What Broken Technology Reveals About The World
The Verge has some good coverage of recent transportation issues: SF’s BART expects ‘major delays’ after a computer problem ground subways to a halt “A train control problem.” The Verge Umar Shakir Newark Airport radar outage strikes again, delaying more flights Newark Airport is
Airports continue to be a reliable source of screen-based errors, likely due to their high concentration of screens. Here's a few recent ones from Denver International Airport circa April 2025: Arrivals/Departures screen crashed out. Window is looking for MSMQ content (Microsoft Messaging Queue). - The airtrain screen
This isn't an "error" per se, but a creative use of public screens. Spotted in Cary, North Carolina, in May 2025. Unfortunately (or fortunately), the screen was totally wrong. The storm passed us by with not even a drizzle. This suggests that the weather forecasting application
Spotted in Longmont, Colorado, March 2025. Interesting to see that USPS screens are simply a VLC player loop. Interesting details on the screen: It's "Restricted information" to see the backend. Video build is versioned and deployed by "Technology Applications"... which turns out is a
Spotted in October 2022, in a restaurant that was done up to be "rustic" but not very well. TV log fires are... something, but this really ruins the illusion. The interesting bit is that the TV is trying to be helpful and conserve power when "not in
A selfie booth in JFK Airport, promoting an opportunity to win tickets to a Broadway show. Just as well that it wasn't working – people who are flying out would find this too late, people flying in often just want to get out of the airport as fast
Spotted December 15th, New York City, East Village. A follow-up to the glitch aesthetic spotted in Colorado, under " Old Televisions ".
Spotted in New York City, December 14th. Lower East Side. It reminds me of a quote by William Gibson: "the street finds its own uses for things", from Burning Chrome . The street does indeed find its own uses for things. These trashcans and newspaper holders are repurposed as
Much has already been said and bally-hoo'd about what's going on with Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition and extremely quick loss of almost 75% of the talent (including engineering talent), but it's worth saving this small but important piece about microservice dependencies and
Illuminating about the limitations of language-based AI models: Galactica is a large language model for science, trained on 48 million examples of scientific articles, websites, textbooks, lecture notes, and encyclopedias. Meta promoted its model as a shortcut for researchers and students. In the company’s words, Galactica “can
This is a fascinating one: “I’m not sure I want to deal with the can of worms it will open, so I’ll tell you privately,” he wrote back. “But you, in particular, are going to hate it: Teams can’t wear cream
There's an interesting divide happening between Getty and Shutterstock, two massive stock image businesses, with regards to AI-generated media. Getty: “We took a step around AI-generated imagery to protect our customers,” Peters told The Verge . “There’s a lot of questions out there right
As technology wanes, business based on it will decline until you’re left with only a handful of companies. Then there’s usually a period of stable equilibrium where those few companies survive on the long tail of demand for a while. In some cases, often related to
Consider the threat once posed by the calculator to homework that involved arithmetic. In some cases, the point of such exercises is to learn arithmetic or mathematical principles through practice. Teachers mostly shifted those exercises to the classroom, and prohibited the use of calculators in that setting. In other cases,
As the article concludes, " is this AI that generates code, or AI that searches the web for open source code that might be suitable? " Not dissimilar from articles about how DallE and image generation tools will regenerate existing art when given the right prompts (as when the "