[HN Gopher] Dynamicland
___________________________________________________________________
Dynamicland
Author : andyjohnson0
Score : 198 points
Date : 2021-04-07 14:22 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dynamicland.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dynamicland.org)
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| Dynamicland feels to me like The Mother of all Demos. Ahead of
| its time, groundbreaking practical applications of interactivity
| research.
|
| Dozens of companies and projects will spring from this. Just give
| it time.
|
| We'll be back to using real objects instead of keyboards at some
| point in the near-future. Brett's right that a lot of the
| difficulty in actually using computers to produce things is in
| the translation of human interactions into a medium the computer
| can understand, and translating the data a computer outputs into
| a medium humans understand. We aren't two-dimensional creatures.
| The state of the art cannot remain in pictures and text forever.
|
| I'm not sold that everything will be done this way - some things
| will always need the precision of automated, textual input (see
| tool assisted speed runs in video-gaming if you think human
| beings can match pre-programmed precision inputs).
| twobitshifter wrote:
| They actually cite Englebert at the top of the page as guiding
| the project spirit.
| jarmitage wrote:
| For those wondering about an update, they posted a "Narrative
| Description of Activities" document (something to do with 501c
| status) recently
| (https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/1367894681342799875),
| choice quote re comments in this thread:
|
| > The Dynamicland researchers are not developing a product. The
| computers that the researchers build are models: not for
| distribution, but for studying and evaluating. The goal of the
| research is not to provide hardware or software to users, but to
| discover a new set of ideas which will enable all people to
| create computational environments for themselves, with no
| dependence on Dynamicland or anyone else, and to understand how
| these ideas can be taught and learned. The end result of the
| research is fundamentally intended to be a form of education,
| empowering communities to be self-sufficient and teach these
| ideas to each other.
| jkscm wrote:
| Games like Kerbal Space Programm and factorio exhibit a lot of
| the concepts from the original research agenda[^1] because they
| are "Dynamic Environments-To-Think-In"
|
| [^1]: http://worrydream.com/cdg/ResearchAgenda-v0.19-poster.pdf
| adenozine wrote:
| What in the fresh hell! This is so awesome. I've always dreamt of
| something like this with some form of handwritten programming
| language, a group of people sketching a program on a single,
| giant canvas.
|
| I guess this isn't a new project, but I'm glad it's been
| reposted.
|
| I do worry that this format has some pretty sharp limits, just
| due to the spatiality and trying to cram functionality into a
| limited area of a room, amongst other people. Some form of code
| storage might need to be designed, so one could stack those
| little code papers on top of one another. Who knows.
|
| Very though-provoking project.
| Animats wrote:
| There's the usual scaling problem with graphical representations.
|
| The now-discontinued Blender game engine was an example of
| building a complex system by connecting up boxed with arrows. You
| could easily get to a few square meters of program, and then
| finding anything was tough.
|
| Dynamicland PR: "Programs are flexible, and compose readily." So
| what do you compose? A functional block with ins and outs? What's
| the equivalent of a subroutine? That's where graphical systems
| usually fall down.
| myhf wrote:
| There are some interesting examples of large visual programs at
| https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/
|
| I think the goal of Dynamicland is to build computational
| paradigms other than procedure-oriented programming. Individual
| cards can call lua subroutines, but the emergent behavior
| between cards is not the same type of composition as connecting
| subroutines.
|
| It reminds me of the gameplay in "Baba is You": the "program"
| is the set of rules currently in play, and the emergent
| behavior is the set of moves allowed by those rules.
| Animats wrote:
| _There are some interesting examples of large visual programs
| athttps://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/_
|
| Yes, same problem, and same solution, as the Blender game
| engine. ROS, the Robot Operating System, which is really a
| message passing library that runs on Linux, is something like
| that, too, with blocks connected by one-way connections.
|
| _Emergent behavior between cards is not the same type of
| composition as connecting subroutines._
|
| Good point. You can start to see where this model works.
| Things where there's a lot going on in parallel, and loosely
| coupled modules need some interconnection.
|
| People keep re-inventing this idea, but so far, it tends to
| get really messy as it scales up. There's a second level of
| concepts needed here, something comparable to the invention
| of modules or classes or traits in programming.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| I think this is a better paradigm than Augmented Reality glasses.
|
| The medium is limited but interesting.
|
| Perhaps this would be more portable if there is a projector
| underneath a table with a transparent glass top and a camera on
| top to view inputs.
