Longer-form posts about whatever I'm exploring.
I had a bike commute where I happened to join the 2026 May 3rd 5 borough bike tour1. I was curious how much overlap I had. The below is an overlay output from a vibe coded ChatGPT session, extracting the overlay data using gpx from my strava data and gpx from the bike tour that looks like is here2. So in my mind it felt like 5 miles. And looks like it was about 5.92 miles.
Recently, myself and the rest of NYC went through a cold spell and news outlets reported2 the 13 day stretch of sub-zero weather, ending Feb 6th, was not longer than a 16 stretch in 1881. And this was shorter than a 1963 stretch, but tying a 2018-01-13 streak. But this recent winter sure felt extreme. I know there is a recency bias, but I figured, why not also compare the area under the curve too. So I ranked the coldest 14-day stretches, using available data of the past decade. And then tried to visualize the spans of the coldest years too.
Email forwarding mystery solved Feeling several facepalms now that my michal@piekarczyk.xyz email finally forwards to my hey.com email inbox. After several sessions of tweaking, the answer was low tech! Registrar forwarding Originally, I setup mail forwarding on my domain registrar. Only $5 a year, okay why not. After proving to my registrar I owned my hey email, I was all set, but tests yielded silence. I spent several chat sessions with a support engineer at my registrar. He pointed out I was missing SPF and DKIM records for my custom domain and so he added those. Those have nothing to do with delivering mail to my address and only help to authenticate mail sent from my domain, but I figured what the heck let’s try something. That did not work.
Life’s a garden, can you dig it? That is what a colleague of mine had said very often when we worked together, about how you need to put time and effort into stuff. You know, get your hands dirty ! Picking up my shovel Today I finally took a first step to trying out this digital gardening concept on Maggie Appleton’s blog0. I came across back on haha I don’t know why but on 2025-07-04 , I guess it was a kind of independence day in my brain, from the march of chronology.
Came back from a flight from New Delhi , Monday morning, that left New Delhi just after midnight and 16 hours later arriving in New York around 5:30 am. And so far today, Thursday morning, I feel kind of fine, not really jet lagged, in the sense of wanting to wake or sleep at odd hours. The specific strategy I did in attempting to align meal time and sleep time with the destination time zone was to fast the day of the flight until lunch time arrival at my destination. It would have been ideal if I was able to sleep during the red eye though not doing so was also perhaps fine since by the time I crashed on Monday at around 19:00, I had about 16 + 16 + 12 = 44 hours of sleep pressure in the tank. And then when I slept for basically 12 hours, waking at 7 am on Tuesday, and getting the morning sun, I was basically back in my rhythm. And so far, sleep on Tuesday night and Wednesday night was pretty okay.
Fleeting notes and thoughts that might take shape later.
Note on creating this image Original prompt to Chat GPT Realistic Image of someone in shorts pulling a pocket out, inverting it, revealing a small hole the pocket lining has. They are of the facial expression sort of like “hide the pain harry”. They are holding a slightly screen cracked telephone in their other hand. This image has a second vertical pane as well, on the right. This pane is further split into top and bottom, the same person shows they are putting now their phone into a thin hat, and their mood is like neutralish. Now the last bottom pane here, we see them half way, putting their thin hat, that visibly has the geometry of a phone rectangle , into their pocket. Now their facial expression is “clever” . And there is also a thin frame at the top where a title reads “Hat Pocket” The panes, arranged, are like this ,
so I got a kind of an interesting thought about what is a good benefit from AI by listening to this interview about how AI is making our education system dumber because people are cheating. So the people in the interview are talking about how students are cheating when they are writing, but at minute 15 one of the guests talks about the defense as a style of proving that you know some material as an interesting way of my passing the cheating, which is in writing, and I think he’s out to something.
Why are the AI capabilities discussions so polarizing? People either see current AI as a net negative or net positive. But the gap is a chasm. Well ok maybe there are people who are uncertain too. Okay maybe it is task specific. But the edges are extremes. Why? I suspect the split aligns, along whether believe in planning. On the one hand, yes there are many AI aided workflows that produce very stable reliable outcomes. And that side is growing. But some people see the billion dollar single person start up around the corner.
Image notes Original Prompt Lets create a realistic image of a bunch of dogs in a parking lot, where there is maybe one or two cars in bad shape and the dogs are just visibly barking , to each other at random birds , at thr cars, or off frame . Everything is super real looking , but lets add in some small “bark” “woof” words near the dogs that are vocalizing
Thinking this brilliant Balaji Srinivasan ism is that merging is hard . I think he meqnt it broadly, including with a merge in traffic patterns and companies and ideas. I wonder if he had code in mind. Linus Torvalds decided to build a version control system that made it easier to fork and code but if not used cautiously, you will spend an afternoon resolving merge conflicts. Maybe blindly merging and letting tests save you is like trusting an LLM tool to write code for you? But kind of that’s the thing, trusting an LLM’s diff is accepting a merge in a way and merging is hard.
an interlude to having better grasp of an unwieldly photo situation
This project is a reboot of an earlier project predicting bicycle ride share riders destinations.
This is a simple personal time tracker built with clojure, aws lambda and dynamodb, inspired by Laura Vanderkam’s “168 Hours” book
