Take a needle. Any needle. Drop it on a floor with parallel lines spaced apart by the needle's length.

Do it again. And again. A few hundred times.

Count how many needles cross a line. Divide the total drops by the crossings.

You get pi.

Not approximately pi. Not "close to" pi. The ratio converges on pi as you keep dropping. 2/p, specifically. Which means if you drop 1,000 needles and 637 cross a line, you get 1000/637 = 1.57. Multiply by 2. That's 3.14.

This is Buffon's Needle. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 1777. Almost 250 years ago. Before electricity. Before statistics was even a proper field.

A ratchet is a mechanism that only moves in one direction - it clicks forward but can't click backward.

When you're in flow with an AI coding assistant, each "ooh what if we also..." only adds scope, never removes it. You can't un-have the idea once you've had it and seen how easy it would be to implement.

Writing CryptoKitties: What Happened Next made me want to see the connections between my kittens as a graph.

I thought it would be cool to generate an image of the connections between my kittens, but ended up vibe coding and releasing an open-source interactive family tree visualizer for CryptoKitties which can be used to explore breeding relationships, discover mewtation gems, and visualize a kitty lineage.

Here's my kitty family:

Click any cat to see details. Double-click to expand its family tree. Pink edges are matron (mother), blue edges are sire (father).

What the graph shows

Zoom out on any large dataset and patterns emerge.

Dragon sold for Ξ600 in September 2018. Load its ancestry alongside my cats and there's exactly one shared ancestor: kitty #1461. Born November 23, 2017, five days before launch. Part of the seed population. Nobody special at the time. Nine generations down one branch, Dragon. Through another, Mulberry, my mauve munchkin.

Moving the blog to a new platform meant going through everything I'd written. I hadn't thought about CryptoKitties since early 2018. Reading those posts, I got curious - what actually happened?

Axiom Zen spun off CryptoKitties into Dapper Labs in February 2018. First round: $12M from a16z and USV.

But CryptoKitties didn't just clog Ethereum. It invented the standard. Dieter Shirley, Dapper Labs CTO, authored ERC-721, the token standard that makes each NFT unique and indivisible. Every Bored Ape, every CryptoPunk, every piece of NFT art traces its lineage back to cartoon cats.

For three years, NFTs stayed niche. Dapper Labs built the Flow blockchain to solve the scaling problems CryptoKitties exposed. They launched NBA Top Shot in 2020. Video highlights as NFTs.

Then 2021 happened.

March 11: Christie's sold Beeple's "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" for $69.3 million. A JPG. At a 255-year-old auction house. Bidding started at $100. The final minutes saw jumps of $10 million, then $15 million. Beeple became the third most expensive living artist, behind only Jeff Koons and David Hockney.

Plugged the adapter between the DE-9 and the dongle.

Power on.

Flashed the refactored firmware. The one that had only ever run in the simulator.

Still nothing.

Wrong pins were fixed. New bugs took their place.

Claude Code was watching the serial log with me. Had been the whole time. Two windows open: Claude Code on one side, the log tailing on the other. Every state transition, every WiFi event, every failed AI call streamed past both of us.

Fix one thing. Next thing breaks.

Each fix uncovered the next. Weeks of simulator work couldn't catch any of them. Hardware could.

The last one was a single line. The main loop was returning early when WiFi wasn't connected, skipping all typewriter code. Moved the return. Recompiled.

Typed on the typewriter:

did that fix it? i think it did. 180 degrees twice is a full circle.

Daisy wheel spun. Carriage moved. Print hammer struck.

One moment...    It s-seems my circuits are aligned, Writer. Your
insight is keen; one hundred eighty units, doubled, does indeed
trace a perfect revolution.

There's almost nothing more exciting than a package from JLCPCB awaiting by your doorstep.

Bare board. Green. Crisp silkscreen with diagrams I picked from the Smith-Corona Service Manual.

Beautiful.