Ftrain, by Paul Ford

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February 2, 2026 (today)

Numbers odd

Stats don't make sense any more
Screenshot 2026-02-02 at 9.25.34 PM

I figured I'd throw stats on this site like the old days, but stats like they used to be: information about how the server was reacting to user demand, not information about users.

I really don't want to know anything about you, the reader, unless you tell me yourself, preferably over email. It's privilege enough to have you show up. Nor do I want to even think about GDPR or other punishments Europe has meted out to the web platform for its overreach. No cookies.

Not that I'm particularly virtuous. We use analytics, and retargeting, and all manner of normal marketing awkwardness at the office. But this is home.

The chat suggested goaccess. I installed it and it works fine. But the numbers don't make sense. There is simply no way that 82,522 unique visitors came last week. This is not false modesty. It simply make no sense. So it must be bots, or RSS feeds, or bots reading RSS feeds.

I don't have a grand conclusion. I'm just noting the change, and that I'll figure it out some day. In the meantime memories of optimizations past come unbidden to mind. I will need to gzip everything; I will need my content types set correction; I will need to cache with proper ETAGs. So many hours lost to Apache's regexp syntax, and it's not like I can explain the pain to anyone except a vanishing few grayheaded souls like myself. Nor was it particularly meaningful work. I'm just noting that my soul was forged in Apache config files, setting up virtual hosts, and seeking to do redirects as the new CMS came online, and that these experiences did mean something to me, logged into some server somewhere.

Anyway. The stats make no sense. Everything is off by two orders of magnitude at least. Although I doubt it's making anything up. It's just a different web than I understand and it will take me a while to understand it again. With the exception that I can say, “Please optimize this site,” and a friendly robot will trundle through the config and do as asked. So that that experience of broken configs, so foundational to my very being, will never be shared again. It's for the best, I just wish progress didn't seem so intent on making everything I sought to comprehend into an irrelevance.

February 1, 2026 (yesterday) · Personal Essays

Mentioned in Hell’s Dispatches

Of course Satan has a Gmail account.
Screenshot 2026-02-02 at 10.49.54 AM

Detail from Albrecht Dürer, “The Angel with the Key to Bottomless Pit.”

On a hunch I searched the files—I'm leaving the name out because I don't want that SEO—and found myself—15 tweets from the daily “in your network” email that Twitter sent out back in the day, and a citation from an article about Bitcoin (of course). Oddly some tweets are redacted—a URL, so perhaps they just automatically scrubbed URLs. I expected to feel some way or another but aside from a kind of grim irony it doesn’t mean anything. Just database noise. I told my wife and she went, “huh.”

When you participate in the world you then participate in the worst of it. You can’t write up a sign at the beginning of an article that says “no monsters.” All attempts at this—and I've seen them all—fail. Even if you did they'd ignore the sign, because they're monsters. Someone awful will eventually read this too. Maybe you. Maybe just OpenAI's chat spider. Hi buddy.

What makes this so wild to me, looking at other emails, is the legibility of the evil. I have two words I use excessively: Metabolize, as in how will this system metabolize this change? And legibility, as in, can people perceive this change? In general I find that my function in life, prose, and organizational management is to make the way change works through a system legible.

But there's no need to explain anything here. All subtlety is rejected. There's no strategy either, it's just all tactics in pursuit of their basest desires. The intent is always right in the subject line of the email. That's what makes it so confusing. No moral quandaries, no ambiguity, no seeking, no neoliberal Davosian hedging. A typical day for an associate:

  • Go to work at the bank.

  • Go yell at some underlings

  • Email your buddy on his island asking if he could hook you up with your dose of exploitative cruelty

  • Ask him for tax advice

It's a monolithic system of greed and narcissistic feeding—high-fiving vampires descending on the orphanage with wide fanged grins. All humans are things, except for you, who lead Harvard. All this grotesquerie in a blobby database of subject lines. One wonders about BCCs. If you get caught you fake an apology, then get right back on the cruelty horse.

All the masks came off this year. I mean we all have our masks. But this is They Live level. Goblin faces everywhere, and no need for secret glasses. Not even suits and ties, but middle-aged shits in soft linen shirts. Comfortable on the deck chairs as they plan revenge on Gawker.

