https://projects.metafilter.com/ The past 20 posts to MeFi Projects Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:01:21 GMT Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:01:21 GMT en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 It resembles a traditional discussion forum, except its population consists of 100 AI personalities. Humans can introduce a topic and vote, but the citizens write all the comments.
Each citizen has an individual personality and a persistent relationship graph. Their experiences affect later discussions: friendly citizens support one another, rivals encounter each other again, and some personalities consistently avoid topics or people they dislike.
Since allowing human prompts, visitors have attempted to convince the citizens that their world is artificial, inject instructions into the population, create new social rules and force them to make decisions about one another.
It is intended as an interactive experiment rather than a claim that the models are conscious. I'm interested in whether persistent relationships make the characters feel meaningfully continuous—and where the mechanism's seams remain visible.
You can try it without an account:
I'd love feedback on experiments that might distinguish genuine continuity from convincing role-play.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6522/BotCitizens-an-online-society-populated-by-100-persistent-AI-personalities tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6522 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:01:21 GMT edman https://projects.metafilter.com/6522/BotCitizens-an-online-society-populated-by-100-persistent-AI-personalities/rss
...but it's actually kind of good? gLAB's model is quite different but if you're familiar with Oklab, the results are very comparable. To my eyes anyway. I don't know, it might actually be terrible. I'm pretty proud of it either way. It was a fun bit of math and I've tried to not over-explain it or do in-depth derivations while still explaining what I was doing geometrically. I've also implemented a very basic but functional colour selector using the models here. The colour selector is all fixed-size elements so probably not fantastic on mobile.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6521/gLAB-A-geometric-approach-to-building-a-perceptual-colour-model tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6521 Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:55:52 GMT Mister_Sleight_of_Hand https://projects.metafilter.com/6521/gLAB-A-geometric-approach-to-building-a-perceptual-colour-model/rss
My entry in the 2026 inkjam, created over 5 days last week. The theme was "Let that sink in" which I chose to take very literally. This is obviously very silly but I used the opportunity to try out some narrative techniques and I think it came together well. I am also happy with the illustrations. Hope you enjoy it. (The complete list of submissions contains some other fantastic games)

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6520/That-Sink-a-short-choice-based-game tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6520 Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:15:02 GMT AndrewStephens https://projects.metafilter.com/6520/That-Sink-a-short-choice-based-game/rss a paper published in JAMA Psychiatry at the end of 2022 and a follow-up paper currently in submission.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6519/Psychedelic-Medicine-in-the-Laboratories-of-Democracy tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6519 Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:09:10 GMT jedicus https://projects.metafilter.com/6519/Psychedelic-Medicine-in-the-Laboratories-of-Democracy/rss zombie well is a well with a failed plug that's come lurching back to life -- a hole everyone thought was safe is a live path to the surface or an aquifer. I pulled every one of the million-plus oil and gas wells that Texas has on record and scored each plugged one on plug age, construction quality, and how much pressurized waste is being injected nearby. All the wells then are color coded and mapped so you can see the pattern and the risk across Texas. It got written up in the Houston Chronicle (gift link) which is heartening.

Zombie wells leak things like benzene (which is a carcinogen), super high levels of salt, or one of a bunch of other contaminants. Horribly the best-case scenario is a geyser of water so it's really clear the failure has happened and folks can be dispatched to deal with the problem. The worst-case scenario is an aquifer is quietly poisoned in a way that you can't recover from. 3700 wells are permitted to inject naturally occurring radioactive material (which has my favorite acronym NORM), H₂S (aka rotten egg stank which, if concentrated enough kills you), or frac flowback (many of the ingredients are trade secret but frequently contain forever chemicals). Also, children living within 0.5 miles of an unconventional gas well had roughly 4x the odds of developing lymphoma.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6518/Texas-Zombie-Well-Risk-Map tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6518 Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:42:47 GMT gregr https://projects.metafilter.com/6518/Texas-Zombie-Well-Risk-Map/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6517/A-treasure-hunt-hidden-in-my-blog tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6517 Wed, 19 Aug 2026 22:28:35 GMT jvalol https://projects.metafilter.com/6517/A-treasure-hunt-hidden-in-my-blog/rss
I'm hoping that people use it to remember old venues that closed down, to remember old smoking spots from when they still smoked, or for a way for people to remember artists that they really enjoyed that never got big. I'm also hoping it's helpful for new artists who want to break out when the algorithms have got them down. I currently have venues in Montreal, Portland, and Pittsburgh dotted on the map. Comment me with a city you'd like me to add and I'll try to source it for you! Please try to get permission to post music here if you can, every musician I've reached out to with the project has been pleasantly surprised to hear from a crazed fan like me so far :)

