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Ben Fry

@benfry.com
1.1K followers 152 following 422 posts

Running fathom.info since 2010 / spent 22 years building processing.org and supporting its community / sometimes seen teaching at mit.edu

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 6h
“Post hoc ergo fucking propter hoc.” letterror.com/ai
letterror.com
On generative AI at LettError.com
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mattie lubchansky @mattielubchansky.com · 29/09/2026
awoke this morning with a Vision
that diagram showing  the SUV blind spot in the front but it's lowly worm driving his little applemobile
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 28/09/2026
so you're saying there's a chance
Stack of no less than 8 error messages stating 

The application “Safari.app” is not open anymore.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 26/09/2026
Loved this story from a woman talking about having a functional relationship with her husband, and how they're supporting each other and their kid.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 26/09/2026
great piece. man social media is a cancer themomoftheyear.substack.com/p/im-the-mom...
themomoftheyear.substack.com
I’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.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 24/09/2026
To celebrate the launch, we spent the afternoon on projects around the studio…
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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.com
Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”
Microsoft, OpenAI emails reveal fear of AI “doom loop” killing news orgs.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 17/09/2026
We 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.
The Delphy home page
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DC Pierson @dcpierson.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Me: OK, BRAIN, WE ONLY HAVE AN HOUR TO WORK ON THIS PERSONAL PROJECT.

My brain: Y'KNOW WHO I BET HAS AN INTERESTING WIKIPEDIA PAGE?
BUN E. CARLOS FROM
CHEAP TRICK.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
A 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...
In Beijing, a think tank at Renmin University recently published an assessment titled
"Thank Trump," which wryly hailed his efforts to hasten the "twilight of an empire," by undermining America's alliances, civil service, scientific institutions, and democratic credibility. In the past two years, the international approval rating of the U.S. has dropped nearly forty points, according to a worldwide survey by the Alliance of Democracies; in multiple polls, China now rates higher than the U.S.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 12/09/2026
We could call it “Open” AI or something like that
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Ben Recht @beenwrekt.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
The 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.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 12/09/2026
News 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)
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 11/09/2026
There'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
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 11/09/2026
As someone else said: “wake me up when an ‘agent escapes containment’ and starts paying off medical debt.” Until then, it's all human error.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 10/09/2026
Neat 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.edu
System helps humans predict when self-driving cars will make mistakes
The 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...
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 09/09/2026
The new Duo rumored to be announced by Apple today is looking sweeeet
Mid-90s ad spread touting Apple's PowerBook Duo

Conjuring my high school self to say “sweet” in the most 90s midwestern way possible
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 06/09/2026
They'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…
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Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
From 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."
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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
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 03/09/2026
We *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.com
1Password wades into a right-wing mess after funding a Linux project
The controversy surrounds David Heinemeier Hansson, who has posted strident anti-vax and anti-immigrant views.
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Fathom Information Design @fathom.info · 02/09/2026
This 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.
A headshot of Rekha sitting on a couch at the Fathom office.
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David_j_roth @davidjroth.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
I love to live in the neighborhood of Autechre Heights.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 31/08/2026
Returning 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:
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 21/08/2026
Difficult 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/zsAF3
statnews.com
A star scientist showed that better genetics lessons could reduce racism. It was the death knell for his career
Brian Donovan had persuaded high school teachers and education researchers that prejudice might be ended by changing how genetics is taught.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 20/08/2026
Felt 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.”
Cover for “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy” by Gil Durán
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 19/08/2026
Thanks! and as it turns out, the piece I was preparing for the show was the original for the Nature cover:
full version of image used on the Nature coverFrancis Collins wields a Nature cover with my illustrationdetail of the imageeven closer detail… includes thousands of tiny letters, rendered manually by extracting their curve geometry and projecting it into a false 3D isometric perspective (to maintain size relationships and avoid the distortion from proper 3D perspective)
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 19/08/2026
Throwback 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.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 17/08/2026
Banderas 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:
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Wonder of Science @wonderofscience.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
An 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
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 07/08/2026
That 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.gov
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Economy: New Estimates of the SNAP Multiplier | Economic Research Service
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Miranda Yaver @mirandayaver.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
SNAP 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.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 06/08/2026
aww, s*t arstechnica.com/cars/2026/08...
arstechnica.com
Ford picks "Fathom" for its affordable truck name, starts at $28,350
Deliveries of the new electric pickup are slated for later next year.
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John Rogers @johnrogers.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
A 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.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 31/07/2026
Tonnes 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.net
rowboat.net
Rowboat
A lightning fast tool for understanding large datasets.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 30/07/2026
brb, 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...
“The map presented in Brazil on Sunday showed a landlocked Nigeria in the Sahara and placed Mozambique in the Horn of Africa. Photograph: Picture obtained by Reuters/Reuters”
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 29/07/2026
I 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.garden
Ben 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....
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 24/07/2026
Joseph 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.org
ELIZA effect - Wikipedia
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 23/07/2026
I'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.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 18/07/2026
Love this clear-eyed take on how open models are a “dystopian hellscape.” From the head of public policy at “Open” AI.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 16/07/2026
Just 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.
Image of the Grid Compass 1101
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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...
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Ryan Marino, MD @ryanmarino.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Election results:
Everyone gets a Puppy: 49.9%
Diarrhea Forever: 50.1%
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 11/07/2026
A 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.)
Page from a notepad showing a 12yo's notes while watching Jaws. Includes things like

Someone's gonna die ✓
(pls) John Williams? ✓✓✓
…
gonna hire the guy – prob gonna die } torso bitten? / get sucked in with fishing rod / spear → expert hates him
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Zach Binney @binneyz.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
I like how this chart makes Godzilla
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Molly McKew @mollymckew.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
And, 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
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#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
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Faisal فيصل @faisalhamadah.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
It 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.
Hi, thanks for posting! We do appreciate you thinking of us even though we have to moderate.

Our stance on all AI generated content (Images, Video, Voiceovers, and whatever else LLM based AI gets up to in the future):

At best, they are approximations of street fighter characters as the AI has no clue what it is trying to create. Because of this, there is no street fighter content so they are not allowed. (rule 1)

Also, they aren't allowed per our source rule. As AI sources cannot be tracked, we must assume that they use uncredited sources in the learning data. (rule 5)

Finally, AI images, video, text, and voiceovers are barely any different than posting a screenshot of a google search. The level of effort is so low that we consider it spam (rule 3).

Because of these reasons, AI art and other AI content is not allowed.

If you would like to contact the moderators about this removal, you can do so here.
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 20/06/2026
Fascinating 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.com
Huawei’s big comeback tests limits of US chip controls
Seven years after being written off the Chinese tech giant is making technical advances that appear to sidestep Washington curbs
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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 19/06/2026
Had 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:
screen capture of Java source code reading:

static final String[] platforms = {
    "", "windows", "macos9", "macosx", "linux", "irix"
};
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