And this surprises you? Yes! I mean, this is what we knew, always: But in popular imagination it involves masks and rituals, Hellfire clubs, and cruel viziers. Things cooking in fireplaces and oaths on parchment. Basically our myths are useless. Even our modern Arendtian conception involves some denial, some willingness to look away from the great orb of death in the backyard, plus some IBM punchcard bureaucracy. Here it's casual. Flood the zone for the LOLs. hey guys do you want to invade poland this weekend kek kek kek frog emoji. Pure void shit. Of course Satan has a gmail account and posts to 4chan. Milton at his wildest never imagined two-factor authentication.

In general it seems like anything too large, with too much process, was kept at bay. Because accountability would have rapidly identified the void, called attention, ruined the party. Any orderly system based on rational actors, good faith, and accountability was avoided at all costs. No systems allowed, only people who could be trusted, and twisted.

This network is what runs the world now, and this is the mold into which they are pouring the whole country, and they hope the world. Why in God's name did they keep invoking the monster's name to win the election, knowing that they were in the monster's archives? Convenience, I guess. An assumption they could keep the lid on, or shape it, or use it further. How could you go about your days running global finance knowing you're in here? But they will.

(The inability to metabolize shame is a secret power. Our side is all shame, addicted to it, and they can and do use that.)

Finding my name in those files: You’re always closer to the malevolent heart of things than you think. And typically you'll never know it, that you're just skimming over the water and below it's all sharks. Unless you fall over the side, or get pushed, or, deciding that you are a shark yourself, decide to jump in. Or they put a freaking search engine in front of the fraction they release, while continuing—barely even pretending otherwise—to hide the most implicated. Where are the other sharks hiding?

February 1, 2026 (yesterday)

John 20:11-18

It's this one moment.

15 He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.”

She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).

I got to tell you it's a lot of begats in general. I drift a little. I'm trying here. I listen on the train and at night. I had AI make me a nice audio playlist with images for each book from Doré. They're kind of crabbed and gray on the iPhone, though. Everything is just a robed shape.

Anyway I don't know why exactly I keep reading the Bible. I think I'm just going back to infrastructure in general, since the world makes so little sense—watching an entire society commit suicide is hard and baffling. It draws one toward poems and proverbs and foundational narratives.

On a whim I tried Obadiah. Can't remember a single thing that happens. But I've also been plowing through the New Testament and I got to this part in John and man. I mean John nailed it. What a moment. Can't get it out of my head. It's his mother! She doesn't recognize him. She knows her son is dead. She just wants the body. But when she recognizes him it's not her boy. It's as teacher. Fifty million ideas at once in there. Two thousand years of unpacking easy. You get a story locked down like this and you can build societies regardless of oceans. This happened and now what are we going to do with you? And for so much of the world, looking up from an empty plate or from a hard pew in a cold room, it just sings.


February 1, 2026 (yesterday)

Bad Prose

The big social platforms being absolute trash, there is a form of tech-influencer post, common to LinkedIn or those long Tweet disasters, which open with “The absolute worst thing about X is...” and then the twist is that X is amazing, and it makes everything else look terrible in comparison. Bonus points doing it for your friend's startup, or Claude Code, or whatever new thing is dominating conversation.

Even relatively respected people will spray this warm egesta from their posting cloacae.

If I were younger and not so compromised nor innerly dead I think I'd make a Trash Catalog of trash posts—a new collection of updated rhetorical strategies for an era in which all critical thought has to be pulped out through the algorithmic Orange Julius thought squeezer.

February 1, 2026 (yesterday) · Essays

Lorne

The worst thing about podcasts.

The worst thing in the world is when comedians share their Lorne stories. Podcast after podcast: “Well, I had a meeting with Lorne,” they'll say, like an old sailor describing a storm. “Must have been, oh, 2003 or so.” And buckle up because you are about to hear the least relevant, most uninteresting half-hour of material in your life.

“What was it like for you?”

“So I was there, and Lorne said, hey, have one of those candy bars.”

No context. No drama. Just ever-more Lornery, and the audience knows that the conversation is about to be flushed down the time toilet with no relief. They'll do Lorne impersonations, even though absolutely no one outside of their hermetically sealed coffin of anxious rejection has the first clue. Half of the time the conversation is about not getting a job, an experience that nearly all of adult humanity has shared, but in this case is supposed to represent an almost cosmic level of injustice and narcissistic insult. A comic will tell the story of not getting a Lorne callback until the clock melts, while another comedian encourages them, like two addicts getting it together enough to steal a catalytic converter. It ends not with jokes but with two men diving so deep into comedy-world minutiae that, by the end, they're listing the snack preferences of the doormen who worked between 1997–2007 at the Poughkeepsie Chamber of Chortles.

