Ben Fry @benfry.com · 6h“Post hoc ergo fucking propter hoc.” letterror.com/ailetterror.comOn generative AI at LettError.com 220
Reposted by Ben Frymattie lubchansky @mattielubchansky.com · 29/09/2026awoke this morning with a Vision 4988781628
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 26/09/2026Loved this story from a woman talking about having a functional relationship with her husband, and how they're supporting each other and their kid. 030
Reposted by Ben Fryryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 26/09/2026great piece. man social media is a cancer themomoftheyear.substack.com/p/im-the-mom...themomoftheyear.substack.comI’m the Mom in That Viral Giants Clip. Let Me Tell You About My Husband.You saw me carrying our baby and food. There was more happening in our family that night. 12352801352
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 24/09/2026To celebrate the launch, we spent the afternoon on projects around the studio… 100
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 18/09/2026“Microsoft recorded 83–93% drops in click-through for some news plaintiffs & 51–94% for others. Suddenly, it becomes easier to see how declining news revenue could rob chatbots of the abundant streams of reliable information that makes them such groundbreaking tools.” arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...arstechnica.comMicrosoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”Microsoft, OpenAI emails reveal fear of AI “doom loop” killing news orgs. 010
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 17/09/2026We have a paper in Nature today! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Several years in the making, Delphy (www.delphy.bio) is one of the tools for outbreak response that we've been building over the last several years with Pardis Sabeti over at the Broad Institute. 281
Reposted by Ben FryDon Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 13/09/2026A recurrent theme in this excellent story about China’s progress is that people there regard Trump as essential to their success, including his ability to drive scientific talent from the US www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... 361742737
Reposted by Ben FryBen Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 12/09/2026The right way to pace the frontier is to commit to a robust, open-source AI ecosystem, thereby diluting the power of these badly behaving frontier labs. 5599
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 12/09/2026News you can use: “Noctuary is to night as diary is to day.” www.wordnik.com/words/noctuary (Or maybe it just seems more interesting after several hours of not being able to sleep) 010
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 11/09/2026There's a 10% chance that Rowboat will kill us all before the end of the decade. Until then, I hope you'll find it's drastically faster, more accurate, less expensive, and more fun than using an LLM to play with large datasets. Our latest: buttondown.com/rowboat/arch... Give it a try: rowboat.net 0134
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 11/09/2026As someone else said: “wake me up when an ‘agent escapes containment’ and starts paying off medical debt.” Until then, it's all human error. 061
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 10/09/2026Neat idea: instead of relying on attempts to perfect systems that will never be perfect, focus on warning when they're about to break down. Used here for autonomous vehicles, but a broadly applicable approach to making complex systems more tractable. news.mit.edu/2026/system-...news.mit.eduSystem helps humans predict when self-driving cars will make mistakesThe CW-Net technique explains the behavior of an autonomous vehicle, using concepts a human can easily understand. Researchers found these explanations helped drivers predict how a vehicle would behav... 171
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 09/09/2026The new Duo rumored to be announced by Apple today is looking sweeeet 051
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 06/09/2026They're just trolling me for not donating last year, right? Of all the institutions I would not have expected to lazily jump on this destructive LLM bandwagon… 110
Reposted by Ben FryPaul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 13/01/2026From the folks behind rowboat.net: "We want to make thoughtful products, where it’s clear that someone has spent time thinking about the hard parts of a task and has invested the time and effort into making that a smooth process." 011
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 04/09/2026“After 2029 they increasingly turned their attention to much more difficult problems, like making an AI companion who could convincingly fake empathy and concern.” www.math.brown.edu/reschwar/Sto...math.brown.edu 010
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 03/09/2026We *just* finished migrating off of Harvest after its acquisition by Bending Spoons. And now it's time to move off 1Password… www.theverge.com/tech/988536/...theverge.com1Password wades into a right-wing mess after funding a Linux projectThe controversy surrounds David Heinemeier Hansson, who has posted strident anti-vax and anti-immigrant views. 240
Reposted by Ben FryFathom Information Design @fathom.info · 02/09/2026This summer, we welcomed Rekha as the latest member of our team! Rekha is a developer and designer with a background in theoretical linguistics and interactive journalism. 141
Reposted by Ben FryDavid_j_roth @davidjroth.bsky.social · 02/09/2026I love to live in the neighborhood of Autechre Heights. 2747161
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 31/08/2026Returning from vacation and happy to see that the squirrels were continuing to improve Rowboat while I was out. “Inline representations” break up cells by category & color, making it easy to scan down a column and see what's similar & different. Now even easier w/ multi-column selection: 030
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 21/08/2026Difficult to read this story of how the insane cuts to science funding affect the best people, and harm some of the best work being done: www.statnews.com/2026/04/07/b... Archive link: archive.is/zsAF3statnews.comA star scientist showed that better genetics lessons could reduce racism. It was the death knell for his careerBrian Donovan had persuaded high school teachers and education researchers that prejudice might be ended by changing how genetics is taught. 130
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 20/08/2026Felt obligated to pick this up just as a thumbs up to the author for its title, but I'm half an hour in and we already have this banger from Paulina Borsook: “As many political schools of thought do, these techno-libertarians make a philosophy out of a personality defect.” 0122
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 19/08/2026Thanks! and as it turns out, the piece I was preparing for the show was the original for the Nature cover: 010