|
| Potential Applications
|
| 1. Mapping (Interactive maps, interactive routing, real-time
| weather, etc) 2. Collaborative art 3. Engineering CAD and CAM
| modeling and design.
| porcc wrote:
| Tilt5 might interest you as IMO the best paradigm of AR glasses
| --headmounted projectors with retroreflective surfaces.
| https://www.tiltfive.com
|
| Portable, multiplayer--and comes with massive improvements in
| FOV and contrast due to its design.
| gmueckl wrote:
| The mythical AR glasses of the future should be able to do
| everything your proposed projection table setup can. I see both
| setups as just two different manifestations of AR as a concept.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| Haha. Mythical indeed. But more importantly, they are
| impersonal. In a collaborative setting, they are simply not
| conducive enough.
| indigochill wrote:
| Are you thinking of VR? AR merges the virtual environment
| with the physical one. One fun example was that I played a
| Finnish board game sort of like Pictionary with a Finnish
| friend. All the cards were in Finnish which I don't know,
| but I could use my phone's AR translation app to "read" the
| cards in effectively real time.
|
| AR glasses could hypothetically share a networked virtual
| environment, so I don't see why they couldn't be
| collaborative.
| kumarvvr wrote:
| No, not VR. Interacting socially is better without a huge
| glass that covers half your face, and most importantly,
| covers your eyes.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Proper AR glasses would be completely see-through and not
| very intrusive.
| J5892 wrote:
| In an ideal AR setting, everyone with a display will see
| everything everyone else sees. So the exact concept of
| Dynamicland would be completely reproducible in AR.
|
| And you get the advantage of having optional private
| workspaces on top of that.
| crazypython wrote:
| This is the most "object-oriented" programming language I've
| seen.
| SamBam wrote:
| I went to a meeting at Dynamicland a few years ago, and got to
| spend a few days playing with it and chatting with people.
|
| The positives are many: I think it's awesome to conceive of
| computers outside the actual computer boxes, especially in an
| educational setting. I think the notion of "collaboration" is
| _way_ more engaging when it 's kids standing shoulder-to-shoulder
| and actually pushing pieces of paper around and arguing about
| things out loud, rather than "collaborating" on a Google Doc,
| sitting at different computers. I also think that this can be
| enlarged: all sorts of working meetings could be improved by
| people standing shoulder-to-shoulder at a table and pushing
| around tangible objects, with simple programming about how
| they'll interact.
|
| My negatives are what I took away from this, and may be incorrect
| or out-of-date, so feel free to jump in if I'm wrong, but I felt
| that Bret Victor was very much a purist regarding his vision, and
| had no desire to help spawn clones or variants of Dynamicland
| anywhere else. In many ways this may be laudable, but it felt
| like he was protecting his baby from going out into the wild,
| which has meant that the spread of ideas and possibilities has
| been greatly curtailed. It seems like it will only ever be
| destined to be a tiny playground for Bret and the few friends
| working with him.
| rollcat wrote:
| > I also think that this can be enlarged: all sorts of working
| meetings could be improved by people standing shoulder-to-
| shoulder at a table and pushing around tangible objects, with
| simple programming about how they'll interact.
|
| I've worked at a company (~30 people) that used a physical
| kanban blackboard, with slips of paper and magnets.
|
| The slips started out hand-written. Then someone made a
| printer. Then someone realized there was still too much
| information being held on Redmine. Then someone connected the
| printer with Redmine. Then we decided to keep the long
| descriptions in Redmine, but priorities and assignments on
| kanban. Then someone decided we need to keep ticket priorities
| and progress on Redmine as well, because computers are actually
| better when you need to sort and filter a mass of tickets. Then
| someone noticed it's difficult to locate either the physical
| representation of a ticket, or its copy on Redmine, to keep
| both in sync. Before I left, we were throwing around ideas like
| printing QR codes on the tickets, or using CV/OCR. The printer
| would also get jammed, the paper tickets got lost, we never had
| enough magnets, and I hate chalk.
|
| We've had a very unusual (in my experience) policy of no remote
| / no WFH, I didn't mind but I wonder how much more of an
| obstacle it would have been if remote work was more common. It
| would certainly make zero sense in the pandemic world, but I
| didn't stick around long enough to find out.
