I launched Meutch in May! Thanks to friends who told me to stop fiddling with it and get it out into the world.
We ended the month with over a hundred people on Meutch. And 35 people joined a circle and took an action, which means I donated $35 dollars to a local sharing-oriented organization. This month it’s MakerWorks, where people share space, tools, and skills. As a reminder, I will donate to charity for every user who is active in a given month through all of 2026, so continue to borrow, loan, request, or giveaway!
It seems like anecdotally the platform is working. My garden now is full of plants that I got in response to my Meutch request – the tomatoes came from a friend while the green onions were especially magical as I got them from someone I didn’t already know!
Yesterday I borrowed a Sawzall via Meutch and used it to chop up some long scrap boards that were too big to fit in my garbage can. It was nice to use a high-quality tool without having to pay for it and store it – or even decide what model I wanted to buy.
The fruits of my labor and the tool I borrowed: this stack plus a bunch more in a garbage can.
And I heard from friends who borrowed a Pack N Play crib to host visiting family and a folding table and chairs for a party. Plus I lent a ton of camping gear to a work colleague who is trying backpacking for the first time.
Growth areas: I heard complaints and suggestions from users directly and also learned from how people use Meutch, leading to improvements (here’s everything that changed in Meutch in May). For instance, 96 people logged into Meutch in May, but two-third of them then took no further action. I’m now nudging new users to join a circle so they see activity in their feed immediately of what’s going on near them.
On the technical side, I completed the foundation for a mobile app, moving things around on the backend to get ready. Meutch is not a slam dunk case for a mobile app, given that it works fine in your web browser. But I think a lot of people expect a mobile app and I want to meet people wherever they are. That said, in June I want to prioritize the core web app experience.
Thanks to everyone who signed up and especially those of you who made a circle and told your friends about Meutch! I’m hopeful that we can sustain a foundation of activity among early adopters who are passionate about sharing and keep growing the user base.
Here’s to sharing in June! On my summer bucket list is to go tubing on the Huron River … I plan to borrow the tubes on Meutch.
I enjoy borrowing things from friends. And I love lending to them even more. We all have stuff sitting on a shelf that could be out there helping people! When I lend out my darning supplies, or borrow a board game to try it out, it warms my heart.
My sharing activity is limited by my worry that I’d be spamming my group texts, Slack chats, and neighborhood email list. But I know some people in those groups likely have the item I need and would eagerly lend it.
Surely, I thought, there must be some app for this? I looked for a community lending site for years and couldn’t find one that met my needs. There’s the local Buy Nothing group on Facebook but that’s not what I want – it’s massive, unorganized, and I have to go on Facebook.
In 2024 I found myself with free time as I recovered from surgery and began bringing my vision to life. It started off as a proof-of-concept, then took shape with a name, website, and serious functionality. I’ve been using it with friends and it’s finally ready for the world.
Meet Meutch!
I’m excited to unveil Meutch! The name is short for “mutual aid”.
Meutch provides a set of features that don’t exist together anywhere else:
It accommodates both temporary loans and permanent giveaways.
You share through circles to people you are socially connected with: your neighborhood, faith community, workplace, etc.
It’s uncommercialized. No ads, no data tracking, no fees, you don’t need a social media account – just an email address. To my nerds: the code is open-source.
Meutch benefits its users, who save money, avoid storing more things in their homes, and feel good from strengthening ties with people in the communities.
It also has big potential upsides for the world, as it can reduce consumerism (I’ve gotten items faster than I could on Amazon Prime) and build trust and connections at a time when we are atomized.
Let’s take a peek inside
Here’s the home feed of actual real-world sharing activity:
Beyond watching the home feed, you can browse & search items that people in your circles have posted.
The blue boxes show how far away an item is from you
Here’s my current Meutch lending activity (blacking out my friends’ names):
You connect with others by joining circles. These can be public, private (requires approval to join), or even unlisted. This screenshot was taken from my phone; there’s no native app yet, but it works well on a mobile browser.
It has been a delight to use so far. For instance, I wanted to try the boardgame Forbidden Sky; I posted a request and my friend Aaron saw it and lent me his copy. I played it twice and didn’t like it. I won’t buy it. Success!
Since the loan was tracked on Meutch, we got reminders to return it. Those would have been nice for everything I’ve lent over the years and then lost track of.
