Tom MacWright
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macwright.com
Tom MacWright
@macwright.com
writes, bikes, makes val.town, writes macwright.com, open source, geo, music, sewing and other stuff.

twitter archive: https://bsky.app/profile/archive.macwright.com
my eyes were tired and annoyed with how bright by website was, so i implemented dark mode for it (again) macwright.com
November 24, 2025 at 12:16 AM
recommendation algorithms cannot be reformed, only abolished
November 23, 2025 at 6:39 PM
new placemark.io feature: drawing with routing. currently uses the mapbox directions api!
November 22, 2025 at 8:33 PM
every new editor is a vs code fork / every new browser is a google chrome fork
November 18, 2025 at 5:50 PM
@observablehq.com in a talk at #jsnation in a talk not about observable!
November 17, 2025 at 5:16 PM
anyone else heading to the liberty science center for jsnation today?
November 17, 2025 at 11:36 AM
'latitude comes first' and 'vacancy rates are high' neck and neck for the most common niche misinfo i have to personally battle day in and day out
November 13, 2025 at 1:33 PM
i wrote everything that i've been kind of nervous to write about @val.town: here's how things have been going the last three years, and read to the end for how we're hiring for two people macwright.com/2025/11/11/v...
Val Town 2023-2025 Retrospective
The whole story
macwright.com
November 11, 2025 at 5:07 PM
Reposted by Tom MacWright
i used to joke that the solution to the housing crisis is to make home prices lower but keep home values high, but slowly realized that's what a lot of the financial engineering is actually trying to do.
February 28, 2025 at 4:48 PM
the hallucination problem with llms is very bad macwright.com/2025/11/07/h...
Hallucination city
macwright.com
November 7, 2025 at 8:39 PM
doing little public devlogs for learning effect because the learning curve can be 📈 macwright.com/2025/11/07/e...
Effect notes: caching
macwright.com
November 7, 2025 at 7:54 PM
recommitted to @opensourcepledge.com at @val.town for 2025! very pumped to support projects like zod, fastify, codemirror, unified, and esm.sh with real 💸 as well as positive vibes.

blog.val.town/oss-pledge
Year Two of the Open Source Pledge
Updates and articles from the Val Town team
blog.val.town
November 5, 2025 at 9:10 PM
November 5, 2025 at 7:05 PM
i'm starting to get effect.website pilled. started to add some to the @val.town codebase. loving that it's one big dependency with a common style & maintainers. doesn't seem that much more cryptic than neverthrow in practice. discovered one bug so far, in datetime parsing, but robust otherwise.
Effect – The best way to build robust apps in TypeScript
Effect is a powerful TypeScript library designed to help developers easily create complex, synchronous, and asynchronous programs.
effect.website
November 5, 2025 at 6:31 PM
Reposted by Tom MacWright
the reason republicans lost yesterday is because theyre a bunch of weird freaks pushing policy that everyone hates
November 5, 2025 at 1:56 PM
Reposted by Tom MacWright
I'm working on a new kind of computer. It's called the Radiant.

I've been dissatisfied with the state of personal computing for many years now, so it's time I did something about it.

If you think computers could be so much better than what they are, this is for you.

radiant.computer
Radiant Computer
A new kind of personal computer
radiant.computer
November 4, 2025 at 11:02 PM
and then cuomo was never seen again
November 5, 2025 at 3:49 AM
Reposted by Tom MacWright
Cops stopped giving out traffic tickets is what happened
lbwatchdog.com/content/file...
November 4, 2025 at 11:45 PM
this is a really really great talk www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH2d...
Y Oslo - How to draw an orange, Mike Monteiro
YouTube video by Y Oslo
www.youtube.com
November 4, 2025 at 11:32 PM
what the new york times has lacked in understanding voter sentiment this election, it has made up for in repeatedly interviewing one of the four founders of warby parker about how much he doesn't like mamdani
November 4, 2025 at 4:31 PM
hyperlocal brooklyn news: the intersection of Willoughby and Duffield is finally getting fixed! crosswalk signals installed yesterday. Used to net an unmarked crosswalk that drivers would speed through. Good stuff!
November 4, 2025 at 2:23 PM
the ex-palantir blog posts about how "oh boy, there are moral grey areas but we were just building technology and we didn't do the very bad things" are aging like milk, sorry folks you're the baddies, treat the rest of your career as penance
November 4, 2025 at 1:33 PM
Reposted by Tom MacWright
NEW: Common Crawl, the massive archiver of the web, has gotten cozy with AI companies and is providing paywalled articles for training data. They’re also lying to publishers who have asked for material to be removed. “The robots are people too,” CC’s exec director told us when we asked about this.
The Nonprofit Feeding the Entire Internet to AI Companies
Common Crawl claims to provide a public benefit, but it lies to publishers about its activities.
www.theatlantic.com
November 4, 2025 at 12:15 PM
congrats to all the finishers of the new york marathon today!

a perfect occasion to write about one of my old hobbyhorses: fewer people should run marathons

macwright.com/2025/11/02/f...
Fewer people should run marathons
macwright.com
November 2, 2025 at 5:30 PM