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Tom MacWright

@macwright.com
3.2K followers 2.2K following 1.2K posts

bikes, runs, makes val.town, writes macwright.com, open source, geo, music, sewing and other stuff. twitter archive: bsky.app/profile/archive.macwright.…

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 29/09/2026
tempted to make my website's design 'weirder' because websites are getting too normal. might do the csszengarden thing and do multiple layouts with just the power of Modern CSS.
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Mr. Joshua @pantspants.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Ballpoint pen, watercolor, acrylic paint, copic marker, and colored pencil.

A man in a sweater vest carefully walks through a field of wild flowers. He’s concerned about accidentally stepping on his colleague so he calls out, “Don’t wanna stomp ya out. Clap so I know where you’re at.” Beneath the flowers we see a very teeny man, also in a sweater vest, clapping to make his location known. Their plan works. No one is stomped. 

The meaning of this piece is open to interpretation. If we don’t take the scene literally, the smaller man could be a version of the larger man that exists somewhere in his subconscious. A part of him that needs to make itself known so it isn’t forgotten (or stomped out). Artist’s note: I usually start off drawing with no plan to turn it into a “comic” or whatever this is. For this one I started by just sketching flowers. I think originally I had dozens of little creatures clapping before simplifying it into the final version.
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Everest Pipkin @everest.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
I'm very please to announce a public release of my drag-and-drop bookmarking, game-making, and wandering tool Scrubjay! Scrubjay is a weird website builder that lets you cobble together web elements, images, links, text fragments, etc into a series of nested rooms...
"SCRUBJAY" sits over a bunch of images of frogs, birds, doors. it's a very 90s look
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 28/09/2026
I think students should read full books.
Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech," from "The Four Freedoms," 1943
https://prints.nrm.org/detail/260937/rockwell-freedom-of-speech-1943?srsltid=AU7gw4V4FH-u5tF-MWC6kxNw8lDeOazTP-7MNiQoCo3kEiIMRLgK7l7-
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 28/09/2026
oh you felt connected to your work? felt the pride of hard-won skills? you fool! you absolute narcissist!
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Observable @observablehq.com · 26/09/2026
You can now create and manage teams in the new Observable, use Opus 5.5, connect to MySQL… but, most exciting, and by far the most overdue: you can now access SQL cells’ metadata fields by opening the cell menu with ⌃M. Keep those hands on that keyboard! observablehq.com/@observableh...
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 16/09/2026
nowadays it's hard to know whether i should follow the ai accelerationism of ashton kutcher or joseph gordon-levitt's safety fears
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 15/09/2026
it's a new computer, it's cute, is it for you? no! for your agents! stay away from the computer, it's a computer for computers. you'll get a computer when your agents decide you deserve one! www.pamir.ai
pamir.ai
Lapis One — A Dedicated Computer for Your Agents | Pamir
Lapis One is a dedicated Linux computer for AI agents, built to run 24/7, connect from anywhere, and control other computers with Agent KVM.
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11/09/2026
i'm very happy that placemark is now on maplibre / however, it's sad not to get the huge perf boosts that @agafonkin.com delivers for mapbox-gl-js, few in the industry are on this level github.com/mapbox/geojs...
github.com
v5: Radically improve memory footprint by mourner · Pull Request #191 · mapbox/geojson-vt
TL;DR: 45–75% less retained memory and up to 79% lower peak across the bench corpus, with init build time within ~10% of v4 (and 50–70% faster on point datasets). Tile output is the same; the publi...
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11/09/2026
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Justin Fagnani @justinfagnani.com · 09/09/2026
I wrote about what I've been up to with my new programming language! Zena targets WebAssembly GC, with a TypeScript-like syntax, sound type system, and lots of cool features like pattern matching, async cancellation, borrow checking, WASI integration, and more! justinfagnani.com/2026/09/09/z...
justinfagnani.com
Zena: A new Wasm-first programming language
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 08/09/2026
i know it's not their market but "an oxide rack but with big honkin gpus" seems like an inevitability
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 08/09/2026
cycling nyc is so delightful, covered new ground on randall's island and rode the high bridge this weekend
gardens and bridge view from randall's islandview from high bridgethe hell gate pathway
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 08/09/2026
i'd recommend people who are really jazzed about ai: - be a sysadmin for a website with a lot of dynamic pages that ai crawlers like to hit - manage a bug bounty program - maintain some popular repos on github, especially awesome-* repos that are good for promoting projects
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 07/09/2026
observable's community is just stacked with talent
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 07/09/2026
little detail in drawing app side project: when i show options to customize directional arrows, the arrow ui shows the arrows based on their screen orientation, not the order in which you drew then arrows
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 06/09/2026
i applaud togo on promoting the equal earth projection, but as a pseudo-cartographer i have to note that the earth is in fact round, not flat, and quite a lot larger than this
equal earth projection
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 06/09/2026
❤️ www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/o...
But food, for all that, is not art. Both begin by addressing the senses, but that is where food stops. It is not narrative or representational, does not organize and express emotion. An apple is not a story, even if we can tell a story about it. A curry is not an idea, even if its creation is the result of one. Meals can evoke emotions, but only very roughly and generally, and only within a very limited range — comfort, delight, perhaps nostalgia, but not anger, say, or sorrow, or a thousand other things. Food is highly developed as a system of sensations, extremely crude as a system of symbols. Proust on the madeleine is art; the madeleine itself is not art.
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Observable @observablehq.com · 01/09/2026
For more than a year, we’ve been quietly building an all-new Observable. Today, that new Observable is live on observablehq.com. Read Mike @ocks.org’s announcement: observablehq.com/@observableh...
A screenshot of the new Observable interface, showing a notebook visualizing “Bollinger bands”. Several interface elements are labeled. Along the top: workspace menu, new notebook button, user menu. Along the right side: file attachments, dependencies, comments, settings, enable tinkering, show AI. In the interior: cell inserter, cell menu, cell toolbar.
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 07/01/2026
don't go anywhere near my lakehouse bro, it's swarming with agents
the agentic lakehouse, the only lakehouse built for agents, managed by agents
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 01/09/2026
it's good, you should read it
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 01/09/2026
my favorite bogus security report goes like "your application does X. and mind you, it does it correctly. but if it _didn't_ do it correctly, that'd be a security problem!"
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 01/09/2026
Recently: macwright.com/2026/09/01/r...
macwright.com
Recently
The waning summer days
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 29/08/2026
on a fun project bugs are fun too
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journeyman folklorist @aniceburrito.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Flavors used to be infused but nowadays flavors are blasted. This is happening to society as well of course
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 26/08/2026
it continues to fascinate me that of all the custom big corporation fonts, the one that has the most flavor is from ibm
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 26/08/2026
Placemark is now _fully_ open source, thanks to @bskyum.bsky.social macwright.com/2026/08/25/p...
macwright.com
Placemark is now fully open source
Replacing Mapbox with MapLibre in an update
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 26/08/2026
big news as soon as i fix and merge this revert revert revert revert branch
Revert "Revert "Revert "Revert "Move to MapLibre and provider-neutral routing
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 25/08/2026
the protocol labs narrative is starting to solidify into it having been a very spendy labs project that ultimately benefited atproto and iroh instead of its own projects ipshipyard.com/blog/2026-th...
ipshipyard.com
The end of IPFS at Shipyard
We have some difficult news to share with the IPFS and wider peer-to-peer community. Our IPFS funding was cancelled
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 24/08/2026
good history of monsignor mcgolrick park in brooklyn, fun to presume that if he had kids they would've hated naming that park after him
Winthrop Jones had had no children, and so left no family in Greenpoint to oppose the renaming of the park he had helped establish. The park was used as a setting in the 2018 film, An Interview with God.
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 22/08/2026
blocked out an hour for my 'focused free time somewhat hard engineering' side project. makes me think about focus & distraction: real focus imho only comes downstream of both effort & quality-of-life stuff like uninterrupted free time. lots of tech either breaks focus or caters to unfocused work.
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 22/08/2026
cursed dialog
do you want to connect cursed device to your mac?
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 21/08/2026
brief notes: - most panelists and the audience were focused on abolishing ai and datacenters - the tax policy (which i love) got a lot of probing questions, which were expertly answered - rorty's theory that post-1960s socialism is an anti-government libertarian movement continues to be correct
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 21/08/2026
the worst gtm slop for slop product that makes slop (so far)
We recently came across your personal site — writing, photos, drawings, and technology optimism.

