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 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
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.
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.
It's funny because the NYT currently has a policy of never saying anything positive about the current president (as in the editor has said this in writing), for the sole reason that they're mad he hasn't given them an interview yet.
