michal.piekarczyk.xyz

Longer-form posts about whatever I'm exploring.

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  Coldest Feb 15, 2026

  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.

• Looking Forwards Feb 7, 2026

  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.

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  Gardening time Dec 28, 2025

  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.

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  Skip the Jetlag Dec 11, 2025

  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.

• Something is not Tracking Dec 10, 2025

  Recently I went on a trip to India where so much was going on I stopped using my meal tracking. And on this trip the other thing that happened was that half the time, I was in a plane, waiting for a plane, or on a bus –or on the back of a Maruti Suzuki offroad Jimny– or otherwise sedentary. And yet, after the brief 10 day trip, I carved off an inch and a half off my waist and dropped over 6 pounds on the scale. (Side note, I know that “intra-day” variability can be high, because I have personally seen a reset of 5 pounds , within a day’s worth of eating, answering the call of nature and exercising, and so on, but “inter-day” variability, should be lower, when you weigh-in at a consistent time of day).

Fleeting notes and thoughts that might take shape later.

• you grep Apr 12, 2026

  I recently1 discovered ugrep, and I have benefited a lot in using this to search my logseq journals. But recently I noticed I was getting less results and also confirmed some misses. My specific strange issue was that if I pointed directly to my miss, ug found it but not otherwise. I was consulting with microsoft copilot about this mystery. running into a weird ugrep issue where, ug -%% 'some blah' /some/foo/path , comes up dry , but if I am specific ug -%% 'some blah' /some/foo/path/more/specific/file.py , then I get results. Is there some index that needs to be poked for rebuilding?

• to done Apr 7, 2026

  This person [1] discussing gping for a walk and breathing to combat overthinking. Also harnessing the Tim Ferris “how can this be if it were easy?” What I also like, for a close relative to over thinking, over-emphasizing, over-valuing , the impact , of not a decision say but a upcoming event. The trick I find, is to discount its importance or better just pretend it has already happened. I know it is similzr to what Michael Phelps was known for doing, mentally viewing the tape literally linearly of a swim meet. I think focusing specifically at the end , and how good that feels, helps me to keep myself in that state even before it’s over.

• Random Colloquialism Mar 22, 2026

  Originally posting1, here are some thoughts from reading this article2, on random variables on how they are not. The author addresses this quote , “Why random variables are neither random nor variables” Summarizing, the author would prefer I think “random variables” were renamed as “probabilistically deterministic functions”. or maybe more verbosely, “probabilistically deterministic functions mapping uncertainty to known possible outcomes”. The argument being, that, “random variables” are not variables because they are not single numbers but really intended to describe how a probabilistic distribution , say, maps to outcomes. I like that the author refers to these outcomes as “shadow numbers” 🙂. (And by extension I like the point that, just semantically, a number, “14” , is not random even if it was generated through a quantum event, because by definition the mapping function is what is random and not the numbers they produce).

• Grass is Greener Mar 20, 2026

  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood I was reading Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, because I’ve been looking into writing about my whys. I have a document penning down whenever inspiration hits. It has the “path of mastery”, like Dan Pink might add , the “path of impact”, where I see Andrew Ng in my mind whenever I write that, the “path of curiosity”, which is a pet I have that must be fed or else we have Jack a dull boy. There’s also the “path of making others go ooooh thats cool or thats funny” , which I can never really help myself not visiting if I trip into it.

• Design and try Mar 19, 2026

  Just perusing Gayle’s [1] intro. I am wondering about will Gayle write about when is a good time to transition from thinking about and designing a solution to a problem, and writing some code to test things out. i Think this interview style does actually relate to what lately i think about that design skills are really important to save time. But also, to be specific sometimes you can write some quick code that can really be faster than white boarding. but agree that your compute in your head can save you lots of time from going down the wrong path just by your intuition and not because you have actually worked out why.