September was another big month for my life, mostly for me offline. Another good month for bicycle riding, seeing more of the trails on Randalls and Wards Islands. The New York area has taught me a few things about islands and one of them is that they're very fungible. On a map, Randalls and Wards Islands look one one island because they're "conjoined". They were conjoined on purpose: they used to be two, with a bridge and everything. But then in 1955 the government announced they wanted to join up the islands "by allowing private contractors to dump debris within Little Hell Gate for free" (!) Photo from From City of New York Department of Parks: 28 Years of Progress, scanned by Erica Fischer (!) CC BY SA 2.0 The opposite happened with Fire Island: it was one island for a while until 2012, and Hurricane Sandy broke it back into two. Photo from USGS, PD Dump trash to combine islands, dump water from the sky to divide them. That's just how life is. .two-up{display:grid;grid-template-columns:1fr 1fr;gap:10px} Listening I watched Magnolia this month and finally got the hype around Aimee Mann. It's a little frustrating that the songs from the film aren't on And a throwback: Dusty Springfield's version of When the Love Light Starts Shining Through His Eyes. Originally recorded by the Supremes and forgive me for highlighting the blue-eyed soul version of this song but it's so driving and urgent in a way that most of the other versions aren't, it's such a good slice of that very particular rushing rhythm of the era. Reading On a meta-level: I'm getting pulled back to Instapaper from Readeck, because I rely on offline reading so often and unfortunately the Readeck iOS offline mode is unreliable. It is open source and I should contribute and in all likelihood the issue will get fixed, but in the meantime I need something to look at on the subway. Reading: I enjoyed Spiral's launch post a lot, as well as turbopuffer's post about their refactoring. Database companies in the AI-adjacent space are a nice hybrid kind of reading, still concerned with architecture and a little more grounded than a lot of the "big idea" or marketing-centric stuff that I read from AI labs. I also liked Charles Broskoski's "Personal Business" essay (one of the are.na founders). And I've been really liking reading Work by Bud Smith. Review of that soon. Otherwise The end of October will be even more packed than September for me, so if I don't post, don't worry, I'm not dead, I'm partying.

I skipped August's Recently because this summer has been relentless, mostly in the positive sense. July and August were filled with bike rides, 5K races, friends in town, life changes and logistics. For a friend's birthday, we rode the rickety Coney Island Cyclone, which was faster and more intense than I remembered it. But it's been 18 years since the last injury on the coaster, and the rider was partly at fault: good enough for me. .two-up{display:grid;grid-template-columns:1fr 1fr;gap:10px} I rode my first proper randonneuring ride: 200km (124mi) to all of the beaches around Brooklyn. It was pretty challenging, as you'd expect, but I didn't 'find my limit' for endurance, but I did find my limit in terms of how many gels & ride-nutrition packets I could consume before sugar becomes repulsive. I do still heartily endorse maple syrup packets for ride nutrition: compared to the space-age fuels that all taste like fruit or coffee, it's an identifiable substance that tastes like you'd expect. And, not pictured, but I ran a bunch of 5Ks. Haven't hit my goal this year of going sub-20, but got close in the last one - 20:15. I'm not giving up yet, because the weather is getting better and Brooklyn has a lot of 5K options. Listening Hot Creek by Duffy x Uhlmann Duffy x Uhlmann has been in my rotation for a year now and the new album has all the things I like from the combination. This and Shrunken Elvis go along well together and both have been hits at dinner parties. This album from Frances Quinlan, the frontperson of Hop Along, went under the radar, but it's so good. I've also been playing Hop Along's send album Get Disowned. I really like everything that this band has put out. It's a product of Philadelphia but I hear some of the elements that drew me to DC post-punk in the turn-on-a-dime songwriting. Get Disowned by Hop Along Watching This video, 'The surprising truth about what motivates us', is kind of an artifact of the 'Obamaverse', as one of my friends would put it. It's by Daniel Pink, a writer-speaker-self-help kind of guy, and it's accompanied by one of those realtime hand-illustrations. There are lots of reasons to tune it out as YouTube filler. Still, I thought it was pretty cool for two reasons: first, it connected directly with Andrew Kelley's video, which is the next one. And it connects with my feelings about incentives and how most simple incentives are counterproductive. And second, the drawing is real. I'm so used to the artificial version of this visual style that it took a minutes to realize that the it wasn't AI or some 'drawing hand' style of video essay, it was a real person making quite nice illustrations: specifically Andrew Park. Found myself nodding along to every bit of this interview with Andrew Kelley. His values and motivation are so nice to encounter in this current phase of tech. He's kind of a role model, which is something that I used to find trite in my early career but I'm coming around to. As Adam Neely pointed out in his video, a lot of the people heavily using Suno (an AI music tool) could not cite any role models, and defaulted to a sort of