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What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

dynamicland.org

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Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#31

Post by Animats »

chubot wrote: post #23
Animats wrote: post #11

Here's a video of Dynamicland.[1] The textual description doesn't tell you much. It's still at the cool demo level, though. How do you scale this thing? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wa3nm0qcfM

What do you mean by “scale”? It’s designed to be decentralized, and promote agency of small, co-located groups of people The typical “scale” mindset is almost the opposite of that — the people doing the scaling are the ones with agency, and the rest get served slop they didn’t choose! If the system is an unreliable demo, then that can promote agency. In the same way that you could fix your car 40 years ago, but you c…

They've been at this since 2017 and there's only one location where it's working. Occasionally they do a demo somewhere else. It is only used, apparently, when supervised by its promoters. That's the "scaling" issue. They need a few more deployments.

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#32

Post by rtkwe »

chubot wrote: post #23
Animats wrote: post #11

Here's a video of Dynamicland.[1] The textual description doesn't tell you much. It's still at the cool demo level, though. How do you scale this thing? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wa3nm0qcfM

What do you mean by “scale”? It’s designed to be decentralized, and promote agency of small, co-located groups of people The typical “scale” mindset is almost the opposite of that — the people doing the scaling are the ones with agency, and the rest get served slop they didn’t choose! If the system is an unreliable demo, then that can promote agency. In the same way that you could fix your car 40 years ago, but you c…

The difficulty with that is there's no code or instructions to build your own so despite being "more open than open source" you're stuck implementing it from scratch if you want to make your own. Even if you can make the trek out the the current instance you can't take it home because there's still the core interpreter you need to run on a regular system to read the cameras, recognize the feducial marks, run the interpreter, and output that to the projectors that isn't immediately replicable.

I love the project but it's nearly a decade old and still lives in one location or places Bret's directly collaborated with like the biolab. [0]

[0] https://dynamicland.org/2023/Improvising_cellular_playground...

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#33

Post by [deleted] »

chubot wrote: post #23
Animats wrote: post #11

Here's a video of Dynamicland.[1] The textual description doesn't tell you much. It's still at the cool demo level, though. How do you scale this thing? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wa3nm0qcfM

What do you mean by “scale”? It’s designed to be decentralized, and promote agency of small, co-located groups of people The typical “scale” mindset is almost the opposite of that — the people doing the scaling are the ones with agency, and the rest get served slop they didn’t choose! If the system is an unreliable demo, then that can promote agency. In the same way that you could fix your car 40 years ago, but you c…

[deleted]

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#34

Post by infinite8s »

rtkwe wrote: post #32
chubot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by “scale”? It’s designed to be decentralized, and promote agency of small, co-located groups of people The typical “scale” mindset is almost the opposite of that — the people doing the scaling are the ones with agency, and the rest get served slop they didn’t choose! If the system is an unreliable demo, then that can promote agency. In the same way that you could fix your car 40 years ago, but you c…

The difficulty with that is there's no code or instructions to build your own so despite being "more open than open source" you're stuck implementing it from scratch if you want to make your own. Even if you can make the trek out the the current instance you can't take it home because there's still the core interpreter you need to run on a regular system to read the cameras, recognize the feducial marks, run the inte…

Folk.computer (https://folk.computer) is an open source version of DL-like system, and even though the code uses TCL it's pretty easy to reimplement any bits you see in the DynamicLand archives (I've done this). For example, the code in the video here https://dynamicland.org/archive/2022/Knobs can be 1-1 translated into TCL and it works the same.

If you really wanted to play around with similar ideas it doesn't take a needing to do a full reimplemention of the reactive engine.

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#35

Post by AnthonyMouse »

quonn wrote: post #25
chubot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by “scale”? It’s designed to be decentralized, and promote agency of small, co-located groups of people The typical “scale” mindset is almost the opposite of that — the people doing the scaling are the ones with agency, and the rest get served slop they didn’t choose! If the system is an unreliable demo, then that can promote agency. In the same way that you could fix your car 40 years ago, but you c…

> you could fix your car 40 years ago, but you can’t now, because of scaled corporate processes. You can fix your car just fine - just not the electronics. And those were to a large degree added for safety reasons. It is due to the complexity that they are difficult or impossible to fix.

The electronics don't have any more complexity than any other computer system. If you can fix your PC you could fix your car's electronics. Except that they aren't documented. So then your service light comes on, and the car has all kinds of detailed information about why, but the manufacturer doesn't give it to you because they want you to take it to the stealership so they can pick your pocket or try to sell you a new car instead of fixing it yourself or taking it to an independent mechanic.

