Ben Fry

Ben Fry

@benfry.com

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

1.1K followers 152 following439 posts

Ben Fry reposted

@billhanage.bsky.social

I do not do much on social media right now. Making an exception. I talked to a lot of reporters during the pandemic. I don't think any of them would be surprised or offended if I say Helen was the best 1/n

STAT@statnews.com

We are going to miss you very much, Helen. https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/13/helen-branswell-stat-reporter-obituary/

statnews.comHelen Branswell, whose reporting on infectious diseases and public health drew acclaim, dies at 69Helen Branswell, STAT's infectious disease reporter who earned the respect of experts and public health officials with her accessible, prescient dispatches, has died at age 69.

This is really scummy: GitHub won't even tell me who requested Copilot unless I… first turn on Copilot. I'm trying to keep an open mind about tools like this, but at every turn, I'm repeatedly reminded that the people behind the tools are severely lacking in even basic ethics.

“Reagan was especially shaken after watching WarGames at Camp David. Days later, Reagan asked John Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, whether ‘something like this’ could ‘really happen?’ Vessey answered ‘Mr. President, the problem is much worse than you think.’” foreignpolicy.com/2026/10/04/w...

foreignpolicy.comThe Year Hollywood Changed the National Security DebateIn 1983, two movies sought to educate and alarm the public about the risks of new technologies.

Oh no, how sad… Helen Branswell was one of my favorite reporters. “She loved her work. She loved science and medical writing. She thought her job was a gift. She found it so interesting.”

STAT@statnews.com

We are going to miss you very much, Helen. https://www.statnews.com/2026/10/13/helen-branswell-stat-reporter-obituary/

statnews.comHelen Branswell, whose reporting on infectious diseases and public health drew acclaim, dies at 69Helen Branswell, STAT's infectious disease reporter who earned the respect of experts and public health officials with her accessible, prescient dispatches, has died at age 69.

Thanks for joining me for tonight's episode of “Dumb Moments in Software Engineering” www.anthropic.com/engineering/... Also stay tuned for an update on our story about DOGE's plan to rewrite 60 million lines of COBOL for the Social Security Administration in *just a few months* using Generative AI

anthropic.comRedesigning source control at AnthropicAs our merges per day grew more than tenfold, source control became our biggest development bottleneck. Here, we share how we migrated to an in-house version control system in five months.

Found this while looking for the Cairo character set & immediately had this rush of memories…I think a MacPaint file of this was available, since I vividly recall a much younger me enjoying the keycaps, and the Athens typeface across the top. (I must have been about 10?) www.moma.org/collection/w...

(Another memory is the smudgy 72dpi-scaled-to-300dpi that the LaserWriter would use by default… so gross! Gotta check that box in printer setup to do the scale by 96% so that it's a clean 4x!)

Ben Fry reposted

Alexander Obenauer

@alexanderobenauer.com

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! From missing characters to damaged reams, this is the tale of recreating Ada Lovelace's Notes. It's equally an investigation of old books and the work of making new ones. Link in reply.

For anyone who has ever coveted a beautiful piece of gear from Teenage Engineering (teenage.engineering/products) www.youtube.com/watch?v=562Y...

youtube.comInterview with a "Teenage Engineer"YouTube video by Kai Lentit

“Every educator is dealing with the bomb that the AI labs have dropped on them, which is ‘we've made a machine that can do all your kids' homework so… you guys figure it out‘”

Chris Hayes@chrislhayes.bsky.social

No AI for kids. Full stop.

We've just added “lambda columns” to rowboat.net! When starting with a dataset, you often have a column that's not *quite* in the correct format. Heights listed in feet and inches. Temperatures in Fahrenheit when you want celsius. GPS coordinates that are uniquely weird in their own weird way.

rowboat.netRowboatA lightning fast tool for understanding large datasets.

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Temperature data listed in Kelvin, but needs to be understood by a less Kelvin audience? Easily fixed, and now we can see a more relatable distribution:

This has been one of our most-requested features. We've been testing it the last couple weeks and have found it incredibly useful for the many quick options it opens up. We hope you'll enjoy it too!

We've just added “lambda columns” to rowboat.net! When starting with a dataset, you often have a column that's not *quite* in the correct format. Heights listed in feet and inches. Temperatures in Fahrenheit when you want celsius. GPS coordinates that are uniquely weird in their own weird way.

rowboat.netRowboatA lightning fast tool for understanding large datasets.

You can fix this sort of thing in a complicated data cleaning tool, or by firing up a Python notebook, but it's a lot just to make these quick changes. With this update, you can write a single line function that does the conversion and creates a new column.

ZIP codes trashed by Excel shaving off the leading zeroes? Poof, fixed! And then we can see them mapped instantly:

Ben Fry reposted

Dustin A. Chacón

@lingdustin.bsky.social

I've heard people make claims that AI would lead to a new Renaissance, but I didn't imagine it'd happen like this:

Let's do this

Finished this, and torn between 1) feeling better that the broligarch behavior is not just a recent (i.e. post-Trump) phenomenon (buy elections! spread right wing hate! cut university funding! cut funding for the world's poorest!) or a seat of the pants thing they're making up as they go, and

Ben Fry@benfry.com

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.”

2) …learning that it's *not* just some random thing; that it's a couple decades in the making, and now we have to live with the consequences of these fringe ideas because the people who adopted them have billions of dollars.

Perhaps more simply, I'm just not sure I'm more comfortable with the method version or the madness version of what's happening right now.

“Post hoc ergo fucking propter hoc.” letterror.com/ai

letterror.comOn generative AI at LettError.com

Ben Fry reposted

mattie lubchansky

@mattielubchansky.com

awoke this morning with a Vision

so you're saying there's a chance

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.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper.com

great 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.

Ben Fry reposted

@ryanlcooper.com

great 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.

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

Ben Fry@benfry.com

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

…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.

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

Ben Fry@benfry.com

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.

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

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

“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.

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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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.

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.

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.

View full thread

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.

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.

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.

View full thread

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.

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.

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.

View full thread

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.

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

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 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.

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.

Ben Fry reposted

@dcpierson.bsky.social

Ben Fry reposted

@donmoyn.bsky.social

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...

Michael Clemens@mclem.org

The US President's new proposal to tax international students has been approved by the White House for release this week. It's an unprecedented $100,000 tax on int'l grads who stay to work after graduation on Optional Practical Training (most grads do), a crucial bridge to remaining by any channel.

We could call it “Open” AI or something like that

Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social

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.

Ben Fry reposted

@beenwrekt.bsky.social

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.

Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social

Oh boy, Dario has put up another insufferable post. darioamodei.com/post/we-must...

darioamodei.comDario Amodei — We Must Pace the Frontier

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)

Erin McKean@emckean.bsky.social

It's newsletter day: this month's installment includes adder stones, Don Quixote's favorite book, and a link to all the links: buttondown.com/thingslearne...

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

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.

Judah Grunstein@judah-grunstein.bsky.social

I think we'd see a lot more urgency about regulating AI in Silicon Valley if the AI agents suddenly developed a sense of restorative justice, and instead of them threatening humanity with total extinction, they just wanted to redistribute wealth and reverse power hierarchies.