Ben Fry

@benfry.com

1070 Followers 146 Following

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

Image of the Grid Compass 1101
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
screen capture of Java source code reading: static final String[] platforms = { "", "windows", "macos9", "macosx", "linux", "irix" };
“Acquiring one grape costs Alex $2 billion. Alex offers to sell Mike one grape a month for the next 12 months for $1 billion per grape. Alex asks for the full $12 billion up front and provides Mike with one grape for the first month. Alex makes a $10 billion profit this month; his ARR is $120 billion, and his profits are trending up at an infinite rate. The Wall Street Journal’s business editor moves into Alex’s house, having accepted a part-time position as Alex’s human footstool. He never asks to see the books.”
Quote from the piece: “Each new crisis follows a familiar playbook, as scientists, epidemiologists, health-care workers, and politicians race to characterize and contain the new threat. Each epidemic is also different, and each is a mirror that reflects the society it affects.” This portion highlighted: “In the new coronavirus, we see a world that is more connected than ever by international travel, but that has also succumbed to growing isolationism and xenophobia. We see a time when scientific research and the demand for news, the spread of misinformation and the spread of a virus, all happen at a relentless, blistering pace. The new crisis is very much the kind of epidemic we should expect, given the state of the world in 2020.” And finally: "It's almost as if the content is the same but the amplitude is different," Bhadelia said. "There's just a greater frenzy, and is that a function of the disease, or a function of the changed world? It's unclear."
A pixelated cat coughs up a network graph visualization, which bounces harmlessly offscreen. Kitty is not impressed.
Screenshot of the linked page; see the page for better descriptions!
Cover of Patrick McGee's “Apple in China”
Power Computing machine upright in a box with foam stuck to the sides.
Spread from a MacWarehouse catalog from 1996, depicting several options from Mac compatible maker “Power Computing”
The original Jaws poster, lovingly re-fashioned by Paul to depict a tiny rowboat and massive shark mouth heading upwards. The top reads ROWBOAT instead of JAWS. Get it? Ok ok it gave me a giggle.
“Upgrade to macOS Tahoe” dialog box with buttons “Install Tonight” and “Not Fucking Ever”
America is on the cusp of competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration has already begun to weaponize state institutions and deploy them against opponents. The Constitution alone cannot save U.S. democracy. Even the best-designed constitutions have ambiguities and gaps that can be exploited for antidemocratic ends. After all, the same constitutional order that undergirds America’s contemporary liberal democracy permitted nearly a century of authoritarianism in the Jim Crow South, the mass internment of Japanese Americans, and McCarthyism. In 2025, the United States is governed nationally by a party with greater will and power to exploit constitutional and legal ambiguities for authoritarian ends than at any time in the past two centuries.
Cover of “Beading with Algorithms” with 30% promo code RECMATH30
As we train our sights on what we oppose, let’s recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the further degradation of an already degraded educational system. We agree that we would rather deplete our natural resources than make our own art or think our own thoughts. We dig ourselves deeper into crises that have been made worse by technology, from the erosion of electoral democracy to the intensification of climate change. We condone platforms that not only urge children to commit suicide, they instruct them on how to tie the noose. We hand over our autonomy, at the very moment of emerging American fascism.
Connect to the file server “borges” as: ( ) Guest (x) Registered User Name: [ a very large text field… ] Password: [••••••••] [x] Add to Keychain
Email from Google Gemini <google-gemini-noreply@google.com> with subject line “You're now using Gemini on your iOS device”
90s-era Mac OS dialog box from Macromedia Freehand 7, reading: Did you know that Macromedia has a great website? You can download product updates and information, find technical answers, communicate with other users, and keep up with late-breaking developments in the world of multimedia. Check us out at http://www.macromedia.com
Actual tweet: “Shared row data file with GPT5 to analyze, the result KPls were crazy, so I naively asked, and innocently it responded.” In the ChatGPT window, the user asks “Did you make up these numbers?”  The response: “Good catch - I wasn't able to actually open and parse your CSV file yet”
The inside of the fridge at Fathom, with different flavors of seltzer arranged in columns, fewer cans for some show preference for particular flavors over one another.
Brazil's roads
Andorra, as told by roads
A map of Alaska's roads… things are looking… sparse
All of the streets in the United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population.
“In a moment where investments in global public health are at risk, the Sentinel project will transform infectious disease surveillance and response through cutting-edge technology, global collaboration, and local empowerment,” said MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey. “Infectious diseases kill millions of people every year, disrupt regional security and economic stability, and can escalate into global crises. Sentinel detects, prevents, and preempts outbreaks to save lives and strengthen global health security.”
Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum."
Screenshot of the Install macOS Sequoia installer, showing its size as 15.71 GB.
Ellory shares her project on an iPad while Andy, Paul, Karlie, Katherine, and the boy look on in amusement.
Quoted tweet from Merriam-Webster… text in original post from Daniel Litt @littmath reads “Here are the numbers from 10 to 100 in alphabetical order: 18, 80, 88, 85, 84, 89, 81, 87, 86, 83, 82, 11, 15, 50, 58, 55, 54, 59, 51, 57, 56, 53, 52, 40, 48, 45, 44, 49, 41, 47, 46, 43, 42, 14, 19, 90, 98, 95, 94, 99, 91, 97, 96, 93, 92, 17, 70, 78, 75, 74, 79, 71, 77, 76, 73,
Photo of an open book, the text reads: They walked to the far comer of the play-ground, where they were alone. "What's up, D.J.?" Louis asked. D.J. just smiled. "Come on, D.J. You can tell me. Why are you so happy?" D.J. looked up at him. He said, "You need a reason to be sad. You don't need a reason to be happy."
All BYTE magazine covers for a decade-long span, shown in a grid.
The images of four panel comic of a kid asking his dad "Papa, what was the internet like when you were a boy?" In response the father mimics the sound of a dial-up modem connecting, "EEEEEEEEEE BWONG BWONG BWONG KRRRRRRRRRRRR". The kid interjects to ask if he is okay. In the last panel, the father's speech bubble shows the placeholder icon for an image that failed to load. (alt text from @aburka@hachyderm.io)
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.”
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.”
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
Screenshot of Visual Basic 3.0, which, like all Windows applications at the time, used a very heavy typeface to unfortunate effect.
Ben standing behind the podium at VK25 with Rowboat applied to a pair of older artworks, and the original JAWS film poster co-opted to shill for Rowboat.
Image from https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:3f462v674
Garrett introducing the Collection while we take in an amazing map embedded in the floor (see final post in thread).
Screenshot of Zoom's home screen, with a huge AI Companion panel opened by default. I've just clicked on the toolbar icon to remove it, but received a pop-up that says “AI Companion always shows on the home screen”