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 tried out this1 cool tool for extracting amazon kindle notes. It is way better than emailing myself a pdf of notes like I had done in the past. Then I had some script I lost for converting from pdf to markdown. This project just pulls directly from amazon2 which I didn’t even know was a place your notes go! I used this bookmarklet tool from Prime Radiant Inc and pulled my notes, but then I tried looking at my kindle Clippings file directly also, which looks like is even easier.
Augmenting your intelligence feels like a high. It’s a powerful drug. It feels thrilling and amazing when you use it but when the high wears off there are racoons in your kitchen eating your trash and you are half dressed sleeping on the floor. You have a headache. You have to go to work now and actually do work. But all you can think of is the next high. And if you get to day dreaming about your next dose, then that helps fulfill one of the attributes of addiction. The other is if it interferes with your ability to fulfill your role at work. Are you at the point where you can no longer function at work without using? And how are your relationships. Are people commenting on you spending a lot of money on your new ehhem activity?
We talk about scaling laws have slowed down as they apply to large language models, but we used to have the same conversations about organizations. If you increase the size of a deep neural network, into the terabytes number of parameters, it has been shown over the last handful of years, you get some exceptional results. But either because of a data ceiling – as the AI snake oil book authors describe wrt predictive models – or some other constraint, foundation models pivoted away from generalized models to heuristic routing to more specialized models and to agentic real world action at a distance, getting out of that artificial metaphorical arm chair.
Reading Tanya’s Staff Engineers path1 and also yesterday hearing Take Two CEO interview2 on Gen AI. Strauss Zelnick saying, from his game company perspective, hits are always novel. And Gen AI produces what is derivative. Dont expect to get creativity out of an LLM basically. This helps to better direct the plasma cutter, the coding harness, to a tighter subset of problems. Or the better analogy is what are the nails, when youre holding the code gen shaped hammer. ( I also discussed this here 3).
Since I have been using fuzzy find fzf1 lately, switching to fzf for reverse shell search2, I was wondering hey can I use this for switching to a chrome tab? With a super quick trial and error session with ChatGPT, I have an Applescript answer to this question, below. So this works really well for me so far. Will try it out a bit more before adding it to my ~/.bash_profile. But pretty game changing for now.
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
