Comment by Animats
3 days ago
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?
3 days ago
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?
Reminds me of Microsoft's "Surface/Table computing"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr1O917o4jI
> How do you scale this thing?
You release a tablet and call it Dynamicland? I think that's what Microsoft did, but don't quote me on that.
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 can’t now, because of scaled corporate processes.
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!
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.
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...
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.
> 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.