What folk can do

I'm a huge fan of Brett Victor's previous work and a lot of it was a huge inspiration. I used to think Dynamicland was extremely cool and followed the updates excited where it would go but that was many many years ago now and honestly Dynamicland is the worst use of a major talent like that.

A mix of the worst of Academia where knowledge is trying to be locked to a single place and network for gatekeeping, a rebuild everything from scratch within that single place meaning all effort put in by anyone there only advances within those walls, locking everything within that system meaning the time and effort is ultimately wasted when the most beautiful thing about computing is 1 person can write something that empowers millions.

If the whole thing had been built with the ideology that the first Dynamicland was built to die as in the knowledge and idea should have had virality built in at its core by providing the tech and instructions for how to recreate it then yeah I'd be fine with the indulgent thing of it being the one phyiscal space.

Dynamicland by building with the ideology that it's building with if this idea ever takes off then it deserves to be a footnote while the system that manages to bring it to the masses deserves the credit.

Is it a product though? So far they've just released all their code as open source (which Dynamicland did not do) and helped people set up their own Folk systems in other cities. I don't think they're selling anything.

Oh that’s what this is? Finally! I’ve been waiting for someone to do this for years (assuming this is an open source thing like the Github implies, the site has been hugged to death).

I live in Baltimore, I don’t know anyone in Oakland and have no occasion to visit there, so there’s no way I’m ever going to see the original Dynamicland. Bret Victor’s insistence that Dynamicland’s ideas can’t leave that space have never made any sense to me. I can’t see something like this as anything other than a positive good.

I would buy one of these if they sold a kit. Although I have the skill-set to assemble an working copy of folk myself without the kit, it's something that I just haven't prioritized doing. And a kit is probably enough for me to get over that hump.

Imagine if the 3D printing movement ideologically refused to sell kits. 3D printing would have remained irrelevant instead of starting a revolution and creating millions of home makers. Same for Arduino and so many other devices.

If the goal of dynamicland & folk is to empower everyone to participate in computing by moving it into the physical world, I'm not sure why lowering the barrier to the necessary hardware is off limits. That's what dynamicland is doing with the UI, but how can anyone interact with the UI if it only exists in Oakland, CA?

Folk is doing the messy work of making dynamicland-style physically interactive computing available on hardware that normal people have access to and in the environment where they currently are.

I'm watching the second video right now. Really interesting thing of comparing that Oculous and Apple Vision are doing vs what folk computer is doing to put the physical world first.

A weakness I see is the frequent printing and communication using glyphs similar to April tags. The origami buttons are clever tho.

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