“Hey Steve why are you so concerned about making Grand Army Plaza safer?” “Oh no reason”

The bottleneck isn't model size, it's data. And pooling pays off: adding one collection made the model better at collections it had never seen. Every institution that contributes makes the shared model better for everyone. I'd love to see this kind of thing built by the GLAM sector!

Say, for example, if we had 3 examples of labeled city directory data from every state in the US, we could easily train a generic city directory parser! (I’m actually working on this, and I’ll have it done relatively soon, but @danielvanstrien.bsky.social’s point holds in so many other cases!)

I cannot urge you strongly enough to spend a random evening every now and then hand-transcribing 150 year old city directories from where you live, because you will find out that an inventor from 1876 lived around the corner from you!

Well, it was bound to happen, and it did: Claude just explained #IIIF to me like I was 5 years old.

I get to spend a percentage of my time working on the Revolution Crossroads project, and there’s some great stuff coming down the pike!

Calling library and general GLAM data people 📜📚: If you were looking for training data related to historical city directories, where would you look? I'm considering fine-tuning a small GLAM model to parse 19th and early 20th century city directories, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel!

I did this with Emily Wilson’s Odyssey when my kid was in the NICU for 30 days. Not sure the kiddo cared what I was reading given they were -2 months old, but I can confirm it was a fun version to read out loud

Over the weekend I built a prototype data explorer for the 1921 edition of the Tulsa city directory, which was published just a few months before the Tulsa Race Massacre: hadro.github.io/tulsa-city-d...

NEW PIGEON WHO DIS besties, THE CITY is now The City Reporter extra extra read all about it!

Can an LLM agent help me with all the "class action notice" emails I get and wake me up if there's ever actually a genuine payout for the various ways technology companies have violated my rights in recent years?

Built a useful GLAM model this week: flags blank index cards before expensive OCR. Cheap, scales, adapts. IMO the technical barrier is now very low, the main one is knowing how. So I wrote this up as a chapter: danielvanstrien.xyz/ai-patterns-for-glam/patterns/index-card-classifier.html

My 2yo was really grooving to St Thomas when it came on the radio this AM. Only later did I realize why all the inter-segment music buttons were by Sonny Rollins. RIP to one of the true greats.

Maybe if we went back to the era where license plates were printed in annual indexes along with your name and home address, there’d be more accountability for drivers running over pedestrians E.g., digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/0b4ed4...

Thanks so much for putting "The Case for Boring AI" right up front! I've been carrying that banner for a long time -- but just in conversations and meetings -- so now I have this chapter and amazing book-in-progress to link to.

I’m working on a data explorer for some mid-19th century travel guides, based on the output of my Directory Pipeline tool, and I’m really jazzed about how it’s coming along!

Angine de Poitrine is playing in Washington, D.C. the week of the #AI4LAM Fantastic Futures conference! Who wants to go with me?!!! #FF2026 www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ssi...

It’s her day

We parsed 3.6 million historical names with 96% accuracy by moving away from expensive frontier models to fine-tuned Qwen 3.5 models. We also found that switching our output format from JSON to YAML dramatically increased stability.

Pigeons are (deservedly) having a bit of a swing back from the “rats with wings” disparagement era, but I’m so, so psyched for the “bats are good, actually” renaissance 🦇

Everyone wants to live in Roku City, but I woke up last night and couldn't get "Roku Suburb" out of my brain so now you have to witness an approximation of it

This was stunning when I saw it 12.5 years ago, and remains a stunning and elegant use of geo and viz tools today!

“Neat things on the Web” IMO had its heyday from like 2005-2012ish, but there are still gems appearing like this

Try this one weird trick: elect a mayor who doesn’t despise the actual work of being mayor

No shade to this Victorian chabot effort, but one of the main reasons libraries themselves aren’t doing this left and right is that the general public would be stunned at how casually racist/misogynist/etc every LLM along these lines would be without *extensive* post-training/alignment

Teach your kids about subway signaling and interlockings at home before they learn it from someone else on the playground

I'm fascinated by digitized historical directories, and I'm a big #IIIF booster, so naturally I spent some recent evenings building the tool I wanted to see in the world: a "Data Explorer" view of 12 brewery directory guides from 1896 to 1918: hadro.github.io/brewery-guid...

