Mark Allen

@markallen.io

77 Followers 134 Following

Making software that helps people be more active and trying to ride my bike stupid long distances. Based in Toronto. https://markallen.io

An ebook on a tiny Xteink X4 e-ink reader.
Screenshot of Google Maps, showing the lack of coverage Street View for most of the country.
Why is it happening? There is no single answer. It is the bike, the body, the fuel and the way the race is ridden. Frames, wheels, helmets, clothing and riding positions are more aerodynamic. Larger-volume tyres, carefully matched to wider, deeper rims and run at lower pressures, roll faster over real roads. Training is more precise, recovery better managed and the overall depth of the peloton greater. Riders understand their fueling requirements and can consume enough carbohydrate to sustain huge power outputs for longer. Teams model routes, weather and race scenarios in extraordinary detail, while the riders themselves race more aggressively and from farther out. But perhaps the most important change is that none of this knowledge belongs exclusively to one or two teams anymore. Once, a handful of teams knew more and could exploit that advantage. Now the equipment, expertise and data have become normalised and widespread. The performance floor of the entire peloton has risen. It is marginal gains applied to everything, by everyone, all at once.
Banner above a Substack article saying “Read distraction-free on Substack”
Screenshot of the original iPad Notes app UI, with a heavily skeumorphic UI that Steve Jobs gushed over for having the appearance of "rich corinthian leather."
Pro cyclist Luka Mezgec of the Jayco Alula team wearing a gray Giant Pursuit helmet.
Beyoncé performs onstage in a white rhinestone cowboy outfit and wide-brim hat during her Cowboy Carter tour, holding a microphone with dancers behind her.
Screenshot of my results from the AI Compass quiz. Text: The Optimist patron saint: Marc Andreessen AI cures diseases, teaches children, liberates workers, and democratizes expertise. You see the problems but you believe the trajectory bends toward good, and the only real sin is slowing it down. Your bookshelf has both Pinker and a manifesto you wrote yourself.
Screenshot of the Duolingo leaderboard where I have twice as much XP as the person in second place because the flash card feature only asked me to recall “coffee,” “tea,” “hello,” “sir,” and “please” for an entire week.
Screenshot text: "Indeed, in my view, bad AI futures are much likelier if only an extremely narrow subset of actors have access to frontier AI. This is because that narrow subset of actors is likely to composed of groups that already have significant economic and political power (including, of course, the federal government itself). You should not expect the most powerful people in the world using the most powerful technology ever conceived in a way that is inscrutable to the public to turn out well, and you should see that dynamic as fundamentally inconsistent with a democratic republic. That is the future we could be careening toward."
Surly's re-issued Steamroller single-speed bike frame in a charming "Anxious Lavender" color.
Screenshot of text from The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells: "It is tempting to look at these strings of disasters and think, Climate change is here. And one response to seeing things long predicted actually come to pass is to feel that we have settled into a new era, with everything transformed. In fact, that is how California governor Jerry Brown described the state of things in the midst of the state’s wildfire disaster: 'a new normal.' The truth is actually much scarier. That is, the end of normal; never normal again."
A large red-tailed hawk sitting on top of an electric pole in the woods.
Screenshot text: But there was one American son who believed that dream of innocence and adolescent clarity. Who, like a boy scout, took those Spector productions at face value, and adored them. So it shouldn’t surprise us that when Brian Wilson first heard The Beatles (in 1964: The Beach Boys had been famous for two years), he reported suffering real panic; was literally, physically overwhelmed—an early version of the schizoaffective tendencies that later had him believing Spector had sent men to kill him while he planned his “teenage symphony to God,” threatening to surpass his idol for good. Brian Wilson was always in earnest: he felt things in bodily waves; heard music from heavenly places; aspired to transform actual human consciousness by delivering the Gospel of Spector to the world. When he said God, Brian Wilson didn’t mean sex, or the Market—he meant God. From Spector’s records, Wilson caught a tincture, a reflected fragment, of sublimity. And as The Beach Boys’ early career went on, Wilson’s evolving creations captured that promise of transcendence—which for Spector had been egoic monuments of pure sound (with a commercial imperative to boot)—expanding it into a vision of Pop Music as a kind of secular redemption.
Screenshot of an Eight Sleep landing page featuring Bryan Johnson's dumb uncanny valley face.
George Costanza telling a woman about his fake career as a Marine Biologist. Closed caption: "I just got back from the Galapagos Islands. I was living with the turtles."
A view from High Park in Toronto with winding paved paths, tall mostly bare trees, and flowering cherry trees under a partly cloudy blue sky; a person sits alone on a bench in the distance.
Screenshot from study: Model details Consumer-­ optimised generative AI-­ driven chatbots were selected for inclusion: Gemini (2.0, Google; version available December 2024), DeepSeek (V3, High-­ Flyer; version available December 2024), Meta AI (Llama 3.3, Meta; version available December 2024), ChatGPT (3.5, OpenAI; version available November 2022) and Grok (2, xAI; version available August 2024). Models were treated as closed/proprietary deployments, since underlying model weights and training data were not available for evaluation. We selected these models because, at the time of our analysis, they were the most accessible and popular public-­ facing platforms, and though subscription versions may yield greater accuracy, we opted to use the free (unpaid) versions that are most often accessed by the general public. Specialist medical chatbots (eg, ChatDoctor) were excluded from the analysis as they are either inaccessible to non-­ professionals or rarely used for public health queries.
Screenshot text: Kennedy recently authorized HHS employees to leave work early on April 3 “in observance of Good Friday,” according to an email viewed by WIRED. “From executive orders to agency-wide directives to even early dismissal emails, it is abundantly clear that this administration is not so much proudly Christian as it is belligerently so,” says one HHS employee who was granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation. “There exists a clear throughline of transgressive delight in violating the separation of church and state, of a similar corruptive mindset as the joy they take in forcing our agency to reduce services to the public whose mission it is for us to serve.”
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Player Piano
My prompt to Claude Code: "is that the best solution?" Claude's response: "Honest answer: no, there's a simpler one I should have proposed first."
A row of user avatars, but they are different Na'vi. Or maybe the same guy, I don't know. I never saw Avatar.
Screenshot from Seinfeld S6E7 "The Soup", Jerry is wearing a sweatshirt with a Northwest Podiatric Laboratory logo on the chest.
Screenshot of a Scorched Earth-style artillary game.
The official Board of Peace logo, which has the laziest generative AI gold crest and an inaccurate globe that for some reason has the US at the center of the globe even though the Board of Peace is allegedly supposed to be about rebuilding Gaza.
Screenshot of Microsoft Word with dozens of menus expanded, showing hundreds of options. Only a tiny sliver of space is visible to type in the document.
Screenshot of the Mac OS ChatGPT desktop app. A chat is open, and the content is littered with buttons labeled "🌐" that don't do anything.
During Golden Ages, there is more work than people. And when they crash, it is because there are more people than work. I realize I’m mixing units, but otherwise it gets grammatically awkward. You get the idea. Larry Page told the company in April 2011, when he became CEO, “stop working on new stuff, we’re only going to do X, Y, and Z.” And they kept every single engineer, but cut the amount of work by a solid 50% or more. You could no longer work on any problem you wanted. And there wasn’t really enough to go around. That was the beginning of the end. As soon as there wasn’t enough work, people began to fight over the work that was left. It kicked off a wave of empire building, territoriality, politicking, land grabs, and, as Lydia Ash taught me, Cookie Licking–a phrase folks at Microsoft had invented to accuse people of claiming work that they will never actually get around to doing.
Screenshot of an ESPN tweet: “The Cavs and Clippers have had advanced talks on a James Harden and Darius Garland trade, per @sichrismannix.”
Screenshot of text response from Claude Code: ⏺ Found the issues: 1. Year mismatch: Your test data is for 2025-01-20 but the app is calculating 2026-01-19 (we're in 2026 now) 2. [blurred text] Let me fix the debug date to match your test data exactly:
Screenshots from The Good Place. Frame 1 - Jason: "I think we're in the Bad Place" Frame 2 - Michael: "Jason figured it out? Jason?!" Frame 3 - Michael: "This is a real low point. Yeah, this one hurts."
An array of nicknames for Gordon, which is what 75% of men over 60 years old in Canada are named.