Here are some things I’ve lent so far:
Hammer drill and drill bits
Stockpot for making maple syrup
Sashiko clothes mending kit
Azul board game
Kintsugi ceramics repair kit
Project Hail Mary book
Pair of sawhorses
Balance bike
Calico board game
Tarp
Backpacking equipment
And borrowed:
Dungeon Crawler Carl Book
A black cape for Halloween
Forbidden Sky board game
A cat costume for my 2nd grader’s “dress up as a book character” day at school
Tools to perform a hydraulic brake bleed on my bike
I’ve also given away a bunch of objects, ranging from native trees that had reseeded in my garden to a roll of chickenwire.
It’s Go Time
So please: join Meutch! Register, join circles, then post requests and respond to others. Subscribe to the digest emails, ideally daily. Then you can see what people are posting and asking for and engage when you want, instead of needing to regularly visit the site to see activity.
I’ll keep improving Meutch, but it’s time to move from “build the software” to “grow the user base.” This is the hardest part! I need help from everyone I know in Ann Arbor to get to an activity level where people find the platform useful. Once we achieve critical mass, the sky’s the limit.
Yes, “in Ann Arbor” – for now. Meutch works everywhere else, but you’d have to bring your own group to lend with. A board game collective in Seattle could create a circle and start sharing today. I would love to see it happen! And I hope someday to help with outreach in other cities. But for now I’m focused on Ann Arbor, since that’s where my local ties are (I hope an Ypsilanti resident will create a circle for Ypsi).
One tip: I’ve added “share” buttons to circles and public giveaways and requests to spread the word about Meutch. These generate links that render pretty previews to people viewing the links from outside of Meutch.
These links are the best way to share Meutch resources on other social networks. For instance, you could share your request to Nextdoor, create a circle for your neighborhood and send it to the group’s email list, or post a giveaway link to Facebook. You get the attention on your post from those other networks while managing the activity on Meutch.
You can even share temporary links to your own items with people not yet on Meutch. So when someone posted to the Common Cycle email list, “does anyone have a bike repair stand I can borrow?” I was able to send them a link to my bike stand:
I’ve prioritized privacy in designing Meutch and you would have no way to tell that I have this item listed for loan unless we belonged to a shared circle. This share-link mechanism gives me a way to bypass that briefly for a single item when I want to.
That’s enough of me showing it. Go try Meutch yourself!
I’ll even bribe you! Kind of.
How else can I boost user engagement now? The most common strategies used by new tech companies are off-limits to me. I’m not going to create fake users and upload dummy items, the way Reddit founders populated their site using pseudonyms at its launch. And I can’t offer cash bonuses to active users, the way a startup with millions in venture capital backing can.
Here’s my incentive idea for Meutch: at the start of every month in 2026 I’ll make a donation to a local mutual-aid-type charity of $1 for every user active on Meutch in the prior month, up to $500. “Active” means you:
Belonged to at least one circle with other people
Took at least one action: posted a request, added an item, borrowed an item, or responded to someone else’s request or giveaway
This incentive isn’t restricted to people in Ann Arbor. Folks elsewhere might need to recruit a local circle to start sharing with, but I’ll count anyone active, anywhere.
I piloted Meutch in April with some friends from my co-working space. They told others and we got to 17 users who took actions last month. I’ve just donated that much to Common Cycle, Ann Arbor’s community bike repair nonprofit.
Seventeen bucks is measly, I know. I can put Common Cycle back onto the list later. Help me grow that number in the meantime!
My deep gratitude to those of you who share Meutch with your friends and neighbors at this critical early stage. I will be self-promoting Meutch now that it’s officially launched, but your word-of-mouth is much more effective and less awkward. If this project takes root, it’ll be because of you.
They were quite good! They were also a lot of work and I’m not often game for involved cooking projects so I haven’t made them again.
The most recent book I finished, Automatic Noodle, also found me reading mouthwatering descriptions of a food I’d never tried. The two books have a lot in common: near-future sci-fi set on Earth, anarchist vibes – even the titles are similar. (Side note: I liked Automatic Noodle but didn’t love it. I am realizing that “cozy” books, with their low-stakes plots and pleasant vibes, aren’t my thing.)
In this story, four sentient robots team up and open a noodle shop that serves biang biang, a certain style of Chinese hand-pulled noodle served with chili oil. I read the book in bed and kept thinking night after night, “I need to make these noodles.”
My kids and I finally did it! We were all pulling noodles and slapping them on the counter, wha-bam, and having a jolly good time. Some were thick, some were thin, some were very long. I stretched and slapped the noodles to my full extended wingspan and still they did not break.
I’m not sure we cooked them exactly right. We used this recipe but loaded into my recipe manager which doesn’t show all the pictures… looking at it now, and reading about how some biang biang is as thick as a belt, ours were too thin.
I would love to try an authentic version. That said, we were all thrilled with how they turned out and wished we’d made more.
Going farther back: the book Little House in the Big Woods enticed me to make maple syrup candy by pouring syrup on fresh snow.
It’s a testament to the authors’ evocative descriptions that each of these stories compelled me to cook.
Here’s an update on my journey deploying Apache Superset and using Docker. It felt good to write about what I’ve learned at work, and it’s been a while: I don’t think I posted here that my job title is now Senior Data Engineer! But people who don’t work on computer infrastructure might not find this one interesting.
In 2023, we deployed Apache Superset at the City of Ann Arbor as our Business Intelligence (BI) / data visualization platform, choosing it over Microsoft Power BI or Metabase. That decision has been a resounding success. Superset is a rock-solid product that keeps getting better … and* we’ve saved over $150k and counting in license costs vs. proprietary software.
I’ve re-read the 2015 talk “Choose Boring Technology” a couple of times while working in my current job (that link goes to a slideshow version of the talk, turned into a website – that’s the format I’ve experienced it in). The author talks about having only three innovation tokens to spend on new tech at a given time. The rest has to be boring. Then when you’ve mastered the new tech, you get a token back to spend on something else.
Deploying Superset took all my tokens: Docker, DevOps, Linux sysadmin. I said, we will only deploy official Docker images released by the Superset project. No way are we in the business of creating our own, this is complicated enough.
I learned a ton in the intervening years. I’m still learning a ton. It’s great! As I’ve gotten those tokens back by becoming competent at those technologies, I’ve been able to do more with our Superset deployment.
First that looked like building our own Superset Docker image, tweaking the environment but not touching the code. The project forced our hand on this because starting in 4.1.0, it no longer included basic drivers needed to use Superset out of the box, most notably the one to connect to the PostgreSQL backend database. I’m still not entirely convinced this was the right choice for the project but I saw the other side’s argument that everyone really ought to be building their own image.
It’s 2026. People can use AI to generate copious amount of decent code, especially if they already program and especially if it’s for a low-stakes use case and imperfections are tolerable. And the world is awash in used tablets.
Thus it’s no surprise that at least 3 of my coder dad friends have mounted old tablets to the walls of their kitchens and living rooms and hacked together displays of information for their households. It replaces the paper calendars of yore with digital calendars, yes, but also displays family photos, weather forecasts, meal plans, shopping lists, chore lists, and various bespoke widgets.
A commercial version of such a product is the Skylight. But who wants to buy a new device and then pay a monthly fee? Everyone DIYs it instead. There must be thousands of takes on this project. But are they all one-off implementations of crufty code? And I can’t just deploy someone else’s solution? When I investigated the space six months ago for my own purposes, there wasn’t a single go-to candidate that looked usable. DAKboard is SaaS, Magic Mirror² runs on Raspberry Pi and a display?
EDIT —————-
After posting this, two other options were suggested to me:
Home Assistant: good fit if you’re in that world already! But too technically difficult for most people and not meant to run on an old tablet.
TRMNL: these devices are pretty cool and I like the mix of paid and self-hosted options. There’s not exactly a grid where you can plug anything in, like the Vercel-hosted dog coordinator app. Also not meant to run on an old tablet. But this was the closest thing to what I had envisioned so kudos to that project.
END EDIT —————-
It makes me think there’s a need for a standardized framework. I’m inexperienced when it comes to frontend development and have no mobile experience, so I’m not the ideal person to make it happen. But here’s my vision:
A well-made, simple Android and iOS app that can run on the tablet 24/7
It supports things like on/off/dim hours or waking-on-motion-detection
It has a framework for building plug-ins. These are widgets that can display on a grid. Like dropping widgets on a smartphone home screen, they can be various sizes, moved around, and be assigned to new screens you can scroll to.