This isn't about the cost; they already pay the cost to write the documentation or software for their own dealerships. It isn't about other carmakers; any company large enough to actually make a car would have no trouble getting a copy of it from one of the dealers. The only reason it's not published on their websites is that they don't want the vehicle owners and independent mechanics to have it, which is spiteful and obnoxious.

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#36

Post by bravesoul2 »

Animats wrote: post #31
chubot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by “scale”? It’s designed to be decentralized, and promote agency of small, co-located groups of people The typical “scale” mindset is almost the opposite of that — the people doing the scaling are the ones with agency, and the rest get served slop they didn’t choose! If the system is an unreliable demo, then that can promote agency. In the same way that you could fix your car 40 years ago, but you c…

They've been at this since 2017 and there's only one location where it's working. Occasionally they do a demo somewhere else. It is only used, apparently, when supervised by its promoters. That's the "scaling" issue. They need a few more deployments.

Primary and high schools is such an obvious "market" for this. Even if they just get a smart projector on the ceiling and some decent apps and not all the possibilities.

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#37

Post by dwohnitmok »

why_at wrote: post #22
rtkwe wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dynamicland is bootstrapped in a sense, [0] the same way you write the first compiler/interpreter for your code in another language then later write it in it's own language. The code running the camera and projector systems is also running from physically printed programs in one of the videos you can see a wall that's the core 'OS' so to speak of Dynamicland. I think the vision is neat but hampered by the projector t…

That's pretty cool. I figure this is explained in some of the videos but I can't watch them right now. I'm reading more about the "OS" Realtalk >Some operating system engineers might not call Realtalk an operating system, because it’s currently bootstrapped on a kernel which is not (yet) in Realtalk. You definitely couldn't fit the code for an LLM on the wall, so that makes sense. But I still have so many questions.…

> You definitely couldn't fit the code for an LLM on the wall, so that makes sense. But I still have so many questions.

You probably could fit the code for an LLM on a wall. Usually the code for an LLM is no more than a couple hundred lines.

Of course the weights wouldn't fit on a wall.

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#38

Post by randomNumber7 »

stego-tech wrote: post #7
randomNumber7 wrote: post #4

> we aim for a computing system that is fully visible and understandable top-to-bottom I mean even for something that is in theory fully understandable like the linux kernel it is not feasible to actually read the source before using it. To me this really makes no sense. Even for traditional programming we only have so powerful systems because we use a layered approach. You can look into these layers and understand t…

That’s because you’re conflating “understanding” with “comprehension”. You can understand every component in a chain and its function, how it works, where its fragilities lay or capabilities are absent, without reviewing the source code for everything you install. To comprehend , however, you must be intimately familiar with the underlying source code, how it compiles, how it speaks to the hardware, etc. I believe th…

1. Tell me you trust only humans who always explain you in detail how they come to their beliefs. You are probably very lonely.

2. There is a lot of ongoing work on mechanistic interpretability by e.g. antropic that shows we can understand LLMs better than we initially thought.

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#39

Post by comeondude »

Im genuinely blown away by llms.

I’m an artist who’ve always struggled to learn how to code. I can pick up on computer science concepts, but when I try to sit down and write actual code my brain just pretends it doesn’t exist.

Over like 20 years, despite numerous attempts I could never get past few beginner exercises. I viscerally can’t stand the headspace that coding puts me in.

Last night I managed to build a custom CDN to deliver cool fonts to my site a la Google fonts, create a gorgeous site with custom code injected CSS and Java (while grokking most of it), and best part … it was FUN! I have never remotely done anything like that in my entire life, and with ChatGPT’s help I managed to it in like 3 hours. It’s bonkers.

AI is truly what you make of it, and I think it’s an incredible tool that allows you to learn things in a way that fits how your brain works.

I think schools should have curriculum that teaches people how to use AI effectively. It’s truly a force multiplier for creativity.

Computers haven’t felt this fun for a long time.

Re: What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)

#40

Post by chubot »

Animats wrote: post #31
chubot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by “scale”? It’s designed to be decentralized, and promote agency of small, co-located groups of people The typical “scale” mindset is almost the opposite of that — the people doing the scaling are the ones with agency, and the rest get served slop they didn’t choose! If the system is an unreliable demo, then that can promote agency. In the same way that you could fix your car 40 years ago, but you c…

They've been at this since 2017 and there's only one location where it's working. Occasionally they do a demo somewhere else. It is only used, apparently, when supervised by its promoters. That's the "scaling" issue. They need a few more deployments.

Ah OK, that's a valid criticism. I'd call it reducing the "bus factor", or enabling independent replication of the research results.

Not necessarily "scaling", but the point stands. If the goal is enable agency, then obviously you want that to happen in multiple places!

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