Not being familiar with the installation I found this video super informative: https://youtu.be/WfZQf1983iw?si=wvh-GIj6XIEwWGlA

Tracking-free link:

Not being familiar with the installation I found this video super informative: https://youtu.be/WfZQf1983iw

ah, not the blogging platform.

Still around but you don’t see it much now. There was a GPL version and a fork but WordPress ate a lot of MT market share.

Notably still used to publish daringfireball, but yeah it’s certainly not common to see these days: https://daringfireball.net/colophon/

I work in this building - it’s a wonderful experience walking through it every morning, and will be sad to see it go!

Holy moly that's like $300k in vacuum fluorescent displays (probably much more since they're exceptionally large). Those things are not cheap.

It makes me wonder how difficult it would be to create a shader in order to replace everything with LED or even eInk displays. The cost is certainly a large factor as print news suffers more and more capital depletion.

Well, in that case the good news is that they're being returned to the artists

I did not know that general raster vfd's were a thing, I have only ever seen the application specific ones. And without giving it much thought, figured that was the limits of the tech.

For the actual movable type, there’s a great documentary called Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu about the final day the NY Times used Linotype:

https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu

I watched this again recently and was struck by how the last few lines of narration land very differently now.

The NYT appears to be, with rare exception, a propaganda rag for the establishment / US State Dept. I couldn’t care less about its lobby or anything else. Any authority it possessed as a real news organization is gone.

It's funny because the NYT currently has a policy of never saying anything positive about the current president (as in the editor has said this in writing), for the sole reason that they're mad he hasn't given them an interview yet.

I’m curious according to you what news organizations are not?

I’m curious if you think any of these corporate media networks are actually speaking truth to power.

I'm curious why you answered a question with a question instead of actually answering.

If you’ve ever discussed politics with people online you’d know why.

I think that goes for most western media unfortunately; The Economist, WSJ, Bloomberg, CNN. I think The Guardian is the sole exception that reports on anything and everything without having recurring "opinion" pieces by editors to run propaganda.

AP news?

The lobby had public access all this time?

When there are not protests, yeah.

I thought this was going to be a post about New York Times deprecating use of the Movable Type blogging platform. I was wrong but it brought back some good memories!

Genuinely, same! And I knew intrinsically that that was wrong (The Times uses or used WordPress in some capacity), but I thought “maybe it was a weird straggler” — but nope. Turns out the art installation I’ve seen countless times had a name.

I had the same thought! Interestingly the blog software moveabletype is still alive and kicking, which I did not know before now...

https://www.movabletype.org/

> Before finalizing their design, Rubin and Hansen spent two years observing and interviewing…

I wish we could have this much attention to detail more often for software projects.

The same artists created a similar piece called Listening Post, which I love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzfnndd9fCk

I built a much more basic web-based version of it, using Twitter posts, a few years ago. It stopped working when the Twitter API became paid-for, but I screen-recorded a demo of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaRenG89G9g