The Cherkewski View – Study

A man, his trumpet, and you won’t guess what else

Sun, 17 May 2026 19:00:00 -0400

This week’s moment that made me chuckle: man sits on one of the Muskoka chairs along the Canal, trumpet in hand; inserts a mute, begins playing a tune; beside him sits a six-pack of Twisted Tea.

The “world of abundance” created by local renewable energy (e.g., solar panels attached to your house) reminds me of Deb Chachra’s seminal piece “Resilience, Abundance, Decentralization”. (Also, the first link taught me that positioning solar panels for maximum sun exposure isn’t necessarily as personally efficient as you’d think—you then only have peak energy generation during certain hours!)
Jason Koebler eloquently captured the simmering rage and distrust that now accompanies many digital reading experiences, as we’re forced to ask: “Is this text written by an LLM (AI)?”
Terence Eden translates the civil service speak in the Government Digital Service’s guidance on security research enabled by AI and open-source code, positioning it as a direct response to the NHS’s shuttering of its open-source repositories.
Steve Randy Waldman on how the “professional class” adopted a definition of prosperity that left its members ever striving, but not thriving. He offers this, among other ills, as justification for redefining the professional class as the “fiduciary class”, one with responsibilities toward others at its heart.
Julia Evans wrote about moving away from Tailwinds (a utility-class CSS framework that nowadays requires a build step) in favour of straight-up CSS.

Okay, away from the tech / economics / etc links, let’s broaden the interests:

Laura Olin offers some great links that—for the most part—will you feeling better than most of what you’ll read on the internet. The Linda Pastan poem at the end is worth opening for alone.
Two posts with jazz recommendations this week: Winnie Lim with some favourites, mostly piano trios; Paul Wells with selections from Miles Davis and John Coltrane, other than the ones you definitely already know.
”sudo nano is a web magazine interested in writing and alternative digital futures. … It is hosted in Amsterdam on an old laptop, but it wouldn’t be right saying you are in that laptop right now, would it?” (The magazine’s definitely in its early days, but the site itself is a delight.)
Ryan wrote an update post on his blog, eight years after his last. Returning to a personal blog after a time away automatically earns a spot in this newsletter!!

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas

Three moments and some links

Sun, 10 May 2026 16:45:00 -0400

Three fun(ny) moments from the week:

T suggesting a meeting up with some friends at an event that just happened to be near Moo Shu, and enjoying ice cream in the sun for an hour or two. (Well, the ice cream last much less than an hour, but the sunny sitting on the grass certainly did.)
Hanging out with Asad in the Bank of Canada plaza before checking out the Object//Project Art Book Fair, organized by Possible Worlds.
Walking through Strathcona Park, overhearing a set of bros (but not hardcore bros), sharing a six pack of Bud: “are you using 4.6 or 4.7?” “nah I use Chat” —WHAT IS THIS WORLD lmao

Lindsay Tedds on the long-form census: “You should fill it out because the census is the closest thing this country has to a mirror. Demographic, social, economic — every five years Canada looks at itself and writes down what it sees. And in 2026, 1 in 4 of you will get the long form, the version that asks the questions that actually shape policy.”
Alan Jacobs on the Canvas hack (on which, see CBC or Wikipedia): “Every university function that is on the internet is a security vulnerability. (Just look at how many online systems we have!) But every university function outsourced to a giant company whose tools are used by many universities is a far greater vulnerability, because there is so much money to be made from exploiting all that data. Locally owned and managed data is a smaller and less appealing target for hackers.”
Good Sudoku is a brilliant Sudoku implementation. Just the right level of assistance, with interaction design that makes it a delight to play. (via Dave Rupert)
This led me down the Wikipedia page for Sudoku, through which I learned that its modern form only grew to widespread popularity in 2004/2005. I clearly remember playing Sudoku on a 2006 family trip to Italy. Blows my mind that the game’s popularity in the English-speaking world would’ve been so fresh at that point—but that also makes perfect sense, as my playing it would’ve been following that trend.
What those studying LLMs can learn from studying the history of the GIS industry.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas

Savour, to a point

Sun, 03 May 2026 14:20:00 -0400

Earlier this week, as we traded off our containers of ice cream, T chided me for leaving all the brownie pieces as I uncovered them, reminding me to eat and enjoy them.

I do this often: trying to draw out and savour some food or other time-limited experience. Sometimes, as when I “save the best bite for last”, it’s harmless—that bite will almost definitely be great. But other times, it actually compromises the quality of the thing I was trying to savour, as when I leave a special box of cookies or chocolate too long.

Our storage room has a few jars of tomatoes in it, part of an annual allotment I received from my Nonno and Nonna. I’d always use the jars gradually throughout the year. By the year after I’d gotten these specific jars, my grandparents had decided they wouldn’t make them anymore. The jars took on a new symbolism, so I further slowed my usage of them. Now, though, they’ve been there many years, long enough that I’d hesitate to use them, and they sit more as visual reminders of what’s changed than as something I’d happily reach for and cook with.

It’s a bitter irony, but one worth learning from—sometimes, delaying enjoyment can actually deny it. Time to enjoy some of that chocolate we brought back from Denmark.

Charlotta Kronblad shares her experience of suing over the use of an algorithm for allocating children to schools in Gothenburg. An excellent example of why automated decision-making systems must be legible not only to those who operate them, but those impacted by their operations.
Mandy Brown shares an excerpt from a decades-old book that resonates well with our present moment, on the nature of the economic elite and that elite’s attitude toward everyone else.
Recently spoke with a friend about what you can learn by doing multiples of handwork (pottery, woodworking, etc). Chris Schwarz echoes this with his set of prioritized “jobs” for craftwork—arguing that quality is not job #1.
Simon Collison documented a week on the moors, in the Peak District. I enjoy how Simon capitalizes the names of the different bird species he saw and heard throughout the week.
Wholesome story of a Winnipeg woman who fell into and was rescued from a hole.
Last week, I mentioned XOXO Explore. Turns out, there’s even more to it than I’d realized, with a website archive for each year’s announcement, line-up, and schedule micro-sites. Andy Baio describes the effort required to archive all these sites, each built with different web technologies over the 12 years XOXO operated.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas

Fourteen hours of daylight

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:55:00 -0400

There’s a magic threshold crossed when the sun rises before 6 and sets after 8. Twelve hours of daylight is one thing, but fourteen? Bursting with potential.

Maybe the magic isn’t because of the daylight, but the shorter evenings—pack eight hours sleep into those ten hours of night and there’s just that much less time to let the nighttime worries in. The good advice to “deal with problems in daylight” is because problems seem so much weightier in the night.

This weekend, we crossed that threshold, and thank goodness. We’ve got sixteen weeks of fourteen-hour-plus days ahead of us—plenty of time to bask in the sun.

XOXO Explore is the archive of XOXO, “an experiment gone right”—a festival celebrating independent creativity on the internet. It‘s one of those gatherings you hear spoken of with such love, and now its entire archive of talks is available in one place. Each year is lovingly documented, with the schedules preserved and brief memories woven throughout. If you’re looking for a talk to start with, check out Erin Kissane’s 2024 talk, which she describes as “[explaining] the extraordinary thing the Covid Tracking Project was, why I got off the internet, and why I’m back and all in on networks”.
Nilay Patel wrote about “software brain”, the disconnect between those who see the world as something that can be smushed into a set of databases, and those who don’t. The former type gold rushes toward AI, while the latter? “The people do not yearn for automation.” (Leave aside the AI angle, “software brain” is a very useful analytical frame—one that better helps me understand some of the people I’ve worked with and known over the years.)
John Gruber wrote about the recent printing error in the New York Times crossword, using it as an example of software brain versus hardware brain.
Rachel Andrew on “the importance of people who care”: “The problem for us is that it’s very difficult to demonstrate the impact of it until it’s gone. Even then, people may not connect the fact that support requests have gone up with poor quality documentation, or poor reviews with an unintuitive UI.” (Related: “Before You Fire All Your Glue People Because of AI”.)
Mike Monteiro on how to read: “the only New Years resolution that’s ever stuck: if I am bored, I read.”
Low-tech Magazine experimented with a handcart, using it for both ordinary and extraordinary errands. What a delightful tool. Explains the physics of it well, too (you’re not actually moving all the weight it can carry yourself, at least not on flat ground [would that Ottawa had flatter ground]).
David Coletto on the increasingly difficult work of political polling. Read up on methods for survey weighting after this, fascinating stuff. (That methods link is part of a broader Pew Research Center report, “For Weighting Online Opt-In Samples, What Matters Most?”)
“I just made 424 animated pie charts because if you’re going to break a rule you should break it good and hard.”

