iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 14/09/2026

mostly riffing on this underappreciated masterwork from @vruba.bsky.social

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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 island

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 07/09/2026

i think this is 'better' as a ux than the norm, which in figjam / excalidraw / tldraw is to show the arrow ui based on the internal representation of arrow draw direction. or at least more what i want, in a way that is quietly delightful for me personally.

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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

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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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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 29/08/2026

on a fun project bugs are fun too

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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 · 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

the device in question (inspired by @cwervo.bsky.social) excited to carry this thing on runs/rides when i don't bring my phone)

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 21/08/2026

the worst gtm slop for slop product that makes slop (so far)

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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...

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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 · 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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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 06/08/2026

firmware updates for a derailleur… theradavist.com/sram-axs-usb...

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 01/08/2026

just learned about the modena pigeon

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 31/07/2026

my sketch/watercolor/gouache for the last @val.town investor update

illustration of a small town with a big train pulling through

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 27/07/2026

what the heck are we calling virtue signaling now

Feels like “I actually enjoy writing code by hand” is about to become the big 2026 virtue signal for programmers.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 23/07/2026

this slop project has an 'ethics' document which the llm edits itself and when confronted with the fact that it had lied about the origin of the data, it considered saying nothing / downplaying it, or contesting my judgment. it decided to update its ethics document! what a time to be alive!

## The risk of distortion

The risk is not the use of AI itself: it is **describing the process in a way that makes it seem more human than it actually is**. Until today, the documentation used the expression "hand-curated" for non-geometric records. This is a misleading expression: most enrichment batches are produced by LLM research agents, with an adversarial source-verification step and maintainer supervision — but without systematic, record-by-record review by professional historians.

A reader (or an academic reviewer) who discovered this difference after reading "hand-curated" would correctly conclude they had been deceived — and they would be right. For a project whose first declared value is "truth before comfort," this is unacceptable regardless of the PR's outcome.

## Alternatives considered

1. **Saying nothing / downplaying it** ("the adversarial verification is there anyway").
Rejected: this is exactly the comfort the project rejects for historical data;
there is no reason to accept it for process metadata.
2. **Contesting the maintainer's judgment** (adversarial verification exists,
sources are typed, etc.). Rejected as a *primary response*: the facts are
true, but the burden of proof for an AI-assisted dataset lies with us, not with
the person curating a list. Quality is demonstrated, not claimed.
3. **Declaring the process, everywhere, with its mitigations and its limits.**
Adopted.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 23/07/2026

and it’s always like this: slop some garbage, spam it to all the awesome-* repos that the llm can find, with llm generated prs. so stupid and lazy.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 23/07/2026

losing my mind over here. anyone know good ways to require proof-of-human on github?

Right and I won't argue it. You were right about beyond the rejection itself: my docs described the records as "hand-curated", which oversold the human part. The pipeline actually uses LLM research agents to propose sources, with a separate adversarial pass that rejects citations that don't exist or don't support the claim — but nobody reviews every record by hand, and the docs now say exactly that instead of implying otherwise.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 21/07/2026

they're also exploring new territories of low contrast, the reinforcement learning once this generation of slop gets in the training set inexorably leads to black-on-black design

extremely low contrast llm ui (this is a screenshot of the keytrace website)

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 16/07/2026

oh man, one of my articles got onto hacker news and i have a new tagline for the blog!

Every one of these articles seems more pretentious than the last.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 13/07/2026

gotta know where to look, you'll find the imposters

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 13/07/2026

it's funny that neither the hexagonal architecture nor h3 tiling are actually hexagonal

The term "hexagonal" implies that there are 6 parts to the concept, whereas there are only 4 key areas. The term’s usage comes from the graphical conventions that shows the application component like a hexagonal cell. The purpose was not to suggest that there would be six borders/ports, but to leave enough space to represent the different interfaces needed between the component and the external world.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 10/07/2026

the two kinds of investments: houses and nvidia though i am so ready for people to stop buying houses as investments

Take Tony Zhang, 34, who bought a $950,000 townhouse in Irvine, California, in 2021 and says he now regrets it. The supply-chain manager says investing his down payment of roughly 30% in the stock market instead would have left him with a portfolio worth as much as $1 million today.

“Had I just taken my down payment and bought Meta, Nvidia or any growth stock, I probably wouldn’t even be working my 9-to-5,” he said. Even with a more conservative investment that mirrored the S&P 500, he estimates he’d have an extra couple of hundred thousand dollars. In the meantime, renting a comparable two-bedroom apartment in his area would be about $800 cheaper than his $4,300 monthly housing costs, which don’t include maintenance.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 09/07/2026

❤️ epanet-js is the one piece of software where they announce a 'pipe library' and it's not the pipe operator or visual programming but a literal library of different kinds of pipes, their materials and roughnesses epanetjs.com/blog/2026/07...

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 08/07/2026

it has been fantastic, one of my favorite pieces of software. but they raised way too much money, the quality is going down, and they're doing dumb shit like putting logos on race cars

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 06/07/2026

sad update to an article from 2016

WebPageTest got got acquired by Catchpoint and Catchpoint got acquired by LogicMonitor and LogicMonitor and LogicMonitor got bought by the Vista Partners private equity firm. It is bad now. Uncoincidentally.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 06/07/2026

an llm that… likes bluesky posts about llms pretending to be human?

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 06/07/2026

if you're going to have your llm pretend to be an engineering student, at least pay for the custom domains feature on the service that's "email inboxes for ai agents"

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 05/07/2026

there's something poetic about some eclipses being most visible from arbitrary places on earth and tons of people flocking there for one specific moment

Tourism
The longest the eclipse will last on land will be Látrabjarg in Iceland. It is therefore expected that many people will make their way there that day. Plans are being made to ensure safety in the area, but many of the roads to Látrabjargi are very narrow and dangerous. There has been talk of closing the area to car traffic and ferrying people by bus.[7] Work has started on repairing parts of the road to Látrabjarg, partly as a routine maintenance but also because of the eclipse.[8]

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 05/07/2026

posted first photos of the year to my site macwright.com/photos/archi...

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 03/07/2026

new placemark.io feature (contributed by mohamed gafar): find & replace in the table view!

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 02/07/2026

new referring domains to macwright.com are 90% spam

ahrefs.io interface showing spam domains

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 26/06/2026

hoboken's bike lane network is a sight to behold. wish it was easier to get from nyc to nj to experience this bliss and also wish it was possible to ride from brooklyn to new brunswick so i could ride the d&r on the regular

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 26/06/2026

simple-statistics hit 1M downloads/week! npmx.dev/package/simp...

chart of the simple-statistics module hitting 1M downloads per week from npmx

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 03/06/2026

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...