2018 tweets

1. But is it *programmable*?
2. Is it *learnably* programmable?
3. Is it learnably programmable *together*?

Jan 17, 2018

To semiunsubtweet, this isn't really a dig at NL so much as a clarification that what we're making at DL (and what gets made at DL) is something else entirely.

(It's sort of the difference between the Switch itself and, say, a Smalltalk environment.)

Jan 18, 2018

(I hesitated in posting this because I'm not sure "Smalltalk environment" means anything to anyone anymore. Maybe people just read it as Smalltalk syntax highlighting in Sublime Text.)

Jan 26, 2018

Even the hardest of the hardcore hackers want to sit around the same table and work together in person. trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/808…

only had time to socialize after that. While we came mostly prepared for something that was worthy of entering the compo, the time spent at the party was invaluable for turning a rough draft into something that could really compete for first place. Having all four of us at the same table meant we could collaborate instantly. So, lesson learned: There are rarely substitutes for working together in person! One of the biggest improvements of “party collaborating” was the decision to

Made a little utility to highlight the pages that were created today (while playing "Today" by the Smashing Pumpkins) (12 LOC) @Dynamicland1

(This happened after @mayli made "Purple Rain" and "Kind of Blue".)

@mayli: My little tribute to Prince @Dynamicland1
(with @worrydream)

lots of great songs about triangles

also @dynamicland1 has canola oil (thx @lukexi)

it's derived from the seed of the canola plant

which north american farmers have been growing for about thirty years

also I think we're some sort of futuristic community space but tbh we're mostly about the canola oil

Jan 28, 2018

Lovely interview with @humantransit (via @vectorpark). "That attitude is catastrophic" is my new favorite sentence. ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/01/26/219…

WALKER: That attitude is catastrophic. If you build a tower of any kind where hundreds of people live at, basically, the same place and you expect them all to get into cars at eight in the morning with two or three empty seats, they are not going to be able to go anywhere because there is simply not room at such a high density for everybody to get into cars. This was the reigning fantasy of the 20th century. A very influential architect named Corbusier, in the 1940s, drew a famous image, in which we would all live in giant towers and there would be miraculously uncongested freeways running between them. He simply did not run the numbers on how many cars that is if everybody in that tower has a car. It doesn't work. They don't fit. It doesn't matter whether they're driverless or autonomous. It doesn't matter what kind of car they are.

Jan 30, 2018

@mayli advice from the highest authority

Jan 31, 2018

bundled resources @Dynamicland1
(@mayli, this is getting to be a thing)

Jan 30, 2018

@itshunkydory: So minimalist

Jan 30, 2018

@itshunkydory Dynamicland has become self-aware and is deriving Darude - Sandstorm from first principles

@JobvdZwan: How will you defend against malicious code like that?

You walk up to the person who's doing it and ask them to please stop doing it. If they don't stop, you kick them out.
(When everybody is present in the same space, much of "security" reduces to social negotiation rather than technical barriers.)

Privacy is also just social norms. Things left on public tables are assumed to be public. Things on your own desk are somewhat more private, and things in your notebook or bag are completely private. To work on a private project, go off into a corner. No permission bits required.

"Security by maturity."

@LincolnBergeson: That doesn't address @JobvdZwan's robot question though. Theft & property damage could still happen. Are security measures being considered for this or is it too far off in the future to worry about yet?

It's no different than theft and property damage in a public library. There are strong norms against it, and if somone is causing trouble, we handle it socially, not through software. (Also, casual equipment theft is unlikely because all the hardware is bolted into the ceiling.)

Feb 14, 2018

I may not know much about SEO, but I think this is a win.

Searches related to “prevent the hellscape”
bret victor linkedin
bret victor github
communications design group
dynamicland
bret victor inventing on principle
drawing dynamic visualizations
dynamic land oakland
explorable explanations

@violinar: Do you have suggestions for other books of the same topic?

@violinar From Postman himself --
- Technopoly: amazon.com/dp/0679745408
- the five things: worrydream.com/refs/Postman…
- the seven questions: youtube.com/watch?v=uglSCu…

@violinar About the alphabet and oral/written modes of thoughts specifically, I love "Domestication of the Savage Mind" by Jack Goody and "Orality and Literacy" by Walter Ong.

@violinar About the printing press, the canonical work is "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" by Elizabeth Eisenstein. "Speed of light transmission of images" probably references McLuhan.