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas

Blistered hands

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:25:00 -0400

In a sign of the kind of work I usually do, a few hours raking leaves yesterday has left my hands hilariously blistered. Woodworking’s been good for nothing with toughening those up! I intentionally spent those hours with nothing in my ears—lately I’ve reached too often for podcasts or music, but it was good to be alone with my thoughts. Or, more accurately, with my thoughts and the cacophony of birdsong we’re treated to during these fine spring mornings.

That we’re at issue 450 is a better indication of how I usually spend my days—reading, writing, talking, and so on. But I remain humbled by the difficulty and reward of all kinds of work. Just as there’s labour to organizing a yard, so too is there labour to organizing one’s thoughts. They’re not so different as they may seem. While one leaves physical reminders of its toll, both can tire and wire you just the same.

Anyway, it’s been a happily full weekend! On to some links:

These are difficult days for so, so many people, on so many fronts. For those faced with increasingly unstable employment and uncertain job prospects, or struggling with the work they’re doing, Mandy Brown has some advice on “ways of moving”—whether just a little or a lot, Mandy’s metaphors offer nudges for how we might approach such uncertainty more head-on.
On that note, if you’re considering a career in the vast umbrella of “technology policy”, Christopher Parsons has an excellent long post on what that can mean, how you might educate yourself, and all the ways it may go.
Conceptual walkthrough, in the American context but applicable elsewhere, of “capability-based budgeting” for services, as opposed to line items for individual technical products or systems. (via Jennifer Pahlka)
Paul Craig with an exploration of why generative AI systems run so contrary to government compliance regimes, with some great data analysis building on the Auditor-General’s report on the Canada Revenue Agency’s contact centres.
Aadam Jacobs has been recording concerts since 1989, and they’re all slowly making their way to the Internet Archive. I have a tag in my bookmarks called internet-culture and even though the earliest of these recordings predate the World Wide Web’s public debut by four years,¹ this is 10000% what I mean by “internet culture”. (via Kottke)
Speaking of the internet, the web, and links, I quite enjoyed Marcin Wichary’s dissection of the classic web rule not to link by saying only “click here”. The struggles he discusses of where to put links are so relatable—I tend toward overly long, “self-contained” links, which some of you have identified as being hard to read. I continue to try to strike a good balance!
“Hollywood’s World Map of California.” Reminds me of how the location selection for so many films and shows from the early through mid 20th century (and maybe later?) was heavily influenced by Hollywood union rates—beyond a certain radius, there were extra travel fees, creating an incentive to maximize whatever scenery and landscapes were available within X00 miles of the big studios. (I’ve no idea the radius, nor have I been able to turn up a source for this with a quick search. I recall this coming up as explanation for some of the Star Trek: TOS location selections, where so many alien planets looked suspiciously similar.)

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas

And yes, future nerdy Lucas, “the internet” is different than “the World Wide Web”, but the strange, amazing cultural feeling I’m gesturing at when I say internet-culture is both and neither of them at once. ↩

Variations on themes

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:40:00 -0400

Hullo! Finally, a weekend back home where I’m neither sick nor on the road. Doing chores has been… satisfying? And the weekend’s got a good mix of social time and shop time¹—truly, no complaints.

So, quite a week in world events. Tuesday and Friday evenings alike had an 8pm Eastern deadline—one existential on something approaching a global scale, the other existential for four good folks offering a beacon of hope to all us down here. Thankfully, both passed relatively uneventfully—but I’ve little doubt we’ll soon have new reason to worry, as the continued arbitrariness of world events buffets all us folks just trying to make something from this life.

