Bret Victor: Seeing Spaces [video]

A big part of abstraction for me is bringing problems into something I can visualize. This reduction itself works better if I have visual intuition. I suppose linear systems are a simple case, since their functional behavior for finite dimensions can pretty much all be mapped into 3D (I guess 4D would be a little richer with double complex eigenvalue pairs, but that's just 2x 2D rotations). I don't claim to be a great problem solver, but I've gone halfway through college so far with pretty good grades without changing how much visually I think.

I think this is how the NSA became the NSA as we know it today. When your task is to prevent terrorism you need to see. You need to see in time and detect patterns. So you need to store as much data as possible because.

So it's good to stick to some boundaries. In the example of the robot: you could measure room temperature, because maybe the sensors are acting to it. Or you could measure the amount of people in the room because sensors could act to it. Heck, maybe the sensors are acting different to different people, so track there faces and store it. Well maybe sensors are sensitive to somebodies smell so track that too.

There are limits to what is useful to track.

I decided to quit my job and start Webflow.com on the night that I saw Bret's Inventing on Principle video [1] and read his Magic Ink paper [2]. Based on lots of conversations I've had with other entrepreneurs, I'd say that a lot more people are inspired by Bret's work than you might think...

[1] https://vimeo.com/36579366

[2] http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

tangle is really old, and his least innovative stuff at this point. it hardly counts my friend. Bret needs to stop teasing us. At least deliver the code for the one he said he would put on github.

I think it's very obvious what needs to happen to software development right now. I'm straightup doing it--my startup is making come to life much of what Bret put forth in Javascript, where it should exist (on the web, not objective c and other technologies). He could help a lot by sharing his code, no matter what language it's in.

His stuff could change the entire landscape, and now. I get it--we're all stupid developers doing the status quo who can't think for ourselves and invent something new. I get his message. And yes, that's a big part of his message whether he knows it or not. But the point is that the stuff he's put forth for all the live coding and coding observability stuff needs to happen now and like a lot--it will enhance coding by several orders of magnitude. So, I don't need any more talks about how we must think. We need to make simply what he put forth. We need to get done his gospel already so he himself can see what it actually looks like and move to the next level.

My guess is he doesn't want to share the code because of some sort of philosophy that we need to do it ourselves, and more people need to be true thinkers and inventors like him, thinking outside the box. Fuck the philosophy. It's kinda arrogant. Release the code if ur not making ur own company out of it. I used to think he was starting his own company, which is why I never spoke up. But my latest prediction (after seeing this maker spaces drivel) is that he certainly is not.

...And it's drivel because he's making the whole point about observability regarding hardware startups, where it's way less of a big deal as in coding. Like, his breakthrough moment was when he pointed out how all us coders were so stupid for going along with how current coding tools work, which are totally unobservable. That is especially relevant in the abstract world of coding, whereas it is way less profound when it comes to concrete hardware objects, which by nature are observable. Not that it doesn't apply--it's just not at the level of breakthrough described in all his essays on his site.

ps. ur talkin to someone who's read every single essay on his site, cherished his every word. this maker space stuff is crap. he's fallin off, side tracked, whatever. I'd like to see him truly help get some of his ideas executed. It would take zero energy on his part--release the code is basically all im asking.

> He worked for a company out of his own will

Did he?

I understand a guy like Brett Victor has more options than most people, but think of the statistics for a second. Most of us work for corporations. The only real choice here is which corporation. (There are other ways, but they often amount to helping corporations, or building your own. That doesn't exactly solve the problem.)

At the end of the day, one's gotta eat. Are you willing to starve to save your own soul? Neither am I. But I'd like to have my cake and eat it too anyway.

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Background: I side with Noam Chomsky and most classical anarchists here: corporations are a systemic problem: they just concentrate too much power. We should dissolve them. As for the problems they solve (like shiny graphic cards), I'm sure we can think of a better way than corporate capitalism (no, I'm not thinking of command economies that are often associated with "socialism" —yet are anything but).