12 ms·
Bret Victor update
- projectileboy 3y agoWe don’t have enough long-term research these days. I wish Bret Victor well and am looking forward to future innovations from him and his crew.
- apu 3y agoI think it's the worst indictment of our entire industry that Victor doesn't have oodles of funding for life.
- Towaway69 3y agoPerhaps he doesn't want the stress from investors who only care about their ROI?
- SamBam 3y agoGrant funding, I would have thought GP meant.
- coke12 3y agoI think he does? Has he indicated he doesn't have enough funding?
- ripley12 3y agoHe has publicly lamented the lack of funding for long-term research many times, yes.
- picometer 3y agoThe optimist in me hopes that a UBI-like system would enable more people to tackle research, nonprofits, and other long term “social good” type projects.
- StevenOtto 3y agoHis latest demo of Realtalk, Biomolecular design in Realtalk, showcases the strenghts of Dynamicland. Really impressive stuff, as usual. https://youtu.be/_gXiVOmaVSo?t=865 https://youtu.be/_gXiVOmaVSo?t=865
- thom 3y agoWhat do you think will be the keys to any future battle between this, something like Apple Vision Pro, and traditional desktop metaphors? I have to admit, on first viewing every single component of this looks unbearably clunky but presumably it’s going somewhere, and I can’t say I want to live in a future where I have to strap on a headset either.
- HammadB 3y agoI have become convinced that the only mass-marketable form of spatial computing is a neural implant or contact lens.
- layer8 3y agoThe sunglasses form factor would be more mass-marketable than contact lenses, I believe.
- pixelatedindex 3y agoMy only concern is for people like me who already have really poor eyesight (mine is -9 on one and -11 on the other). I am envious of people who can wear sunglasses, and the only option I have is to get contacts and that doesn’t seem very pleasant. Also why I never fully came around to VR/AR because it felt like I’m wearing double goggles, but I acknowledge that there are others who wear glasses and don’t share the same concerns.
- coldtea 3y agoWhat does the poor eyesight have to do with not being able to wear sunglasses? There are prescription sunglasses for shortsightness, astigmatism, etc. So the sunglasses-form VR would just have to cater for that. Apple's headset-form VR already does (offers the option to have prescription lenses in it).
- jakemauer 3y agoQuick link to his Mastodon: https://posts.dynamic.land/@bret https://posts.dynamic.land/@bret
- dontlaugh 3y agoThe image is clickable.
- davidcollantes 3y agoRight now (2023-07-05T13:35:45-0400), and for me, it is not.
- davidcollantes 3y agoI stand corrected. I see the link to his Mastodon instance is! Wow, completely missed it.
- dontlaugh 3y agoIt’s an overly cute trick with poor ergonomics :)
- the-printer 3y ago> I’d appreciate if you don’t ask for my opinions about things. I feel this. Nice looking web page also.
- swyx 3y agolook i'm as much of a bret victor fanboi as the next guy, but that one felt a little like "whoa ok you're too cool for school now huh"
- indigochill 3y agoI vaguely recall a meme somewhere about how ridiculous it is to ask, say, a sports or movie star their opinion on politics or something else that isn't their field just because they're famous. Heck, even within one's field, Bret may have neat ideas about interfaces for programming and attained a sort of celebrity status for some of us, but that doesn't mean he can confidently answer random questions from strangers. He's a researcher, not a guru.
- the-printer 3y agoThat last part stands out to me, him being a researcher, that is. I wonder if there is any detriment to the idea of researchers or other “knowledge workers” who use social media at the risk of exposing new developments or ideas to people who may be uninformed or unqualified in regard to whatever the individual is exposing publicly. Could/does this affect what they share or how they/others perceive their work that is shared?
- gsatic 3y agoSure does. Faraday stopped his EM experiments, not cuz of ignorant ppl, but "great" mathematicians of the day were mocking him for his lack of math skills. Without those experiments, no one would have ever dreamt up electromagnetism. And on the flip side, "qualified" ppl who couldnt grok the math of Maxwell or Heaviside, would dismiss the math as just too complex. This type of stuff happens all the time. Social media amplifies it. But you just have to find good ppl and ignore the herd to make progress. And dont mistake capturing Attention on Social Media or HN for progress.
- smokel 3y agoHaha, this reminds me of the Web 0.1 post on The Daily WTF (2006): https://thedailywtf.com/articles/web_0_0x2e_1 https://thedailywtf.com/articles/web_0_0x2e_1
- silisili 3y agoI love it. Only thing I'd change is it's a little too zoomed out...we don't need to see any background. Other than that, once zooming a hair, I found it extremely quick and easy to read. For whatever reason, moreso than if it were in a standard font. Three full paragraphs with zero scrolling.
- djmips 3y agoBut per the Web 0.1 design style guide. "Though it may not seem to visible in the screenshot, the designer certainly went with the preferred technique of the wooden table / digital camera."
- shanks512 3y agoI have a faint memory of watching a Youtube demo video couple years back of a concept similar to Bret Victor's DynamicLand where you connect lego-block-like things together and they do cool stuff. Does anyone remember what that product is, and what its current status is?
- bostonvaulter2 3y agoI don't know if this is it, but your description reminds me of HyperCubes which was a research project using AR: https://youtu.be/GnVp4hrQ7QU?t=82 https://youtu.be/GnVp4hrQ7QU?t=82
- Barrin92 3y agoGreat to see he's still around. Bret Victor's post on abstraction and his visualization of Strogatz classic paper on networks are two of my favorite pieces posted on the internet. http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/#!/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt http://worrydream.com/#!/ScientificCommunicationAsSequential...
- arc-in-space 3y agoWhen I first saw Dynamicland I assumed it'd quietly evaporate within a month, I'm glad to hear it's still being built.
- andrewgleave 3y agoAnyone interested in Dynamicland may want to check out Paper Programs. It's been about 5 years since I last played with it. It’s great fun and should be much more interactive with 5+ years of browser and hardware development. https://github.com/janpaul123/paperprograms https://github.com/janpaul123/paperprograms
- picometer 3y agoI had this set up on a vertical wall at my previous apartment and it was so much fun. I’m working on getting it set up in my current place, too, and I’d really like to get it projecting downwards so that I don’t have to deal with taping things to the wall. Fyi for those interested: you need a color printer. You need a good projector. You need a good webcam. I already had the printer, got a projector as a hand-me-down, and shelled out the $ for a good webcam. It can be a little finicky if you don’t have the perfect setup. For me, I got it to work in an hour or so, once I figured out a good mounting location for the projector. Then I had to periodically fiddle with the webcam settings as the light in the room changed. I’m considering investing in black fabric to improve the contrast. Also, I suspect much of Dynamicland’s magic is in RealTalk, which is not open source. The Paper Programs repo uses Javascript with a realtalk-esque mini framework. This means that Paper Programs doesn’t quite achieve the goals set out by Dynamicland, ie, that it spills be approachable and imminently learnable to all ages, backgrounds, skill levels. My partner and I are both programmers, and both patient, so we’ve been able to replicate a little bit of Dynamicland’s social magic.
- randito 3y agoI tried setting up Paper Programs in my office, and had similar issues trying to get it to work. Glad that you were able to play with it.
- dluan 3y agoI don't like this. This reduces the scientist or designer to some small cog in the machinery, to the point where they are further alienated from their work. Remove the scientist and replace them with an algorithm doing some poor facsimile of gradient descent for some protein energy metric. Or make it multiplayer where some crowd is doing the depth first search. No individual. The only analogy I can think of is cooking. You can reduce all of the steps into a checklist, which can be optimized, but instinct is still the differentiating factor. Or rather, taste. Maybe this helps designers develop taste better, but imo the interface is not the problem. It's training scientists to have better sense of taste or smell. There's a dimension above all of this that is still yet to be tapped.
