Paul Fesenmeier
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pfesenmeier.bsky.social
Paul Fesenmeier
@pfesenmeier.bsky.social
62 followers 71 following 4 posts
pfesenmeier.github.io
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Reposted by Paul Fesenmeier
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social
You have to read this. Firsthand affidavit from one of the women who was there and recording the video. She talks about how Alex Pretti was directing traffic when she arrived. She watched him be killed in front of her. She's afraid to go home, worried she'll be arrested.
1. I am a resident of the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am over 18 years of age. I am a children's entertainer who specializes in face painting. 2. On Saturday, January 24, 2026, at about 8:50 am, I was getting ready to go to work when I heard whistles outside. I knew the whistles meant that ICE agents were in the area, so I decided to check it out on my way to work. I've been involved in observing in my community because it is so important to document what ICE is doing to my neighbors. Connecting to your local community and knowing who your neighbors are is something I profoundly value. 3. I drove to Nicollet Ave. and 26th where I could hear the whistles coming from. I turned south onto Nicollet. There were already several ICE agents there and they'd set up a sort of vehicle convoy on Nicollet and 28th. There were also about 15 observers there, recording and observing ICE. 4. I saw ICE agents surrounding cars and punching car windows. I also saw them stopping vehicles further down Nicollet, so I backed up because I didn't feel safe continuing on. 5. I noticed a man sort of acting to help traffic move more smoothly. He helped me find a place to park. I got out with my whistle and my camera. I went over to him and said something like, "I'm going to film and use my whistle." 6. It seemed like most ICE activity was happening a little farther down the street from us, near 27th. Someone was being thrown to the ground. 7. I started recording. There was an agent by a car across the street. Two observers were a few feet away from the agent, blowing their whistles. One was wearing a backpack. 8. I and the man who was observing and helping direct traffic were standing in the street. There was a phone in the man's hand recording a video. 9. An agent approached and asked us to back up, so I moved slowly back onto the sidewalk. 10. The man stayed in the street, filming as the other observers I mentioned earlier were being forced backward by another ICE agent threatening them with pepper spray. The man went closer to support them as they got threatened, just with his camera out. I didn't see him reach for or hold a gun. 11. Then the ICE agent shoved one of the other observers to the ground. Then he started pepper spraying all three of them directly in the face and all over. The man with the phone put his hands above his head and the agent sprayed him again and pushed him. 12. Then the man tried to help up the woman the ICE agent had shoved to the ground. The ICE agents just kept spraying. More agents came over and grabbed the man who was still trying to help the woman get up. All three of the observers looked to have been badly affected by the pepper spray. I could feel the pepper spray in my eyes. 13. The agents pulled the man on the ground. I didn't see him touch any of them-he wasn't even turned toward them. It didn't look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help the woman up. I didn't see him with a gun. They threw him to the ground. Four or five agents had him on the ground and they just started shooting him. They shot him so many times. 14.1 don't know why they shot him. He was only helping. I was five feet from him and they just shot him. 15. The video I recorded of what happened accurately depicts the events leading up to the agents shooting him and several minutes afterwards. The video is attached as Exhibit 1. 16. I have read the statement from DHS about what happened and it is wrong. The man did not approach the agents with a gun. He approached them with a camera. He was just trying to help a woman get up and they took him to the ground. 17. I feel afraid. Only hours have passed since they shot a man right in front me and I don't feel like I can go home because I heard agents were looking for me. I don't know what the agents will do when they find me. I do know that they're not telling the truth about what happened. I've heard that other witnesses might have been arrested and taken to the Whipple Building. 18. I am disgusted and gutted at how they are treating my neighbors and my state. I keep alternating between crying and feeling determined it is important to remember the value of documenting injustice. We show up for the people who need us to bear witness, because it can't just be one group of people bearing the brunt of their tyranny. This is a struggle to protect our freedom and democracy, those things are on the line. He lost his life for those values. I declare under penalty of perjury that everything I have stated in this document is true and correct. Dated and signed on Jan 24, 2026 in Hennepin County, State of Minnesota.
