Tom MacWright
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Tom MacWright
@macwright.com
2.6K followers 1.8K following 710 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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macwright.com
learned a little sparql to query wikidata and satiate a curiosity: a graph of all the programming languages and what they influenced query.wikidata.org/index.html#%...
January 11, 2026 at 6:14 PM
macwright.com
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
January 7, 2026 at 9:15 PM
macwright.com
zohran mamdani updating his bio from mayor-elect of new york city to mayor of new york city
January 2, 2026 at 3:18 PM
macwright.com
all right i'll lose my mind over this but as someone who has actually read abundance (the book) in full, i can report that the book spends five paragraphs on ceqa and all of them are about the law being used by nimby groups and none of them are about the law being used by environmentalists
Then, in 1972, came a case called Friends of Mammoth v. Board of Supervisors of Mono County. A developer had proposed to build six buildings’ worth of condominiums and shops and restaurants near Mammoth Lakes, one of California’s beloved ski resort areas. Friends of Mammoth, a homeowners’ association, sued to stop the build, arguing that it would strain water and sewage resources. The novelty of their argument was that they sued under CEQA. The legislation, as passed, held that government entities in California needed to produce environmental impact reports before embarking on major new projects. But the developer of the proposed Mammoth Lakes condos was not an arm of the California state, and this was not a public project. The argument of the Mammoth homeowners held that yes, actually, it was, because any development that required public permits to be built was inherently a public project. Friends of Mammoth lost the case in the lower courts but appealed up to the state Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor in a 6-to-1 decision. CEQA, the court held, applies “not only [to] situations in which the government itself engages in construction, acquisition or other development, but also [in] those instances in which the state regulates private activity.”70 That meant it applied to, well, almost anything that anyone might try to build in the state of California. As a lobbyist for the Sierra Club put it, CEQA now covered “anybody engaged commercially in putting two sticks of wood together.”
December 20, 2025 at 10:53 PM
macwright.com
squeaked in one last book to hit 20 books this year

(it was there is no antimemetics… and i could see why everyone loved it but it was not for me macwright.com/2025/12/14/t...)
chart of books per year
December 14, 2025 at 2:40 PM
macwright.com
google's ai overview has to be one of the most used and also worst ai implementations

searching for walton goggins reindeer games = he's not in the movie

searching for walton goggins "reindeer games" = he appears in the movie as a hitman for the mob
walton goggins isn't in the movie reindeer games walton goggins is in the movie reindeer games
December 8, 2025 at 3:55 AM
macwright.com
map nerd challenge difficulty kind of high: name this city depicted in hotel wall art
Wall art of some roads
November 28, 2025 at 1:05 PM
macwright.com
my eyes were tired and annoyed with how bright by website was, so i implemented dark mode for it (again) macwright.com
macwright.com in dark mode
November 24, 2025 at 12:16 AM
macwright.com
new placemark.io feature: drawing with routing. currently uses the mapbox directions api!
November 22, 2025 at 8:33 PM
macwright.com
i had to try them all out to see for myself, capitalism is amazing www.are.na/tom-macwrigh...
all of the ai editors
November 18, 2025 at 9:41 PM
macwright.com
@observablehq.com in a talk at #jsnation in a talk not about observable!
Slide showing design system usage on the Liberty science center imax screen
November 17, 2025 at 5:16 PM
macwright.com
with a heavy heart i've updated the /lonlat page for geosparql-flavored wkt, which has 'literal axis order' unlike wkt and ewkt. docs.ogc.org/is/22-047r1/...
November 13, 2025 at 4:28 PM
macwright.com
can the wagon train go any faster?
November 5, 2025 at 7:05 PM
macwright.com
i've seen variations of this function so many times and it never becomes less shocking, as does probably the performance once it goes over 9 github.com/Effect-TS/ef...
javascript code that has to switch based on arity with a preset 'up to 9' optimization
November 5, 2025 at 6:35 PM
macwright.com
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!
The intersection with walk signals installed
November 4, 2025 at 2:23 PM
macwright.com
maybe a mini-theme is that devices for kids are where the good computer-physical-user-interface-innovation ideas are cooking, like the yoto
October 31, 2025 at 2:31 PM
macwright.com
i am puzzled about how all of the new york city council's pushback against this year's budget proposals is legal at all www.cityandstateny.com/politics/202...
When responding to a question about whether the rally was in fact an example of electioneering, Hudson said “we’re not electioneering because we haven’t told people how to vote.” However, Schulman said earlier at that rally: “I’m asking people to please vote no on these measures.”
October 22, 2025 at 7:21 PM
macwright.com
welp another one on the list www.are.na/tom-macwrigh...
chatgpt atlas list of products called atlas
October 21, 2025 at 4:54 PM
macwright.com
@daringfireball.bsky.social quoted Stanley Kubrick in his defense of AI art, I'm announcing my champion to quote in response: the one, the onlyyyyy 💪 Kurt Vonnegut 💪

macwright.com/2025/10/16/t...
“There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France. “I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer’s mind. If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball game. “Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness.” I went on: “There is also the matter of craftsmanship. Real picture-lovers like to play along, so to speak, to look closely at the surfaces, to see how the illusion was created. If you are unwilling to say how you made your pictures, there goes the ball game a second time.
October 16, 2025 at 9:57 PM
macwright.com
copilot is smarter than ever (we no longer have accurate counts of pull requests on the pull requests tab)
October 9, 2025 at 3:02 PM
macwright.com
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.
September 27, 2025 at 8:24 PM
macwright.com
bike camping photos came back ❤️
sorrel ridge campsite in maryland riding on the trail people riding through a fallen tree view of the mountains through a break in the trees
September 26, 2025 at 11:52 AM
macwright.com
September 24, 2025 at 7:40 PM
macwright.com
i wrote a whole thing about wrangling npm dependencies because it's an unglamorous part of the job that's nevertheless really important. also because i wanted to make some watercolor illustrations. blog.val.town/gardening-de...
an illustration of a boat, as a metaphor for carrying dependencies
September 11, 2025 at 4:47 PM
macwright.com
i occasionally search twitter for my name for desperate "do people still think of me" reasons and this time i learned that no, they don't, but the llms do
Hilarious hallucinations from my own AI program today. So far, it's told me my real name is Christoper Harper-Bill (its attempt to explain what CHB means) and when I said "no, I'm Cubby" it then told me my name was Tom MacWright. Fun stuff when even your own AI is like "looking up documentation is hard, I'll just wing it, lol" when you ask it about yourself.
September 8, 2025 at 12:39 PM