| endergen wrote:
| @SamBam, the concern about Bret maybe not asking for help and
| just working more in the open concerned me too. It's a large
| endeavor to try to popularize something like what he's doing. I
| assume a sense of showmanship and worrying about people
| misrepresenting it are a bit part of the dynamics. Perhaps
| sponsorship exclusivity, but that's more speculative.
| [deleted]
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's got a technological problem which is very much like
| augmented reality, picoprojectors, and such.
|
| A movie projector projects onto an otherwise dark screen, but
| this thing projects on a surface: your black level is going to
| be good light for "seeing".
|
| The projectors have to be pretty bright, outside light
| controlled and the sensor array would have to be pretty robust.
|
| A good installation would be pretty expensive, but there must
| be a $1000 version that's possible.
| vchak1 wrote:
| I gave Bret the same feedback. My point was that if he could
| package up a smaller version of it (say with a pico projector
| and a simple webcam) then you could have a ton of creative
| efforts happen in parallel. There are a ton of use cases for
| the home and for schools and I'm sad that the potential there
| is not fully realized..
| theon144 wrote:
| I see how that might be constructed as a negative, but IMO it's
| too early to tell whether that's a genuine setback to the
| project.
|
| "Protecting his baby" might be a very wise decision at this
| point, if only because of how the reception generally goes;
| pigeonholing the project into something like "an AR coding
| environment" or "visual programming with projectors" is a very
| real risk that could damage the project's aims - even "clones"
| such as https://paperprograms.org/ make it abundantly clear
| that they are _not_ attempting to be an "opensource
| Dynamicland".
|
| It's only been 3 years since it was founded. While that might
| be generally considered an eternity in tech-time, I feel it's
| barely enough to get one's feet wet given the scale of the
| project, which seems to aim to be _decades_ long. Besides, the
| roadmap they 've got on their website mentions 2022 as the year
| they go public - so, I personally am stoked for what that will
| bring.
| Uehreka wrote:
| If the goal is to prevent misconceptions about the project's
| goals from becoming mainstream, then partially withholding
| access and information about the project seems like a poor
| way to achieve that goal.
|
| People will just make assumptions about what the project is
| based on the photos/videos they see, but won't absorb the
| deeper meaning because they won't get to actually use it.
| jVinc wrote:
| If you read their material you'll see that they are
| expecting the project to "meet the world" in 2022 and are
| looking to achieve widespread adoption by 2040. As others
| have mentioned this might seem like forever in tech-startup
| terms, but they aren't aiming to just make a "AR-projector
| setup", they have much more ambitious goals, so it seems
| reasonable to also work on longer timelines, including
| keeping the "baby" in the crib until it's ready to walk
| instead of crawl.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Might be wise but might not be, look at Xanadu, with the web
| we got a massive 'halfstep' without any xanadu hands on the
| wheel.
| anarticle wrote:
| To contextualize this, check out Seymour Papert's work on LOGO,
| especially teams of kids working together to solve problems. Some
| of this is also related to Alan Kay's work. It's all inspiring,
| and shows that there may be many ways to compute.
| coloneltcb wrote:
| Great to see this on the front page. I've been lucky enough to
| visit Dynamicland/volunteer there and it absolutely lives up to
| the hype.
| platz wrote:
| The actual interactions seem rather limited. Rotations,
| translations, associations. not sure how much fidelity that
| actually gives you. How many problems can you actually solve with
| that?
| _Microft wrote:
| Is the technology of detecting and using marked everyday items
| (sheets of paper/whatever) as input devices and parts of programs
| patented? I couldn't find anything on that yet. It feels like
| something that would benefit from being patents-free.
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| It was used in Killer Game Programming in Java by Andrew
| Davidson published in 1995. That used a Webcam and a color
| coded bracelet you made yourself as an input device for one of
| the code examples. Microsoft had Surface touchscreen 2.0 pre
| 2011 that tracked real world objects [1].
|
| 1. https://youtu.be/57k2iJbotV4
| olah_1 wrote:
| Has anyone used Scratch style blocks for real physical blocks?
|
| They fit together like puzzle pieces. Kind of a neat visual that
| could translate to physical medium.
| gklitt wrote:
| If you're looking for more concrete details on what it's actually
| like to make things at Dynamicland, I recommend this writeup by
| Omar Rizwan. (from 2018, so doesn't reflect recent progress, but
| it's still helpful for getting a feel for the place):
|
| https://omar.website/posts/notes-from-dynamicland-geokit/
|
| I also wrote a short explanation of some little experiments I did
| there when I visited a couple years ago:
|
| https://www.geoffreylitt.com/projects/dynamicland.html
| mwcampbell wrote:
| I sent the following message to Dynamicland a few years ago and
| never got a satisfactory response. Does anyone know if they're
| doing anything about accessibility for blind people or people
| with other disabilities?
