— Creative Computing, December 1981One element that encourages community: Dynamicland is the only place you can go to work on Realtalk projects. I can’t work on projects alone at home. There’s no GitHub for Realtalk. My time at Dynamicland feels precious, and that preciousness seems to elevate my creativity. Maybe this is what it felt like to have to schedule a block of time at a university computer before the PC era.Is Realtalk the future? No. In the larger arc of the research, it’s just a single iteration. It’s a suggestion: Maybe by going back to the drawing board, and redesigning things further down the stack, we can escape the Dark Age of the command line, and computational literacy itself can become more accessible and communal.Victor’s dream is to be able to experience an entire scientific paper — or the entire global supply chain — in a computationally-driven room. To explore the data with more richness and depth than would be possible on a single screen. And on the most existential level, his hope is that the research might help to avert human extinction.
Great research on making the medium inviting, learnable, with community and humane values. Less focus so far on scaling and interacting with outside data, scaling sensing and uncertainty, incentive systems, conflict between people in the space (maybe their model of in-person humans has the right essence, but still), etc.