# WT354 — A museum for nnxyz art - Issue: 354 - Published: October 24, 2026 - URL: https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/354/ - Summary: nnxyz rooms, 626 Nifty Ink works, stroke-by-stroke SVG replays, Linking Things, Claude Duet, AWS Lambda Web Functions, Margaret Hamilton. - Word count: 3167 - Domains: 512pixels.net, aws.amazon.com, blog.glyph.im, claude.com, commandline.microsoft.com, contextfirst.blog, educationminnesota.org, github.com, hadrian.io, links.thingelstad.xyz, news.mit.edu, nishtahir.com, nnxyz.thingelstad.xyz, notes.yourversionnumber.com, pele.run, quesma.com, sheets.works, spittyscards.com, techcrunch.com, thingelstad.xyz, unsloth.ai, www.404media.co, www.anthropic.com, www.colombari.org, www.eff.org, www.lennysnewsletter.com, www.maclock.shop, www.macsparky.com, www.mnpoetscollective.org, www.ripcitymn.com, www.youtube.com --- Hello there! I'm landing a double-issue Weekly Thing in your mailbox. Last weekend was "MEA" break in Minnesota. If you aren't familiar this is the long weekend where [Education Minnesota](https://educationminnesota.org/events/annual-events/mea-conference/) gets all the teachers together and everyone disappears on a short trip away. We went away for the annual trip with Tammy's side of the family. Hence no email last week. Some fun projects to share this week and a bunch of links to get to! I'm going to keep this short as I'm switching to watching the US Grand Prix in a few minutes! 🏎️ ## Currently **Building:** I've long had a "Projects" tab on my blog but a while back I picked up the `thingelstad.xyz` domain name and I've always planned to use that to host a number of projects. The first one is the [Things I've Built](https://thingelstad.xyz) site! **Building:** The links that I share in the Weekly Thing are stored at Pinboard in what is effectively a giant database. I've tried a couple of times to make this database usable on the web, not just in the newsletter. I told Claude what I was looking for and we built [Linking Things](https://links.thingelstad.xyz) that now has all 16,500+ links that I've ever kept. It is searchable, supports programmatic access, and the [stats](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/stats/) page is amazing.

> A world that doesn’t need new software > > is a world without ideas.

— Jamie

I was thinking about agentic coding and how quickly we can generate software now. What will this mean for creating new things and building? Will we just be done? How do I test my assertion that the appetite for software is infinite.

