(🚲 > 👟) < 🍕

What a delightful weekend of community in Ottawa.

Yesterday morning, we walked over to the Great Glebe Garage Sale. There, we intentionally ran into one friend, and serendipitously ran into another. I hung out around the Ottawa Tool Library section for a while, and we all had some good finds.

T crushed the marathon again, as did friends and family running the half. (Every year, we know more people doing it—such fun! Congrats to D and B!) We’ve had a hell of a week, so it was particularly impressive to see her come out of that and run so strong. I played kit man again (with G as company for part of it, thanks!), cycling from point to point—but even with that (mechanically advantaged) exertion, I didn’t do a marathon worth of kilometres. What a wild distance.

The common thread over the weekend was how delightful it was to see and be among so many wholesome interactions, between friends and strangers alike. One of the weird and wonderful parts of race days is that it lowers barriers to social interaction. Cheer someone you don’t know? Sure! Offer support or comfort to someone who seems to be having a hard go? Why not! Congratulate someone you see walking around with a race bib after? Of course! There’s a good-naturedness to the whole day that gives you a bit more faith in humanity.

This’ll also be an impressive logistics week in Ottawa: not only did we have race weekend, but over the next two days we’ll have the royal tour and opening of Parliament. As someone who’s never managed logistics at scale (and, aside from my spreadsheet to manage marathon support, does not feel very logistically inclined), I marvel at just how much is required to pull off days like these. Would love a window into how it all works one day.

Anyhow—good times all around.

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It seems to have been a week of data-y thinking, but not just—skip to the end for two fun links (for a particularly Lucas definition of “fun”):

• I used DuckDB a bunch for the recent OC Transpo New Ways to Bus explorer, and remain a fan. Their blog is plenty fun, see two recent examples: “The Lost Decade of Small Data?” (running DuckDB on a 2012 MacBook Pro, via Sean); “The DuckDB Local UI” (what it says on the tin—a slick local UI for interacting with a database).
• City of Austin’s IT work (from per-service data or development work, through to individual helpdesk calls [!]) is all tracked in GitHub (via Simon Willison).
• Speaking of Simon, he’s my go-to for vaguely keeping on top of LLM stuff. He’s definitely supportive of them, but writes in an accessible and not too hype-y way—a helpful window into how enthusiastic people are thinking about this technology with very mixed reviews. Today, he annotated Anthropic’s Claude 4 system card (an assessment of the models through various safety and ethical tests) and system prompt (the instructions given to the model every time it runs).
• Meanwhile, for a thought-provoking perspective on AI, Neal Stephenson ruminated on different kinds of intelligence, including where and when we knowingly impair our own intelligence.
• Nicola Griffith offered some brief, but neat, examples of how Old Norse wound its way into modern English.
• A vegetarian teetotaller industrialist who advocated for better working hours for both workers and parliamentarians, for principled reasons? Joseph Brotherton seemed quite a character.

Alright! We’ve friends coming over for post-run pizza—it’s time to carb reload. All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas