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Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

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Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#21

Post by GuiA »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #19
3rd3 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idealism appears to be one reason why he left Apple: http://worrydream.com/Apple/

That's… horrible. It feels like he's under a gag order. I wager this stuff could be useful to all of us, but Apple just clings on this "Intellectual Property" like, like… Well, like any corporation.

Huh...?

He worked for a company out of his own will, and that company paid him in exchange for his work, with the full understanding that all ownership of the work would go to them. I mean, it's not even as if Apple hides that about them- that's one thing they tell you OVER and OVER when you interview with them.

He knew exactly what he was getting into when he accepted to work for them (and did so for many years), and he definitely doesn't seem to mind what he got out of it (salary + the ability to call himself an "ex-Apple employee" and extract the social proof/appeal to authority that comes with it).

I love Bret's work, but this page on his website is very distasteful and comes across as fairly petty.

Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#22

Post by DalekBaldwin »

jayvanguard wrote: post #4

Great presentation as usual. One fundamental tension I see in much of the work he does is between purpose-built and general-purpose tooling and environments. The challenge in both the maker space as well as much of the visual learning and programming material he has done previously is that each of them is incredibly time consuming to adapt to each new different project. In the real world even similar tasks within pro…

Especially for programming, the tools have to be narrowly tailored to the examples since you're constantly wrestling with the specter of Turing-completeness. Any given program is an instance of an infinite number of more general classes of programs, and it's the tool designer's job to choose which dimensions of the design space are meaningful and important enough to be worth simultaneously visualizing the consequences of possible alternatives. I think it's going to take some very judicious integration of recent work on modularity-enhancing programming paradigms into the design of reflective language implementations before it becomes tractable to build responsive special-purpose reflective tools on top of a generic infrastructure. Or at least that's the strategy I'm trying.

Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#23

Post by shasta »

GuiA wrote: post #21
loup-vaillant wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's… horrible. It feels like he's under a gag order. I wager this stuff could be useful to all of us, but Apple just clings on this "Intellectual Property" like, like… Well, like any corporation.

Huh...? He worked for a company out of his own will, and that company paid him in exchange for his work, with the full understanding that all ownership of the work would go to them. I mean, it's not even as if Apple hides that about them- that's one thing they tell you OVER and OVER when you interview with them. He knew exactly what he was getting into when he accepted to work for them (and did so for many years), an…

Nah, the companies pushing these contracts are the ones exhibiting distasteful behavior. That page is very tasteful.

Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#24

Post by ilovecomputers »

tsunamifury wrote: post #11

I think software engineer and the fundamentals of coding have always had a bias towards those who can conceptualize ideas in the abstract, then build with the assumptions that those concepts are happening regardless of their ability to see them. This is fine, except that it limits those who need to tinker in order to find out how those concepts work. When the elements are visually recognizable and physically manipula…

That bias came from the necessity that engineering work is mostly invisible and you can't completely generalize every concept to fit every project. You need to put in extra work to visualize a graphic that would respond to the state of the system and the concepts you are visualizing might only be relevant to the project at hand. Despite these challenges, when we can visualize certain general concepts, which apply to a wide group of systems, but engineers do a good enough job and rarely are visual designers or UX experts involved. At that point its a cultural issue and that's why I'm grateful Bret Victor is around to advocate better designed tools for engineers.

Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#26

Post by ilovecomputers »

DalekBaldwin wrote: post #22
jayvanguard wrote: post #4

Great presentation as usual. One fundamental tension I see in much of the work he does is between purpose-built and general-purpose tooling and environments. The challenge in both the maker space as well as much of the visual learning and programming material he has done previously is that each of them is incredibly time consuming to adapt to each new different project. In the real world even similar tasks within pro…

Especially for programming, the tools have to be narrowly tailored to the examples since you're constantly wrestling with the specter of Turing-completeness. Any given program is an instance of an infinite number of more general classes of programs, and it's the tool designer's job to choose which dimensions of the design space are meaningful and important enough to be worth simultaneously visualizing the consequence…

That strategy lead to quite the run-on sentence. You have much work ahead of you friend from that appearance alone.

Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#27

Post by vilterp »

faceyspacey wrote: post #15
primigenus wrote: post #12

It blows my mind that Bret keeps giving talks in public and sharing his ideas for free when pretty much each of them could have been used as a startup pitch in return for likely investment. But I guess he's more interested in inspiring others than just committing to one idea for years. I'm glad we have him around.

it blows my mind is how little of what he's put forth has led to others creating startups out of them. ...what blows my mind more though is he keeps giving talks and hasn't open sourced any of his software on github, like he said he would. i doubt he's working on some big product that puts all his software to use. it's all going to waste and could have helped propel the visions he's set forth. it makes zero sense.

Both the Light Table team (http://www.lighttable.com/2014/06/10/light-table-and-apples-...) and the Apple Swift lead (Playgrounds feature: http://nondot.org/sabre/) have explicictly cited Bret as an important influence — his ideas are certainly not going to waste.

Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#28

Post by DaniFong »

GuiA wrote: post #21
loup-vaillant wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's… horrible. It feels like he's under a gag order. I wager this stuff could be useful to all of us, but Apple just clings on this "Intellectual Property" like, like… Well, like any corporation.

Huh...? He worked for a company out of his own will, and that company paid him in exchange for his work, with the full understanding that all ownership of the work would go to them. I mean, it's not even as if Apple hides that about them- that's one thing they tell you OVER and OVER when you interview with them. He knew exactly what he was getting into when he accepted to work for them (and did so for many years), an…

Maybe he once had a hope more ideas would see the light of day?

Maybe that hope was crushed and he realized he made a mistake.

The contract theory of morality does not admit well to asymmetry of information. Most organizations preach about the impact one will have, not exclusively about compensation. Certainly Apple would have, certainly Bret would have been looking for impact. Bret was at the informational disadvantage there.

In general, it seems, at least, that if employers decide not to do something with creative works, that they at least have some other life raft they can escape upon.

Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#29

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ilovecomputers wrote: post #24
tsunamifury wrote: post #11

I think software engineer and the fundamentals of coding have always had a bias towards those who can conceptualize ideas in the abstract, then build with the assumptions that those concepts are happening regardless of their ability to see them. This is fine, except that it limits those who need to tinker in order to find out how those concepts work. When the elements are visually recognizable and physically manipula…

That bias came from the necessity that engineering work is mostly invisible and you can't completely generalize every concept to fit every project. You need to put in extra work to visualize a graphic that would respond to the state of the system and the concepts you are visualizing might only be relevant to the project at hand. Despite these challenges, when we can visualize certain general concepts, which apply to…

There are UX designers that focus on high investment tools....at AutoDesk for example. Also, high investment tools are more difficult to change given...well...the investments made in them by the user base. Also, be careful to distinguish between visual and UX, those aren't often the same people outside of the web world. Heck, data visualization people often aren't visual designers.

Re: Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

#30

Post by seanmcdirmid »

Some of this is extremely similar to Jun Kato's research.

http://junkato.jp

More specifically see phybots:

http://junkato.jp/phybots/

Kato leverages the overhead camera trick in this system, though in a bit different way. See "A Toolkit for Easy Development of Mobile Robot Applications with Visual Markers and a Ceiling Camera:"

http://junkato.jp/publications/uist2009-sakamoto-andy.pdf

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