Thanks @ChristinaDEI for a video digest of the 1969 (not 1968!) Engelbart demo!! dougengelbart.org/firsts/1969-de…

The 1969 Demo - Interactive
Experience yet another “Mother of All Demos” presented by Doug Engelbart and team at the ASIS Conference, October 1st, 1969. CLICK on any frame or section.
INTRODUCTION
Preface (Silent)
Presentation by Doug Engelbart and staff at SRI for the 32nd Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) | Our Sponsors: ARPA, NASA, RADC-USAF.
Some views of our lab (Silent)
Video camera briefly pans the lab.
Welcoming remarks
This is a final rehearsal for the ASIS conference. For starters pretend I have a fancy slide projector, and a pointer that points on the screen.
Description of presentation setup
Doug shows a rough schematic of the computer, workstation, and projection setup supporting this demo.
Who and what we are
The Augmented Human Intellect Research Center (AHIRC) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) | multiple sponsors | special lab facilities | a long-term goal-oriented program.

I made a browsable version of that video a couple years ago, but it doesn't exactly fit on a webpage. (Turn on sound.)

Jan 7, 2018

@arthur_affect: People are surprised by sudden shifts when they mistake a subgoal for a main goal and don't realize the main goal never "evolved" or "changed" at all

Like a sports fan who can't see uniforms "Wait we used to cheer when the batter got a home run, now we cheer when he strikes out"

I really really like this way of putting it. (I've phrased this in the past as "If you think I've gone off the rails, I was never on your rails to begin with" but this is nicer.)

Feb 16, 2018

@jnd1er: Michael asked what advances have come from HCI. I say it is HCI itself. Every major computer & software company now has an HCI group (sometimes called UX). HCl is ubiquitous: it has improved thousands of systems. You can't see it because it is everywhere-which makes it invisible.

Feb 16, 2018

@michael_nielsen: Interesting observation. There's a 1989 joke of Alan Kay's, roughly: "Companies are finally understanding that interfaces matter, but aren't yet sure whether to order interface by the pound or by the yard." That joke doesn't work nearly so well today, which makes your point.

The joke also doesn't work today on a generation of people who have never ordered anything by the pound nor by the yard, because they've grown up completely disconnected from how real things are made. This too is a legacy of HCI.

Feb 26, 2018

From the preface of a book from 1890 about best practices for running your machine shop. (Keep reading.)

A pleasure has also followed the writing of these letters. It has often come to the author's knowledge, that they were read by people who, as a rule, never read anything. It is not known that this proves merit in the letters, but there is a pleasure in knowing that one has in the smallest way, or in any way, been instrumental in getting anybody into the habit of reading anything.
There is plenty of shop in these letters; good shop and bad shop; in fact, they are shop letters, written for shop men, by a shop man, who has as much interest in the people who go into the shops, as in the marvelous products which come out of the shops.
As if there were not enough of the mechanic in these letters, it seems a pity to miss the chance, in a preface, to express the view that we live in a peculiar land, under a peculiar form of government, surrounded by peculiar social conditions.
in other lands, the well-being of all depends on the wisdom of the few who rule. In our land, the well-being of all depends on the wisdom of the mass, who select their rulers. In other lands, the ignorance of the mass will insure the stability of the existing civic form.
in our land, the ignorance of the mass will insure the total destruction of the existing civic form.
The shop men form a large proportion of our civic mass. They must be more than workmen; they must be citizens. They must have more than skill; they must have education.
Education and wise citizenship cost money. The mechanic of the Republic must be better paid than the mechanic of the Monarchy.
Our mechanics are wiser citizens than are the mechanics of any other land, and they are better paid than in other lands.
The Republic owes it to its mechanics, that it pay the hire of good citizens; and the mechanic owes it to the Republic, that he make himself worthy of a citizen's hire, as well as the workman's hire.

Feb 28, 2018

the most endearing conference proceedings

SECOND INT'L CONFERENCE ON SMALL AND SPECIAL ELECTRICAL MACHINES

Mar 3, 2018

creative differences
creative sums
creative products
creative quotients

Mar 3, 2018

of all possibilities consistent with the facts, believing the most optimistic one. Occam's Raiser

Mar 5, 2018

rereading Egan on the plane, and came to that part where I once tried to extract a quote and ended up transcribing ten pages worrydream.com/oatmeal/egan-1…

Mar 5, 2018

idk

Mar 7, 2018

⌘X two thousand years ago

Treating bamboo was generally more complex than treating wood. To begin with, the bamboo needed to be stripped of its epidermis, and the cane had to be split; the nodules often needed to be removed as well. Ultimately, the smoothed product underwent heat treatment over an open flame to ward off insect or fungal infestation. At least in one respect, however, bamboo tablets were superior to almost all other writing surfaces: using a small knife, specifically made for this purpose, erroneous passages could be removed and corrected, and even entire portions of text could be erased. Then again, longer treatises had a distinct disadvantage: they were comparatively heavy and very unwieldy.

