Hello! I wrote a new blog post. It’s primarily about the evolution of the agentic design pattern for use of large language models.

In the spirit of my recently-discovered research interests: of all the human-centered systems design patterns out there, agentic AI currently seems to me like it has the highest potential for future impact. Although this post started as a rabbit-hole of a rabbit-hole of another writing project I’ll release soon, I’m glad I wrote it! I learned far more than I thought I would in the process, and hope this will be interesting to somebody else out there.

It’s the longest single piece of writing I’ve ever written, at over 26,000 words. (Luckily, most of this is stowed away in collapsible prompts, rubrics, and LLM-generated self-evaluations that can be safely ignored unless you’re morbidly curious :) It contains an in-depth evaluation of the performance of the top coding agents on the market at the time of writing (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Augment, and Antigravity), with a few thoughts on future agent designs that feel compelling to me.

You can go read it by clicking on the link below!

bencuan.me/blog/vibecode

🌱 This post is a mirror of my Garden's newsletter. For a better experience, click here to view the original!

On some foggy morning sitting on a BART train somewhere between Colma and Daly City two years ago, I reckoned I should probably figure out what I wanted to do with my life. “I should write this down somewhere”, I thought.

I was starting from a completely blank page, and was completely clueless about how personal writing worked, so this was quite an impossible task. I’m also easily distracted, and spent the next year-and-a-half writing about pretty much anything and everything I could to procrastinate on it. I started a blog. and then a substack. I wrote about Club Penguin, and keyboards, and trains. I started a digital garden and dumped a couple novels’ worth of words in there. It was all great fun! But even after all of that, the “who am I and what am I doing with my life” document remained tauntingly blank.

On an equally unremarkable day about six months ago, I felt some burst of inspiration to just try writing the thing. I bought my first journal, put a physical pen to physical paper, and wrote the first draft of what I christened ‘The Values Document’.

That draft, and the dozens that followed, frankly felt soulless and incoherent to me. Is this really it? Do I even want to show this to anyone, let alone myself? I rearranged the words until they became meaningless, then rearranged them three more times just to make sure.

The breakthrough finally came when I realized that I needed to put some fancy gift wrap around my values, rather than brute-force spewing them out. If I could come up with a form that represented who I am as a proxy, it’d be a whole lot more fun to read and write!

So here it is: my past, present, and future; my identity and all the things I find meaningful, in a single page five-thousand-word research syllabus.

✏️ Read it here!! https://bencuan.me/research

Going into this, I did not expect this document to end up becoming research-shaped whatsoever-- it was a pleasant emergent surprise! It feels very much like myself in a way that no other single label could; I’d be happy to be considered a real legit researcher at some future point in my life.

I fully anticipate the shape of the “who am I and what am I doing with my life” artifact to radically change as I continue to grow. Maybe in five years it’ll end up being a podcast, or a short film, or an album on Spotify; but for this exact point in time, it’s exactly what it needs to be.

life updates!

Given my many months of attempts at writing the research syllabus, I’ve been pretty quiet on this newsletter for the past half-year. It feels great to be back! I have such an enormous backlog-- much of which is already written but unpublished, because I wanted to get this out first-- so expect a minor flood of entries to come out in the next couple months :)

physical space makeover!

I moved back to the South Bay! I’ve really enjoyed being closer to friends, family and work. In the process of moving, I found my third and final obsession of 2025: interior design. I hope to turn my scattered notes into a real blog post somewhat soon-- it’s pretty on-topic in terms of my newfound research interests.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the process of building up a physical space from the ground up with my goals and values in mind. As a result, it’s kitted out for frequent hosting and I’ve been having friends over almost every week since moving in! Let me know if you’re in town-- we cook a big dinner and jam out with some live jazz a few times a month, among many other fun gatherings.

digital space makeover!

Big news: I finally bought a Figma subscription! Unrelatedly, I completely redesigned my website, again, for the seventh time.

Moreso than any of the previous iterations, I’ve tried to make my homepage as minimal and intentionally designed as possible this time around.

This year was the first time I made my own color scheme. I thought it’d be cool if my digital space also reflected some of the same themes from around my room (natural light tones, lots of green, with a big friendly dinosaur lurking in the corner).

The existence of the Garden, which I launched earlier in 2025, drove most of the high-level design decisions for my main website. Now that I have a space dedicated to chaos and playful experimentation, I could reserve bencuan.me to become my curated, organized, forward-facing side on the internet.

updates from around the garden

Tending to the Garden has provided me with a good, needed break from formal blog-post writing for the past six months. I now have over 65,000 words across 100 published pages:

• started publishing a few of my recipes now that I’m cooking them for larger groups of people regularly. They’re pretty rough right now and are fairly limited in terms of instructions. Let me know if you ever try one and have suggestions on how to tweak them!

• added a few more updates to the Things I want to do or organize list, which remains a popular entrypoint to the Garden. I’ve gotten a surprising amount of inbound from folks; turns out people want to do more fun things if the opportunity is made available!

• learned how to lead climb! I compiled some lead climbing field notes in case anyone was curious about what goes into it. (Next stop: outdoor/trad climbing. Will have some more notes to share on that topic later this year.)

• dumped out some ML systems notes I’d accumulated. These are all pretty WIP and will hopefully turn into something much more coherent as I gain more knowledge in the domain.

• I wrote up some tips for major career decisions in August based on the thoughts I worked through around that same time last year when deciding where to go for a full-time position. It’s helped a few of my friends, maybe someone else out there will get something out of it too?

• I moved the bookshelf to the Garden, since it no longer felt like it fit on my main site. I haven’t yet gotten around to updating it yet, though.

some more photos from the reel

imagine having instagram, couldn’t be me..

(I’ve realized that the best days of my life seem to take place outdoors. I should go outside as often as I can!)

🌱 This post is a mirror of my Garden's newsletter. For a better experience, click here to view the original!

After spending many of my weekends in May hiding inside & drawing digital nature for the Garden, it was about time to go outside and appreciate real nature.

My primary goal for the month of June was to spend the majority of my weekends offline1 and outdoors. I am happy to report great success!

While I'm not here to exposit any life-shattering revelations, there are a few things worth getting out of sharing what I was up to this month. Notably two things:

1. I'd like to make it easier for others to organize similar fun events in the future-- it's hard but so rewarding to pull off; I'm assembling a toolbox to make event/trip organizing feel possible to those of you who haven't tried it before.

2. Northern California in June is one of the most beautiful times and places on the planet and deserves more recognition, especially from bay area folks like me who are stuck in front of computers all day :)

huge shoutout to everyone i had the wonderful opportunity to camp/golf/hike/climb with for dealing with my shenanigans and making this month's adventures so memorable ❤️

01. santa cruz beach camping

went camping the first week of June at New Brighton State Beach, just a few miles south of Santa Cruz off hwy 1.

This was my first time camping in a very long time; I'd forgotten how awesome it can be to just exist and appreciate the bare-minimum creature comforts of survival, like making food, building a shelter, and having a warm place to sleep.

~highlights

• kevin escaped his leash and and terrorized the campsite. he did not get eaten by a bear, and we all collectively got some great cardio in chasing him so i consider it a win overall.

• attempted a push up circle with mild success.

• had an incredible nights' sleep. the temperature was literally perfect, and there was a delightfully comfortable sea breeze + mist.

campfire talk, like chatting during a long car ride, can get refreshingly thoughtful. One particular conversation I had that stuck out to me was a meta-reflection on how well-organized this camping trip ended up, and how different of an experience being in organizer-mode was compared to participant-mode. There are just so many things to consider and keep you on your toes if you feel a sense of ownership over an event you're helping to host! I'd been slowly assembling a guide to organizing fun events with friends, and this evening around the campfire made its ideas feel that much more real and alive.

Many MASSIVE enormous thank you's to Peter for organizing and getting all of this together. he's my hero.

next stop: big sur ?? (hope to publish a camping guide soonish too)

02. golf at crystal springs

I've had two major obsessions this year. The first few months were filled by Balatro; more recently, it's been golf.

After playing all four years of high school, I went close to 6 years without playing a round. For the past few months I've started getting back into it (seems like it's getting more and more popular; lots of my friends either have started playing or want to try it out!). While I don't consider myself to be particularly good at it, I can at least hit the ball straight and it sometimes goes the right distance. It's a really hard sport, after all.

I'm not sure whether my enjoyment of walking or of golf came first. regardless, I view a good round like a chill hike with friends and family, while having an optional side quest (of hitting ball with long stick) to give your meandering some sense of purpose.

Crystal Springs Golf Course is genuinely such a beautiful place to be, especially near sunset time when they offer their 50%-off Super Twilight rates. It's nestled along the mountains next to the Crystal Springs Reservoir, and feels like wandering around a hillside meadow with amazing views. (The course itself is just fine; hitting balls up steep hills can get frustrating..) I sometimes go to their practice area after work and sink putts, while the sunset-time fog rolls over the mountains, as some contrived form of meditation.

While golf can be expensive and time-consuming, it's also possible to have a great day out on a budget (both monetarily and time-wise). If you're looking to give it a try, first let me know- i'm happy to organize a tee time and let you borrow clubs- but secondly, here are some tips and tricks:

• The Bay Area has really nice courses open to the public (like TPC Harding, Half Moon Bay, Coyote Creek...) that offer world-class golf at reasonable rates. They're often even cheaper for local residents and/or during hours past 5pm.

• At the cheapest, you can get a great round at Shoreline (or a par-3 course like Mariners Point) for $20.

• You don't need good clubs, especially if you're a beginner. You can assemble a perfectly serviceable 4-club set (putter/wedge/iron/3-wood) for less than $100. I've had good luck at the Golf Mart's bargain bin; FB marketplace and Nextdoor also have some great deals for used clubs.

• If you're under 18, you might qualify for Youth On Course and be able to play on most courses for $5.

shoutout to kian for the INSANE pitching wedge skills \o/

03. hiking (2x)

for the third week of june I went on two hikes at some nearby spots i'd somehow never been to!

A relaxed saturday morning hike with family brought me to San Bruno Mountain, with incredible views of SF a short walk from the entrance.

San Bruno Mountain is especially cool because you can walk most of the way around it on few hours of moderate terrain and get 360-degree views of the Bay Area (with SF to the north, the airport to the south, the Pacific Ocean to the east, and the bay itself to the west).

A cloudy sunday afternoon took me to the coastline near Pacifica for the Old Colma Road Loop. Travelers in the late 1800s used to take sections of this trail to get around, before Highway 1 (and the nearby Devil's Slide Tunnel) were constructed. There's a bunch of cool artifacts around like old rail ties, an abandoned farmhouse, and the oddly-constructed Devil's Slide Bunker.

The classic evening fog took no time at all to roll in, and by the time we got to the top of the mountain we were properly inside of a cloud which was quite cool (both literally and metaphorically).

If you're looking to go out on a trek, I wrote down a few of my favorite hikes in SF and around the Bay (both of these made the list!).

shoutout to shruti for the very well-timed misty mountains cold.

04. climbing at castle rock

To end off the month I got a small bouldering trip together to Castle Rock State Park.

Castle Rock holds a special place in my heart, having grown up so close by. I feel so grateful for having one of the best climbing spots in the world practically in my backyard.

Coincidentally, the park exists at the intersection of two of the most beautiful roads in northern california - highways 9 and 35. It's hard to get there without running into parades of supercars and biker gangs appreciating the incredible driving alongside you.

Although I didn't send any projects today, lots of other folks certainly did (and/or sent their first-ever outdoor routes!!) and it was just such a wonderful relaxing day outdoors hanging out on top of / on the side of rocks.

Bringing a picnic blanket + camp chairs + picnic food ended up being a fantastic idea, too. Even after my arms gave out I found it hard to leave because of how vibey it all was, and ended up staying many hours past when I'd expected to head out.

This isn't the first, and won't be the last, time I climb outdoors! I wrote a little bay area outdoor bouldering guide if you're looking to get a better sense of what to expect if you're looking to get out as well.

some other garden updates from this month

• Opened the Internet Trails section to collect my thoughts about digital spaces. Currently pretty barebones; I intend to turn this into a more substantial project towards the end of the year.

  • Browse my list of Cool places on the internet! If you have a website of your own, let me know so I can add it here :)

• Started writing out Everything i know about keyboards. Should be more readable towards the end of this month; I'll share more once it's ready for general consumption.

• Continuing to update music i'm listening to. Send me song/album reccs!

• Started a garage sale page for objects I am slowly trying to find new homes for.

• Made a list of things to do in SF for the newcomers: A local’s guide to SF (and, a more silly edition: sf bingo)

• Finished the Balatro naneinf guide. More game guides coming soon, when I get time to write them.

• In the process of figuring out how to best use my 2025 Highlights and Goals page.

what's next?

I don't have any super concrete goals for the upcoming month, and hope to spend large chunks of it just relaxing/vibing. However, a few thoughts:

• I have a few music-related projects in the works. I hope to start using the Garden to house more non-writing experiments/creations, and this will probably be the beginning of that!

• A weekly newsletter cadence feels too rapid; I'm back in the mode of doing-things-then-writing-about-it, which means taking time off to do non-writing things. Newsletter entries will come when the time is right (hopefully at least once a month, but no guarantees) 🙂

• considering renaming this newsletter to 'whimsical whensdays' because it now updates whenever i feel like it. (s/o to tenzin for the wicked naming skills)

have a wonderful day y'all!! don't forget to put on your sunscreen.

“often when i find myself feeling kind of bad i'll reflect on the last couple weeks of my life / and the first question i will ask of those last couple weeks is ‘did i write anything?’ and the answer is almost always ‘no’”

—Savannah Brown

Hi friends! It's been a while since I've posted something on Substack. I missed y’all ❤️

The weekly newsletter returns! on a Friday of course, in typical Whimsical Wednesdays fashion. It's coming back with roughly the same size and shape of content, but with one very, very big difference—

I've found a new home for my writing.

In the midst of work and travel and generally spending time in good company throughout March and April, I found some breathing room to reflect upon the outsized role of writing and creating— especially in public, on the internet— on the past few years of my life.

I've realized that my absolute favorite way to spend time (outside of sleeping, of course) is to make and share things with the world. There are endless ways to create— music and code and art and video games and film— and so much more. I hope I'll be able to explore all of them at some point my life!

Ever since its inception, my Substack was intended to be an experiment to try out writing as one of those creative outlets. I've since cemented it as my favorite make-and-share-things method (such low friction!! keyboard go brrr!). Though I still have so much to learn about writing as a craft, it's become my default launchpad for a wide variety of creative work. Thinking in writing is so real, and so powerful.

But something still felt slightly off about how I approached writing. Over the course of April I posed a few critiques for myself, in an attempt to clarify this feeling:

• How can I write more sustainably? Despite trying out a pretty relentless weekly schedule (and staying up to ungodly hours on many Tuesday nights), I felt an ever-growing delta between all the things trapped in my head and the amount I was able to get them out into real words. Writing more made me feel more cluttered, which is the exact opposite of what it's supposed to achieve when done well.

• How can I create a space that lets me grow and experiment more freely? While having a way to release content via an email blast is wonderful for accountability, I feel restricted from sending small, incomplete thoughts frequently. And once a post is out, I have to make another one to update it- which results in a lot of friction and throwaway prose when revisiting older ideas.

• How can I start branching out into other modes of creation, while still writing as a default? Every social media platform has a culture around what it encourages its users to share: vertical videos go to TikTok; fun garageband music to Soundcloud; vibey blog-essays to Substack; epic top 10 chess montages to YouTube. Though many content creators navigate the tides, it's truly a full-time job keeping up with all of it, and adjusting what I create to the norms of a big platform feels inauthentic at times.

By the time May rolled around, I felt like I finally had a semblance of an idea that made sense. I reserved an entire day, sat down, and sketched out what I wanted the future of my online presence to look like.

6 weeks, 29,845 words and 119 code commits later, I'm incredibly excited to share it with you on this fine Friday morning. The vibes have been so good thus far, and I'm ready to officially open the gates.

Welcome to the Garden!

“Our digital artifacts and spaces are reflections of our real selves. We feel like we outgrow digital spaces just as we change, learn, and grow in real life.”

—Websites as Homes, Jacky Zhao

The term "digital garden" is a very new phenomenon, yet it already holds a very dear place in my heart. At its core, digital gardening re-frames the role of personal websites on the Internet: as locations that take up space, are hosts of constant change, and homes that reflect who we are online.

I've been keeping a digital garden on my local computer as an Obsidian vault for nearly 5 years now. It's secretly hosted my notes from college, rough drafts of the TurtleNet series, scrapped blog posts, daily journal entries, and basically every piece of personal writing I've typed up. Until now, I've resisted the temptation to publish it in its entirety for a couple reasons:

• Throughout college, I found that I preferred taking more structured, linear notes to match the natural progression of course content (see notes.bencuan.me and amethyst). Berkeley classes go way too quickly, and I didn’t have the mental capacity to rearrange the firehose of information coming my way! Unfortunately this kind of goes against the nonlinear and exploratory nature of digital gardening, which is better suited for topics I already understand and are looking to mentally organize.

• As a result of my acquired bias for structure from the above, I kicked off my post-college writing with long-form, self-contained essays. (I was a little tired of note-taking, anyways :P). This first manifested here on Substack, then later (and now) at bencuan.me/blog.

The more I look at it, the more I realize that curating my garden for public consumption is the logical next step. I'm confident enough in my writing process now to experiment with a less organized format, and it provides the 'everything, but writing-first' platform I've been looking for.

Taking a stroll

Ready to wander around with me? Head over to garden.bencuan.me when you are :)

I spent a lot of time building a subtly interactive homepage. I wanted to design a space where visitors feel like they can come back again and again to— but days or weeks apart, rather than providing the dopamine rush of an endlessly-refreshing doomscroll.

I also wanted to provide visitors with opportunities to make a small impact of their own. Feel free to click the 'hey i'm here too!' button if you like seeing small number go up, or to leave a message in the guestbook.

Although admittedly unimaginative, the imagery of a garden works so well that I just had to roll with it. Plus, the doodles were really fun to draw.

Given how new the Garden is, there's not a whole lot of real content- yet! I've decided to publish the list of writing and other creations I'm working on in a Coming Soon page. As I get around to making a thing, it'll probably become a note (or even a category!) of its own.

As a note evolves over time, I assign stages to them depending on where they are in their journey.

Growth stages are a very rough way of communicating the epistemic status of notes in the Garden, which span a wide range of correctness, thoughtfulness, and completeness.

All notes are born as sprouts. I make no guarantees on sprouts; they can vary anywhere from 3am insomnia-fueled bullet points to super rough drafts of blog posts to log dumps from a debugging session.

Blossoms are incomplete notes that I believe are ready for initial sharing and public consumption. I’m often looking for feedback or waiting for new information, and intend to iterate on them for some while longer.

Evergreens are completed notes that I don’t intend on editing in the future. They’re generally edited, factually accurate to the best of my knowledge, and presents information in a way that won’t become inaccurate as time passes.

If an evergreen note passes some entirely arbitrary threshold of quality and importance, I may move it away from the Garden and into my blog (bencuan.me/blog). Blog posts are generally well-researched long form essays about topics I care about deeply. By separating them from the Garden I hope to give myself space to play and experiment here, while still having a platform dedicated to the ideas I’m most proud of.

Where to next?

I have so many fun things in the works (see what’s coming soon!) that I hope to share in the coming months. Since my creations will no longer be strictly tied to a weekly release schedule (or writing as a medium), they'll pop up anytime I have a spare moment to get them started.

Then, once a week, at 9am on Wednesday, I'll gather my favorite new developments into one big post and send it out as an update here on Substack. You're welcome to subscribe by using the box below if you'd like to be notified of future newsletter entries :)

Subscribe now

If you've gotten this far, you're awesome! (And you're probably looking to explore the Garden further). Here's a few trailheads to get you started:

• Want more things to read? Check out some Featured posts.

• Here is A list of everywhere I’m on the internet. (and, some Cool places on the internet)

• Want to take a peek behind the scenes? You can read the Garden Design page, or the Build Log for more technical details.

Further Reading

Here's some further reading related to concepts mentioned in this post. I really, really enjoyed reading these and hope you will as well!

• A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden (by Maggie Appleton): the best place to start if you're looking to jump down the digital garden rabbit hole.

• Websites as homes (by Jacky Zhao): the reason why I redesign my website every year

• My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be? (by Laurel Schwulst): physical metaphors for digital spaces

• The Need to Read (by Paul Graham): a very concise argument for why writing (and thinking in writing) is necessary

• Epistemic statuses are lazy, and that is a good thing (by Devon Zuegel): how to post incomplete thoughts without fear of misinterpretation.

• Sharing Your Work Is Like Lifting With Your Legs (by Devon Zuegel): a more brief and immediately-relevant version of one of my [favorite essays](# A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox) by Henrik Karlsson

• Digital Garden Terms of Service (by swyx): a sketch of expectations for visitors and creators of digital gardens

• Taking an Internet Walk (by Spencer Chang and Kristoffer Tjalve): on the importance of local internet communities

Hope to be back with more next week! I'm glad you're here. Don't be shy and reach out if you want to keep in touch, my inbox will always be open :)

I made my first-ever Substack post on Wednesday, March 13, 2024. Tomorrow, this publication turns 1 year old!

A year is a long time yet not at all; the last 8,760 hours have been some of the best in my life so far! Some meaningful highlights:

• travelled to 8 different cities across 5 countries (and completed the LA-to-Seattle Amtrak route in the process!)

• outdoorsy firsts: went snowboarding for the first time, learned how to crack climb in Yosemite, competed in my first climbing competition, ran my first 5K, hit a golf ball 300 yards for the first time!

• started a new job!

• built a 3000 piece puzzle in 35 hours

• walked through (almost) every neighborhood in SF in one day

• added 15 more books to my reading queue (they're not going anywhere anytime soon haha)

• consumed at least 30 bags of coffee (at least one from nearly every Bay Area roaster! still a few more to collect...)

In the midst of all this, whimsical wednesdays nestled itself into some corner of my brain and refused to let go.

In the last year, I've published 49,737 words over 29 posts here. (I was really curious, so I copy-pasted everything into wordcounter.net lol.) My entire Obsidian vault contains 90,000 words, so over half of my typed-out thoughts this year have been viewed by another human!

I still don't consider myself to be a proficient or natural writer yet, and I hope the journey will continue to raise more questions than answers.

But there is one thing that I've gained a great sense of clarity on:

why do i write?

why do I feel the urge to stay up through ungodly hours on tuesday nights over and over and over again; to spend weeks obsessing over things like 18th century typewriters or old roads; to yell into the void expecting absolutely nothing back?

there are quite a few reasons, actually-- if someone asked me "why do you write?" these are the three big ones I tend to lead with.

escaping thought spirals

I'm a heavy thinker. For most of my life, I leaned on this fact as a coping mechanism; whenever things got hard, I'd feel waves of rumination crashing down on me, as if a voice were saying "if you just think about it more, you'll get out of it!"

Most of the time, that voice was actually correct, and it worked!-- I'd spend a week going on long walks, sitting in trains, and otherwise giving myself the empty time and space to do some high-quality mental processing; I'd come out the other end refreshed and ready to take on the world once more.

But as the years went on, I noticed that I kept getting stuck on the same things over and over again in my periods of rumination. My thoughts were just looping back on themselves and going nowhere.

Writing got me out of that, and for the first time I feel like my thoughts plot a one-way path now. I have a very clear way of comparing how I'm conceptualizing things to yesterday-me or last-month-me or last-year-me, and build upon my old thoughts instead of rediscovering them from scratch.

This is especially helpful for times where I'm juggling a huge number of disparate thought chain, as I often do. Context switching between kubernetes/anthropology/writing/human-computer interaction/music/community-building and whatever big ideas are swirling around seems to only work if I can dump my thoughts down and pick them up later, after I've inevitably forgotten all about them. My memory can be really spotty sometimes!

a search query

The previous part explains why I write at all; this explains why I want to write publicly. A big part of it for me is that I do this to connect with people!

I have linked this blog post many times before, and I will do it once more now:

Escaping Flatland

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

This essay is the third part of a series. Here is part 1, part 2, and part 4. They can be read independently…

Read more

4 years ago · 854 likes · 71 comments · Henrik Karlsson

If you've ever considered starting a blog of your own, I recommend you click on that link and give it a read. For the rest of you who don't want to read any more words than you need to, I'll copy a few of my favorite quotes here:

Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn’t want a general public. I wanted a specific set of people, the people who could help me along as a human being obsessed with certain intellectual problems. I didn’t know who these people were. I only knew that they existed. Hence my writing was a search query.

If you follow the advice above, you will write essays that almost no one likes.

Luckily, almost no one multiplied by the entire population of the internet is plenty if you can only find them.

Writing publicly has given me a very pointed purpose for existing on the internet: if you come and read the jumbled mess of thoughts here and somehow actually like it, we should probably be friends-- and you now have a reason to contact me!

Conversely, if someone else out there is writing about something similar that makes me jump out of my chair in excitement, they now have a whole library of context on who I am when I reach out to them.

I've already lost count of how many meaningful conversations I've had friends and readers about thoughts I've posted here. I've met some fantastic people IRL through events like the SF Writing Club, caught up with a bunch of old friends by sending them stuff I wrote and thought they'd like; and am starting to find my roots in a corner of the internet I feel like I belong in.

storytelling

I really enjoy telling stories (and experiencing them!). My next long-term goal is to figure out two things:

• what are the stories I want to tell (and am qualified to tell)?

• what medium do I want to use to tell them?

Prior to writing, I've experimented with a bunch of different modalities of storytelling. I'm pretty sure I will end up choosing one or more of these to explore much more deeply in the coming years!

• I've been involved in music since I was very young (first piano, then trumpet/horn in band) and ended up getting into music production. I've made a few video game soundtracks so far!

• Relatedly, I wanted become a game developer when I grew up for the longest time. It's such a dynamic, all-encompassing creative format; it's shameful that the industry treats its developers so poorly.

• I had a decently long art phase in college, enough to know that becoming a proficient visual artist would take years of time I'd rather spend doing something else on this list. (I even made a webtoon during this phase, and no, you are not allowed to ask about it it's way too cringe lmao)

• One of my favorite high school memories was making a short film with my friends for our contemporary literature class! (ok you can see this one, maybe, but only if you ask nicely no way i'm posting this on the internet).

Writing isn't the end goal for my storytelling ambitions, but I feel like it's the clearest and most applicable realm to lay a solid foundation in. After all, nearly every other medium relies on it, whether it's poetic lyricism, captivating screenplays, or game lore. Just as visual art/photography changes how you see the world and music changes how you hear the world, writing changes how you think about the world.

what's next?

who knows; the world is an exciting place!!

I do have a few things in mind for where I'm taking this in the near future, though.

1. I'm going to take a month-long mini-break from big posts here! I'll still be putting up something every week to keep the streak going, but don't expect too much of substance for the next 4 weeks. I feel like I've been almost too on top of things with this weekly cadence; my thoughts need some stewing time (and maybe I can actually get some real sleep on Tuesdays for once!). I also want to spend some time fixing up my website's blog content; it's pretty janky right now.

2. whimsical wednesdays is, and will always be, primarily a place for me to share random thoughts with my friends (i.e. you, hopefully!). I have no desire to publicize it myself or share it with the rest of the world-- though, you're welcome to if you know someone who might appreciate it. I'm planning on launching another home (perhaps also on Substack ?) for the long-form, well-researched, edited content I'd like to write for a wider audience-- I don't know when this will be ready for launch and don't want to rush it, so more thoughts to come in the next year!

thanks for hanging out with me :) here's to an even more amazing year 2!!

future blog post alert! this is a rough outline of a topic I hope to be fairly long-lived. For now, I'll give you a couple hours of my time to get the gears turning! (Which reminds me, I have a lot of tech/editorial/design debt accumulating on my website right now. I'll get to that soon lol.)

In this post I make the following claims:

1. The only scientifically valid, reproducible measure of personality is the Big 5. (I'll expand more on what this is and how it works in a bit.)

2. If you're not a psychology researcher, you're probably best off viewing personality as a non-science. For most people, frameworks like the Enneagram are more useful if your goal is just to understand yourself better!

3. The MBTI is not a real personality measure, but it can still be fun. I group it alongside astrology, meaning it's often enjoyable as spiritual/emotional guidance but should not be seen as a valid indicator of personality.

I. personality as a science

what even is "personality"?

In psychology research, personality encapsulates the characteristics of a person that describe and explain consistent patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving.

Behavior being consistent is a bit paradoxical actually:

• We all talk, act, and think differently depending on the context. There are a lot of things I'd do on a night out with friends that I'd never do at work, and so on.

• A lot of minor life decisions (like how much I tip, what drink I'd buy at a cafe...) end up being wildly unpredictable, and could be affected by anything from the weather to the quantity of cereal I ate the previous evening.

Psychology researchers have two main solutions to this problem:

1. Average out over all observations of a behavior. This is known as the trait approach, which is useful for generalizing claims but removes much of the nuance of situational behaviors.

2. Take variability seriously, and figure out a way to account for it. This is also known as the if-then model of personality, i.e. trying to find consistency in how someone will complete the blank: "If (some specific situation), then (some specific response)".

how do researchers measure personality?

There are few things personality psychologists universally agree upon. One of them is that the Big Five, while imperfect, is by far the best tool we have so far for measuring personality.

The Big 5 looks something like this:

Unlike many other personality measures, the Big 5 emerged empirically. Researchers first started out by attempting to define every measurable personality trait they could think of; they quickly realized that by grouping the traits in a specific manner, they could reach nearly the same predictive power with only 5 dimensions as with the entire set!

The Big 5 has been used to predict a wide range of personality-based outcomes like mortality risk, academic achievement, and criminal behavior.

These five major domains are, briefly:

• Openness to Experience: How much do you seek knowledge, new experiences, and breaks in routine?

• Conscientiousness: How organized and achievement-seeking are you? Do you like to always have a plan?

• Extraversion: How social and emotionally expressive are you?

• Agreeableness: How much do you seek cooperation and compassion?

• Neuroticism: How prone are you to experiencing negative emotions, namely anxiety?

To use myself as a case study, here are my Big 5 results!

• I have always self-identified as a high scorer in openness and conscientiousness; if you know me these are probably the least surprising results!

• The culturally-accepted definition of extraversion is pretty different from the Big-5 version. While I'm generally very assertive, active, and joyful, having these extravert-like traits can be a fairly separate concept from "do I actually want to be with other people right now".

• Being low in neuroticism isn't always a good thing! I fault myself for being too chill and nonchalant about things that I definitely should be more emotionally invested in.

the problem i have with the big five

Two sorts of problems, actually:

1. It's really hard to understand and talk about. The typical non-psychologist has only heard of terms like 'neuroticism' or 'conscientiousness' in passing, and the numbers themselves are pretty meaningless unless you spend the time to decipher all of the concepts.

2. The Big 5 is designed to be generalizable, not personalized. It's great for studying trends over larger populations, less so for evaluating yourself and the specific relationships you have with people in your life from a self-reflection standpoint.

II. personality as a non-science

Outside of a research context, we all have an intuitive understanding of our own personalities and how they relate to others' personalities. We don't need fancy measures to understand how organized or extraverted or competitive we are!

That being said, personality is a very messy, emotional subject. Wouldn't it be nice to give someone a neat little summary of what type of person we are without needing to expound our entire life story?

why the MBTI is bad

By far the most popular type of personality measurement (outside of psychology research circles) is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI for short. You've hopefully heard of it by now!

I'm a bit baffled by how pervasive it has become: of all the personality tests out there, why did this one specifically win the title of default?

There are a whole bunch of glaring issues with the MBTI that make it, in my view, not much more a valid measure of personality than astrology is.

By far the largest issue is that it treats personality like a series of binary classifications. Although dimensions of personality have unimodal distributions, the MBTI tricks us into thinking the underlying distribution is bimodal.

For example, most people are averagely extraverted- but according to the MBTI, if 51% of the population is more extraverted than you are, then congrats, you're an introvert!

There's a bunch of slightly less egregious (but still inexcusable) problems, like:

• Lack of test-retest reliability: One study found that 50% of participants tested into a different MBTI type when retaking the same test 5 weeks apart.

• Reliance on the Barnum Effect: MBTI type descriptions are loaded with vague truisms like: "People with this personality type tend to feel directionless or stuck until they connect with a sense of purpose for their life." (real quote about INFP's from the most popular MBTI test online!)

• Direct contradictions with the Big Five: There is no reliable way to reduce the MBTI categories into Big Five categories. It's generally not a great sign if a measure blatantly disagrees with another one we know to actually be valid...

A bit of nuance: when I say "the MBTI is bad", I more specifically mean that it's a bad measure of personality. I understand that a lot of people find enjoyment and meaning in it, and I don't want to be a killjoy for that! I'd just be slightly more skeptical of using its findings to extrapolate further.

the Enneagram as a compelling alternative

Another popular model known as the Enneagram reduces personality into a set of 9 distinct types. If you want to learn more about it, I think this post is a great starter:

Useful Fictions

There Are Nine Wolves Inside of You

When I first encountered the Enneagram, I thought it sounded pretty dumb: Nine types of people, precisely? It seemed awfully arbitrary, not unlike astrology. But some wise friends (including my husband) convinced me to give it a shot, and that decision ended up making me happier, saner, and more free. Here are a few notes about how I came to love it and…

Read more

2 years ago · 116 likes · 11 comments · Cate Hall

I think Cate does a great job of communicating the utility (and her own infatuation) of the Enneagram both from a skeptic's perspective (like mine) and an astrology enthusiasts' perspective. Namely, she positions it as an effective middle-ground that mostly works (unlike astrology), while still being easy to interpret and understand (unlike the Big Five).

You won’t see me trying to argue anyone out of astrology, because I’m all about finding the “harmless untruths … that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy,” in Kurt Vonnegut’s words... And for me, that’s what the Enneagram is: A model of self that has made me more free.

To be clear: the Enneagram is still, like the MBTI, a pseudoscientific measure. There's little evidence for it being valid and useful in a research context; its type descriptions still fall victim to the Barnum Effect. However, I think it's a large enough of a step-up from the MBTI that it can actually be used as a productive self-reflection tool!

• The 9-type layout handily solves the unimodal/bimodal problem. You're clearly a mixture of different amounts of Enneagram types, rather than being assigned one in a mutually exclusive fashion.

• Although reliability/validity are questionable, at least its results are mostly consistent with the Big Five factors (there are just more of them, grouped in slightly different ways).

Here are my Enneagram results, as reported by Truity.

Right off the bat, this is really different from the Big 5 in terms of how I'm thinking of communicating these results.

• If you've taken the Enneagram test before, you immediately have a frame of reference for how your results compare to mine (in a way that you don't with the Big 5). For example, if you're also an 8-type or a 5-type, you can recall some of the traits we likely have in common (like striving for understanding and truth-seeking as primary values).

• The Enneagram defines its types by core drives and fears, i.e.:

  • Type 1 presents the desire for righteousness, and the fear of becoming corrupt.

  • Type 5 presents the desire to be knowledgable, and the fear of being incapable.

  • Type 8 presents the desire to be in control, and the fear of being controlled.

• Such an assertive presentation of "these are the core values you care about" feels much more personal than the Big 5's passive observations of "you are X percent more of a thing than the general population". Cate described her first experience with it as "forgettable as a slap in the face": i.e., chances are, you're already stewing on the character flaws it identifies in your strongest types.

TODO

More to come! Some yet-unanswered questions:

• Do I myself see personality more as a science, or as a non-science?

• What makes personality tests helpful or harmful, and in which contexts does that matter?

• What are some more interesting personality-based outcomes that the Big 5 has successfully predicted?

weekly reviews!

I hope to be more intentional with the things I consume this year. As a part of that, I'd like to share some words about some of my favorite new discoveries of the week!

If you so desire, you may stalk my listens on Rate Your Music, digital reads on Sublime, and physical reads on my bookshelf page.

🎵 album review: Oklou - choke enough

First 2025 album review!! French DJ Oklou brings a super chill, nostalgia-packed Eurobeats album straight from the early 2000's.

This one popped up on my feed by way of harvest sky, her collab with Underscores (and by far my favorite on this album!). I haven't heard anything quite like it- the best description I have for this song is "if a bunch of pilgrims attended the afterparty of a rave".

After listening to the singles on repeat for a while with growing anticipation, the album finally dropped; unfortunately, none of the other songs really did it for me (even as much as I want to like them). But maybe you'll enjoy them!

Rating: 5/10
Favorite tracks: harvest sky

✍ review: Football 17776

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/chapter-1

If you're looking for the written equivalent of liminal space, this is it.

If humans stopped aging and became immortal, what would the world look like? Jon Bois thinks we'll all still be waiting in line at grocery stores, defrosting our windshields, and playing lots of football.

I don't want to spoil this one too much; I'll just say that this was probably the most impactful story I've read (watched? experienced?) in the past few months. Instant recommend for any enjoyers of sci-fi, speculative fiction, and/or alternative media. Thanks again to Jacob Geller for helping me discover another work of art worth mentioning.

And its sequel, Football 20020, is as entertaining as the prequel is transformative! Patiently waiting for 20021…

1. If I were to make a list of all the questions I'd like to explore in this lifetime, what would be at the top of it? (The answer is not at all this list, though I hope it's a start!)

2. How can I enable myself (and the people around me) to be sillier and have the privilege of taking life less seriously?

3. How can I balance my affinity for pattern-matching and synthesis against the dangers of overgeneralization?

4. What kinds of people do I want to surround myself with, and how do I find them?

5. Is a hot dog a sandwich?

6. How can I tell the stories I find meaningful without accidentally putting words into the mouths of others?

7. How can I live with joie de vivre and further cultivate the skill of liking everything more?

8. How can I be more chaotic and spontaneous while preserving my overarching desire for intentionality?

9. What is actually my favorite book?

10. How can I be more in tune with my mind and with my body? (i.e., what are the habits that help me feel physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy?)

11. How do we foster community, connection, and human expression in the era of post-individualism?

12. What does it mean to be a sparkly person and to be involved in communities that attract/encourage that archetype? (and how do we gently push back on harmful designations like 'sparkly' and 'interesting' while preserving the merits they stand for?)

13. How can I expand my definition of "we" in the context of this list from "mostly WEIRD (western/educated/industrialized/rich/democratic), very online, neurotypical, English-speaking, city-dwelling friends, family, and community" to include a wider range of perspectives?

14. What is my role in promoting the power of third places and helping more of them come alive around my neighborhood?

15. What artistic medium will serve me the best in the pursuit of consistent creation? (right now it's writing, but I anticipate that this will change.)

16. How do I write about myself, without using something else as a proxy, in a way that feels authentic, natural, and vulnerable?

17. If I had to pick one of the Big Problems on this list to work on for the rest of my life, which one would it be?

18. Why do breakfast foods always taste better when I eat them at any time other than breakfast?

19. Should I be feeling as content as I currently am about the idea of living in the Bay Area for the rest of my life? (alternatively: if I had to pick 1 city to live in outside of the Bay Area for the rest of my life, which one would it be?)

20. Which avenues for advocacy are most effective for creating positive change in policy-related areas I'm passionate about improving (like transit, municipal zoning, and public spaces)?

21. How do we design digital spaces in a manner that's complementary (and not mutually exclusive) to life in physical spaces?

22. How can we walk the fine line between context collapse and tribalism in digital spaces to ensure accurate information can be delivered to the groups of people they're intended for?

23. How do we fight the expanding digital dark forest and ensure that social platforms are maintained by and for humans, not bots?

24. How can I make sure I don't fall prey to status games and other vices related to the proliferation of meaningless internet points?

25. How do I present myself online in a way that feels genuine (and useful for finding the people I want to be friends with) while respecting my personal privacy?

26. What is the ideal balance between creation and consumption on the internet? How can we ensure creators can continue making a living after the death of the follower?

27. How can we close the gap between our current scientific knowledge base and what is needed to solve currently impossible problems (like curing cancer, achieving net-positive fusion, reversing ecological collapse)?

28. Will we be able to find a truly satisfying unified theory; is this something we should even be looking for? (e.g. the housing theory of everything, the particle physics Theory of Everything, powerful/general/superhuman AI)

29. How do we preserve and uplift the power of human creativity, ingenuity, and connection in the AI-driven society of the near-future?

30. What do we need to do to ensure that, 10-20 years from now, we will leave the world in a state that I'd want to raise kids through?

31. Why is '42' currently the most compelling answer to any question related to the meaning of life?

32. If I wrote a novel, what would it be about?

33. Why is making music so difficult and expensive right now (and can I do something about it?)

34. What is the most effective way to get the United States away from a being a country that builds cities for cars, and back towards one that builds cities for people?

35. How do we preserve journalism's essential value (especially relating to local journalism) in a news climate increasingly devoted to sensationalism and misinformation?

36. Will I be able to ride on California High Speed Rail before I die?

37. How techno-optimist am I?

38. What can we do to cultivate a greater appreciation for art in popular culture (and as a side note, in wealthy/powerful people who have the ability to sponsor unrestricted artistic creation)?

39. How can I harness my love of history (and rabbitholing about history) for the greater good?

40. Should I go to sleep at a somewhat respectable hour, or continue this list to 50 as I had originally intended?

debrief

that was fun!

this exercise was a wholly stream-of-consciousness, raw 'what am i thinking about right now' brain dump. and it worked- my brain feels emptier and lighter now, in a good way!

I hope this serves as a window into a few of the bigger life things I'm currently pondering; in a way, I suppose it could be construed as an initial answer for "what are all of the things I want to do with my life?"

This list will probably be completely different if I remake it in a week, or month, or year from now. My obsessions are rather unstable 🙃 though I think that's not actually a bad thing?

(also: still a bit review'd out from last week haha- weekly content reviews will resume next week!!)

I finally made a letterboxd account today, so you can now make fun of my mediocre taste in film! I also lurk similar forums like Rate Your Music and Goodreads.

Generally speaking, social rating platforms like Letterboxd/Goodreads/Rate Your Music tend to attract the thoughts of serious connoisseurs, critics, and the general type of person who has strong opinions on everything. I've noticed that rating scales skew far lower than one might expect from, say, a typical Google restaurant review (i.e., anything getting more than 4 stars is probably a timeless masterpiece!).

Rating deflation can be off-putting to newcomers, but once I acclimated to the "two stars=good, three stars=great, four stars=incredible" scale, I found that reviewers out there are mostly fair and respectful of both the art and the artists they're rating.

On occasion, though, I stumble across a work of art that is so thoroughly lambasted to the point where it becomes morbidly fascinating. Tonight was one such occasion.

nothing, except everything

On the surface, nothing, except everything is the knockout success story of our filmmaking generation. Wesley Wang's 8-million-view viral creation made its rounds on YouTube and TikTok and won a dazzling array of awards at multiple film festivals. At the age of 20, Wesley is now working with a major Hollywood studio to produce a feature-length version of the film.

Wesley is an incredibly inspiring person. In addition to filmmaking he's also a chess prodigy; he's been honing his craft for years to create the perfect overnight-success-ten-years-in-the-making; he kept going even after being told "no" by producers and actors hundreds of times during the early stages of this film.

Clearly, a lot of people and festival judges loved it (and I, admittedly, enjoyed it on first watch!)— which is why I was so surprised to see that nothing, except everything is one of the most universally despised short films according to Letterboxd reviewers.

After combing through one-star review after one-star review, it's not hard to understand where this hatred is coming from. Critics are fast to point out its ridiculous pretentiousness (the first thing you see is a quote from Karl Marx!), lack of substance, and blatant re-adaptation of themes from Everything Everywhere All At Once and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It claims to be a student film, and yet has a 30-person production team, famous actors, and a budget in the tens of thousands.

People are livid, angry, and disgusted by this film. Some felt so strongly as to write paragraphs upon paragraphs on why this was the worst thing they've ever seen. Much of it is crude jealousy over Wesley's privileged upbringing and the relatedly overblown budget (which I don't think is deserved or should have been said!). But just as much of the discourse is genuine, useful criticism that I'd like to focus on for a second.

One of the most insightful takes I've found is from fellow filmmaker Sam Morgan, who made a 35-minute video response to the film. One compelling point he makes is that nothing, except everything feels so safe and sanitized to the point where it becomes meaningless. It feels inauthentic for the sake of checking all the boxes needed to win festivals, get recognition, and go viral on social media— almost as an insult to the filmmakers who stayed true to their visions at the expense of marketability.

Wesley Wang is a chess player who applies the same mindset to art. It's strategic; it's whatever's most likely to get what he wants.

What stuck out to me the most, though, is that Sam is afraid of this film and the implications of its success.

Whether he (and we) like it or not, Wesley Wang now faces the daunting task of representing an entire generation of young filmmakers on the Hollywood stage. Sam, alongside many of his peers, are now asking themselves: do we really trust Wesley to show the world what we, as Gen Z filmmakers, are truly capable of?

who's afraid of modern art?

Jacob Geller opens this video essay with the story of Barnett Newman's contemporary art series "Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue", a set of nondescript canvases with the three colors it promises and no more.

"Who's Afraid of Yellow and Blue" is undeniably striking. For many viewers, it slapped them in the face and sent them reeling in disgust. The museum it was housed in received a bunch of angry letters about it.

One day, someone walked in with a box cutter and destroyed it. He was lauded a hero by art critics too timid to do anything about it themselves.

It's not hard to see why someone might dislike this painting (and much of contemporary art, for that matter). "It's just solid red paint, I could have done that too!" they cry.

"It's an insult to real art!"

The true reason people dislike modern art, Jacob argues, is not that it's easy to create. (Even the simplest paintings and sculptures often reflect decades of unreproducible technique and experience!). Rather, the purpose of these provocative creations is to be subversive; to challenge the default cultural narrative set by tradition. "Above all else, they're not talking about art," he concludes about the people who are the most afraid of it.

"Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue" and nothing, except everything represent two sides on the spectrum of creative extremity: on one side, people are scared of art that's overtly radical and unorthodox; on the other, people are scared of art that's generic and inauthentic.

But if the whole point of art is to evoke emotion and spark discussion, haven't they achieved their purpose?

how much is too much?

I'm tempted to subscribe to the naïve ideal that all artists are entitled to create, and everyone else is entitled to their opinion about it. But as nice of an ideal as it may be, I don't think it's true.

As someone who publishes content online, I often grapple with the validity of the things I post. While writing this piece I thought to myself numerous times, "should I really be sharing this, or is it a thought I should just keep to myself?". I'm not a film or art critic by trade; I have no real qualifications to write today's post other than "I care a lot about this topic". There's the potential of real harm if I misrepresent something or express my ideas in ways that aren't truly authentic.

My coping mechanism for all of this is just to not take myself too seriously. It'd be a wild stretch to call what I'm making "art", after all— I'm just some random guy typing out his thoughts at 4am on a Wednesday! If anything I ever publish is problematic, you're an email away (and I'm an edit button away) from getting it removed. This is one of the risks of publishing incomplete thoughts like I do, but I think it's worth it :)

I don't believe I'm entitled to create anything. Rather, I have to earn the right to do so by showing up as my genuine self, believing in what I make, and responding to feedback that can help make it even better.

how to like everything more

There's a lot to like about the internet, but its rampant negativity is not one of them. This is a bit of a dilemma when accounting for the constructive side of criticism (which I've hopefully painted as a vitally important tool for discussion in the rest of this post!).

Perhaps the root of the problem lies somewhere in the process of unraveling nuance. For example, "I hate nothing, except everything" is a completely useless opinion in itself, but when you ask "but why?" the real, constructive thought lies closely beneath: "I think nothing, except everything sets a dangerous precedent by misrepresenting Gen Z filmmaking as shallow and meaningless".

I really like this recent post by Sasha Chapin about enjoyment as a skill that anyone can improve at:

Sasha's 'Newsletter'

How to like everything more

I believe that one of my skills is that I’m good at liking things. I intensely enjoy many of my experiences, whether we’re talking about music, art, people, food, places, books, movies, anything. My wife, glimpsing me reacting to a Fiona Apple song, once said: “I wish everyone could enjoy something as much as you’re enjoying this right now.” She’s also …

Read more

a year ago · 1701 likes · 71 comments · Sasha Chapin

Life is so dull if it’s just “like” or “dislike.” Maybe the movie is riveting but you still hate it. Can you find “begrudging enjoyment?” You simply do not understand the outfit of that kid on the subway. Can you locate “would be compelling to someone who is not me”? How do you feel about the song that represents you so well it’s almost personally violating? Can you be grateful for the person who reminds you of all the annoying tendencies you try to repress in yourself? These are all genuine forms of enjoyment to be cultivated and savored alongside the cleaner kinds.

I'd like to think of myself as someone who can find a sense of appreciation in any form of art, regardless of how much I don't understand about its existence. I still struggle with this sometimes; it's refreshing to view it as something that I can consciously get better at with a little practice!

And with that, I'll leave you my final review of nothing, except everything:

On first watch, I really wasn't thinking too hard about it. The cinematography is great, it's well-produced, the pacing is riveting! I let myself play into the emotions the film so clearly conveys: of nostalgia, coming-of-age, and the desire for meaning-making in a world full of nihilism.

There's a lot to like on first glance, but when you try to take it apart and really ask, 'what is this film trying to convey?' the answer is... nothing? As in, it reminds me of a typical Instagram feed, sparkly and engaging but devoid of any narrative.

Maybe that's what Wesley was trying to get at here— to express himself in a way that is only really decipherable by the kids like us who grew up with chronic internet access, scrolling endlessly for dopamine, trying to find the bottom of a feed that gives us nothing in return.

I give nothing, except everything 3 stars.

hi friends!!

in Valentine's spirit, I would like to share one of my new favorite research papers with you.1

(Here it is, if you want to read it first. but you don't have to :)

Anik, Lalin, and Michael I. Norton. "Matchmaking Promotes Happiness." Social Psychological & Personality Science 5, no. 6 (August 2014): 644–652.

Before we proceed, I want to clarify one very important thing:

matchmaking isn't exclusive to romantic relationships!!

I like to think of matchmaking like sending recommendations to your friends— except instead of music/movies/TikToks you think they'd like, you send them people! I’ve noticed do this without realizing it sometimes; some recent examples include:

• connecting one of my high school friends with one of my college roommates (they'll be going to the same grad school next year!)

• getting some climbing buddies in SF together, since I knew they go to the same gym

• helping a recruiter friend get in contact with friends I knew would be interested in the job

Of course, randomly pairing people together is really awkward if nobody asked for it. But it's often an offhand comment that gets the gears turning: "I wish I had someone to talk about comics!" or "I wanna learn guitar and I don't know how to start!" or "I have lots of board games at home, and I hate how they're just collecting dust!" is often all it takes to know someone's interested.

I really resonate with the findings of this paper. It's genuinely so fulfilling to see a friend or acquaintance's life trajectory change in meaningful and positive ways, all from a few minutes of my time and a few well-placed exchanges of conversation. Sometimes, the connection fizzles out and I never hear about it again— but that's quite insignificant of a consequence compared to the potential upsides for everyone involved.

For the non-researchers out there who just want results, here's a quick summary of my takeaways from the study:

1. chronic matchmaking is positively correlated with overall well-being. This is almost certainly a consequence of the fact that you need a lot of friends/connections to be an effective matchmaker, and more friends == more better!!

2. matchmaking is intrinsically rewarding. Study participants who got paid per match actually completed fewer trials and reported a smaller increase in happiness compared to those who made matches for free!

3. a matchmaker's happiness increases with the perceived difficulty of a match. This makes intuitive sense to me: if I connect two very different people whose lives would have never crossed otherwise, and they get into a great relationship, I can almost claim full credit for it! (In contrast, if they were probably going to meet anyways, helping accelerate the process is still fulfilling but doesn't feel as fateful.)

So far, I hope I've done an okay job at establishing the fact that being a matchmaker is fun, and actually does have a good chance at making your life better. But why exactly does it feel so rewarding?

I (alongside the paper's authors) think a lot of it has to do with network density. While matchmaking doesn't directly grow your social network, it's a really low-effort way to substantially increase the quality of your existing connections.2 And when the quantity and quality of connections between a pool of people increases enough, a formerly disparate collection of loose relationships becomes a community.

I'm a strong proponent of quality-over-quantity when it comes to my interpersonal relationships. If I get to know you, it's in the hopes that we'll remain in each others' lives for a really long time! It takes a lot of effort to maintain that level of connection with a huge number of people, so I like to keep my world small. And hey, if everyone in that world also happens to know each other (whether through my meddling or otherwise), my life becomes a lot easier :)

I still have a bunch of open questions surrounding matchmaking and its consequences, like:

• Why do social media platforms feel so icky sometimes, despite being fantastic catalysts of online matchmaking?

  • Likely, the introduction of an automated middleman- i.e. the recommendation algorithm- takes away most of the benefits even though your presence contributes greatly to your friends-of-friends discovering one another.

  • I've also noticed that most (though not all!) online relationships aren't as strong as IRL ones— the digital world often revolves around quantity-over-quality, which doesn't lend itself well to the benefits of matchmaking.

• What does this research suggest about the ubiquitousness of dating apps in modern culture?

  • IRL matchmaking feels special because it means the matchmaker felt so strongly about it that they specifically sought out two people to connect. When matches are commodified and plentiful, it quickly turns into a numbers game.

• From a professional perspective: what are the parallels between recruiting and social matchmaking? How can we use our enjoyment of the latter to improve the job search experience?

  • From my experience, stronger+denser+smaller professional networks are a lot nicer to work with compared to huge, loose ones! Genuine, intentional connections that aren't made simply for headcount or a LinkedIn statistic go a really long way in creating high-trust environments.

So here's my own (kind of meta) request for matchmaking! if any of you reading this have thoughts you want to share surrounding matchmaking, or know someone who does and wants to have a long conversation about it, please let me know!! I'm starting to think this topic might be the tip of an iceberg for a much larger writing/discovery project in my future and would love to hear as many perspectives on it as I can.

have a great week :)

weekly reviews!

I hope to be more intentional with the things I consume this year. As a part of that, I'd like to share some words about some of my favorite new discoveries of the week!

If you so desire, you may stalk my listens on Rate Your Music, digital reads on Sublime, and physical reads on my bookshelf page.

🎵 album review: Rina Sawayama - Hold The Girl

Rina revolutionized pop with her heavy, future-forward namesake album Sawayama in 2020.

Hold The Girl, in contrast, feels much more like iteration than revolution. And while critics may say it lacks the creativity of its predecessors, I actually really enjoyed the smoothness of it— so much so that I personally prefer it over Sawayama. On the surface it's a fun and easy listen, but it quickly gives way to darker themes on replays.

This one's for sure going into my rotation.

Rating: 7/10
Favorite tracks: This Hell, Frankenstein

✍ blog review: "cool communities that do cool stuff"

general zuo's chicken

"cool communities that do cool stuff"

come join our community…

Read more

a year ago · 37 likes · 7 comments · nancy

this one gave me a laugh! it's actually so real though— although there's a lot about SF hacker culture that aligns with my values surrounding community in theory (i.e. lots of high-agency people who all know each other and do interesting things), I'm much less enthused by it in practice. This little post absolutely nails that feeling.

3AM UPDATE: felt inspired. got in the zone. now it’s a normal-sized update lol. and kev is still doing great :)

Pressing a like button is a quiet way to send a tidbit of your appreciation to a creator. It's a nod to the employee stocking the grocery store shelves; a wave to the driver who let you merge; a gentle smile back when a stranger glances your way.

Liking something on the internet is a two-way exchange with an air of finality. There's no expectation for either party to respond to the act of sending or receiving a like, but the record of it occurring remains as a permanent fixture to the original creation.

Everyone uses the like button slightly differently. I'm rather discerning with my likes; I treat them like a scarce resource that I reserve for saying "hey, I REALLY liked what you made and will definitely be coming back to it again and again!".

As a result: whenever I'm feeling uninspired I just revisit my liked Substack posts or YouTube videos or tweets and instantly get a hyper-curated feed of my top 10-100 discoveries of all time, as a gift from my past self.

From a creator's standpoint, I think it's important to have a healthy relationship with your like buttons. It's extremely easy for creators to falsely use their like count as a measure of success; in the post-dislike-button era, a lack of likes often gets treated as failure.

The quality of a like also matters some amount. If the act of liking is frictionless, more people will click the button but it also feels much more impersonal.

As an example of a low-quality like button, I added a number-go-up button on my website's homepage:

I have no idea who clicked this button or when they clicked it. 328 people could have clicked it once, or maybe one person clicked it 328 times. But that's the fun of it-- this button isn't meant to measure anything useful; it simply exists to be played with and to give people a way to make a visible impact on my site when they visit! (Admittedly, it's also very entertaining to see big number go up.)

The like button at the bottom of this post is a higher quality one. There's a decent amount of friction to be able to use it at all (i.e. you need to be signed in to Substack first), which means fewer people are willing/able to click it. But it's also far more personal than a number-go-up-button:

• I get a ping whenever someone likes a post, which ends up almost being a realtime interaction!

• Likes are tied to identities. I, and everyone else who reads this post in the future, get to peek at the list of people who stopped by previously.

• It takes real effort and nonzero risk to click the like button because of the previous points.

self-hosting the like button

One of the other seldom-discussed problems with like buttons is that they're stateful. From a website's standpoint, this means the like count must be stored in a database that anyone in the world can read/write to.

This poses a challenge for all of us who host content on our own websites. Going from stateless to stateful necessitates finding a server to run the database in, which can get cumbersome and expensive.

Luckily for me, I have a server at home! For my front-page button, I run a super simple Go backend attached to a MySQL database at api.bencuan.me. Every time someone loads or clicks on that button, a request gets made to the backend, which knows how to read or update the right number in the database.1

Clearly though, the DIY method isn't practical for most people. It’s also extra hard (and totally not worth the effort) to get a Substack-type like button.

Old blogs sometimes used a Disqus integration, which you still see every now and then. I'm sure you've come across one of these slow, ugly, hard-to-use behemoths:

There's a few other services out there like utteranc.es (which uses GitHub as a backend) and brid.gy (which uses the ActivityPub protocol to federate with Mastodon, etc.).

My favorite solution so far is using Bluesky posts as a provider for likes and blog comments! Although not everyone has a Bluesky account, it's a well-known and well-designed enough platform at this point that interacting with it feels seamless once you're in. It's super simple to understand both from a user and creator perspective: when I link a website post in a Bluesky post, all of its likes and comments get mirrored onto my website.

Thanks to a very cool npm package I was able to get this up in less than 30 minutes today! I would highly recommend it.

- For example, here’s a bluesky post:

- And here’s bencuan.me/colophon:

that's all for this week's thoughts :) have a great day!

weekly reviews!

I hope to be more intentional with the things I consume this year. As a part of that, I'd like to share some words about some of my favorite new discoveries of the week!

If you so desire, you may stalk my listens on Rate Your Music, digital reads on Sublime, and physical reads on my bookshelf page.

🎵 album review: Sufjan Stevens - Javelin

Major tone shift this week from hyperpop to some chill folk music!

The latest release from longtime singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens caught my eye for being the highest-rated album of 2023 on Rate Your Music, so I thought I'd give it a listen! And even though it's not my preferred genre, I enjoyed its sonic landscape quite a bit.

The first track Goodbye Evergreen is incredible. Its luscious backing vocals clash with a beautifully dissonant wall of sound before fading back into nothing.

I wish the rest of the album had a similar feel, but it didn't stand out at all to me. Just some calm, nostalgic vibes to get lost in 😌

Rating: 5/10
Favorite tracks: Goodbye Evergreen

✍ blog review: The Website Manifesto

https://nora.zone/manifesto.html

A short and succinct argument for why you should have a website:

1. It's the only place on the internet you have full control of & can do whatever you want in.

2. If your favorite social platforms shut down or otherwise become unusable, you should have a fallback where people can still find you.

3. It's worthwhile to be tech-literate. ("If you don't want to learn to use technology, other people will use it for you.")

Now that we're in the age of LLMs, you don't even need to write your own website code anymore! Asking Claude to "please make me a cool website with lots of flying unicorns and penguins" is totally valid and encouraged.

I'll write up a simple "how to make a website in 15 mins" guide pretty soon :)

My Oura Ring data confirms this-- this is pretty much what the entirety of my 2024 data looked like (I wear it because I'm a data nerd, not because it actually makes me sleep better lol):

Overall, I (alongside nearly every medical professional) would highly recommend doing whatever you can to get good, consistent sleep. It's not possible for everyone-- if you have young kids, or work a graveyard shift, then there's only so much you can do-- but I believe opting to do so when you have the choice is one of the best ways to instantly feel happier, healthier, and more productive.12

But in the last month of writing/releasing something every week, I've realized the following:

• The period that I feel the most creative and generative happens to very consistently fall somewhere between the hours of 12-4am.

• Perplexingly, if I stay up really late making stuff, I feel more energized- and I even get something tangible out of it!

• Although my Oura-reported sleep quality is thoroughly trashed on these nights, it doesn't affect my ability to feel fully alert the following day, nor my ability to return to a consistent sleep schedule for the other 5-6 days of the week I don't do this.

This is a complete upheaval of everything I know about sleep! How could this be?

I have a few (very un-scientific) hypotheses for why I'm experiencing this phenomenon:

1. Maybe my sleep debt is low enough (and i'm young enough) that I can get away with it? A lot of my peers go out clubbing past 4am once a week anyways; this isn't really all that different (if anything, it's better- not being hungover the next day is pretty awesome).

2. I could be getting too much sleep? Many professionals seem to recommend getting 7-8 hours, but my body will happily remain unconscious for 10+ if I let it.

3. Perhaps I'm overthinking all of this (as I usually do) and I should just let my body figure itself out and do what feels good, even if it's unintuitive and sometimes contradicts what research suggests over general populations.

Since I know you're wondering: yes, this is currently being written at 1am.

What you might not know is that nearly everything I've written has been primarily created after midnight. This includes

• the initial brainwave that gets me excited to think/write about it;

• all of the wide swaths of on-topic ideation;

• the finishing touches.

Notably, this does not include the more well-defined supporting activities like research, making graphics/finding photos, proofreading, etc.— I'm a lot better at these during the daytime!

I don't think this is me pattern-matching a couple examples to justify some convoluted theory (if anything, I really would like this to not be the case!!!)— 4 out of the 9 entries currently on my blog page were created in their entirety after midnight.3

I'd subconsciously internalized some of this when I first started writing early last year and would routinely do my best work past midnight. I quickly reverted back to prioritizing a consistent sleep schedule however, and my creative output dropped significantly for the rest of the year.

For now, I'm curious to see what happens if I continue this pattern of staying up through the liminal hours of the night, at least once a week when inspiration strikes.

Why dream in my sleep when I can be awake for it?

(time to go to bed!)
~ until later,

if you've made it this far:

first of all: thanks for your continued support of my silly thoughts! ily!

this is a periodic reminder that I'm basically repurposing this publication as a glorified journal at this point. Most of what I'll be posting here will be fairly low effort (maybe some of it will even make sense!).

I'm strongly considering starting another Substack as a home for the long-form, well-researched, thought-out essays I primarily enjoy writing. Will be sending out a draft of the first post next week for you to peruse if you so desire- currently 3k+ words and enlargening (though hopefully shrinking, eventually) every day :)

The final version of the aforementioned post, and all of the future long-form content I make, will always end up at bencuan.me/blog sooner or later, but I've been enjoying the ease of interaction+visibility Substack lends. Most folks seem to prefer emails and push notifications over wrangling with RSS feeds, and understandably so!

weekly reviews!

I hope to be more intentional with the things I consume this year. As a part of that, I'd like to share some words about some of my favorite new discoveries of the week!

If you so desire, you may stalk my listens on Rate Your Music, digital reads on Sublime, and physical reads on my bookshelf page.

🎵 album review: underscores - Wallsocket (Director's Cut)

(has to be the director's cut; the bonus songs are soo good!)

underscores is quickly becoming one of my favorite artists. I'd first come across her stuff last year and gave both Wallsocket and Fishmonger a few listens; neither really stuck—

—but strangely, I re-discovered Wallsocket last week and it's been pretty much playing nonstop since. The worldbuilding in this album is downright eerie sometimes (culminating in CCTV), but punctuated with enough fun bangers that it took a while for the power of this album to soak in.

It's hard to describe the genre of this album exactly, other than saying it's absolutely on point with what you'd expect from Fishmonger's sequel. Slightly less hyperpoppy, slightly more country, multitudes more feels with a few extra coats of polish.

Wallsocket quickly rises to the top of my all-time favorite albums.

Rating: 8/10 (!)
Favorite tracks: Stupid (Can't run from the urge), Seventyseven dog years

✍ blog review: Supernuclear

Supernuclear

How to live near (and with) friends

By Phil Levin

Single-family housing is clearly unsustainable as a future default for urban living.

Skyrocketing home prices, wildfires/earthquakes, archaic zoning laws, and half a dozen other factors are pointing us very clearly towards sustainable, dense, multigenerational neighborhoods-- but getting there is such a monumental task that only the wealthiest and most powerful really think they have a real shot at changing whole urban landscapes (see: the California Forever project).

I've been enjoying reading Supernuclear's case studies on how friends and families around the country are taking the problem into their own hands and attempting to run grassroots co-housing experiments. There's merlin's place, a community living room in NYC; Radish, a multi-family compound in Oakland; and so many more with their own flavors.

None of these experiments are perfect, but it's inspiring to see the early signs of a wider trend towards cohesive, collaborative, and spontaneous neighborhood communities once more.

Pretty much every social platform today has some sort of infinitely scrollable front page.

Whether it be Instagram's Feed, Twitter's "for you", Reddit's r/all, or the entirety of TikTok, each site is deeply integrated with The Algorithm™️.

The Algorithm™ is capitalized because its sole purpose is to print its makers as much money as mechanistically possible. As a neat side effect, this means its primary goal is to keep you scrolling for as long as possible, since every minute means another ad you could potentially set your eyeballs on!

While this clearly has a lot of frequently-discussed consequences, it's not universally a bad thing. The Algorithm™ is fantastic at surfacing content we'd like to see from our friends/favorite creators, and serves as a frictionless way to discover new people/topics/things we wouldn't have otherwise gone out of our way to find.

friends are the best recommendation algorithm

In an effort to be as deliberate as possible with how I spend time on the internet, I avoid The Algorithm™ whenever possible. I don't have a TikTok account, my Instagram is solely used for DM's, and I zapped Twitter's homepage with uBlock such that it always redirects to the 'Following' feed.

But this is clearly an unpopular choice. Most of my friends like to send me highlights from their feeds on occasion. I very much enjoy this and thank you all for your service 🫡 you make my day a little bit better every time!

In a sense, your recommendations are my replacement for The Algorithm™. My friends know exactly what I'd enjoy viewing; I get most of the discovery benefits without any of the time-sink downsides.

Unfortunately, since I don't scroll with y'all, all I have to give in return is this lousy newsletter. until now!!

introducing: the bencuan.me doomscroller!

The Doomscroller will eventually have all of my updates in one convenient, infinitely-spam-refreshable location on the frontpage of bencuan.me. This includes:

• Weekly posts from this newsletter!

• Long-form blog updates on bencuan.me/blog

• Automated feeds from Bluesky and status.cafe

• Webmentions from other federated sites

At the time of writing, it's 3am and I need another hour or two to get that working. So until next-week-me gets around to it, I've pre-loaded it with links to my favorite content from all over the internet. This includes:

• my frequent listens on spotify

• some fun youtube videos/channels

• blog posts I've been thinking about

• cool personal websites I've stumbled across

I'll update my recommendation list every now and then; there's still a lot more stuff I want to put in there. (and, if you send me more, it might get even longer!)

Right now, it’s very much under construction— it looks kinda boring at the moment, and doesn’t have that much content diversity yet. Will be back for some more updates soon…

happy scrolling :)

weekly reviews!

I hope to be more intentional with the things I consume this year. As a part of that, I'd like to share some words about some of my favorite new discoveries of the week!

If you so desire, you may stalk my listens on Rate Your Music, digital reads on Sublime, and physical reads on my bookshelf page.

🎵 album review: Jamie xx - In Waves

My British producer listening streak continues this week with Jamie xx's second album, coming after a nearly 10-year wait.

His first album, In Colour, remains at the top of my favorites list, boasting laid back, thoughtful, memorable themes.

Like its cover art suggests, In Waves feels much less colorful, trading variety for polish. It delivers the solidly consistent, distinctly British house beats Jamie is so well known for-- no more and no less.

It's a solid album, and one worth a listen- but one I ultimately find forgettable in the wake of In Colour.

Rating: 5/10
Favorite tracks: Baddy on the Floor, Dafodil

✍ blog review: a tweet thread by Henrik Karlsson

Not really a blog, but blog-related nonetheless:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1881287554999460250.html

I talked to a friend who wants to start a blog and wanted some advice on that—how to find her voice and so on. A few random thoughts [...]

Henrik is a fantastic writer. None of his points in this list are particularly surprising to me, but seeing all of this advice together in one place rather than scattered in vague "oh, I must have heard that somewhere at some point" corners of my brain feels powerfully validating.

A common theme that I resonate with a lot here is the idea that you can't force good writing; you have to let it pass through yourself like a complex set of emotions. Whenever I try to transcribe an exact thought I've been honing for weeks, I almost always throw it away in favor of something new I came up with on a whim in five minutes.

3. Here is a classic pattern: you try really hard to do something GOOD, then you fail, or you make something silly. And it is the failures that people love, or the thing that was just a silly thing.

If I were to choose Henrik's most salient piece of advice:

Most of all: the point is to aim for writing that enhances your feeling of aliveness, that lets you refine your thoughts about what matters, lets you experience with more nuance what you care about, lets you enrichen the texture of your mind.

💫 This is a rough draft of a future blog post. I'm not bothering to use pretty words and making things flowy yet; I'm just dumping a bunch of info onto a page and figuring it out later. Some fraction of it might be useful to future me.

Comments and feedback, as always, are much appreciated, especially constructive ones!🐈

questions i'm trying to answer

My experience with Google over the last year (really any traditional search engine like Bing/DuckDuckGo/etc) has deteriorated to the point of being barely usable.

I'm not alone in this experience. Several high-profile examples I've found of people having negative experiences with Google in the past year include:

• a youtube video by mrwhosetheboss with 4M views

• a Medium essay by Cory Doctorow

• a Reddit thread with 1k+ comments, largely echoing the author

It's very possible I'm running into a reporting bias: most people who think Google is "just fine" won't openly talk about it, after all. But it's telling that I have to try really, really hard to find examples of people having positive experiences with Google recently. It's now easier to find evidence for the Earth being flat than evidence for Google Search meeting user expectations!

On the surface, this seems like a net loss. Lots of people, myself included, rely on Google to get quick facts, find critical information about people/places/events, and keep up with breaking news.

I would like to explore the following:

1. Why, and how, did this shift happen?

2. Can/should we do anything about it?

3. Is the traditional search engine now an outdated concept? If it is, what's going to replace it?

I. 1998

Before Google the company existed in a Menlo Park garage, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were just a couple Stanford grad students working on a cool research project.

At the time, the Internet was exploding in popularity and users struggled to keep up with the exponentially-growing ocean of content. While it was fun to surf the web and see where the endless chain of links took you, it was difficult to find some exact thing you were looking for.

Their PageRank project solved this with a beautifully obvious algorithm. The original paper, which is only 17 pages long, now has over 150,000 citations.

In case you're unfamiliar with how PageRank works, here's a quick rundown:

1. Suppose you have a list of every webpage, and a list of every link from one webpage to another webpage.

2. A webpage's rank is determined by two things: how many other webpages link to it, and how highly ranked those linking pages are. (If a high-rank page like the Stanford website links to your page, then you're probably famous!)

3. A simple Google search will first filter the list of webpages by the ones whose titles include the query, then sort the list by their rank.

If you're a visual learner, I really like this 5-minute youtube explainer by Spanning Tree!

breaking down 25-year-old assumptions

The original paper makes a bunch of assumptions that are fascinating to explore with the context and hindsight of the modern Internet. Below are excepts from three sections worth highlighting.

Introduction and Motivation

The paper begins with the following three sentences:

"The World Wide Web creates many new challenges for information retrieval. It is very large and heterogenous. Current estimate are that there are over 150 million webpages with a doubling life of less than a year."

If the number of websites doubled every year from 1998, there would be 150,000,000 x 2^27 ~= 20,000,000,000,000,000, or 20 quadrillion websites today. Clearly, this trend hasn't held-- it may even have reversed, if we're only considering the number of actively used websites. This age-old tweet serves as a fun anecdote:

Americans today spend most of their social internet time on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. These four websites collectively capture U.S. adults' attention for 400 million hours every day:

The Random Surfer Model

The PageRank algorithm works by modeling the behavior of a "random surfer", who clicks on links randomly until they "get bored" and randomly switches to a new website (to avoid getting stuck in infinite loops).

Mathematically, this is a pretty standard approach for Markov processes (of calculating useful metrics out of state transitions with known probability distributions). For 1998 Internet, this more or less accurately represented the average Internet user. Links were the primary way you got around online, after all!

Today, algorithmically-driven feeds dominate the digital landscape, and the promise of advertising revenue incentivizes platforms to retain their users for as long as possible. This creates a much more centralized hub-and-spoke model: nearly all website links are self-referential, and those that don't are temporarily visited before returning to the original site.

Manipulation by Commercial Interests

For a page to get a high PageRank, it must convince an important page, or a lot of non-important pages to link to it. At worst, you can have manipulation in the form of buying advertisements(links) on important sites. But, this seems well under control since it costs money.

ahaahaHAHAHAHAHAHAaaha dies

oh, the irony is palpable! Today, anyone can simply bribe Google itself to advertise their link on top of everyone else's and bypass all of the ingenuity behind PageRank. Since when has something costing money ever been a barrier to internet manipulation?

One of the most striking screenshots from the paper is a side-by-side comparison of PageRank to the leading search engine at the time, AltaVista. The example search query is "university", and PageRank actually delivers some fantastic results here!

This is what Google looks like today for the same search query. It is absolutely staggering: Google front-page results in 2025 are very clearly worse than Altavista's in 1998.

Ads are so uncool! If only we could have nice things…

II. the future of internet search

where will we go from here? find out in next week's edition of whimsical wednesdays!! ⸜( •⌄• )⸝

weekly reviews!

I hope to be more intentional with the things I consume this year. As a part of that, I'd like to share some words about some of my favorite new discoveries of the week!

If you so desire, you may stalk my listens on Rate Your Music, digital reads on Sublime, and physical reads on my bookshelf page.

🎵 album review: A.G. Cook - Britpop

If Jacob Collier is the musicans' musician, then A.G. Cook is the producers' producer.

One of the masterminds behind Charli XCX's Brat and founder of influential record label PC Music, A.G. Cook is the primary culprit behind the rise of the hyperpop genre in recent years.

I first came across A.G. Cook's work in 2020 with his acoustic set for Secret Sky. At the time he was just about to release his first two albums, 7G (which is 7 disks long!!) and Apple (which is actually normal length), both of which I enjoyed enough to enter my regular rotation in bits and pieces (especially Superstar and its variations).

Britpop encompasses A.G. Cook's past, present, and future in three disks over a very short-feeling 1 hour and 40 minutes. It begins with bright, chaotic 2010's hyperpop, abruptly transitions into a collection of guitar-heavy emotional ballades, and finally emerges into an enchanting mixture of the two.

I think Britpop is A.G. Cook's best work yet, maintaining all of 7G's grandiosity while simultaneously taking us through a journey of hyperpop's evolution through time.

Rating: 7/10
Favorite tracks: Lucifer, Bewitched, Pink Mask

✍ blog review: Cate Hall - There Are Nine Wolves Inside of You

Useful Fictions

There Are Nine Wolves Inside of You

When I first encountered the Enneagram, I thought it sounded pretty dumb: Nine types of people, precisely? It seemed awfully arbitrary, not unlike astrology. But some wise friends (including my husband) convinced me to give it a shot, and that decision ended up making me happier, saner, and more free. Here are a few notes about how I came to love it and…

Read more

2 years ago · 104 likes · 12 comments · Cate Hall

You won’t see me trying to argue anyone out of astrology, because I’m all about finding the “harmless untruths … that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy,” in Kurt Vonnegut’s words -- hence the name of the blog itself [useful fictions]. And for me, that’s what the Enneagram is: A model of self that has made me more free.

I am a psychology major, and therefore have had the 'MBTI is pseudoscience' research arc thoroughly hammered into my brain. This perspective is logically valid: any measure of personality that doesn't reduce into the widely-studied Big Five must be inaccurate at best, and misinformation at worst.

Practically, however, personality is far from a solved science— and even treating it as a science can feel like a distraction sometimes. Many people take personality tests not only to understand themselves, but to discover their strengths, flaws, and how they deal with interpersonal relationships. This second part is something the Enneagram does particularly well (with its concepts of wings, stress, and growth) and something the Big 5 does not do well at without further interpretation.

This piece is a fantastic introduction to the Enneagram, both from a skeptic's perspective (like mine) and an astrology enthusiasts' perspective. Although I'm not completely sold yet, I'm intrigued by how it could serve as an effective middle-ground that mostly works (unlike astrology), while still being easy to interpret and understand (unlike the Big Five).

Addendum: Unrelated to the contents of the post, but Cate Hall is such an enigmatic individual— somehow squeezing a career in law, a stint as a top professional poker player, and cofounding a research organization in less than half a lifetime! I’m inspired.

2024 was a fantastic year for new music. I oftentimes find myself shuffling the same playlists over and over again (or even- gasp- use the spotify dj!), but this year I was caught up listening to so many incredible new albums I had a hard time keeping track of them all.

Here are the 5 most memorable ones of the year (and, a few honorable mentions!).

5: Jacob Collier - Djesse Vol. 4

I'm a big fan of Jacob Collier and have been awaiting Djesse Vol. 4 for close to 5 years now, most of which under the assumption it'd automatically claim the #1 spot in whatever year it came out. To have it barely sneak its way onto a top 5 list of mine (and not even an all-time one) is not something I'd have remotely considered in any universe, yet here we are.

Perhaps the expectation of a grand finale was its greatest downfall. In a vacuum, Vol. 4 is a perfectly serviceable album-- but "perfectly serviceable" after the incredibleVol. 2 (which is on my top 5 all-time list) and its brethren Vol. 1 and Vol. 3 (which also hold their ground on my leaderboard) makes me feel quite underwhelmed.

Djesse Vol. 4 has its moments for sure-- Never Gonna Be Alone in particular has been one of my most-listened-to tracks for the past two years-- but much of it passes by as a forgettable, over-produced pop record. Jacob's songs have always felt uniquely his in the past, but I'd struggle to pick out most of Vol. 4's songs from the radio if I hadn't heard them previously.

For personal significance alone, Djesse Vol. 4 deserves a spot on this list. But it's also the only one here that I would not handily recommend. (Go listen to Vol. 2 instead!!)1

4: Fontaines D.C. - Romance

I'd first come across Romance because it came out on the same day as this list's #1 album (August 23, what a day!). This was the first time I'd heard of Fontaines D.C. and it certainly won't be the last.

“art-rock” feels like an apt label for this album. It dips into experimental territory on occasion, while returning to more traditional rock progressions every now and then.

Starburster is a very clear favorite, trailed (slightly ironically) by Favourite. There is such a stark mood swing in between those two tracks, which the rest of the album does a neat job of spanning. The titular Romance and In the Modern World are also mention-worthy.

3: Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee

At an intimidating 122 minutes and 9 seconds, Patrick Flegel's latest triple-feature project is breathtaking the entire way. Diamond Jubilee is less of an album and more of an ethereal out-of-time worldbuilding experience that just keeps getting better and better as I replay it.

What's even more charming about Diamond Jubilee is its absence on any major stream platform-- its release consisted of a single geocities-inspired webpage straight from the 90's alongside an official Youtube video.

2: Porter Robinson - SMILE! :D

Porter Robinson's Nurture is easily my favorite album of all time. SMILE! :D is decidedly not anywhere close to that, but it's a ridiculously fun, endlessly replayable listen nonetheless. Porter really let loose on this one— it’s much less meticulous than his previous works, but feels more genuine.

My two clear favorite tracks are Is There No Happiness Without This Feeling? and Easier To Love You, accompanied by the brighter-sounding yet still brutally honest Cheerleader- which, in my opinion, holds its weight even against the countless other highly-regarded releases from the pop world this year. And as polarizing as Year of the Cup and Kitsune Maison Freestyle are, this album wouldn't feel complete without them.

1: Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk

I've been loosely following Magdalena Bay ever since Mercurial World hit in 2021, and almost let Imaginal Disk sneak up on me. I was listening to a random new-release Spotify playlist 18 days before release when Tunnel Vision came on. It made me stop what I was doing and think wait, when did Magdalena Bay release a new song? and why is it the best thing I've ever heard from them?

Needless to say I was incredibly hyped on release day, and my expectations were through the roof. Yet, Imaginal Disk still completely shattered them.

Imaginal Disk creates its own little universe-inside-a-CD, which truly gets kicks off when it's burned (only 22 more minutes!) within Image.

The four singles (Tunnel Vision, That's My Floor, Image, Death & Romance) are four of my favorite songs from this year, and they're not even my favorite songs on this album. That distinction goes to either Cry For Me or Angel on a Satellite, depending on how I'm feeling when you ask. Killing Time, Vampire in the Corner, and Watching T.V. are also all heavy hitters in their own right.

If there is one album this year that deserves an hour of your time for a front-to-back listen, it's this one.

honorable mentions

• Brat, because no 2024 music list is complete without it. 360, Club classics, and Apple featuring the japanese house are my personal top 3.

• Cascade by Floating Points is an instant electronic classic, and a wild (though totally expected) departure from his previous ambient work Promises.2

• Two back-to-back jazzpop albums from Louis Cole and Cory Wong two weeks apart (Nothing and Starship Syncopation respectively), both with the Metropole Orchest!

• A new Crywolf album (let me be your womb), a much calmer departure from the abject intensity of OBLIVIØN from a year prior.

weekly reviews!

I hope to be more intentional with the things I consume this year. As a part of that, I'd like to share some words about some of my favorite new discoveries of the week!

If you so desire, you may stalk my listens on Rate Your Music, digital reads on Sublime, and physical reads on my bookshelf page.

🎵 album review: The Last Dinner Party- Prelude to Ecstasy

A music review inside of a music review post? how meta!

To kick off the beginning of weekly reviews, this week's discovery from the hit new all-female British pop-rock band The Last Dinner Party featuring intentional over-the-top pretentiousness, catchy progressions, and strong lyricism. I was instantly enamored on first listen; we'll have to see whether it'll hold up to repeat listens, but I'm already looking forward to future music from them.

Favorite tracks: The Feminine Urge, Caesar on a TV Screen, Portrait of a Dead Girl
Rating: 7/10

✍ blog review: Fish Eyes by Amelia Wattenberger

This is the most beautiful blog post I have ever read. I am very inspired.

In addition to the stunning attention to visual detail, this post explores an open design question around how we think about and visualize information at different levels of abstraction (reading a novel is a very different experience than reading this summary, for instance). How can we design interfaces that allow us to context-switch between detailed long-form content and lossy-but-approachable short-form content?

that’s all from me for now. see y’all next week!!

hi friends we are so back!! happy new year to all of you 🎊

Today I have a fun announcement: the first phase of the whimsical wednesdays experiment is now over!

thanks for coming along for the ride! and...

🎉 welcome to season two 🎉

so what is happening, and why?

1. The expectation of quality is a dangerous thing.

I think my quality-vs-time graph looks something like this for WW:

This trend is clearly unsustainable. Tim Urban of wait but why on going through something similar (in which his latest post was supposed to take a day, but ended up being 121,000 words long and becoming a book).

So I'm hitting the reset button. Here's what I want this newsletter to look like for the next phase of its existence:

This will mean more work-in-progress and less "this is finally a thing i'm proud of and am totally ok with existing in the fabric of internet-space-time for all eternity".

2. Regardless of what happens, i will send out a thing every wednesday at exactly 9:00am pacific time.

I have finished exactly zero of my writing projects in the time I allocated for them! When I first started this newsletter, I had some loose idea that it'd be nice to have a regular schedule, but it quickly became clear to me that most of the things I wanted to write about took far longer than a week to create.

I still have a bunch of super long-form posts I want to write, but instead of stewing on them for many months I'm going to release bits and pieces of them as drafts every Wednesday. Regardless of what I have, or how proud of it I am, I'm handing them over to you. (Please eviscerate with care!)

3. digital streams, campfires, and gardens

When I first launched Whimsical Wednesdays, I was enthralled by Tom Critchlow’s theory on digital streams, campfires, and gardens ↗. I originally planned to divide my internet interactions into these categories, but this didn't work out for a couple reasons:

1. Joining Twitter was a big leap of faith into a platform I didn't entirely trust. And while I think that experiment was worthwhile, it confirmed my suspicions that I won't ever feel truly at home on Twitter.

2. Because of the quality creep, my middle-ground "campfire" lane quickly became what I'd envision my "garden" lane to achieve. Opening another platform somewhere to house the missing middle-ground content seemed excessive, so I just kept rolling with it.

I still think there's a whole lot of value in thinking about internet creation this way. Trying to cram the needs of all three different communication speeds into one platform clearly doesn't work. I'm going to try splitting them once more-- now with extra intentionality because I know for sure this is something I want now, and that I'm willing to put in some work to make it happen.

This is what I envision it looking like:

1. Streams: I'm switching to Bluesky as my short-form firehose community! I still have my reservations about it1 in its current state, but far less so than Twitter-- I resonate a lot with the team's overall vision to build a federated, yet approachable, social network.

   • You can follow me @bencuan.me on Bluesky if you so desire.

• Campfires: Whimsical Wednesdays will now actually be the place for me to dispatch semi-coherent, medium-term (lifespan <1 year) thoughts . I intend to enforce this pretty strongly-- it's going to be much more a newsletter now than a blog.

• Gardens: You can view my long-form (lifespan >1 year) content at bencuan.me/blog. I've ported over some of my bigger essays from Season 1 to here (i.e. sfstreets, keyboards, [hk eats]).

  • I have a lot of ideas around how to make long-term content more durable/findable/interactable. Very excited to play around with them in the coming year!

4. my 2025 creation goals

I have 3 huge projects to soft-announce; I intend to share more about them regularly here on Substack, and elsewhere in the digital world. No spoilers yet 🙈 (unless you ask me reeeal persistently then maybe i'll cave)

1. Hopefully, I'll get to talk about what I've been working on in my actual real full-time job this year.2 I'm very excited but it is not yet time \o/

2. The music studio is finally assembled (after 2 on-and-off years of building and waaay too many Adorama packages, whew)! I intend to release my first album this year.3

3. I've been thinking a lot about the question, "if I could spend all of my time trying to solve only one problem, what problem would that be?". I've found a compelling answer, but it's going to take a while to figure out the best way to tell the story. At the very minimum though, I'll manage to release an exposition this year.

If you have any goals for this year, please share them with me! we'll keep each other accountable ^-^

I have no idea how long S2 will last; all I know is it, too, shall evolve again when the time is right.

see you next week!!!

you know it; I know it. From the Transit app's NYC rat detector to a guest appearance of BART's screech in the horror game Dead Space, American mass transit sits squarely in the "needs improvement" category.

In the face of all the doom and gloom, I'm actually here to spread some unreserved optimism: I believe the improvement we so desperately need is real, it's coming, and much faster than you might think.

To celebrate one of the most exciting years in recent Bay Area transit history, I'd like to highlight some recent developments, and things to look out for in the near future!

table of contents

1. why should you (and i) care so much about this?

2. the story so far: an indirect, abbreviated attempt at history from a non-historian

3. what's new?

   1. BART's fleet of the future

   2. Caltrain electrification

   3. L Taraval reconstruction

4. what's next?

