iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Just had a super frustrating back and forth with ChatGPT on an OpenSCAD model. This was the first time I've seen it produce code with actual syntax errors and use the wrong names for arguments.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

"Have your cake and eat it too" is a dumb expression. Nobody wants to "have" cake; the only reason to have it is if you plan to eat it. So really the expression should be "eat your cake twice" or "have two cakes for the price of one".

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Spotted at Home Goods: an AI-generated image for sale to hang on your wall.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Just saved so much time by pasting a bunch of code into ChatGPT Pro, asking it to find any potential bugs, and letting it run during my meeting. I came out of the meeting and learned about two subtle shape errors that would have made results silently broken.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

Today I've been trying out a new concept for a programming language. Everything is an object; there's no separate notion of "functions". All fields of an object are lazy, and you can patch fields arbitrarily. A "function call" is just overriding "argument" fields.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

I recently claimed in a conversation that Apple doesn't have a leg up in the AI race because no consumer cares about running models locally. Maybe what I said will turn out to be as wrong as the 1970s sentiment that no normal person would want their own computer.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

I asked ChatGPT who the most famous person in the world is. It guessed Cristiano Ronaldo. Never heard of him. I feel very American right now.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Alexa+ is nice, but it did hallucinate almost immediately.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

Did I beat the game? I got it to admit it was wrong.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 27/09/2025

Made an agent that generates 3D models by writing Go code (which uses my model3d package as a foundation).

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

Before hiring a contractor, ask them how they keep track of how much you owe them and how much you've paid so far. The answer should be clear and simple (e.g. "I use a spreadsheet"). It should NOT be "I have a bunch of different versions of a doc in iCloud".

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

If the whole "put a fake bug in the urinal" thing works, why aren't there fake bugs in every urinal now that it's years later? Seems to me like nudge theory is either BS or impractical for various reasons?

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

I'm starting to believe that ExitStack() is a code smell.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

I made an agent that unsubscribes you from spam. It controls a web browser to navigate an unsubscribe page. The agent runs JavaScript to perform actions on the page, and gets to see a screenshot after each action it takes. Blog post: blog.aqnichol.com/2025/09/20/u...

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

Damn birds are striking again?

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 11/09/2025

There was a ~month where, instead of opening this app, I was learning graph theory. My mind felt so much more at peace. What should I learn next?

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

I don't understand laws around music. 👎 copy a few words from someone else's song. 👍 re-record your entire album word-for-word so the old version that you sold to a company for millions of dollars becomes worthless to them.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

Why don't we have a programming language for deep learning where dtypes and shapes are part of the type system?

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 07/09/2025

The "baseball Karen" has a narrow opportunity to start a podcast and scam millions of people with a memecoin.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

completely messed up that I can try to type `10.9.0.4` and instead type `10.9.04` and it still works.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

Pure evil: "you just checked out, you have exactly two minutes to get 20% off something else"

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Had a dream the other day that I met someone who went insane after being unable to pin down a memory corruption issue in a Flash game 10 years ago. I tried to help them by digging up the old code, and the first step was even figuring out how to run Flash games anymore.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

The other day I noticed that a service I wrote (and self-host) has a memory leak and has been getting OOM killed once every ~15 days for the last six months. I only noticed because my server was slower than usual, and I found that almost all memory and swap was full.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

Tbh, I don't even know how to get to a chat UI where I can interact with Gemini. Never looked into it and was never presented with it. Google completely failed with this.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

Neural networks with multiple features dimensions aren't safe. What happens when one feature disagrees with the other 511 of them? Which feature wins? That's why we only use one-dimensional neural networks here at ...

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 26/08/2025

In elementary school, we were given a list of electives to sign up for. I was the only person to choose "Solitaire". The teacher asked if I still wanted to do it, and I remember saying something like "isn't it *supposed* to be a solitary game?"

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

I feel sad that AI has ruined the emdash for my wife.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

Just saw an ad for Claude for the first time.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

Sudoku is just a graph coloring problem. The sudoku board is a graph where rows, columns, and 3x3 blocks are fully connected.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 10/08/2025

I implemented graph coloring using dynamic programming on a tree decomposition. The US map is quite "tree-like", with a treewidth of 6. This makes it really easy to compute colorings and other (typically NP-hard) problems on it.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

Someone tell me if you can use Genie 3 to generate an image from on top of an airplane while it sits on the tarmac. E.g. generate an airplane on a tarmac and climb on top of the plane or onto the wing.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

If you're worried that AGI will turn the world into a paperclip machine, have you met Jewish mothers? Mention your love of a certain food once, and the observable universe will soon be made entirely of this food.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

So what ever happened with that neuralink lossless compression challenge?

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Finally glad to see programming Twitter hating on Rust.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 24/07/2025

Implemented a little LP-based solver for the traveling salesman problem. It can solve a 52 city problem optimally in a few seconds. I also implemented the LP solver itself.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Fun little exercise: take a graph that happens to be planar, and find valid 2D coordinates for all of the points to turn it into a straight-line drawing.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

A new argument for air conditioning in Europe just dropped.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

I wonder if it'll try, given that it clearly found out the algorithm is unknown to be in P or NP-complete.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

If you want to implement WYSIWYG in your website, just put 💩 emojis all over your code because it's likely a shitty website. Most websites are.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

So there are no remaining reasons why MLX couldn't have just been a metal backend for PyTorch or JAX?

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 14/07/2025

The only show we actually need.

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Alex Nichol @unixpickle.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

I'm kind of curious: who actually uses graph theory in their day jobs? As a follow-up, who is using the networkx package in Python?

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