Hacker News Reader

Comment by why_at | Hacker News Reader

I'm only just now reading about Dynamicland for the first time, so maybe I'm not understanding something obvious. The text description is not very helpful, as far as I can tell from pictures it's a place where you can move around physical objects and papers to do computer programming type stuff?

Under visibility they say:

>To empower people to understand and have full agency over the systems they are involved in, we aim for a computing system that is fully visible and understandable top-to-bottom — as simple, transparent, trustable, and non-magical as possible

But the programming behind the projector-camera system feels like it would be pretty impenetrable to the average person, right? What is so different about AI?

View on HN

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.

That's pretty cool. I figure this is explained in some of the videos but I can't watch them right now.

I'm reading more about the "OS" Realtalk

>Some operating system engineers might not call Realtalk an operating system, because it’s currently bootstrapped on a kernel which is not (yet) in Realtalk.

You definitely couldn't fit the code for an LLM on the wall, so that makes sense. But I still have so many questions.

Are they really intending to have a whole kernel written down? How does this work in practice? If you make a change to Realtalk which breaks it, how do you fix it? Do you need a backup version of it running somewhere? You can't boot a computer from paper (unless you're using punch cards or something) so at some level it must exist in a solely digital format, right?

Yeah he's put out a fair number of videos and the whole idea makes more sense there or if you can manage to visit in person.

I think even if you could squeeze down an LLM and get it to run in realtalk I don't think it fits with the radical simplicity model they're going for. LLMs are fundamentally opaque, we have no idea why they output what they do in the end and can only twiddle the prompt knobs as a user which is the complete opposite direction from a project that refuses to provide the tools to build a version because it's putting the program back into the box instead of fileted out into the physical instantiation.

I wish he'd relent and package it up in a way that could be replicated more simply than reimplementing entirely from scratch.

I'm not sure where to draw the line between Realtalk and the underlying operating system. I'm willing to give it some credit, it's interesting without being written entirely from scratch. IIRC most of the logic that defines how things interact IS written in Realtalk and physcially accessible within the conceptual system instead of only through traditional computing.

I believe it runs on stock Linux, but it's an operating system in the sense that it multiplexes tasks and facilitates IPC. The closest analogy I can think of is something like a lisp machine or Smalltalk, where the line between program and OS is really blurry.

Also, if you haven't heard of folk computer[1] as a viable alternative, I'd highly suggest checking it out! I'm one of the contributors, and it's definitely not dead (unlike all the other dynamic land spin-offs I've seen). The head programmers—Omar and Andreas—both worked at dynamic land for a couple months, so they've been able to carry over the good parts while also open sourcing it. The implementations have definitely diverged, but imho in a good way—folk computer is working on multi threading and is much more realtime-safe (you'll see in the latter dynamic land videos that it pauses every second or so).

[1] https://folk.computer/

I'll have to take a look and scrounge up a decent projector to try. The other Bret project I was actually even more interested in was the robotics lab project when I was on a big robotics kick in the 2010s.

> You definitely couldn't fit the code for an LLM on the wall, so that makes sense. But I still have so many questions.

You probably could fit the code for an LLM on a wall. Usually the code for an LLM is no more than a couple hundred lines.

Of course the weights wouldn't fit on a wall.

If you’re looking for an open source project like Realtalk there is https://folk.computer/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com