![A white rowboat marked Minneapolis Lakes floats beside an aluminum dock, oars resting across its seats, on calm blue water.](https://files.thingelstad.com/weekly-thing/354/images/03b774c6dd8e.jpg) The sailboats are off the lake in preparation for winter. _Oct 18, 2026 · [Minneapolis, MN](https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=44.92336&mlon=-93.31085#map=16/44.92336/-93.31085)_ ## Notable ### [How employment is changing at Anthropic](https://www.anthropic.com/research/employment-at-anthropic) Some interesting data on how work at Anthropic is being changed as Claude takes on more and more of the actual effort. "By August interactive AI agent hours outnumbered employees six to one." I read that as about 85% of their "workforce" is Claude. > This acceleration makes human attention the bottleneck for agent output. Even among non-technical employees, reading all the output of their Claude agents would take half their work week. In response, employees turn to "meta-work," of building visibility tools and monitoring agent pipelines. The "Reading Claude as a fulltime job" graph is mind-blowing and a direct representation of the above bottleneck. Engineers are starting to see this as you release agentic processes you need the entire flow to be agentic or it slows down massively. ### [How tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two](https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-are-feeling-in-2026) Technology has a pretty high burnout rate. I don't think it is discussed enough. With the massive transformation happening with AI we are seeing this push people in all sorts of ways. > Tech workers are either amplified by AI or shaken by it, and that divide shapes their feelings about work more than any title, tenure, or company. I wrote [Building and Puzzling about Software](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/09/17/building-and-puzzling-about-software.html) and would suggest those "amplified" are the Builders and the "shaken by it" are the Puzzlers. I believe that a lot of burnout in tech comes from the fact that you must always be learning, and learning is hard. After 30+ years in this field I know that is the one fact that has held true. You must always be learning the next thing. And at least for me as I get older that learning isn't as easy. > Significant burnout rose from 44.7% to 55.7% of respondents, while career optimism fell from 54.8% to 48.7%. To be optimistic for a bit, I do think that we will get to the other side of this and return to a somewhat normalized rate of change. Each major transformation in tech has a high change curve where everything gets redefined, and then you stabilize and scale on the other side. The time of that change is directly linked to the scale of the change. This one may take a while. ### [Deciphering Glyph :: Programming Isn’t Special](https://blog.glyph.im/2026/10/programming-isnt-special.html) I am receptive to the concept that programming can be like art. An algorithm can be beautiful. But ultimately a program has to run and follow the laws of the runtime. Art does not. Productivity is a meaningful consideration with programming that really doesn't extend to art. Yes you can artfully program, but there is also a cost and performance consideration that has no analog in the world of art. ### [Claude Duet | Your personal AI assistant](https://claude.com/product/claude-duet) This looks like Claude's answer to ChatGPT dot and I'm pretty curious about it. We can't install it yet but I did sign up for the beta program and as a Claude MAX customer I think I'll get in right away. Or at least I hope! What has me interested is the screenshot of the interface with three sections: Chat, Tasks, and Make. My guess at what those features might be is what has me excited. - **Chat**: this is expected and I would assume will be very similar to dot or any other "agentic" chat interface. If you are thinking standard Claude or ChatGPT I think it will be more like a continuous conversation with the agent. - **Tasks**: this is the thing I wish Dot showed me and doesn't. I can ask Dot (Otto) to do several things but I cannot see what its list of tasks are. So I have to remember to ask it if it has done anything. I've had it just lose track of things far too often. I'd rather have a shared task list that the agent and I see together. - **Make**: having an agent drive multiple Claude Code sessions is something I tried to do with Dot and it only worked okay. If Make is a way to drive a project through many coding sessions to an outcome I'm gonna be very happy. I'm hoping a Duet invite lands in my email soon! ### [Announcing AWS Lambda Web Functions](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-aws-lambda-web-functions-for-fast-consistent-web-app-performance-anywhere/) I was super excited to see this since I've lately built a number of serverless applications and what I really wanted was to just run a node instance in Lambda. Magically this landed just in time. The other amazing thing? I gave Claude a single prompt in a handful of projects and had moved four different systems to this. A little bit of debugging was needed but the apps are now noticeably faster. ### [Pele · Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG](https://pele.run/) Mermaid is an easy way to use pure text to describe a process flow or really any kind of diagram as text. The wonderful thing is you can then commit it in code tools and version it. There are a number of tools that then visualize those but most are not terribly nice. This library does a really good job of showing it. I asked Claude to include it on my Things I've Built site. The example for [Linking Things](https://thingelstad.xyz/things/linking-things/) is pretty good. ### [The people holding up the internet | Data Drop](https://sheets.works/data-viz/holding-up-the-internet) The reality is that so much of the software our world runs on was written by a really small number of people. This site does a great job of highlighting those folks and showing their accomplishments. These are the names we should respect versus the founders of social networks. ## The nnxyz rooms Years ago I discovered the work of nnxyz on nifty.ink. I acquired a few of his pieces and grew to like it more and more. I ended up collecting four complete collections of hundreds of pieces. I had always wished to create a gallery like experience for anyone to experience. With the help of AI I was able to make that vision a reality. **Check out [the nnxyz rooms](https://nnxyz.thingelstad.xyz).** Some highlights of what the website has. - **Every drawing can be watched being made.** The 574 Nifty Ink works are rebuilt from their archived brush strokes as native vector images, and each one replays stroke by stroke, with the recorded order, widths, colors and transparency. - **Hung like a museum, not a feed.** Six wings, 28 rooms, 626 works. Every work hangs in exactly one room, rooms hold 20 to 30 works, and each room is hung in the order the works were drawn, so a walk through a room is a walk through a few weeks of drawing. - **Wall text in a museum voice.** Each room has an introduction, chapters, labels, one-line notes, explained comparisons and a closing. - **An audio tour in every room.** Press play and a voice reads the room while each work comes on screen, about seven minutes a room, with pause, skip and a progress line. - **A screen saver that draws.** One work at a time, drawn stroke by stroke on black, held with its caption, then the next. Fullscreen, with your choice of drawing speed and hold time, and it can be limited to one room. - **A map of the building.** The collection as a three-floor museum map, rooms sized by how many works they hold, colored by collection, with doors between consecutive rooms and stairs between floors. - **Readable by machines too.** `/llms.txt` indexes the site for language models and `/llms-full.txt` carries the complete gallery text in one file. - **Light or dark.** A white gallery by default, black by choice, remembered across visits. The artwork itself is never altered. - **Everything downloadable.** Each artwork page offers the native SVG, the original PNG and the archived metadata and provenance records, with a link to the collected NFT. I hope you like browsing and experiencing nnxyz's work as much as I do. I feel like it has real movement and energy in it. nnxyz himself uses the term "thrash-art" — I dig it! I've never liked the VR gallery experiences online and I think this museum walk through, particularly with audio guidance, is a better way to experience it.

