I haven’t been posting much to the ‘main blog’ recently, but I have been keeping the micro blog updates humming. If you want more content in your RSS reader, you can subscribe to those posts, which are shorter, more scattered, and even less copyedited. It feels bad to have multiple “Recently” headings in the blog listing, so I’ll give them short subtitles from now on.
Anyway, what’s up? October was all right. At Val Town, we spent a lot of time interviewing job candidates and improving the AI assistant, Townie. I also got some time to tackle long-awaited technical debt cleanups: I conquered the ‘big scary function’ that did the actual ‘running’ of val code.
Cycling
Outside of work, a lot of my October-related excitement was related to being outdoors. It’s been a great year for running – I just passed 600 miles so far and will probably hit 650 barring any injuries or life complications. But cycling is on the mind. We just rode the Old Croton Aqueduct trail from Ossining back to Brooklyn. It’s a fairly rough trail: plenty of rocks and terrain. Rideable on my ~32mm tires, but it’d be a lot easier with a mountain bike.
We rode past some osage orange trees with their funky-looking and inedible fruit the size of large grapefruits.
The trail passed right next to the Lyndhurst Estate, which was owned by a series of rich and powerful people, including Jay Gould, who is especially hated. Upstate, a lot of the attractions are like this, other big historic houses.
The trail was mostly really beautiful, though the parts closer to Yonkers have a lot of trash. It’s much more popular with hikers than with cyclists. Even though bikes are explicitly permitted, locals seemed a little surprised by our presence, even though we were ringing bells, going slow, and making lots of space.
It’s kind of funny to compare the general spatial awareness of people upstate to those in the city: we encountered a lot of people upstate who were standing in the center of the trail, completely zoned out and surprised by the presence of another human, and then on the way back were on city streets with four people within a few feet of us on foot, bikes, cars, scooters, all mostly aware and ready to silently negotiate how to move together through a shared space. I remarked that I think that when some people move out of the city because of the ‘inconvenience’, the inconvenience is people, and once you leave, you lose a certain ability to live around other people - from then on, you expect to have a suburban yard-sized perimeter around your personal space.
Micro
I wrote a lot on the microblog this month: about the Arc browser’s recent news that it’ll be abandoned, Reddit adopting Web Components, domain squatting, Python datascience tech, and Knip, a tool for finding dead code in TypeScript systems.
Content
I watched a bunch of films, which are on my Letterboxd, and the only new album on my rotation is Yasmin Williams’s Acadia:
This YouTube channel is showing all of the steps involved in doing a multi-day bikepacking trip through India. It’s a lot of fun:
And that’s it for this month! I’ll write a full-fledged blog post one of these days.