|
| Hi,
|
| First of all, Dynamicland's goal of "agency, not apps" resonates
| with me. I'm in favor of things that make programming more
| accessible to normal people.
|
| However, I worry that Dynamicland will be a step backward for
| people with disabilities, particularly blind people and people
| with impaired mobility. For us (I'm legally blind myself), I
| believe the virtual worlds of today's computers aren't
| imprisoning but liberating. Consider that a blind person can't
| see that "fully functional" scrap of paper, and a person who
| can't use their hands can't write on that paper or manipulate the
| other physical objects in Dynamicland.
|
| Do you have a plan to solve this problem while holding to your
| goal of "No screens, no devices"? It seems to me that there's no
| way to reconcile these conflicting requirements without making an
| exception for people who can't work directly with the paper and
| other objects.
|
| Or have you decided that it's better to undo the equalizing
| effect of computers for people with disabilities, for the good of
| everyone else? I would obviously be disappointed if that's the
| case. But I understand that everything's a trade-off, and perhaps
| it's not reasonable to confine the majority to an inhumane way of
| working for the benefit of a few. So I don't mean this as an
| accusation; I really want to know.
|
| Thanks, Matt
| gugagore wrote:
| I think your question is important, and I wish you had received
| a reply. I think it's common for people's needs to be in
| conflict; everything is a trade-off, as you acknowledged.
|
| But I think you baked into your question a false dichotomy.
| "Dynamicland" does not necessarily have to _undo_ the
| "equalizing effect of computers", nor does its absence mean
| that the majority is confined to an _inhumane_ (wow...) way of
| working.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > an _inhumane_ (wow...) way of working.
|
| That was Bret Victor's characterization of being confined to
| a screen, not mine.
| rodiger wrote:
| The shadows and latency are rough currently but totally agree
| that single, flat, rectangular input devices shouldn't be the
| future. Tactility is amazing and a large reason people prefer
| their old "dumb" interfaces.
| sesuximo wrote:
| Man that looks cool! I'd love to use paper and a projector
| instead of looking at a screen all day
| jakubp wrote:
| I don't get why there is no way to edit apps live through the
| operating system. Before I knew how programs work I didn't
| understand why I can't recode anything as user - change menus in
| Windows 3.1, change what they do, change logic of forms, etc.
| Today I know how this works and I'm even more convinced this
| would be good for everyone, exposing the actual logic behind all
| we see in apps (start with text, forms, links, buttons, etc.)
| would only be to everyone's benefit - would expose bugs, help
| people learn UIs in depth, suggest better functionalities and
| have swarms of users contribute to computers.
|
| Same with gathering user feedback -- the fact that we have such
| ridiculously unusable basic UI elements on mobile especially
| (people tend to NOT find basic UI elelemtsn of apps for months,
| sometimes years - how the f* is that even possible) is just one
| consequence of the fact that even if say 1000 users intend to do
| something and fail, the authors of the app never learn about
| that. WE get clubhouse to listen to one more type of radio, but
| we never get "userhouse" to get instant stream of people's
| complaints about an app (and a special physical button ON THE
| smartphone itself to launch that "instant feedback to the app
| author"mode so it's part of the base aspect of being a user of a
| smartphone)...
|
| sigh.... one can dream.
| 1-6 wrote:
| If I can only find people to sit beside like that video.
| haolez wrote:
| I saw something like this in a presentation at the MIT Media Lab
| a few years ago (2016?). It's impressive, but it was a little
| glitchy and it felt overkill for the tasks that they were being
| used on.
|
| However, I'd guess that new products and ideas will proliferate
| if we somehow develop incredibly small and powerful projectors.
| Something that could be attached to a table, or even to your
| smartphone, and result in the same experience. I'd certainly want
| that :)
| jancsika wrote:
| I'm trying to think of the simplest way to solve this problem:
|
| 1. Start with an analog synth from the 70s that's just a bunch of
| big, bulky metal modules connected by patch cords.
|
| 2. Remove the guts of each module and shrink them down to lego
| size
|
| 3. Print an English word name on each lego-sized module
|
| 4. Connect them up with patch cords.
