I got to go to Boston today. I listened to this episode while going to Boston today.

Ya’ll circled a really fascinating bit of sci-fi for a bit at the start that I found interesting:

• Jimmy brought up Kantian ethics, and testing a things ethical-ness by universalizing it
• A few moments later Ivan brought up grey goo/computational dust, etc. — I think I understood that this was brought up not because computational dust is the goal of Dynamicland itself, but that, in a world where we may have it one day, the … something … I wanna be a bit vague with that part … which Dynamicland has to contribute will inform how that dynamic substrate is used/interacted with.

Assuming my understanding of Ivan’s point is right , I think we get to an interesting, if maybe over wrought, point from sci-fi here:

What are the consequences of universal, ubiquitous computation, as offered by computational dust, etc.?

…which is maybe part of why, to Lu’s point, so many folks thinking about Dynamicland get tripped up by the “open” bits of Dyanmicland (which I’d suggest are sort of proxy for the ethics of the culture it is proposing) — I don’t have a profound or useful insight beyond that. I’m trying to point out that the work at Dynamicland seems to so closely link the ethical system with…for want of a better word…“the product” of Dynamicland that conversations about one sort of have to include, or at least engage with the other.

Also, the sort of cynical anarchist in me wonders if they should only be focusing on the ethics/culture building and let the tech be incidental — whereas right now the tech seems sort of central, and that excites maybe not the folks they’re aiming to connect with

Yes, you understood my point correctly. I do not think it's the goal of Dynamicland. It's also not likely we'll ever get smart dust. But, the closer we get to smart dust — eg: more everyday objects have computers and networking in them — the more we deserve something like Dynamicland, rather than the server-centric, product-centric, e-waste hell that we currently get from smarthome appliances.

Yeah, I could be totally on board with the "maybe they should only focus on the ethics" point. But I think there's a bit of a… ~demos speak louder than words~ element to what they're doing. If they didn't actually build an environment where people (even just researchers, if not the broader public) could "live in the future", their advocacy would be far less compelling.

Also, you called yourself "cynical" just now, and that reminds me of something I wanted to say but didn't have a good place to… um… say it.

I was feeling really cynical while recording that episode, and struggling with that. Not sure where it came from. Maybe… that Dynamicland sometimes feels like both the most radical and most down-to-earth "future of coding" project, and I really ~want~ people here to be enthusiastic about it? (Not sparing on criticism, just… like… more eager to geek out about it?)

The way we all say "Love what they're doing. Can't say that enough. Big fan. … … Here's a 30 minute tirade about this annoying thing they do". Feels like the way the left eats itself. Narcissism of minor differences, and all that.

Is that, maybe, because of how exclusive it feels?

At a really high level they’ve built the coolest club house tree house in the world for “folks like us” and, as far as I understand, we’re almost all universally excluded from it…which is sort of saddening

even if that exclusion is sort of a visionary part of the work it defo ruffles feathers

a lot of this aligns with my feelings towards permacomputing, which I am often very critical of — it posits a future for computation that excludes a huge number of people without really critically engaging with the consequences of that exclusion.

I think dynamicland engages a bit more critically with that exclusionary impulse, but, it can still ruffle feathers to keep folks who are interested in a thing on the outs, regardless of reasoning for why they’re being kept out

All they're doing is flipping the exclusionary inside-out: swapping out they way current tech excludes and isolates in physical colocation (people glued to screens) but at the expense of appearing exclusive from the outside.

I believe they're wrong to take such a hard position against AR. They're essentially in the pure IoT space: animating matter, physical things. But how humans experience the programmability, whether through augmented senses or through animation of the physical environment, it can seem much the same. They rule out a future where AR glasses are as ubiquitous as smartphones, but I think that's short sighted (😁): I can imagine an office where people share an Augmented space in exactly the same way as in Dynamicland.

With Dynamicland, I try appreciate their flag posting as much as I can: at worst an effort to avoid "isn't this just" analogization, at best an attempt to escape the gravitational attraction of current best practice.

Um. What? Please expand

And why the laughter emoji?