Love it, could you do Harold Cohen next?
Readit NewsTomWhitwell commented on Show HN: Sol LeWitt-style instruction-based drawings in the browser intervolz.com/sollewitt/... · Posted by u/intervolz
TomWhitwell commented on Brutalist Southbank Centre Listed architectsjournal.co.uk/n... · Posted by u/daverol
Absolutely hideous, alienating, and inhuman. Not everything in cities needs to very preserved.
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.
TomWhitwell commented on Brutalist Southbank Centre Listed architectsjournal.co.uk/n... · Posted by u/daverol
A shame. It's a huge complex of fairly sparse buildings right in the centre of the capital city. Listing it just puts big obstacles in front of changing it, which I really wish we could do. People just like how it looks but actually it's not a very useful space for society and I wish it could be changed.
I lived locally for 10 years and visited only a handful of times. Mostly it was just an obstacle in itself: it creates a lot of level changes (read: steps) and moving around it on foot or by bike is annoying.
> lived locally for 10 years and visited only a handful of times
That was a mistake
I had another idea about the same topic a few weeks ago: Creating a news side which uses the clickbait strategy to only share positive news or mentaly opening up news:
“They Said Immigration Was a Crisis — Then THIS Happened to Jobs, Growth, and Local Communities”
“Everyone Expected Chaos… Instead This City Welcomed Newcomers and Its Economy EXPLODED”
“Doctors, Teachers, Builders: The ‘Immigration Problem’ Quietly Fixed a Problem No One Talks About”
“This ‘Risky’ Policy Was Supposed to Fail — Now Other Countries Are Rushing to Copy It”
“From ‘Unmanageable’ to Unstoppable: How One Tough Challenge Became a Surprising Success Story”
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.
TomWhitwell commented on NASA chief suggests SpaceX may be booted from moon mission cnn.com/2025/10/20/scienc... · Posted by u/voxleone
National pride has long been tightly coupled to seafaring capabilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship) "Richly decorated as a symbol of the king's ambitions for Sweden and himself, upon completion she was one of the most powerfully armed vessels in the worl"
Underrated comment
TomWhitwell commented on Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale derwiki.medium.com/do-thi... · Posted by u/derwiki
An app can be a home‑cooked meal, by Robin Sloan: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
TomWhitwell commented on So what's the difference between plotted and printed artwork? lostpixels.io/writings/th... · Posted by u/cosiiine
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...
TomWhitwell commented on It's a DE9, not a DB9 (but we know what you mean) news.sparkfun.com/14298... · Posted by u/jgrahamc
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