Plug in to USB, fire up the web app, and then press a button in NY to light up LEDs in SF – it was exciting stuff!

I never tried actually programming the boards over WebSerial; that obviously opens up many more use cases. I’m thinking about the success that p5.js has had in the creative coding community, largely driven (I think) by a low barrier to entry since it just requires a web browser to get started.

The feature I would really want here is a switch that blocks AI summaries, overviews, etc. on any websites you browse.

Instead of journals getting revenue from subscribers, they charge authors an “Article Processing Charge” (APC) which for ACM is $1450 in 2026 and expected to go up. Authors from lower-middle income countries get a discount. [1]

Authors are often associated with institutions (e.g. universities) who can cover the APC on behalf of the author through a deal with the journal. For the institution, now instead of paying the subscriber fee and publishing for free, they pay a publishing fee and everyone reads for free.

1. https://authors.acm.org/open-access

For those interested / invested, they recently launched a Barbican renewal project: https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/barbican-un...

The “Not Like Us” snippet (09/29 2:43pm) is easily recognizable though. And “Rockabye” can be heard at 3:05pm.

Two notes: 1. These “stringlines” are also known as Time-Space Diagrams in the transit industry, and they’ve been around for a while. e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Time-space-diagrams-of-t...

In fact Vibien cites as inspiration the official NYCT stringline paper: https://www.worldtransitresearch.info/research/5936/

2. I’ve noticed that at least on the A, the viz is inaccurate? It’s missing a lot of trains.

This would also address the two reasons why the author thinks AI is not suited to this task:

1. human stays in the loop by (ideally) checking the JSON-LD before publishing; so fewer hallucination errors

2. LLM compute is limited to one time per published content and it’s done by the publisher. The bots can continue to be low-GPU crawlers just as they are now, since they can traverse the neat and tidy JSON-LD.

——————

The author makes a good case for The Semantic Web and I’ll be keeping it in mind for the next time I publish something, and in general this will add some nice color to how I think about the web.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_automatism

That all makes sense to me, and I agree.

But here’s what’s odd to me:

We ended up not choosing the seconds pendulum approach (for reasons mentioned in the article). Instead they chose to use “1 ten-millionth of the Earth’s quadrant”. Now, how is it that that value is so close to the length of the seconds pendulum? Were they intentionally trying to get it close to seconds pendulum length, and it just happened to be a nice round power of ten? Is that a coincidence?

1. It’s not just a software problem - installing the hardware is time-consuming and expensive. The engineering requirements are much stricter when human lives are at stake so you can’t just strap on a radio to each train. You still need additional infrastructure along the tracks to manage communications.

2. There are other limiting factors in reducing headway - having enough trains and having enough train operators. Somewhat easier to solve perhaps but still costly and non-trivial.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications-based_train_con...

TrainTime has different requirements though - it’s focused on schedules and ticket-buying (and does both of those things really well). The relaunched MTA app seems more about way-finding, trip planning, service status. For those functions, I’m not sure it does much of a better job than Transit app or Citymapper app (although certainly an improvement over Apple or Google Maps).

I think these days, Dwitter has a similar vibe. 140-character JavaScript demos: https://www.dwitter.net/

It seems to me that the outcome would have been heavily dependent on _who specifically_ was in the room. In that way, the piece speaks more to the psyche of _an_ audience and _a_ public, rather than _the_.

I’m also curious what people think of the name?