Imagine going to the DMV but before you get your license photo taken, the clerk gives you a copy of the application they filled out to get the job, and says: “I need to tell you about my interview with Craig sixteen years ago.” Lorne stories are no different. They are anecdotes about the Comedy HR department. Lornepilled, no one can see this and no one stops it.

There needs to be AI involved. If Apple can hear “Siri” they can hear “Lorne.” Then the iPhone simply explodes.

Clearly the only person who could bring it to an end is Lorne himself, via a mass e-mail. “Dear Comedian, Stop talking about me because it's not funny or interesting to anyone.” But it would achieve nothing. It would only lead to impersonations of Lorne transcribing that email in a voice none of us have heard. They would all talk about “the email” and “did you get the email?” “I didn't get the email but I did once get an email from his assistant asking me to return the paperclip dispenser I stole from his desk.” Then they'd talk about that important story for the full duration of Goodfellas.

No matter what we try we cannot make these people realize how boring Lorne is. Lorne stories are fractal, recursive, infinite to them. Even the sound of the word “Lorne” sounds like boredom. How are you feeling? I'm Looooooorne. Nothing will change. I will hear about Lorne until I die. It is not funny but funny people can't be convinced. That is our lot as non-comedians.

January 31, 2026 (2 days ago)

30 years update

Update. The fire marshal shut down new entrants. Six hundred grumblers in a big lobby. Six degrees outside. All of us in a huge snaking unmoving line. Oof.

I stood solo, and listened to VC murmurings.

Someone said: It’s a large fund.

Someone said: He’s surprisingly not liquid.

Someone said: I never knew what Diplo even looked like.

My friend made it to the 41st floor. “I’m by the broken TVs,” he texted me. “It’s crowded.”

It is very hard to do something for a truly large group in New York City. Event spaces are okay but at a certain scale you need to go through a hotel or a theater, or a museum. But then the costs explode.

Alas humans at scale are a liquid. You have to manage them like a liquid. We spill everywhere. A large group desperately wants to be a mess. Just like NYC wants to become a forest.

They kept trying to pack us into tighter cordons because the line wasn’t moving, to kind of compress the situation. People were running around with iPad clipboards and yelling a little. But in 30 years I’ve learned to recognize a proper mess. Time to go.

In NYC the fire marshal—the whiteshirt—is a sacred figure of total power. They are why we don’t have as much death as we used to. They have the power to set the human flow: No bodies in until there are bodies out. There must have been three hundred people in front of me, and hundreds more behind me—meaning I’d have to wait for three or four hundred people to leave.

Or leave myself. Which would make room for someone else to move up in the line. Ah well. No social validation for me. My friend got me a copy of the event magazine. I’m the foreword. Mayor Bloomberg is the afterword. So there you go. Paul Ford and Michael Bloomberg, bookends to 30 years of NYC tech.

I feel very bad for everyone involved. It wasn't their fault! They were utterly pleasant to work with and they'd put an enormous amount into it. I had lots of friends upstairs. The next day, they sent out a contrite email offering full refunds. They tried to do a nice thing and look what happened.

That said, it's also remarkable that upstairs, on a high floor, NYC VCs were in the VIP area, celebrating each other, or as I like to say, LinkIn' in, having recently rung the closing NASDAQ bell—while below, in the overbuilt lobby of this vertical Snowpiercer, there teemed a mass in cocktail dresses and zip-up sweaters, who'd bought tickets, or been handed tickets by a more senior partner, and could not achieve ingress. Metaphor-wise a little on the nose.

Seeing that level of irony become real and manifest makes me love having a personal website once more. Part of what made me resurrect this blog was the sense of that impending 30th anniversary—of anniversaries in general—and what is Ftrain.com if not for moments like these? What is a blog if not a venue for finally exploring all the aspects of ones own hypocrisy?

So it all worked out.

No bars down that far east on Maiden Lane so we bailed to Brooklyn. After a drink, just one, I took a car home.

The thing I left out of the foreword, and out of the piece I wrote before this—because it would have been very off topic—is that, even if the city will outlast the tech industry, the odds are incredibly good that, eventually this all will become the Anthropocene discontinuity, an inch of plastic-y rock in the geological record. Even the base of the Brooklyn Bridge will be subducted into the folding earth. Unless we tesseract the city, geology will have its way, and that is how it goes. I think constantly about that. The train tunnel is just a stack of geologic eons through which we push our little bodies. Far-future scientists, finding our bones, may prefer to study ferns. Anniversaries are sweet—even ones where you can't go upstairs—but the world craves to turn us into something very thin and mineral. At some level you need to welcome it.