A lot of great posts recently on this topic of "vibe coding as enabler," including the two linked here. For me it's manifested as a way to scratch a digital project itch I've had for a decade, a data explorer for a set of Brewery directories from 1899 - 1918: hadro.github.io/brewery-guid...

One of the genuinely beautiful things about local journalism taken seriously is that it gives you daily views into things that people love about this city that are different from the things you already love about the city

a few years ago I went out for a walk, and ended up walking from Fort Greene to the Verrazano Bridge on 4th Ave. Then walked all the way home up 5th. About 13 miles all told. A++, would totally advocate dropping everything some random days and just going on Extra Long Walks

Another idea: one model coding, another set of models criticising/critique-ing with how they would have done it or how it can be improved and feeding back. Get them to document/log to a file all actions and comments. Interesting for model interaction.

Are there people in digital scholarship/digital humanities looking at something like "adversarial vibe coding"? I'm thinking 2 or 3 folks trying to tackle the same core problem, using LLM assisted tools, and then a post-hoc assessment not just of effectiveness, but comparative strategies, etc.

Calling all technologists, artists and other creative visionaries: The Library of Congress has opened the call for the next Innovator in Residence! Apply by 2pm ET April 10 newsroom.loc.gov/news/library...

“I wonder if it made the deadline for the print edition…” “Oh.”

18 Photographs to Rekindle Your Love of Massive NYC Snowstorms hellgatenyc.com/18-photograp...

Don’t threaten me with a good time

The question of whether to re-OCR old digitization outputs has been a hard question for libraries to answer many years, but the combination of lower costs and substantially improved outputs is probably tipping the scales in favor of reprocessing soon for many digitized collections, IMO.

As any article about antisocial neighbors who refuse to pick up their dog feces must obviously do, this article ends with a discussion of Kant’s categorical imperative

I would like to add an entry here I like to call "bodega dinner": make box mac & cheese as directed (Kraft or Annie's, or whatever). Slice an avocado, add it to your mac & cheese. Get a can of those La Morena pickled jalapeños. Put a ton of those on top. Eat, and enjoy the $$ you saved!

Let a thousand @hellgatenyc.com s bloom.

Question for urban planner/policy people: are there any examples of cities quasi-formally marshaling volunteer efforts for things like clearing snow from curb cuts, clearing storm drains in downpours, etc.?

There is a finely choreographed ballet of industrial machinery and infrastructure that, against all apparent odds, keeps this city from descending into chaos

“While Manhattan has been in the spotlight, local trips taken by people in outer boroughs and suburbs — places home to many of congestion pricing’s most vociferous critics — have reclaimed the most travel time.”

Can you imagine being so mad about a bike lane that you bribe a mayor’s deputy to stop the bike lane, but the administration you bribed is so ineptly corrupt that your bribery is incrementally covered by excellent local journalism for years after you first got mad about the bike lane?

The number of those major crimes in the city all fell sharply last year — with some plunging to their lowest levels in modern recorded history. How much attention should New Yorkers pay to figures like these? Here's what to know:

“Literally had to take the earbuds out and pause the radio news broadcast about a riot in progress at the Capitol to get the best news of my life.” Ha! Now that I think about it, this is also a solid metaphor advocating for logging off in general, isn’t it

This is what happens when you elect a guy who actually bikes instead of a guy who double parks in a bike lane sideways.

Around this time 5 years ago today, I found out that my kid would finally be coming home after 30 days in the NICU. Literally had to take my earbuds out and pause the radio news broadcast about a riot in progress at the Capitol to get the best news of my life. Unforgettable day, indeed.

“This low death rate, in turn, contributes to New York’s high life expectancy, which according to provisional data reached 83.2 years in 2024, about 4 years higher than the national average.” Move to NYC, live longer!