That's exactly the kind of personal writing-and-photos site we built NeoDrop for — an AI content team that keeps creating for you. Tell it what to make — newsletters, videos, podcasts, or articles — and how often; it researches fresh sources, picks what matters, and produces editable content on schedule, so essays and journals draft on schedule.

We'd like to open up early access for you, with free AI credits included, so you can try it hands-on — redeem at https://neodrop.ai/auth?invite=8R8A5KRJ with code 8R8A5KRJ and start right away.

Think of a calm morning, drafts waiting:
- Draft essays in your voice
- Turn reading into topic lists
- Keep drawings documented
You keep the final judgement, editing, and fact-checking.
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 20/08/2026
phoebe bridgers-bo burnham :: joanna newsom-andy samberg
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 20/08/2026
phoebe bridgers includes one song that ends loud on each album, i wish she'd make a whole album of loud-ending songs
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 19/08/2026
some of the placemark code got re-adopted into geojson.io, making it a very full-circle open source story: dev.to/mapbox/rebui...
screenshot of the new geojson.io
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 19/08/2026
behold: bsky.app/profile/dava...
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 18/08/2026
🫩
anthropic crawling 10 gigs a day of bandwidth
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 17/08/2026
MAN that is a good hero image btao.org/posts/2026-0...
btao.org
I don't enjoy the Internet any more
The pale is growing
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 15/08/2026
technology optimism hour, the reprise! last edition was in 2022. this edition: typescript 7, effect, long hardware update cycles, decentralized social media, and encrypted messaging macwright.com/2026/08/14/o...
macwright.com
Technology optimism hour
Finding some cool stuff to be pumped about in the world of software and hardware
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 14/08/2026
launched 'access', a new @val.town feature that lets you restrict access to http endpoints and we handle all the auth particulars. glorious illustration by @jxnblk.bsky.social blog.val.town/access
blog.val.town
Val Town Access: one-click team-only authentication for your internal tools
An easier, more precise way to use Val Town for your back office
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 14/08/2026
hell of a headline
Hard Work, OpenAI & Trump Ties Paying Off for Josh Kushner
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 14/08/2026
2026-era photoshop tutorials on youtube: ai-generate a generic babe for the screenshot, drop into the dude for the video
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 13/08/2026
subscription minimizing: macwright.com/2026/08/13/s...
macwright.com
Subscription minimizing
JavaScript, math, maps, etc
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 13/08/2026
the changesets-based release workflow is the best yet, i use it on everything
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 13/08/2026
pleasant update to my post from 2019 about color contrast standards being kind of bad: there's a candidate for wcag 3.0 standards that's a big improvement. via @rubenerd.bsky.social macwright.com/2019/03/30/c...
macwright.com
Accessibility: Color contrast is a problem
Beyond black and white
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11/08/2026
man, 13 year olds with polished ai slop websites makes me so sad, youth is for making weird junk that is a straightforward expression of your pure aesthetic vision as a kid, not for generic resume fodder
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 10/08/2026
illustration for next blog post
illustration of a computer surrounded by plants and flowers. lined with ink, colored with gouache
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taylor.town @taylor.town · 07/08/2026
taylor.town/leaving-openai
taylor.town
I'm leaving OpenAI to build Jurassic Park
We're so excited to send you back to the stone age.
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