Red Line Ashmont Train is Now Approaching

December 13th, 2023
transit
The MBTA has now fully fixed the sign issue I was complaining about! It's great:

Red Line
Ashmont Train is Now Approaching

For years I grumbled inside whenever I was approaching a station and saw the digital signs switch to "Attention passengers, the next red line train". This could signal any of:

  • 25%: My train is coming, I can catch it if I hustle.
  • 25%: I'm missing my train.
  • 50%: A train I don't care about is doing something.

If I waited the sign would switch to, for example, "to Ashmont is now approaching", but time when I'm trying to decide whether to hurry to catch a train is unusually precious!

The issue was that they were displaying a transcription of the audio announcement instead of tailoring the textual notification to the medium. Several months ago they fixed the arriving version, and recently they fixed the "approaching" version as well. Yay!

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, mastodon, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

There's no reason for software to be slow anymore

The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying that people talking about how LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly. We're not quite at the point where we want to write everythin…

via Posts on August 21, 2026

You can't join the secret inner circle of cool effective altruists

I, and a lot of other people I know, seem to believe something like this:

via Thing of Things August 11, 2026

Microfictions 2

A few more microfictions, still no LLMs.

via Evan Fields August 7, 2026

more     (via openring)