Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

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I assume this hasn't been "released" yet, but still thought I'd ask if the source code for the operating system (or "computing environment", in Dynamicland-speak) is available anywhere and also if there yet exists any DIY hardware guides for building your own to play with at my own location (far from the Oakland/Berkeley Dynamicland facility).

I believe the FAQ confirms that this is not possible at the moment:

> Where can I get Realtalk?

>> At present, Realtalk exists in Dynamicland spaces and in the spaces of our collaborators, where we can carefully grow and tend in-person communities of practice. In the short term, additional spaces will be started by people who have contributed significantly to an existing space and have internalized the culture and its values. Long term, we intend to distribute the ideas in the form of kits+games which will guide communities through building their own computing environments that they fully understand and control. Long long term, computing may be built into all infrastructure as electric light is today. This would also require an extensive network of educational support.

There are some similar-ish systems with alpha-level install instructions: https://folk.computer/pilot

Now that we know the term to search for "RealTalkOS" we can see at least one person tried to build an implementation last year https://github.com/deosjr/elephanttalk

"Our goal is to invent a form of computation which local communities of non-specialists can make for themselves. From the ground up, for their own needs, which they fully understand and control."

I'm LiveStreaming building a RealTalkOS implementation now. Come join and let's build together! https://youtube.com/live/02-wJ7Od9Bo?feature=share

>In the short term, additional spaces will be started by people who have contributed significantly to an existing space and have internalized the culture and its values

there's something ominous, weird, and sort of damning about being protective of your "culture and values" in this way and to this extent. If Dynamicland offered a truly novel computing paradigm, it should be one that is accessible by other cultures. If it offers a valuable culture and worthwhile values, those values should be viral on their merits. They should be broadcast, rather than kept closely guarded.

If you have to carefully indoctrinate new users into your culture in order to protect it and keep out the Others who might ruin your culture with wrongthink, maybe what you actually have is a cult.

I think he's afraid, and rightly so, of it getting adopted without being understood but then getting more popular than the original idea and drowning it out. It's the same reason people speak against introducing Douglas Engelbart as the "inventor of the mouse" when he was so much more than that. Look at Scratch. I think it's a pretty objectively a bad way to introduce programming systems to children, especially over something like Logo, but it is incredibly popular. And I'm not referring to the so-called visual aspect of it. I think it's just fundamentally a very uninteresting permutation and medium of teaching.

Yes-ish, I somewhat agree with your critique. I think it's a temporary measure though.

It is very America-centric and that's very sad to me.

I think Bret is a bit hesitant to share the stuff before people understand what it is, to prevent the same problem that happened when Jobs visited PARC and walked away with the idea of "we need to build computers with the desktop metaphor", without understanding at all that it was always meant to be about authoring and sharing, not about the visual metaphors.

Regardless, I hope to see more actual standalone instances/offshoots of dynamicland.

> to prevent the same problem that happened when Jobs visited PARC and walked away with the idea of "we need to build computers with the desktop metaphor", without understanding at all that it was always meant to be about authoring and sharing, not about the visual metaphors

Can you expand on this, or share some links so I can learn about it? I've not heard the story framed like this before. I'm interested to learn "what we missed out on" as a result of "visual metaphors" becoming overemphasised in the public mind.

I think you're missing that this is as much a social technology as a computing technology. Immediate analogy would be stuff like the 'open space' model adopted from anarchist organising into design thinking. Which unfortunately lost its function in the transition. Moving from being a way of generating and consolidating multiple perspectives / ideas / intentions, into a way of generating engagement without influence on a projects direction.

It doesn't seem like the effort here is to keep out any group, but rather to maintain a cohesive structure to the technical and group work aspects of it. Social technologies can be as brittle as they are useful, and abstracting / commodifying them can often make them work in a way that directly undermines their creators intentions.

> there's something [...] about being protective of your "culture and values" in this way and to this extent

Yes, AND it may also be because it's kind of innovation in the open, before it's really ready or that all the critical angles are fixed, and they might not want spoil specifics they would like to make flourish and present to the whole world, and see them ... let's say half-assed, or misunderstood enough that it does not "jell".

In the end, it will be embraced in some way. But it's understandable that they have a specific idea in mind.

See it as a trailer for a movie where post-prod is not yet fully done, perhaps.

Ideas are fragile, etc. There's a point at which you want feedback, but not before you've built enough for people to see the vision. Depending on your audience, you may need to build more or less to get to that point.

Still, they've been working on this for yeeeears.

This is how most hacker spaces and fab-labs and even community gardens I know operate.

Rule 0: "Behave in a way that lets us not need to make additional rules" and things like that.

And I can doubly see it, if you have something ~new, and I could very well see that this is the thing that works if and only if you play along.

Not quite Realtalk, but inspired by it:

http://paperprograms.org

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