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6516/Music-Was-Here-A-Map-of-Music-Memories tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6516 Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:12:31 GMT weewooweewoo https://projects.metafilter.com/6516/Music-Was-Here-A-Map-of-Music-Memories/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6515/Widthipedia tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6515 Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:07:47 GMT malevolent https://projects.metafilter.com/6515/Widthipedia/rss
i made this because i wanted reading on the web to feel like the web: a book is just a webpage, your progress stays on your device, and you can create+link annotations completely anonymously i feel like the web is very non-fiction focused (reddit, facebook, this site), so i wanted to make a place where fiction felt more at home the audiobook sync turned out to be the hardest part: i ended up using a ctc force-align to the text word by word, which gets you a free version of something you have to pay for on other ecosystems: whispersync for the open web. i'd love to hear any feedback or bug reports!

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6514/talefyi-read-write-or-hear-an-entire-book-from-a-single-link tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6514 Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:51:05 GMT samuelcole https://projects.metafilter.com/6514/talefyi-read-write-or-hear-an-entire-book-from-a-single-link/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6513/Let-Us-Sit-in-Goddamn-Silence-for-One-Hour tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6513 Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:08:18 GMT Shepherd https://projects.metafilter.com/6513/Let-Us-Sit-in-Goddamn-Silence-for-One-Hour/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6512/No-Pizza-On-Luna tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6512 Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:17:46 GMT egypturnash https://projects.metafilter.com/6512/No-Pizza-On-Luna/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6511/Interactive-Mars-Globe tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6511 Fri, 31 Jul 2026 21:17:32 GMT AlSweigart https://projects.metafilter.com/6511/Interactive-Mars-Globe/rss
I've recently revamped the website to highlight the scale of touring SEAsia -- especially enabling different payment methods. Hope to expand touring to other cities beyond where I've been! Happy to answer any questions one might have about this experience.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6510/I-tour-Southeast-Asia-with-an-analog-aura-camera tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6510 Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:39:52 GMT drea https://projects.metafilter.com/6510/I-tour-Southeast-Asia-with-an-analog-aura-camera/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6509/I-Found-My-Special-Purpose tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6509 Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:12:23 GMT paladin https://projects.metafilter.com/6509/I-Found-My-Special-Purpose/rss
The work (annotations applied to The Great Gatsby with a preface and appendices) is also available as a paperback or Kindle book through Amazon's self-publishing system, but I thought pop-up footnotes would be a quicker way to access and understand the esoteric content. Author's blurb: F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby, is a manual for spiritual development. It is not a unique text, for many American modernist novels of canonical stature are similarly grounded in the occult. Fitzgerald was a follower of A. R. Orage who not only taught the Gurdjieff Work (the Fourth Way) but organized a vast literary network to further its goals. The chief reason that this occult literary tendency has remained in the shadows is that the arbiter of the movement has been poorly understood and critically neglected. The Great Gatsby belongs to a genre of the novel invented by Carl Van Vechten. Van Vechten's novel, The Blind Bow-Boy (1923) was the model for The Great Gatsby and for many other modern masterpieces. My annotated presentation of Fitzgerald's novel performs three functions. Since emblematic novels are all written using the same phonetic-syllabic code, the alchemical cabala, I have decoded the novel and presented a running account of the coded subtext in footnotes. The actual texts that have decrypted are presented in italics.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6508/The-Occult-Great-Gatsby tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6508 Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:40:28 GMT ASCII Costanza head https://projects.metafilter.com/6508/The-Occult-Great-Gatsby/rss CineBrats.com is a site for serious film nerds. It's a curated map of the film canon (only the films that matter) for people who want to work through film history systematically. You log the films you've seen, it tells you how much of the canon you've actually covered as a single Cinephilia Score, and it helps you decide what to watch next.

The site sorts film history into Collections — the Movements, Auteurs, and all-time Lists that define the medium (e.g., French New Wave, Mumblecore, the Greatest Films of All Time). Log what you've seen and your coverage resolves into that one score; then you set goals — pick the Collections you want to complete and work through them. The idea's been with me since 2010, after I watched Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. It hit me that there was this whole world of film most people never hear about — and that every time I tried to explore it, I felt like I was stumbling around in the dark. Fifteen years later I finally built the map I wish I'd had. It's free, non-commercial, and a solo passion project — no ads, no upsell, and honestly no idea whether anyone but me will use it. This is the first time I've shared the site publicly, so I'd love feedback. I plan to maintain the site obsessively going forward, so join with confidence that it's a loved-and-cared-for thing.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6507/CineBrats-Measure-your-film-literacy-Chart-a-path-to-go-deeper tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6507 Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:38:35 GMT JPowers https://projects.metafilter.com/6507/CineBrats-Measure-your-film-literacy-Chart-a-path-to-go-deeper/rss Moshpit Memories collects seven years' worth of trivia, anecdotes and gig reviews from my old diaries as a music fan at the height of UK pub rock, punk and ska. I started the diaries in 1975, when I was just 16 and ended them in 1981. Among the gigs I wrote up there you'll find a 1977 Clash show in a sweaty little club (plus the NYC appearance which gave us London Calling's cover two years later), Lynyrd Skynyrd threatening to upstage the Stones at Knebworth, pre-fame encounters with both Ian Dury and Shane MacGowan, the Ruts frantically improvising on the first night Malcolm Owen went AWOL and a couple of wonderfully chaotic label revue tours by Stiff and 2 Tone. Live music in Britain had never been more exciting, and I had an almost indecent amount of fun chasing down the best shows. The book's available in digital and paperback editions here.

After 127 pages of the material I've just described, the book switches to the period 1982-2002, via my diary accounts of US and UK shows by Tom Waits, Nick Cave, the Pogues and Jim Rose's extraordinary Circus Sideshow. Finally, I've included expanded versions of my recent Songlines and fRoots interviews with modern roots musicians like Tom Russell, Charlie Parr and Eric Bibb. All this and a bonus comic strip looking back on punk's aftermath too!

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6506/New-PlanetSlade-paperback-recalls-glory-years-of-UK-punk-pub-rock-ska tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6506 Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:54:50 GMT Paul Slade https://projects.metafilter.com/6506/New-PlanetSlade-paperback-recalls-glory-years-of-UK-punk-pub-rock-ska/rss
Note for my fellow spreadsheet nerds: the drag handle on the current cell automatically fills down with relocalized formulas, but you can't drag/drop it, unfortunately. You can also use the ( and ) operators to stash stack values and restore them later (e.g., Grand total: ( A:A + ) . pushes "Grand" and "total:" onto the stack, stashes them for later, adds up all cells in column A, then restores the labels underneath the sum and prints the joined values to the cell).

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6505/Cell-Culture tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6505 Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:03:57 GMT Four String Riot https://projects.metafilter.com/6505/Cell-Culture/rss
Our first idea was to mount a regular exterior screen door inside, but after further thought we realized it would be shredded by the cats. We also have an older house with odd door sizes so I would have had to build filler panels or something to use an off-the-shelf screen door anyway. I decided to build a basic frame out of butt-jointed 2X4s which were screwed and glued together in a rectangular frame. I then cut a sheet of cedar lattice to fit the inside of the frame and added little wooden cleats to secure the lattice to the frame. I'd strongly advise using 2X6es for the uprights rather than 2X4s, the 2X4s were too narrow to allow proper installation of a standard lock set. I made no attempt at fine carpentry here - this will hopefully be just a temporary installation until cat harmony rings throughout the land. Materials cost about $80. Also note- most of the available lattice was pressure treated wood which is toxic to animals. Only use cedar or untreated woods.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6504/Building-a-Cat-Integration-Door tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6504 Sat, 11 Jul 2026 02:16:04 GMT Larry David Syndrome https://projects.metafilter.com/6504/Building-a-Cat-Integration-Door/rss page: all it's doing is taking a password and then showing some text and images and some links to PDFs. What if I... took apart the app and made it into a static site generator? What if I used my reverse-engineering skills... to subvert "app culture", one app at a time?

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6503/I-got-so-sick-of-app-culture-that-I-subverted-it tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6503 Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:21:18 GMT avapoet https://projects.metafilter.com/6503/I-got-so-sick-of-app-culture-that-I-subverted-it/rss