Fascinating history of the NYC grid. Original plan was drafted in 1811 and took nearly 100 years to implement. Quirks like Broadway running diagonally date back to Native American trails, which leads to the iconic Flatiron.
Another neat one: I had GPT-6 Astra build a model of a famous never-built building, Boullée’s 1784 Centotaph. There were only a few black and white sketches to work with, along with a description.
It built a full Blender model & directed a dramatic narrated walkthrough of it.
Pynchon wrote a musical in 1958 about a dystopian future where the IBM Master Machine runs the world, all of Texas is a datacenter, and locals fight the machine expansion. Fun read, and crazy parallels to AI narratives of today.
An apt day to remember that Dolly Parton once recorded a cover of Stairway to Heaven - and, in defiance of every moral law in the universe, she absolutely owned it.