TomWhitwell

“In 2025, the global fleet of EVs avoided the consumption of around 1.7 million barrels of oil per day” https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2026/executive...

Why does AI have to explain everything three times - a headline, a standfirst and some intro blurb all saying what could be said in two words.

Just two resistors to say ‘I am a device, give me 5V’ - you only need more negotiation = a chip - to get more than 5V

Damn font getting smaller and smaller while my eyes stay the same

This is all a reference to the short story ‘Library of Babel’ by Jorge Luis Borges. I feel the page needs to make that a bit more clear!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

Love it, could you do Harold Cohen next?

It’s not an exaggeration to say that every day of the year, from maybe noon to midnight, these buildings are surrounded by people enjoying the city - walking along the river, going to arts events, eating out, walking between offices. It’s a hugely popular free public resource that is a massive good for Londoners. Previously (not here but at other points on the river) the water front was private - accessible only to people inside buildings - or derelict, like the areas around Tate Modern and Tower Bridge. This is one of the most human and whatever the opposite of alienating spaces in London today.

> lived locally for 10 years and visited only a handful of times

That was a mistake

This is exactly what Upworthy did - they invented some of the clickbait headline formats that are still used today (for less positive news) https://web.archive.org/web/20231114181702/https://www.fastc...

In Hong Kong, public outdoor escalators like the Central–Mid-Levels Escalator are a big part of public transport. They go one way - down from 6am-10am, otherwise up. They’ve regenerated/gentrified a whole area of town that was previously hard to get to. Few cars = people travel differently.

Underrated comment

An app can be a home‑cooked meal, by Robin Sloan: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

Harold Cohen was a British painter in the ‘60s who ended up in the Stanford AI lab in 1971, using plotters (and initially turtle robots) to draw images created by a chunk of code he called AARON. There are some bits of that code - particularly the ‘freehand line algorithm’ and its collision detection allowing lines to meet without crossing - that I can’t really understand how they worked on such primitive hardware & software: https://www.katevassgalerie.com/blog/harold-cohen-aaron-comp...

A favourite paper: “ A Microfluidic D-subminiature Connector” “ Standardized, affordable, user-friendly world-to-chip interfaces represent one of the major barriers to the adoption of microfluidics. We present a connector system for plug-and-play interfacing of microfluidic devices to multiple input and output lines.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3786702/ Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32886596

Seems like a larger format version of Lignilock wooden nails https://www.beck-fastening.com/en/innovation/lignoloc

I liked the way I could download the PDF without accepting cookies. Not sure if that was a bug or a feature but I liked it.

I saw and enjoyed bag piece at the recent Tate retrospective- pretty much as she describes it the contrast between the experience of the people inside the bag (giggling, wriggling) and the people standing round watching int the gallery was interesting & memorable. And as for cut piece - obviously related to the later Rhythm 0 by Marina Abramovic - unless you think there’s no possible value in performance art, this seems to me like pretty remarkable work.

Her loft series in 1960 was an amazing moment in time - La Monte Young, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp etc https://press.moma.org/wp-content/files_mf/yoko_sectiontext_...

Such a wild take after looking at, for example, a propaganda poster captioned “Work together to develop pig breeding and new varieties of rice” where the artist has decided to make the pigs in question bright purple with yin-yang signs on their backs.

This idea has been around for a long time: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429935-000-food-bla...

IIRC these are SVGs and excellent if you have a plotter

I worked at The Times in London when we did this - we lost ~98.7% of our free audience, retained a smaller ad business, turned a £20mn / year loss into a £20mn / year profit over a few years.

Technics SL-1200/1210 mk2 had a similar dominance for maybe a couple of decades, I think