"Stop drawing dead fish" by Bret has stuck with me for a decade – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfytHvgHybA

Highly recommend one of the most memorable talks I've ever seen...

Inventing on Principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII

That’s because you’re conflating “understanding” with “comprehension”. You can understand every component in a chain and its function, how it works, where its fragilities lay or capabilities are absent, without reviewing the source code for everything you install. To comprehend, however, you must be intimately familiar with the underlying source code, how it compiles, how it speaks to the hardware, etc.

I believe this is the crux of what the author is getting at: LLMs are, by their very nature, a black box that cannot ever be understood. You will never understand how an LLM reached its output, because their innate design prohibits that possibility from ever manifesting. These are token prediction machines whose underlying logic would take mathematicians decades to reverse engineer even a single query, by design.

I believe that’s what the author was getting at. As we can never understand LLMs in how they reached their output, we cannot rely on them as trustworthy agents of compute or knowledge. Just like we would not trust a human who gives a correct answer much of the time but can never explain how they knew that answer or how they reached that conclusion, so should we not trust LLMs in that same capacity.

There's a fundamental difference between systems that are theoretically comprehensible but practically large (Linux) versus systems whose internal reasoning is inherently opaque by design (modern neural networks).

You're right, and when the behaviour of large codebases violates expectations, the intertwined webs of code are problems. Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research studied this, and famously Kay proposed "t-shirt sized algorithms", where short rules can be used to make even fancy desktop word processing and presentation software. There are also projects like From NAND to Tetris that show understanding a full stack is achievable. Could this go broader, and deeper? Of course, and this is what Bret Victor is getting at. Not just for when code goes wrong, but to make it more modifiable and creative in the first place (See Maggie Appleton's essay/talk "Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers"). Projects like SerenityOS show how powerful "small" software can be. For instance, its spin-off project, the Ladybug browser has vastly fewer lines of code compared to Chromium, and yet it seems that the Ladybug team is able to implement one specification after another. Last I saw, they were close to meeting the minimum feature set Apple requires for shipping as a browser on iOS.

That's similar to the issue with the whole NFT craze where you'd "take items from one game to another", it requires everything to work with everything.

For Dynamicland I get the issue though putting the whole thing through an LLM to make pointy and sharp both trigger the same effects on another card would just hide the interaction entirely. It could or couldn't work for reasons completely opaque to both designer and user.

What do you mean by “scale”? It’s designed to be decentralized, and promote agency of small, co-located groups of people

The typical “scale” mindset is almost the opposite of that — the people doing the scaling are the ones with agency, and the rest get served slop they didn’t choose!

If the system is an unreliable demo, then that can promote agency. In the same way that you could fix your car 40 years ago, but you can’t now, because of scaled corporate processes.

This is true, but modern laser projectors are very, very bright. I use one as my main computer display with no problems with the blinds open, and the sun shining in.

Occlusion is definitely a problem.

Projectors have been strong enough to be visible in decently lit rooms for ages. The reason you want the room extremely dark for most projector setups is for contrast, because the darkest thing you can make on a projected image is the ambient surface illumination (and the brightest is that surface under full power from your projector [0]). If you accept that compromise you don't need a super dark room, the recommendation for tight light control is mostly for media viewing where you want reasonable black levels.

Do still need to keep hands out of the light to see everything but that can also be part of the interaction too. If we ever get ubiquitous AR glasses or holograms I'm sure Bret will integrate them into DL.

[0] Which leads to a bit of a catch 22 you want a surface that looks dark but prefectly reflects all the colors of your projector so you need a white screen which means you ideally want zero other light other than the projector to make the projector act the most like a screen.

>you need to keep your heads, hands, and body out of the way of it.

I've seen systems like this that use multiple projectors from different angles, calibrated for the space and the angle. They're very effective at preventing occlusion, and it takes fewer than you'd think (also see Valve's Lighthouse tech for motion tracking).

Unfortunately, doing that is expensive, big, and requires recalibrating whenever it's moved.

The light level isn't an issue in practice: when I visited the actual installation during the day, the building was brightly lit with natural light and the projections were easily visible, to the point that I didn't think about it at the time.

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.