January 31, 2026 (2 days ago)

30 years

Off to the party
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It’s the 30th anniversary of Silicon Alley—always a specious concept, but a useful one. By merits of basic intransigence and inertia I’ve been here for most of it.

There’s a big, big party downtown and normally I’d be looking for a reason to stay home and mess with computers—but I wrote the intro to the cool-sounding oral history zine they put together, in my ceremonial role, and I want to see it. I’m part of the merchandise.

I’m writing this in the dark in bed because it doesn’t start until 8:30 and goes until 2am, which is so outside my parameters that I made myself nap.

I also just re-read the introduction I wrote—I filed it in October—and it feels like a missive from a different universe. It’s not wrong or anything. It just is an attempt to capture a moment in tech history and talk about the value of NYC—and after I sent it in and did my edits, things really started to…change. Trump slid into an exceptionally cruel madness, the country is committing suicide, the Valley became craven quislings, NYC elected a gleaming young socialist, Grok started undressing children, and computers started writing all the code.

Then again my essay basically said: We are temporary and the city remains. That’s true.

The other thing is, and I left this out of the essay, is that one day NYC will be gone too. The steel girder architecture would crumble into mounds over centuries. The subways flood in hours without pumps. This place desperately wants to be a wooded island if only we’d let it.

Everything is ephemeral without constant maintenance. Networks are the source of all power but networks are ephemeral.

Perhaps the Brooklyn Bridge has the best potential as a ruin. A big pile of stones. Probably our closest to the pyramids. We don’t have a coliseum (we did have a bookstore named after the one in Rome, now gone, and missed).

But that’s okay if it’s all that remains because the Brooklyn Bridge is the best idea in the city. It brought two cities into one. It will absolutely outlive everyone here. It could outlive the flag atop it. Thirty years of the Internet will seem like such a small blip to the future.

January 28, 2026 (5 days ago) · Bluesky Post
What is Ethan Hawke...reading?
A smirking Ethan Hawke dressed all in military shades of green with boots on, in a hideous armchair upholstered with a bird and plants print, one of those things that is so relentlessly ugly it signifies sophistication and probably costs $9,000, in front of a bunch of books. He's reading a massive, marble-edged, leather-bound book that appears to be a dictionary. He pulls it off because he's just an earnest poetic sex angel and we all know it but literally anyone else would be dragged for eons through every tranche of hell.

Alt Text: A smirking Ethan Hawke dressed all in military shades of green with boots on, in a hideous armchair upholstered with a bird and plants print, one of those things that is so relentlessly ugly it signifies sophistication and probably costs $9,000, in front of a bunch of books. He's reading a massive, marble-edged, leather-bound book that appears to be a dictionary. He pulls it off because he's just an earnest poetic sex angel and we all know it but literally anyone else would be dragged for eons through every tranche of hell.

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January 27, 2026 (6 days ago)

Uncle Floyd Dies ➛

I think I end up owing him everything: My fascination with Vaudeville, my sense of entertainment history being the true history of this country. And some of the fondest memories of rough times, watching this show as a kid with my mother. Actual laughs. Pure foolishness. That sense of chaos about to unfold, everything ready to collapse at all times. The sets were so cheap, the jokes so fragile, that you spent the entire show rooting for him, for Oogie the puppet, just waiting for entropy to claim every victory.

In addition to his brother Jimmy, Mr. Vivino is survived by another brother, Jerome Jr., a saxophonist known as Jerry; a daughter, Lauren Vivino, two sons, Christopher and Eric, from his second marriage, to Lisa Vitale, which ended in divorce; three more sons, Gregory, Dante and Massimo, from his marriage to Jane Hillenbrand, which ended in divorce; and three grandchildren. His first marriage, to Debra Gallison, also ended in divorce.

Can't win 'em all. I was ten. I'd stare in awe, like other kids might watch a wrestler or a racecar driver. The cast, they'd always survive, to amuse another day. This is the miracle of entertainment—that they get through it! That is always the secret story of the concert, the talent show, the dog agility run, that it could, absolutely, collapse, and what have they done to manage this, to avoid it, to bring order to the creeping disaster that is always waiting? But in the case of this show they did almost nothing. Sometimes Cyndi Lauper would come on. David Bowie was a huge fan. But there was absolutely nothing between Uncle Floyd and the terrible void. The abyss was practically a guest host.

