Shawn Douglas - Nanoscale Instruments for Visualizing Small Proteins & Bret Victor - Dynamicland
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to Bret Victor's segment as a recent, concrete demonstration of Dynamicland's ideas applied to a specific scientific domain.
What it is
A Foresight Institute workshop video with two talks: Shawn Douglas on nanoscale instruments for visualizing small proteins, and Bret Victor on Dynamicland. Victor's part shows biomolecular design built in his Realtalk system with physical objects.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2022 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec StevenOtto · 2023-07 · on “Bret Victor: Update July 2023”
His latest demo of Realtalk, Biomolecular design in Realtalk, showcases the strenghts of Dynamicland. Really impressive stuff, as usual. [this video]
Recommends jimmySixDOF · 2023-01 · on “Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?”
This is the latest thing I know of from him and was recorded at the 2022 Foresight Designing Molecular Machines Workshop talk called "Nanoscale Instruments for Visualizing Small Proteins" & Bret Victor comes in about 14:14 [1] It shows just how far the Dynamicland concept can be pushed into a hyperspecific feature set customized to fit a single domain -- because they can deconstruct the user experience to that level of detail. Extending a Tangible UI out to the actual OS itself has been the thing at Dynamicland from the get go but here we see it finally as physical 3d objects participating with realtime digital feedback in the built environment !! [1] [this video]
Recommends jimmySixDOF · 2023-01 · on “Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?”
Please see his latest demo you might need to update those priors (Bret Victor on stage aprox 14:14) [this video]
Cites maegul · 2022-12 · on “When Paper Beats the Screen”
A bit wishy-washy, but the general point holds. Since the 90s, I’ve been somewhat surprised to see the PC technology fail to really learn from how well humans have leveraged printed information that is embedded in our environment. I figure screens and projectors are simply harder and more expensive than what would be required for the digital to get paper like. But still, it’s disappointing. Incidentally, just watched a recent Bret Victor talk about his latest application of his RealTalk/Dynamicland system: [this video]
Cites tgbugs · 2023-09 · on “Artificial intelligence can revolutionise science”
We are still quite far from being able to implement these kinds of things at scale. For the literature review piece the key problem is that LLMs are exquisitely bad at working with even the simplest kind of scientific evidence: citations [1, 2]. They will get better, but it is not clear that LLMs can deal effectively with the very sparse kind of evidence that appears in the literature. Also, generating hypotheses isn't exactly the rate limiting step, the bigger issue tends to be when you get people with pet projects/hypotheses in positions of power that dictate funding priorities (e.g. the decades long Alzheimer's Aβ disaster). For automation and instrumentation of labs the vision is on poin