Mar 10, 2018

The universe (which others call Twitter) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of rectangular galleries.

Mar 10, 2018

I went on Twitter because I wished to live deliberately.

Mar 11, 2018

This book represents matrices with photographs of ROMs.

Fig. III. The (32, 6) Biorthogonal Reed-Muller Code
Fig. VII. The Code of Index 6

Mar 13, 2018

@joannekcheung: emerging technology

Mar 13, 2018

@joannekcheung
Some say the world will end in fire.
Some say in snow.
Peruse the dire daily news
to scope the world through burning hues.
But further focal distance brings
a winter slowly turning spring.

Mar 15, 2018

I guess this is the "funny" part that I'm supposed to tweet, but really, the entire book is so illuminating in its historical perspective. amazon.com/dp/1524762938 (highly recommended)

The erosion of basic norms expanded the zone of acceptable political action. Several years before shots were fired at Fort Sumter, partisan violence pervaded Congress. Yale historian Joanne Freeman estimates that there were 125 incidents of violence-including stabbings, canings, and the pulling of pistols—on the floor of the U.S. House and Senate between 1830 and 1860. Before long, Americans would be killing each other in the hundreds of thousands.

@joannekcheung: if the early bird gets the worm, what does the night owl get?

Mar 21, 2018

@joannekcheung
Birds get worms that taste delicious.
Owls get stars to place their wishes.

@joannekcheung: but the stars are there during the day too. it’s just that we can’t see them.

@joannekcheung: wishes aren’t just for nighttime.

@joannekcheung: on a different planet perhaps the stars are always illuminated and wishes can be placed at all hours.

@joannekcheung
Birds get worms that taste delicious.
Owls get stars to place their wishes.
Martians wish, by night and day,
they weren't so cold and far away.

Mar 21, 2018

I got the "are you Bret Victor" walking back from the museum this afternoon. Asked him about himself: "I'm a gardner. I used to be a programmer, but after your talks, I couldn't do it anymore." "Your recent work gives me hope for my two kids."

I really like @windyoona's "Sound of the Dialup" chart:
windytan.com/2012/11/the-so…
so I printed it out and put it on the wall. (Turn on sound.)

Mar 23, 2018

modem dialup is the best party music

Mar 24, 2018

no no, I'm not interested in "project-based learning", I'm interested in "learning-based project-ing"

Mar 25, 2018

I'm working on a "'project-based learning'-based learning"-based project.

Mar 25, 2018

@acwervo @lethalbeef I like @ChrisDeLeon's bit on how real-world games have "rules" (enforced and bent by consenus), but in video games, those become "laws" (of nature, unalterable) digra.org/wp-content/upl… youtube.com/watch?v=5n-apf… A huge motivation for Dynamicland is escaping the fixed laws of digital worlds.

Soccer Rules (Juul):
Playfield dimensions
Ball specifications
What players can do
What players can't do
Win conditions
Not Soccer Rules (Juul):
Air resistance
Grass condition
Human anatomy

Mar 26, 2018

@lukexi is editing pages on the wall and needs to switch between them, so I made him a page selector using yardstick-and-foamcore technology

Mar 26, 2018

earlier, @lukexi filed a bug report by physically handing me a test case and talking it over. I fixed it today and threw it away

Mar 28, 2018

great to see some of the exciting new emoji planned for @unicode 12.0

Unicode Character 'VIRTUE SIGNALLING' (U+035C)

Apr 1, 2018

If you're not at the right place at the right time, you've got to make the right place and make it the right time.

Apr 2, 2018

good news everyone, /dev/video2 is open

/dev/video0 is open
/dev/video1 is open
/dev/video2 is open

Apr 2, 2018

Apr 9, 2018

partial differential equations are a kind of dance notation

sounds of the logistic map

Apr 19, 2018

current music: bob taylor on infinite repeat
youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Msrr…

Q: What is the key to creating a lab that does groundbreaking research and ships products? Can a lab do both, and if so, how?
A: [chuckles] No, a lab cannot “ship products”. A lab can ship technology to a group whose business is to ship products. If the lab thinks it's shipping products, it's not doing research.

Apr 19, 2018

[1] [2] [3] [4]

"bob taylor on infinite repeat" =

taylor series
echo parc
no-stop tty
xerox halto

Apr 20, 2018

realpolitik

Google.com | Adblock - Chrome Web Store | Block ads
(Ad) chrome.google.com/adblock

Apr 20, 2018

wait, who's the father of all demos

Apr 20, 2018

the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference was an immaculate convention

Apr 21, 2018

find someone that looks at you the way milgram looks at zimbardo

When I first presented a brief overview of the Stanford Prison Experiment at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association in 1971, Milgram greeted me joyfully, saying that now I would take some of the ethics heat off his shoulders by doing an even more unethical study!

