John Feminella @jxf.me · 13hI posted about speaking at a conference on LinkedIn and got 162 (!) recruiter messages in the course of 24 hours. Insanity; how do people deal with this spam? 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 29/09/2026I can think of several smart humans who might be interested in trying this out, but my general take is that if you ever liked HyperCard you'll like Scrubjay: 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 29/09/2026After a few weeks of occasionally clicking this button on LinkedIn, I can report that my feed is materially less horrible. 010
John Feminella @jxf.me · 27/09/2026People who can't reason about (or won't consider) the impact of systems in their lives are doomed to blame individuals for their problems. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 25/09/2026The trick is to create the box such that you don't care if Claude runs "rm -rf /". 😄 030
John Feminella @jxf.me · 23/09/2026By far the funniest thing I've ever read. Honey manufacturing is Gravitron for bees! 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 21/09/2026Sucked into a hell vortex of flight diversions and cancellations right at the start of my day. Someday the country where the Wright Brothers launched a plane will figure out how to have operational airports. newjersey.news12.com/2026/09/21/f...newjersey.news12.comFAA issues ground stop at Newark airport due to equipment outageFlights headed to Newark were grounded Monday morning, while departures from the airport were experiencing increasing delays. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 21/09/2026"Has that ever panned out?", he said, posting his thoughts into an electronic ether instead of painstakingly arranging cast-iron pieces of movable type into a printing press, pulping wood himself to make paper, and nailing his ideas to a tree in the town square. 010
John Feminella @jxf.me · 19/09/2026Get 10 million Amex points with this one weird trick: paying $100,000 for a room during UN General Assembly week in NYC. 010
John Feminella @jxf.me · 18/09/20260% chance this goes well. The reason there's congestion is not because we don't have enough AI, it's because we don't have enough controllers. arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/f...arstechnica.comFAA tees up $875M AI tool to help manage air traffic congestionFAA plans for AI tool to help manage DC air traffic before a nationwide rollout. 140
John Feminella @jxf.me · 18/09/2026Cannot believe I've been a US citizen for four decades and only just noticed that "Kansas" is a substring of "Arkansas", but they're pronounced completely differently. 🤯 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 17/09/2026Spotted this very handsome great-tailed grackle delightedly enjoying a bath outside my hotel. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 16/09/2026Famously, Jesus also tried turning it off and then on again, but it took 72 hours to reboot. 030
John Feminella @jxf.me · 16/09/2026Actual quote from an Anthropic architecture doc explaining their new function hooks: "A hook is Koa-style middleware: it reifies an endomorphic continuation." 100
John Feminella @jxf.me · 14/09/2026I'm almost certainly in a bubble with `jj`, the distributed version control system that's also Git-compatible. But it's a very nice bubble. I wouldn't be overly surprised if, in five years, enterprises are starting to try it out. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 12/09/2026Had to dredge up my chemistry knowledge to explain to the kids that this toy is not "salt water powered", but rather uses up a much more limited resource, magnesium: 2Mg + O₂ + 2H₂O → 2Mg(OH)₂ Notice the salt water (NaCl in H₂O) doesn't appear anywhere in the reaction! 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 11/09/2026The problem with Amp orbs (ampcode.com), Pi (pi.dev), and all of the interesting "bake your own agentic environment/runtime" stuff is it's impossible to talk about it without sounding unhinged. The level of weird and unnecessary jargon is bizarre and makes me suspicious. 100
John Feminella @jxf.me · 09/09/2026Increasingly tempted to add a mandatory "slop check" to everyone's CI pipelines to prevent slop PR messages, log strings, comments, and other text from slipping through (or reduce them, at least). 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 09/09/2026Nailed directly in the soul by opusfived.dev. Opus do just one thing challenge level: impossible. (This is why good harnesses are everything!)opusfived.devOpusfivedMake one button blue. Change nothing else. A short interactive comedy about agentic AI assistants that can never just do the thing. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 06/09/2026Our cats watching me make dinner over a hot stove instead of simply going into the woods and hunting a field mouse. 020
John Feminella @jxf.me · 06/09/2026Hiked 8 miles this morning with some friends along the very peaceful and lovely Robinson River. It is now time for lunch: BLTs with greenhouse tomatoes from the garden. 100
