Observable Plot hit >100k daily downloads yesterday for the first time! Literally “off the chart”! (Because we set the maximum of the y domain to the 99.5th percentile in order to occasionally give ourselves this satisfaction.) Congrats to Mike and Fil! observablehq.github.io/oss-analytic...

every day i encounter another company that had interesting, unique technology pivoting to be an agentic thing / chatgpt wrapper, products are homogenizing at a never before seen rate

it's really important that the people using openclaw to bulk-send emails keep doing it from their personal addresses so that they can get spam-scored for eternity

recently: cycling through germany/austria/switzerland, and other minor notes: macwright.com/2026/06/04/r...

inifini-d was so good. incredibly user-friendly, and satisfying to leave your computer rendering some scene overnight

i did not have this on my bingo card at all

if there's no learning curve there's no learning

this michael burry nvidia-is-a-bubble apocalypse diagram is such good human-made content, idk what he used to make this, maybe powerpoint, it still has a misspelling underline in one spot, 10/10 xcancel.com/michaeljburr...

checked in at @atproto.nyc - June 2026 [pevhrcgc] #atprotonyc

abundance (2025) klein, thompson

every day, we stray further, etc

i watched videodrome a few days ago and the scene that sticks in my head is this brief shot of a circuit board with spectacular routing

📍 Val Town Other · New York, New York, US ★★★★★ w/ @stevekrouse.com #BeaconBits

This has been a long time in the making: a proposal on adding floats support to ATProto vmx.cx/cgi-bin/blog... If you prefer code or a demo, you can jump right into the proof of concept: github.com/vmx/floats-o...

i just forgot sam bankman-fried's name and had a moment of glowing appreciation for the fact that someday i'll forget all this shit

all right yeah i'm back on www.last.fm/user/tmcw2

hard to overstate how much i hate ai scrapers, what this article describes is one thousand percent true and i bet lots and lots of engineers at other companies are battling the same enemy right now weirdgloop.org/blog/clankers

Glad to have @vinepair.com reprint my special report for Fingers on Republic National Distributing Company's debts. The piece is now available to read in full with no paywall:

fellow paper journal people: has anyone gotten a mini photo printer to add photo references to entries? any recommendations?

one datacenter in singapore tries to do ~8 million requests a day against val.town, we blocked it weeks ago but yet it persists

i read the alex karp palantir book. it sucks. macwright.com/2026/05/24/t...

hmm. supporting globes in placemark is going to require math.

fun interview about my reading habits with @zacharykai.net.web.brid.gy : roadlessread.com/views/ss-mac...

putting @lisacmuth.bsky.social's ROOTS idea to heart and returning some ancient music to my website macwright.com/music/

nominating 'permission structure' for word of the year 2026 (two words though)

new york city is one of the least cringey places in the world, with the exception of people's obsession with the song 'empire state of mind'

post did well on hacker news! i think it had the critical ingredients of: - not using robots to write - non-attachment to "success metrics" - pointing at the yawning chasm between how companies brag about their good code and their engineers whisper about the trashfire of tech debt

spent five minutes on twitter after posting the val town post to the business account and i feel like i need a five day detox

i wrote about switching from supabase to clerk to better-auth, it's over the course of a few years, i'm not that skittish blog.val.town/better-auth

quick watercolor of a sparrow

sewing is good macwright.com/2026/05/05/i...

recently: macwright.com/2026/05/04/r...

Children (and adults!) don’t need AI literacy. They need confidence in their own capability. They need to believe in themselves. AI is the opposite of all that. AI doesn’t foster confidence, it fosters addiction. I did a whole talk on this, with a bad haircut: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH2d...

nytimes opinion piece with an outlink with the utm_source=chatgpt.com tracker intact www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/o...

row-level security is a technology meant to leak information, the purpose of the system is what it does not what it fails to do

all hail the bogota bus rapid transit map humantransit.org/2026/04/bogo...

if you ship a hobby project and learned nothing, you have failed

i now understand how priority queues work

Me: I voted for Donald Trump because I had him confused with that other guy. Donald Duck. NYT reporter: Are you sure you want me to print that next to your real name and a drawing of you? Me: Yes.

the deno contribution charts are looking very funky. lots of commits, mostly from ~3 humans and 3 robots

the correlations between virtue and wealth or power are, at least tracking from moderate to very high levels, quite obviously inverse. the entire world at the moment is a demeritocracy.

some microsoft project manager commissioning user research that shows users actually prefer lower uptime

an app that uses atproto blobs as 'generic file storage' seems eminently possible but maybe against the intent of the system?

a long time ago i followed @sgillies blog and the moment he announced he had left a job we hired him to work at mapbox, a major coup. now is the time for you to do the same thing for your company, i guarantee you will not regret it: https://sgillies.net/2026/04/24/laid-off.html

i've passively appreciated @redblobgames.com for years but this is the first time i've dedicated the time to focusing and reading his writing. it's an absolute treasure, an incredible resource on so much, and incredibly high quality. for example an intro to a*: www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/...

confirmed that i still got that dog in me

observable podcast! www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUh5...

worst case why it cannot be worse why it cannot be better

we talk about 'enshittification' a lot nowadays but i think the phenomenon for github is more akin to a corporate death-drive, the instinct of a company that hates beauty extinguishing the beautiful thing it acquired to spite the world

the script kids doing pen testing probably don't have access to mythos but boy are they hopping on the brand