Against Usefulness

See something here re mission ops planning.

There’s a tactile element to understanding your assets, supply lines, air/sea/land bridges, time to rendezvous, enemy dispositions, etc that could benefit from a richer visual canvas.

How to take that physical state, encode it so it can be replayed/evolved/disseminated into taskings.

At the moment it’s all spreadsheets, white boards and staff officers.

Thinking cap on - thanks for the post!

I do not get the "against usefulness" portion. The article still discusses the projects she deems "useless" in relation to their future potential usefulness.

> ...two researchers who worked at Dynamicland, Bret Victor’s lab in Oakland.

> Everyone is building the same thing, funded by the same people, using the same words. Where are the independent thinkers?

> [JP] said a name: Folk Computer. In New York.

Who are ... building the same thing as Bret. So where are these independent thinkers?

While I haven't done a lot with the idea (one month of concentrated work a few years ago, before LLMs), my idea is: the stylus needs to become way more digitized. Keyboards and trackpads are fine, but a computer that understands intent based on how we squiggle, that will help us to get out of our confined way of thinking.

I used to have hacker news web pages that I scribbled upon with a stylus.

Web pages should feel more like paper.

But I'm currently not in a position to work on something like this because I have a pay check to earn. The pay checks that come out of university aren't good enough.

This hits home - I wrote you an email!

A recent discussion here[1] also spiked my interest in "physical computing" I'd love to get on board with people working / brainstorming / exploring new possibilities. I'm very inclined for education, I think the potential is tremendous, but could have plenty other use cases

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47747770

How do you plug a keyboard into a sheet of paper?

That's DynamicLab, which has been around for years. Like most 2D programming environments, it runs into a scaling problem. At some point, the diagram becomes too big. This is why complex logic is designed in VHDL rather than with really big schematics.

There was an era of giant books of schematics. It sucked.

relatable. my AR apps (visionOS) are also in prototype/exploration/useless stage despite successful iOS/Android/web, pretty much like whole platform except few usecases like movies (wall-gardeneed). doing literally nothing and looking around in visionOS is one of my favorite features (tastement to good technology, lack of market, and walled garden, which is a shame).

This reads like Dynamicland is no longer a thing. Their website seems to end in 2024. Anyone have any idea what Bret Victor is up to these days?

That intro makes me want to cry, because she's describing what the hope was for augmented reality before Zuck and Tim and every web developer looking for the next step on their career ladder stuck their grubby hands into its chest and squeezed its aorta shut. AR wasn't floating screens. It wasn't hackneyed VR. It was digital bits and bobs integrated into your physical space, onto your physical objects. You know, augmenting them. Like this, but with glasses or a headset instead of a projector. And (particularly at the beginning) not so much hyper-optimized for enterprise productivity, as for doing something small and interesting and maybe a bit useful.

We came so damn close, and it's been ~10 years. Maybe this gets people's imaginations going again. Get us ready to take that, er, magic leap forward.

A fascinating read. Currently, what are the best AR Glasses that could replicate this setup, but just for me ? I am not a developer but just out of interest, I feel like there are interesting things at play here.