Alan Nichol
@alanmnichol.bsky.social
1.1K followers 280 following 130 posts
Co-founder@Rasa, doing chatbots since before they were good. Sharing takes I can't put on linkedin. Former physicist, wannabe chef, someday cuneiform translator.
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
alanmnichol.bsky.social
Is this like how NYT spelling bee asserts all Mexican food words are valid English.
alanmnichol.bsky.social
I used Siri to set a reminder to “go by Lupe Pinto’s” and I genuinely have no idea how it transcribed that correctly
alanmnichol.bsky.social
We used to complain about everything opining on everything 24/7
alanmnichol.bsky.social
In a world of slop posts having something to say is a radical act
alanmnichol.bsky.social
We’ve been trying to correct our toddler that her name is not, in fact, “you” and it’s quite the routine
alanmnichol.bsky.social
In German they don’t say “professor of [subject]” they say professor FOR [subject] and it irks me every time I see it
alanmnichol.bsky.social
Can you think of a demonym for an island in the med ?

“Corsican”
alanmnichol.bsky.social
The curse of intransigency
alanmnichol.bsky.social
Heard “AI slop” on bbc #wakeuptomoney this morning. Lads, we did it.
alanmnichol.bsky.social
good point well made
timkellogg.me
most people’s criticisms of MCP are either bogus or misapplied, but one that i never hear and should is that it doesn’t standardize partial function application

if you visualize the server as a class, and tool as function, the “constructor args” aren’t standardized

they go in ENV, headers, etc.
alanmnichol.bsky.social
to get promoted in tech, when you're out of your depth just say "we should be more strategic and less tactical". Boss move - makes it someone else's problem that you can't keep up.
alanmnichol.bsky.social
Great reporting by the FT but I would also read the hell out of 4K words on this written by an anthropologist in The Atlantic
alanmnichol.bsky.social
So 🔥
I love when startups do research and just ship in product. Skip the benchmarking theatre.
natesesti.bsky.social
Introducing Instinct 🐺, a new state-of-the-art open Next Edit model trained by @continue.dev

Runnable with @ollamabot.bsky.social and available today in VS Code
alanmnichol.bsky.social
Who would have thought that working from a building named after Thomas Bayes would expose me to so many nerdy maths t shirts
alanmnichol.bsky.social
Pausing to appreciate that the success of a gigantic company and a generational consumer product rest on people adding and removing shit like this to a system prompt.
timkellogg.me
the GPT-5 system prompt explicitly says not to ask clarifying questions

i feel like we’re hitting the bitter lesson on theory of mind. they’re trying to fix every last behavior bug, except human preferences are blatantly contradictory, you simply need to understand the person
Yann Dubois
@yanndubs
X.com
Fixing this is very high on the priority list for the next version!
The reason it says it in the system prompt is because the model was asking too many clarification questions (and thinking long for each) which IMO was even worse UX.
alanmnichol.bsky.social
will get to explain to my kids that there were A LOT of years between the world becoming completely dependent on the internet and it being a safe bet that there will be wifi at an airport
alanmnichol.bsky.social
getting unreasonably annoyed at the way the tech industry uses the word 'funnel'.
Have you ever used a funnel? did it discard 80% of the material? No. You're thinking of a sieve.
alanmnichol.bsky.social
wild how some weeks Discover Weekly is filled with bangers I've never heard before, and some weeks it's just dogshit.
alanmnichol.bsky.social
Always wondered about this!
alanmnichol.bsky.social
crushing my Q3 KPIs (eating as much stone fruit as I can)
alanmnichol.bsky.social
zoom when are we getting a feature to do meetings at 2x
alanmnichol.bsky.social
Lads we are now up 2.5%
alanmnichol.bsky.social
As someone who works in this space, yes exactly. Hard to take arguments about AI taking over seriously- the plumbing is always the hard part of automation.