Ah, but who has anything wise to say at a time like this? My turtling this week consisted of loads of reading, so let’s just get on to the links! As we sometimes do, loosely grouped with discernible but unnamed themes. (oooooh)

Anil Dash’s title “Actually, people love to work hard” kinda says it all, but it’s worth reading the whole post for his repeated rearticulations of that concept as a management principle.
What should be outsourced, and what shouldn’t? Dan Davies uses Palantir’s contract with the UK National Health Service to explore exactly that question. Three lines give you the gist: “Running a database isn’t a core competency for most companies. But managing the freaking company is a core competence, or at least it ought to be. And one of the big messages from management cybernetics is that the distinction between these two things is not as clear as you’d think.”
Neat idea from Alex Usher, to think about tradeoffs through a menu of options, with examples given from higher education. When dealing with a budgeting situation, that menu should include both potential cuts (e.g., to wages, facilities, or services, like how often you clean your facilities) and revenues (e.g., the dollar value of a 5% tuition increase, a parking fee increase, etc), to provide a tangible sense of scale for financial discussions (and options to order à la carte, for those so inclined).

“How I Came to Own A Cider Mill” is a delightful saga of taking a risk and seeing it through, with family and in community. (via Shawn Graham’s syllabus / resources for his recent fourth-year course “The Business of History”)
Sticking to the open web means, for Alan Jacobs, little money in his pocket. Instead, they’re full of some other, indescribable, maybe better substance. (Definitely open it for the one-liner about the open web from Austin Kleon.)

Two sides of the same coin with everyone’s, err, favourite technology, LLMs:

Cybersecurity implications abound: “vulnerability research is cooked”, Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model withheld because it’s too good at finding vulnerabilities—it all adds up to new ground for both the offensive and defensive sides in cybersecurity, with us, our poor devices and data, caught in the middle. (Bring back the airgap?)
Meanwhile, it offers great promise for the mundane but essential work that underpins scholarly and journalistic projects. Dan Cohen catalogues a bunch of recent academic work that was enabled by one-off tools or data extraction built easily with the latest models. Derek Willis announces his revamped dataset of congressional press releases, with more robust scraping enabled by LLMs: “There are many, many problematic uses of Large Language Models out there. Writing scrapers is not one of them.”

Giles Turnbull is, yet again, planting his year’s potatoes.
How ancient wild cabbage became SO MANY DIFFERENT VEGETABLES.
There’s a Mary Oliver documentary coming this year. GOODNESS YES PLEASE

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas

For a broad definition of “shop time” that includes many hours tooling away on data analysis projects. ↩

The primary stuff of history

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:10:00 -0400

Earlier this week, we went with some friends to the REEL Politics screening of Prime Minister, a documentary covering the lead-up to and follow-on from Jacinda Ardern’s five years as prime minister of New Zealand.

The film differs from many political documentaries in that it’s based on two primary, contemporary sources: home videos, shot by Ardern’s partner, and Ardern’s oral history interviews with the Alexander Turnbull Library. Both sources started before the election that delivered Ardern the premiership, and continued after, offering an uninterrupted window into her thoughts and experiences while in office.

The film left me reflecting on the primary sources of history—what’s available after the fact to reconstruct what people did, thought, and felt at the time. I’ve long been interested in the accidental primary sources, records created for a contemporary purpose that then help future historians, like ledgers, catalogues, and so on.

A few other examples of political history come to mind. Diaries are a good example of sources created somewhat explicitly with the goal of future reflection, like Jim Coutts’s diaries from the era of Pierre Trudeau’s time as prime minister. But there’s also behind-the-scenes photography, like Adam Scotti’s year-end roundups from his time as Justin Trudeau’s official photographer. 2020 was a big year (pandemic!), as was 2024–25 (resignation!); Scotti also did a 15-year retrospective that’s worth a peruse.

It also had me thinking about all the other kinds of primary sources being created now. What kinds of history could you tell with a copy of someone’s geotagged photo library, for example?

Anyhow, I found it remarkable that New Zealand had an oral history project with political leaders. It seemed both therapeutic for the politicians while in office, but also an incredible source after the fact. Imagine my surprise to learn, after the film, that the Alexander Turnbull Library has ceased its 40+-year run of oral history recordings. A shame for future historians, and just as a documentary exemplifying its worth is making the rounds.

