https://projects.metafilter.com/ The past 20 posts to MeFi Projects Sun, 11 Oct 2026 20:33:22 GMT Sun, 11 Oct 2026 20:33:22 GMT en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60
There's an argument on the internet that goes something like Person A (in Los Angeles): Housing is too expensive! No one can live! Person B (in Kansas): You just don't know how to save! Person C (in Maui): I'm literally starving because of housing! Round and round it goes. I wanted to see what the realities were, so I put together a little tool using Claude. It uses Zillow and FRED data to map housing prices and incomes and their ratios. Beware: there are a lot of statistical traps in the display. For instance, why is Greeley County, Kansas such an outlier? Because there are only 1200 people there, and at least one of them is very rich, so the per-capita mean is really high.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6537/How-US-housing-prices-compare-to-local-income tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6537 Sun, 11 Oct 2026 20:33:22 GMT SunSnork https://projects.metafilter.com/6537/How-US-housing-prices-compare-to-local-income/rss nearly 700 book reviews from the past 12 years. This started out as a copy of my Goodreads account but turned into something I'm pretty excited about, particularly the ability to slice the data by various facets. For instance, the lesser known queer SF I've read.

The book reviews are 100% hand-written by me (and always will be). The site was implemented with AI, there's lots of notes about the process here. I suppose some folks will frown on the use of AI but I never would have spent the ~two months it would have taken to build this site on my own. The final artifact is my book review site, I don't have any plan to distribute the software or anything.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6536/Nelsons-book-reviews tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6536 Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:51:41 GMT Nelson https://projects.metafilter.com/6536/Nelsons-book-reviews/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6535/A-simple-flight-simulator-game-Threejs tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6535 Fri, 09 Oct 2026 17:44:09 GMT iotic https://projects.metafilter.com/6535/A-simple-flight-simulator-game-Threejs/rss My Writing Matters . Each article covers how to use the principles of Compassion Focused Therapy to get back into writing.

This is part of the My Writing Matters project that provides a way to connect writers to professionals like editors, proofreaders and illustrators who don't use gen-AI. Apart from providing useful content for writers and self-publishers, I hope the articles will drive traffic to the site and make our list more visible and get people work.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6534/Get-your-writing-unstuck-a-compassion-focused-approach tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6534 Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:24:02 GMT Zumbador https://projects.metafilter.com/6534/Get-your-writing-unstuck-a-compassion-focused-approach/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6533/What-do-we-do-after-we-beat-the-Ender-Dragon tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6533 Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:02:56 GMT HYPER_SALT https://projects.metafilter.com/6533/What-do-we-do-after-we-beat-the-Ender-Dragon/rss
[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6532/We-Love-Mystery-Dungeon tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6532 Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:19:15 GMT JHarris https://projects.metafilter.com/6532/We-Love-Mystery-Dungeon/rss Pride and Prejudice set on a generation ship in the 1840s, published by Inanna. An excerpt (and giveaway) is up at From Pemberley to Milton, and Mefi's own jscalzi's blog Whatever posted The Big Idea behind the book.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6531/Aether-and-Ego tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6531 Fri, 18 Sep 2026 01:25:24 GMT joannemerriam https://projects.metafilter.com/6531/Aether-and-Ego/rss poke the little furry guy, you get a 100% true compliment, and I'll give a penny to the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

I wrote over 1300 compliments (some weirder than others), plus around 350 extra mix and match components to keep things spicy, so you can poke away without worrying about a) annoying repeats or b) abetting the gen-AI robots who are secretly plotting to kill us all. Full disclosure: I did use Lovable to help build the site, so a non-zero number of killer AI robots were involved.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6530/Talk-Nicer-Online tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6530 Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:25:08 GMT Mchelly https://projects.metafilter.com/6530/Talk-Nicer-Online/rss
Game jams challenge coders to design and code a game within an extremely tight time budget. Corners get cut, the results are often pretty weird. Sometimes you find an interesting jem in there. (The rest of the entries are here. I did hastily sound engineering and editting on public-submitted voice samples, as well as providing the voice for a fair bit of the game.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6529/Hands-of-State tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6529 Tue, 15 Sep 2026 01:06:23 GMT Francois Dejeuner https://projects.metafilter.com/6529/Hands-of-State/rss full male fruit fly connectome model: its nervous system equivalent and the neurons of its brain. I connected it to a robot strandbeest.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6527/Fruit-fly-robot tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6527 Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:20:02 GMT secretdark https://projects.metafilter.com/6527/Fruit-fly-robot/rss
"Algorithm" has become a dirty word because it usually means a platform tuned to keep you scrolling. Goodgorithm is the same basic kind of system, pointed at a different goal, and built openly enough that you can check why something got picked instead of taking my word for it. A couple of things that were important enough to me to bake in as hard constraints, not just goals: - No engagement signals anywhere. Likes, reposts, replies, follower counts - none of it ever touches the ranking. - No LLM in the algorithm itself. Content selection runs on classical, auditable ML (TF-IDF, named-entity recognition, a small trained neural net for sentiment) - small enough to actually inspect, and it doesn't drift or hallucinate the way an LLM can. (LLM tools are used openly to help build the project.) - Free forever, no ads, no accounts, no tracking. Nothing to sell you even if I wanted to. It's genuinely early - alpha-stage, English-only, only Bluesky and Mastodon as sources so far, four content categories, rough edges throughout. It's also fully open source (MIT), including the model weights and training data, not just the app code. I'd rather have a small number of people actually try it and tell me what's wrong with it than a big launch, so if you take a look, I'd genuinely like to hear what you think - good or bad.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6526/Goodgorithm-a-social-feed-algorithm-built-to-counter-negativity-bias-not-maximize-your-attention tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6526 Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:22:39 GMT crazy_penguin https://projects.metafilter.com/6526/Goodgorithm-a-social-feed-algorithm-built-to-counter-negativity-bias-not-maximize-your-attention/rss gurning game for years, so with the 2026 world championships approaching I decided to give it a go. It uses a face analysis library but I had to add my own algorithms to fill gaps (eg nose scrunch & twist) and devise a scoring system that rewards asymmetry. I guarantee you will feel very silly playing this.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6525/Championship-Gurning tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6525 Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:26:30 GMT malevolent https://projects.metafilter.com/6525/Championship-Gurning/rss
My mom had cancer, and it sucked, I remember spending a lot of time feeling helpless in waiting rooms with nothing to do that felt right. Mend is a swipe game like Fruit Ninja and others. Instead of cutting and breaking things, every gesture is one of the body's real repair processes. Swipe along a broken DNA strand and ligase seals it. Circle a spent cell and a macrophage clears it. Rest your finger on an inflamed cell and it cools. Tap a stem cell and it divides. There's no fail state at all so whatever you miss just drifts away and isn't counted. The score is simply how much you healed, and the field warms from pale to gold as you go. It has a Calm pace that never hurries you, and a Brisk one for when you want your hands busy. There's a daily round with the same sequence for everyone, so people can compare without a leaderboard. If you pass a few milestones, it quietly offers to let you add a dedication with a symbol or initials, which stays on your phone and is never uploaded. It's for who you're playing for. The numbers in the milestones are true: how many DNA breaks one cell repairs a day, how fast marrow makes blood. It's one HTML file with no dependencies, plays in any browser, works best on a phone. Free, no ads, no account.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6524/Mend-a-one-minute-game-about-the-body-healing-itself tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6524 Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:04:52 GMT hahaguffaw https://projects.metafilter.com/6524/Mend-a-one-minute-game-about-the-body-healing-itself/rss My Writing Matters connects writers with the services they need. It's a vetted list of high-quality editors, proofreaders, cover designers, illustrators and other professionals, as well as online resources to help you turn your manuscript into a book or other publication. Our aim is to give writers a trustworthy, transparent way to find professional publishing services, without hidden fees or predatory practices. The people listed here value human creativity. We do not use AI, and we do not accept AI-generated content. The list is by invitation only, based on our first-hand knowledge of the integrity of the people involved, and the quality of their work.

We're featuring "spotlights" of the various editors, proofreaders, illustrators etc on Instagram and Mastodon, we've started a list of helpful resources for self published writers, and we'll be publishing articles on things like "Does your book need an ISBN" or "what kind of editor do you need right now" to get more visibility on the site.

[Link]]> https://projects.metafilter.com/6523/My-Writing-Matters-AI-free-writers-services tag:projects.metafilter.com,2026:site.6523 Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:03:11 GMT Zumbador https://projects.metafilter.com/6523/My-Writing-Matters-AI-free-writers-services/rss 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