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.

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  Git Lfs Poke May 9, 2026

  While I was reviewing my git lfs based logseq markdown backup, I noticed a git lfs inconsistency. So git lfs fsck reported 339 .PNG files as pointer: unexpectedGitObject: "assets/IMG_4942.PNG" (treeish 53f01b6616262c6e9bcb6eabb3cc11cb298fab1c) should have been a pointer but was not, even though when I looked at my .gitattributes I did see *.PNG filter=lfs diff=lfs merge=lfs -text. The numbers suggested my .PNG however was not on my git-lfs. $ git lfs ls-files |wc -l 1715 and

• optionity and constraints May 5, 2026

  Settling on Procrastination Having options and constraints is good in moderation. Sort of a twist on explore and exploit here. I fall in line with the thinking behind Tim Urban’s Monkey Mind TED talk [2]. Hold out until we know [1] just the right amount of information to proceed, not a second less or longer. Feels chaotic though! I remember I had a coworker who was all about “scope creep man, watch out for that!” His preference was for seeking comfort-in-constraints. Like business, as usual.

• To do or not to do May 4, 2026

  Drowning in information. Is this a low hanging fruit for LLMs that is close to being solved? When I first encountered How to Take Smart Notes [3], offering up Luhmann’s lost art of the slip box, I thought this was the way. Luhmann created notes on primary sources he read like books or papers, but added links to them from topics as the connections seemed to make sense. He did it all on index cards filed in drawers that were hyperlynked manually but this made him a prolific writer still.

• From the Trenches May 2, 2026

  Riffing off of , https://michal.piekarczyk.xyz/note/2026-03-04-prompt-driven-development/ , and the famous Do Learn Show Loop , and also the ODSC conference I just attended and also squarely on a few topics Nate B Jones has been covrring lately on career visibility , much extending what I think Steve Huynh has introduced me to with his brag docs a few years ago, because work iterates and becauase everyone loves a story, especially interviewers, we should extend the STAR and brag doc styles to be more punctuated, more colorful, still as accurate as possible.

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  ODSC Notes May 1, 2026

  I just finished a trip to attend the ODSC conference in Boston, leaving without really understanding where we are on the hype cycle of Agentic AI . But on the flight back, I read on article2 where Rogé Karma was walking back the stance he had about the AI bubble given new revenue data. The conference gave me a lot of confidence that regardless of what benefit agent AI will ultimately have, there was now no doubt that companies and individuals who do not upskill will fill behind in one way or another. But the article put down some numbers about the new revenue that Anthropic, open AI cursor and the data center companies they rely on, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Core weave, were now recently experiencing, taking them perhaps, out of bubble territory.