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_rpf commented on What is Realtalk’s relationship to AI? (2024)   dynamicland.org/2024/FAQ/... · Posted by u/prathyvsh
rtkwe · 2 months ago
Dynamicland is bootstrapped in a sense, [0] the same way you write the first compiler/interpreter for your code in another language then later write it in it's own language. The code running the camera and projector systems is also running from physically printed programs in one of the videos you can see a wall that's the core 'OS' so to speak of Dynamicland.

I think the vision is neat but hampered by the projector tech and the cost of setting up a version of your own, since it's so physically tied and Bret is (imo stubbornly) dedicated to the concept there's not a community building on this outside the local area that can make it to DL in person. It'd be neat to have a version for VR for example and maybe some day AR becomes ubiquitous enough to make it work anywhere.

[0] Annoyingly it's not open sourced so you can't really build your own version easily or examine it. There have been a few attempts at making similar systems but they haven't lasted as long or been as successful as Bret's Dynamicland.

_rpf · 2 months ago
If you’re looking for an open source project like Realtalk there is https://folk.computer/
_rpf commented on Matt Trout has died   shadowcat.co.uk/2025/07/0... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
_rpf · 2 months ago
Super sad to see this. I worked with Matt around 2004.

Super smart kid, very nice to work with. I ended up supporting one of the systems he built (in Perl). I used his Cataylst Perl framework for some projects after that because of him.

_rpf commented on Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive   tansanrao.com/blog/2025/0... · Posted by u/tansanrao
wpm · 5 months ago
Jobs initially did not want to come back to Apple. Apple bought NeXTSTEP because between it and BeOS, Jean-Louis Gassee overplayed his hand and was asking way too much money for the acquisition. Apple then defaulted to NeXT. Jobs thought Apple was hopeless just like everyone else did at the time and didn't want to take over a doomed company to steer it into the abyss, and it's not like NeXT was doing great at the time.

>There wouldn't have been any downsides for them

Really? NO downsides???

- throwing away a decade and a half of work and engineering experience (Avie Tevanian helped write Mach, this is like having Linus being your chief of software development and saying "just switch to Hurd!")

- uncertain licensing (Apple still ships ancient bash 3.2 because of GPL)

- increased development time to a shipping, modern OS (it already took them 5 years to ship 10.0, and it was rough)

That's just off the top of my head. I believe you think there wouldn't have been any downsides because you didn't stop to think of any, or are ideaologically disposed to present the Linux kernel in 1996 as being better or safer than XNU.

_rpf · 5 months ago
> Jean-Louis Gassee overplayed his hand

Well, there’s a parallel universe! Beige boxes running BeOS late-90s-cool maybe, but would we still have had the same upending results for mobile phones, industrial design, world integration, streaming media services…

_rpf commented on A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design (2011)   worrydream.com/ABriefRant... · Posted by u/yarapavan
bbor · a year ago
This is incredible work, thanks for sharing. That said, does anyone know what kind of technology they’re gesturing to? Maybe I’m really stuck in the present, but short of tangible holograms I’m not sure how we’d make tactile computing devices.

The keyboard is tactile, and I’ve long dreamed of augmenting Alexa by covering my house in purpose-specific buttons, but that seems like a short road. Even the most advanced HCI device I’ve ever seen proposed by a consumer company—Meta’s Orion wristbands that read hand movements by measuring the electrical signals in your wrist—aren’t tangible in the slightest.

What am I missing? Can any fellow futurists point me in the right direction? I don’t need “doable today” or even “the technology is worked out”, but ideally I’m looking for something more doable than tangible holograms. See https://xkcd.com/678/

EDIT; the VR suits from the Three Body Problem books come to mind, using tiny actuators and temperature controls (thermal actuators?) to simulate touch. I could see that in a glove for sure, and that’s probably the most futuristic tactility gets at this point, but I doubt it’ll ever see fully-body usage, both for technical feasibility and user convenience reasons. There’s a reason the TV show replaced them with brain-modulating headsets… I guess that’s really the end dream.

What is a tangible hologram (or any interface, really) other than an illusion, at the end of the day?

_rpf · a year ago
Bret Victors current project is Dynamicland, a real space he’s been building to explore computing within the physical world, with humans at its center. The system he invented is known as Realtalk, and is integrated into the building, where cameras and projectors engage with the humans within it.

https://dynamicland.org/

u/_rpf

KarmaCake day17March 24, 2020View Original