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 19/08/2026Throwback from 2001… Had to revive an old project for an upcoming show, and in the process, ran across this old poster from around the same time. 231
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 17/08/2026Banderas is every bit as interesting a character as one would hope, and somehow Helen is as good an interviewer as she is a writer. Well worth reading: 100
Reposted by Ben FryWonder of Science @wonderofscience.bsky.social · 14/08/2026An amazing solar display over the Swiss Alps, consisting of a 22° halo with sun dogs, a parhelic circle, along with a complex network of other rare phenomena, caused by sunlight interacting with ice crystals in the atmosphere. 📽: Yesthatsam | CC BY-SA 4.0 010615
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 07/08/2026That we get $1.54 in economic activity from *giving away* $1 to people who are hungry might sound too good to be true (even if it makes sense from an economics standpoint), so I tracked down the study: www.ers.usda.gov/publications...ers.usda.govThe Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Economy: New Estimates of the SNAP Multiplier | Economic Research Service 130
Reposted by Ben FryMiranda Yaver @mirandayaver.bsky.social · 07/08/2026SNAP has an outstanding ROI: every dollar we invest in SNAP generates $1.54 in economic activity. With SNAP cuts, people can’t continue to support these local grocers, so local businesses suffer. Everyone loses. 4928881093
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 06/08/2026aww, s*t arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08...arstechnica.comFord picks "Fathom" for its affordable truck name, starts at $28,350Deliveries of the new electric pickup are slated for later next year. 020
Reposted by Ben FryJohn Rogers @johnrogers.bsky.social · 05/08/2026A family member was working at AVID back in the day, doing well. At a big company-wide meeting the execs announced “95% of television & movies are edited on Avid!” and during the cheers, their boss quietly said “that means one good competitor cuts our sales in half.” They left the next week. 415637
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 31/07/2026Tonnes of updates in our latest Rowboat release! Major improvements for row/column selection, editing features, find/replace, and more. Lots more on the way from our amazing summer interns, but I don't want to spoil the surprise. Check it out, share w/ friends, and send us feedback! rowboat.netrowboat.netRowboatA lightning fast tool for understanding large datasets. 061
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 30/07/2026brb, I've just split in two because the part of me that cares about foreign policy is devastated at what our State Department has become, while my information designer self cannot stop laughing at this map slop www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026... 120
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 29/07/2026I spilled some words about my experience with the “demo” culture at the MIT Media Lab and how it relates to what feels like a drastically scaled up variant created by Generative AI tools: information.garden/@benfry/1170...information.gardenBen Fry (@benfry@information.garden)During grad school at the Media Lab, I learned a ton about building demos. Externally, there was this “demo or die” thing that was part of the PR spiel, though nobody ever talked like that internally.... 140
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 24/07/2026Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA: “I had not realized…that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_e...en.wikipedia.orgELIZA effect - Wikipedia 020
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 23/07/2026I've not seen the Nolan movie, but I *have* listened to both of these books from Emily Wilson, and I cannot recommend them highly enough. The Iliad translation is so good it feels like music, while The Odyssey is a perfect balance of engaging its history while still feeling contemporary. Amazing. 010
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 18/07/2026Love this clear-eyed take on how open models are a “dystopian hellscape.” From the head of public policy at “Open” AI. 320
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 16/07/2026Just look at this beauty… The first laptop ever, the Grid Compass 1101… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_Co... I don't feel like Bill Moggridge gets enough credit for what an incredible merger of form and function this was. 140
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 13/07/2026“MIT mechanical engineers designed a robot that can swim underwater, break through the surface, and continue flying in air. Diving birds manage this feat. ‘So we knew it was possible. Just no one had tried this in a mobile robotic system’” news.mit.edu/2026/new-fla... 030
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 11/07/2026A 12yo watches JAWS for the first time… (We've started having our daughter write down what she thinks will happen, to keep her from spending the movie blurting things out and ruining the surprise—or simply frustrating—the rest of the room.) 041
Reposted by Ben FryZach Binney @binneyz.bsky.social · 08/07/2026I like how this chart makes Godzilla 1445
Reposted by Ben FryMolly McKew @mollymckew.bsky.social · 24/06/2026And, I just want to say, because none of our recent political leaders ever seemed to think it was worth doing — THIS IS AWESOME The American people, for about $15/person/month, saved 90+ million lives because doing good because we COULD is part of what we believe in — and I think we still do /1 416354
Reposted by Ben Fry#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 23/06/2026*Also, nonfiction books which attempt to document and describe real events are not a whole lot more convincing than fiction. Just read one written five hundred years ago, all its core realistic assumptions feel completely off-the-wall 35214
Reposted by Ben FryFaisal فيصل @faisalhamadah.bsky.social · 20/06/2026It will never stop being funny to me that the street fighter subreddit has a much better, well reasoned ai policy vis a vis literally all universities. 45170506110
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 20/06/2026Fascinating piece about how Huawei has kept itself alive in spite of US export controls, spurring innovation that may simply result in yet another own goal for the US. giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...giftarticle.ft.comHuawei’s big comeback tests limits of US chip controlsSeven years after being written off the Chinese tech giant is making technical advances that appear to sidestep Washington curbs 000
Ben Fry @benfry.com · 19/06/2026Had to dust off an ancient piece of code from 2004 that used an early version of Processing. Amused to see the supported platforms list in the source: 0100