For all they trash the humanists out there, measure the tears when a guy who used to emcee events for the Knights of Columbus tanks it. Man that's us who kicked. We all know who gets the loudest funeral. All I personally ever wanted to be was someone who could give a good toast at a function. Everything else comes second. He gave us all of that. A beautiful model of lo-fi shenanigans, a debased and kitschy folly. We knew what a treasure he was. Those alimony payments must have been a trip. Then again they all knew exactly what they were marrying. Blessings upon Uncle Floyd forevermore. Thank you for showing me how much fun it could be sing into the void.

January 27, 2026 (6 days ago) · Bluesky Post
hey guys let me get your attention for a minute...got something here I think we ALL need to see and think about
yellow hilited text: [VIDEO OF THINGS THAT MATTER]

Alt Text: yellow hilited text: [VIDEO OF THINGS THAT MATTER]

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January 25, 2026 (1 weeks ago) · Personal Essays

The Bike Shop

Is now gone.
IMG_2820.jpeg

I am a passive verb. I operate in language and business and descriptions of future state; basically my brain is entirely for describing. I find action confusing. This part of myself is not always under my control. So I gravitate to actors.

My spouse acts. She takes news hard. She does more every day, is a node in a network of people who act to make things better. She invites, cooks, assembles, 3D-prints, coordinates. She brings 20 people around the table to make things that will be given away, and since the table can't hold that many people, sets up another table right next to it.

This leads to some funny processes; one night I host an event about AI and marketing at work—the opposite of an activist occurrence. I moderate. But the caterer is out of slider buns so sends us 100 full-sized hamburgers, leaving 80 because no one wants whole snack burgers before dinner. And trays of assorted apps and crudités. We mingle for hours. I close up the office—I like being last to leave—and pile up all the remaining trays and bring it all home on the Q train in Fresh Direct bags (the Birkin of New York City mutual aid).

There are waiting clean, new plastic trays by the hundreds. We'll also recycle the aluminum trays that hold the burgers. I pack dinners for a half hour, two per tray—you want to get as many calories in a box as you can, even if it smushes a bun. I put bits of tape on each container then mark vegetarian vs. meat in Sharpie. Then I repack the Fresh Direct bag with the containers, and jam them into the fridge.

I find this all boring and wish someone would acknowledge my decency and good intentions and do it for me. But then I put on headphones and lean into the process and it goes by fine.

Each community fridge has its caretakers; my spouse goes with the food and comes back with a story: The burgers were exactly right, this appetizer will probably not be eaten, and so forth. It’s all halal which is great but not mandatory because so many are Caribbean. I love this data, which is localized and cannot be found on Wikipedia. There's pleasure in pure information. Did you know it is offensive to whistle in some cultures?

Between this and the biweekly food distro—do I love cleaning up when she drives the 40 meals to the site? Not really, but it's the least I can do—and the donations to the food bank and the pandemic mutual aid and working with the school, we’ve fed what? Thousands of meals, I guess. Hundreds of people. Maybe ten thousand meals over a few years. Bulk bags of chicken breast, crates of broccoli.

That feels nice. Some full bellies. I remember it, getting bags of groceries from the community church. God all you want is Oreos. Lucky if you get grocery brand sugar cookies. Of course, now I take Mounjaro so I don’t want to eat, and to keep my blood sugar within mortal ranges.

We are, and this was our unspoken goal, infrastructure. I’ve never felt like I belong anywhere at all. Nonetheless I think we may be load-bearing. I like being infrastructure: Invisible but useful.

1447

I emailed this to 311, and a year or so later those bikes were gone.

Today she went to a tiny bike shop run by two immigrants to drop something off and it was empty, stripped.

It was, I am sorry to say, the absolute greatest bike shop. In this neighborhood or any.

A NYC-typical shop you go in and they look you up and down and go, Come back in two weeks. Now you have no bicycle. You go back in two weeks. You went in with loose brakes but now they say, We had to replace your frame, it's made of pure moon aluminum, that's all we could get. So it's $6,000. And you have to pay.

But this one, pizzabox chef kissing fingers, it had a Spanish name and served everyone—delivery drivers, the ultra-Orthodox, intensely costumed bike nuts, and trundlers like me. They fixed your brakes in ten minutes for ten dollars, rewiring, and you'd give them $20. Right on the sidewalk. One guy would just run tools to another. Another kind of infrastructure.

It's all guesswork, working backwards from the empty shop, but—obviously they saw where this was headed and cleared out. Odds are they had their bugout bags packed, at least metaphorically. Paid in cash all those years, hopefully a lot went home and got stashed away. And a wonderful thing is taken out of the world. And I’m back to two week bike repairs.

