John Feminella

26 June 2025

[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.

lnkd.inBalloting has completed for C++26. Unfortunately it was Disapproved P-Members voting: 12 in favor out of 20 = 60 % (requirement >= 66.66%) (P-Members having abstained are not counted in th...Balloting has completed for C++26. Unfortunately it was Disapproved P-Members voting: 12 in favor out of 20 = 60 % (requirement >= 66.66%) (P-Members having abstained are not counted in this vote.) M...

Here's a brief explainer thread for what just happened around C++ 26. C++ contains two new features designed (in part) to improve safety. There's been increasing pressure from governments and cybersecurity organizations for the adoption of languages that are memory safe by default.

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Last week voting took place on the C++ standard. Bjarne promised that if contracts were not removed, he would personally lobby various national bodies (who have a voting say in the process) to reject the proposed standard.

Contracts were not removed, and Bjarne did as he promised. The balloting completed and the vote was not successful, so the standard did not get approved. Contracts (but also safety profiles) remain not part of C++.

There is also a contingent of Rust/"safe C++" folks who want the language to change in bigger, non-incremental ways, like adding function coloring to make sure safe functions only call safe functions.

The community has tried going down this road before, most notably in 2020. A similar "contracts" feature back then generated a lot of excitement but turned out to be too difficult to implement because it had too many different competing ideas. It was ultimately rejected.

Bjarne really, really doesn't like contracts. He wrote up why he doesn't like them: www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg... Conversely, some of the people writing compilers don't like safety profiles because they seem very hard to implement or too vague.

open-std.orgopen-std.org

Others also don't like safety profiles because if you're trying to make C++ safe by default, this is still an opt-in approach.

Safety profiles let you do stuff like: [enforce(profile::bounds_safety)]] at various scopes. The compiler then enforces invariants at compile time. Bjarne wants safety to be free or (at worst) very low cost to runtime. Because this happens at compile time, it doesn't affect runtime performance.

By contrast, contracts look more like runtime assertions. For example, you can specify preconditions or postconditions that are checked before or after specific code points. Since they happen at runtime they can impact runtime performance.

One of the features, championed by Bjarne Stroustrop, is called "safety profiles". Another, opposed heavily by Bjarne, is called "contracts".

Oh, so *my* password has to be 32 characters long, contain letters/numbers/symbols, and can't be a previously used password — but it's fine when a certificate authority makes their password "4"?

(But also, we should all be using passkeys anyway.)

If you don't like New Mexico's name, wait until you hear about New York, New Hampshire, and New Jersey!

latent.spaceCrossing the Threshold: How OpenAI and Anthropic Approach Autonomy and Safety in Financial AgentsAt AI Engineer New York, frontier labs and financial firms explored how to give agents useful autonomy while keeping consequential decisions under control.

Petition to make all human-computer interfaces as cool and steampunk as the National Museum of Mathematics does. "Not now, Steve, can't you see I'm working on my orb?"

John Feminella reposted

Richard MacManus

@ricmac.org

Replying to @jxf.me

I enjoyed your presentation, John! I included it in my article here: www.latent.space/p/crossing-t...

luma.comPapers We Love NYC | Learning Rules: What can math tell us about language · LumaPapers We Love, Espresso AI, Authentic and Antithesis are pleased to present the October edition of PwL. Papers We Love is a community of programmers who love…

On October 28 the NYC chapter of @paperswelove.org will be hosting Abed Qaddoumi, who will talk to us about "language identification in the limit" from a famous 1967 paper, and what math can tell us about languages (both formal and human). RSVP here: luma.com/xhgp3nlp

Reading the livestream comments from my keynote this morning and this is my favorite one:

Excited about one of my PRs landing in `pi-claude-bridge` so that I can see Claude subscription meters in Pi. Right now it's zeroed out because the bridge doesn't pass through the headers. :(

Thanks to all the attendees of AI Engineer NYC for coming to my keynote talk! Special thanks to organizers and conference staff Sydney, Kyle, Kate, and Aubrey for running the show; and to my colleagues Aji, Nathan, MIG, and Shams for slide review.

Amazon is selling male-to-male extension cords. It's probably worth a reminder that these are death traps. (If it's not obvious why that is, consider what happens when one end is plugged in: the other end is instantly energized and dangerous.)

I would like to unsubscribe from Plague Facts

Are there any cross-"platform" recommendations for publishing plugins which work in both Claude and Pi (and ideally other harnesses)?

Attendees at tonight's beCamp are reminiscing about great past beCamp talks and @emily.gorcen.ski got a shout-out! So many wonderful past and present topics.

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?

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:

Everest Pipkin@everest.bsky.social

I'm very please to announce a public release of my drag-and-drop bookmarking, game-making, and wandering tool Scrubjay! Scrubjay is a weird website builder that lets you cobble together web elements, images, links, text fragments, etc into a series of nested rooms...

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

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.

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

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

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

Jay Edidin@edidin.bsky.social

One of my favorite cases of someone being Wrong on the Internet was a very earnest, very confused vegan who was telling people how cruel honey is; and it eventually turned out they thought honey was made by putting bees in a centrifuge and spinning them around until they threw up.

newjersey.news12.comFAA issues ground stop at Newark airport due to equipment outageFlights headed to Newark were grounded Monday morning, while departures from the airport were experiencing increasing delays.

21 Sept

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...

21 Sept

"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.

This post is unavailable.

19 Sept

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

arstechnica.comFAA tees up $875M AI tool to help manage air traffic congestionFAA plans for AI tool to help manage DC air traffic before a nationwide rollout.

18 Sept

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...

18 Sept

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

18 Sept

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. 🤯

17 Sept

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

thelettersfromleo.comPope Leo XIV Does Tech Support and Tax Prep for His Brother in Suburban ChicagoJohn Prevost locked himself out of a new computer, propped his iPad on top of it, and called the Vatican. Then he told Italian TV what makes him proudest of his brother: “He hasn’t collapsed yet.”

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

Christopher Hale@christopherjhale.bsky.social

NEW: Pope Leo XIV’s brother, John, told Italian media that the pope helped him file his tax return and, over a video call, got him back into a computer he had locked himself out of. Prevost propped his iPad on the dead machine and asked his brother what to do. “Because I’m computer illiterate.”

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

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".

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

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

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...

14 Sept

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.

12 Sept

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!

11 Sept

The problem with Amp orbs (ampcode.com), Pi (pi.dev), and all of the interesting "bake your own agentic environment/runtime" stuff is it's impossible to talk about it without sounding unhinged. The level of weird and unnecessary jargon is bizarre and makes me suspicious.

11 Sept

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

9 Sept

Increasingly tempted to add a mandatory "slop check" to everyone's CI pipelines to prevent slop PR messages, log strings, comments, and other text from slipping through (or reduce them, at least).

opusfived.devOpusfivedMake one button blue. Change nothing else. A short interactive comedy about agentic AI assistants that can never just do the thing.

9 Sept

Nailed directly in the soul by opusfived.dev. Opus do just one thing challenge level: impossible. (This is why good harnesses are everything!)