- svnt 3y agoI am not in the field but I just felt trapped by the whole thing. To me it appears to be skeuomorphic design to the nth degree. Why would you create an entire system of artifacts in the real to replace something you could do more flexibly with higher resolution and better visualization in CAD? Like if these were real processes you were doing in the lab and they were somehow being captured more accurately or efficiently, I could see that perhaps making sense. But this just seems like extra steps and the novelty is you’re working on a table. It feels claustrophobic somehow.
- ehnto 3y agoIn regards to the specific UI concern around it feeling claustrophobic, I can see that but I feel like there are many use cases where focus via constraints is very useful. Analyzing abstract ideas into a real thing can be powerful at helping humans see the connections and hidden relationships that are sometimes difficult to see in the digital realm. That is essentially the AR value proposition in it's entirety in my opinion. Meeting the human experience half way, so we can use our immense spatial reasoning skills in an environment that supports them.
- mst 3y agoI've seen molecular chemists and biologists (and even for a weird set of 3d shapes mathematicians) experiment with physical stuff before transferring the ideas elsewhere - the tactile aspect and the ability to intuitively rotate a 3d shape while visually perceiving it directly rather than as a translation of something else can be a really helpful tool for thought, so snap together molecule sets seem to be a pretty common posession - perhaps it'll never catch on amongst younger scientists but I can certainly see practitioners who're currently, say, 30-35+ getting a blast out of using it at least sometimes.
- dataf3l 3y agodang, now inexplicably I need his opinion on things...
- 0xpgm 3y agoI got the sinking feeling something might have happened to Bret Victor when I saw the title. Thankfully, its just an update about his project. Maybe it can be slightly edited to reflect that.
- newaccount74 3y agoMe too. "Short update from Bret Victor" would be less worrying :)
- DrScientist 3y agoReminds me of a demo of using MS hololens to tell a scientist where to pipette something. Just put the plates on a liquid handling robot - stop trying to treat the person as a robot. The other aspect - the human -> computer ( as oppose to the computer -> human ) interface is interesting - it sort of reminds me of the first multi-touch demos. ie exploring how best for humans to communicate intent to computers - though again - a bit like the example above around automation - in my view the best UI is no or less UI!
- newaccount74 3y agoI assume most wet labs have robots that do part of the workflow. But they are mostly useful for automating repetitive tasks, and need a lot of setup before they can get to work. For small experiments, when setup is 90% of doing the job, then you just don't win much by letting a robot do the remaining 10%.
- shadowfox 3y agoFrom what I can tell, at least for academic wet labs, robots seem fairly unavailable/unaffordable.
- newaccount74 3y agoThe university lab I interned in had a 96 well pipetting robot that was shared between a few research groups. I never used it. I think it was mostly useful if you wanted to do an experiment many times with varying parameters. But for most of the stuff we did, the steps were just not repetitive enough that programming a robot would make sense. Also, there are usually a lot of steps between the pipetting that the pipetting robot couldn't do like loading stuff in a centrifuge, checking DNA concentration, putting it in the PCR machine, etc.
- DrScientist 3y agoNot your typical liquid handlers sure - but advances in robotics like Robocat type things should mean you could build a much more general robot that could operate much more like a human in a chain of tasks.
- matricaria 3y agoA quick introduction of what this is about would be great!
- karaterobot 3y agoBret Victor is a programmer and programming communicator (because he makes really good videos and articles) who has, for a number of years, been working on a project involving programming using physical objects and image recognition. It's called DynamicLand. The latest demo video is linked throughout this thread. This appears to be a fairly standard progress update, but it being a photograph of paper on a table is very much in keeping with the idea of DynamicLand, which I guess is why it's been posted.
- bagels 3y agoI guess it's this? https://dynamicland.org/ https://dynamicland.org/ Some kind of paper computing collaborative art project?
- deosjr 3y agoGlad to hear from Dynamicland; the last video got me so excited I decided to try and build a demo for tinkering with at home: https://github.com/deosjr/elephanttalk https://github.com/deosjr/elephanttalk Only dependency is on openCV through GoCV, otherwise pure Go. Supports a webcam/beamer setup. Uses Lisp for scripting instead of Lua (see https://github.com/deosjr/elephanttalk/blob/main/cmd/elephanttalk/test.lisp https://github.com/deosjr/elephanttalk/blob/main/cmd/elephan...). It's a lot slower/less mature than paperprograms, but it does attempt to implement the wish/claim/when model using a homebrew datalog implementation :)
- unconed 3y agoI am glad he's still doing it but I am not very optimistic that a tangible computer built for children and laymen will lead anywhere good. Even getting professional programmers to reason correctly about their program is hard. And getting them to not build "intuitive" tangles that devolve into complete spaghetti is even harder. Everything I know tells me that the software we consider good and intuitive actually requires an enormous amount of unintuitive design and engineering to pull off. Not appreciating this, and not knowing what you don't know, is a plague in modern application development, the kind which makes people boot up Windows 3.1/NT and remark how utterly instant everything is.
- squokko 3y agoI wish more of this Dynamicland stuff was made available. I'd be happy to set up a projector and camera on my ceiling if my kids could play with some of this stuff.
- alephaleph 3y agoIf you just want the projector and the camera stuff there's https://paperprograms.org/ https://paperprograms.org/
- jononomo 3y agoIs this someone we are supposed to know about?
- ulkesh 3y agoIf you haven't yet seen this video, please do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4 (Bret Victor The Future of Programming) This won't tell you who he is, exactly, but it does give insight into how he thinks. And it's a pretty great talk, in my opinion.
- jononomo 3y agoI'm afraid I don't have time to watch some video -- please provide a 3-sentence synopsis here.
- retromario 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Victor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Victor
- ulkesh 3y agoThanks for posting this. I was not inclined to respond after already providing information that he could have viewed when time afforded him. Here's hoping he has time to read a Wikipedia article instead of having people do the work for him.
- wes-k 3y agoMuch love for Bret Victor! I've been working on a project inspired by http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddendum/ http://worrydream.com/DrawingDynamicVisualizationsTalkAddend... which was released 10 years ago!
- EricRiese 3y agoTranscribed for accessibility. (Google Lens did a really good job but I cleaned up what I noticed.) July 4, 2023 Hi Dynamicland is still going, just quietly. We closed the Oakland space for covid, but Realtalk development and collaborations have continued basically as originally planned, if more slowly due to our small size. I'm hoping to spend the summer working bionano, and get back to preparing new on the Dynamicland website in the fall. It might be ready by the end of 2023? It'll have everything. I'll try posting at @bret@dynamic.land (currently Mastodon until we have time to do our own thing in Realtalk). Id appreciate if you don't ask for my Opinions about things. Thanks, Bret
- ontouchstart 3y agoThis is a copy of that element, you don't need Google Lens. :-) <img width="1056" height="792" src="July2023.jpg" alt="Hi, Dynamicland is still going, just quietly. We closed the Oakland space for covid, but Realtalk development and collaborations have continued -- basically as originally planned, if more slowly due to our small size. I'm hoping to spend the summer working on bionano, and get back to the new Dynamicland website in the fall. It might be ready by the end of 2023? It'll have everything. I'll try posting at @bret@dynamic.land (currently Mastodon until we have time to do our own thing in Realtalk). (I'd appreciate if you don't ask for my opinions about things.) Thanks, -Bret">
- OzzyB 3y agoSemantic Web FTW xD
- m3kw9 3y agoI still don’t get what this is about
- brendanyounger 3y agoCan we all take a moment and appreciate that Bret Victor's natural handwriting is good enough to make a typeface from?
- addgsfgs 3y agoLet's remember that Bret Victor is famous for presentations, a bit like Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown). So it shouldn't come as a surprise that he has a pleasant voice and handwriting, and a charismatic way of expressing himself. I'm not particularly a Bret Victor cynic, but let's be clear what he is celebrated for: it is presentation.