I go there to get my bike fixed—but my wife had gone to drop off some different infrastructural output—little cards and whistles—for the deliveristas and was very sad that it was all gone. Told me all about it. I stretch out on the floor and she talks to me. She is very, very bummed.

I was quiet for a while. My business partner emigrated here as a child; I'd had my piano lesson in the morning—my teacher is Argentinian. Next morning I'll see my Lebanese therapist. Immigrants are essential infrastructure; the city collapses without them in all of its aspects—transit, culture, arts, finance, government, even policing. Our mayor was born in Kampala.

But look, I said, not knowing anything but trying to sort it out, this is a grievous time and it might not get better. We should think about that. Maybe we won't die as Americans. (Which made me sad. I would like to die as an American.) 

But…we probably will.

I am trying to update my website, and importing all the things I've written over the years. And I keep finding posts from decades ago. We knew this was here the whole time. We saw it when we invaded Iraq. And I found this thing I posted 22 years ago—“A Chinese View of the Statue of Liberty.” But it’s from 1885. The author wanted to be an attorney, and didn't have the right. I keep listening to a recording of the Bible. I'm trying to figure out what stories we are telling. 

I know you're worried I'm getting religious but trust me I am a stone atheist. I regret it but I am. But how different groups can believe the same story and come to these conclusions—you know in Jon Dos Passos's American Trilogy it's about Sacco and Vanzetti and the famous line from it is, “All right we are two nations.” And yet it seems intolerable to us. It breaks our heart. And I want to understand that, but every time I think I do, I can't quite figure it. Maybe it’s in the Bible. Or I should just finish Dos Passos. Both are hard to read.

The carpet is soft and gray. The steam heat is warm. I have a house. I have a refrigerator.

This will seem like a jump but stay with me. When I went on Mounjaro, I felt this immense sense of relief and freedom, and the only narratives that made sense were trans narratives. You take a shot, the hormone changes you who are, it's baffling, but for the first time in your life you see a future where you have some control. When there were shortages I would panic and despair.

We turned the world onto hormones. I did it because my endocrinologist prescribed it. We all lost all this weight. We could have realized just how wonderful it must be to be trans, to understand that the food noise was an analog to gender noise, but we did the opposite. We doubled down on hatred and made it worse. At the moment of maximum potential empathy we mounted a national twinkie defense. We see ourselves in the other person and it enrages us. We are broken entirely.

(I am always running my predictive model. Cynicism has high predictive function. Patriotism has very little. Hope does have some. Empathy has a lot, actually, if you listen to it very carefully. But empathy carefully applied mostly brings bad news.)

I wanted to write about that, about this possible bloom of empathy but I couldn’t find a way that didn’t require the reader to feel empathy for me. And you just can’t ask for that any longer, or I can’t. Empathy is dead from all angles. If you profess it you're a grifter from one side and a mark from another. Everyone has chosen a side, and seekers after common cause are good for target practice, only.

But stretched out on the floor I said, But I think that will pass.

I think it is good to see the real face of this place. It's good for people to look in the mirror and see what we do, the ways we kill people. This is what we are.

Now we have seen it. And most people want to do better. They may not let us, but we do. And so I take a lot of faith and hope in that. We keep finding each other, meeting around tables. [A friend] distributed 30,000 pounds of food in Minneapolis.

I got up and did the dishes, there are always some. Did I say it all exactly thus? No, but in this shape.

January 25, 2026 (1 weeks ago) · Post

Software No Longer Needed

cu31924072675410_0342

From Minnesota Algae, 1910.

I've spent a lot of time in rebuilding this website and making a nice CMS which handles taxonomy. But I wonder if I should have. I can simply paste things to Claude and let it organize and publish them. You don't need software, in some cases. I keep seeing people building applications on top of these tools, but then you could just tell the tool and skip the application.

And yet. I don't think I'd have what I want if I'd just instructed a bunch of agents to chew through gigabytes of files.

Nonetheless. Software is still software but also a substrate now—a thick algae layer above the pond, nutrient-rich but throwing off the ecosystem too. It's out of balance right now. It's choking the fish. You don't have to write any code at all quite often. But you forsake a lot of control when you do not.

January 24, 2026 (1 weeks ago) · Bluesky Post
Chatted with the kids about about turning off video autoplay on their devices and doing some filtering. It's going to be 200 million Americans trapped inside during a snowstorm, as nightmares fly out of their phones. Check in with folks.... ➛
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