Error States

Transportation Delays & Issues

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 VergeUmar ShakirNewark Airport radar outage strikes again, delaying more flightsNewark Airport is a mess.... againThe VergeRichard Lawler Newark airport has

Spotted

032: At the Airport, 3

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 crashed

Spotted

031: "Thunderstorm Warning in Effect"

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

030: USPS - VLC Player Has Crashed

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

029: Your Virtual Fireplace Will Now Power Off

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

Spotted

028: Say "Bad Internet Connection!"

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 as

Spotted

027: The Glitch Aesthetic

Spotted December 15th, New York City, East Village. A follow-up to the glitch aesthetic spotted in Colorado, under "Old Televisions".

Spotted

026: "The Street Finds Its Own Uses For Things"

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

Microservices Failures

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

Why Meta’s Giant Science-focused AI Model Only Survived 3 Days

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 summarize academic

Why the Milwaukee Bucks Can't Wear Cream Uniforms (Hint: It's because it interferes with courtside digital ad placements)

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 anymore because it interferes with the

The Diverging Future of AI Images in Stock Image Businesses

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 now — about who owns

The Last Remaining Manufacturers

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 nostalgic media,

AI & ML

Students are acing their homework by turning in machine-generated essays.

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,

Software

Laundering Code with Github Copilot

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 "

Software

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates

To many folks, Excel is their operating system. It's not just spreadsheet software, but data collection, analysis, visualization, reporting, and processing. But the software – designed to be flexible – is not without limitations. So in line with losing Covid data because of file sizes and formats, we now have

Software

Cloudflare silently deleted my DNS records

Interesting from the perspective of error-handling and cloud-services as fundamental communications infrastructure: If I intentionally set out to build a horrible user experience I’m unsure if I could top this. I naively expected that I would be notified by email before Cloudflare broke everything. In the absence of that,

Software

A new way to think about your favorite game’s code

It’s surprisingly hard to archive a video game. Cartridges decay, eventually; discs become unreadable as their plastic degrades. Source codes are lost to corporate mergers and acquisitions. But what’s most dangerous to preserving game history isn’t a physical or corporate consideration: it’s the prevailing attitude that

Hardware

A Ferrari That Bricks Itself

Dude comes straight from the dealership for a car-seat installation, but halfway through the car disables itself (I’m guessing some anti-tamper safeguard). Hilariously, the boys at Ferrari can’t remotely fix it because there’s no reception underground. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/j914fh/dude_comes_

Hardware

Land Rover’s New $83,000 Defender Is an Alpha Male Still in Beta

The bigger concern is the electronics. New owners have complained about minor, but annoying, glitches: a clock that works only intermittently, keyless entry failure, irregularities with the preprogrammed infotainment system, poor operation of the side-hinged rear door, even an engine stall at a stoplight when the stop-start function failed. Although

Spotted

025 - On AdTech & Awful Advertising UIs

This isn’t an error state per se. But, it does highlight a form of extremely poor design that might as well be an error. It all started when I wanted to read an article online. I happened to be actively browsing a website with quite a few outbound links,

Data Bias

Code Rot and Data Biases in Healthcare Apps

On code rot and data bias in health devices: https://apple.news/A8IvTES9NRPWijHhtnUG89Q Vaughan was spurred into action when the continuous glucose monitor (CGM) function on a mobile app used by his daughter, who has had Type-1 Diabetes her entire life, failed. “Features were disappearing, critical alerts weren’t working,

AI & ML

"The Algorithm" is an Excuse

Stanford Health Care apologized Friday for a plan that left nearly all of its young front-line doctors out of the first round of coronavirus vaccinations. […] The “residents” — medical school graduates who staff the hospital for several years as they learn specialties such as emergency medicine, internal medicine and family medicine

Deep Dives

A Trip to the Airport / Digitized Wayfinding

Airports are logistics-centric data fiends. Flights are constantly being routed and rerouted. The showcase of data is an integral part of the experience. So when screen critical to the traveler's experience fail, you take notice. And when it happens over and over…

What is Integration Testing?

On June 17th, HBO accidentally sent out an email meant for only internal developer audiences. This email was an integration test, confirming that the code was running as intended. Except, they sent it out to everyone... by an intern.