Media for Thinking the Unthinkable (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Media for Thinking the Unthinkable (2013)

worrydream.com

99 pointsrfreytag12 comments

Bret Victor is the modern day equivalent of Alan Kay. Hopefully in a decade we will see the fruits of his ideas everywhere in tomorrow's software and machines.

Bret is one of those presenters that makes you feel simultaneously enlightened and incredibly stupid for not seeing things so obviously how they are. I've read (and watched) that Richard Feynman had that same quality, and I agree that Alan Kay shares the same.

Maybe. I find his talks fascinating and energizing (he’s clearly a sharper guy than me), but Dynamicland feels like the ornithopter of ubiquitous computing. It will be cool, clever and instructive - but why mess around with all that paper and dots when AR will do that and more?

I didn't mean to suggest Bret's projects and his output will literally manifest as-is in the future. I don't want paper dots or 80's style dynabooks in my living room. My intention was to say that I hope his ideas are catalysts for the next generation's innovators like Alan Kay's ideas were.

Absolutely. I’m entirely with you on that sentiment .

My main criticism of Victor is that his software demos overshadow the concepts. They're extremely flashy and don't recenter the main thesis.

And the concepts themselves are more like popularizations of the Engelbart-Kay dialectic than an original perspective.

Despite that, I reference his talks fairly often, so I guess this is a case of "Thanks, I hate it."

In fact they have worked together on Dynamicland, where the building is the computer.

I always check into that again whenever Bret Victor comes up. It moves slowly, so I was excited to see this in their timeline:

> 2022: Dynamicland meets the world, in the form of new kinds of libraries, museums, classrooms, science labs, arts venues, and businesses. We will empower these communities to build what they need for themselves, to design their own futures.

https://dynamicland.org/

Been working on bringing his drawing dynamic visualizations* to life! I saw the demo like 6 years ago and have been itching to build it. Finally started on it last year and am pretty excited about the possibilities.

Don't have much to show a.t.m except for an old animation I made a while ago when developing the engine: https://imgur.com/a/ELhwWo5

* https://vimeo.com/66085662

Bret has spurred a following. My little contribution[0], Aurora, Lighttable. I'm afraid that wave has mostly died down (do comment if you think otherwise). Instead after 7 years we're converging on VS Code, a mostly traditional IDE "done right", and super pragmatic, but conventional languages (Typescript for high level, Rust for performance).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnZipJOan54

There is a well-hidden note in the footer that is well worth a read.

http://worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/note.ht...

I've been thinking about this exact same problem. I also think that unthinkable for one person is not necessarily unthinkable for another - because people tend to create their own mental models, however robust or limited, to help them understand things. Sometimes the reason I have a difficult time learning something is simply because I haven't found the right mental model.

Oh, and human language is a subpar medium to transfer thoughts and ideas.

The effects of finding new mental models can be profound. It spurs advances in science but probably also has the potential to reposition our thinking when it comes to more abstract concepts like existence, god, etc. I think we can become an overall wiser species by searching for the mental models that fit us best.

I really did not understand what the DynamicLand is about. I get that vaguely it is a place to think physically and share ideas. But how will it be implemented concretely ? For example lets say i want to learn about aerodynamics or electromagnetism. The only possible way i could think is to do the math and think about the equation mostly in solitude. How would DynamicLand change the learning ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com