Ftrain, by Paul Ford

So I’m in Cambridge, Mass., where the first words I heard getting out of the Amtrak station in Boston were “Abolish ICE and save America!” I kept walking in my travel fog and then 40 feet later I turned back gave a thumbs up which no one saw.

I have a New Yorker’s normal disdain of Boston but we didn’t have protesters outside of Penn Station, and Boston handles snow better than New York. So right now I have to give Mass. the advantage. Gives me no pleasure, etc.

Then Cambridge. As I got on and off the Red Line everything feels very familiar. There’s a certain kind of face that is here in abundance—far greater abundance than in NYC—and every time I see it I think, “math face.”

I can’t fully nail it down. It’s a slender, clean face with a particular jawline and wide eyes. You either have it or not. I don’t. It’s not programmer or finance or actuarial. It’s math face. Women have it, men have it, trans people have it, people from everywhere in the world have it. There’s a lot of it here. If I showed you, you'd probably lecture me for a half hour about not putting people into categories, and then you'd go, Yeah, okay. Math face.

In the same way, I can tell a writer on the train. I can’t explain how. There aren’t as many as there used to be. But there’s a sort of essential sallowness coupled with a lack of presence. Words are inherently unhealthy. You shouldn’t, if at all possible.

I've seen so many writers try to escape writer self over the years. They lift weights and work hard for amazing forearms. They climb mountains. They pivot to video. They leave their families. They even schedule haircuts. Never matters. They have the stain.

Many years ago, my dad came up for my college graduation. He had retired a while ago but had taught creative writing at a state college for decades. We were in his car, parked outside the dorm.

My friend and her father walked in front of us. Normal-looking guy with a beard. I'd never seen him before, but I knew my friend's father was a poet who taught poetry at a college in New Jersey.

My father didn't know that, though. Didn't know the girl, either. Looking straight ahead out the windshield, he said, “Look at that fucking English professor.”

I wonder how we end up looking like our work, or if our careers descend upon us like invisible bats. My, says the bat of writing, ultrasonically, that one likes to sit a lot, and he seems sad. Let's give him something to type with his fingers. The bat of being good at piano and/or sex flies right by going, All yours, buddy. And that is how the avocation bats impose our destinies.

I was out with a friend of mine once 20 years ago and a person in line at the coffee shop turned to him and said, correctly, “You’re a Java programmer.”

It was the “Java” that broke his heart.

I have no idea if all the math faces I see actually are doing math (they are). I’m just noting the confidence with which a brain makes entirely arbitrary distinctions based on very limited information. I don’t even look at faces in NYC. I look at my phone. When I am somewhere else, away from home, my pattern matcher goes into overdrive and the weirdest patterns pop up.

I'm sure this is, somehow, a problem.

Working on simple stuff: Minuets in G major and G minor, from the Anna Magdalen notebook (bum, dum dum dum dum, bum bum bum), memorized at 50-60BPM—in the Bach book but actually Christian Petzold. And Oscar Peterson Minuet 3, also memorized, and Tune-Up by Miles Davis (it's not actually by him; I can't remember who). Some of this is going back to basics by mutual agreement—much of my study involves single, circled words pencilled at the top of the page.

TEMPO

THUMB

I play about as well as a talented seven year old. You could say that I am improving but it doesn't really register like that. It is more like,

• I am no longer shocked by how bad I am.

• I am aware of what happened when I was supposed to land on the E with third finger.

• I am not good at the contract, expand chord motion on the right hand.

• I have trouble with the intervals in the walking bass in my left hand.

I get so jealous of my teacher. I go over there, trudging through the snow, and take off my shoes, and he's already at work. His work is piano. He's my age. He's probably taught 25,000–30,000 lessons. Each one has a little narrative. First we do Hanon. He's very professional and we chat amiably about kids and schools in the neighborhood but there's no expectation aside from that I will attend, and Venmo.

He takes my intent seriously though. After a lifetime of putting on a business show, selling the sizzle, doing my interdisciplinary jazz hands, it has taken me a long time to accept that progress will be only incremental, and not just incremental but fractional, not just fractional but a derivative, we are calculating a slope here. And it can't be sped up. You can't make a half-century-old brain into an ambidextrous sight-reader. In about five years I will probably be able to play a little Chopin or some nice pop tunes without spaghetti fingers spilling all over the keyboard.

I'm about to go into work and discuss how we'll market the platform once some of the integration tasks are complete. What are you doing today, I ask? Friends are coming over to rehearse tango, he says. His apartment is warm and filled with sheet music and books and a baby grand stacked with manuscripts. He composes.

I know I did not waste my life, those meetings were important.

It's not like I could play piano anyway.

So. Today was pretty good. We're about to put some Bach to bed. I have a plan for the week. We've adjusted goals a little bit, to get the fundamentals shored up. You have to decide whether you're humiliated or not. Most of the time I decide that I am.

Birds flock around the Space Shuttle in 1988, NASA.

Claude helped me work it out. It was swarms gobbling tweets.

A few months ago I realized that I had stuff scattered all over the web and I wanted it in one place, especially in the age of AI grabbing and compressing the world's data into a universal blob. I want my own little brain castle, you know? I want to own my blob.

At the same time LLMs mean that absolutely prohibitive tasks, like converting a 25-year-old messy XML database, or downloading a bunch of newsletters from many different websites and cleaning them up, or setting up HTTPS, or configuring a dev server, or setting up caching, or producing RSS, are far more manageable—you don't need a framework or a CMS. Major efforts are reduced to tasks.

