iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Feminella @jxf.me · 30/09/2026

I 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?

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 29/09/2026

I 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:

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 29/09/2026

After a few weeks of occasionally clicking this button on LinkedIn, I can report that my feed is materially less horrible.

A screenshot from LinkedIn's message options. One labeled "Seems like AI slop" is highlighted.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 27/09/2026

People who can't reason about (or won't consider) the impact of systems in their lives are doomed to blame individuals for their problems.

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 26/09/2026

Pro tip: the NICU sometimes accepts human-contact volunteers for holding newborns and premature babies when the parents can't be there (e.g. recovering from surgery, etc.).

John Feminella @jxf.me · 26/09/2026

Meanwhile, this sad boy valiantly defended the kiddos from an aggressive groundhog but got a bite in return and had to go to the vet. All the treats!

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Interestingly, the printed URL is legitimate, but the QR code goes to a different URL that is a redirection site for Civitech. If this is a GOTV effort it leaves much to be desired in its execution.

The trick is to create the box such that you don't care if Claude runs "rm -rf /". 😄

A satirical meme riffing on the "Frog and Toad" children's book series. Frog is holding a box and talking to Toad. The text below says:

Frog put Claude in a box. "There," he said. "Now he cannot run rm -rf /." "But he can run bash -c 'rm -rf /', said Toad. "That is true," said Frog.

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#rust folks: this is your periodic reminder to `cargo clean`

"Removed 87414 files, 50.9GiB total" reported by `cargo clean`.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 24/09/2026

I unironically love saying "it's orbin' time" out loud to annoy everyone

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Announcing: the Jamelle A. Bouie Photo Gallery and Taco Shop

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 23/09/2026

"Subscription cancellations will get easier and that's bad for the EBITDA of these companies" is the general thesis.

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 23/09/2026

By far the funniest thing I've ever read. Honey manufacturing is Gravitron for bees!

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 23/09/2026

Is there any chance at all you remember the source for this? It's one of the funniest things I've ever read and I'd love to frame the original thing firsthand for a beekeeper friend of mine.

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 21/09/2026

Sucked 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.com

FAA issues ground stop at Newark airport due to equipment outage

Flights headed to Newark were grounded Monday morning, while departures from the airport were experiencing increasing delays.

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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.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 19/09/2026

Get 10 million Amex points with this one weird trick: paying $100,000 for a room during UN General Assembly week in NYC.

Even the quotes they're getting from the humans working on this cursed thing are from generative AI:

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FAA tees up $875M AI tool to help manage air traffic congestion

0% 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.com

FAA plans for AI tool to help manage DC air traffic before a nationwide rollout.

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Cannot 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. 🤯

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I can get my laptop back up and running from zero with a repave/Nix/regular backups, but that's so annoying and I'd hate to have to do it because an agentic harness went haywire just once

John Feminella @jxf.me · 17/09/2026

Spotted this very handsome great-tailed grackle delightedly enjoying a bath outside my hotel.

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Famously, Jesus also tried turning it off and then on again, but it took 72 hours to reboot.

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(Relatedly: are we also assuming that people in general know what Koa is?)

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To be fair, I don't think this is a factually incorrect description of function hooks. They really do involve continuations (`next` in the signature), for example. But come on. That's not helpful for the vast, vast majority of people who are going to be reading this. You can just say "middleware".

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See also this legendary tweet from Isaac: "git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space". x.com/agnoster/sta...

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 15/09/2026

Actual quote from an Anthropic architecture doc explaining their new function hooks: "A hook is Koa-style middleware: it reifies an endomorphic continuation."

"A hook is Koa-style middleware: it reifies an endomorphic continuation."

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I think it's debatable whether it's token inefficient. It _uses_ a lot of tokens but that doesn't necessarily mean it's inefficient, right?

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Sometimes it's any scrutiny at all, which tells you a lot about how much effort they really put into it before it was shared with others.

I'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.

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Yeah, agreed. This is what I mean by the nuance of how you measure the power consumption. Depending on what you do or don't count it makes situations more or less favorable (sometimes in unexpected or undesirable ways).

The distributed version (2) draws roughly double the instantaneous GPU power but finishes each token much faster, so energy per token is lower.

Imagine Llama 3.1 70B with 16b precision, so you're at about 140 GiB. You could do: (1) 1 H100 with CPU offloading for the excess weights (2) 2 H100s with tensor parallelism, where each GPU holds half the weights, and they'll exchange small activation tensors over NVLink on each layer

John Feminella @jxf.me · 13/09/2026

Does this depend on how you're counting power consumption and what the point of comparison is? For instance, distributing models seems like it would absolutely reduce total power consumption on a W/tok basis, relative to trying to squeeze the same model on a GPU that doesn't fit all the weights.

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It's right on the state flag!

A satirical "explanation" cartoon of the Minnesota state flag, showing a loon that appears to be emitting a blue laser from its mouth in a way that emulates the state flag.

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 13/09/2026

If this had existed back in 2011 (Skyrim is almost old enough to vote!), IKEA would have instantly become a meme. People would be stampeding the stores to get KALLAX.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 13/09/2026

I spelunked a bit, but am kind of bummed that no one seems to have reconstituted the OG Space Travel source code somewhere.

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Every time I see a piece from him I have to resist saying "It's-a me, Dario!" out loud in my head

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Sloppy Linux is an incredible summary. A++ work

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Had 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!

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I'm hearing from Meta peeps that this was relatively well-received, but not anything remotely like a mea culpa.

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Working: Yes, but also seeing far better parallelization, reduction in context-switching, reduction in context-management. Hiring is hard: Endless rivers of AI slop resumes mean everything is gated, fronted, or network-first.

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Code reviews: an increasing challenge but manifesting as longer wait times, not rubber-stamping. Mostly I've responded by ratcheting up standards and not down quality. Open models: Agree it's getting mainstream. But imo industry is missing widely trusted turnkey option that enterprises will use.

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Death of IDE: I think the primacy of the IDE has declined. I don't think it's dead, though. Tokenmaxxing: never started but I'm glad it's over because it was obviously stupid.

"I used Puck instead of queueing so my orbs woke up for the ticket, then my Oracle looked at Space." Insanity.

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