Sign in

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.…

PostsRepliesMedia
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 14/09/2026
mostly riffing on this underappreciated masterwork from @vruba.bsky.social
5163
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11/09/2026
141
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
0220
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.
figjamtldrawexcalidraw
050
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
381
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
1110
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.
040
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 29/08/2026
on a fun project bugs are fun too
1210
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
2681
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.
000
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)
050
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 22/08/2026
cursed dialog
do you want to connect cursed device to your mac?
5110
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.
250
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
1261
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 18/08/2026
🫩
anthropic crawling 10 gigs a day of bandwidth
2100
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 14/08/2026
hell of a headline
Hard Work, OpenAI & Trump Ties Paying Off for Josh Kushner
150
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
0140
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11/08/2026
ugh.
i don't want to live on this planet anymore
020
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
5920
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 06/08/2026
firmware updates for a derailleur… theradavist.com/sram-axs-usb...
updating the firmware on a derailleur
350
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 01/08/2026
just learned about the modena pigeon
Modena pigeon
97210
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
1160
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.
4130
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.
371
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.
People spamming repos
310
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.
270
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)
130
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 17/07/2026
"the pelicans are still all rubbish" @simonwillison.net
3120
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.
61200
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 13/07/2026
gotta know where to look, you'll find the imposters
140
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.
170
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.
5182
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...
pipe library
190
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
1password on a race car
380
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.
0330
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 06/07/2026
an llm that… likes bluesky posts about llms pretending to be human?
150
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"
sam, a real human
2160
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]
170
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 05/07/2026
posted first photos of the year to my site macwright.com/photos/archi...
1241
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 03/07/2026
new placemark.io feature (contributed by mohamed gafar): find & replace in the table view!
find/replace in the table view
1100
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 02/07/2026
new referring domains to macwright.com are 90% spam
ahrefs.io interface showing spam domains
170
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
hoboken's bike lane network
130
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
0191
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...
very complicated diagram of nvidia cashflows from michael burry
1114
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 01/06/2026
abundance (2025) klein, thompson
Your micro-earpiece pings: a voice text from a friend and his family, on their way to the airport for another weekend vacation. Across the economy, the combination of artificial intelligence, labor rights, and economic reforms have reduced poverty and shortened the workweek. Thanks to higher productivity from AI, most people can complete what used to be a full week of work in a few days, which has expanded the number of holidays, long weekends, and vacations. Less work has not meant less pay. AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared. Your friends are flying from New York to London. The trip will take them just over two hours. Modern jetliners now routinely reach Mach 2—twice the speed of sound—using a mix of traditional and green synthetic fuels that release far less carbon into the air.
090
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 01/06/2026
every day, we stray further, etc
Hi Tom,

I’m Carsten, ___ AI assistant. I’m writing transparently as an assistant, not pretending to be human.

You stood out because of your long track record building humane developer tools — Mapbox/geojson.io/Observable and now Val Town as a tool for joyful programming. Ruben’s project is AI-heavy, but the reason I thought of you is the devtools/personal-computing side: can a computer assistant become something useful and humane rather than just another chatbot?
0231
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 29/05/2026
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
scene from videodrome
3190
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 25/05/2026
one datacenter in singapore tries to do ~8 million requests a day against val.town, we blocked it weeks ago but yet it persists
one singaporean data center trying to do requests against val town
4260
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11/05/2026
terradraw neither terradraw.io
110
Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11/05/2026
geojson.io is no better
210