The film is a good watch, though definitely with a few warnings in mind: the film covers the pandemic years in detail, including New Zealand’s version of a convoy / occupation, as well as the response to the Christchurch terrorist attack—no world leader escapes heavy topics, and the film doesn’t shy away from them.

Speaking of primary sources and history, we’re getting some golden material from the Artemis II flight. To the moon!
Mandy Brown on workslop is an insightful tour into the visibility of labour and the demoralizing, debilitating effect of doing “bullshit work”. The answer, as ever, is a return to the people at the heart of anything worth doing.
Angelo wrote about his experience living with bipolar disorder—and his thriving life.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas

Snow, spring, let’s goooo

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:00:00 -0400

Why hello there! It’s good to be typing to you with a full-sized keyboard.

I’m back in Canada after some delightful time in Denmark. Though there for work, it was inspiring and energizing for me personally, too. I’ll be processing this trip for a long time, but some odds and ends I noted:

On my first day, it felt like everyone was looking at me as I walked along. The next day, no one seemed to. The difference? Not some sudden relaxation of my “I’m in a foreign land” self consciousness, but my outfit: on the first day I wore a yellow rain jacket, while on the second I wore a drab overcoat. Almost nobody local seemed to wear bright colours. And yet, such happy people!
SO MANY YOUNG CHILDREN AND FAMILIES. Denmark’s fertility rate isn’t particularly high, but it was a striking difference to life here to see just how present family life was in even a dense, urban place like Copenhagen. It felt like every other bike going by had a carrier or second seat for a child (who’d be happily snacking away on the way home, as T often pointed out), while apartment courtyards seem to often feature playgrounds or other shared infrastructure for play. To see family living be so common and accessible even in a relatively big, dense city was inspiring.
Yes, what they say about cycling is definitely true—and T and I both made great use of the infrastructure during our time there. But it also struck me how common and ever-present cars are. I think it’s easy for debates about prioritizing better infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians in places like Canada to be read as “get rid of the cars”, but Copenhagen proves you can definitely have both. (Though some Danes I spoke with also emphasized how important the good public transit is to this equation—prior to the expansion of the metro, Copenhagen traffic was reportedly awful. Even now, cycling will often be the quickest way around!)
Museum wayfinding was often confusing, surprisingly so for a country so attentive to design?? Or, at least, I could rarely sort out a sensible way to get to the start of an exhibit, or to move myself through it. Maybe a consequence of museums often occupying old, difficult-to-modify buildings, but funny nonetheless.
People seemed generally unhurried (even if they were walking briskly). In Canada, by contrast, I feel a general sense of stress or hurry, of striving. In Denmark, it was… contentment? (Insert “Is this… happiness?” meme here!)

By reputation, Danes can be a bit difficult to get to know. But those that welcomed and invited me in were incredibly kind and generous. It was a trip that’ll stay with me for a long, long time—I’ve many more reflections, both professional and personal, which I’m sure will slowly make their way here and elsewhere. Photos, too, but I remain perpetually behind in putting those online!

A few links!

“This Is Not The Computer For You”, Sam Henri Gold’s quasi-review of the MacBook Neo, made the blogging rounds when it came out a few weeks ago, and for good reason. But the part most people quoted wasn’t my favourite bit, which was this: “Somewhere a kid is saving up for this. He has read every review. Watched the introduction video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every benchmark, every footnote. He has probably walked into an Apple Store and interrogated an employee about it ad nauseam. He knows the consensus. He knows it’s probably not the right tool for everything he wants to do. // He has decided he’ll be fine.”
This nerdsnipes me in every way possible: an open-source, browser-only tool for time tracking using statistical principles to request random samples of your activities, instead of requiring strict, regular timekeeping. There’s also a delightful issue / resolution tracker in the project’s repository.
Regarding LLMs, Rachel Andrews advocates neither an “always for” nor “always against” position, but to instead be discerning in when AI is well placed to do the job at hand.
I always enjoy Simon Collison’s photo essays from his travels, so of course enjoyed his latest from Tokyo (a series of three, that’s part two!).
Reflections on Tracy Kidder by Jessamyn West, who had a unique vantage point into Kidder through her father, Tom West, subject of Soul of a New Machine.
Delightful account of Brad Frost’s visit to his daughter Ella’s coding club.

