Bret Victor says he has tried to treat Dynamicland like a biological containment facility. He’s concerned that there’s been so much damage done by half-baked ideas stolen from research labs by entrepreneurs. “The thing about taking a deep idea and making a mass-produced, superficial treatment of it, is that after that point it becomes impossible to see the deep idea,” he says.

One element that encourages community: Dynamicland is the only place you can go to work on Realtalk projects. I can’t work on projects alone at home. There’s no GitHub for Realtalk. My time at Dynamicland feels precious, and that preciousness seems to elevate my creativity. Maybe this is what it felt like to have to schedule a block of time at a university computer before the PC era.

Victor’s dream is to be able to experience an entire scientific paper — or the entire global supply chain — in a computationally-driven room. To explore the data with more richness and depth than would be possible on a single screen. And on the most existential level, his hope is that the research might help to avert human extinction. If we can understand the complexity of our world more broadly, we’ll be in a better long-term position to mitigate risks that may threaten civilization.

What we consider unknown or mysterious continues to shrink, even if the scale of the cosmos means that the shrinkage takes the form of ∞ - x, where ∞ is the vast unknown and x is all of human knowledge.

[...] Victor wants to experience the revolutionary ∞. He seems to be on a spiritual quest, seeking an insight that Alan Kay calls “a kerpow.” An opening into a new dimension. Because deeper than any deep idea, somewhere beyond the land of ideas entirely, there is a rich and boundless terrain that has never been mapped, though we have tried for thousands of years.

Victor talking about Steve Jobs copying GUI from Smalltalk... The original concept of object-oriented programming was entirely graphical — objects on the screen represented objects in the program. That was the deep idea. But in the Macintosh, the GUI didn’t allow for programming the computer at all. Jobs made a shallow clone of Smalltalk’s deep ideas in order to get the first Macintosh onto the market.

Can you explain this day one thing? Fridman asks It’s really a very simple, and I think age-old idea about renewal and rebirth and every day is day one. Every day you are deciding what you’re going to do and you are not trapped by what you were or who you were or any self-consistency. Self-consistency even can be a trap. And so day one thinking is we start fresh every day [...]

Meetings at Amazon and Blue Origin are unusual. When new people come in, like a new executive joins, they’re a little taken aback sometimes because the typical meeting, we’ll start with a six-page narratively structured memo and we do study hall. For 30 minutes, we sit there silently together in the meeting and read. [...] Take notes in the margins. And then we discuss. And the reason, by the way, we do study, you could say, I would like everybody to read these memos in advance, but the problem is people don’t have time to do that. And they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo or maybe not read it at all, and they’re trying to catch up. And they’re also bluffing like they were in college having pretended to do the reading.

[...] But one of the problems is PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It’s kind of a sales tool. And internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. Again, you’re truth seeking. You’re trying to find truth. And the other problem with PowerPoint is it’s easy for the author and hard for the audience. And a memo is the opposite. It’s hard to write a six-page memo. A good six-page memo might take two weeks to write. You have to write it, you have to rewrite it, you have to edit it, you have to talk to people about it. They have to poke holes in it for you. You write it again, it might take two weeks. So the author, it’s really a very difficult job, but for the audience it’s much better.