I didn’t intend to launch a living blog again. That's a side effect of me trying to build a good hierarchical content manager for my personal archive. In doing so I accidentally built a CMS. That's vibe coding! Once I saw that text box I had to type into it. Then I had to debug it on mobile and make it work when the subway goes underground. And now I have a blog.

Most of my external work is in the Publications section, and within there are my many terrible tweets. Apparently 23 thousand of them—50k if you count replies (I don't post those here, but I leave them in the database).

Wait, I said, could that be a miscount? That's too many tweets. It can't be that many.

And Claude said: “Peak Twitter years (2013-2017) averaged 15-23 tweets/day. That's high but not impossible if you were actively replying and engaging. The count looks legitimate - you just tweeted a lot!”

You little LLM son of a bitch with your exclamation points.

There are maybe 10 thousand other things in this website of Theseus—like blog posts, podcasts, articles, images, photos, and newsletter posts, plus Bluesky. From my point of view I was building a personal archive that knitted together the rich tapestry of my own written, cultural, and corporate output in a way that would be accessible and permanent—eventually I could even move all the code and data into the Internet Archive.

Analyzing the logs offers a different perspective. From the perspective of the modern web, I've smashed open an enormous piñata and dropped 60,000 pieces of candy into the middle of the room, and now every bot is trying to grab every single piece of candy as quickly as possible before anyone else. Doesn't matter what the candy even tastes like. The modern web consists of giant companies jamming their face into your data like Pacino with his mountain of cocaine in Scarface. In this case, it's a whole swarm of tiny Pacinos—a vast range of IPs downloading everything they could, moving across all the tweets, orchestrated by some hidden system. And since I hadn't turned on any kind of limits, they just kept going, slamajamming my database like monkeys with hammers. I have mixed a lot of metaphors but let’s have some fun okay?

I have everything connected in a hierarchy, and the database is well-architected even if the queries are complex—so they could get dozens of pages a second. Multiple or actors grabbing tens of thousands of URLs as fast as they could. Data orcs.

This way you learn. With the help of a bot (probably fed by the same process wrecking my stats) I turned on rate-limiting—nothing serious, just enough to keep the site available to humans and slow the swarm down a bit. I made my peace with being spidered decades ago, I just don't want to spend all my time cleaning up. Detente is the only option. You can’t win. It’s a billion nanothieves.

This explains why I'd log into server and every letter I typed required a full second to show up on screen. I've read that OpenStreetMap is getting similarly swarmed. The ridiculous thing is they make the data entirely open and easy to download. But the nature of data now is smash-and-grab, zero compensation, go, go, go. All you can do is slow them down and protect your little corner.

Rule of threes...Uncle Floyd..Catherine O'Hara...

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. This is not false modesty. It makes no sense.

There is no way that 82,522 unique visitors came last week. Or that 40 gigs were transacted. Given the way audience works now and how many people see RSS, a few hundred could be the outside. My bet would be under a hundred. So it must be bots, or RSS feeds, or bots reading RSS feeds.

Digging in lightly you start to see some shape of it—tons of attempts by bot farms to log into WordPress admins that don’t exist, other strange URLs. Maybe the stats themselves are misconfigured. It’s been so long that I looked at unfiltered logs.

There’s obviously a ghost web—AI bots in a frenzy, infinite compromised machines looking to compromise other machines, the individual server as a natural resource to be mined, or even better, stolen, turned into a link farm, made to send spam messages. Sure, 25 years ago the same kind of long soft attack was going on, it was just once an hour instead of everywhere constantly.

When you’re building sites you develop empathy for the machines in their racks and I suddenly had a flash of some little slotted box, hosting 10 or 100 virtual machines, under siege by a million buzzy-bee attacker drones. Hang in there little box! Over time I will come to understand this traffic because it interests me how we turned a single simple protocol, HTTP, into a global geopolitical and criminal war zone, and how we turned people publishing their little thoughts into cheap digital coal to be extracted and jammed into vectors.

One day, little server, I will abandon you too.

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 correctly; 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.

Now you just say “do this.” Claude codes, Claude deploys, Claude breaks everything at midnight, all of which used to be my job.

The stats make no sense.

Absolute joyful nonsense, the wrecked piano, the idiot friends, everyone yelling. Watching everyone throw him off and he keeps coming back to the song.

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.

At first I thought it was his mother who saw him. That would have been something. It's a risk of listening to the audiobook Bible instead of going to church. Often right before bed. You get Marys mixed up.

For example I've been trying to get through Acts and for a long time I couldn't figure out who exploded (it turns out it was Judas). I always thought he hanged himself. Turns out it was both. But not at once. That would have been even more memorable.

It really surprised me, that Judas explodes.

Anyway it's Mary Magdalen. My friend Mark put me straight there. She doesn't recognize Jesus. She just wants the body. When she sees him she cries out “teacher.”

Fifty million ideas at once in there. Two thousand years of unpacking it, easy. You get a story locked down like this and you can build societies—regardless of oceans.

Some guy comes to town. He gets off a boat. He's get a big beard and extremely bright eyes. Glow-in-the-dark eyes.

This happened! I'm telling you. It really happened! What are you going to do about it?

That guy said it happened! Let's give him a little soup and hear him out. He might know something.

For so much of the world, looking up from an empty plate or from a hard pew in a cold room, they think of mothers, and sons, and friends, and students, and teachers, and it sings.

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.

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.

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.

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.