jake
@yetanotheruseless.com
he/they
/in/jakemannix, fka @pbrane
professionally: Tech Fellow, AI/Relevance, Walmart Global Tech
here: bad math/physics jokes, AI++, puns, OSS ML news, ultras/MTB/outdoorsy stuff, DL papers, shitposting, the fall of democracy
Abolish ICE, full stop.
/in/jakemannix, fka @pbrane
professionally: Tech Fellow, AI/Relevance, Walmart Global Tech
here: bad math/physics jokes, AI++, puns, OSS ML news, ultras/MTB/outdoorsy stuff, DL papers, shitposting, the fall of democracy
Abolish ICE, full stop.
Reposted by jake
buddy in minneapolis sent this to the group chat
January 16, 2026 at 7:37 PM
buddy in minneapolis sent this to the group chat
well shit, if we've caught Bruce Sterling's attention... *something* interesting is going on!
*Well, obviously it's problematic, but I'd be in favor of an industry that could use terms like "Gas Town" and "Great Loom," and not pseudodivine handwaviness like "Artificial Super Intelligence" or "Singularity"
I need to be following Gas Town a lot more closely. I've just had my own stuff going on! Project Alpha is barreling ahead. Work on the Great Loom continues.
I … sound like a crazy person. I should really stop naming reverse proxies things like "the Great Loom."
I … sound like a crazy person. I should really stop naming reverse proxies things like "the Great Loom."
January 16, 2026 at 5:42 PM
well shit, if we've caught Bruce Sterling's attention... *something* interesting is going on!
<hmm... laptop's not feeling particularly hot in my lap right now...>
<wonder if my refinery shut down. I should bug the mayor>
<crap: polecats dementus and furiosa musta run into some wolves>
yep, just another morning in gas town.
<realizes he's only been here 12hrs>
(Oo)
<wonder if my refinery shut down. I should bug the mayor>
<crap: polecats dementus and furiosa musta run into some wolves>
yep, just another morning in gas town.
<realizes he's only been here 12hrs>
(Oo)
January 16, 2026 at 5:30 PM
<hmm... laptop's not feeling particularly hot in my lap right now...>
<wonder if my refinery shut down. I should bug the mayor>
<crap: polecats dementus and furiosa musta run into some wolves>
yep, just another morning in gas town.
<realizes he's only been here 12hrs>
(Oo)
<wonder if my refinery shut down. I should bug the mayor>
<crap: polecats dementus and furiosa musta run into some wolves>
yep, just another morning in gas town.
<realizes he's only been here 12hrs>
(Oo)
well that was enthusiastically short lived :D
January 16, 2026 at 6:11 AM
well that was enthusiastically short lived :D
Well shit, with that many tokens left in that little time, what will I do?
Why I'll dispatch ALL the polecats, natch!
Why I'll dispatch ALL the polecats, natch!
January 16, 2026 at 5:57 AM
Well shit, with that many tokens left in that little time, what will I do?
Why I'll dispatch ALL the polecats, natch!
Why I'll dispatch ALL the polecats, natch!
and if you want to query the gas town DB, you can just ask a polecat to write a distributed mapreduce program in erlang, instead of telling *me* to go fuck myself!
gas town is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?
January 15, 2026 at 10:30 PM
and if you want to query the gas town DB, you can just ask a polecat to write a distributed mapreduce program in erlang, instead of telling *me* to go fuck myself!
Reposted by jake
my neighbor told me deacons keep killing his polecats so I asked how many polecats he has and he said he just goes to the orchestrator and gets a new polecat afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding polecats to deacons and then his daughter started crying
January 15, 2026 at 12:17 AM
my neighbor told me deacons keep killing his polecats so I asked how many polecats he has and he said he just goes to the orchestrator and gets a new polecat afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding polecats to deacons and then his daughter started crying
Gonzo Engineering! I love it.
This answers the question no one had previously thought to ask, “what would have happened if you gave prime Hunter S Thompson Claude Code”
January 15, 2026 at 1:40 PM
Gonzo Engineering! I love it.
cynic in me says "oh, so Murkowski and Collins demanded that two others flip so they could act like they had integrity (that they don't have)"
(and if nobody else would, they'd have made sure it didn't pass anyways)
(and if nobody else would, they'd have made sure it didn't pass anyways)
🚨 51-50, Senate votes to block Venezuela war powers resolution after 2 Republicans succumb to Trump's pressure tactics
Josh Hawley & Todd Young flip, vote to sink it.
