Bret Victor - Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

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Recommends magicink81 · 2020-12 · on “Learnable Programming (2012)”

You make a great point about notations becoming more abstract for more advanced use cases, indeed this may be a "natural" process. However I'd like to add nuance with the observation that Bret may not be suggesting that we reverse the trend from abstract notation back to concrete visualizations. Actually I think he is calling for a rich variety of visual/concrete notations and symbolic/abstract notations that work in concert together to express our dynamic concepts, and extending those with the use of the dynamism of the computing medium to add interactive aspects to the notations (ala "Magic Ink"). His talk "Media for thinking the unthinkable" goes into detail on this, especially from minut

Recommends vignesh_warar · 2021-08 · on “A visual introduction to Gaussian Belief Propagation”

What a great article - and the way it's presented is insanely great. It reminds me of a talk given by Bret Victor [this video] (Media for Thinking the Unthinkable)

Recommends yesenadam · 2023-01 · on “Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?”

For the people asking who is Bret Victor: When "What are your favourite tech talks of all time?" is asked on HN, he gets more mentions than anyone else, usually. Some of his talks: Inventing on Principle [LINK] The Future of Programming [LINK] The Humane Representation of Thought [LINK] Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [this video] Seeing Spaces [LINK] Drawing Dynamic Visualizations [LINK] [LINK]

Recommends boomlinde · 2023-05 · on “Ask HN: How do you approach a problem you are not sure has a solution?”

I look for different ways of representing the problem domain or the desired outcome. This will improve your vocabulary/toolbox for reasoning about and subdividing them into more approachable units. For some inspiration, I recommend watching this talk by Bret Victor [this video] (Media for Thinking the Unthinkable)

Cites kragen · 2015-11 · on “TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence”

This is really significant. At this moment in history, the growth of computer power has made a bunch of important signal-processing and statistical tasks just feasible, so we are seeing things like self-driving cars, superhuman image recognition, and so on. But it's been very difficult to take advantage of the available computational power, because it's in the form of GPUs and clusters. TensorFlow is a library designed to make it easy to do exactly these things, and to scale them with your available computing power, along with libraries of the latest tricks in neural networks, machine learning (which is pretty close to "statistics"). As a bonus, it has built-in automatic differentiation so t

Cites mkl · 2015-11 · on “The Space Doctor’s Big Idea”

In principle, yes, but in practice, no. Tools let us think previously unthinkable thoughts. See Bret Victor's Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [1], where he quotes al-Khwarizmi from the ninth century: What is the square which when taken with ten of its roots will give a sum of thirty nine? Now the roots in the problem before us are ten. Therefore take five, which multiplied by itself gives twenty five, and amount you add to thirty nine to give sixty four. Having taken the square root of this which is eight, subtract from this half the roots, five leaving three. The number three represents one root of this square, which itself, of course, is nine. Nine therefore gives the square. He's solvi

Cites mitchtbaum · 2018-10 · on “Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?”

on one level, yes on another, they're down right scary and overwhelming, or at least dumbfounding and perplexing ..thinking specifically about The Humane Representation of Thought [LINK] I had to stop it half way through.. :-/ see also Seeing Spaces [LINK] and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable [this video]

Cites morphle · 2023-01 · on “Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?”

I cool a wafer scale with a liquid that boils at 43 C and immersing the wafer in this liquid. The bubbles (cavitation) of the boiling liquid should not damage the surface layers of the wafer, of course. This boiling liquid is further cooled by water and a sonic heat pump moving the heat into a water tank where the stored heat is used for showers or cooking [1]. Given 45 trillion transistors (45x10e12) times 3 femtojoule (3x10e-15) to switch each transistor at 1 Ghz (10e9) you get 1.000.000 joules/sec = 1 megawatt. These are ball-park numbers, back of the envelope calculations. In reality I make full physics simulations and electrical SPICE simulations of the entire wafer on a supercomputer a