This video shows hourly PM2.5 air pollution across the United States for 2025:

I did the same thing for 2023 using the Purple Air sensor network. Unfortunately they are now charging for access to the data, however the official AirNow network has an API and so I used that instead. The lack of sensors at the local level is frustrating, but it works fine for this nationwide view.

The 4th of July is pretty incredible (see the photo at the top of the post).

In San Francisco this was a pretty mild year for wildfire smoke. We did see a few days in mid-July from the Butler and Green fires. Canada was a big factor again, look particularly around June 3-5 and late July. And of course the Palisades fire, starting on Jan 7.

Rivian is about to start charging for cruise control. Which sucks. It's handy for long stretches of I-5, but generally I enjoy driving so I'm not planning to shell out unless they offer a day pass.

There is something I would pay for though.

Fix the fucking turn signal.

I'm pretty sure this wouldn't even need an AI supercomputer. I'm not an automotive engineer but I've sketched out a rough design for this:

1. When you are already signaling one direction, moving the stalk the other way just cancels the signal.

I should probably file a patent before hitting post.

Every car I have owned or rented made the other choice and so trying to cancel the turn signal just lights up the opposite direction. A behavior I need once a decade or so, but the rest of the time I just completed a less than 90 degree turn and I'm ready to stop signaling. Instead I have turn signal tourette's for the next mile. I'd pay a buck or two a month to not do that.

In terms of traffic this blog has always been driven by code. Extracting step counts from Google Fit, automating Azure monitoring, pushing the limits of Apps Script, and so on. Over the past year referral traffic is solid, but Google Search isn't interested any more. It's the same trend as Stack Overflow - programming questions are now answered by LLMs. I do the same thing and so I'm responsible as a user (I used to answer my own questions disturbingly often), and as a content creator (according to WaPo this blog is 0.00002% of CommonCrawl: transformers also die in darkness).

Can I be a social network instead?

I have had a vague integration with Bridgy Fed for a while. This syndicates posts into the Fediverse and will accept comments back but has always been a bit one sided. I just tightened this up a bit and added support for follows, and did a little following. Implementing all the microformats is a lot easier with LLMs. I'm never going back to a social network that I don't own, even a well intentioned Mastodon server. But I'll interoperate all day and iterate in an IndieWeb direction.

You can follow @ithoughthecamewithyou.com@ithoughthecamewithyou.com and starting now I can follow back.

I have been in the habit of posting each plane I fly on for a long time.

This started on Twitter, where for a while there was this #boarding hashtag so you could chat with people in transit from the same airport by IATA code (like #boarding #sfo). That dropped out of usage, because why would you do that, but I continued on Facebook until I deleted social media in 2018. After a brief lapse I started posting to my blog. I have a vague intention to resurrect some older flights with AI and build out a more complete history.

After adding flights here for a few years it seemed like a good idea to do some visualization. The image above (click for a larger version) is my current route map, updated after each flight. The routes are great circles rather than the actual track (created via the .net version of GeographicLib and this geolocation of airports). You can view individual flights here. I could probably use a carbon offset or two (unless this).

Required disclaimer:

This site or product includes IATA/ICAO List data available from https://github.com/ip2location/ip2location-iata-icao.

Updated 2026-02-07 23:07:

The vague intention turned into a mild obsession and so I mined email for more flights. I have email going back to 1996 and quickly whipped up two scripts via GitHub Copilot and Claude Sonnet 4.5 to process them. The first searched and downloaded any likely candidates from gmail and converted the HTML email to markdown to save on tokens. The second ran all the candidates through GPT 5 mini to extract the details. I then added a few older flights from memory resulting in the image above. There are some work emails I don't have access to so I'm sure it's not totally comprehensive, but I'm now up to 300 flights and approximately 868,381 miles.

Roko's basilisk is the improbable theory that advanced AI in the future will punish anyone who failed to help speed the development of the AI.

I'm coining Rob's basilisk, which is the far more likely theory that AI will eventually torture people who made it watch home security cameras. Here's a gem from mine:

"The day began with regular neighborhood activity, including several individuals walking by. Early morning saw garbage collection services, with a person in a yellow vest moving green garbage cans and later a blue recycling bin was picked up. Around 7:34 AM, a person exited the Garage, and shortly after, a green Rivian SUV pulled into the driveway, with a resident exiting the vehicle as the garage door opened. Throughout the morning, numerous people walked dogs, including one with a black dog on a red leash. Later in the morning, a person was seen putting a green suitcase into the trunk of a white SUV, coinciding with an Amazon delivery truck driving by. In the afternoon, a person was observed taking a picture of the house. A UPS delivery person delivered a package around 4:50 PM. As evening approached, a cat was spotted walking across the Backyard, and two people got into a white pickup truck from the Garage. The day concluded with continued pedestrian activity and several trains passing by, including a person seen holding a glowing blue object in the evening."

Nearly a decade ago I whipped up a script to send my Nest footage to the Google Cloud Vision API. The twist was that it only notified me when it saw something novel. It was pretty chatty to start with, and then every few weeks I'd get an alert that it had spotted an ice hotel or ballistic missile submarine. At that point I turned it off (maybe this will save me one day).

Some terrible part of me wants to build a RAG database of Google Home Premium Advanced notifications so that I can do the same thing in prose, and never miss anything unusual on my street. A more practical part realizes that the glowing blue object is probably a phone.

I just finished Alan Wake 2, and while it's a pretty good game this took me well over a year.

It's not (mostly) because I'm still not that great with a Xbox controller. It's a long game and I'm pretty busy. Astonishingly at the end it wants me to play the whole thing again, which seems to be a bit of a trend. It also wants to sell me expansion packs which is completely missing my section of the market.

I would happily pay you twice as much if the game was half as long.

Sadly I'm a completionist and I'm not going to stop halfway through unless the game is bad (e.g. No Man's Sky. I already have a job. I'm not going to find and smelt minerals to weave wiring to eventually twenty hours later turn the light on in my space cabin). But I'd love to play more than one game a year.

Also, making more content is lazy. Taking a scalpel to your plot and getting to the essential core of the story takes skill and guts.

Publishers, please take my money!

(PS, man, I loved Firewatch. More like that please.)