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 don’t know what this is about yet, but that’s the point. I’m reading in [1] Rose Horowitch “The Age of Reading is Over”, a sentiment I have encountered also through Sam Harris too, but it is a good reminder to see it again. She writes that writing is the space where you realize what you actually think. She also says it is how you share this with others. This kind of also reminds me of Daniel Dennett’s thought pump but also of Socrates’s method, which elevate thoughts into reasoning. But coming back to the beginning of this idea, it’s almost like you are the first person you are trying to convince. And how is it that you don’t know what you think until you write it? Do you literally not know yet how to put it into words or are you improvising on the spot? And maybe the answer to that is in the realm of philosophy or psychology, but I think until you linearize your thought, either by speech or pen, you are only deluding yourself if you think you really know. This is very much like the Feynman line,
I’m sure recommendations from a coding harness will vary in quality with the parameters of the model and the context available, but if these are not quite right, there will likely always be some room for error. Several interesting issues today with my semantic notes search project. I was using opencode with GPT 5.5 Fast recently and I ended up with pod memory monitoring that was not taking advantage of kubernetes capabilities and a parallelism split that did not align with my cluster node cardinality.
I have been pairing with codex to add parallelization to my logseq semantic search kubernetes batch job. Codex authored this function for checking if a shard environmental variable, SHARD_INDEX, should process a particular journal date among the set of journal dates to be processed. Paraphrasing the func, to just the basic hash algo, def index_from_date(date_str, shard_count): digest = hashlib.sha256(date_str.encode("utf-8")).digest() return int.from_bytes(digest[:8], "big") % shard_count I wanted to test out of curiosity the distribution, and found it was wow pretty skewed, non uniform,
PLACEHOLDER Want to add a placeholder to this comment I started drafting on this video1 suggesting that the inability to hold the full context of a code base is the core limitation to agentic software engineering. I don’t think people have that either but we do just fine. I scrolled through the ffirst half of the comments and I couldn’t find the challenge that is on my mind here. But there was at least one commenter who pointed out, paraphrasing, that only leads on a team really have the context and most people are going to be just like LLMs, working with limited information.
Hugo suddenly serving only 404s locally while GitHub Pages worked Trying something new here. I have in this post, asked Chat GPT to turn a full troubleshooting thread into a blog post. I did not edit it–maybe except a tiny one–, because my goal was to document this particular weird problem without really spending time on writing a blogpost. Actually I think the result is pretty good, sticking very nicely to reality. It is not in my voice or my style, but that’s ok, I literally just wanted to document the thing and move on.
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
