6 ms·

DynamicLand seems awesome, but I'm afraid it will be forever irrelevant if it's not open-sourced or launched as a consumer product. Are there any open source i

by evv 9y ago

DynamicLand seems awesome, but I'm afraid it will be forever irrelevant if it's not open-sourced or launched as a consumer product. Are there any open source implementations of DynamicLand, that I could contribute to? If not, maybe I'll hack something together with JS and put it on Github. Brett Victor has been inspiring me with his talks for years, but I can't help but wonder- when is he going to ship any of this awesome work!? His innovations would be profound for our industry, its a shame to see them locked away in closed research.

masukomi 9y ago
Brett's a R&D guy. R&D guys don't ship consumer products. They find the future paths and test if they're viable. Developing and maintaining a consumer product is a completely different skillset and one that would greatly hamper what he is best at if he tried to follow it. He's shown us what's possible and much of what he's shown _has_ been shipped by other people. Look at the playgrounds in Swift + XCode Those are totally based on ideas he put out in his talks. Don't ask our best creative thinkers to be slaves to retail viability, and customer support. There are plenty of us who can manage that, but there are very few Brett Victors in the world.
- evv 9y ago
  I'm glad he has a research budget, I just wish his work was open source. The fact that its not means that there is a huge barrier for anybody to actually use these ideas. Most of us don't have a team of engineers that we can task for a year to build something like Xcode playgrounds. A fun opposite example, of somebody who hasn't invented anything in particular, but solves real user's problems in an open-source, practical way? Matt Mullenweg. Wordpress powers ~30% of sites on internet. I'm not saying that Brett should be more like Matt. I'm saying that a little bit of openness goes a long way.
  - jarmitage 9y ago
    To understand why Bret does not open source, you need to watch this talk from his lab's ethnographer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dweVuJBoK6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dweVuJBoK6o Money quote: "In the CDG, prototypes work decidedly against usefulness. That's the mantra, against usefulness. To be very clear, this being against usefulness is not the being against usefulness of artists, who like to do their autonomy. It's also not the grumbling hate of engineers who hate users, stupid users who don't understand their products. The paradoxical reason for the need to avoid usefulness is the experience that usefulness can stop the overall longer process of bootstrapping. Yes, at the end of the process of bootstrapping, products need to be shipped. But before this happened, usefulness is feared, at least for many researchers in the CDG, as a trap. Once you produce useful tools, they reify. Usefulness reacts to present users, and present users are not the future users that the lab is working towards. Useful prototypes stop being pointers of something larger, more long-term than what the prototype achieves. Useful prototypes become a means to an end demand, too much attention, become solutions, and maybe even are in danger of being turned into opportunities." Now whether you think your understanding of open source differs from Bret's is an interesting question. But it seems like his is "throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks is no way to reinvent a civilisation."
    - lomnakkus 9y ago
      A less charitable interpretation might be that many of these ideas are actually not workable -- and never will be -- in the real world where you can't just insert special cases whenever you need to. (I've seen this sooooo often in research code.) It's also not just a question of computing resources. <rant incoming, be warned> I'll use the Mario example from one of his first widely disseminated talks as an example: In the Mario example you see him run time backwards. That's actually reasonably achievable by just recording all previous states or (more plausibly) all state changes and then "just" replaying backwards. Then he runs time forwards again after having changed a setting (or some such). This is, again achievable within limits, see e.g. "rr". The problem comes when he shows a projected future path of Mario. Because of a) Turing Completeness (TC) + the Halting problem, and b) the fact that much code actually interacts with other systems which are not able to just rewind (and/or themselves interact with systems that ...). The only plausible scenario in which this is even remotely possible in practice is if the programs adhere to strict rules about side effects, have built-in "project into the future" (or have no side effects so that we can run them to see what the results