The plug-ins I would build would be for Google Calendar, Google Photos, a chore list for my kids, and a generic web view widget. My neighbor created an app deployed on Vercel where we coordinate which dog is outside so they don’t bark at each other through the fence.
(I think this latter part is where this product shines: you can plug in janky vibe-coded web apps via a single widget).
Other devs would contribute plug-ins for Home Assistant, Notion, shopping lists, weather, etc.
Apache Superset, the data visualization software I run at work and contribute to, has invested massive effort in refactoring the codebase to support extensions. VSCode is an inspiration in this regard. The idea is that extensions will make it way easier for developers to contribute new modular pieces to Superset. I’m thinking something similar here.
Then an end user doesn’t have to know coding to use it. They install from their app store, then select and configure the widgets they want. They just populate the necessary config and credentials for each widget.
Initially I wouldn’t worry about the “accessible to layperson end users” or “on the app store”, those have a higher bar for code quality and then someone is on the hook for maintenance (though maybe that can be monetized, especially if it provides API services like weather?). I would just make an app you can sideload (I have sideloaded onto Android before, apparently it’s possible on iOS too).
What I really want here is that instead of thousands of us doing a crappy job on this, we get one rock-solid framework app and then individual devs build high-quality plugins.
Does this already exist and I can use it & contribute instead of building from scratch? Please?
If not, who’s coming with me? What stack are we building this in? Where do we start?
I have a 6 gallon aluminum pot that I wired an electrical heating element into. It appears in my first post on this blog, Homebrewing on a Potbelly Stove in 2015. I’ve used it with success to boil maple sap into syrup.
This year I went to lend it to a friend for syrup making and they expressed concern that the aluminum pot might contribute off-flavors to the final product. A quick search confirmed that indeed, this belief is widespread in maple syrup-making posts online – they say an aluminum pot is inadvisable due to the syrup’s acidity.
As a longtime beer brewer, this claim seemed questionable. Citation needed! Off I plunged into a rabbit hole. In short, here’s why I don’t think this risk can be real:
Past participle: when others see through your attempt to pass off AI slop as your own writing and thinking, usually due to carelessness.
Ex.: “My teacher caught me sloppin’! I turned in my paper and forgot to remove a sentence at the end where ChatGPT asked, ‘if you like, I can complete one last pass of copy-editing.'”
“Sloppin'” can be used on its own to describe this lazy and deceptive use of AI, e.g., “I don’t read emails from John, he stays sloppin'”.
I read these two pieces a few weeks ago and they were still kicking around in my head so I re-found them to share. They are nice complements to my 2023 post about LLMs being good coders and useless writers. They argue that, in fact, LLM writing is often worse than useless.
Link 1: Using LLMs at Oxide. This is the best guide I’ve seen for expectations related to LLM usage at a particular workplace. It acknowledges LLMs as valuable tools while focusing on their ultimate purpose, serving humans. It’s good throughout, but the can’t-miss section is 2.4, LLMs as Writers. Here’s an excerpt:
To those who can recognize an LLM’s reveals (an expanding demographic!), it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is walking around with their intellectual fly open. But there are deeper problems: LLM-generated writing undermines the authenticity of not just one’s writing but of the thinking behind it as well. If the prose is automatically generated, might the ideas be too? The reader can’t be sure — and increasingly, the hallmarks of LLM generation cause readers to turn off (or worse).
Finally, LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.
If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?
When you use an LLM to author a [LinkedIn] post, you may think you are generating plausible writing, but you aren’t: to anyone who has seen even a modicum of LLM-generated content (a rapidly expanding demographic!), the LLM tells are impossible to ignore. Bluntly, your intellectual fly is open: lots of people notice — but no one is pointing it out. And the problem isn’t merely embarrassment: when you — person whose perspective I want to hear! — are obviously using an LLM to write posts for you, I don’t know what’s real and what is in fact generated fanfic. You definitely don’t sound like you, so… is the actual content real? I mean, maybe? But also maybe not. Regardless, I stop reading — and so do lots of others.
I see this from a few people in my professional network. It’s brutal.
“Your intellectual fly is open” is a good comparison to say “we see something embarrassing, we’re just not saying it” but it’s not strong enough in terms of the impact. Once I see someone I know writing through AI without disclosing it, I permanently distrust what they say from then on.
I was prompted to write this post when at a friend’s recommendation I listened to a podcast episode, AI and I: Why Opus 4.5 Just Became the Most Influential AI Model. The episode was okay, and I didn’t like the second episode of that show I tried. But I was struck by something the guest, Paul Ford, said. He spends much of the show discussing how he uses LLMs all day for coding and research. He’s building an AI-based product. But when it comes to writing, he said the bottom-line limitation of using AI is simple: “it’s not me*.”
It’s 2026 and I stand by my 2023 take. I double down on it, in fact: current LLM coding tools are leaps and bounds better than they were in 2023. When I wrote that post, Claude 3 had not yet been released, to say nothing of Claude Code, Github Copilot, Agent mode, etc.
But generating code is writing for machines. And LLMs still aren’t useful for writing to humans.
*I’m quoting that line from memory. I’m not going to re-listen to fact-check myself but please correct me if I got it wrong.
Sometimes you don’t intrinsically care about a topic but in the course of solving a problem you learn a bunch about it against your will. That’s me and winter tires. (For cars. Winter tires for bikes are fun and not a chore to me).
Here are my notes for … future me? My kids? In ten or fifteen years I’ll say “you should consider getting snow tires for your car, here’s the link to my blog.”
I find car stuff stressful, maybe writing this down will be cathartic.
Winter tires are worthwhile. Not having grown up in Michigan, I thought four-wheel drive was the thing for Michigan winters. I even bought a Subaru Outback. Then I learned from my car-savvy friends that winter tires make a bigger difference.
Why didn’t I have them when I lived in Chicago? I was about to blindly write that they weren’t necessary when I lived in Chicago because … the streets were plowed more? But that’s just wrong. Looking back on a few years of winter driving in Chicago:
I slid in the snow getting on Lake Shore Drive around 2008. I hit the curb, dented my wheel, and took the world’s longest bus trips to get my Corolla back from the repair shop.
About that time I barely made it home from work in a blizzard. The drive that normally took 25 minutes was 2+ hours. Along the way I totally lost traction on the Dan Ryan expressway. I was just sliding toward the barrier in slow-mo, wondering if I’d stop in time.
And I have a memory from some unknown age of trying to turn left across Lake Park Ave in Hyde Park and instead spinning 180 degrees into the oncoming lanes.
I was lucky to get away in all of those cases! I should have had winter tires in Chicago, storage would have been more annoying but I could have figured it out.
One year ago today* I gave away my left kidney. Taking a lap around the sun with only one kidney was everything I hoped it would be.
My body has long been fully recovered. I started learning ice hockey three months after donating; now I play in a beginner league and feel no sign of the surgery no matter how I stretch or sprawl. Besides my scars, which have faded from red to cream, there’s no sign I donated a kidney. I’m staying active, staying hydrated, and feeling great.
My one-year labs show my kidney function is as expected: about 60% of what I had with two kidneys. I gave away the larger one, which put me at about 45% remaining, but then the remaining kidney should have hypertrophied (grown) in response. At any rate, it’s getting the job done.
When I see my test values charted right on the edge of the normal range, I remind myself that my numbers might be concerning for someone with two kidneys but that’s not the accurate scale for me anymore and I’m where I should be.
This is, more significantly, my recipient’s kidneyversary. I still don’t know who they are and I remain satisfied with that arrangement. I hope the kidney is pumping away in good health!
Other donors mention have written that after a while, they forget about their donation. That’s humble, but in truth, it still pops into my head regularly. When the thought arises, it affirms parts of my identity that are important to me (I covered that in in the “how it feels” section of my blog post linked above).
One thing has changed since I wrote that earlier post: the donation never comes up in conversation. Immediately before and after the surgery, I talked about it with everyone. In the months that followed, people would ask me how I was feeling.
But now that it’s not affecting my life, there’s no context in which it arises. Which makes sense, it’s pretty far removed from the regular things people talk about. I can imagine a different timeline where I’m always deciding whether I should mention it, and I’m glad that’s not something I even have to consider. Sounds awkward.
I recently read The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I believe the book began as this essay. In the essay and book, she quotes a Brazilian hunter-gatherer who has killed an animal larger than his family can eat. Asked how he’ll store the surplus, he replies, “Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother.”
* this sentence was true when I wrote it, but I’m a day late in publishing.