Apr 22, 2018

i just wanted to play some video games

Welcome to Best Buy #499
3700 MANDELA PKWY
OAKLAND, CA 94608
NINTENDO SWITCH CONSOLE
Memento mori

Apr 24, 2018

when the moon hits your eye
and you're told you will die
memento mori

collidescope

bobby mcferrin is the best party music

Apr 28, 2018

@tophtucker: why dont moons have moons

Apr 28, 2018

@tophtucker
So, astronomers observe, a moon
Hath smaller moons around it strewn;
And these have more, too small to fathom,
And so proceed down to the atoms

Apr 29, 2018

A number used to be a tactile phenomenon. Now it's an image.
I wonder if music-making will go the same way, purely manipulating intangible marks on screens, instruments becoming as obsolete as the abacus.
(via journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117… )

We may conclude this subsection by noting the following. Counters — and not written or spoken symbols — were the medium for the manipulation of numbers in the Greek world. They of course cannot function as a medium for permanent record, but their centrality as a medium for manipulation was such that, in the classical Greek world (as in the Roman world, well into early modern times) their use in the abacus shaped the form of the medium of record itself. This must be stressed: counters were not some aid to the manipulation of number, itself understood primarily in other terms. They were the medium of numerical manipulation par excellence, in exactly the same way in which, for us, Arabic numerals are the numerical medium par excellence. We imagine numbers as an entity seen on the page; the Greeks imagined them as an entity grasped between the thumb and the finger.

Apr 29, 2018

@inthehands: Not as long as humans have voices. (Yes, voice is not something we experience spatially, but there’s nothing more tactile than singing.)

Apr 29, 2018

@inthehands but what if singing is someday seen as handwriting is today -- quaint, messy, not for anything serious, falling into disuse, atrophying... (are we already there?)

getting into sticky-note-based configuration technology
[print however you like]

getting into sticky-note-based configuration technology
[volume control]

the controls for "print however you like" are drawn on tracing paper, so you can still see the code underneath

@nsfmc: please tell me that there's a page @Dynamicland1 that slowly fades in youtube.com/watch?v=gke9ITo0KWk when it's visible

responsive to feature requests (turn on sound)

@MattPLavoie: Pretty sure you're just having fun at this point. Are you supposed to get to have fun when you're changing the world?

@MattPLavoie When you're working on a 50-year time scale, fun is a requirement in order to get anywhere. Otherwise, the enormity of the task will drag you down and eat you. Joy in the moment is the only short-term incentive.

homeodynamics

introspective text
(thx @rmozone for lowerquality.com/gentle )

May 7, 2018

every now and then we learn something

May 7, 2018

every now and then we don't

May 8, 2018

theverge.com/2018/5/8/17332…

@tophtucker: if you seek my monument, just, uhhh---- quick, look, over there!!

May 8, 2018

@tophtucker if you seek my monument, please install Adobe Flash Player and restart your browser

May 8, 2018

May 9, 2018

Dynamicland is a computer designed, from the ground up, around human beings talking to human beings

May 9, 2018

The Human Being system is capable of carrying out sophisticated conversations and it completes the majority of its tasks fully autonomously, without computer involvement. The system has a self-monitoring capability, which allows it to recognize the tasks it cannot complete autonomously (e.g., performing an unusually complex process). In these cases, it creates a computer program, which can complete the task.

May 10, 2018

@michael_nielsen: What, if anything, lies beyond language? Are there modes of thought and communication that are strictly more powerful than language? Can we invent new forms as much more powerful than verbs and nouns (etc) as human language is more powerful than the communications of chimps?

May 11, 2018

@michael_nielsen I used to ask those questions, before I got too concerned about what was being done with all that "powerful" power. I switched to the q of what new forms of communication could make possible understanding, responsibility, and stewardship of global systems.

May 11, 2018

@michael_nielsen The answers to your questions are the same as the answer to "can we split the atom", that is, "obviously yes, but if that's the only question you're asking, you're also asking for some terrible implications".

Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death
We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.

May 12, 2018

@flantz: I know “powerful” has bad connotations but in regards to communication wouldn’t it just mean having more of whatever qualities you want, ie better understanding, dialogue, etc? Having a hard time picturing what power means in this context if it isn’t those things.

May 12, 2018

@flantz I consider propaganda and modern advertising to be powerful forms of communication. And the conversations at Los Alamos were conducted in a powerful mathematical language very much in the spirit of Michael's question.