|
| Now I have a physical artifact that represents a DSP graph in the
| visual diagram interface of a program like Pure Data.
|
| Question-- what is the easiest/cheapest way to continually pipe
| the topology data of the physical artifact into my laptop? It
| wouldn't be too hard to just have each module shouting a
| superaudio signal at my laptop and instantiating the
| corresponding object in the software when it's detected. But that
| doesn't cover the interconnections.
|
| I could take video input of the artifact but that would be crappy
| UX with the user constantly having to "show" the artifact to the
| camera from a non-ambiguous angle.
|
| I feel like there's some simple solution lurking out there with
| something like tinfoil and a 9v battery...
| sigstoat wrote:
| if we ignore the issue of powering them, a CV cable is enough
| for a half-duplex serial connection. you don't need to transfer
| a lot of data to establish the topology. i think (hand waving!)
| every module could re-broadcast all the broadcasts it hears
| (that don't include itself) with its ID appended. those will
| make their way to the edges where they can be picked up, and
| would describe all the possible paths through the system.
|
| some microcontroller in each brick with a bunch of uarts would
| be ideal. then somewhere you need a usb-to-whatever link.
|
| (maybe somebody really clever could put the right set of
| passive parts in each brick so that every topology of devices
| would be distinguishable by some sort of analog probing from
| the periphery. i'm not that clever.)
| Animats wrote:
| _If we ignore the issue of powering them, a CV cable is
| enough for a half-duplex serial connection. you don 't need
| to transfer a lot of data to establish the topology. i think
| (hand waving!) every module could re-broadcast all the
| broadcasts it hears (that don't include itself) with its ID
| appended. those will make their way to the edges where they
| can be picked up, and would describe all the possible paths
| through the system._
|
| Not too hard. 1-Wire, a very low end LAN from Dallas
| Semiconductor, would be good for this. The parts are cheap,
| low-power, and powered over the connection cable.
|
| (1-wire requires 3 wires. You could use stereo phone jacks.)
|
| There are probably musician applications for this sort of
| thing. Some people like cables.
|
| A similar form of fakery is seen in DJ systems where you have
| vinyl records that contain not music, but time code.[1] The
| DJ can do DJ turntable stuff as if playing analogue records.
| They're just sending time code info to the the control unit
| which has the audio in memory, and the output is the
| appropriate audio for the time code.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_emulation
| jude- wrote:
| Is it open-source yet? I can't seem to find any source code
| anywhere.
| thrower123 wrote:
| This looks like the most vaporware thing I have seen since Duke
| Nukem Forever.
| sparsely wrote:
| It feels like this has been reposted regularly for years, but the
| demo videos and slightly threadbare use cases haven't changed at
| all. Re-imagining how we interact with computers sounds great,
| but it doesn't feel like this project is actually going to
| achieve it's goals beyond letting a small number of lucky users
| play around with stuff.
|
| I'm not sure if darklang is going to succeed, but that seems like
| a far more fruitful direction to approach the problem from. It's
| a very hard problem, and they are attempting to make programming
| a little bit more visual while not removing any power from the
| user, instead of making it entirely visual and almost completely
| dis-empowering the user. Importantly, it's actually accessible to
| people all over the world, and they can use it to achieve real
| world goals.
| crazypython wrote:
| How is darklang related to dynamicland? I only found
| https://darklang.com/
| theon144 wrote:
| Right, it honestly feels like the parent commenter either
| misunderstands Dynamicland's aims, or is willfully drawing
| comparisons to make it seem like the projects are tackling
| the same issues, out of which Dark comes out as the more
| successful one (at least measured by "adoption").
|
| I don't see what the "almost completely dis-empowering the
| user" is about either; if anything, Dynamicland seems the
| more empowering of the two, whereas Dark's endgame is more
| efficient development of a fundamentally conventional type of
| software.
|
| It feels rather dishonest; the comparisons are sweeping and
| vague, with very little substance as to an actual criticism.
| endergen wrote:
| I personally hope that the output ends up being systems that
| are good for individuals with their own dynamic lands at home,
| not just strong group collaboration. I know there are already
| people who have setups done in coordination with the Dynamic
| Land team.
|
| I've visited dynamic land also, and the vision of this more
| tangible visible computation is bigger than the
| incarnation/progress last shown.