All Dems + Paul, Murkowski & Collins vote to advance.
Vance breaks tie, blocking it.
www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...
Josh Hawley & Todd Young flip, vote to sink it.
All Dems + Paul, Murkowski & Collins vote to advance.
Vance breaks tie, blocking it.
www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...
Senate blocks measure to restrict Venezuela strikes after Trump flips two Republicans
Two Republican senators, Josh Hawley and Todd Young, flipped their votes after backing the measure in a procedural vote last week, enabling the GOP-led chamber to sink the resolution.
www.nbcnews.com
January 15, 2026 at 5:14 AM
cynic in me says "oh, so Murkowski and Collins demanded that two others flip so they could act like they had integrity (that they don't have)"
(and if nobody else would, they'd have made sure it didn't pass anyways)
(and if nobody else would, they'd have made sure it didn't pass anyways)
<flashbacks of the days when tiny fuckups in /etc/X11/xorg.conf would lead to days of having to dig around in the terminal trying to get it working again>
> Hey Claude, can you rebuild XWindows for me?
wHAt cOUld gO Wrong?!?
<cries in VT100>
> Hey Claude, can you rebuild XWindows for me?
wHAt cOUld gO Wrong?!?
<cries in VT100>
in a nutshell,
January 14, 2026 at 4:10 PM
<flashbacks of the days when tiny fuckups in /etc/X11/xorg.conf would lead to days of having to dig around in the terminal trying to get it working again>
> Hey Claude, can you rebuild XWindows for me?
wHAt cOUld gO Wrong?!?
<cries in VT100>
> Hey Claude, can you rebuild XWindows for me?
wHAt cOUld gO Wrong?!?
<cries in VT100>
ooh ooh ohh!
How often do you get to skeet about "the Anthropic Principle" to a bunch of Claude-obsessed nerds!
TL;DR: universe had to be basically flat because if it were relatively "- curved", it would've Big Crunch'ed before intelligent life could evolve, and if too "+ curved": no galaxies
How often do you get to skeet about "the Anthropic Principle" to a bunch of Claude-obsessed nerds!
TL;DR: universe had to be basically flat because if it were relatively "- curved", it would've Big Crunch'ed before intelligent life could evolve, and if too "+ curved": no galaxies
January 14, 2026 at 4:09 AM
ooh ooh ohh!
How often do you get to skeet about "the Anthropic Principle" to a bunch of Claude-obsessed nerds!
TL;DR: universe had to be basically flat because if it were relatively "- curved", it would've Big Crunch'ed before intelligent life could evolve, and if too "+ curved": no galaxies
How often do you get to skeet about "the Anthropic Principle" to a bunch of Claude-obsessed nerds!
TL;DR: universe had to be basically flat because if it were relatively "- curved", it would've Big Crunch'ed before intelligent life could evolve, and if too "+ curved": no galaxies
Really, it's in some ways "infinitely" more productive, because many tasks which would take me 10 days will just never get justified in my head.
But if I can get them done in one day on the weekend? Ok now we're talking.
So the space of possible exploration *explodes*.
But if I can get them done in one day on the weekend? Ok now we're talking.
So the space of possible exploration *explodes*.
How do you define 10x more productive?
January 13, 2026 at 8:36 PM
Really, it's in some ways "infinitely" more productive, because many tasks which would take me 10 days will just never get justified in my head.
But if I can get them done in one day on the weekend? Ok now we're talking.
So the space of possible exploration *explodes*.
But if I can get them done in one day on the weekend? Ok now we're talking.
So the space of possible exploration *explodes*.
Fuckin' MCP man
JSON-RPC with request ids to handle long-lived connections mapped to channels... and if you haven't been bitten by JSON and int64 in long time, you forget that it'll lose precision if you generate arbitrary i64's, and silently store keys in places you can't find.
Fine: fucking JSON
JSON-RPC with request ids to handle long-lived connections mapped to channels... and if you haven't been bitten by JSON and int64 in long time, you forget that it'll lose precision if you generate arbitrary i64's, and silently store keys in places you can't find.
Fine: fucking JSON
January 13, 2026 at 10:56 AM
Fuckin' MCP man
JSON-RPC with request ids to handle long-lived connections mapped to channels... and if you haven't been bitten by JSON and int64 in long time, you forget that it'll lose precision if you generate arbitrary i64's, and silently store keys in places you can't find.
Fine: fucking JSON
JSON-RPC with request ids to handle long-lived connections mapped to channels... and if you haven't been bitten by JSON and int64 in long time, you forget that it'll lose precision if you generate arbitrary i64's, and silently store keys in places you can't find.
