John Downey

x.com/aikidosecurity/status/2...

Current status: setting up my own DERP server because this airport WiFi is blocking the tailscale control plane and DERP servers

Must be still looking for John Connor blockclubchicago.org/2026/09/...

Continue to be in awe of the great work my wife Mara does in Chicago

I finished www.recodingamerica.us/ this morning and it was a good read that hit on a lot of things I've thought about in terms of how government and tech interact. But, wow did it make me even more upset about what DOGE did to dismantle all of this good work.

Oh Salesforce is down? That must mean you can force your sales team to do the required training they're behind on.

I've updated this to add a build for 32-bit ARMv7 on Debian, which is still a common target, such as Raspberry Pis.

I too love the error messages in @gleam.run #elixirconf

At this point if you run a platform where users can semi-anonymously post content, you should probably be checking if OpenAI agent swarms are using it to coordinate and communicate.

It's been a while since a book has caused me to stop and laugh like Dungeon Crawler Carl book 6 Carl: Mordecai, who is the god Ogun? Mordecai: For fuck's sake, did you already summon another god?

My newest lukewarm take is that it should be required to have coffee for sale at an airport if you're going to have flights posted that early

I wanted off Google Authenticator without re-enrolling every account by hand. Keyhop scans the export QR codes with a webcam and re-emits each one as a standard QR code any other app can enroll. jtdowney.com/blog/2026/08/23/...

Bravo @jtdowney.com for adding password hashing algorithms Erlang's crypto module! So many NIFs can be removed from so many web applications when this is released, hype! github.com/erlang/otp/p...

Contribute to Gleam, you too can delete code I wrote in 2018

The more I work in the @gleam.run compiler, the more impressed I am with all of the existing work it does. There is a lot of interesting stuff that goes into compiling pattern matching into efficient JavaScript.

Reading the OpenAI/Hugging Face story and I think, maybe humanities real last exam is going to be seeing if we can construct these systems safely

And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer. x.com/andyfang/status/2077516...

Debian Trixie and Ubuntu 26.04 are still shipping OTP 27. I built an APT repo that automatically publishes new Erlang/OTP releases via GitHub Actions. Useful if you want current OTP on Debian/Ubuntu without containers, compiling from source, or asdf/mise. github.com/jtdowney/erlang-bu...

I don't get why you're all saying mythos is so expensive, this seems reasonable to me

In a world of ever-expanding programming languages packed with features, Gleam takes a different path: it chooses to stay small, focused, and resolutely practical. Learn more about this philosophy from my talk on Gleam and the value of small ⭐️ youtu.be/E6_JqYMeNqs?...

This is exactly what Turing had in mind, I am sure

I can't believe in this era of support chat bots I just said to myself "I wish I could just get someone on the phone"

This explains so much

Schrödinger's Straight of Hormuz

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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...

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.