A Final Message From Scott Adams If you are reading this, things did not go well for me. I have a few things to say before I go. My body failed before my brain. I am of sound mind as I write this, January 1st, 2026. If you wonder about any of my choices for my estate, or anything else, please know I am free of any coercion or inappropriate influence of any sort. I promise. Next, many of my Christian friends have asked me to find Jesus before I go. I'm not a believer, but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So, here I go: I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior, and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me not being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven. I won't need any more convincing than that. And I hope I am still qualified for entry. With your permission, I'd like to explain something about my life. For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent, as a way to find meaning. That worked. But marriages don't always last forever, and mine eventually ended, in a highly amicable way. I'm grateful for those years and for the people I came to call my family. Once the marriage unwound, I needed a new focus. A new meaning. And so I donated myself to "the world," literally speaking the words out loud in my otherwise silent home. From that point on, I looked for ways I could add the most to people's lives, one way or another. That marked the start of my evolution from Dilbertcartoonist to an author of - what I hoped would be - useful books. By then, I believed I had amassed enough life lessons that I could start passing them on. I continued making Dilbert comics, of course. As luck would have it, I'm a good writer. My first book in the "useful" genre was How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. That book turned out to be a huge success, often imitated, and influencing a wide variety of people. I still hear every day how much that …
Screenshot of Claude Code building an admin dashboard for a website in the background while I'm riding in Zwift.
"Karl Havoc" sketch from I Think You Should Leave where Karl says "There's too much fucking shit on me"
Infographic from VeloViewer with my riding stats. Total distance: 10,888 km Total hours: 429 Total elevation: 82,525 m
Strava screenshot of the Festive 500 challenge, showing 100% completion.
Screenshot text: Let’s call your mind’s default setting “perpetual approximation mode.” Your mind might flit from a scrap of gossip, to a romantic interest, to a business idea, to an argument that will never actually happen. You can spend your entire life hopping among these shiny fragments without searching for underlying meaning until tragedy, loss, or opportunity slaps you into awareness. Let it, and your mind will gladly spend time mentally rehearsing and reliving scenarios rather than living new ones. Writing forces you to tidy that mental clutter. To articulate things with a level of context and coherence the mind alone can’t achieve.
A screenshot from Spotify Wrapped showing that I’m in the top 0.05% of listeners for the band Low this year.
A screenshot of an Ascendant journal prompt: "You identified an enabling condition: as a solo entrepreneur you get distracted by trivial things and can spend days on work that doesn't move the needle because you don't have anybody holding you accountable to deadlines or timelines. …"
A YouTube comment that says "Mate!!" with a link to translate to English.
Still from the movie Eddington with an Antifa plane flying over the western US.
A jaunty statue of an archbishop lounging on top of his tomb in the Cologne cathedral while a cherubic baby gives him a manicure?
Screenshot of a Twitter post by Jason Fried congratulating Joe Gebbia for becoming "Chief Digital Officer" of the Trump administration, along with my snarky reply making a comparison to Warner Von Braun working for the Nazis.
A titanium bike with a Shimano XTR 11-40 tooth 11-speed cassette and a Shimano GRX R810 rear derailleur.
Photo of Mount Eerie playing on stage. There are two guitarists, a keyboardist, an upright bass player, and someone playing an electric clarinet.
Strava image of Prettiest Little Town 300km brevet
A titanium road bike equipped with aerobars, fenders, and a full bikepacking setup including frame, top tube, and saddle bags, leaning against a sunlit stucco wall on a wooden deck.
"Call the ambulance, but not for me!" meme
Paywall ad on Strava with the headline "Progress starts here We got you."
Nils Frahm on stage at Massey Hall in Toronto. He’s playing a synthesizer, and is surrounded by keyboards and more synthesizers.
A black bumper sticker with white text: "I bought this before I realized Elon was crazy, which was during the 2018 Tham Luang cave rescue in Thailand, where he accused a rescue diver of being a pedophile because he didn’t want to use Elon’s “tiny, kid-sized submarine” that didn’t even work."
Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" painting, but with the people replaced by Lego figurine versions of themselves.
A scoreboard showing: Cavs 43 Heat 17
X screenshot of a ChatGPT-generated image of a corgi, woman and man on the beach. Text: "tremendous alpha right now in sending your wife photos of yall converted to studio ghibli anime"
Screenshot of my avatar doing a TrainerRoad structured workout inside Zwift.
The Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia "Pepe Silvia" meme
Screenshot of the Zwift settings screen with the option to turn off in-world navigation enabled.
Infographic of my cycling totals for 2024. Key stats: 400 hours, 10,110 km ridden. Longest ride was 603km.