May 21, 2018

Now resolved on a career of scientific research, Lavoisier first arranged to assure himself of sufficient financial means. He bought a share of the Ferme Générale, the private company that collected taxes for the King. This association was highly profitable to Lavoisier throughout his life, but it was to bring him to the guillotine.

May 21, 2018

@nagle5000: don’t do it bret

May 22, 2018

@nagle5000 why didn't Lavoisier just start a Patreon

rain this color

@acwervo: Hi Dynamicland is the future, I mean, look at how little code there is in this amazing demo!! And it's not even about the code, it's about the system being so robust that you can compose color detection & modifying other pages!!!

harder to capture in a tweet -- this came out of @itshunkydory and me casually taking turns messing with "make it rain" while chatting with Margaret and Cynthia around the lunch table. it's a doodle.

this is what's impossible to convey about @dynamicland1 -- what look like "demos" or "projects" in these tweets are actually just the leftover scratch paper from conversation, discussion, exploration, playing, joking, riffing in a real place in real time with real people

@david4096: Although this isn't yet self-hosting, it suggests the possibility that one could write a parse cards using only cards

@david4096 it is self-hosting. these are the cards that parse the cards.

@curious_reader: But is it self hosted when you need another device to write the code on the cards???

May 27, 2018

@curious_reader all the code in the system is written within the system itself. the code editor is itself implemented on cards.

start a project that you need to work on until age 110

Jun 4, 2018

@sableRaph: Apple just announced a comprehensive set of measures to help users manage the time they spend on their phone. Congrats to @tristanharris and @edelwax for pushing #timeWellSpent into the Zeitgeist

Jun 4, 2018

Congratulations Apple, a 942.8 billion dollar company, for building on the work of @tristanharris and @edelwax, who have dedicated so much of the last few years to scrounging for nonprofit funding.

Jun 5, 2018

To be clear, this has nothing to do with Apple being "bad" or "good". It's a structural problem. There are vast incentives for logging the forest, planting seeds has become an unfundable nightmare, and many people don't realize that trees grow from seeds in the first place.

Jun 7, 2018

dialin' & driftin' @dynamicland1
(Realtalk on Raspberry Pi by @rsnous)
(turn on sound)

Jun 8, 2018

you are reading this tweet adjacent to a dozen completely unrelated tweets

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan provides a good case in point. The author has solved his difficulties by the simple (albeit inelegant) device of dispensing with chronological sequence and his- torical context altogether. Far from appearing to be concerned about preserving proportion and perspective, he impatiently brushes aside all such concerns as obsolete. Developments that have been unfolding over the course of five hundred years, affecting different regions and penetrating to different social strata at different intervals, are randomly intermingled and treated as a single event - most appropriately described, perhaps, as a ‘happening.‘
It is not really accurate to say that McLuhan has taken data out of context, for an adequate context has not yet been supplied. As noted earlier, I think the author has shirked the difficult task of organizing his material coherently. His insistence that coherence is itself outdated strikes me as unconvincing.

Jun 20, 2018

In 1828 George Green (1793-1841) published an Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theory of Electricity and Magnetism. In this seminal work of mathematical physics, Green sought to determine the electric potential within a vacuum bounded by conductors with specified potentials.
Green's essay remained relatively unknown until it was published at the urging of Kelvin between 1850 and 1854. Later Poincaré summarized our knowledge of Green's functions near the turn of the twentieth century. The subsequent evolution of Green's functions can be divided into two parts: before and after the publication in 1946 of Methods of Theoretical Physics by P. M. Morse and H. Feshbach.
By the 1960's many textbooks began to champion the use of Green's functions. For example, in Mackie's 1965 book he sought “to give a general account of how certain mathematical techniques, notably those of Green's functions and of integral transforms, can be used to solve important and commonly occurring boundary value problems in ordinary and partial differential equations.”

Jun 20, 2018

1. Invent.
2. Publish.
3. Die.
4. PROFIT

Jun 22, 2018

re dropped objects for gravity models, pucks for momentum models, etc

One challenge is that current computing systems place a wall between the computational space and physical reality. Regardless of the quality of the programming environment, it's always much easier to program a simulated falling object “inside the computer” than it is to record and analyze a real one “outside the computer”. The design of computers as boxes with an “inside” and “outside” (and a little mail slot called “I/O”) is taken for granted. To the extent that people are encouraged to model “within” the computer, they become estranged from the world that they're supposedly modeling.

My group is building a non-boxed computing system that is grounded in and participant in the physical world, observing and responding, with close commingling of physical and computational processes. If you want the position of a falling object over time, you might just pick up some object and drop it. The time signal resulting from this physical movement is just as “immediately available” as the result of a simulation, and can be viewed and used identically. Observed signals can feed into computations and simulations; simulated signals can feed into real-world actuation. All this is live, continuous, visible, etc.

One goal is to put “experimentation” on equal footing with “simulation”, to encourage “getting the actual models from nature” as you put it. But not in the sense of “setting up an experiment” (which itself creates a contrived artificial space that feels separate from nature) but rather by working in an augmented space which allows for observation and analysis of nature in vivo.
Hopefully this should be a good environment for doing the sorts of “real science” that you have in mind.

We would like a medium for reading and authoring dynamic media, designed around:

people in the world
people working together in a shared space with everything visible
thinking with the body, thinking with the hands
conviviality, horizon of observability
peripheral vision, visual scanning, spatial orientation, sense of scale

processes in the world
physical processes and computational processes working together
experimentation, not just simulation
world-in-the-loop
direct contact with physical world
less mediation, less “designed experience”

seeing, understanding, exploration
organizational structures that make powerful representations possible
seeing system behavior in the form of powerful representations
defining behavior within powerful representations
clear boxes, not black boxes

Jun 26, 2018

jan 5, 2018, a dynamic conversation supported by dynamic modeling in the dynamic medium @qualmist @nagle5000
(has sound)

Jul 7, 2018

@arntzenius: 9. Making realtime cooperation between interactive programs easy. @dynamicland1 does this, among other things. @leastfixedpoint's Syndicate also seems super cool. Both draw on the old idea of tuple-spaces.

Jul 8, 2018

[1] [2] [3]

@arntzenius indeed, very much inspired by Linda's tuple spaces, with two less-old ideas: tuples as complete sentences (inspired by Inform 7 and @alexwarth) and tuples located in real physical space (inspired by handwork, Tufte, reality). Both super-important!

@rsnous another purpose of this dramatic simplification is to enable STEPS-like human-scale computing systems, and the purpose of *that* is to enable Nile Viewer-like representations that let people to see and understand the behavior of the entire system at every level of abstraction

Jul 18, 2018

if you want to do anticomputing, you gonna need a hypercube worrydream.com/refs/Jefferson… worrydream.com/refs/Repenning…

Architecturally speaking, antiobjects and Collaborative Diffusion grew out of some of our multi-agent scientific simulations running on a Connection Machine CM-2. Powered by sixty four thousand CPUs connected through a twelve dimensional hypercube the Connection Machine achieved unprecedented performance of about 2 Giga Flops.
Time Warp offered a simple and elegant implementation based on the notions of antimessages and annihilation. The Time Warp Operating System now runs reliably on the JPL Mark III Hypercube, and is capable of extracting at least an order of magnitude of speedup in at least one

Jul 22, 2018

@michael_nielsen: I love that Aldrin is still amazed by his moon walk. The Onion was exactly correct. The moon walk & LIGO's detection of gravitational waves are, perhaps, the most mind boggling things the human race has ever done.

Jul 21, 2018

@michael_nielsen there's been a few good ones

The notion of representing a sound by a graphic symbol is itself so stupefying a leap of the imagination that what is remarkable is not so much that it happened relatively late in human history, but rather that it ever happened at all.

THE ONION
HOLY SHIT
HUMANS REPRESENT SPEECH WITH PHYSICAL MARKS

Aug 2, 2018

@joannekcheung: you ipsum, you lorem.

Aug 2, 2018

@joannekcheung lorem ipsumbody once told me dolor sit gonna roll me, amet the sharpest tool in the sed

Aug 4, 2018

@Cabbibo: Today at @Dynamicland1 we made some code editors! Sublime Text has got nothing on @carolinehermy Artisanal Masterpiece

Aug 4, 2018

@Cabbibo @carolinehermy glammed-up system components are a lab tradition! twitter.com/worrydream/sta…

Aug 7, 2018

@rsnous: also, even the specific Realtalk syntax _never_ talks about cameras or projectors, just 'pages' and 'illuminations'

Aug 7, 2018

@rsnous and always inches, never pixels. I still get a kick out of defining constants that I've measured directly with a ruler

Aug 8, 2018

The "deploy-or-die" attitude in research is obscenely negligent. If what you're creating can have enormous and unpredictable ramifications, then testing on millions of people is unethical and depraved. If it can't, then you're not doing significant research.

Aug 9, 2018

figure 2.51 has got it all figured out
(1995, geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/ModelingSo… )

Figure 2.51. Modeling Workstation: General structure and external links.
User
Empirical Interface
Data Storage & Processing
Scientific Instruments
Real World Phenomena
Theoretical Interface
Scientific Knowledge: theories, models, tools, facts
Other Scientists and knowledge sources

In seeking criteria for authentic software designs, we examine the ways computers are used by scientists. Scientific computer workstations are generally of two kinds: empirical or theoretical. As an empirical workstation, the computer functions as a universal interface with laboratory instruments of every kind; they collect, process and display complex data from experiments and observations. As a theoretical workstation, the computer is used for complex calculations and simulations to explore the implications of mathematical models. Although empirical and theoretical uses of computers are usually separated in scientific research today, there is ample reason to coordinate them in a single scientific workstation design, since consistency between theory and empirical data is an ultimate objective of science.

Aug 24, 2018

programming conflates naming and hiding
worrydream.com/2016-03-01-abs…

Aug 24, 2018

@haikustranger: Interesting, but don't you also have to blackbox things ("sweep the pile into a procedure") in electronics? e.g. the op-amp: You know how it works, but you don't look at its inner structure while using it as a component.

Aug 24, 2018

@haikustranger Indeed! I think the difference is that programming consists of constantly churning out new blackboxed functions, whereas in electronics, you only occasionally make a black box yourself. So every op-amp is carefully designed, has a detailed spec sheet, application notes, etc.

I think about this suggestion from Scott a lot. I kind of think every CS undergrad should be required to implement a toy Xanadu.

Scott Kim: Viewpoint: Toward a computer for Visual Thinkers
Twenty five years after the invention of text editors, there are still no books or courses on text editor design. The lack is especially striking given that most of the use of personal computers is text editing. Computer science students design compilers to learn principles of programming; why not design text editors to learn principles of user interfaces?

"Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither." -- CS Lewis on assigning CS students to implement Xanadu instead of some compiler or database or whatever

pretty sure my favorite business book is still cometbus #51

@Cabbibo: thought u would enjoy @elikosminsky and I’s hard newest attempt at destroying the space :p

@ilovecomputers: Did you just create the first dynamicland malware?

dynamicland "malware" is really just "annoying the people around you", which is a state of being which I'm pretty sure was not invented at dynamicland

@rsnous: It's still underemphasized that @Dynamicland1 is a complete _programming environment_, not just a front-end, unlike most of what I've seen in earlier research and in VR/AR products

Sep 3, 2018

Growing up within a worldview of "apps" and "dev tools" constrains people to see everything in those terms. It can take tremendous unlearning to even be able to /see/ an "authoring is always on" system for what it is.
squeakland.org/resources/arti…

Sep 3, 2018

"distinguishing between the physically new matter and the new form" (schrödinger 1927)

I must ask leave to develop afresh here some important matters which have previously been expounded by others (Heisenberg, Dirac, Jordan). For I should like to remain intelligible to those even who have not yet made themselves familiar with the use of the new number-systems (matrices, q-numbers) employed by those writers.
The difficulties which are very generally experienced may be compared with the following. If someone, e.g., in a lecture, began by expounding the old action-at-a-distance theory of electricity in Cartesian co-ordinates, and then introduced vector analysis for the first time while passing to Maxwell's theory, the listener would have great difficulty in distinguishing between the physically new matter and the new form.

Sep 11, 2018

Allowed energy levels of the
Sommerfeld model of a metal.
Allowed energy levels for a periodic lattice.
CPU memory map
PPU memory map

Sep 14, 2018

1953, Charlie Townes invents the maser (precursor to the laser), then takes a sabbatical to consider doing something useful instead

Some of the broad outlines of the future were visible, but let me disclaim any great clairvoyance by also pointing out that, a year after the maser was working, I took a sabbatical leave with the plan to examine myself and physics and to decide whether or not it would be wise to change to some other more useful type of research. I could have continued interesting enough work on the maser, but the next most useful steps were by no means clear.
Perhaps by good luck, when I settled in Paris I encountered Arnold Honig and Jean Combrisson, who were working with a paramagnetic impurity in silicon of very striking properties, which I had not previously realized could be achieved. An easy calculation showed that it could produce a maser amplifier, and I found myself again, late in 1955, in the happy state which most researchers know of losing sleep as the result of an exciting idea.

incorrect

my two favorite places to hang out

One of the longest of the notes in FitzGerald's copy of Maxwell's Treatise is an interleaved sheet dated 7 September 1878 in which he first broached the possibility of combining Maxwell's theory with MacCullagh's. It was a step FitzGerald was peculiarly well placed to make; for he was one of the few physicists active in the 1870s who had a solid grasp of both the old and nearly forgotten ideas of MacCullagh and the new and still largely unfamiliar ones of Maxwell.

Oct 11, 2018

Modern Views of Electricity
We Have Never Been Modern

Oct 15, 2018

@nickcammarata: do you know of any definite optimist projects that offer alternative concrete visions on the future of computation than Dynamicland?

Oct 15, 2018

@nickcammarata Dynamicland is more about incubating the future of person-to-person communication and systemic literacy. Since the Dynabook, computation has merely been means to that end. See e.g.
worrydream.com/cdg/ResearchAgenda…
vimeo.com/115154289
worrydream.com/refs/Kay…
worrydream.com/refs/Kay…

Oct 14, 2018

all your piety and wit
won't change a goddamn word of it

Oct 16, 2018

electrons will never go out of style

@edouerd (FWIW, AK tends to implicate TBL more than I think is fair. TBL's WWW was WYSIWYG-editable. Others made "the browser".)

Tim Berners-Lee: Vannevar Bush Symposium talk, 7:20
So, I still have a dream that the web could be less of a television channel, and more of a sea of interactive shared knowledge...
The “World Wide Web” program, the original browser / editor, was in fact an editor, and you could make links as easily as you could follow them. And that was fundamental. There are two things which seem to me to be totally bizarre. One of them is the fact that you can't do that [now], that we've lost that. So in fact the thing is not interactive. I don't know if I can think of any hypertext experiments in research where you haven't been able to make links just as easily as following them. Authorship has always been right up there. And now, for some historical quirk, which I could go into, I have gone into, I won't go into, we have a whole bunch of things out there which are “browsers”.
So that's something I'm a little embarrassed about. And the second thing I'm embarrassed about... When you made the links, and you edited the text on the screen, you didn't see any of these URLs and HTML and all that stuff. The weirdest thing for me, if you can imagine, is to see an advertisement in the “help wanted” of the Boston Globe, saying they want HTML writers, HTML programmers. I mean, give me a break! That's like asking somebody to come along with the skills to write a Microsoft Word file in binary. The whole thing is totally inappropriate.

Jamie Zawinski: resignation and postmortem
When we started [Netscape], we were out to change the world. And we did that. Without us, the change probably would have happened anyway, maybe six months or a year later, and who-knows-what would have played out differently. But we were the ones who actually did it. When you see URLs on grocery bags, on billboards, on the sides of trucks, at the end of movie credits just after the studio logos - that was us, we did that. We put the Internet in the hands of normal people. We kickstarted a new communications medium. We changed the world.

@rsnous: huh, I hadn't thought about "the browser" as a term that already drags in problematic assumptions

@rsnous "web browser" is exactly akin to "hypercard player", which is what killed hypercard dorophone.blogspot.com/2011/07/ducksp…

Vincent Toups: Duckspeak Vs Smalltalk: The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Computers
HyperCard was, by comparison, much closer to the Dynabook ethos [than the iPad). In a sense, the iPad is the failed “HyperCard Player” brought to corporate fruition, able to run applications but completely unsuited for developing them, both in its basic design (which prioritizes pointing and clicking as the mechanism of interaction), in the conceptual design of its software, and in the social and legal organization of its software distribution system.

@ecgade: Question: does HyperTalk "work" because (unlike most languages) it's easier to read than it is to write, and therefore encourages learning by exploration?

@ecgade it works because 1. you mostly don't need it at all, 2. all actions you perform in the hypercard UI generate hypertalk "under the hood" which you can then tweak instead of writing from scratch, 3. when you copy & paste objects from other people's stacks, the code comes with them

Nov 2, 2018

[1] [2] [3]

@rsnous @_chenglou this is how people take notes and chat (for real work) when not confined by a screen

Nov 2, 2018

@rsnous @_chenglou this is a photo of my study space at this very minute

Nov 2, 2018

@notcalledjack slightly less convenient, massively *massively* more effective. I care about effectiveness.

Nov 5, 2018

@joannekcheung: things one learns at the airport newsstand: there’s a magazine called BOAT, another called YACHTS, and yet another called POWER & MOTORYACHT

Nov 5, 2018

@joannekcheung

Nov 21, 2018

@maxkreminski: game studies people call this “ludonarrative dissonance” and were universally traumatized by the 5 or so years we spent debating whether it was real in the late 00s/early 10s

Nov 21, 2018

@maxkreminski Isn't this dissonance characteristic of any domain where humans layer a narrative over a system? e.g. mythological and religious narratives over actual nature, advertising narratives over the actual economic system, political narratives over the actual social system...

Nov 21, 2018

@maxkreminski The scientific process (and, to some extent, historical research done well) are humanity's only serious attempts to escape this vulnerability by painstakingly ensuring that the narrative matches the system in every possible detail.

Nov 23, 2018