   1. BART's new fare gates

   2. Self-driving cars

   3. Muni signaling upgrades (i.e. no more floppy disks)

   4. Geary Subway

   5. SMART expansions

   6. Second transbay tube

   7. Caltrain's Downtown Extension

   8. Silicon Valley BART extension

   9. Caltrain grade separations

   10. Central Subway Extension

   11. CA High Speed Rail

   12. Bay Area 2050

5. footnote: how we can help

I. why should you (and i) care so much about this?

Growing up, my grandparents would take me and my brother all around the bay on what felt like grand adventures at the time. We'd hop on the Muni, Caltrain, and even (gasp) VTA in rather rowdy accompaniment of their shopping excursions to the various booming shopping malls of the early 2000's. My memories of being on trains are much more vivid than they have any right to be; since we lived in the suburbs miles from the closest train stop, I'm sure we spent several orders of magnitude more time driving around than commuting by rail.

I'm sure much of my love for the Bay Area's struggling transit systems is rose-tinted by nostalgia. But even so, and even after visiting a bunch of places with truly world-class transit (Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Barcelona, etc etc)1, I'm beginning to treat my long-held opinion more and more as a fact: bay area transit is not actually that bad. And with recent developments, one could now reasonably claim it's good (?)

a. the urbanist's argument

Recently, the concept of urbanism seems to be in the beginning stages of taking off- especially as internet personalities like Not Just Bikes grow their following and the YIMBY coalition continues to gain traction alongside skyrocketing rent prices.

I wouldn't consider the urbanist movement mainstream; the average American shan't be bothered by the atrocities of municipal zoning laws. Anecdotally, though, the number of people I meet who casually use urbanist lingo like "stroad" and "mixed use development" when talking about their neighborhoods continues to grow by the day.

While popular urbanism is far from infallible (I fault it for being obscenely idealistic at times), I think the movement is a big positive step towards promoting healthy discourse around our built environment and how we can start making things better.

They also bring a lot of recyclable talking points for those of you who like to sift through facts and/or data:

• Cars, roads, and parking lots take up a lot of space that could be better utilized by shops, restaurants, and homes. It is very hard to contest the fact that a canal is way nicer than a four-lane highway.

• Riding transit is significantly safer than driving. For example, BART measured 18 times fewer fatalities per passenger mile compared to personal vehicles in 2022 (0.03 vs. 0.54).

• Riding transit is significantly cheaper than driving. Factoring in gas, maintenance, insurance, parking, tolls, and depreciation, I end up paying around $1000/month to own a car. That's only slightly less than the amount I pay for an entire year of riding transit 3-5 days a week! (I could even throw in an extremely nice e-bike purchase once a year and still be way under.)

• Every full bus takes up to 30 cars off the road; every full BART or Caltrain dispatch takes off somewhere between 500 and 1,000. If transit gets better, more people will take it instead of driving, and the notorious north-south Bay Area traffic might finally be tamed.

My biggest takeaway from all of this is that transit and driving are not a zero-sum game. If we improve our transit systems, the world becomes better for drivers and pedestrians, too!

b. a tangent on freedom

While all of those things are great, the main reason I care so much is slightly more intangible: I find that I enjoy the kind of freedom offered by mass transit much more than I do the kind of freedom offered by driving a car.

The difference between these kinds of freedom mostly revolves around responsibility, or a lack thereof. On a train, I can zone out, sleep, read a book, stare out the window at the passing scenery; while driving, paying attention to the oncoming road is literally a matter of life or death. An hour in a car very much feels like an hour; an hour on a train produced a few hundred words of the post you're reading right now.

Relatedly, there's the concept of the freedom to not drive. Driving is enjoyable in many circumstances- but for every person who wants to be driving, there's someone who has no choice but to drive, tailgating and dangerously weaving in a frustrated bid to escape their personal hell a few minutes faster.

c. an even bigger tangent on induced demand

In the everlasting battle against soul-crushing traffic, numerous studies support one surprising outcome: adding more lanes to freeways makes traffic move slower, not faster.

This is the phenomenon of induced demand in action-- simply put, if you build it, they will come. (Here's a nice intro video if you're confused, which I was too!)

At a macro scale, induced demand implies a few notable consequences:

• Traffic cannot be solved with road infrastructure alone.

• Building more lanes displaces local residents and encourages commuters to live further away from city centers. This further increases sprawl, commute times, and of course traffic.

A reasonable conclusion to make here: if we want to solve traffic, the only sustainable solution is to take cars off the road.

I feel like this is something Hong Kong does particularly well. Despite having a population of 7 million and an expansive network of six-lane highways that would make us Americans proud, there's hardly any traffic. Over 90% of commutes are done via transit, which makes it easy for the rare driver (and, more importantly, the buses/trams) to zoom along the busiest roads in the city during rush hour. It's a win-win for everyone, whether for the subway passenger enjoying 3-minute headways or the taxi drivers easily navigating the empty streets.

another tangent on the even bigger tangent on induced demand

"So", somebody must have said, "if adding lanes is so bad, what if we tried deleting lanes instead?"

In 2018, BART's Regional Measure 3 passed with 55% of the vote. This allocated $4.5 billion to transit initiatives, part of which was funded by the headlining $1 bridge toll increase.

The fine print included lots of nice goodies like ferry upgrades, new BART cars, and improvements to the Salesforce Transit Center. And, tacked onto that list was an overhaul of the Bay Area's most crowded HOV lanes into toll lanes.

This was, and still is, highly controversial: at peak hours, the express lane pricing shoots through the roof. I've seen 2-mile stretches cost $12.50 to enter, as drivers in the slow lanes enviously eye the cars zooming by.

But the fact is, the toll lanes are working-- in 2023, they generated $123 million in revenue and increased the average speed in the lane by 15-20 miles per hour. Once the construction costs are paid off, this revenue can be put back into transit and road improvements.

d. on community, and prioritization

Here is the closing argument I'll make in the case for better transit: cities are much nicer when they're built for people, and not cars.

We've seen the firsthand effects of this mindset shift over the past few decades. For example, Hayes Valley used to look like this!

And here's a before-and-after of the Embarcadero:

What used to be two of the grimiest neighborhoods in the city are now among the nicest, most popular places to be. Walking through the picturesque waterfront alongside the Ferry Building, or browsing the shops near Patricia's Green makes me (and its residents) happy in a way that a loud, looming concrete tube could never.

This, however, comes at the cost of the people whose commutes are now longer, and the businesses on the other side who get fewer visitors. One of the neighborhoods hit the hardest by these freeway removals was Chinatown, whose shops struggled to stay open. Today, thanks to years of advocacy by Rose Pak and other activists, we now have the Central Subway as direct replacement to the freeways.

While it's still not perfect, it's inspiring to see an example of how we can, and should, reclaim our city centers for living and thriving.

II. the story so far

I'm not a historian, and attempting to cover the vast history of transportation in the Bay Area would take me far out of my depth.

So here's a cliffnotes-FAQ-summary-timeline-thing, brought to you by Wikipedia and this video:

• Throughout the mid-to-late 1800s, transit in San Francisco was privately owned, with a dozen companies running their own routes while jockeying for rider share.

• In 1863, the Peninsula Commute line began serving riders from San Francisco to San Jose. (This line would become Caltrain nearly a hundred years later.)

• In 1873, the first cable car line in North America opened in San Francisco. Cable cars would continue to grow in popularity, replacing traditional streetcars.

• The first transbay direct rail-to-ferry line, operated by the San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose Railway Company, opens in 1903.

• Most transit lines were damaged beyond repair in the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire, but lines quickly bounced back as the city rebuilt.

• After more consolidation, the SF railways were largely controlled by the Union Railroads Company, and the East Bay railways were controlled by the Key System. This period of time, from the 1920s to 1950s, would mark the peak of transit in SF, as illustrated by this map:

  

• The Bay Bridge opened in 1936, with the Golden Gate Bridge following shortly in 1937. The Key System ran a rail line across the Bay Bridge for a time, but the bridges marked the beginning of the shift towards cars and buses, away from rail-based transit.

• Today's Muni system, which is publicly owned and operated by the city of San Francisco, took control of nearly all of the city's rail lines by 1952. Due to lobbying from car/oil companies and pressure from increased demands from car owners, Muni would dismantle all of its rail lines by 1956 except for the ones which survive today (J, K, L, M, and N lines).

• BART opened its first line on September 11, 1972 between Fremont and MacArthur stations. The Transbay Tube opened in 1974, finally restoring rail service between SF and the East Bay.

• Caltrain begins operations in 1985, as Caltrans assumes control after Southern Pacific threatens to discontinue the Peninsula Commute amid declining ridership.

• BART opens its long-awaited connection to the San Francisco International Airport in 2003. The Oakland Airport connector would follow ten years later, in 2014.

• The Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit line (SMART) opens on August 25, 2017, marking the beginning of modern passenger rail service in the North Bay.

• In 2023, the Central Subway opens as Muni's first new underground metro line in nearly a hundred years. This reroutes the T line to follow 4th Street through downtown, terminating in Chinatown.

And, here's a big list of resources vaguely ordered by level of enjoyment, that I would recommend if you're a transit nerd and/or just want to learn more :)

1. The Bay Area's Lost Streetcars: interactive maps and photo archives documenting the devolution of the streetcar networks of SF and the East Bay.

2. Tunnel Vision: An Unauthorized BART Ride: it's hard to describe this film in a way that can truly express my appreciation for it. Go watch it! "*BART isn't perfect, but in a way it's better than perfect: it's the only thing that could have worked, executed with the slimmest of margins in the narrowest window of history... we did not have the technology to build BART any sooner, nor did we have the money to afford BART any later. The trains were exactly on time."

3. Portal: a pretty well-written, engaging history about the history of San Francisco's urban fabric, centered around the story behind the Ferry Building. One-star-worthy on my bookshelf!

4. Fog City History: A small YouTube channel that only has two videos as of writing, but they're both incredible.

5. The evolution of San Francisco public transit: A chronological video walkthrough from 1847 to 2020.

6. A History of BART: a succinct summary, with lots of fun archival photos/videos, from the official BART website.

7. BART: The Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System: if the BART website was too short and you want the full book version of it.

III. what's new?

The past year has been super exciting! Lots of long-anticipated, major changes. Here are three of the big ones:

September 11, 2023: BART replaces the entire legacy fleet

Only OGs remember: the old screech; the faux-vinyl seats; the robotic sound of "8 car 2 door Richmond train now approaching platform 1" echoing throughout the station.

For fifty years, the legacy fleet dutifully served the Bay Area-- but now, covered in decades of grime and far older than their expected lifespan, it was time for them to retire.

Although the first of the new cars (also known as the Fleet of the Future) started carrying passengers in 2018, technical difficulties and production delays meant it would be years before the entire fleet could be replaced. And finally, just last year, they did it-- $394 million below budget, too!

The new cars are brighter, roomier, cleaner, and quieter. As of today, all 775 ordered by the project are fully in service, with a few hundred more on the way to get trains back up to their full 10-car length (these days, they're usually 6 or 8 cars long, and can get super crowded during rush hour).

September 21, 2024: Caltrain goes electric

If the new BART cars were a night-and-day difference, the arrival of Caltrain's new electric fleet was like a resident of Longyearbyen seeing a sunrise for the first time in six months.

Here's a fun comparison video. The new trains smoke the old ones!

The new trains are incredible- if stacked against European networks in terms of frequency, speed, and quality, I have no doubt they'd hold their own. What was once a 35-minute commute for me got cut to a 25-minute one overnight, with headways going from 30 minutes to 15. We are finally in the 21st century :)

Getting this up was no easy task: unlike BART, which already had nearly all the power delivery facilities needed for the new trains, Caltrain was going from 0 to 1 with their electrification. Retrofitting overhead lines and power stations onto an extremely busy active corridor is a monumental feat!

September 28, 2024: L Taraval reopens

As one of the original streetcar lines in San Francisco, the L line is one of the most important corridors for residents of the Sunset District. For five years, Taraval Street has been a tangled mess of construction, and woefully inadequate buses subbed in for the trams as Muni completely redid the entire street from the beach to West Portal.

Since the trams run in the center of the road, passengers had to cross two lanes of busy car traffic to board at stops, some of which didn't even have platforms! Given these safety concerns, the new Taraval Street is a huge step up for pedestrians and transit riders. The street is now two lanes instead of four in most places, with proper waiting platforms, signaling, and crosswalks.

IV. what's next?

BART's new fare gates

Optimism level: super high!

It's no secret: BART has a safety problem. Or rather, it's actually super safe- many multiples safer than driving- but the general perception of BART trains used to fall somewhere in between public toilet and drug den. NBC Bay Area did a fantastic investigation called Derailed a few years back and found some pretty horrifying shenanigans going on both en-route and behind the scenes of BART's police force.

One of the many causes of this symptom is fare evasion: the old fare gates were notoriously easy to jump, and BART seemed to have some unspoken policy of ignoring the jumpers in fear of retaliation. It's fair to assume most of the drug addicts and unhinged knife-brandishers didn't tap their Clipper cards to get on the train.

The new gates aren't perfect, and it's still possible to force your way through them without paying-- but it's significantly harder than before. We shall have to wait for the initial reports to see how much they're improving safety (and whether or not the increased fares will make up for their installation cost)- but I'm extremely optimistic about considering this a huge improvement for BART.

Self-driving cars?!

Optimism level: ???

Self-driving cars have been a staple of sci-fi/futurist literature for almost as long as cars themselves existed in the public mind. They really started taking off as a "wow, this might actually happen" reality in the 2010's as Waymo, Tesla, BMW, and lot of other car manufacturers hopped on the R&D hype train.

And since 2022, you and I can hop in one for approximately the same price as a regular rideshare (assuming you're in SF, Phoenix, or LA at time of writing)!

Generally, I've found the them to make people go 'whoa' the first time they ride one- but it's surprising how quickly it wears off. I recall it taking 10 or so minutes my first ride before it felt just like any other taxi service and I started checking the map to see how much longer it was before we arrived.

As of writing, Waymo's San Francisco fleet contains 300 cars. This isn't quite enough to satisfy the demand; wait times tend to be consistently longer than those of a comparable Uber or Lyft ride (typically 10-15 minutes). Once they figure out their distribution problem, Waymo hopes to expand their service area to most of the Peninsula-- with the notable exception of SFO, whose spokespeople are communicating a cautious "let's wait and see" message with no clear plan ahead.

Cool factor aside, self-driving car services bring a lot to the table.

• Autonomous vehicles are already safer than human drivers in most circumstances, and will continue to improve rapidly.

• Some optimists (the most famous being Tesla) imagine a future where robotaxis supersede the need for private vehicle ownership. While this is certainly in moonshot territory, the possibility of an extreme reduction in the number of cars and parking spaces shouldn't be discounted.

• Sitting in the passenger seat is usually way less stressful than driving-- and will take a whole lot of reluctant drivers off the road. In other words, people who shouldn't be driving (drunk drivers, road ragers) or shouldn't need to drive (elders, people with disabilities) can now get around with the same convenience, but without all of their assumed risk, of driving.

On the other hand, self-driving cars have garnered a lot of deserved criticism; staunch opponents posit that they will actually make our transit problems worse. Transit consultant Jarrett Walker points out that transportation is primarily a geometry problem, not an engineering problem: it's physically impossible to replace trains and buses with private vehicles due to the amount of space they occupy on the streets.

So a bus with 40 people on it today is blown apart into, what, little driverless vans with an average of two each, a 20-fold increase in the number of vehicles? It doesn’t matter if they’re electric or driverless. Where will they all fit in the urban street? And when they take over, what room will be left for wider sidewalks, bike lanes, pocket parks, or indeed anything but a vast river of vehicles?

Not Just Bikes released a video a couple weeks ago about this topic, which falls squarely into the "staunch opposition" category. While he raises some very good points, this comment struck me in particular:

What was most surprising to me was that when I began researching this video (two years ago!) it was going to be about some of the technical challenges that would need to be overcome in order to make self-driving cars a reality, but the conclusion was going to be that ultimately, AVs would be a good thing. By the time I was done researching this topic I was absolutely horrified of our future self-driving dystopia. 😱

Personally, I'm garnering some reserved, and cautious, enthusiasm for the future of autonomous driving. I see it as a tool: neutral in itself, but could be either fantastic or disastrous depending on how we choose to harness the technology. It's very possible that they create a second wave of car-dominated dystopia, but I think it's just as possible that they'll serve us well in a transitional period, making our roads safer and providing a new mobility option for non-drivers while the current shift towards transit-oriented urban thinking continues.

Muni gets better signalling

Optimism level: high

Muni gets memed on a lot for still relying on floppy disks for their central signaling control servers, which have been in service since the late 1990's.

I'm happy to hear that this will soon no longer be the case. For us riders, the benefits should be abundant-- trains will be faster, more reliable, and come at a higher frequency once trains can be automatically controlled rather than manually driven. This will also (hopefully) mean that the Muni light rail cars will no longer get stuck in traffic, since their patterns can be automated to always sync up with traffic lights.

Muni currently predicts that the project will wrap up around 2034; given how unrealistic their past deadlines have been, I'd hope for them to come online sometime in the late 2030's. But it's happening, it's fully funded, and it's likely the highest-impact sections (like the street-level T and N sections near Oracle Park) will be completed first. For that, I'm highly optimistic about this project.

The Geary Subway

Optimism level: cautious

Since the 1930s, Geary Street has remained the most well-traveled, congested east-to-west corridor through San Francisco. Today, over 50,000 people ride one of the several bus lines spanning the street daily-- which, by comparison, is a quarter of BART's peak-weekday ridership!

Talks of a Geary Street subway date back as far as 1935, and have spilled over to its own Wikipedia page. However, the closest we've ever gotten in recent times is the 2018 construction of a dedicated bus corridor through the busiest parts of the city, which while nice, is still woefully inadequate for the sheer volume of people moving back and forth.

As much as I would love to see it, a whole lot of friction remains between now and a better Geary Street. Connie Chan, the recently re-elected Richmond supervisor (and by extension, a majority of the Richmond District), is notoriously pro-carand unlikely to advocate for new transit lines through the neighborhood that would disrupt the flow of traffic. At the same time, both BART and Muni will likely be preoccupied by their current enormous expansion projects for decades to come (the Silicon Valley Extension and the Central Subway-- I'll get to them soon!).

Will transit ever make it across the Golden Gate? It's possible-- though I'm skeptical it will happen within my lifetime. And while it's much more likely for Muni to resurrect the old B line, it's still not likely enough to consider myself anything more than cautiously optimistic that I'll be able to see anything more than a bus route on Geary Street.

SMART to Healdsburg

Optimism level: high

As the Bay Area's newest transit agency, SMART has everything to prove and nothing to lose. They're doing pretty great, actually, closing in on a million yearly riders and improving regional mobility by building a 30-mile bike path along its corridor.

Their biggest win of the year, announced last month, was that they'd secured funding for an expansion to Healdsburg. While still falling short of the original vision of a full 70-mile railway to Cloverdale, we're getting really close!

SMART hasn't come without criticism: train frequency is quite bad (30-minute peak headways!!!), and the brand new ferry connection at Larkspur requires a miserable 20-minute walk to catch. But given that the agency is still in its infancy, and that they're enjoying rapid improvements while ironing out their current issues, I'm quite optimistic about SMART's future.

A second transbay tube?

Optimism level: cautious

Right now, the biggest transit bottleneck in the Bay Area is the Transbay Tube. Spanning 3.6 miles, the submerged tunnel whisks over 25,000 people per hour between SF and Oakland at peak times.`

Since four of the five BART lines pass through the tube, it pretty much operates at 100% capacity, with trains coming once every few minutes per direction on average! This means the system as a whole is maxed out at 10- or 20-minute headways per line- and if we ever want to get more frequent trains, they'll need to go somewhere.

The Bay Area's various transit agencies seem determined to build a second underground connection between San Francisco and Oakland, but where it'll go-- and which agency it'll belong to-- are wildly open questions right now. I believe BART has the strongest bid at the moment, given they've already proven they can operate a transbay link productively and efficiently. Caltrain and Amtrak are also possible contenders for extending their existing commuter rail lines to the recently-constructed Salesforce Transit Center.

Given the lack of a plan, lack of funding, and lack of conviction at the present moment, I'm putting the Second Transbay Tube squarely in the 'cautiously optimistic' category. I personally think it's slightly more likely to happen within my lifetime than a Geary Subway, but not by much.

Caltrain to Downtown SF

Optimism level: mid

Now that Caltrain is electrified (again, HUGE!!) its next biggest problem is that it dumps its SF-bound passengers in the middle of nowhere.

The current terminus at 4th and King is a good 25-minute bus/rail journey away from downtown (assuming you can catch a transfer!). Anecdotally, most people I know who commute up use a bike or scooter to get to their homes or offices in the city, which is suboptimal.

Today, the final Caltrain terminus lies partially constructed below the floors of the Salesforce Transit Center, patiently waiting for its fated connection to the rest of the system. Despite being less than 2 miles away from 4th and King, the stakes behind tunneling through SF's busiest, densest business neighborhood are astronomical. The project's current price tag, which includes a new underground station to replace the existing terminus, sits at around $5 billion.

This is a project driven by sheer force of necessity, rather than practicality or economic viability. It's going to be an uphill battle to build this thing, and as much as I'm all for it there's a very real chance the end result isn't going to be what we want or need. With that in mind, I'm moderately optimistic about the Caltrain Downtown Extension.

BART to Silicon Valley

Optimism level: mid

The second phase of BART's Silicon Valley Extension was the most recent major project to break ground this June. When completed, BART will finally be able to take riders directly between the downtowns of the Bay Area's three largest cities.

On paper, things are looking great: the federal government just committed $5 billion to the project (out of a $12.7 billion total budget), designs are finalized, and construction is under way!

I do, however, have a few reservations:

1. VTA is managing this section. VTA also manages one of the least effective light rail systems in the US as found by a civil grand jury. As an example of a recent VTA initiative, a $453 million project to extend the Orange line was estimated to attract 611 new riders to the system. As a baseline I have absolutely no faith in the VTA to deliver, and am desperately hoping they'll prove me wrong.

2. For some reason, the project design calls for a single-bore, horizontally-stacked tunnel section that looks like this:

   

   There's only one other single-bore subway system I can think of, which is Barcelona's Line 9. Although it is a technological marvel and one of my favorite subway lines of all time, it is still not done, being nearly 20 years behind schedule and €5 billion behind budget. This does not bode well for BART, and I wonder what kind of analysis would have favored this unvalidated design over traditional twin-bore methods with well-established precedent.

So as much as I'd love to see BART reach downtown San Jose and think it'd be a massive bonus to the city, there's so much room for this project to be better-managed. I hope other future projects- like Caltrain's Downtown Extension- don't get unduly punished by funding reallocations to the very-likely-to-go-over-budget Silicon Valley Extension.

Caltrain Grade Separations

Optimism level: high

Every year, collisions with Caltrain cause 10 or more fatalities. A non-insignificant number of these occur at one of the corridor's 71 at-grade crossings, where (often major) roads intersect with rail lines.

In addition to the human cost, these crossings are a major cause of delays both for the trains (whenever someone's car gets stuck on the tracks) and the cars trying to cross (since they often need to wait several minutes for trains to pass). If Caltrain wants to maintain any guise of reliability, and eventually welcome high-speed trains, most of these crossings need to be grade-separated.

The most recent and notable grade-separation project was Hillsdale Station, which eliminated three at-grade crossings in San Mateo and made one of the system's busiest stations much safer for pedestrians.

At the time of writing, 30 at-grade crossings are under consideration for grade separation work. The most notable of the bunch, and the most likely to see construction the soonest, are:

• The Broadway Grade Separation in Burlingame, which will re-introduce the currently-underserved Broadway Station, hopefully before the end of the decade;

• The Rengstorff Grade Separation in Mountain View, which lies at one of the busiest cross-intersections in the city (Rengstorff Avenue x Central Expressway);

• The Castro Street Grade Separation at the Mountain View station, which sees a huge amount of pedestrian and bicycle traffic of people trying to cross a currently dangerous intersection.

Given the very positive impacts from these relatively short, low-risk projects (especially compared to major rail line extensions), I'm super optimistic that we'll see some shiny new grade separations pop up in the decade to come.

The Central Subway continues

Optimism level: mid

You may be aware that the T line currently looks like this:

But not-so-secretly, the tunnel actually extends half a mile further, since the closest place to dig the boring machines out was at Washington Square, at the intersection of Columbus Avenue and Union Street. This station, which would extend the T line to North Beach, unfortunately doesn't look like it'll be completed anytime soon given that it's being lumped in with a much more ambitious extension project.

Extending the Central Subway is much like Caltrain's Downtown Extension in that it feels simultaneously inevitable and impossibly difficult. Easy, fast access between the main downtown corridors and the cultural hotspots in the Marina, North Beach, and Fisherman's Wharf would completely transform San Francisco for the better.

Currently, the Central Subway Extension is still in its early planning phases, with several possible alignments under investigation:

I'm personally rooting for this project to roll forwards. There's still a lot that needs to go right, but I'm hoping that the half-mile of already existing tunnel will give it the kickstart it so desperately needs.

California High Speed Rail

Optimism level: existential dread

sigh, I guess this post wouldn't be complete without CAHSR...

This project is so controversial. Just go search for it anywhere on the internet-- YouTube, Reddit, traditional news sites etc. etc. You'll see thousands of people from across the political spectrum blasting California for setting $100 billion ablaze for a nowhere-to-nowhere railroad that could be most generously described as a "complete shitshow"; you'll see just as many people arguing that this will singlehandedly save the Central Valley, and that the Shinkansen was 100% over budget but everyone adores it anyways and CAHSR will be exactly the same!

Out of all the squabbling going on out there, I think this Alan Fisher video is a must-watch if you want to figure out how you want to feel about this project. His main argument goes something like this:

1. CAHSR is doing alright, actually, and it's getting way more negative press than it deserves.

2. The negative press mostly comes from two things: people and politicians not understanding trains (because they don't really exist in the American zeitgeist), along with lobbying from car and plane companies.

3. Yes, a public works project as big as this is going to have lots of budget inefficiencies and probably some political corruption. But compared to the shenanigans in for-profit companies, our concern about this is blown wildly out of proportion.

4. Larger and more mismanaged infrastructure projects involving cars/freeways are currently ongoing and have no issue with bad press or funding shortfalls. We definitely have the ability to build this thing, yet we're choosing not to believe in it.

I really, really, really want to see high-speed rail not only exist, but succeed and thrive, within my lifetime. But whether or not this dream is realistic is, unfortunately, still up for debate. Out of the 500 miles of a complete SF-to-LA route, the easiest, straightest, flattest 199 of them are currently under construction-- and even that won't be complete until the mid-2030s! The difficult parts of the route (namely, Pacheco Pass connecting Gilroy to the Central Valley and Tehachapi Pass connecting Bakersfield to LA) call for some insane tunneling and viaduct work and currently has zero funding. And given the recent political climate in the United States, it's highly unlikely they'll get anything for the next four years at the minimum.

I will continue to watch this project, hopefully with growing excitement rather than dread.

Bay Area 2050

Optimism level: too early to tell

Every good planning commission has a long-range plan; this one is the Metropolitan Transportation Commission's attempt.

As with most long-range plans, this one is very high-level and optimistic about what the Bay Area will look like in 30 years. This means it's probably not too useful to use as a measure of what will actually happen.

Regardless, there were some interesting tidbits I thought would be worth sharing!

• The MTC estimates that 20% of vehicles in the Bay Area will be autonomous by 2050. Self-driving technology also has a possibility of appearing in mass transit offerings, like for local shuttles and buses.

• I was super surprised to see per-mile tolling being floated for nearly all major Bay Area freeways. From a policy perspective this would solve a lot of problems (reducing traffic, reducing emissions, producing $25-50 billion in revenue for transit) but sounds incredibly unrealistic from a public-approval perspective.

• Maintaining our existing infrastructure is expected to cost $389 billion through 2050, whereas all of the proposed improvements combined are expected to cost less than $200 billion!

footnote: how we can help

Whew, so much stuff is happening! Given how slow transit development moves in the US, I'm pretty sure I won't need to write another one of these anytime soon 🥲 It'll be fun to make little follow-up update posts every now and then though.

While it might feel like huge, slow-moving stuff like transit has too much inertia for us to make a difference in, it's still possible to have a positive impact! Here are some ideas:

1. Go vote!!!! Many transit-friendly measures get brought up for evaluation during elections. But perhaps even more importantly, you can have a direct say in your local officials (like the BART Board of Supervisors) and an indirect say in who appoints transportation-friendly officials (like mayoral positions).

2. Actually use transit! Everyone has a different calculus for how they prefer to go places; try challenging yours-- maybe you've been making inaccurate assumptions about how fast/convenient/affordable your backup routes are. (For example, after the Caltrain electrification, I've found that taking the train is consistently faster and more reliable than driving to work during rush hour-- which 100% wasn't true a few months ago.)

3. If you really want something to be done, chat with your local representatives-- or even become one! Here's a post about someone in Boston getting a new bus lane. I also recommend Charles Yang's substack posts about becoming an organizer for local advocacy.

see you all soon :)

and happy holidays!

Not all creation is art, though. The typical Lego set gives you pre-portioned pieces and a detailed manual which leaves no room for interpretation. Even though millions of people have built exactly the same thing, and very little creativity (in the traditional sense) is involved, nobody would contest the fact that you’d have created something by constructing a set.

In childhood, creating for the sake of creation is as natural and plentiful as breathing. I’d invent new games, or build elaborate wooden-block cities, or mash all my Lego sets together in Avengers-like fashion only to clean it all up and completely forget about it the next day, ready for the next adventure.

My inner child still longs for play. There’s something sacred about self-contained effort; to think and do things without a need for reason or external validation.

It’s curious how the word puzzle is nearly synonymous with jigsaws, and yet unlike nearly any other type of puzzle, they aren’t at all an advanced challenge of intellectual thought and abstract reasoning.

I’ve been building jigsaw puzzles for as long as I can remember; very little has changed in the methods or strategies I use to build puzzles since I was barely old enough to clear the choking hazard age on the box.

There are people out there who are very, very good at puzzles. (Take a look at Kristin Thuv winning the 2024 Jigsaw Puzzle Championship just last week by building a 500-piece puzzle in 38 minutes!) But even the competitive puzzling scene doesn’t have any advanced theory, strict training regiments, or standard technique— the only consensus for improving is to practice. A lot.

Ignoring corners and edges, the total number of ways to arrange n standard jigsaw puzzle pieces is

For any respectably-sized puzzle, this number is so large we cannot even begin to comprehend it. For example, a 500-piece puzzle would have approximately this number of arrangements:

130,738,711,099,440,736,186,561,741,551,555,000,605,088,328,452,285,958,608,949,739,490,558,485,988,053,943,126,073,919,411,802,268,453,002,994,430,167,086,682,966,046,060,428,801,634,700,773,410,669,230,750,893,224,158,624,161,827,067,202,644,022,409,000,837,615,123,671,689,682,467,262,502,376,700,727,476,698,405,749,361,814,310,214,869,251,942,773,416,205,369,556,142,966,264,511,378,880,672,388,604,302,839,742,619,550,409,463,172,594,434,363,563,368,852,212,387,534,755,509,913,805,712,094,224,762,605,812,866,923,450,557,538,857,959,515,969,249,516,733,627,021,317,718,336,497,689,759,165,021,938,448,507,176,930,141,322,574,842,943,317,234,561,539,979,385,726,580,828,274,672,394,717,048,234,238,222,483,711,192,115,174,838,634,787,273,502,550,962,501,060,552,716,347,158,476,485,211,378,890,426,540,340,248,757,871,804,649,404,316,482,160,377,234,633,868,473,419,458,373,488,873,274,529,550,753,370,917,639,646,023,781,011,034,579,245,735,342,309,141,267,136,521,469,300,687,371,727,687,907,923,859,751,249,306,733,556,871,149,163,772,973,342,157,921,187,522,508,876,109,145,473,165,250,659,357,581,908,563,190,241,192,072,131,905,983,440,572,979,937,589,911,567,787,405,915,418,456,606,919,817,360,557,418,525,360,168,020,755,621,336,556,428,927,639,210,038,755,950,769,865,333,468,157,742,300,792,736,100,828,125,809,743,678,276,153,078,572,373,190,601,745,449,693,860,282,532,332,792,503,659,856,639,231,723,253,658,383,596,426,598,320,088,850,237,645,396,268,497,918,442,487,555,487,340,926,859,523,969,761,169,028,689,965,311,028,749,744,547,602,667,816,745,324,976,062,231,197,150,205,120,399,345,957,816,113,940,057,755,972,212,064,653,510,844,044,101,261,908,526,975,161,198,726,401,228,800

How is it even possible for a human to build a 500-piece puzzle, let alone in less than an hour? We can get a few clues from attempts to engineer puzzle-building robots12, but they can only go so far in modeling real human ingenuity.

actually building a puzzle

In an attempt to understand the how and why of puzzle-building, I’d like to walk through the process behind my most recent build.

Looking for a challenge, I’d picked up this 3000-piece Ravensburger puzzle depicting the Norwegian village of Hamnøy.

I’ve never keep track of time while building before, and I was curious to know how long it’d actually take. So over the span of the six real-life months it took to complete, I’d set a timer for 1-hour chunks, build nonstop until it went off, then take a picture at the end.

Being nearly 4 feet wide, this puzzle took up a decent chunk of the living room. Visitors would often try to get a piece or two in, but few were successful: besides the obvious features of the houses, there’s very little to grasp at for someone who hadn’t been staring at this picture for tens of hours. If you’re looking for a coffee table centerpiece, this ain’t it :p

In order to have a large-enough portable surface, I taped four of these 18-by-24-inch foam boards together. I also have one of these wooden puzzle boards which usually works well (and has neat drawers!), but it’s only large enough for 2000-piece puzzles.

hour 1

According to speed-puzzlers, there’s no time-saving advantage to building the edges first, and many avoid it.

I always kick off builds with it, though. It makes the process of sorting through the massive pile of loose pieces much less daunting, and literally gives a frame of reference for what’s to come.

At the same time of digging for the edges, I tried decluttering the pile by separating all of the plain-blue pieces I came across. The fact that the backs of the pieces are blue didn’t make it any easier 🙃 (I also had no idea which of them were sky vs. ocean pieces, but I didn’t care for the time being.)

Having spent most of the hour sorting rather than building, I didn’t have much to show- but it’ll go faster soon!

hour 2

The frame’s looking a lot nicer now, but there’s still a lot more to do before it’s complete!

There’s a very clear threshold of diminishing returns for continuing to build out the edges, unless I went through and sorted every single piece first (which, again, is something speed-puzzlers do but I don’t!). A heuristic I personally follow is that if I continuously search through all of the pieces for 2 minutes and can’t find any edges, I should move on to the next phase. The rest of the edges will slowly emerge anyways as I search for non-edges!

Right after that condition is met, I usually try going for what looks to be the easiest, most identifiable section of the puzzle to do next. In this case, it was the smattering of red-and-white houses along the coastline.

hour 3

When the luxury of identifiable patterns presents itself, I’ll happily take it! This is perhaps the only point in this puzzle where I can look at a red piece and say “yes, this is definitely the door of the 3rd house to the right”.

In this sense, the houses are a very well-defined subpuzzle: if a piece is red or roof-textured, there’s a 100% chance it belongs here.

Hole-patching (where there’s a missing piece somewhere, and you’re trying to find the exact fit) only works in cases like these where there are only a few possible pieces, and all of them have distinct patterns. But when it’s available, it’s usually the fastest way to make progress!

hour 4

Having exhausted all the obvious house pieces, I turn to the second-most recognizable group of pieces: the border between land and sky. These types of boundaries are often very distinct, and made even more so this time by the pure-white snow of the mountains.

Hole-patching won’t work anymore: any one pure-white pieces could really go anywhere on the mountain, and any one border piece could be at any position on the boundary. (The question of maybe becomes dangerous in puzzle-building. If you have 100 pieces that could maybe fit somewhere, you’d need to, on average, try 50 of them to find the right one.)

The next strategy to move onto is similarity: given a large group of similar-looking pieces (like the sky!), pieces that are more alike are more likely to be close to each other.

hour 5

It turns out that the beginnings of the sky were quite nice! The left side had a super distinct cloud, and the right side featured an unmistakably light shade of blue.

I thought there’d be a huge issue sorting sea-blue from sky-blue, but it doesn’t seem like it’s come into play (yet… dun dun dun)

hour 6

One surprising experience I’ve had with puzzles is that the plain gradients, like the sky, are among the easiest components to piece together.

This is probably because they’re a pure application of the similarity heuristic: there’s absolutely no chance that two pieces of the same shade will be unexpectedly far from one another. (They could still be on opposite sides of the puzzle, in the case of the sky— but still on the same layer!)

Given this property, the right side of the sky is coming along smoothly. All I need to do is find the lightest-blue pieces remaining, take them out of my pile of blue pieces, and repeat as the sky grows upwards.

hour 7

This picture is a little scuffed. I don’t know what that black thing is, either…
Anyways, the sky has crept up a couple more layers. Yay :))

So far I’ve addressed a bit of the how question; I’d like to give some attention to why: why subject myself to the tediousness of staring at nearly a thousand pieces of varying shades of blue? Why spend indeterminate amounts of time constructing an image instead of just buying an identical poster on Amazon?

For me, part of it is in how effectively it can fill up the part of my brain that’s itching to do something, no matter how much that is—

• getting lost in thought about something I need to ponder;

• idly trying every combination of pieces while on a long phone call;

• falling into a flow state and completely losing track of time while speeding through big features

In this way, I see puzzles as physical manifestations of listening to music. (I’d also often listen to music while building too, which is an interesting cognitive interaction to ponder!)

hour 8-10

After ten in-puzzle hours: I’ve finally fit every piece of the sky I know to exist. (There’s quite a few remaining a the top right, but my perception isn’t yet trained enough to distinguish them from the ocean.)

In these ten hours, three months have passed IRL. I don’t like leaving things unfinished, so this was a test of patience and active prioritization. Finding a day in which building a puzzle is the most pressing issue is incredibly rare, but so nice.

hours 11-17

Ocean time!!

The process of building the ocean was nearly identical to the sky, so I won’t introspect on it too much.

Notably though, it was a significant difficulty jump— mostly because the gradient was much more poorly defined. On the middle fringes, the pieces could have gone anywhere surrounding the bright reflection; and at the very edges, the dark blue-grays blended into the mossy outlines of the rocky coast.

Like musical pitch, I think there’s an acquired skill of being able to tell apart relative shades of color.3 The ability to consistently decide if one shade of blue is slightly lighter or slightly darker than another shade of blue often is all that separates 1 hour vs. 10 hours of trial and error. (Lighting matters a lot here, too— this section was a couple orders of difficulty easier during the daytime!)

hours 18-24

The big mountain at the heart of this puzzle is an interesting case: while seemingly gradient-like, the gradient fluctuates so wildly as to be more distracting than helpful. But after a few rounds of taking way too much time figuring out where an obvious-looking piece should go, I slowly built up a mental model of how the different shades of rock and snow intertwined. Whereas the darkest shades seemed to be the crux of this section in the beginning, I found out that they came together surprisingly quickly.

hours 24-33

As with most things in life, I am very bad at estimating how long a task will take.

Moving to the last section, I was confident I’d be able to pull through in a few hours— after all, there were only a couple hundred pieces left!

But 2 hours turned into 4, which turned into 6 then 9 over the course of a week of trying to get the last pieces in.

I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised, as the final section of rocky terrain was by far the most difficult one on this puzzle. Most of the 200-odd pieces look completely identical, so I had to fall back to solely relying on matching shapes (like an all-white puzzle…)

This is hard, but not as hard as it might sound. The standard 4-sided jigsaw puzzle piece has a few distinct possible shapes:

• The first three pieces are somewhat uncommon.

• The 4th and 6th pieces (all nubs or all holes) are fairly rare, and the most challenging to fit.

• The 5th piece (2 nubs and 2 holes across from each other) is by far the most common piece.

So the general idea is to identify the slots that can cannot fit the common piece, and try to fill those first— this cuts the possible number of candidates by about half.

Then, certain features of the shapes help narrow them down further: maybe a slot has an unusually large hole, or has a nub that’s super far to the right, or has an aggressive curve. While it still takes some trial and error, the easiest slot on the board should rarely have more than 10-20 viable candidates. And trying 20 pieces is way more manageable than trying 200!

Here is the nearly-final state of the puzzle, with just short of a hundred (nicely sorted) pieces to go:

finale

At last: I have a shiny new thing to hang up on the wall :)

If you’re curious about how all the pieces are staying together— I like to buy a bunch of these puzzle stickers and stick them onto the back:

Flipping the puzzle is really scary, but overall I think it’s a much cleaner and longer-lasting way to preserve puzzles compared to the glue that most people use. Maybe it’s a skill issue on my part, but I’ve found the glue to be really hard to spread evenly, and then it gets everywhere, and then the puzzle starts falling apart in a few years. The stickers are pricey, though; sometimes, the stickers are more expensive than the puzzle itself!

I’ll leave you with one last gif(t) before I sign off for the day 🎁

hope to see you soon!! i’m very very excited for the next one 🚃

🏗️ This post is really really big, and contains a lot of photos. If you’re viewing this in an email… good luck! You should probably view it on the Substack website/app instead :)

San Francisco is an often-misunderstood city.

Caught within the crosswinds of technological progress and political discourse, one of the few things we can all agree on is that SF punches well above its weight class.

Everything else about the city roots itself in deep juxtaposition. Homeless encampments meld into the shadows of luxury penthouse skyscrapers; monolithic cargo ships obstruct the panoramic bayside/oceanside/bridgeside views; a single block is all that separates obscene wealth from destitute squalor.

Despite its multitude of issues, San Francisco residents are willing, though not always able, to pay more than nearly anyone else in the world for the privilege of having a roof above their head.

The entirety of San Francisco fits neatly into a seven-by-seven-square-mile grid, yet the typical tourist only visits a tiny fraction of it.

Even myself, a Bay Area native, had seen maybe 40% of it as of last month.

Once you’ve seen 40% of a prototypical city, you’ve seen it all: the most interesting bits are usually near the downtown, or clustered in distinct, easily-accessible hotspots.

But San Francisco, with its incredible diversity of neighborhoods, has a much more uniform level of interestingness throughout. North Beach residents are very different from Marina residents, which are very different from Excelsior residents; even within a neighborhood, 16th Street at Mission is an entirely different beast compared to 16th Street at Potrero.

I felt like there were so many holes and unknowns in my mental map of the city. In my larger quest to explore the meaning and formation of communities (more about that later!), it bothered me to think that I didn’t even understand the communities around me.

Given the unparalleled density and walkability of the city, an intrusive thought emerged and eventually won my attention:

Is it possible to visit every neighborhood in San Francisco in one day?

The answer, without any constraints, is an obvious yes: grab a car, open Google Maps, and blast some music; you’ll be done lunchtime.

But when you replace the word possible with enjoyable, or sensible, or a generally good and fun time, a few reasonable constraints pop up:

• Ideally, I’d like this to be possible via exclusively walking and public transit. Zooming around in a car isn’t a useful way to experience what it’s like to actually be present on the street as an active participant.

• As much as possible, the route should optimize for enjoyability while allowing for some sacrifice of completionism. It’s totally fine if the route doesn’t hit all the neighborhoods: e.g., if it takes 2 hours to get to Yerba Buena Island and back, and there’s nothing but houses there to see, we should just skip it. (Just being theoretically and practically possible is good enough— I don’t need to actually execute it this time around if I’d rather go to a nice restaurant instead.)

• The route should be completed entirely within daylight hours. Nighttime walking can be spooky in certain parts of the city!

What even is a neighborhood?

In some ways, the word “neighborhood” is synonymous with community: it’s a group of people who share a common identity and a sense of belonging. While the rough boundaries of neighborhoods are often defined by landmarks like highways, rivers, and hills, they’re primarily characterized by who lives there and what they do there.

As such, a pretty good heuristic for what a neighborhood is lies at the intersection of geography-based and community-based: officially, San Francisco uses the list of registered neighborhood group organizations, arbitrarily drawing boundaries for data-labelling purposes in the absence of obvious geographical dividers.

For the sake of this project, I’d like to use the smallest number of divisions possible without significant loss of information— this leans towards using the 36-neighborhood official SF Planning Commission map, plus a few more subdivisions I know to be culturally significant1:

• Western Addition will be split into Hayes Valley and Japantown.

• Downtown/Civic Center additionally contains Tenderloin.

• South of Market (Soma) additionally contains Mission Bay.

• Potrero Hill additionally contains Dogpatch.

• Seacliff will henceforth be known as Lands’ End.

This brings the grand total up to 40 distinct neighborhoods to visit!2

The Route

If you want to see the original route I planned in May, click here! The final route didn’t change too much, but it still might be interesting to compare.

In total, this was somewhere between 16 and 17 miles of walking plus occasional assists from public transit: a 15-minute T Line ride, a 5-minute BART ride, and the entirety of the 38R bus line. I tried keeping Strava running, but it’s kinda scuffed because a) I forgot to pause/unpause sometimes when switching from walking to transit, and b) my phone ran out of battery, so it didn’t capture the last 1.5-mile stretch from the Lands’ End Lookout to Judah Street.

I would like to thank my walking enjoyer friends for joining along and for the votes of confidence. Y’all made it a fun time 🫡

If you didn’t join this time and think this kind of stuff is neat, let me know (and/or leave a comment)! I’ll almost certainly do something like it again next year, with a bigger group and better route.

I. wtf, bayshore?

8:44am, Bayshore Caltrain Station

The Bayshore Caltrain station is the worst station in the system.3 One one side, warehouses; on the other, separated by a 6 million dollar pedestrian bridge, is an empty field.

Disappointingly, the latest news of any development of said empty field came in 2017 with this study. It seems like they’d hoped for construction to begin by 2022, which clearly hasn’t happened… so for now, the station is still stuck in limbo for the foreseeable future.

Saying goodbye to the old diesel trains for (hopefully) one of the last times4, we started into the field towards civilization…

only to be blocked by a chain-link fence.

Gotta love bay area transit 🙃

II. the crosstown trail

9:00am, Visitacion Valley

We successfully crawled under the fence— which was surprisingly doable, but I’m horrified to think this is a nontrivial number of peoples’ daily commutes…

But the other side of the fence more than made up for that ordeal; Visitacion Valley is genuinely one of the nicest (and most underappreciated, imo) neighborhoods of the day.

Walking into Mission Blue for the morning coffee stop, we quickly found out that we weren’t the first urban explorers to plot a path through the city.

In 2019, the Crosstown Trail opened after a few years of planning by dedicated volunteers.5 This trail cuts 17 miles southeast-to-northwest, connecting some of SF’s best parks and local trails into one continuous, well-traveled route. And by coincidence, we’d stumbled upon one of its key components: the Visitacion Valley Greenway. The Greenway cuts through the middle of four city blocks, lined with lush trails and community gardens.

After a short (but steep!) hike around the outskirts of McLaren Park6 we were stopped at the border of Excelsior by… yet another fence. This one didn’t seem climbable, so I guess we’ll have to settle with walking along the neighborhood instead of inside of it. I’ll count it anyways…

intermission 1: the best coffee in the city ?

I drink a lot of coffee— mostly homebrewed and decaf, or else I’d go insane and bankrupt immediately7— but when I’m out, I make a habit of seeing what the local cafes have to offer!

Here are my (very opinionated) thoughts on the SF coffee scene:

Overall: SF has the best coffee in the US, and by extension most of the world. (Seattle is a very close second!!) The concentration of super high-quality local roasters is bonkers; if most of these were in a random American city, they’d easily be the best shop in town. I am very happy to be here 😀☕️

S-tier:

• Mission Blue: I was blown away by my visit here. Super friendly service, $2.75 !!! a cup for Saint Frank’s (also locally roasted) , and a landmark on the Crosstown Trail… hands-down the best place to get coffee in SF, and 100% worth the trek. I cannot recommend it enough.

• Andytown: I’ve tried a bunch of their roasts, and they never miss. The location in Salesforce Park is great to drag coworkers to for 1:1’s!

• Capital One Cafe: They sell Verve at 50% off if you have a Capital One credit card. It’s also one of the rare indoor places in SF you can hang out in with no expectation of buying anything!

A-tier:

• Sightglass: Just an all-around excellent cup of coffee with no frills. They’re on the more expensive end, but I think it’s worth the price.

• Verve: Same good stuff as in the Capital One Cafe, just at full price lol. I like to buy their beans online, too— they roast from Santa Cruz and have super reasonable shipping prices.

• SPRO: Huge selection of creative drinks. The baristas can also make fresh pour-over for you (also with a large selection of blends/single-origin beans)! Might bump to S tier after trying a couple more of their drinks.

B-tier:

• Blue Bottle: ok, the coffee is clearly A-tier (or even S-tier), but the fact that they’re owned by Nestle now makes me unhappy. It’s also expensive af.

• Outset: Super interesting drinks (I once had orange juice + early grey + espresso, it was an… interesting experience…), coffee itself is just average for a specialty store (it’s from Onyx).

• Kopiku: Specialty coffee from Indonesia, lots of pandan! But, imo, the novelty for what tasted like any other cup of coffee wasn’t worth the inflated price tag for me.

• Peet’s: if I want a good cup of simple, normal-tasting coffee. I used to live next to the original Peet’s store in Berkeley so the chain has a special place in my heart.

C-tier:

• Starbucks: just ok coffee for not ok prices. not a fan :(

To-try shortlist:

• Tartine, CoffeeShop, Ritual, Sextant, Wrecking Ball.

III: marathon

9:45am, Bayview/Hunters Point

We run back down the hill to Third Street to catch the T Line up to Dogpatch.

Today’s the SF Marathon, and the route cuts the T Line in half at 19th Street— so we got off at the intersection to cheer on the runners, most of whom looked elated to be coming downhill into the final stretch of the race.

To put it into context— I’m walking 17 miles today over the course of 12 hours; these folks are doing 26 in less than half of that time. It’s genuinely inspiring, and (as someone who hates running) I actually want to go join them now…

I’ll see you all there next year 🫡

intermission 2: the 101 tech billboard phenomenon ??

The billboards along Highway 101 in San Francisco are the Times Square of B2B SaaS startups: if your company has one, you’ve made it. I’m not sure how well they work (given that only a small fraction of people even *know* what these companies do or why someone would buy their product), but they’re very entertaining and never get old.

IV: potrero

10:25am, Potrero Hill

If I were to buy a house in SF, it would definitely be in Potrero Hill. It might just have the best views in the city, without the $ price tag of Pacific Heights mansions (we’ll get there soon!).

Nestled between the two biggest highways in the city, it’s super quiet but easy enough to get to the more exciting neighborhoods nearby like the Mission.

Since we were ahead of schedule, I popped into Christopher’s Books to grab a copy of Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha— which, by the way, is phenomenal. I highly recommend.

Bonus: a community garden billboard endorsing RFK, which has aged poorly:

V: mission

11:00am, Mission District

1776 was a big year for the United States of America. The fledgling nation had a lot of stuff to deal with; so as influential California is today, it wouldn’t become a state until 75 years later.

Instead, another empire had their eyes on San Francisco. On October 9, 1776, the first permanent European settlement on the peninsula— now known as Mission Dolores— was dedicated by the Spanish, who would rule the land until Mexico’s independence in 1821.

The Spaniards’ entrance marked a significant, and regrettable, turning point in San Francisco’s history. The peninsula was long inhabited by the Ramaytush Ohlone people, who were subjected to disease and indentured servitude (read: slavery) under the missionaries’ guise of converting them to Christianity.

And since then, the Mission has cemented itself as the historical center of San Francisco’s major population shifts: first a home for wealthy Spanish ranch-owners, then for working-class immigrants in the Gold Rush era, and now for a big portion of the city’s Latino population.

It is perhaps fitting that the most historic neighborhood in the city is also its most interesting one.

Today’s Mission District is hard to put into words, but there are three things worth mentioning that stand out to me:

• the Mission Burrito: Although incomparable to the Mexican food in SoCal, the taquerias in the Mission are some of the best in the Bay Area. Almost all of them serve Mission-style burritos: a generous helping of rice, meat, and beans wrapped in a warm tortilla. (And if you’re like, what’s the big deal, it’s just another burrito— yes that’s exactly the point. Most Americans’ concept of a burrito is derivative of the Mission style because it was the primary inspiration for Chipotle!).8

• Murals: During a class in my study abroad, we were tasked with delivering a 5-minute persuasive speech about whatever we wanted. One of my classmates grew up in the Mission and gave us an incredibly detailed, way-longer-than-5-minute masterclass on her favorite murals in the neighborhood and their artistic visions. That presentation could have easily been an hour long, and I would enjoy listening to the entire thing.9

• Diversity: Not only in terms of demographics, but also in the character of the neighborhood itself. You really have no idea what you’re getting into when you turn the corner onto a new street, but whatever is there was probably also there 100 years ago. There are three Michelin-starred restaurants here, but also a chocolate factory, the oldest building in the city, and the 16th/Mission open air market (pls i just wanna get on bart in peace 😭).

intermission 3: the best bread in the city ???

Another thing the Mission has is Tartine, which in my opinion is far and away the best bread in the city. This stuff is truly a game-changer— it can hold its ground against the European bread scene.

It was so good, all of us completely forgot about taking a picture of it until it was all gone. So you’ll have to make do with this shot:

VI: like a diamond in the sky

1:00pm, Diamond Heights

A super-quick BART ride from 16th Street Mission to Glen Park took us to the base of Twin Peaks, and the biggest hill climb of the day.

Given the remaining walk ahead, I decided to exclude the full hike up to the Twin Peaks summit for today (though it’d only take a dedicated hiker an extra hour out and back!). Instead, we topped out at Billy Goat Hill, still some 500 feet of elevation gain in less than half an hour.

Diamond Street took us on a steep, straight path barreling down into Noe Valley, with (again) some of the best views of the city along the way.

Cutting through Noe Valley feels like being in on a well-kept secret— it’s surrounded on all sides by some of the biggest hills in the city, and tucked away from the major highways and transit corridors. Although unremarkable, it’s quite a charming neighborhood.

After the big descent, another hill climb took us up and out of Noe Valley into our next major destination:

VII: straight through the castro

1:45pm, Castro Street

Wow, the people in this neighborhood must really like rainbows!

Evidently, they also have a lot of fun on weekends— we passed by packed bar after packed bar, parklets full of afternoon diners, and lots of live music (including a band setting up for practice in their garage!).

In the Castro, the storied history of LGBTQ+ activism lives on full display. First a hotspot for WWII veterans dishonorably discharged for their sexual orientation, it quickly grew into the city’s cultural and political center for the gay rights movement.

In 1978, the Castro’s loudest proponent and California’s first openly gay public official, Harvey Milk, was assassinated along with mayor George Moscone in a politically motivated attack by a fellow board member. Milk’s activism— and untimely passing— remains one of the biggest influences on the neighborhood.

Without context, Castro Street is a thoroughly enjoyable place to be; with it, the neighborhood becomes downright legendary.

VIII: the best neighborhood in the city!

2:25pm, Hayes Valley

The question “what’s the best neighborhood in San Francisco?” is a surprisingly easy one to answer: it’s Hayes Valley.

As far as size goes, Hayes Valley is quite compact: Google Maps plots it as a miniscule 19 city blocks. Nonetheless, the neighborhood contains some of the best restaurants and shopping in the city, and awesome community spaces like Patricia’s Green, SFJAZZ, and The Commons. The walkability and density create a vibrancy you’d expect of a busy shopping district in a European city— and is certainly unparalleled anywhere else in SF. My terrible photography skills don’t do this place justice at all.

Hayes Valley is also, for better or worse, the epicenter of San Francisco startup culture. A more-than-noticeable chunk of its residents are:

a) unemployed
b) startup founders
c) living in a hacker house
d) all of the above

“the valley is a small place” is a saying that often describes the well-connected circles of Silicon Valley, but it even more aptly applies to Hayes Valley. Seems like they’re all following each other on Twitter!

IX: a red carpet through the tenderloin

2:55pm, Civic Center

Just a few blocks down, the vibes in Civic Center are totally different.

In the recent past, Civic Center was hit incredibly hard by the homelessness, rampant drug use, and COVID lockdown abandonment issues widely plaguing the city. It was— until extremely recently— a massive no-go zone if you didn’t want to get harassed by cronked addicts at every corner.

While there’s still a lot of room for improvement, things are actually passable now! I still wouldn’t recommend loitering anywhere around here, but most of the streets are pretty clean and quiet, as one might expect of government buildings on the weekend. Election year, mayhaps?10

Capping off the longest continuous walking stretch of the day, we finally intersect with the 38 Geary to take us downtown. It would have been faster to take the BART from Civic Center to Embarcadero, but the bus isn’t that far behind now that it has a dedicated lane!

The 38 (and 38R) cut straight through the Tenderloin, the most notorious district in San Francisco. Just like Civic Center, while things definitely aren’t pretty, it’s gotten way better recently.

I have many more thoughts about the 38, but that’ll have to wait for another time…

intermission 4: downtown

3:25pm, 2nd and Market

I do love ogling at tall buildings, and the heart of Downtown SF is definitively the best place on the west coast to do such a thing.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the only thing you can do here on a weekend. Let’s keep going!

Today’s time spent in SoMa and the Financial District, collectively: 92 seconds

X: embarcadero

3:30pm, Ferry Building

San Francisco has had a contentious relationship with cars for as long as they existed in the American Dream.

Even in a city known for its streetcars, the automobile craze of the 1950s could only be contained so far.

Where Streetcars Used To Go, a website designed by transit activist Chris Arvin, highlights the rapid decline of rail lines in favor of buses and private vehicle traffic: as late as the 1940s, streetcars crisscrossed the entire city— but by the 1960s, only the J, K, L, M, and N lines remained.

Politicians (and, the automobile lobby) were hard at work replacing those streetcars with double-decker highways. From 1959 to 1991, the Embarcadero waterfront looked like this:

I don’t think I need to rub it in any more that this was a horrendously atrocious idea. And it took the most destructive earthquake in recent times to shake us to our senses: 1989’s Loma Prieta quake collapsed a very similar section of double-decker highway on the East Bay, killing 42 and prompting an immediate reconsideration of why the disgrace-to-society Embarcadero Freeway was still standing.

Today’s Embarcadero looks like this:

What used to be an exit ramp is now a lovely park with waterfront views:

It even has a monument to commemorate the removal of the freeway!

It’s mindboggling to me that one of the most iconic, beautiful parts of the city is only thirty years old. I appreciate it so much more knowing how far we’ve come, but it’s also bittersweet knowing that the famous streetcars have regressed to tourist trap status.

XI: north beach

3:50pm, North Beach

A quick jaunt up and down Telegraph Hill takes us into the picturesque neighborhood of North Beach, known historically for its large Italian-American population. Today, it’s a hotspot of fantastic pizza11 and Italian bakeries.

It’s also the home of SF’s most famous bookstore, City Lights:

Last time I was here, I grabbed a copy of Portal by John King, a captivating history of the Ferry Building and its outsized influence on San Francisco’s urban fabric. It’s the first book I’ve read that includes a mention of the bookstore I got it from!

XII: touristy things

5:20pm, Fisherman’s Wharf

Whenever I venture into the northwest corner of the city, which is very rarely, my first instinct is to fast-walk away with great intent until I am back to somewhere that isn’t overrun by tourists. Today was no different.

If you’re a tourist, though, the area is definitely still worth a stop! Join your brethren in grabbing some sourdough at Boudin, playing some pinball at Musée Mécanique (free entry!), arguing with the sea lions at Pier 39, and sipping on hot cocoa at Ghirardelli Square. Alcatraz is also extremely worth a visit, especially if you like history (which you must, if you’ve read this far…), if you have time for the ferry ride and back.

What definitely isn’t overrated is the walk along the waterfront towards Fort Mason, with the Golden Gate Bridge peeking through the rapidly converging fog of the early evening:

XIII: marina bros

5:30pm, Marina District

The stereotypical Marina Bro lives with his 5 best friends in an old Victorian built in 1907 with one functional bathroom. They throw house parties every other night (there’s an L-shaped couch, a giant cooler, and a fake fire pit out in the backyard!). On Thursday and Friday nights he hits up all of the bars on Fillmore, then hops into an Uber to Soma to catch a rave at Raven or DNA. His other pastimes include morning runs along Crissy Field, hitting the gym, and hyping up his coworkers at corporate happy hours.

The Marina is a beautiful neighborhood, but in terms of living here… I’ll have to pass😵‍💫

XIV: $8 million mansion

6:20pm, Pacific Heights

Sometimes, I like opening up a Zillow tab and zooming into Pacific Heights. The results are quite entertaining!

If San Francisco were a Monopoly board, Pac Heights would undoubtedly be Boardwalk. While dotted with enormous multimillion dollar mansions, the streets are otherwise quiet. This is largely attributed to the fact that the hills are very scary.

Lower Pacific Heights is a much more normal neighborhood: a slightly quieter, richer version of Noe Valley, perhaps.

intermission 5: a foot in japantown

SF’s Japantown is essentially just one massive shopping mall (and, one mildly sketchy Safeway). It’s pretty neat! We’re quickly losing daylight, though, so it will have to wait for another day…12

XV: sunset in the sunset

7:20pm, Lands’ End

Growing up, I’d often visit my extended family in the Sunset. As far as I could recall, nearly every day was gray and foggy— and when it wasn’t, maybe 30 days out of the year, the blue skies were a cause for celebration.

These days, thanks to climate change, the number of sunny days in the Sunset continues to climb rapidly. Last I checked, over a hundred days a year were mostly sunny.

The lack of a clear sunset today actually makes me really happy. It’s how I know it’s supposed to be, and what we can hope will continue to be the expectation.

As the gray sky fades into darker and darker shades of gray, I say goodbye to the wonderful city that’s hosted our last 12 hours of adventure. I’ll be back next week!

Closing thoughts

Q: so… did you end up visiting all the neighborhoods??

Nope!! And that’s ok! There’s a lot of room for improvement for next time.

The route as travelled missed:

• Yerba Buena Island (and Treasure Island)— right now, there’s almost nothing and no easy way to get there. That is changing rapidly! I hope that in the coming years, it’ll become an exciting destination to stop at en route.

• Twin Peaks— as mentioned in the Glen Park / Diamond Heights section, this would be a simple add to to the route, but would also make it much more difficult.

• West Portal— originally planned as the ending for the V1 route, but ended up skipping it since I’ve been there many times, and didn’t think it was worth the late-night detour.

• Lakeshore, Parkside, Oceanview— there’s very limited public transit options around here, and they’re quite detached from the rest of the city. SFSU and Lake Merced are worth checking out for true completionists, but definitely not worth the detour in most cases.

• Outer Mission, Crocker-Amazon— we got a glimpse of the skylines of these neighborhoods from McLaren Park. Trekking a loop around them starting and ending at the park would be a realistic addition for a truly completionist route, but I think it was okay to omit them for V1 given their similarities to Excelsior and Visitacion Valley.

There are also a few landmarks that are fun to visit, but I couldn’t fit into the route:

• The Twin Peaks Tunnel, and the historic Forest Hill Station (a short ride on the Muni Metro would fix this!)

• the Presidio, and the Golden Gate Bridge

• Crissy Field and the Palace of Fine Arts

• Golden Gate Park (and the Panhandle)

• Candlestick Point

• Coit Tower

Q: What was your favorite/least favorite part of the journey?

Favorite: either the morning vibes in Visitacion Valley, or the hike up from Glen Park.

Least favorite: the Bayshore Station empty field, and walking through Civic Center / Van Ness to get up to the bus stop

Q: How have your thoughts about SF changed after doing this?

Despite the huge amount of new area I explored, this project has made me realize just how much more of the city I have yet to experience and learn about.

Also, most of the city’s action happens in a very small portion of it; I’d estimate around 80% of SF by area is super safe, quiet, and extremely normal. It’s remarkable how quickly you can enter, and leave, the chaos of urban life just by walking over to the next neighborhood over.

Q: I’m a tourist / only have a few days in SF. Would you recommend doing something like this?

If you really like walking, then absolutely yes! I’ve done something like this in a handful of cities I was visiting for the first time, and had amazing experiences that I’d never get doing normal touristy things. One recent memory from my time in Prague, for example, was stumbling upon this Red Bull skating competition on a random side street by sheer coincidence of being at the right place at the right time.

If you’re not into walking, or have a bigger group, you’ll be better off just picking a few of the nicest neighborhoods and more deeply experiencing what they have to offer. My shortlist would include:

• A waterfront stroll along any one of: the Embarcadero, Lands’ End/Ocean Beach, the Marina, Fort Mason

• The touristy stuff around Pier 39

• A shopping/food stop in Hayes Valley

• The Castro

• Chinatown and North Beach

• Twin Peaks

Q: When are you doing this again?

I’m planning on hosting another long urban exploration walk sometime mid-next year! It may or may not be in San Francisco. Subscribe to hear more about it and how to join :)

Thanks for reading! Hope to see y’all soon,

footnotes.

Hi friends! i’m alive!

It’s been almost 2 months since I last made a post here. Time moves in mysterious ways!

There's a delicate balance between taking time for writing and experiencing things worth writing about. Since I’ve yet to get it right, I’m more inclined to lean towards the latter when in doubt. But it’s due time to run it back and make good the promises I’ve made to myself (and, to you)!

what’s next

I’ve been working on a bunch of writing projects in parallel, and the first batch is almost ready for your consumption :)

• San Francisco Streets, releasing this Thursday 9/12

• Puzzles, releasing Thursday 9/19

• The Future of Bay Area Transit, releasing Thursday 9/26

After that, I’ve got another big project in the works. I want to take extra time and care on it— I’m hoping it will be ready by the end of the year!

some microthoughts

One idea, retold in four different ways with varying degrees of coherence.

1. tv shows

Something we’ve probably all noticed about TV shows recently is a major shift in release schedule.

For much of television history, it was the norm for a show to take up a 20-minute slot, once a week, for 20 or so weeks a year. But with the recent streaming takeover, many major productions are shifting over to 10 (or fewer) episodes a year, which are about an hour long.

One consequence of this shift is that TV show quality (and, our expectations for it) are much, much higher than they were even 5 years ago. Many are downright cinematic, no different from watching 10 Hollywood-quality short movies in a row.

When I started writing online earlier this year, I was very focused on consistent quantity— but now that I’m starting to get a feel for the ideas I enjoy exploring, I’m finding that I need increasingly longer periods of time to let them stew. I’m thinking of hopping on the new-style release bandwagon, perhaps in a more permanent fashion.

2. busyness, and emptyness

busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the ocean breathe. Novels that make you daydream.
- Jasmine Sun, the scenic route

I’m incredibly grateful to have a busy life: of fulfilling work, of friends and family to hang out with, of good food to try and interesting places to explore.

Through most of it, I feel a sense of relaxed urgency— It’s not the end of the world if I don’t move quickly, but I know I’ll enjoy my life much more if I do.

This mindset is, as writers and artists have discovered, wholly incompatible with most facets of creativity. Writing isn’t something I can do easily in a spare lunch break or 15 minutes between meetings; I need a few hours of Doing Nothing before my busybrain fades and I get ahold of a blank canvas.

Doing Nothing looks different for everyone, and it almost never involves literally doing nothing. What it does involve, however, is a complete and overwhelming lack of objective.

My personal favorite modes of Doing Nothing include:

• Being trapped somewhere beautiful, like a scenic train ride or a window seat on an airplane

• Long walks to nowhere in particular

• Building jigsaw puzzles

There’s a subtle, but significant, difference between Doing Nothing and other nonconstructive activities that also lack objective, like doomscrolling the internet or driving on a busy highway. For me, the difference is attention— a true episode of Doing Nothing means there is zero expectation for me to attend to anything but my own thoughts.

Most of the time, the product of Doing Nothing is intangible but positive: I feel some general sense of contentment, and don’t feel like pressing it further. But sometimes, I can pluck out a thread and keep pulling on it, until something real and cohesive comes out of it. Like this thought, hopefully!

3. Ideas as higher-dimensional objects

You may have heard of 4D chess, or the 4D Rubik’s cube (showcased above). Unfortunately, I’m not skilled in either of them, but neither is anyone else! Us humans are hardwired to only be able to intuitively comprehend three dimensions.

Ideas are like higher-dimensional objects; we can rotate our thoughts in unusual ways that make them appear distinct, but really they’re just all facets of some bigger object that we’re deceptively close, but never able, to see in its entirety.

We can still get a pretty good understanding of them, though, by observing them from as many different perspectives as possible, and whittling away the contradictions from our mental model. Perhaps we’ll soon make a breakthrough in understandability, but for now our lower-dimension projections are the best we’ve got!

4. On repeating myself

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves - that's the truth...we tell our two or three stories - each time in a new disguise - maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

As I’m getting more experience framing the world in ways conducive to English prose, I’m realizing that most of the things I enjoy writing about are very closely related to one another. I haven’t figured out exactly what this relation is or how to describe it in a coherent manner— and I’m excited to keep digging, in the hopes that one day I will be able to find out!

See you on thurs :)

I've been tinkering with keyboards for a while now. A couple weeks ago, I'd decided to take upon the challenge of designing and building one from scratch.

I was supposed to have an update for the construction process this week- but I ran into a big question mark: why does every keyboard look and function exactly the same way? All I wanted to do was make one tiny change- replace the standard microcontroller, the ATMega32u4, with a Raspberry Pi- but not only was this more difficult than anticipated, I realized that nobody had ever done this before.

In search of answers, I bought my first nonstandard keyboard: the Iris CE, a split, ortholinear, low-profile device with 25g Choc switches. I'm typing on it right now!

In a vacuum, keyboards like the Iris make so much sense. The non-staggered matrix of keys looks way cleaner, and the lightweight, split layout promises to not give me carpal tunnel by the age of 25.

But the learning curve is insane. I'm two weeks in and I still mistype all the time, because I have to undo the years of muscle memory I've built up for a standard keyboard.

Why is a standard keyboard, well, standard? What came before our familiar QWERTY typing machines, and how did they come to be? The answers, as is typical for inquiries like these, were absolutely fascinating- and also completely useless for actually building a keyboard.

Here is my attempt at understanding how and why we got to this point. I dug myself into the depths of a rabbit hole, and now I must crawl back out.

Table of Contents

I. The Pre-Mechanical Era

1. Remington No. 1: the first commercial typewriter

2. ENIAC and Z3: the first digital computers

3. Datapoint 2200: the first personal computer terminal

4. Xerox Alto and the Macintosh 128K: the first graphical user interface

II. The Mechanical Era

1. IBM Model M: the first mechanical keyboard

2. Cherry MX: the renowned keyboard switch

3. Kalih, Gateron, Outemu: the evolution from cheap Chinese clones to powerhouse manufacturer trio

4. The Groupbuy: a controversial engine for a thriving creator economy

III. The Future

1. Towards Open Source: converging on new and better industry standards

2. Nonstandard Keyboards: what-ifs turned into reality
   

IV. The Legacy of the Keyboard

1. Parting thoughts

I. The Pre-Mechanical Era

The First Typewriter

Last week, on July 1, 2024, the world's first commercially successful typewriter turned 150 years old.

The original patent and early prototypes for the Remington No. 1 looked awfully like a piano. Since a typewriter has to slap a specific letter onto a specific part of the page really hard, this made sense: why not steal a proven, centuries-old mechanism for slapping stuff really hard, but make the hammers output ink instead of sound?

After years of failed prototypes and a change of ownership, The Remington No. 1 was unceremoniously shoved onto shelves. People didn't want it. Even ignoring the frequent breakdowns and required maintenance, it was 125 whole dollars- a half-year's worth of income for most! According to this chart you could get half a two-bedroom house, a horse, or 2500 pounds of cheese for that money.

But as publishers, accountants, and lawyers slowly realized its potential, businesses flocked to the newfangled device. A new industry was born, and the reigning champs got the chance to define the standards that are still in use a century and a half later: the familiar staggered QWERTY layout of uniform, floating keys continues to greet nearly every computer today.

Even though most of the design decisions are vestiges from a past we've long left behind, the only thing more powerful than a perfect design is a standard one.

Which came first, the digital computer or the digital keyboard?

Let's jump ahead a little bit. The year is now 1946; two world wars, Einstein, Turing, and a Great Depression later, typewriters looked almost exactly the same as they did a half century ago. (still no backspace key- that was invented in 1961!). The classic Remington design had prevailed over all others, and something really drastic would have to come to dethrone it.

Sparks of that something were looming across the horizon, as the Digital Age quickly transitioned from a couple loony engineers into a full blown revolution.

Many historians consider the ENIAC to be the first modern, programmable digital computer. It didn't have a keyboard (since it couldn't understand human text, why bother?). Instead, programmers would create punchcards (like the one below) to feed into the engine for processing.

For now, computers and typewriters were on completely separate branches of the tech tree- but signs of a convergence started to show.

For example, the ENIAC wasn't really the world's first digital computer. That would be (with some contention 1) the Z3, which was designed by German engineer Konrad Zuse from 1938 to 1941, four years before the Americans could get to it. And it did have a keyboard!

The Z3's keyboard may very well be the world's first digital keyboard. But since the Z3 wasn't Turing-complete in practice, many argue the ENIAC should get the 'first' badge instead.

Was the computer first, or the keyboard first, then? I guess you get to decide :)

Computing for the masses

There was still a ways to go, but these two pioneering designs laid the groundwork for the next big problem: bringing computers to the masses.

After the ENIAC's pivotal role in Cold War-era military research (like solving thermonuclear equations for the hydrogen bomb), people realized just how powerful digital computers could be, even for normal people.

The invention of the personal computer needed to solve three big technological hurdles:

• making it cheap

• making it portable

• making it easy to use

Moore's Law meant the first two were a mere matter of time: chip innovation was so rapid that the number of transistors in a CPU doubled every two-ish years, while the price per transistor halved.

The third problem was much more difficult, and called for some truly out-of-the-box thinking.

The Datapoint 2200 was the first attempt at a modern desktop PC. It looked like this:

A tiny monocolor terminal, a built-in keyboard, and a tape reader: that was the whole thing. I wouldn't call it exactly easy to use, but it was a start!

Side note: something that really caught my eye was the schematic for the Datapoint 2200 keyboard:

It's remarkable how similar this looks to a modern keyboard PCB! Below is the schematic for the Bakeneko65, a popular keyboard kit made by Cannonkeys:

Ever since computers started becoming mainstream, people dreamed of a techno-utopia; the digital world suddenly made what used to be pure fantasy- like holograms and self-driving cars- seem not only possible, but inevitable.

The first step towards bridging the present to our dreams was a better way for humans to interact with computers. The text-only interface of the Datapoint machines was revolutionary in itself, but equally limiting. Shouldn't we be able to experience computers through images, sounds, and touch, and not just read cryptic text?

In 1968, Alan Kay did some research on what this step would look like. He made a cardboard mockup of a computer small and thin enough to be held, which would include a video screen and the ability to communicate with other devices through a virtual network. (hey, that sounds familiar!) And it still had a keyboard!

Kay, along with the Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox's famous R&D lab, set out to actually turn this dream into reality.

What the PARC team came up with was a "graphical user interface", in which humans could move a pointer around the screen with a mouse and interact with windows. It came with simple applications like a word processor (which would later become Microsoft Word), a printing application (which would later become the Adobe suite), and an editor for the Smalltalk programming language (which would inspire nearly all modern object-oriented languages, like Java).

The proof-of-concept Xerox Alto was so ahead of its time that nobody knew what to do with it. Nobody, that is, until Steve Jobs entered the scene.1 After he and the Apple team (a then three-year-old company) laid their eyes on it, they were convinced that the Alto was the future of computing and set out to make their own graphical computer.

It only took a few years for Apple to release the Lisa (in 1983), and then the Macintosh (in 1984).2 Together with the Alto, these three devices went on to inspire nearly every core software design for every future laptop and desktop.

From this point on, the keyboard no longer represented the computer itself; rather, it became just one of many plug-in accessories, standing alongside mouses, speakers, and microphones as a necessary part of the whole to drive the newly-popularized graphical interface.

And with that shift, a new hobby was born: one of infinite customizability, built around the promise of ultimate utility.

II. The Mechanical Era

The IBM Model M

While Apple was busy inventing their new GUI, IBM strode on with confidence. As the leading PC manufacturer, they hardly cared about the scrappy startups around them (like Microsoft, another small company who'd just come out with the MS-DOS and was cooking up their own GUI, called Windows).

Facing massive consumer demand for durable, premium keyboards for their popular terminals, they set out to design the ultimate typing experience.

In 1985, IBM came out with the most legendary keyboard in history: the Model M.

The Model M was immediately noticed for several reasons.

First, people loved its layout so much that it became the de-facto standard. Today, that standard is officially known as the ISO and ANSI layouts, which almost all modern keyboards use.

Second, its unique buckling spring switches were fun to type on and basically indestructible. You can go on eBay right now and find hundreds of fully functioning original Model M's from the 1980s. (I cannot emphasize enough how impossible it is to make an electrical component last 40+ years with no sign of decay.)

Many people consider the Model M to be the first mainstream mechanical keyboard, meaning that each switch had individual, moving parts that sent a signal when they made contact. This marked a departure from the prevailing membrane design (how nearly every keyboard is still made today), which was a lot simpler and cheaper to produce.

Although the Model M wasn't the very first mechanical keyboard it represented a massive turning point: it got people to start caring about the keyboard they were using. What was seen before as a standard, boring computer part was now exciting, innovative, and noteworthy.

Cherry MX rises to the top

Computer users weren't the only ones who paid attention to the success of Model M; other companies also stepped in to try and captivate the fledgling market.

One of these companies was the German manufacturer Cherry, which had been making keyboard switches and other various mechanical parts for decades to moderate success.

(here's someone clicking a Cherry switch from 1959.)

In 1983, Cherry's latest experiment was a series of standardized, modular switches. They coined it "Cherry Mechanical X-Point Technology"- Cherry MX for short.

The Cherry MX lineup quickly gained traction: they felt just as good as the Model M's, and were just as durable, with each switch rigorously tested and certified for a lifetime of 100 million actuations.

A big selling point of MX switches was their customizability. They offered three main types, which each had a different color switch:

• Linear switches (Black, Red) are smooth, with a similar amount of resistance throughout the entire press.

• Tactile switches (Brown) are bumpy: it's very clear when the key gets actuated, since you feel a noticeable amount of resistance about halfway down.

• Clicky switches (Blue, Green) are like tactile switches, but have an extra moving piece that makes a crispy, loud click sound when you go past the bump.

Cherry MX is yet another keyboard standard that got so popular that it persists to this day. Many people still consider Cherry switches to be the ultimate gold standard, with every other switch manufacturer producing "Cherry MX-compatible" switches.

Nearly every mechanical keyboard today supports any MX-type switch, and some even let you hotswap between switches by simply pulling them out and plopping in new ones.

Together with the Model M, Cherry defined an entire industry. When someone says "mechanical keyboard" today, there's a 90 percent chance you can automatically assume it's MX-compatible, with an ANSI or ISO layout.

Kalih, Gateron, and Outemu: the resurgence of enthusiast keyboards

As computers became increasingly popular over the 90's and early 2000's, mechanical keyboards slowly faded away from the mainstream. Even though there was always a devoted group of keyboard enthusiasts, more and more new computer users just wanted something that worked.

But one phenomenon almost singlehandedly brought back the mechanical keyboard into the popular tech space: PC gaming.

Going into the new millennium, computers were more powerful than ever and could finally keep up with the technological prowess of gaming consoles like the Nintendo 64 and Sega Genesis. Smash hit titles like Doom, Halo, and Starcraft had gamers flocking back to their PC's. And just like the typing enthusiasts of the 80's, they once again demanded durable, satisfying keyboards that could keep up with their fanatic button mashing.

Now that the standards had all been agreed upon, manufacturers around the world scrambled to innovate around Cherry, undercutting them with cheaper alternatives.

During this time, three big players popped up: Kalih in 1990, Gateron in 2000, then Outemu in 2004- all based in China. With their much lower production costs compared to Cherry's German factories, they pumped out billions of Cherry clone switches for a fraction of the price.

Most of the earlier clone switches were absolutely terrible. Users complained about the poor quality control and low durability; some weren't even mechanical at all- just a cheap membrane dome disguised within a plastic Cherry MX case! (I was the not-so-proud owner of one for a while...)

But over the years, they found their stride, partnering with well-known designers from companies like Razer as well as knowledgeable keyboard hobbyists to create hundreds of high-quality, unique switches.

Today, nearly every mechanical switch on the market is manufactured by one of these three companies. Some of the most famous ones include:

• The Boba U4 and U4T, widely regarded as the best tactile switches ever produced due to their tight tolerances and distinctive bump. Designed by Gazzew, manufactured by Outemu.

• The Holy Panda series, first debuted as a "frankenswitch" of a Halo switch stem with a Invyr Panda case, now designed by Drop and manufactured by Kalih.

• The Zealio and other ZealPC switches, which are the most expensive mass-produced switches available, ranging from $1 to $1.50 each. (For reference, an original Cherry MX costs around 25 cents, and the Boba U4 costs 65 cents.) Designed by ZealPC, manufactured by Gateron.

The Groupbuy

Keyboard people are very particular about their keyboards.

With the explosion of choice comes decision paralysis: what's your favorite switch? how many keys do you want? do you like something light and portable, or something with satisfying heft?

For the wealthy (or the enjoyers of crippling credit card debt), the answer is usually "yes, I want all of it." And so they shall:

Another enterprising crowd of enthusiasts noticed two things:

1. Their perfect keyboard doesn't exist yet (and they want it really badly).

2. A lot of people (see above) are willing and able to pay a lot of money to buy yet another cool keyboard for their collection.

Slowly, a thriving creator economy sprouted up to facilitate a symbiotic relationship between buyers and sellers. Today, this economy sprawls over a vast network of vaguely connected internet forums, Discord server, and Shopify storefronts.

To explore further, let's look at the journey of a real keyboard in the wild: the Alpine65.3

Step 1: The Interest Check

In 2020, Alex wanted to make a keyboard. Alex founds Bitmap Studio, and makes an aspirational Instagram post with a 3D render of their dream keyboard:

Alex posts the keyboard onto Reddit and Geekhack (the most popular forum for keyboard things).

In the keyboard community, these types of posts are officially known as Interest Checks, or IC's. The main purpose of IC's is to gauge how excited the community is for a particular project, so the creator knows if there's enough buy-in to move onto prototyping.

In the Alpine65's case, a lot of people were interested. To date, over 160,000 people viewed the Geekhack post!

The virtual buy-in was more than enough for the newly formed Bitmap Studio to scrape some prototypes together.

Step 2: The Group Buy

As nontrivial as designing and building a prototype from scratch is, it's small potatoes compared to the real challenge: going to mass production.

Manufacturing several hundred keyboards takes an enormous amount of upfront cost: building them to order would be far too inefficient, so factories will take the design, set up the assembly line, and make them all together.

The keyboard community devised another trick to get around this: the Group Buy (GB).

In Group Buys, hungry enthusiasts will happily drop hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a nonexistent keyboard, in exchange for an "IOU" from the creator to ship one over in a few months to years, when (or if) the keyboard is finally produced. Some more limited-run group buys even run lotteries, where the winners have the chance to buy said nonexistent keyboard! Sounds fantastic, doesn't it?

But group buys are a necessary evil: they're the Kickstarter of the keyboard world, injecting the much-needed capital for creators to be able to create the keyboard and place the order in the first place. Some projects fail, leaving buyers with nothing to show for their investment; most make it out of development hell (eventually).

Step 3: In Stock

Oftentimes, creators will order a bunch of extra keyboards and sell them to vendors who run online keyboard stores (like CannonKeys in the US, CandyKeys in the EU, PantheonKeys in Singapore, etc). It's a great chance to make a great keyboard available to a much wider (and possibly international) market.

When this happens, a keyboard becomes "in stock", meaning it's already produced, sitting in the warehouse, and ready to ship the moment you click on the 'buy' button.

Sometimes, the creators themselves will open up a store of their own- here's bitmapstudio.xyz for example. Now that Shopify exists, this is surprisingly easy to do!

Step 4: mechmarket

When almost every purchase is a preorder, not everyone can be a happy customer. Many people, after waiting years on a forgotten groupbuy, no longer want it when it arrives; some others look to trade their now-super-exclusive collectibles for much higher than the asking price (though this practice is highly contentious).

In the Reddit forum r/mechmarket you can find anything and everything to do with keyboards, from handmade artisan keycaps to flea market grab bags of unwanted switches. This is the eBay of keyboards: a marketplace to sell whatever you don't need, and impulse buy at your heart's desire.

III. The Future

As people are spending more and more time on their computers, the demand for enthusiast-grade keyboards is at an all-time high. That means innovation is at an all time high, too! Here are some exciting developments that I'm looking forward to experiencing in the near future.

Towards Open Source

Many creators are less concerned about money or profit, and more about simply sharing their love and knowledge of the craft to as many people as possible.

They've released all of their designs to the public, often with instructions on how someone might be able to recreate them with basic tools and a few spare dollars. Here's one compilation of open source keyboard designs.

Keyboards aren't only a pure hardware creation; they need firmware to convert key presses into something your computer can understand, either through USB or Bluetooth.

Nearly every modern keyboard comes with a built-in microcontroller, which is a very low powered processor that runs basic software to perform this conversion.

For most of keyboard history, manufacturers would make this firmware in-house, which makes it hard to do things like customize key bindings, create macros, or manage the keyboard's backlight.

Recently, though, the open source QMK firmware is taking over the world. Nearly every keyboard kit today is QMK-compatible, which allows users to use a single, familiar interface (like VIA) to customize all their keyboards.

Nonstandard Keyboards

Now that there's no longer a physical limitation on keyboard layout, creators are branching out to wacky experimentation. Some of it is practical (like ergonomic keyboards); most of it is purely for fun (like knobs and LED screens).

Ultra-compact keyboards

Some crazy people want their keyboards to be as small as possible for some reason. This led to the 40% keyboard standard, which has 40 keys as the name suggests. This means no function keys, no numpad, no number row, and no arrow keys!

In order to make up for the missing keys, such keyboards come with mappable function layers, so you can press one or more function keys to access an alternate set of key bindings.

Split keyboards

It's no secret that typing on a keyboard all day can be pretty terrible for your wrists.

In order to resolve this, some people tout the power of split keyboards, in which the two halves of the keyboard can come apart and be typed on at whatever position is most comfortable.

Low profile keyboards

One problem with the Cherry MX standard is that MX switches are quite tall- much taller than the laptop keyboards many people are used to.

New standards, like the Kalih Choc switch, are coalescing around a subgroup of people who like mechanical keyboards, but appreciate the sleekness of non-mechanical keyboards.

Ortholinear keyboards

Since keys can be arranged however we want now, there's really no requirement to keep the stagger. Ortholinear keyboards are shaped in a simple grid pattern, kind of like how 8-year-old me would draw computer keyboards for a school assignment. They're very elegant, but come with a learning curve since the keys are all in different positions from how we're used to.

Macropads
Some keyboards aren't even meant to be typed on! For those who need extra keys (for streaming, or Photoshop, or video games), macropads come with a small collection of customizable keys. Alongside scripting languages like AutoHotkey, these switches can be made to do pretty much anything.

IV. The Legacy of the Keyboard

We're currently living the legacy of the computer keyboard: will the gold standard continue for another 150 years, or will something change tomorrow? I'm betting on the former.

When the iPhone was first revealed in 2007, we thought keyboards would go digital. When Siri came out, we thought we'd never have to type again.

But even now, the keyboard is still vital for everything we do. We use keyboards to converse with ChatGPT; we still have staggered QWERTY on smartphones; even in VR, we have to mess around with a floating keyboard. Despite the game changing innovations in human-computer interaction over the last decade, we can't seem to erase the century-and-a-half of design precedent, however arbitrary it is now.

I wonder what Sholes & Co. would think if they saw a modern keyboard. Would they be surprised? proud? disappointed?

As for me, I'm just here to see how far this niche can go. I'm on a keyboard for 8+ hours a day, so why not make it a fun experience?

Whew, that's a long post! Time to get back to building :)

I'll put up an edited version of this on my website at some point. For now, I hope you enjoyed this little tidbit of modern history!