Fine: fucking JSON
Vibe coding is giving serious "having a nice picnic with your friends, while your neurodivergent friend teeters around on a unicycle nearby, juggling hatchets"
Doing this on your last-years-present-to-yourself $9k MBP is bringing your grandmother's china to said picnic.
Yolo?
Doing this on your last-years-present-to-yourself $9k MBP is bringing your grandmother's china to said picnic.
Yolo?
January 13, 2026 at 7:53 AM
Vibe coding is giving serious "having a nice picnic with your friends, while your neurodivergent friend teeters around on a unicycle nearby, juggling hatchets"
Doing this on your last-years-present-to-yourself $9k MBP is bringing your grandmother's china to said picnic.
Yolo?
Doing this on your last-years-present-to-yourself $9k MBP is bringing your grandmother's china to said picnic.
Yolo?
Y'all having fun with Claude Code nuking directories, but me, I'm having fun with Claude running lil' oopsie on pkill with xargs, and watching all my little mac taskbars giving bouncies with fun error messages like "unable to render, crashing now".
My Claudio is a mass murderer!
My Claudio is a mass murderer!
January 13, 2026 at 7:43 AM
Y'all having fun with Claude Code nuking directories, but me, I'm having fun with Claude running lil' oopsie on pkill with xargs, and watching all my little mac taskbars giving bouncies with fun error messages like "unable to render, crashing now".
My Claudio is a mass murderer!
My Claudio is a mass murderer!
So since I’m in my own personal bubble, I’ll ask y’all this:
If you had a way to take N different pre-built tools, and you could configurably combine them into one or more tool-graphs (which appeared as a single tool) for your agent, without writing code, would you find that useful / interesting?
If you had a way to take N different pre-built tools, and you could configurably combine them into one or more tool-graphs (which appeared as a single tool) for your agent, without writing code, would you find that useful / interesting?
January 10, 2026 at 7:00 PM
So since I’m in my own personal bubble, I’ll ask y’all this:
If you had a way to take N different pre-built tools, and you could configurably combine them into one or more tool-graphs (which appeared as a single tool) for your agent, without writing code, would you find that useful / interesting?
If you had a way to take N different pre-built tools, and you could configurably combine them into one or more tool-graphs (which appeared as a single tool) for your agent, without writing code, would you find that useful / interesting?
Everything's weird, and you can get way out ahead of yourself. I had like 5 independent extensions of a prototype I've been building, across 2 repos, started testing them, sequencing all the branch merges and updates and remembering which ones had which features... kinda wrecked *my* context window.
"the price is that everything is fucking weird" 🙌
The bargain of this paradigm shift is absolutely shocking
computing becomes something fundamentally new
no longer just cars on rails
but autonomous mechanisms that can maneuver like spiders, coming at problems from multiple directions
the price is that everything is fucking weird
computing becomes something fundamentally new
no longer just cars on rails
but autonomous mechanisms that can maneuver like spiders, coming at problems from multiple directions
the price is that everything is fucking weird
January 10, 2026 at 3:18 AM
Everything's weird, and you can get way out ahead of yourself. I had like 5 independent extensions of a prototype I've been building, across 2 repos, started testing them, sequencing all the branch merges and updates and remembering which ones had which features... kinda wrecked *my* context window.
One of my early experiences in OSS was having to email the authors of a linear algebra library we wanted to absorb into our Apache project, but while it was 99% permissively licensed, it had this teeny, well-intentioned clause: "May not be used for military uses".
That encumbered our downstreams!
That encumbered our downstreams!
Don't make your software open-source if you don't like the deal. Personally, I think having a software commons anyone can use is a net positive for humanity, but that's just me.
I was open-eyed about the bargain of contributing to the commons when I got into open source so it's shocking to me that so many people came in the door without the understanding that publishing open source software means people you detest may use it in ways you despise.
January 9, 2026 at 9:22 PM
One of my early experiences in OSS was having to email the authors of a linear algebra library we wanted to absorb into our Apache project, but while it was 99% permissively licensed, it had this teeny, well-intentioned clause: "May not be used for military uses".
That encumbered our downstreams!
That encumbered our downstreams!
