#170

Post by RodgerTheGreat » Thu, Sep 05, 2024, 5:01 PM UTC

samatman wrote: post #160

daniel_grady wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

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.