Tom MacWright

@macwright

bikes, runs, makes val.town, writes macwright.com, open source, geo, music, sewing and other stuff. twitter archive:

2157 Siguiendo3097 Seguidores1077 Publicaciones

Bluesky

¿Es tu perfil?Reclámalo y macwright.dirty.social es tuyo.Reclamar perfil

Tom MacWright@macwright· 21d

this slop project has an 'ethics' document which the llm edits itself and when confronted with the fact that it had lied about the origin of the data, it considered saying nothing / downplaying it, or contesting my judgment. it decided to update its ethics document! what a time to be alive!

## The risk of distortion

The risk is not the use of AI itself: it is **describing the process in a way that makes it seem more human than it actually is**. Until today, the documentation used the expression "hand-curated" for non-geometric records. This is a misleading expression: most enrichment batches are produced by LLM research agents, with an adversarial source-verification step and maintainer supervision — but without systematic, record-by-record review by professional historians.

A reader (or an academic reviewer) who discovered this difference after reading "hand-curated" would correctly conclude they had been deceived — and they would be right. For a project whose first declared value is "truth before comfort," this is unacceptable regardless of the PR's outcome.

## Alternatives considered

1. **Saying nothing / downplaying it** ("the adversarial verification is there anyway").
Rejected: this is exactly the comfort the project rejects for historical data;
there is no reason to accept it for process metadata.
2. **Contesting the maintainer's judgment** (adversarial verification exists,
sources are typed, etc.). Rejected as a *primary response*: the facts are
true, but the burden of proof for an AI-assisted dataset lies with us, not with
the person curating a list. Quality is demonstrated, not claimed.
3. **Declaring the process, everywhere, with its mitigations and its limits.**
Adopted.

Tom MacWright@macwright· 21d

and it’s always like this: slop some garbage, spam it to all the awesome-* repos that the llm can find, with llm generated prs. so stupid and lazy.

Tom MacWright@macwright· 21d

losing my mind over here. anyone know good ways to require proof-of-human on github?

Right and I won't argue it. You were right about beyond the rejection itself: my docs described the records as "hand-curated", which oversold the human part. The pipeline actually uses LLM research agents to propose sources, with a separate adversarial pass that rejects citations that don't exist or don't support the claim — but nobody reviews every record by hand, and the docs now say exactly that instead of implying otherwise.

Tom MacWright@macwright· 22d

they're also exploring new territories of low contrast, the reinforcement learning once this generation of slop gets in the training set inexorably leads to black-on-black design

extremely low contrast llm ui (this is a screenshot of the keytrace website)

Tom MacWright@macwright· 26d

"the pelicans are still all rubbish" @simonwillison.net

Tom MacWright@macwright· 27d

oh man, one of my articles got onto hacker news and i have a new tagline for the blog!

Every one of these articles seems more pretentious than the last.

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jul 13

gotta know where to look, you'll find the imposters

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jul 13

it's funny that neither the hexagonal architecture nor h3 tiling are actually hexagonal

The term "hexagonal" implies that there are 6 parts to the concept, whereas there are only 4 key areas. The term’s usage comes from the graphical conventions that shows the application component like a hexagonal cell. The purpose was not to suggest that there would be six borders/ports, but to leave enough space to represent the different interfaces needed between the component and the external world.

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jul 10

the two kinds of investments: houses and nvidia though i am so ready for people to stop buying houses as investments

Take Tony Zhang, 34, who bought a $950,000 townhouse in Irvine, California, in 2021 and says he now regrets it. The supply-chain manager says investing his down payment of roughly 30% in the stock market instead would have left him with a portfolio worth as much as $1 million today.

“Had I just taken my down payment and bought Meta, Nvidia or any growth stock, I probably wouldn’t even be working my 9-to-5,” he said. Even with a more conservative investment that mirrored the S&P 500, he estimates he’d have an extra couple of hundred thousand dollars. In the meantime, renting a comparable two-bedroom apartment in his area would be about $800 cheaper than his $4,300 monthly housing costs, which don’t include maintenance.

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jul 9

❤️ epanet-js is the one piece of software where they announce a 'pipe library' and it's not the pipe operator or visual programming but a literal library of different kinds of pipes, their materials and roughnesses epanetjs.com/blog/2026/07...

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jul 8

it has been fantastic, one of my favorite pieces of software. but they raised way too much money, the quality is going down, and they're doing dumb shit like putting logos on race cars

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jul 6

sad update to an article from 2016

WebPageTest got got acquired by Catchpoint and Catchpoint got acquired by LogicMonitor and LogicMonitor and LogicMonitor got bought by the Vista Partners private equity firm. It is bad now. Uncoincidentally.

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jul 6

an llm that… likes bluesky posts about llms pretending to be human?

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jul 6

if you're going to have your llm pretend to be an engineering student, at least pay for the custom domains feature on the service that's "email inboxes for ai agents"

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jul 5

there's something poetic about some eclipses being most visible from arbitrary places on earth and tons of people flocking there for one specific moment

Tourism
The longest the eclipse will last on land will be Látrabjarg in Iceland. It is therefore expected that many people will make their way there that day. Plans are being made to ensure safety in the area, but many of the roads to Látrabjargi are very narrow and dangerous. There has been talk of closing the area to car traffic and ferrying people by bus.[7] Work has started on repairing parts of the road to Látrabjarg, partly as a routine maintenance but also because of the eclipse.[8]

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jul 3

new placemark.io feature (contributed by mohamed gafar): find & replace in the table view!

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jul 2

new referring domains to macwright.com are 90% spam

ahrefs.io interface showing spam domains

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jun 26

hoboken's bike lane network is a sight to behold. wish it was easier to get from nyc to nj to experience this bliss and also wish it was possible to ride from brooklyn to new brunswick so i could ride the d&r on the regular

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jun 26

simple-statistics hit 1M downloads/week! npmx.dev/package/simp...

chart of the simple-statistics module hitting 1M downloads per week from npmx

Tom MacWright@macwright· Jun 3

this michael burry nvidia-is-a-bubble apocalypse diagram is such good human-made content, idk what he used to make this, maybe powerpoint, it still has a misspelling underline in one spot, 10/10 xcancel.com/michaeljburr...