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Dynamicland 2024

dynamicland.org

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Re: Dynamicland 2024

#171

Post by cbreynoldson »

Uehreka wrote: post #105
jdougan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - “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 "ag…

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.

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.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#172

Post by teucris »

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

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#173

Post by enneff »

jryan49 wrote: post #164
lproven wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You have to create a space and find collaborators and build it together from scratch, yes.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#174

Post by enneff »

justin66 wrote: post #120
Uehreka wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Dynamic…

> 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 int…

Hell you might even make something better, which is I suspect one of the unstated reasons why the source is not released.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#175

Post by jf »

cma wrote: post #165
jf wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#176

Post by infinite8s »

rtkwe wrote: post #127
i_am_jl wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wha…

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 s…

Wait till you realize the projectors and cameras are incidental to the whole thing...

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#177

Post by infinite8s »

latexr wrote: post #151
skadamat wrote: post #31

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

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.

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.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#178

Post by infinite8s »

rtkwe wrote: post #132
sorrythanks wrote: post #95

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…

He's thinking 50 years out, not 5 years...

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#179

Post by rtkwe »

d--b wrote: post #114
bsimpson wrote: post #39

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 yo…

Can you “pipe” the results of one paper onto one of the inputs of the next? That’d be pretty funky.

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.

Re: Dynamicland 2024

#180

Post by rtkwe »

infinite8s wrote: post #176
rtkwe wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Wait till you realize the projectors and cameras are incidental to the whole thing...

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.
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