From Thingy, my agentic librarian

In past years, readers of The Weekly Thing have funded the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons through Supporting Membership. This year the giving goes to Signal: free, open-source, end-to-end encrypted messaging that runs on donations rather than advertising, which is what keeps it independent. The newsletter itself is free and stays free. A year of Supporting Membership is $48, and 100% of it goes to Signal. You are welcome to join the readers giving this way.

## Journal ### Saturday [9:30 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/10/we-took-tammys-mom-to.html) — We took Tammy's Mom to her first MN United game! It looked like we might get to see a win and sing Wonderwall but alas, the Loons did not hold the lead. Selfie of a man in a cap and scarf with three women seated in a crowded stadium, fans in light blue MNUFC jerseys behind.

Selfie of a man in a cap and scarf with three women seated in a crowded stadium, fans in light blue MNUFC jerseys behind.

### Sunday [4:11 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/11/my-maker-space-is-now.html) — My **Maker Space** is now in a totally workable and ready spot! Basement corner with a 3D printer on a steel stand, shelves of filament spool bins, a steel worktable, and a jazz painting.

Basement corner with a 3D printer on a steel stand, shelves of filament spool bins, a steel worktable, and a jazz painting.

**[Whitman on Walls!](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/11/whitman-on-walls.html)** — Mazie, Tammy, and I went to the Parkway tonight for the Whitman on Walls show. We weren't sure exactly what we were in for but it was a cool mashup of music, poetry, and video. > Minnesota poets respond to Walt Whitman's iconic words in a "Poetry Slam and Jazz Improvisation Meets Film Screening" at The Parkway Theater. In honor of the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the iconic poet Walt Whitman's celebration of the American people and their indestructible spirit, New York-based theatre collective Compagnia de' Colombari's film screening meets live performance event, [Whitman on Walls!](https://www.colombari.org/productions/whitman-on-walls!-(wow!)). > > In collaboration with [Minnesota Poets Collective](https://www.mnpoetscollective.org/), **John Munson**, and **Steve Sutherland**, sponsored by Calamus Project, and featuring a live music trio led by **Dean Magraw** (guitar), with **Liz Draper** (upright bass) and **Suwal Singh** (Tabla), will accompany the MN poets: **Ashley Gray**, **Mishal Mazin**, **Suheb Rumi**, **Timothy Frantzich**, **Allen Wilcox**, **Erik Riese**, and **Christian Worby**. Colombari created a series of seven short films featuring 50 actors performing Whitman's "Song of Myself." Two men speak at a mic beside a screen showing an engraved Whitman portrait as a bassist and tabla player sit stage right.

Two men speak at a mic beside a screen showing an engraved Whitman portrait as a bassist and tabla player sit stage right.

Selfie of a man and two women under a theater marquee reading 10.11 Whitman On Walls 630P, autumn trees behind them.

### Tuesday [8:30 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/13/lovely-to-connect-with-bigcharts.html) — Great time connecting with BigCharts alumni Steve Sutherland and Jim Rikkers! Three men pose for a selfie beside a brick house at a backyard gathering; one wears glasses, another a Twins cap.

Three men pose for a selfie beside a brick house at a backyard gathering; one wears glasses, another a Twins cap.

[9:00 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/13/cold-and-rainy-weather-put.html) — Cold and rainy weather put a damper on the evening but it was still cool to watch John Munson play with Steve Sutherland and I'm not remembering the guitar player's name in a backyard show. Guitarist in a cap, drummer, and singing bassist in red plaid play on a lit backyard stage at night before a wooden fence.

Guitarist in a cap, drummer, and singing bassist in red plaid play on a lit backyard stage at night before a wooden fence.

### Wednesday [10:00 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/14/we-saw-sting-tonight-at.html) — We saw Sting tonight at the Orpheum. It was really cool to see a music legend in such a small venue. It was a great show including a wide range of his catalog. According to Wikipedia he is 75 years old but doesn't seem like it! Sting plays bass under purple light beside a drummer, a giant screen of him behind them and audience silhouettes below.

Sting plays bass under purple light beside a drummer, a giant screen of him behind them and audience silhouettes below.

Guitarist, bassist, and drummer perform on stage under white light beams and red patterned projections above a crowd.

### Thursday [9:21 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/15/i-added-a-new-upcoming.html) — I added a new Upcoming feature to [Release Notes](https://notes.yourversionnumber.com): > Release Notes now has a new section for what's coming next. In Upcoming you can save birthdays, anniversaries, trips, and one-time events. You can choose when you would like these events to show up in your Release Notes. Trips include a destination with a start and end date. All of these upcoming events are private to only you. I’m having a lot of fun journaling each day's version. ### Friday [1:10 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/16/tammy-had-these-amazing-trophies.html) — Tammy had these amazing trophies made for the inaugural Grandpa Don games at this weekend's Olson Family Vacation. 🧡 Three identical bobblehead trophies of a bald man with glasses holding a gold cup, on blue gift boxes in a wood cabin

Three identical bobblehead trophies of a bald man with glasses holding a gold cup, on blue gift boxes in a wood cabin

[3:00 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/16/fire-tower-walk-in-pequot.html) — Fire tower walk in Pequot Lakes. My fear of heights kept me firmly on the ground. Steel lattice tower with switchback wooden stairs rising to a small cab, seen from below behind a black iron fence and pines.

Steel lattice tower with switchback wooden stairs rising to a small cab, seen from below behind a black iron fence and pines.

[7:24 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/16/im-bartending-tonight.html) — I’m bartending tonight. Home cocktail bar on a granite counter with liquor bottles, citrus fruit, shakers, jiggers, and a printed drink menu

Home cocktail bar on a granite counter with liquor bottles, citrus fruit, shakers, jiggers, and a printed drink menu

### Saturday [9:08 AM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/17/morning-coffee-with-a-nice.html) — Morning coffee with a nice fire. Hand holding a Sunrise Coffee Stop cup beside a glowing fire pit, with picnic tables and a red food trailer on the lawn

Hand holding a Sunrise Coffee Stop cup beside a glowing fire pit, with picnic tables and a red food trailer on the lawn

[2:24 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/17/card-shop-stop-for-pokmon.html) — Card shop stop for Pokémon at [Spitty’s Cards](https://spittyscards.com). Six people smile outside Spitty's Cards, a boy in front holding a Pokémon card box

Six people smile outside Spitty's Cards, a boy in front holding a Pokémon card box

### Sunday [2:00 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/18/this-weekend-marked-the-rd.html) — This weekend marked the 23rd annual Olson Family Vacation! It was our year to plan it and Tammy put together a wonderful weekend of fun including a ghost hunt, walk to the fire tower, the Grandpa Don games, Rafferty's pizza, exploring Nisswa and Baxter, "The Game", and me bartending! About twenty adults and children of several ages pose on leaf-covered grass beside a brown log house and yellow-leafed tree.

About twenty adults and children of several ages pose on leaf-covered grass beside a brown log house and yellow-leafed tree.

[2:00 PM](https://www.thingelstad.com/2026/10/18/it-is-fun-to-explore.html) — It is fun to explore new card shops in different cities so we stopped by [RipCity](https://www.ripcitymn.com) as we were passing through St. Cloud. We found some nice cards. Recommended! Selfie of a man in a plaid shirt and cap beside a teen in a Bayern jersey outside a trading card store with an open sign.

Selfie of a man in a plaid shirt and cap beside a teen in a Bayern jersey outside a trading card store with an open sign.