are _without affecting anything external_.). That is, it's not about fancy IDEs -- it's about programming languages and turning away from Turing Completeness and/or non-abstract/non-formalized effects. FRP/(React+Flux) sort of work for this if you adhere strictly to purity, but then again break down when it comes to things like "what is the focused element" if the user clicks around when you're replaying. I don't want to be a party-pooper, but good luck changing the programming paradigm of everyone to achieve this vision. For it to work everything has to work in this FRPish way, and that's just never going to happen -- for example, networks (for real-world reasons) cannot behave this way, etc. etc. I WISH we could have everything behave this way, but we can't -- billions of e.g. browser installations which have to have backward-compatible DOM implementations and millions (billions?) of installations of C/C++-based operating systems say so. Now, I'm not against Imagining Things How They Could Be, but if there's mathematical proof that "thing X" is not possible one either needs to explain how you are not doing "thing X" (perhaps not using a TC language, or disallowing non-pure state) or shut up. Brett Victor and many "visionaries" like him are just very bad at stating their fundamental assumptions up front (which is perhaps part of the reason we don't get to see the code, it's probably just simple pure FRP-like code) so that we can evaluate the vision against the assumptions. (Light Table just seemed to assume that the assumptions were plausible and see where that got them. Funded but with very little actual technological advancement to show for it.) ... and also don't get me started on the whole "Kill Math" thing. Ugh. (Sorry about the rantish nature of this -- I should probably just write this up properly somewhere so I could properly flesh it out. I just get tired of this "What A Genius!" and "Well, it would take too much time away from inspiration to actually make the thing!" credulous nonsense.)
- ryukafalz 9y ago
  Honestly, I'd be happy if it were just open sourced with a heavy disclaimer about not being able to support users. If you see a piece of technology and have an idea you want to try, with an open system you can just get the source code and try it. With a closed system, the answer is "first, rewrite it from scratch..."
  - convolvatron 9y ago
    its likely that its completely unusable off the machine thats running it and that there the author can't run it a month later (like grad student work) I guess you could argue that devoted interested parties would invest the time to tease out all the dependencies, get it integrated in common packaging systems, and spend some time debugging it. if you had an even slightly more devoted person they could make a production system using the demo as an inspiration. I don't know Bret personally, but he'd probably be likely to engage with that person and give feedback and advice.
    - ryukafalz 9y ago
      >its likely that its completely unusable off the machine thats running it and that there the author can't run it a month later (like grad student work) That's possible, yeah. But I bet there are a lot of real-world lessons they learned in the process of building Realtalk (and previously Hypercard in the World) that wouldn't necessarily be apparent from a demo. For that matter, we don't even really know what the user experience is like - most of the pictures I've seen aren't high-res enough to see what the code looks like. Even if they're open to tours (which it sounds like they might be), I live on the other side of the country. I'm sure talking to Bret personally would be illuminating in that regard, but reading through the code and commit history can be illuminating in similar ways (doubly so if the authors were diligent about documenting things). Heck, even documentation on how to use Realtalk would be nice!
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
paulgerhardt 9y ago
Much of the work at the DynamicLand is in the same vein as Mike Eisenberg's Post-PC/Craft Technology Lab[1] Similar to the MIT Media Lab (Mike is an alum) much of the research focuses on physical computational interfaces beyond the traditional screen/keyboard model - i.e. how can we collaboratively 'compute' things with real physical objects around us. Or put another way, what does computing look like when everything is a computer. Some other projects to come out of there are the Lilypad Arduino, a project similar to DynamicLand called SHALE, and Lockitron. [1] http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~ctg/Previous_Projects.html http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~ctg/Previous_Projects.html
bchjam 9y ago
Alex Warth of HARC has a new Dynamicland-inspired repo called roomdb https://github.com/alexwarth/roomdb https://github.com/alexwarth/roomdb