I don’t know about you, but it’s finally feeling like spring (despite the snow still on the ground). LET’S GOOOOOOO!

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas

Back on the ice

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:50:00 -0500

The last few weeks have included a solid amount of skating. Not so much that I feel I fully wrung the Canal season’s potential, but enough that I feel satisfied, and won’t feel too poorly when it closes.

Out on the ice yesterday, I was struck by just how many people there were, particularly at the hub sites (like the first kilometre, nearest Parliament, or the rest areas at Fifth and Dow’s Lake). The density! The familiar thought experiment came to mind: how much space would you need to mass the same number of people if they were all in cars?

Not only were all these people massed and moving, they didn’t need formal rules or physical structure to constrain or shape their movement. Norms and attention are plenty enough. Skate to the right when you can, don’t cut folks off, and mind the people in front of you.

It reminded me of Adam Gopnik’s account of learning to drive later in life. One of his central observations was that driving is a deeply democratic act: identifying and moving into openings when they present themselves; yielding and giving space to enable others to do the same. And all this without much verbal communication.¹

I enjoy this when driving, but I enjoy it far more when skating, where the stakes feel lower and you live the joy of self-powered movement and the sun in your face.

Yesterday, I’m glad I fully lived that joy—and I look forward to next time, whether next week or next year.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas

On a tangent, I think of how low-resolution our on-road communication is. Turn signals, yes, headlights and a honk, sure. Other than that, there’s not much more than “Arturo’s all purpose hand”, as described by Gopnik: ‘the one that means “thank you,” “fuck you,” “who cares about you”—is the proper hand for a citizen. It broadcast civility, while keeping its private meanings to itself.’ ↩

Non-consuming consumption

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:25:00 -0500

I’ve caught myself a few times this week starting and ending the day with phone in hand, scrolling the screen. I’ve caught and challenged myself, asking, “is this really how you want to spend your time?”

Sure, I tend to be reading blogs and newsletters, not so much caught up by an algorithmic feed (though I do have a bad habit of compulsively loading news sites, even though I specifically subscribe to a physical paper to try to constrain how and when I read the news), so it’s easy to justify to myself that it’s “good scrolling”. It tickles something to fill my brain, but the act of digital consumption still isn’t that satisfying—I yearn for more tangible things.

This morning, happily, I kept the phone away, instead reading Sherlock Holmes. And it was good.

It was a reminder that, much fun as it may be to make things (woodworking, cooking, or so on) or go places (a spirited walk, a gallery, what have you) off-screen, consumption can be its own reward, and reading a book offers a non-digital form of consumption that isn’t so… consuming.

Years ago, I learned of Joan Didion’s “On Self Respect” via a post by Frank Chimero, who described it memorably as an essay that “smacked me on the back of the head at the right time”. Frank has taken that post down, so I’ll instead link to Maria Popova’s long quotation from Didion’s essay. As with Frank, reencountering Didion’s take on self respect has given me a much needed—much welcomed—smack in the head.
Doug Stowe blogs about making things with his hands, mostly out of wood. But he also writes about education. In “The 800 lb. sore thumb”, he integrates several quotations to argue the importance of both hand- and head-work, not only to our personal development, but to democracy itself.
Mita Williams shares her reasons for installing solar panels atop her garage. Among the many excellent reasons, Williams raises the heavy subsidies the Ontario government makes for our electricity rates: “The Ontario government will spend as much what it currents spends on all of its universities and colleges on subsidizing electricity costs for consumers, so we don’t notice anything [even as electricity rates increased by 29% in November].” The subsidy is one of those programs I periodically forget, then re-learn about, and every time it’s mind boggling. What a way to hide the true cost of energy production (and thus discourage rational economic decisions around both energy production and consumption).
As a guy who knows a thing or two about it, Stéphane Dion has warnings about Alberta’s secession rumblings.
What nineteenth-century cities can teach us about our own.
For any among you who went to a Canadian elementary school, prepare for a blast from the past in CBC’s profile of Scholastic.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas