Chris Dwan (he/him)

It's mostly on entirely separated trails.

MCRT: Mass Central Rail Trail
BFRT: Bruce Freeman Rail Trail
Minuteman: Minuteman Bikeway
Bullshit: Lowell to Billerica

Heck yeah.

What a great day to put some miles on it.

Without disagreement, can we just throw pedestrian / bike infrastructure alongside every new light and heavy rail project from now on?

Like - always include a pedestrian path when we build a bridge. That kind of thing.

Most of that thread is the author gatekeeping, and the rest is him yelling ‘Damn bro! Savage dunk!’ about what he, himself just said.

Another set of companies where there’s just a fantastic case for divestment and boycott.

DOGE was created for data theft and infrastructure dismantling and it wildly succeeded on both counts within the first few weeks of its existence. It will take a generation to rebuild what it destroyed and the breach of data is unprecedented.

That’s exactly the loop I’m going today. Not looking forward to Lowell -> Billerica, but otherwise it’s great.

We’ve got such great rail to trail infrastructure around here.

bsky.app/profile/some...

I am, right now, in the middle of a negotiation that hinges on whether an 18 month old pile of servers should be valued at 50% of purchase price (3 year depreciation) or 85% of purchase price (10 year depreciation).

Honestly, there are decent arguments in both directions.

Tomorrow’s world is shaped by today’s decisions. Better decisions lead to better outcomes.

Causality holds.

And with that, I’m gonna hang up and take a long bike ride on this brisk, sunny fall day.

Good morning, everybody.

I share this to say, as with the coming plagues, famines, floods, and general collapse of the present era - we will soon be to the part where we will be told that this was inevitable - a system too complex to predict and that nobody could have controlled.

Fuck that.

bsky.app/profile/some...

It’s worth noting that there’s nothing we mortals can do about this. The ‘smart money’ took their profits in the exuberant 18 hours between the CEO’s speech and markets opening the next day .. then the shorts hit and our 401k’s all took the shit for their feast.

The Algorithm That Detected a $610 Billion Fraud: How Machine Intelligence Exposed the AI Industry’s Circular Financing Scheme On November 20, 2025, trading algorithms identified what may become the largest accounting fraud in technology history—not in months or years, but in 18 hours.

Fantastic long-form analysis of how, without exactly lying, NVDIA is concealing the fact that they have saturated the market for their products, their customers are paying slower, they’re fudging depreciation in their favor, and it’s all a circular stack of cards.

open.substack.com/pub/shanakaa...

If a politician texts me asking for money right now, they better be asking for -bail- money so they can get out and commit more civil disobedience.

If the hand doesn’t do its job, maybe we don’t do ours.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that it’s time to start biting the hand.

And with that pathetic spasm complete, I’m gonna head to Marlborough to the Paradise City Arts Festival … there to mingle with hundreds of actual artisans who made actual artifacts with their very own hands.

Have a good Saturday, everybody.

Over on LinkedIn, a large fraction of my network has their faces locked in rictus grins, painting their smiles bigger and bigger because we all have to show how goddamn enthusiastic we all are for this technology that … by and large … is mostly being used to wreck everything (again).

Make no mistake, I’m grateful to have six more weeks of work before having to find my next gig (going into the holidays too … fucking crap time to yank the rug guys) but I feel like I got paid to dig a hole and then paid again to put the dirt back in the hole.

What a wasteful, bullshit system.

This whiny post brought to you by yet another of my clients getting their funding yanked because of ‘market conditions,’ so ~60 more people are out of work and I’m spending the next six weeks ripping apart and auctioning off the perfectly good IT environment I just spent two years building for them.

What if we took the money we’re shoveling into building data centers to make AI slop that nobody wants, and that’s putting our whole creative class out of work, in a way that will inevitably crash the markets … and instead built housing and provided social services that people actually need?

Reminder.

Watching the US government merrily set aside well established science on vaccines brings to mind this thread I wrote [checks watch] 10 months ago about the famines in Russia and China caused directly by politicizing planting policy.

Like, we all know what’s gonna happen next, right?

I think that if any city in MA wants to start rejecting low-bids from otherwise qualified bidders, for whatever reason, they need to be really, really specific about the details.

To whom does it apply? Who makes that list and who reviews it? When and by whom do qualifying bids get rejected?

a close up of a person 's arm with a few drops of water on it ALT: a close up of a person 's arm with a few drops of water on it

That’s most of why I write long form stuff and publish it for people to read. I’m trying to figure things out.

It takes huge amounts of work to stuff facts into your brain and even more work to figure out new facts.

In related news, I’mma hit the gym so my body doesn’t rot.

Good morning.

6/6

Google’s Sundar Pichai says the job of CEO is one of the ‘easier things’ AI could soon replace | Fortune Pichai said apart from running a company, advances in AI could also help people evaluate medical treatment or decide whether to invest in a stock.

If you want to build skills and be competent at the thing, you must do the thing.

For knowledge, this means writing. Reading summaries written by a sycophant gives you an idiot’s confidence and little else.

Which makes the whole ‘CEO uses AI’ thing doubly sweet.

fortune.com/2025/11/19/g...

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a man in a helmet with the words " this is the way " behind him ALT: a man in a helmet with the words " this is the way " behind him

If you want to -learn- you must work your -brain-. There is -no- way to have done without actually doing.

Finding and then reading primary sources is -it-.

But wait there’s still more!

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a man is holding a piece of bread over a woman 's ear and asking what are you . ALT: a man is holding a piece of bread over a woman 's ear and asking what are you .

LLMs give you a pre-chewed mashup of what a bunch of people might say when asked a question.

It’s not necessarily right, it’s just a likely answer.

That’s great for ‘how do I structure a resume’ or ‘what do I bring to a kid’s birthday party,’ but it suuuuuuks for actual learning.

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