by evv 9y ago

masukomi 9y ago

Brett's a R&D guy. R&D guys don't ship consumer products. They find the future paths and test if they're viable. Developing and maintaining a consumer product is a completely different skillset and one that would greatly hamper what he is best at if he tried to follow it. He's shown us what's possible and much of what he's shown _has_ been shipped by other people. Look at the playgrounds in Swift + XCode Those are totally based on ideas he put out in his talks. Don't ask our best creative thinkers to be slaves to retail viability, and customer support. There are plenty of us who can manage that, but there are very few Brett Victors in the world.

evv 9y ago
I'm glad he has a research budget, I just wish his work was open source. The fact that its not means that there is a huge barrier for anybody to actually use these ideas. Most of us don't have a team of engineers that we can task for a year to build something like Xcode playgrounds. A fun opposite example, of somebody who hasn't invented anything in particular, but solves real user's problems in an open-source, practical way? Matt Mullenweg. Wordpress powers ~30% of sites on internet. I'm not saying that Brett should be more like Matt. I'm saying that a little bit of openness goes a long way.
- jarmitage 9y ago
  To understand why Bret does not open source, you need to watch this talk from his lab's ethnographer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dweVuJBoK6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dweVuJBoK6o Money quote: "In the CDG, prototypes work decidedly against usefulness. That's the mantra, against usefulness. To be very clear, this being against usefulness is not the being against usefulness of artists, who like to do their autonomy. It's also not the grumbling hate of engineers who hate users, stupid users who don't understand their products. The paradoxical reason for the need to avoid usefulness is the experience that usefulness can stop the overall longer process of bootstrapping. Yes, at the end of the process of bootstrapping, products need to be shipped. But before this happened, usefulness is feared, at least for many researchers in the CDG, as a trap. Once you produce useful tools, they reify. Usefulness reacts to present users, and present users are not the future users that the lab is working towards. Useful prototypes stop being pointers of something larger, more long-term than what the prototype achieves. Useful prototypes become a means to an end demand, too much attention, become solutions, and maybe even are in danger of being turned into opportunities." Now whether you think your understanding of open source differs from Bret's is an interesting question. But it seems like his is "throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks is no way to reinvent a civilisation."
  - lomnakkus 9y ago
    A less charitable interpretation might be that many of these ideas are actually not workable -- and never will be -- in the real world where you can't just insert special cases whenever you need to. (I've seen this sooooo often in research code.) It's also not just a question of computing resources. <rant incoming, be warned> I'll use the Mario example from one of his first widely disseminated talks as an example: In the Mario example you see him run time backwards. That's actually reasonably achievable by just recording all previous states or (more plausibly) all state changes and then "just" replaying backwards. Then he runs time forwards again after having changed a setting (or some such). This is, again achievable within limits, see e.g. "rr". The problem comes when he shows a projected future path of Mario. Because of a) Turing Completeness (TC) + the Halting problem, and b) the fact that much code actually interacts with other systems which are not able to just rewind (and/or themselves interact with systems that ...). The only plausible scenario in which this is even remotely possible in practice is if the programs adhere to strict rules about side effects, have built-in "project into the future" (or have no side effects so that we can run them to see what the results are _without affecting anything external_.). That is, it's not about fancy IDEs -- it's about programming languages and turning away from Turing Completeness and/or non-abstract/non-formalized effects. FRP/(React+Flux) sort of work for this if you adhere strictly to purity, but then again break down when it comes to things like "what is the focused element" if the user clicks around when you're replaying. I don't want to be a party-pooper, but good luck changing the programming paradigm of everyone to achieve this vision. For it to work everything has to work in this FRPish way, and that's just never going to happen -- for example, networks (for real-world reasons) cannot behave this way, etc. etc. I WISH we could have everything behave this way, but we can't -- billions of e.g. browser installations which have to have backward-compatible DOM implementations and millions (billions?) of installations of C/C++-based operating systems say so. Now, I'm not against Imagining Things How They Could Be, but if there's mathematical proof that "thing X" is not possible one either needs to explain how you are not doing "thing X" (perhaps not using a TC language, or disallowing non-pure state) or shut up. Brett Victor and many "visionaries" like him are just very bad at stating their fundamental assumptions up front (which is perhaps part of the reason we don't get to see the code, it's probably just simple pure FRP-like code) so that we can evaluate the vision against the assumptions. (Light Table just seemed to assume that the assumptions were plausible and see where that got them. Funded but with very little actual technological advancement to show for it.) ... and also don't get me started on the whole "Kill Math" thing. Ugh. (Sorry about the rantish nature of this -- I should probably just write this up properly somewhere so I could properly flesh it out. I just get tired of this "What A Genius!" and "Well, it would take too much time away from inspiration to actually make the thing!" credulous nonsense.)
ryukafalz 9y ago
Honestly, I'd be happy if it were just open sourced with a heavy disclaimer about not being able to support users. If you see a piece of technology and have an idea you want to try, with an open system you can just get the source code and try it. With a closed system, the answer is "first, rewrite it from scratch..."
- convolvatron 9y ago
  its likely that its completely unusable off the machine thats running it and that there the author can't run it a month later (like grad student work) I guess you could argue that devoted interested parties would invest the time to tease out all the dependencies, get it integrated in common packaging systems, and spend some time debugging it. if you had an even slightly more devoted person they could make a production system using the demo as an inspiration. I don't know Bret personally, but he'd probably be likely to engage with that person and give feedback and advice.
  - ryukafalz 9y ago
    >its likely that its completely unusable off the machine thats running it and that there the author can't run it a month later (like grad student work) That's possible, yeah. But I bet there are a lot of real-world lessons they learned in the process of building Realtalk (and previously Hypercard in the World) that wouldn't necessarily be apparent from a demo. For that matter, we don't even really know what the user experience is like - most of the pictures I've seen aren't high-res enough to see what the code looks like. Even if they're open to tours (which it sounds like they might be), I live on the other side of the country. I'm sure talking to Bret personally would be illuminating in that regard, but reading through the code and commit history can be illuminating in similar ways (doubly so if the authors were diligent about documenting things). Heck, even documentation on how to use Realtalk would be nice!

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

paulgerhardt 9y ago

Much of the work at the DynamicLand is in the same vein as Mike Eisenberg's Post-PC/Craft Technology Lab[1] Similar to the MIT Media Lab (Mike is an alum) much of the research focuses on physical computational interfaces beyond the traditional screen/keyboard model - i.e. how can we collaboratively 'compute' things with real physical objects around us. Or put another way, what does computing look like when everything is a computer. Some other projects to come out of there are the Lilypad Arduino, a project similar to DynamicLand called SHALE, and Lockitron. [1] http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~ctg/Previous_Projects.html http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~ctg/Previous_Projects.html

bchjam 9y ago

Alex Warth of HARC has a new Dynamicland-inspired repo called roomdb https://github.com/alexwarth/roomdb https://github.com/alexwarth/roomdb