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Tom MacWright

@macwright.com

2.4K followers 1.8K following 580 posts

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

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 2d

openai announcements: the gold mine is also selling the picks and shovels now

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 3d

🤦 time, sometime i'll get a handle on it

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Reposted by Tom MacWright

Jesse Hawken @jessehawken.bsky.social · 3d

Queen

KOJAMF🤘🖤🤘 @kojamf.bsky.social · 3d

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 4d

recently: macwright.com/2025/10/04/r...

Recently

Back from the wilderness

macwright.com

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 5d

🚄 new train map from planemad alert: api.mapbox.com/styles/v1/pl...

Rail World

A map made by planemad

api.mapbox.com

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 5d

not to knock the slot machine or the labor saving potential, more just that there are a lot of forms of knowledge, intelligence, and critical thinking that i've encountered, appreciate, and desire, and i haven't found those things in the world of llms yet. most of it is trend-following?

Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 5d

yesterday i used llm tools a lot to write a lot of code, overall i'd say that the experience taught me nothing and the whole discourse about 'adapting and learning new tools' is kinda goofy, it's not a new programming language it's a slot machine

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 8d

please do! happy to help

Reposted by Tom MacWright

derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 8d

"no more superficial individual expression"

Pete Hegseth wearing USA flag pocket square, USA lining, contrast stitching, and "America First" embroidery.

Pete Hegseth wearing a USA belt buckle. monogrammed shirt cuff, contrast buttonhole, contrast buttons, and USA flag lining.

Pete Hegseth in tailored clothing. They are full of cheap "personalization" options common in low-end made-to-measure tailoring.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11d

the "highly leveraged" piece really bounces around in my brain, if a t-shirt factory switches from sewing machines that make 1 shirt/worker/hour to robotic ones that let a worker make 20 shirts per hour does not increase pay 20x, right? what is the mechanism for that higher leverage becoming wages?

Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11d

that said: the article is well-written, and definitely thoughtful in the domain that amodei is most passionate about, which is medicine / biology. i wish it covered the other domains a lot more, though.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11d

i want a big ol' citation needed marker on "increasing compensation" in this paragraph because i cannot see any simple or complicated economics brain way in which this is inevitable

As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10% will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and amplifying what AI is good at, such that the “10%” expands to continue to employ almost everyone.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11d

it seems, at the moment, lopsided: ai has a very visible (so far, negative?) impact on governance, definitely negative impact on economic measures (paying llm researchers $10M bonuses is not good for gini coefficient…), but its impact on medicine is uncertain, minimal, and not visible to most

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11d

spent some time reading dario amodei's "machines of loving grace" this morning.

found it surprisingly narrow? extensive ideas about how ai will assist medicine and then a pretty brief, noncommital discussion of economic, governance, and cultural impacts

www.darioamodei.com/essay/machin...

Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace

How AI Could Transform the World for the Better

www.darioamodei.com

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 11d

porteur bag v2 update macwright.com/2025/09/27/p...

Porteur bag 2

Thinking machines, no! Sewing machines, yes!

macwright.com

Reposted by Tom MacWright

Dave Infante @dinfontay.com · 11d

Mad Enough to Blog It™️:

Kevin Dmytriw, author of the 9/27/25 letter to the editor "Letter: Roads were built for cars. Take down the bike lanes" is entitled to his own (selfish) opinions about road design, but he's not entitled to his own facts. Neither is the opinion editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch who headlined Dmytriw's reactionary screed against bike lanes. As a matter of plain fact Richmond's roads were not built for cars: portions of the city's downtown grid predate private automobiles by over a century. The city's pioneering electric streetcar system was moving Richmonders by rail throughout town starting in 1888—30 years before the Model T's 1908 introduction. Sadly, that system was retired in 1949 to make way for cars. Whether Mr. Dmytriw neglected this history or willfully ignored to advance his retrograde, classist, car-centric argument at his neighbors' expense is impossible to say, and besides the point. The point is that Richmond's roads have indeed made "special accommodations" (his words) for different modes of transit before, and cars have no originalist, birthright-esque claim on its grid today. I don't expect the RTD's Opinion section to make such a progressive case; I do expect it to require basic adherence to historical fact from people who seek to use its imprimatur and reach to lie for their own benefit. Alas.

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 12d

also just checking back and wild that this camera that i bought 11 years ago for $40 and was manufactured before i was born has given me so many photos

Reposted by Tom MacWright

Will Craft @wcraft.bsky.social · 12d

According to data from Ice, we passed a significant milestone. Immigrants with no criminal record now make up the largest group arrested and booked into detention by Ice.

Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in Ice detention

Government data shows 16,523 people with no record, versus 15,725 with a record and 13,767 with pending charges

www.theguardian.com

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 12d

shot on an olympus xa2 with ilford hp5, developed at pink folder film studios in brooklyn.

had a lot of luck with film this summer! gotta buy more kodak gold, want to shoot more color

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 12d

bike camping photos came back ❤️

view of the mountains through a break in the trees

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 13d

just learned that the max-age header's shared-cache equivalent is… s-maxage.

why
not
s-max-age

why do i have to commit this to memory for the rest of my life

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 14d

listening to music and reading books that are generated by ai to your specifications will make you a worse person

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 14d

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Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 14d

yep, i mean this is how docs are run at @val.town currently and how we did it at mapbox. for internal technical docs only, not forcing sales or other functions to do it that way. but the bliss of writing docs in the same pull request as you make a feature, and to keep formatting simple

Tom MacWright @macwright.com · 14d

a directory called 'docs/' filled with markdown files is 1000% better for internal documentation than notion

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