Episode 7: Rob Haisfield & Sean Lee (Websim)

Chase Van Etten⁠⁠ &⁠ ⁠Daniel Keller⁠⁠ talk with Rob (@RobertHaisfield) and Sean (@infinitefun_) about their project Websim. 

Websim is an incredibly cool project that invites users to browse and interact with a parallel world wide web, as hallucinated by AI. Even with such a simple UX conceit, (you type whatever you want to see into the url bar and it appears) websim community members have managed to create truly incredible stuff. Projects like websim really effectively demonstrate how AI is revolutionizing the way we produce and consume software and media. 

We cover:

• Hackathon origin story of Websim’s creation 

• Rob’s background as a behavioral product strategist and Sean’s experience moving from the live coding community to Google 

• The Influence of Brett Victor on creative coding 

• Scaling and gamification

• Fostering the WebSim community as a ‘social creativity engine’

• The rising importance of simulation in economics

• Canvas and text as universal interfaces and tools for thought

• Dreams as synthetic training data and the shortcomings of an LLM model of the brain

• The Future of Websim

Artwork: Yves Tanguy, “Imaginary Numbers”, 1954