TimVasil

I live near San Diego Bay and look out my window wondering, "What's that ship?" Inspired by TheFlightWall's air traffic display (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46066640) on an LED screen, I figured I'd try something similar with maritime traffic. So I built LumiBridge.

I put together seven 64x64 LED panels driven by a Raspberry Pi with an RTL-SDR dongle and VHF antenna to receive AIS broadcasts from ships in the bay. I chose 7 panels because that's what fit over my fireplace.

The absurd 7:1 aspect ratio made for a fun UI design challenge. With all that real estate, I started creating a whole bunch of other apps: earthquakes in the area, bird sightings, trending new music -- there are a ton of free feeds out there perfect for display in the living room. That led me to add support for a prioritization scheme and remote control so the most important thing would be visible, and navigable, and down the rabbit hole of adding games and other content. Obviously that includes DOOM :-)

I posted schematics, BOM, and details on the 40+ apps in case anyone wants to try something similar. Yes, some of these hardware choices are overspec'd; you can probably do it cheaper. I erred on the side of caution because I'm new to the hardware side and didn't want to burn the place down.

This was a ton of fun to build, and I keep finding interesting new apps to add. Happy to answer any questions about the setup.

I was the Associate Product Manager assigned to Orkut as it prepared to launch. It was not 20% of his time ;-) Orkut was the backup name we had to go with because we couldn't reach a deal to get the name he wanted (eden.com) from a domain squatter.

Same here. I also used to love writing with em dashes, but don't anymore out of fear people will call my writing AI and stop reading. It'd not hard to do in most word processors, typing two hyphens "--" does it in Word and Pages, so I don't get why people think it's such an obvious AI tell. It's not that exotic.

Maybe we will get to a place where we normalize AI authorship or co-authorship in our writing?

I appreciate what the Palm Springs Post does with its news articles. It has an "AI Assist" author and gives it credit in bylines as appropriate:

https://thepalmspringspost.com/author/ai-assist/

That's nice. So when I'm reading I know whether it's a human author or not. And if it's a dry municipal meeting, seems like a perfect place to send in the bot!

Spot on about environment.

I recently built a calculator to try to quantify the gains an org could expect as they become more "AI-native." I tried to account for a bunch of things including env, which I call "AI roadway," but I'm definitely missing codebase readiness (thank you, author), and also bottleneck analysis. Even without those considerations, though, gains are usually modest. It's hard to get to 2x.

Tool is here if useful: https://timvasil.com/ai-native

Agree it's light on data. The "evidence" cited is traction with the IndieWeb, Neocities, and Bear Blog. I'm not familiar with these, but Bear Blog seems to be relatively new (5-6 years) and growing?

The article resonated with me personally, though. I taught a continuing ed course on creating personal websites (with AOLpress!) in the late 90s and had my own until giving it up in 2016 or so, but coincidentally decided to try again this month.