John Feminella @jxf.me · 01/09/2026My "our website is completely legal" sign has people asking a lot of questions that are answered by the sign. 213027
John Feminella @jxf.me · 30/08/2026If a character in a movie explains their plans in detail, the plan is guaranteed to go awry or fail completely. If they say "I've got a plan" but don't elaborate further, it goes off without a hitch. Any apparent derailing of the plan will turn out to be accounted for in the plan. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 29/08/2026"We've got his hard drives." Sir... that is a PC power supply unit. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 25/08/2026A note for code authors in this AI era: * PR has more than one goal? It's too complicated. * Can't understand the PR's goal? It's too complicated. * Can't understand how the commit achieved a step in the goal? It's too complicated. * Can't review a commit? it's too complicated. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 23/08/2026What I thought I was doing: calmly putting a single dusty, cracked 1×1 Lego that's been under the couch for six weeks into the recycling bin What my children perceived: Dad laughing evilly as he permanently destroys a vital and irreplaceable piece of their imaginarium, like some kind of MONSTER 010
John Feminella @jxf.me · 21/08/2026Tired mouse hunters after a long but exciting day of catching two (2) field mice in the backyard. 010
John Feminella @jxf.me · 13/08/2026Anthropic removed a line in the system prompt that said "Default to no comments", so naturally Claude has now gone buckwild with comments. Teams love reviewing PRs like: ``` // let me sing you the song of my people: [5,000 more tokens] const TEASPOONS_PER_TABLESPOON: i32 = 3; ``` 1321
John Feminella @jxf.me · 09/08/2026Beds are just shelves that I lay my bone armor mech suit onto when I'm not using it. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 06/08/2026Same energy.static.klipy.comWho's That Pokémon? Pikachu RevealAlt: The "Who's That Pokemon?" Pikachu reveal scene from the anime series "Pokemon". 040
John Feminella @jxf.me · 28/07/2026Hypothesis: The "it's not X, it's Y" pattern that LLMs are so fond of outputting can be traced back to a single, very prevalent phrase in the training data: 637153
John Feminella @jxf.me · 17/07/2026Me looking at the air quality numbers on AQINow.static.klipy.comChernobyl: Not Great, Not Terrible QuoteAlt: Clip from Chernobyl of Dyatlov saying "Not great, not terrible." 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 12/07/2026My wife is out of town so the cat is settling for scratches from me tonight. 030
John Feminella @jxf.me · 10/07/2026This is going to turn out to be a single vibecoded Java class definition 120
John Feminella @jxf.me · 08/07/2026If I were FTC Commissioner, I would mandate that all popups with a "Maybe later" button must also have a prominent "Never ask me again" button. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 07/07/2026Wish I could bottle up these 67°F July days in NYC to save for when it's 90°F in August. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 01/07/2026Stay cool! Find a cooling center near you: nchh.org/information-... 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 23/06/2026Very curious to hear the detailed postmortem on Anthropic model failures this morning will be. Personally, I saw effects on the public Anthropic endpoints, but _also_ on Azure, AWS, and GCP, which is not typical outage behavior for model endpoints. Suggestive of a big configuration change, imo. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 19/06/2026Hot take: .gitignore should be for things _specific to that repository_. General files that should always be ignored go in your user-level .gitignore. 020
John Feminella @jxf.me · 16/06/2026In a very welcome move, it looks like @Anthropic is rolling back the `claude -p`/API SDK changes. 100
John Feminella @jxf.me · 08/06/2026Controversial take: making your coding agent a coauthor on your commits is harmful in the long run. It invites too much abdication of responsibility. 100
John Feminella @jxf.me · 08/06/2026Idea: The Doomsday Clock (thebulletin.org/doomsday-clo...) but for the Butlerian Jihad.thebulletin.orgDoomsday Clock - Bulletin of the Atomic ScientistsIt is 85 seconds to midnight. 000
John Feminella @jxf.me · 07/06/2026✈️ Off to NYC. This week's trip and work is sponsored by the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. (I've always wanted to say that!) 010
John Feminella @jxf.me · 05/06/2026If you love spending 6 hours in the RPG character creation screen instead of playing the game, Starship is for you (and me): starship.rsstarship.rsStarship: Cross-Shell PromptStarship is the minimal, blazing fast, and extremely customizable prompt for any shell! Shows the information you need, while staying sleek and minimal. Quick installation available for Bash, Fish, ZS... 000