iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

…while Paul and I plotted about what a modern type specimen might look like when your input is the trove of information in a modern font file.

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…Katherine figures out the color changer on the knitting machine and makes a scarf…

…Karlie donning headphones to make weird sounds with a new AMYboard… (www.amyboard.com)

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…Ellory took a shot at learning to use the embroidery machine…

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 18/09/2026

To celebrate the launch, we spent the afternoon on projects around the studio…

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“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.

Having passed this hurdle (a paper! a usable tool!) our next steps are all about digging further into that last question. How can we better focus on the *meaning* of the data, rather than getting distracted by the data itself? Lots of ideas about what that entails, but I'd hate to ruin the surprise.

How can they poke at it, look at it from different sides, play with it? It's not about single answers, it's about building a mental model of what the data *means*, whether for a research paper about how an outbreak has spread, or for a policymaker to make decisions about outbreak response.

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More effective is when they can actually engage with it: building, interacting with other students, etc. The same thing applies for a dataset: instead of users sitting back and passively “reading” data, or visualization of it, we want to build tools to help people interact with it.

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Part of understanding a dataset is the idea of being able to interact with the data to learn about it. This is something I take from my days during undergrad working in child development. The basic idea in constructivism is that you can't just shovel information at kids and have them memorize it.

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Like the map of a hurricane path, with its error bars that everyone agrees is a range yet mentally perceives it as an actual path, a tree can be a distraction. So we've been trying to lean into that, and showing the haziness everywhere we can.

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Another thing we enjoyed about this project is the ability to visualize the uncertainty, ranges, and error behind its calculations. The output of this analysis is a phylogenetic tree, but like all such trees, it's inherently a lie. It's the least worst lie we can come up with, but it's still a lie.

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(That last part is a post for another time. This is already too long.)

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Instead of spending all your time cleaning data first, there's essentially no cost to taking a quick look and proceeding with your research. That's really powerful, because *all data is bad* and the pursuit of what passes for “good” is both time consuming and has its own kinds of badness.

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While it's always nice to run faster, what's *actually* exciting about that is the way that it can change the way you work. It means trying things early instead of waiting for perfection. You can immediately identify overall trends, bad data, outliers, etc and fix these problems before the next run.

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The project is the brainchild of the inestimable Patrick Varilly, and the tool is 100-1000x faster(!!) than others. For our part, we worked with Patrick on how to make Delphy usable & accessible beyond the handful of PhDs who know the necessary command line incantations to run this kind of analysis.

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Ben Fry @benfry.com · 15/09/2026

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.

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This also seems like a terrible path for universities: if you start “scaling” the way the rest of these platforms do, they become more generalized/commodified/whatever term you want to use… and you're back to students waking up to “what the hell am I paying for?” the way they were during COVID.

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Reposted by Ben Fry

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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Reposted by Ben Fry

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)

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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amazing; also impressed that 1) someone had the prescience to run a separate network for artists, and 2) someone else bothered to decode the messages and identify them as JPEG data

Haha, straightforward enough that I almost didn't mention it (and don't want to be that guy), but shared since I thought it would be especially funny if it actually closed the loop.

We did an installation early 2001 that was extremely prone to crashing due to the sensor hardware: acg.media.mit.edu/projects/atm... Late in the install, purchased a machine fast enough that it could crash & even restart in the split second between using the sensor & glancing up to see the result.

acg.media.mit.edu

a t m o s p h e r e

Ha, yes—that may even be a method he picked up from Golan Levin who picked it up from me: installations are always prone to crashing, so you'd deploy on a Windows machine with a run.bat file that read @echo off .\installation.exe run.bat

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System helps humans predict when self-driving cars will make mistakes

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

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

Ha, they've deleted the post, but the kids in the picture are still bored

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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…

Paul Rohr @pevohr.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

Reposted by Ben Fry

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

Ben Fry @benfry.com · 04/09/2026

Ooh, and they have an apps solution too, since I'd also like to get us off Google Apps… (We started using it since it was the only way to get our email actually delivered, since running your own Postgres server for a, uh, dot info domain is not the path to righteousness.)

Ben Fry @benfry.com · 03/09/2026

For all the effort I make to quiet the “just build that yourself!” voice in my head, the rent seekers and nazis are making it nearly impossible these days. Let's see, what else do we depend on… Notion? No way that ends well, right?

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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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Reposted by Ben Fry

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.

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Reposted by Ben Fry

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 cover

Francis Collins wields a Nature cover with my illustration

even 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)

Ben Fry @benfry.com · 19/08/2026

(This was a sketch on the way to creating this piece: www.benfry.com/isometricblo... where I was thinking through ways of showing interconnections, getting proportions to work, and getting a feel for variation in the data.)

benfry.com

isometricblocks | ben fry