I spent a lot of time outside in April. The first two weekends I did long bike rides: from Brooklyn to Tarrytown along the Old Croton Aqueduct trail, and out to Rockaway Beach via the Marine Parkway Bridge & Cross Bay Memorial Bridge.
Then, I ran the Brooklyn Experience Half Marathon. I wrote some notes about the experience over in /micro. I properly trained for it this time, and it felt good and was pretty fast: shaved five minutes off my previous record.
And then, the Great Saunter…
The Great Saunter is a full loop around Manhattan. The route is 32 miles but it took us 33 with GPS jitter and detours. Ten hours and forty-three minutes. It was very difficult, in a lot of ways tougher than the half-marathon in terms of the stress it puts on the body.
I'm getting more comfortable with longer endurance events, but still have no interest in running a marathon, and definitely no ultramarathons. A 200-300km randonneuring ride though could be in the cards.
Reading
I read The Origins of Efficiency by Brian Potter, the author of Construction Physics. I learned that I like his blogging better than his book-length writing: for example, this month's article Helium is Hard to Replace is really great, with understandable and fascinating charts and examples.
there’s a final layer to this argument that nobody’s quite articulated yet. product quality improvements, at the frontier, are not bounded by how fast you can write code. they’re bounded by how fast you can come up with ideas good enough to push the frontier.
I liked claude code is not making your product better, and think it perfectly rhymes with John Cutler's post about maximizers vs. focusers which isn't directly about AI. Maximizers are overrepresented in the top rungs on tech companies, people who are marked by opportunistic, experimental thinking, and for them the ability to implement a ton of features really quickly even at low quality is a gift. Their ability to enact their will was previously gated by the people doing the coding and designing, who mostly dislike pushing low-quality work. Now it isn't, as much.
I took the time to thoroughly read through JavaScript has a Unicode Problem and JavaScript’s internal character encoding: UCS-2 or UTF-16? They're from 2013 but still relevant, and really engaging from a technical perspective if you are very interested in text encoding and also JavaScript, which I am.
Listening
An excellent month for music. The new Gregory Uhlman (guitarist for SML) album.
New Mammal Hands, too.
New album from Dosh, Ismaily, Young. Dosh who you might know from being Andrew Bird's drummer at one point (after Kevin O'Donnell and before Griffin Goldsmith).
The Bad Plus's final album from back in 2024! They're on a farewell tour right now, all things must come to an end.
Watching
This was a great long watch on some math concepts that I've had to re-learn a bunch of times, and it was the first time that the idea of a quaternion really clicked for me. Freya's channel has a lot more great videos.
Jamelle Bouie's channel is consistently the best video commentary on the details of US politics I can find.