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.
I have been getting into Cate Hall’s book [4], You Can Just Do Things, and I appreciate the discussion on agentic foundation, but it’s just that she means the other agentic than the agentic engineering everyone else is talking about these days.. For Cate, being agentic is from the human perspective about your agency. There is this song, by this dutch band De Staat, “Make Way For the Passenger”, [1] where the music video is a POV of a motorcyclist, riding alongside a few other motorcycling buddies. Then the music crescendos and we see the POV rider gets t-boned by a truck, and wipes out. Then the video rewinds to the beginning, while the music keeps its original forward orientation. The lyrics now are “live fast, die young. THis ride will ride on. This life will die on.” And now, the video direction goes forwards again, and the crescendo plus crash sequence is replayed right until the impact when the screen goes dark.
No One Knows Fun anecdote, watching the AI Doc, how I became an Apocoloprimist. (Which btw really is in the samw spirt of film titles for films as Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), directed by Stanley Kubrick and perhaps To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar ). The Director slash interviewer asks everyone what will happen. There is the Existential Risk tribe and the Accelerationist tribe. Also the movie is sponsored by Tristan Harris who is bipartisan here. (Raskin as well).
Is decisioncrime the new thoughtcrime? It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step. This above is the part of 1984 when Winston Smith begins again to reenter thohght. Decisioncrime I find myself –like many others Im sure– deciding less, by outsourcing them to a SlopBot. I must have written almost these very words many times already here, but now I have a new word for the phenomenon of not being allowed to decide.
Hmmm There can often be overwhelm in a day to day, that prevents us from enjoying doing work even if we actually like the work. The secret out-of-office test. I have realized a kind of hack long ago that if i toke a day off, i could open up my computer and work at a more relaxed pace and derive way more joy joy than if other people knew i was working.
Going back to [1], from writing [2], i think in the conversation between DHH and Lex Fridman, they identify a sweet spot for swarms. Safe side So never using parallel agents, on the one hand, is playing it safe. You work iteratively with one agent on the task at hand. The premise is you likely dont know exactly ehat you want or necessarily what you need, at least when youre in the fog of war. For sure you have your own plan for your project, half in your head, half in markdown and a third half you discussed with others and proceeded to forget ðŸ˜. But this is just a plan for your sanity, and would be useless to give to your agent because that would be a fool’s errand. And any way, you are still multitasking, becouse you ore still juggling many commitments, but you are not using multiple harnesses within the scope of any one of them.
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