|
| I'm a fan of Darklang's goals too. But I do think Dynamic Land
| is targeting more approachable, teachable, and communal
| computing. Darklang is going to be more for professionals
| making backends and doesn't target any user facing
| audio/visuals whatsoever. It could in the end of course, so I
| hope it does well as an effort too.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| I hope darklang succeeds too, but I personally believe that
| visual programming is at least partly the way to go. This is
| because I firmly believe that the "most-correct" view of
| regular programming is that of a directed graph of
| computations, and directed graphs don't compress very well into
| text.
|
| I'm building something visual to prove (or disprove) this
| concept, but I'm also thinking that power users would want a
| textual language for faster input, as GUIs are better for
| output where TUIs are better for input.
| sparsely wrote:
| I agree that visual programming can be great - my argument
| would be that starting from a model that we know works and
| making incremental steps towards something more visual is
| more likely to succeed, than attempting to jump all the way
| to something fully visual based
| endergen wrote:
| I'm a fan of what Observable is doing. Combine bubbles of
| classic code, with intermediate audio/visual output as you
| build up to full interactive infographics/demos.
|
| Some types of code, hopefully less than more is just not
| very flow based and doesn't have a concrete visual
| representation.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| in general I agree that incrementalism is the best way to
| improve a model. I'm just not certain how to do that with
| such a drastic change as going from textual to visual - but
| darklang seem to be doing a great job at that, and I do
| hope they succeed at their mission.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Text is much more searchable. Any binary format is ultimately
| text. We use it for non-input, non-human-readable formats.
|
| Graphs are great for showing relationships and high level
| information at a glance. Human can recognize visual shapes
| (this can apply to text as well but text as well. Many
| editors now show text minimaps).
|
| But after a certain scale, the best we have for relationships
| is probably hypertext links and other uri references.
| crazypython wrote:
| "2020: Realtalk-2020. We're bringing together everything we've
| learned to create the next iteration of our Realtalk computing
| system. Realtalk-2020 will form the foundation for the next
| decade of research and applications."
|
| "2022: Dynamicland meets the world, in the form of new kinds of
| libraries, museums, classrooms, science labs, arts venues, and
| businesses. We will empower these communities to build what
| they need for themselves, to design their own futures."
| scroot wrote:
| This issue here is research funding
| bschne wrote:
| > ...but it doesn't feel like this project is actually going to
| achieve it's goals beyond letting a small number of lucky users
| play around with stuff.
|
| Will they end up building some product that will be adopted by
| droves of customers and offers a completely new paradigm for
| interaction? Probably not.
|
| But I'd argue that's hardly where "esoteric" research like this
| ends up going, and in my book that's OK. Bret Victor, who is
| behind Dynamicland, never shipped the full drawing app from his
| interactive visualizations talk as far as I know. Neither did
| anyone ever get to buy or download the editor he shows in
| "Inventing on Principle" as a new IDE that offers incredibly
| great feedback while programming.
|
| Nevertheless, his talks are among the most inspiring things I
| and I think many others have ever seen in the area of HCI, and
| at least in my case are responsible for a large part of my
| renewed interest in the field.
|
| Will anything out of Dynamicland capture people's imagination
| and enthusiasm like that as well? Maybe. Maybe not. But the
| point is to explore, and I applaud those who do.
| endergen wrote:
| The influence of his talks show up everywhere and are
| explicitly called out as inspirations. Elm Lang's time travel
| debugger, therefore redux, hot reloading work, Observable
| calls him out as influential, and on and on.
| bschne wrote:
| Exactly my point -- there's space for those who put
| together amazing but infeasible-as-product demos to
| communicate lofty ideas, those who take those and repackage
| them for "mass consumption", and of course the rare genius
| who does both, and anything in between.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I feel like putting together a janky tech demo is not
| especially impressive though. Anybody can think of
| screens projected onto paper. It's not particularly
| interesting that the tech demo is possible. Actually
| making it usable is the really hard part and the reason
| it remains a tech demo.
|
| That's why Apple is rich. They do the hard part.
| bmitc wrote:
| > instead of making it entirely visual and almost completely
| dis-empowering the user
|
| Why do you think that making something visual completely
| disempowers the user?
| throwaway789256 wrote:
| People who love Bret Victor's work and thought should know that
| he is also part of this effort.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Although I much admire Bret Victor, this Dynamicland project
| seems like a really, REALLY deep rabbit-hole. I hope he finds
| it enjoyable and rewarding, but I do hope re-joins the world
| and starts giving illuminating talks again!
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