freeways, media keys, and slang
gm legends
Today: a live LA traffic camera playing itself as music, a Mac fix for the play button hitting the wrong app, and 308 Japanese slang words your textbook wouldn't touch.
The 101 Plays Itself — Five lanes of LA highway turned into an instrument
The 101 Plays Itself is a live Caltrans camera pointed at the southbound 101 in Studio City, where every car that crosses the line plays a note, so what you're listening to is whoever happens to be driving through Studio City at that exact moment, with the music assembled in your browser as they go past. It sounds a bit like a theremin under glass, which is a strange thing for five lanes of LA freeway to sound like, and considerably calmer than anyone who has sat in that traffic would expect. There's no use for it whatsoever, which is sort of the point, and I've had it running in a tab since I started writing this.
Arcjet — Your agents stopped answering and started doing
(sponsored)Your agents call tools, write to databases and move money, so a wrong answer is now a wrong action, which is a considerably worse meeting. Arcjet runs policy before every LLM call, tool call, query and API request: prompt injection, sensitive data, bots, rate limits, spend quotas, and your own rules in Rego on top. It reads the OpenTelemetry you already emit, so switching it on is one environment variable, no code changes and nothing to deploy. Each check also reads the earlier steps in the same workflow, so an agent's tenth action gets judged against the first nine and not on its own. JavaScript, Python and Go SDKs all at 1.0, agent framework guards included, free tier to start on.
SmartPause — The play/pause key, finally aimed at what's playing
SmartPause sorts out the thing where you tap play/pause to stop a YouTube video and Apple Music opens instead, which happens because macOS sends that key to whatever it last remembers rather than whatever is currently making noise. Yasin's fix is to ask Core Audio which app is actually outputting sound and send the command there, and if two things are playing at once, one press switches between them and a double press pauses. It's free, open source, lives in the menu bar and asks for a single permission, and it's a fairly small fix for something that's been quietly irritating me for about ten years.
YABAI — Real Japanese slang, one giant word at a time
p>YABAI is 308 Japanese slang words on big typographic cards, the ones textbooks leave out and group chats run on entirely, and each one comes with a meaning, a real example and a vibe check so you know whether it's safe anywhere, friends only, or something to handle carefully. Yuichi is a solo developer in Japan who kept meeting people who had studied for years and still couldn't follow a group chat, and he deliberately left out the streaks and the tests, so there's nothing in it built to make you feel guilty about missing a day. Everything is written in Japanese first and then translated into 13 languages, and where a word's origin is genuinely disputed, yabai itself being the obvious example, the app just says that nobody agrees.
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