Ben Fry

This week‘s issue of Die @zeit.de features a number of travel drawings I have made all across Germany.
A big thank you to the editorial and art department and the great @christophamend.bsky.social for masterminding the collaboration and the interview.
www.christophniemann.com/detail/zeit-...

An accessible thread on the history of promises to make programming more accessible

!!!

On a positive note, just had a visit from Amy Davis (who talked to you about the theater for her “Flickering Treasures” book) and is mom to one of my crew here in Boston. She (and the dad) were in town for a visit & are the kind of people that make me feel the opposite way. Hang in there, Baltimore.

YouTube video by You, Me, Everybody Band You, Me, Everybody - Misdirection - [Official Music Video]

New single dropped! "Misdirection" is the second single from the upcoming album by our band You, Me, Everybody. It's the bluegrass banger.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzqU...

Follow us on Spotify and eventually we'll be able to afford a coffee! open.spotify.com/album/342xor...

“Point to the thing you are sure Trump is not allowed to do, and tell me who you imagine is going to stop him. You will quickly realize that what we’re pinning our hopes on is not the rule of law. What we’re hoping for is a mutiny.”

"Candid Photos of Computer Scientists" Exhibit 1974 - 1980

Check out the rest of the collection here: storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/dca7... including Edsger Dijkstra, Barbara Liskov, Grace Hopper, Joseph Licklider, Bob Taylor, and dozens of others from 1974–1980.

Caption reads “Jim Fry (University of Michigan) speaks to the audience while James Rothnie (Computer Corporation of America), Edgar H. Sibley (University of Maryland), and John Gosden (Equitable Life Assurance Society) look on at the ACM SIGMOD Conference in Washington, D.C. during June 1976.”

Worlds colliding this morning while I was looking something up, and instead found this “Candid Photos of Computer Scientists” collection, and I'm scrolling through, only to see…my Dad!?

Here he is behind the podium at ACM SIGMOD in 1974. Meanwhile, the photographer? None other than Ben Shneiderman.

But also, perfect cover: just like Manchin, whose words try to claim the “center,” but there he is, demonstrably, visually, so far to the right that he's falling off the edge.

Yeah, pseudorandom numbers with no real seed! Those things didn't even have a clock chip, so they preceded the “set the pseudorandom number seed using the current timestamp“ method… Lots of not entirely intentional deterministic “random” behavior to help later speed runners.

And that's today's AI in a nutshell… More simple rules, more rolling dice—just massively scaled up!

Now you can do 10,000x more in the same time, so the result is again indistinguishable from magic, and we trick ourselves into assigning agency and even “intelligence” to the outputs.

Take a few things happening in parallel in a highly specified way, throw in a little randomness (no more complicated than rolling dice) & we start assigning agency to the ghosts in the game.

This happens because 1) our brains love to anthropomorphize, and 2) we don't perceive the rules immediately.

New York Times article quote: “Most experts acknowledge that a takeover by artificial intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next five years, and executives have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation. After all, it was one of the first sectors to deploy A.I. programming in the 1980s, with the four ghosts who chase Pac-Man each responding differently to the player’s real-time movements.”

This NYT quote about “AI” in 80s Pac-Man is comically bad.

But rather than dwelling on that, the way the ghosts work to make it *feel* like they were “thinking” is a really cool example of the exact opposite. It's a series of really simple deterministic rules:

web.archive.org/web/20191107...

Thank you to @monachalabi.bsky.social for this powerful graphic, which starkly pictures the severity of the Israeli government’s policy of mass death through forced starvation.

We've found this really helpful: you drop a dataset into Rowboat & the moment you find an insight, this gives you an image to drop into an email, a slide deck, Slack… 

Too much visualization is single player mode, when the point should be socialization: how do you share/discuss/decide with others?

I knew you'd understand

BSODs look different in the UK

Love to see it… 

(As I write this, I'm fixing HP driver issues on my 86yo father's Windows laptop using VNC over an SSH tunnel that's mediated by a Pi 4 plugged into the Starlink connection at his cabin in Canada… Yay for the Pi, even if pondering life's choices here.)

Fascism For First Time Founders Over the last year or so I’ve seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump t…

Been thinking about this a lot and I'm glad someone else wrote it up.

“The Dictator’s Innovation Trap… The Brain Drain You’re Not Thinking About… The Infrastructure You Take For Granted… The Trust Problem… The Historical Precedent…”

www.techdirt.com/2025/07/17/f...

Seeing them present the work last week brought home just what a massive effort this has been over the last few years, and a real testament to all they've done to develop and foster a wide range of partnerships across Africa, the US, and the world to make it happen.

YouTube video by macfound Meet #100andChange Finalist Sentinel

Pretty excited that our ongoing work with @pardissabeti.bsky.social and Christian Happi is one of just five(!) finalists for MacArthur's 100 & Change program.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSek...

www.macfound.org/press/semifi...

The facade of the GBH building, our local public media station, with its sign that's usually celebrating something new they're sharing, instead reads “Local. Trusted. Defunded.” following the Republicans reckless funding bill that out to destroy American institutions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WGBH_Educational_Foundation

Meanwhile, on I-93 in Boston… 💔 💪

A Borges story about a guy who gets AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything

“avoid confusion over immigration”!?! I cannot stomach how quickly this illegal, un-American nonsense has been normalized.

Incredible thread…

brb, writing my “LLMs Considered Harmful” letter to Communications of the ACM

If a colleague had the reliability rate of an LLM, they would be fired. If ordinary* software did, it would be uninstalled.

LLMs require the chat format, because chat makes us party to the conversation. We insert the meaning ourselves - and hold it to a different standard. It's the mirror effect.

Rowboat Welcome to Rowboat–a lightning fast tool for understanding large datasets. Sign in or create a free account to get started.

Stacked bars & histograms, charts for ranges (especially time), text & set analysis! Tiny, adorable, chart exports!

Try all the features now at rowboat.xyz before those VC-backed competitors have a chance to copy them into their own product.

Rowboat: Nine Months Down the River | Fathom Information Design Lots to share since launching Rowboat: stacks, ranges, bars, and more to come!

In between our other projects, we continue working on Rowboat, our tool for instantly making sense of very large datasets.

Lots of this work has been led by @kayserifserif.place who just wrote up several of the new features: fathom.info/notebook/250...