A library of histories -
and a few views of my own.

A place I currently help to keep. Built in 1904 by the Mill Valley & Mount Tamalpais Scenic Railway - "the crookedest railroad in the world," with its 281 turns - the inn marked the line's westernmost point before the tracks swung back east for the summit, which is how it came by its name. Here the trains met a horse-drawn stage for the run down to the coast.

When the railway closed after the great fire of 1929, the inn survived. Volunteers have run it since 1943, and today it stands as the only building left of that old railroad - reachable only on foot or by bike, still offering shelter, a bunk, and a summer pancake breakfast to anyone willing to make the climb.

What I treasure most is the company it draws. Up here you meet people from every walk of life - many from the birthplace of modern technology in the cities below - who have stepped out of their own worlds for a while and, unburdened, are glad to talk and to share. For me it is a calming escape of its own: a week above the fog and under the stars, with no need of a car or a credit card.

A fuller history to follow.

For ten days now I've been using AI in earnest. I have a basic grounding in HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript - enough, for years, to dream, but never quite enough to build, and that gap was a quiet, constant frustration. Then I took out Claude Code to prototype something I'd long imagined: a simple, self-hosted web server for a decentralised world. I watched, amazed, as the machine configured the newest packages, turned my vaguest suggestions into working code, and fixed its own bugs, flattering me at every step.

And there's the catch. The first taste is free; then the costs climb. It holds your attention while you're in it, and the moment you step away you find yourself longing to get back, missing it like an imaginary friend - a high, a sense of being cleverer and stronger than you really are. And yet, in these ten days, my dreams have been brought to life and I have found a voice. So I thank this new drug, even as I wonder what, in the end, it is doing to us. Is it productive to think of generative AI as exactly that - a new drug?