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John Feminella

@jxf.me

78 followers 40 following 170 posts

🥰: bits, bots, bucks, blocks ⏪: Two Sigma, EY, HHCS, Thoughtworks, Pivotal, Forge. 👤: Thing builder, conf speaker, curiosity advocate, dad.

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John Feminella @jxf.me · Jun 26

[Client → Server] PSH, ACK
│ Payload (17 bytes): 0xF0 0x9F 0x91 0x8B 0x20 0x48 0x69 0x2C 0x20 0x42 0x6C 0x75 0x65 0x73 0x6B 0x79 0x2E

👋 Hi, Bluesky.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 8h

If you want, I'm happy to walk through my setup for you sometime. OBS is very technologist-centered and "prosumer" grade, but it's otherwise straightforward once you get the hang of it.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 8h

I frequently record hour-long webinars for clients with OBS that are viewed by thousands of people, and it has only failed twice in 18 months.

Once was user error because I had the audio input set to the wrong mic and I didn't realize it, and once was a glitch that occurred from an overheating GPU.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 11h

Probably the most widespread public example is in blockchain-flavored Merkle trees, where it's usually bounded by fixed key length and the constant branching factor.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 12h

Me: "Hello, daycare. Here is a nontrivial fraction of my income. Please keep my children alive for 8 hours."

Daycare: "Thank you. Here is your child back. Every week we will roll a d20, and if it comes up anything other than a natural 20, your child will also come back with five hundred diseases."

John Feminella @jxf.me · 12h

How much of this advice is because it's an "AI startup" versus if you're just generally building particular kinds of things for any business? For example, would any of this advice to pick, say, Rust for X or Python for Y be different if you were at a startup that had nothing to do with AI?

John Feminella @jxf.me · 13h

Me waiting for a "generative AI is going to replace $JOB_CATEGORY" claim that doesn't come from a vendor selling me generative AI software that does $JOB_CATEGORY:

a skeleton sits at a table with a cup of coffee in front of it

Alt: Animated GIF of a skeleton sitting at a table with a cup of coffee in front of it

media.tenor.com

John Feminella @jxf.me · 2d

Taking a banana's 0.1 µSv from ⁴⁰K and assuming an LD₅₀/60 (lethal dose to 50% within 60 days) of 3-6 Sv, it'll take between 30 and 60 million bananas all at once to be reliably fatal. This is about 2-3 kg of ⁴⁰K.

Better get to peeling!

John Feminella @jxf.me · 3d

It is wild that we don't have "short-lived automatically deployed environment per branch" figured out as a default. It's the first thing I try to introduce in a new engineering organization/product/team because it's just such a massive productivity booster.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 5d

I'm already seeing some users refer to this flavor of content as "sloptok", a fun portmanteau of "AI slop" and "TikTok". Probably doesn't bode well for the quality of informational content we're about to experience over the next few years.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 5d

I think that to the casual YouTube Shorts, TikTok, or Douyin viewer, or to the general untrained eye, it would likely be challenging to identify this video as clearly AI after one viewing.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 5d

While objective evaluation of videos is much harder than objective evaluation of textual answers, it's nevertheless very clearly a capability leap over the earlier generation.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 5d

Prompt:

---
Scene: A NYC street interviewer asks several passersby if they know that they're just the result of a generative AI model's output.
Direction: The passersby act shocked, in denial, or in disbelief when they learn this.
Camera: We cut between each interviewee over the course of the clip.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 5d

OpenAI recently released Sora 2, their new video model. I had access to preview it this past week.

Just to give you a flavor of the general capabilities, here's a zero-shot 15-second video I made (no editing, no revisions). Prompt in thread.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 5d

What's your size?

John Feminella @jxf.me · 5d

If I have met you in real life and you would like a Sora2 invite code, DM me here and I'll send one along.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 7d

Sir, your alleged beef stew is veering dangerously (and deliciously) close to a boeuf bourguignon.

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 7d

It's free with at least a few credit cards, so you might check to see if it's available that way for you. I'm in the same boat — would never use it if I had to pay for it, but it's occasionally cut ~10 to 20 minutes off a line for me.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 8d

If you're in the US, check out womenbacktowork.org!

Women Back to Work | Inclusive Talent and Returnship Experts

Empowering skilled professionals to re-enter the workforce after career breaks. WBW connects top talent with companies committed to inclusion, and innovation.

womenbacktowork.org

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 8d

To be sure, there are tons and tons of hype charlatans, but there's _also_ a lot of robust tooling now that wasn't there before. Newer models are substantially better than their predecessors.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 8d

The more I talk to developers the more stunned I am at how little we are (as a community) leveraging the power of LLMs, and also how poorly we're using them now.

I feel like the median developer is using something like 1% of the available potential here. So much is being left on the table.

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 8d

Hi! Launch is specifically those three tracks -- we prioritize based on demand and what roles students are getting placed successfully into, and I'm sure if there were enough support for cybersecurity we'd think about expanding for that too.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 8d

A totally normal, not at all unhinged banner to have on a nonpartisan government website.

A screenshot of the header of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development website. A large red banner displays text: "The Radical Left are going to shut down the government and inflict massive pain on the American people unless they get their $1.5 trillion wish list of demands. The Trump administration wants to keep the government open for the American people."

John Feminella @jxf.me · 8d

Something LLMs are really great at that I'm bad at remembering: alt text on posted images! Often the entire content of my prompt is "alt text" and the image, and I get a great answer.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 9d

I love hiring interns so much that I'm on the board of a nonprofit that prepares college students and matches them with companies that want to do it too: joinforge.co

If you don't water the seedlings, the whole garden dies.

Forge

Learn the modern skills you need to make an impact in the world. Get connected with fun projects, awesome jobs, and a community you'll love.

joinforge.co

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 9d

Just discovered that even though Google Calendar's UI doesn't let you have multiple monthly recurrences (e.g. "first and third Tuesday of each month"), they can import and represent ICS files that do.

That means you can do something like this and it'll work correctly in Google Calendar: