Peek Behind Bret Victor's Lab at YC HARC
What a bunch of of vague, hand-wavey nonsense (the article, not necessarily the HARC lab, I couldn&#x27;t make heads or tails of what they actually do). Covers up its lack of clear thinking with an attempt to sound profound and obfuscatory in every sentence, like many academic articles. Also full of weird typos and misspellings (e.g. &quot;mid 1970ties&quot;, &quot;most currently available imaginaries about technologies&quot;).<p>I love Bret Victor&#x27;s talks, in them he shows real engineering work and highly original ideas demonstrated with beautiful working prototypes. So don&#x27;t want to sound like I&#x27;m knocking him. But reading this article makes it sound like some fool is footing the bill for endless navel-gazing and philosophizing. Some kind of strange architecture astronaut convention (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2001&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;dont-let-architecture-astronauts-scare-you&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2001&#x2F;04&#x2F;21&#x2F;dont-let-architect...</a>)<p>It&#x27;s continuing the ongoing lowering of my opinion of Alan Kay too; the more I hear about him the more he seems like a good bullshitter who happened to write a programming language back in the day. &quot;Kay combined them with ideas about pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics by Maria Montessori, Seymour Papert, and Jerome Bruner, and added further zest in form of the sassy media theoretical speculations of Marshall McLuhan.&quot; Wow, world changing stuff; if anyone knew what the hell it meant it&#x27;d probably have a big influence on the course of civilization.<p>&quot;So Kay took all of these ideas, desires, technologies, and opportunities, and recombined them. The results were crucial contributions to a new and emerging sociotechnical imaginary, in many ways representing the computer as a digital medium, which we now have today.&quot; Again, sounds really revolutionary, and wonderfully vauge enough that you could say he predicted pretty much everything that happened in the last 30 years. I say: ideas are cheap, especially vague ones.<p>God bless the real engineers who make things work; photography and digital art were revolutionized with the availablility of programs like photoshop, not pseudo-philosphers bloviating about &quot;representing the computer as a digital medium&quot;.