Opus 4.7 is a bit jumpy on the refusal

The DMRF Auction for Action is live through April 19. I'm on the board of the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation and have dystonia myself. Travel, art, dining, luxury items -- every bid funds research toward better treatments and a cure. Browse and bid: fundraise.givesmart.com/e/7Tyt7g?vid=1puich

"Honestly at this point: just nuke the world and start fresh on 1.21.11 with Geyser. It's a family Minecraft server, not production infrastructure. How attached are the kids to the current world?"

Claude is clearly not the parent of a 7 year old

A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines

words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/ get ready, cause this shit's about to get heavy (in terms of the number of bytes on the wire)

I'll take people I'd want to not have compare themselves to me for $400, Ken

If you are on the Vanta or Drata sales teams, remember to take regular breaks and drink lots of water. It is going to be a busy few days leading into weeks.

Unrelated, but what CLI tool is that? Just a script?

One undeniably good side effect of the massive push into agentic engineering tools: support for the previously-nascent Git worktrees feature is at an all-time high.

Last night, my 4-year-old daughter told me, "I want a YubiKey."

As an infosec dad, I was beaming, ready to explain phishing-resistant MFA and why she should probably start with passkeys.

Turns out she said "Hello Kitty."

Battling one of those fun bugs where you don't know why something is crashing but some internet traffic is causing it to crash. Good news: the background radiation of the internet will probably cause it to crash again if left long enough and this time my diagnostics should catch it.

Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal') in wisp ### Summary `wisp.serve_static` is vulnerable to arbitrary file read via percent-encoded path traversal (`%2e%2e`). The directory traversal sanitization runs before percent-decoding, allowing en...

I marked an item off my bucket list over the weekend and got my first CVE. github.com/gleam-wisp/wisp/se...

Donate to Together, We Can End Alzheimer's, organized by John Downey My name is John Downey, and I know firsthand how painful it is to watch a loved one suffe… John Downey needs your support for Together, We Can End Alzheimer's

Watching someone you love battle Alzheimer's is heartbreaking. I'm supporting the End Alzheimer's Fund & the Alzheimer's Association to fund research, care, and advocacy. Every dollar moves us closer to a world without Alzheimer's. 💜
gofund.me/9cdea6c27

There is something deeply funny about letting an agentic AI browser fill out a bunch of RFP forms for me and seeing that one of the forms has a question where you need to prove you are human by answering a math question, and the browser doesn't even stop to ask me. It just puts in the answer.

Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land, bear got to throw an interception on a fourth down

HMAC with SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256 produces incorrect results using node:crypto polyfill · Issue #31765 · denoland/deno Version: Deno 2.6.3 I am working on a cryptography library for the Gleam ecosystem and in testing my test suite against the various Gleam targets (Erlang, Node, Bun, and Deno), I noticed that Deno'...

Deno messed up HMAC-SHA-512/224 and HMAC-SHA-512/256 because they are so obscure, I am sure no one uses them github.com/denoland/deno/issu...

I just saw that my library had no unexpired copies of an ebook I had on hold and it made me remember that the overdrive/libby system is insane with forced expiration of digital books

Got back into reading this year by keeping three books going at once and switching by chapter. It removed just enough friction to keep momentum.

Wrote up what worked and what I noticed along the way:
jtdowney.com/blog/2025/12/18/...

I finished pragprog.com/titles/jbtracer/... after like 10 false starts, the big hurdle over the years was the pain of translating the tests from the book to Rust. It turns out LLMs will do that no problem now. I even got in there and tried some SIMD optimizations: github.com/jtdowney/ray_tracer

As the parent of a grade schooler, I feel like Spotify is trolling me with 6-7

Joker making a rust joke

Right now it's specific to GitHub as that was my use case but it could certainly be expanded

GitHub - jtdowney/distronomicon: Linux tool that checks GitHub for repository releases and performs automatic updates Linux tool that checks GitHub for repository releases and performs automatic updates - jtdowney/distronomicon

I got tired of manually copying binaries to servers, so I built Distronomicon. It automates continuous deployment of artifacts directly from CI and supports private GitHub repositories.

It's written in Rust and designed for Linux servers with systemd. Code is here: github.com/jtdowney/distronom...

GitHub - jtdowney/tapestry: Leverage Fabric's crowdsourced LLM prompts directly from your browser Leverage Fabric's crowdsourced LLM prompts directly from your browser - jtdowney/tapestry

Been a fan of Fabric (from @danielmiessler.bsky.social) for a while and wanted this for myself, so decided to build it. Tapestry brings Fabric patterns into Chrome/Firefox. Run prompts on any page without context hopping. github.com/jtdowney/tap...

Knowing that LLMs are a fuzzy approximation of the internet and then seeing how quickly Claude is willing to ignore failing tests does not bode well for the broader software industry

Inside every LLM coding agent are three wolves:

1. Superstar instantly spotting bugs you chased for weeks
2. Mid-level dev who can Google and read docs
3. Intern on day one with a recent head injury

Which shows up depends on your prompt and context. It’s not always immediately clear who arrived.

GitHub - jtdowney/tsbridge: A lightweight proxy manager built on Tailscale's tsnet library that enables multiple HTTPS services on a Tailnet A lightweight proxy manager built on Tailscale's tsnet library that enables multiple HTTPS services on a Tailnet - jtdowney/tsbridge

Had an itch to simplify my tsnsrv setup, registering multiple services easily in one process. Not a Go dev, but AI coding assistants (mostly Claude, a bit of Gemini) helped me build tsbridge this weekend. It supports Docker too, inspired by Traefik!

Check it out:
github.com/jtdowney/tsb...

Is it dns or bgp, I'm guessing bgp

Me too, Claude Code, me too

Something I realized yesterday while testing Codex on a legacy codebase: if your team already supports junior devs with clear documentation, strong test coverage, and clean architecture, you’ll easily adopt these AI coding tools. If you don’t, the AI tools will struggle just like junior devs do.

Proud to serve on the board of the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation and support its mission as a dystonia patient.

The DMRF's 2025 Auction for Action is live. Funds raised go directly to research and support for the dystonia community.

Take a look and consider bidding: bit.ly/4diKJVt