The thing I think super-lefty people in tech have forgotten is that the maximal "pro-worker" way to do open source is as I describe here: we usually work for big capitalist enterprises, right? We want a way to make sure as much of what we build, we can take with us from job to job. This is the goal:
The point was really never about "sharing" in some purely altruistic sense, it was about being annoyed at having to build the same thing 5 times at different companies, and to save *ourselves* effort, build it once in the open and keep reusing it everywhere we go, working together to keep it awesome
January 9, 2026 at 8:05 PM
The thing I think super-lefty people in tech have forgotten is that the maximal "pro-worker" way to do open source is as I describe here: we usually work for big capitalist enterprises, right? We want a way to make sure as much of what we build, we can take with us from job to job. This is the goal:
It's always interesting to notice the fashion differential between e.g. western europe, NYC, SF, Seattle.
(hint: the gradient from the first of those to the last, is a bit of a sigmoid: a slow dropoff, then very steep, then slows down again, but... in a direction of "getting monotonically worse")
(hint: the gradient from the first of those to the last, is a bit of a sigmoid: a slow dropoff, then very steep, then slows down again, but... in a direction of "getting monotonically worse")
January 8, 2026 at 4:58 PM
It's always interesting to notice the fashion differential between e.g. western europe, NYC, SF, Seattle.
(hint: the gradient from the first of those to the last, is a bit of a sigmoid: a slow dropoff, then very steep, then slows down again, but... in a direction of "getting monotonically worse")
(hint: the gradient from the first of those to the last, is a bit of a sigmoid: a slow dropoff, then very steep, then slows down again, but... in a direction of "getting monotonically worse")
I’ve always been fond <s/> of hyper parameter search by grad-student descent, myself!
I kid, I kid!
Working with Claude Code *definitely* requires “thinking like an architect/PI/PM” (with a healthy dose of “actually understanding a fair amount of fundamentals), to get highest leverage.
I kid, I kid!
Working with Claude Code *definitely* requires “thinking like an architect/PI/PM” (with a healthy dose of “actually understanding a fair amount of fundamentals), to get highest leverage.
I've often joked that as faculty I program in a high-level language called "graduate student". Having tried out Claude Code this morning, I (i) feel extremely at home, (ii) am realizing that research-by-graduate-student is perhaps the original vibe-coding. 1/2
January 8, 2026 at 2:06 PM
I’ve always been fond <s/> of hyper parameter search by grad-student descent, myself!
I kid, I kid!
Working with Claude Code *definitely* requires “thinking like an architect/PI/PM” (with a healthy dose of “actually understanding a fair amount of fundamentals), to get highest leverage.
I kid, I kid!
Working with Claude Code *definitely* requires “thinking like an architect/PI/PM” (with a healthy dose of “actually understanding a fair amount of fundamentals), to get highest leverage.
History doesn't make me feel particularly sanguine about <all this>, because eg. in 1965, there were hundreds of thousands of people protesting the Vietnam war, and people didn't yet even see how much worse it would get between then and '68... and then *Nixon* was elected.
How do things get better?
How do things get better?
January 7, 2026 at 9:38 PM
History doesn't make me feel particularly sanguine about <all this>, because eg. in 1965, there were hundreds of thousands of people protesting the Vietnam war, and people didn't yet even see how much worse it would get between then and '68... and then *Nixon* was elected.
How do things get better?
How do things get better?
Reposted by jake
in these moments, in my view, it is a political and spiritual DUTY for my outrage and anger to be as fresh as if I'd never heard how they shot Fred Hampton in his bed. As fresh as if I didn't know Bobby Hutton was surrendering when they shot him. 1/2
January 7, 2026 at 7:40 PM
in these moments, in my view, it is a political and spiritual DUTY for my outrage and anger to be as fresh as if I'd never heard how they shot Fred Hampton in his bed. As fresh as if I didn't know Bobby Hutton was surrendering when they shot him. 1/2
Timeline cleanse.
you're welcome!
you're welcome!
This wheel is to the boy squirrel the way that the football is to Charlie Brown and it still makes me laugh every time he tries to use it only to be immediately spun.
January 7, 2026 at 3:12 PM
Timeline cleanse.
you're welcome!
you're welcome!
so since my bsky timeline is evenly divided among "googleballs" and "i <3 my fren claude", I wonder why nobody is commenting on how if you go to Claude Code-upon-Web, and move your mouse over the little cuttlefish/cthulu (?), it squints its eyes and runs away?
January 7, 2026 at 2:45 PM
so since my bsky timeline is evenly divided among "googleballs" and "i <3 my fren claude", I wonder why nobody is commenting on how if you go to Claude Code-upon-Web, and move your mouse over the little cuttlefish/cthulu (?), it squints its eyes and runs away?