now

this is a dated snapshot of whatever currently has my attention, borrowed from the /now idea. it gets to change whenever the answer does. the slower-moving parts live in about, where they should still make sense after these ones expire

last updated from Curitiba, Brazil

  1. what has your attention right now?
  2. right now right now?
  3. let's say these days
  4. much better

what software should get to do

keeping people in control of software that acts for them, without making the secure path so painful that everybody starts looking for another one

at Clerk, auth not getting in your way is hardly a new idea. the new part is holding onto it while AI lets people build software much, much faster. agents, MCP servers, and CLIs keep changing what software can do, often before anyone has finished deciding when to allow it or how to record what happened

people are going to use these tools whether or not we have caught up. if staying secure means interrupting every action, consuming more context, or turning each step into another approval, they will find a way around it. the work is giving them enough control to use all of this safely without asking everyone else to stop while we figure out what changed again this week

the same tension changes direction when i turn it toward my own work. i'm preparing a talk about authorship and AI, and finishing this website has somehow become one of its requirements. AI lets me build faster and attempt more on my own, but more software is not necessarily more authored software. every night i use the machine to finish the thing while wondering how much help i can accept before i made this starts needing a footnote

three projects, only so many evenings

each one has somehow become a requirement for finishing the next, and all three have agreed on the same deadline without consulting me

  • cmrg.me

    you are looking at it. after years of rewriting this website, the talk has finally given me a deadline i cannot move. much of its argument comes from what i built and learned here, so this version needs to be finished and released before i can call the slides done

  • an upcoming talk

    an upcoming talk for a conference here in Brazil. every change to the site either gives me another example or ruins a slide i thought was done, and every new idea for the slides gives Metope something else to support. the title stays hidden until i can change the site without reopening the slides

  • Metope

    the talk only works if Metope does. it remains private for a few more weeks. once the talk and site are done, i need a little time to recover from both and finish the structure i have in mind before releasing it. until then, its first serious test is powering that talk at a conference with more than 2,000 people. almost no pressure at all

once the talk is over, the site has to be live and Metope has to have survived its biggest test so far. getting all three there has made this one of the hardest working weeks i've had in a while. after years on the site and three talks' worth of building Metope as i went, i should finally be free of the whole arrangement. at least for a few days

i've been up to a few things!

the last few weeks of activity. GitHub can count contributions, but remains unhelpfully silent about whether any of them were a good idea

away from the editor

when i close the editor, i'm usually studying Spanish, watching Wong Kar-wai movies, taking photos, or listening to music
  • in progress: watch every Wong Kar-wai movie
  • in progress: have a full conversation in Spanish without translating first
  • not started: make and print a photo book documenting a place i care about

music moves faster. it follows me through most of the rest, changing the speed or mood of whatever is already happening. apparently a few songs have been doing most of the work

what's been on repeat

the 6 tracks i've returned to most over the last few months. no defense will be provided, but Spotify has made sure the evidence is available anyway

the songs will probably change first. the ideas i am not working on have been around much longer and seem perfectly happy to keep waiting

not now

a few old ideas that became real, plus the ones still waiting without a deadline or any reason to pretend otherwise

i keep these written down because forgetting an idea and deciding not to start it yet are different things. an empty bracket means exactly what it says

  • complete: spend months building a framework from scratch
  • complete: turn a joke into a real project
  • not started: make something heavy
  • not started: play one song on piano from beginning to end
  • not started: build something hardware related

this page is supposed to expire. if the date starts looking suspicious, please bother me on x before i decide it is still recent enough