enclosed, self-centered stance. I see this with engineering too: it's hard to discern what values or talents the people at 'the forefront of the industry' have that I want. Finding personal qualities as something to imitate instead of desires and possessions (cue the segue into Girard's Memetic theory) seems like a better way to live. Reading What strengthens a relationship? Almost always, it is personal investment. Perhaps an AI agent might be better at predicting what my father will want for his birthday than I am, but it definitionally cannot give him my time and consideration. Love is not just a feeling; it is a way of paying attention. Elizabeth Lopatto in The Verge picks apart Mark Zuckerberg's weird, sad view of humanity. It's worth a read even just for the incredible opening anecdote. Home of the titular 100 foot waves. Which existed when I was a kid of course, but the larger world didn’t know about them yet. They were our secret. My grandfather and I would walk to the lighthouse and watch the waves hitting against the cliffs and he’d tell me that these were the biggest waves in the world. I didn’t believe him, of course. I thought it was standard grandpa hyperbole. But I also didn’t want to believe that I was seeing the biggest of anything. Not yet. I wanted the really great things to be in the future. Something to aim for. Which means I missed out on some great things that were right in front of me. Mike Monteiro's newsletter is always beautiful and melancholy, and this is a really nice edition of it. I read and highlighted a few other articles but they were all saying things about AI, mostly about how it makes the world worse and makes people feel bad. I won't add those to the pile because I don't want that kind of content to dominate what I mention, even if it does dominate what I read. Elsewhere For the Val Town blog, I wrote about our experience with the bug bounty program. It's been a very interesting experience. Val Town has a pretty difficult security surface: in contrast to Mapbox, which was mostly a read-only API, it's a very read-write system with many access controls. At the center of the product is a sandbox that we want to keep secure. And because we're living in the AI age, a single bit of functionality can be exposed via REST API, React Router loaders, tRPC, and MCP. Building a model layer and a shared authorization layer - modeled after Oso - has helped a bit. But the reports still come in. It's pretty wild how AI factors into it: I'd say that 100% of the vulnerability reports used AI to write the report itself. From the best reporters, the vulnerabilities come with screen recordings and evidence, and it's clearly not all-robot. But - I suspect that other people manning help desks & bug bounty programs know this experience - it's jarring to go three replies into an email conversation with someone and they suddenly stop using an LLM to write their emails and the voice completely changes, from hyper-literate to abbreviated and misspelled. I also wrote about our new authentication scheme that makes vals require login and makes it possible to manage permissions to val applications, not just their code. It was pretty fun to implement, and the sixth or seventh time working with HMAC schemes I'm starting to get a natural grasp on them.

June was a big month: I went to Porto & Lisbon, and had a lot of life stuff happen. I'll get into the trip once I get my rolls of film developed. Three rolls at a new photo developing place: fingers crossed! Reading I finished reading Intermezzo (of the bag) and it was fantastic. I've always liked Sally Rooney's books but this was the one where the writing style really clicked. Also, The Vegan. Meh. I read Patricia Lockwood's 'A Tradcath Wedding' via Perfect Sentences but found an additional sentence to be perfect: Whenever they rang the chimes, which seemed to be every four seconds or so, a toddler screamed ‘WOW A BELL!’ to the visible displeasure of the celebrants – though isn’t the entire point of the ritual that you’re supposed to be that awestruck every time? Patricia Lockwood is the funniest writer I've read. You cannot grow a pumpkin, but you can improve the odds. Taylor's 'You Cannot Grow a Pumpkin' is a fantastic little prose poem of sorts. Watching I'm always trying to find a 'romp' when it comes to movies. Something lighthearted, pretty easy to watch, so on. We watched The Pink Panther this month and it is a perfect example of the genre. The inspiration for the watch came from the hamburger scene: But there's so much more of this kind of thing in the movie, little bits and physical comedy. Oh, and I also watched The Departed, which everyone says is good and is good. Elsewhere I wrote Accidental Anonymity on the micro blog, and it stirred up some discussion on Bluesky as well as at least one blog response. It was kind of an angry piece, as I said at the start. I will keep trying to stay out of the trap of writing about that topic all the time. Listening The only album I bought this month was Songs of Her's by Her's, which is fine. I wish I had something more profound to say about it given how the band met an unbelievably tragic end. Maybe more influential than that was Know Your Enemy's recent podcasts, especially this one about the pope's encyclical. I've really grown to love that podcast, and it has been part of me intellectually reconnecting with, but not readopting, Catholicism. Art Here's some art I really liked this month: This Hockney piece called 'Picture Emphasizing Stillness' from 1962 was at the MAC/CCB museum in Lisbon. Via Tim Babb, I enjoyed finding Tomás Sánchez's work.