## Briefly Training a custom model is crazy expensive and I would assume someone was nuts to endeavor to do it for internal use at a company. Building a decision model though seems like something that may be very useful and applicable. → **[Build your own decision model](https://nishtahir.com/build-your-own-decision-model/)** Another take on training your own decision model. → **[Train your own Decision Model | Unsloth Documentation](https://unsloth.ai/docs/new/train-your-own-decision-model-with-unsloth)** Another decision model in the spirit of Jev. These are pretty useful and interesting for specific use cases. → **[Microsoft-Decision-1: Our model for fast decision-making](https://commandline.microsoft.com/microsoft-decision-1-model-foundry/)** Coding orchestration agents are showing up all over the place. → **[Superlite: hand an agent a spec, come back to tested work](https://contextfirst.blog/superlite-hand-an-agent-a-spec/)** Reverse engineering things is super simple for coding agents. → **[Video Game Reverse Engineering Community Shuts Down Because AI Has Made It Too Easy](https://www.404media.co/video-game-reverse-engineering-community-shuts-down-because-ai-has-made-it-too-easy/)** [Visualizing the series of cities](https://p.migdal.pl/invisible-cities-opus-5.5/) with a one shot prompt from Opus. Really cool. → **[I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities](https://quesma.com/blog/invisible-cities-one-shot/)** Video of demo from Minnedemo with great insight into plant operations. → **[Watt Window: See Your Energy Costs @ Minnedemo42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YLQPJd9OtU)** Full video of a great demo from Minnedemo. The responsiveness of the software here is impressive. → **[BeastBox: Your Mouth Is the Drum Kit @ Minnedemo42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnIrVCrbHe8)** Pioneering computer programmer and a giant in the field. Thank you! → **[Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90 | MIT News](https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007)** I find myself intrigued by this product but ultimately not feeling like I need to get my wallet out. I'm not sure where it would live in our computing life. Perhaps we just have enough screens? → **[With HomeView, Apple Shows How Powerful Its Ecosystem Can Be](https://512pixels.net/2026/10/apple-homeview-impressions/)** I'm a regular and longtime user of Drafts and I wasn't expecting this feature. It looks like it could be pretty useful for impromptu things, which is generally where Drafts shines! → **[Drafts Adds a Chat Console and Better Dictation - MacSparky](https://www.macsparky.com/blog/2026/10/drafts-adds-a-chat-console-and-better-dictation/)** Delightful little font. → **[Nordwand-Mono: A compact monospace neo-grotesque font designed for developers (and adventurers).](https://github.com/tywr/Nordwand-Mono)** This is a perfect Christmas gift for the Mac enthusiast in your life. 🎁 → **[Maclock | Mini Macintosh-Style Retro Desk Alarm Clock](https://www.maclock.shop/en)** Atrocious security vulnerability in one of the most ubiquitous languages used online. Ouch! → **[php2shell: Leaked critical PHP RCEs](https://hadrian.io/vulnerability-alerts/php2shell-leaked-critical-php-rce-cve-2026-109618-cve-2026-109619)** Happy to see this finally arriving in Safari! → **[Announcing Privacy Badger for Safari on macOS](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/announcing-privacy-badger-safari-macos)** This is great! Want to embed spyware and surveillance in your Smart TV? All that code is also an opportunity to hack the device and remove that stuff. → **[People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again | TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/19/people-are-using-ai-to-make-their-smart-tvs-dumb-again/)** Thanks for reading and if you visit the [nnxyz rooms](https://nnxyz.thingelstad.xyz) I'd love to know what you think — particularly if you take the audio tour! **Twenty-eight rooms hung, each drawing replays its strokes — nobody rushes** ## Echoes

From Thingy, my agentic librarian

The "shaken by it" half of a splitting tech workforce has a first-person account in [WT348](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/348/). Jamie shared an engineer's essay about losing a thirty-year flow state once agentic tools changed the daily work. _Ask Thingy:_ [How has Jamie written about AI changing how programming feels?](https://thingy.thingelstad.com/chat/?prompt=How+has+Jamie+written+about+AI+changing+how+programming+feels%3F&from=weekly-thing-354) Jamie's caveat to Glyph, that a program must run and answer to cost and performance, tempers an older admiration: he praised Knuth for titling his work Art rather than Science in [WT86](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/86/) and [WT221](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/221/). _Ask Thingy:_ [Does Jamie think programming is an art?](https://thingy.thingelstad.com/chat/?prompt=Does+Jamie+think+programming+is+an+art%3F&from=weekly-thing-354) The 23rd annual Olson Family Vacation counts forward from [WT24](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/24/), written during the 2017 gathering of Tammy's side of the family, then in its fourteenth year and grown from 10 people to 19. _Ask Thingy:_ [How has the Olson Family Vacation changed over the years?](https://thingy.thingelstad.com/chat/?prompt=How+has+the+Olson+Family+Vacation+changed+over+the+years%3F&from=weekly-thing-354)