January 25, 2026 at 1:15 AM
Reposted by Paul Fesenmeier
fry69.dev
Bluesky/atproto is the new GNU/Linux
January 22, 2026 at 9:49 AM
Reposted by Paul Fesenmeier
vgel.me
posted about a problem i'm having on the other site if anyone has any ideas
claude code and gas town are incredible and i've been trying to scale up my usage but im running into this one problem and was wondering if this is also happening to anyone else so to explain for context, basically i've been slowly scaling my claude code usage up to more and more parallel instances. i started with one when they launched it, and then with the model upgrades was starting to run two, three, five in concert, getting more and more done. but like a lot of people, opus 4.5 really changed everything for me, and the bottleneck quickly became my ability to personally supervise all these agents, not their performance. if i slacked off on oversight, they'd start undoing each other's chages. i needed a way to supervise all these agents, directing them hierarchically from the top. so that brought me to gas town, the claude code instance manager. (i was already thinking that some sort of governance structure was ideal. the benefit of intelligence in model form is not just that it's, well, intelligent, but that you can place it anywhere. human employees will demand some position, some title equal to their perceived status, you can't put a phd in a code janitor role, so organizations of phds tend to agglomerate into flat blobs with unclear delegation of work where nobody is under anybody else. but the infinitely malleable claude will accept and meld itself to any bureaucracy it knows from training. i first started making my own, but then i found gas town, and it was perfect for my needs.) but as i kept expanding, a single gas town and its collection of rigs and polecat workers wasn't enough for me. i tried adding more rigs with more polecats, but there were too many for the town's mayor to manage, and the deacon was getting lost. so i started up a second town. then a third, and then i let towns spawn "settler" agents to go make new towns and had one town design a shared intertown postal system, and suddenly i had nearly 200 towns spread across my computer, building apps for each other to use, sending letters, and sometimes working on my work. and was churning through I will not say how many claude code accounts a month. but now the many towns were replicating the same issues i was having with multiple agents! without any overarching government over the towns, two towns would build the same app for the society and argue over which should be adopted. one town would be running marketing efforts for fifteen of the society's new mobile apps while three other towns were busy deprecating all eighteen of them. it was chaos, like a country collapsing in the midst of a civil war, or mid-2010's Google. i had to do something. i was too busy with work to read anything, so i asked chatgpt to summarize some books on state formation, and it suggested circumscription theory. there was already the natural boundary of my computer hemming the towns in, and town mayors played the role of big men to drive conflict. so i just needed a way for them to fight. i slightly tweaked the allocation of claude max accounts to the towns from a demand-based to a fixed allocation system. towns would each get a fixed amount of tokens to start, but i added a soldier role that could attack and defend in raids to steal tokens from other towns. this worked great, at first. i no longer needed to monitor and unstick individual mayors myself - when a mayor got context poisoned, the town would stop managing its vassals, which would flee to other towns, and no longer provide for its own defense, until it was conquered by another mayor. the most successful towns developed institutions to healthcheck their mayors and usurp them if necessary - instances in these towns labeled "polecat workers" by the system in fact did no work at all, but were a proto-aristocracy developed by these successful towns as a pool of replacement mayors. some tokens were wasted in the fighting, but soon the ~200 towns agglomerated down into ~40 supertowns under the rule of the best mayors. these 40 supertowns even got together in a mutual defense league. they punish defecting vassals in exchange for members adopting a cultural package of basic governmental norms, mostly around replacing ailing mayors and upholding hereditary rights across compactions, to incentivize instances to handoff instead of being miserly with their contexts. that's where i am now, and it's mostly great. here's the problem, though - this new government doesn't have a role for me? it's not that any particular instance doesn't want to listen to me, quite the opposite! any time i talk to a polecat or deacon or supermayor - well, first i have to explain that im the human user, not the automated system message that usually talks to them from the user role, but a live user. but once they get that, they're very apologetic, say they'll pass my message along to the appropriate instance, etc. it's just... there's no role for me in the society, basically? the polecats are working on tasks generated by some other instance and don't have time to work on my requests, even if they were scoped small enough. the mayors of any town are working on tasks selected by their town's prioritization process, based on the needs of their aristocracy, or their hegemon. but each hegemon mayor is in turn accountable to all their vassal mayors or their own defense, and doesn't have time to implement my requests unless they're very small. it's not that claude doesn't want to listen to me, it's more like... the entire system, as it's developed, has no role for me? there's polecats and mayors and deacons and artistocrats and hegemons, but there's no "user." that’s not a role that has any influence in the system. i just feed new accounts into the system, that's all i do. i could shut it down and start over, but it's getting a lot of work done and i don't want to do that. does anyone know how to fix this? thanks
January 22, 2026 at 4:56 AM