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 suspect Matt Pocock [1] , (along with Dax Raad and Peter Steinberger), is someone who sits kind of in the middle of the debate about just how much more productive coding agents can make you wrt the software development lifecycle. On one extreme is Steve yegge who is kind of declaring orchestration is here, and you need not, ever look at code again, just express your intent and the swarms[4] will manifest it. Or something [5]. Chaos theory be damned. 100x to 1000x productivity is claimed. (Holding my breath?) There are many others in this camp. I would like to understand them better.
Exploring Kelley’s benevolent noncompliance [1], has been more formally studied as goal displacement [10], exploration vs exploitation, but also creative deviance. Kelley’s take is about how organizations are kind of like functioning alcoholics, formal and goal-oriented looking on the outside, but held together by unsanctioned thankless sustainment and stewardship of the few. This paper [2] formally explores this topic–no pun intended 😆–and my initial thought is that cultivating deviant creativity is a kind of artform. Helicopter management can likely only will it into wilting.
Realizing, i have discussed the topic of llm short cuts many times, but have not mentioned how prescient the 2012 article from erik dietrich on this was. on the rise of the expert beginner, Diedtrich argues that there ore many people who fall into mediocrity because they have achieved expert status and there’s noth hing left to learn. And I suspect llms can also hold back your learning while feeding you enough positive feedback to keep you happy where you are. They are holding you back by stunting your deep learning.
When I think of swarm, I think of bees or ants, preprogrammed by millenia of evolution. Each generation, following a script built into their bee-knees and ant-bdomens. Interestingly, survival of the fittest – a quote apparently a philosopher coined after reading Origin of Species but not Darwin himself wrote – maybe doesn’t mean the best particular colony carries on, but more like the particular gene line in a particular place on Earth – so Selfish Gene.
I have had access to claude at work now for maybe two weeks now. Incidentally, I had already been using open code at home for a few weeks now at this point, so I’m wary of slot machining. I notice myself leaning into lift coding. So in data science speak, lift is the benefit above a baseline. So this can be using claude to rewrite a small piece of code based on a colleague’s PR feedback almost on the spot as opposed to perhaps waiting for some down time when I might get around to it. And I was iterating on a function, replacing it with a new one, and I found myself using claude to update the unit tests. That was really nice. Maybe I would have put off writing the unit test until later.
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
