Both seem to have worked at/with Dynamicland previously, though not mentioned on this site.
Just saw a demo of this last week. The most exciting use case was when multiple tags “programs” composed. For example, one program measures a value, passes that to one that accumulates values, and another that plots.
I think there is a very cool version of this where the primitives are simpler and easier to compose (the composition demo I saw was a bit difficult to pull off). Then, rather than program the purpose of individual tags, you can create programs physically on the table
This is so refreshing! As sibling commenter [0] mentions, this is clearly inspired by Dynamicland, and even uses the "Claim/When" syntax that Dynamicland uses to implement their "Realtalk" operating system.
When Omar's post about Dynamicland [1] hit the front page last month, I was frustrated by how little information was available about the project. It seems that the folks behind Dynamicland were very against sharing anything online [2] due to concerns about "including everybody".
On the one hand, I admire their vision. But on the other hand, it doesn't feel obvious to me that holding back something like Dynamicland would help it ultimately become "available everywhere." Even their answer of "come visit us in person" isn't relevant anymore since their physical space is closed.
I'm very excited about this approach - even if it isn't open source, they've shared far more information about the way the system works. I'm sure this will inspire others and ultimately blossom into something much greater.
Edit: actually, it's open source here: https://git.folk.computer/folk
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39242467
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979412
[2]: https://gist.github.com/shaunlebron/4b9a9a986fca1e7abd0bfcad...
This was also mentioned recently in a good discussion on another post on the author's blog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38979412
Tbh it's really cool to see a practical walkthrough of what applying dynamicland ideas can look like, and I love the fact that there is a bunch of open source coming out of it.
The button is pretty amusing, but The rest of the site does a better job of motivating it.
I've taught a few kids a little bit of programming with things like scratch, but I think this would be infinitely more fun. I could imagine a group of kids who don't think programming is for them having a blast with something like this.
What is this?
Yeah, another universe where you have wizards who know how to fold the paper correctly to make the ambient computational environment do things.
Hard pass.
Folk computing for me is a hardware/software layer stripped off the commercial abstractions that hide the inherent simplicity of the medium.
Is this a paper computer? If so, the first page of the site does a poor job of explaining what it is, and even then going to “make a button” page it’s still not that clear. Where is the about page or some kind of introduction?
It's a bit unfortunate that people can't look past the projections and the dot frames/QR codes. Those are just a means to an end, which is trying to simulate a world where all objects have the ability to compute and can be easily reprogrammed on the fly.
Imagine a future 20 years from now where color e-ink is as cheap and ubiquitous as wood pulp paper, and microchips are so small and cheap they can be embedded in everything. Folk (and DynamicLand which inspired it) seems to be a peek into what living in that world could be like.
Bret plans on publishing all their experiments this Spring - https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/1753116042254340526. I for one cannot wait.
This would be cool with a "swarm" of "cold-tech" displays. Like, a bunch of small e-ink displays. Feels like something like elixir/erlang vm would do great with.
I started on the "Let's make a button" page and got very confused. IIUC the missing part is "you point a camera at stuff and a program on your computer does things in response, including sending output back to the stuff via a projector". Printing things onto bits of paper and folding them up doesn't cause anything much to happen on its own.
This is pretty cool once I figured out what it is (~10 minutes)
Site seems dead.
edit 1h later: loaded now, dont know what im looking at
This is almost the opposite of what I envisioned when reading the title "folk computer", which makes me think of a computing experience that's fundamentally simple, convivial, and transparent to users, something like what's captured by the concept of "permacomputing". While the ideas explored here are no doubt interesting and probably important to consider, they seem like they require an enormous amount of abstraction and complexity to implement, while at the same time remaining somewhat impenetrable to the user. For example, using QR codes guarantees that the semantics of any given symbol are impossible to determine at a glance. Is it really an improvement over the mouse-and-screen paradigm to paste QR codes to your hands (the printed hands in the demo are actually two left hands), and set up a rig that requires camera mounts, projectors, and a large flat surface dedicated to object manipulation with extremely specific, non-intuitive semantics? I can't help but wonder how this would ever generalize to the number of uses or amount of convenience that people were able to wring out of even simple text-based terminals.