“Moveable Type” to end 17-year run in The New York Times’s lobby | Hacker News Reader

“Moveable Type” to end 17-year run in The New York Times’s lobby

nytco.com

101 pointsdonohoe25 comments

Not being familiar with the installation I found this video super informative: https://youtu.be/WfZQf1983iw?si=wvh-GIj6XIEwWGlA

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Not being familiar with the installation I found this video super informative: https://youtu.be/WfZQf1983iw

For the actual movable type, there’s a great documentary called Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu about the final day the NY Times used Linotype:

https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu

I watched this again recently and was struck by how the last few lines of narration land very differently now.

I work in this building - it’s a wonderful experience walking through it every morning, and will be sad to see it go!

I thought this was going to be a post about New York Times deprecating use of the Movable Type blogging platform. I was wrong but it brought back some good memories!

Genuinely, same! And I knew intrinsically that that was wrong (The Times uses or used WordPress in some capacity), but I thought “maybe it was a weird straggler” — but nope. Turns out the art installation I’ve seen countless times had a name.

I had the same thought! Interestingly the blog software moveabletype is still alive and kicking, which I did not know before now...

https://www.movabletype.org/

The same artists created a similar piece called Listening Post, which I love: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rzfnndd9fCk

I built a much more basic web-based version of it, using Twitter posts, a few years ago. It stopped working when the Twitter API became paid-for, but I screen-recorded a demo of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaRenG89G9g

Holy moly that's like $300k in vacuum fluorescent displays (probably much more since they're exceptionally large). Those things are not cheap.

Well, in that case the good news is that they're being returned to the artists

It makes me wonder how difficult it would be to create a shader in order to replace everything with LED or even eInk displays. The cost is certainly a large factor as print news suffers more and more capital depletion.

I did not know that general raster vfd's were a thing, I have only ever seen the application specific ones. And without giving it much thought, figured that was the limits of the tech.

> Before finalizing their design, Rubin and Hansen spent two years observing and interviewing…

I wish we could have this much attention to detail more often for software projects.

The lobby had public access all this time?

When there are not protests, yeah.

ah, not the blogging platform.

Still around but you don’t see it much now. There was a GPL version and a fork but WordPress ate a lot of MT market share.

Notably still used to publish daringfireball, but yeah it’s certainly not common to see these days: https://daringfireball.net/colophon/

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