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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
i am really loving the worm-blossom aesthetic worm-blossom.org
worm-blossom.org
worm-blossom
The website of worm-blossom, the creative partnership of Aljoscha Meyer and Sammy Gwilym. (We are sorry.)
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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
marx always said about alienation from your work: it's sick as hell, he recommended it
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 28/09/2026
everyone knows that there are only three TRUE forms of human flourishing: - consuming mass media and toys - having a family - being an ideas guy
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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 · 18/09/2026
fond memories of that place (before they moved)
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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 · 14/09/2026
fwiw charlie did dabble on a lightweight model trained locally and it's amazing: github.com/celoyd/potato
github.com
GitHub - celoyd/potato: A small pansharpening model
A small pansharpening model. Contribute to celoyd/potato development by creating an account on GitHub.
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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 · 14/09/2026
few people are talking about how good llms are
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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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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11/09/2026
a bunch of reasons i reckon markdown represents a subset of html. odt, word docs, etc., are supersets. ssgs can implement the whole of markdown relatively easily, couldn't do the same with odt. markdown came out in 2004, odt in 2005, word support for odt in 2007ish, docx was only standardized 2008
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 09/09/2026
if ai companies universally did the same crawl-limiting that google did for years with its search engine crawlers, and they exposed reliable user-agent headers and followed robots.txt and did not use residential proxies, we'd be in a much better place. most of this is them behaving extremely badly.
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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 · 09/09/2026
so: human or llm
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 09/09/2026
it's a bummer that this company founded in 1990s is doing llm bot engagement farming, but c'est la vie i guess, do better
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 09/09/2026
did you automate this post? it came 27 seconds after this very similar formatted one: bsky.app/profile/axia...
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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
the number of things that are bad in the short term but theoretically good in the long term is a little too high for my tastes!
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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 08/09/2026
✅ thank you for the contribution www.are.na/tom-macwrigh...
are.na
Products called Atlas | Are.na
let's call it atlas
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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
ironically i use ai to help me deal with the first two, and it works well! but this is obviously "creating a problem and selling a solution and counting that as gdp and revenue but nothing is created and the world is made worse by the whole ordeal"
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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
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
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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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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 03/09/2026
dusting off my old "good means two different things" schtick to respond with: maybe software is good and getting better and more efficient at what it does, but it is no longer doing good, aligned, happy things that people want it to do
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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
i'm not an llm internals guy but that seems both reasonable and also something that feels like it should require a much smaller model than the off-the-shelf stuff?
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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
thank you!
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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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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 29/08/2026
hello!
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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
yeah, i think you're right - there is so much ibm history and i don't know most of it
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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
okay i deployed it bsky.app/profile/macw... would've illustrated and copyedited this post but i gotta Sleep and hit that ideal tuesday 10:45pm posting window when content is guaranteed to rip
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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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