A section of trail in Switzerland May was a big month! The highlight was a cycling trip around Lake Konstanz, passing through Konstanz, Bregenz Austria, Stein am Rhein in Switzerland, and Meersburg. A farm in Bodenseeufer, Germany We passed a lot of operating agriculture, growing apples, strawberries, and other fruits. The route is very continuous, mostly flat, and popular with retirees. It's very idyllic riding: lots of protected and separated lanes. There are some interesting regional differences in the riding. Swiss drivers were noticeably more aggressive and gave a lot less space to bikes, but the Swiss infrastructure was really nice when it was off-road. Also it was interesting to see that the vast majority of other cyclists on most of the route were on ebikes. This only changed when we were close to hip cities and we'd notice more young people on high-end road bikes. Münster St. Maria und Markus Taking the ride in 40-60 mile days left a lot of room for checking out the towns, food, and views. It was very easy being vegan in Germany, and significantly harder in Austria and Switzerland. Some highlights: KERVAN Imbiss in Konstanz: cheap, delicious vegan kebabs Insel Mainau: beautiful botanical garden on an island, recommended to follow up with Biergarten St. Katharina, a beer garden in the woods The Pile Dwelling Museum in Uhldingen-Mühlhofen-Unteruhldingen: very aesthetic museum plus recreations of pile dwellings In Zurich: the Swiss National Museum was gigantic and featured the best-integrated high-tech exhibits I've seen On the final evening we took a cable car up to Panorama Restaurant Falsenegg and it delivered on the name Reading I read The Technological Republic the book by Alex Karp and one of his employees. It was terrible as expected: part sales-pitch, part standard-issue MAGA cultural critique, part implied defense of just war. The last part was the most interesting to me, because Karp spends so much time grandstanding about his intellectual background and telling protestors to quiet down and have a real discussion, and this book confirms that he can't actually have that conversation. He has nothing to say about the moral complexity or justification of war. It's surprising that the only critical reviews I could find of the book are from other right-leaning sources. Providence, an American Christian Realist magazine, found it too weak. The Independent Institute didn't like it based on their Libertarian principles. I guess it's just so far from any left-wing thought that nobody bothers to read it. Democratic governance rests on a bargain so old we’ve forgotten it’s a bargain at all. The governed have something the governors need: labor, tax revenue, military service, consumer spending. This dependency is the source of democratic leverage. The whole system functions because power is distributed, and it’s distributed because the people at the top need something from the people at the bottom. I'm still trying to avoid writing about AI, but this piece by Owen McGrann was worth the time. It takes a lot of points that I've long agreed with and stitches them together into a coherent but miserable whole. On the bright side, I'm just finishing reading Intermezzo and it's wonderful. A totally rejuvenating and inspiring novel. Listening Cheekface is a ~9 year old band in the tradition of Cake, They Might Be Giants, etc. They've got some great hits - part sardonic and ironic, part euphoric and ultra-light pop choruses. It's Sorted by Cheekface Watching Adam Neely's talking about AI and music again, and like always, it's very worth watching. The generational element is especially interesting here: just like the commencement speakers getting booed, there's a consistent theme where Gen Z (and millennials, to some extent) are rejecting the AI hype while older generations are optimistic and coincidentally in a position to benefit from it.