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John Feminella

@jxf.me

77 followers 41 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
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👋 Hi, Bluesky.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 8h

Pleased to announce that my biography was published by America's sole remaining bastion of journalistic integrity: theonion.com/cool-dad-rai...

Cool Dad Raising Daughter On Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out Of Touch With Her Generation

RENTON, WA—Local man Paul Campbell confirmed Saturday he was raising his daughter Emma on a variety of media carefully selected to help her cultivate an appreciation for artistic quality, a move that ...

theonion.com

John Feminella @jxf.me · 3d

Feel free to DM if you want a deeper dive in this sometime; have done an excruciating number of enterprise modernization efforts involving ServiceNow (sometimes deleting it!) and many other products.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 3d

Don't get me wrong; a considerable amount of the surface area has horrific default UX. But "ticketing" doesn't get you to $180B market cap.

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 3d

"Ticketing" is part of it, but that really undersells it. Saying ServiceNow is "ticketing" is like saying GitHub is for "version control" — technically true but massively underestimates the value to the enterprise for everything else that comes along for the ride.

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 4d

There are more neighborhood children stopping by to say hello in my house than there are family members.

We have become "that house" and my food budget is in shambles because everyone is staying for dinner.

Please send help.

John Feminella @jxf.me · 5d

The best Kanban board to have no tasks on

John Feminella @jxf.me · 7d

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 · 7d

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 · 7d

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 · 7d

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 · 7d

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 · 7d

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 · 9d

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 · 10d

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 · 12d

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 · 12d

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 · 12d

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 · 12d

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 · 12d

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 · 12d

What's your size?

John Feminella @jxf.me · 12d

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 · 14d

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

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John Feminella @jxf.me · 14d

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 · 14d

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 · 15d

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.