Alex Nichol
@unixpickle.bsky.social
1.3K followers 210 following 360 posts
Code, AI, and 3D printing. Opinions are my own, not my computer's...for now. Co-creator of DALL-E 2. Researcher @openai.
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
unixpickle.bsky.social
Alexa+ is nice, but it did hallucinate almost immediately.
unixpickle.bsky.social
Did I beat the game? I got it to admit it was wrong.
unixpickle.bsky.social
Made an agent that generates 3D models by writing Go code (which uses my model3d package as a foundation).
unixpickle.bsky.social
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".
unixpickle.bsky.social
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?
unixpickle.bsky.social
I'm starting to believe that ExitStack() is a code smell.
unixpickle.bsky.social
To benchmark the agent, I made a few "simulations" of unsubscribe websites. The results are far from perfect! There's still a lot of room for improvement here.
unixpickle.bsky.social
Apps like Gmail try to give you automated "unsubscribe" buttons, but companies have clever ways of making this not actually do what you want. The most common trick is having many "mailing lists". By default you are removed from only one. This is also a trick on unsubscribe pages.
unixpickle.bsky.social
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...
unixpickle.bsky.social
Don't use floats for money.
unixpickle.bsky.social
Damn birds are striking again?
unixpickle.bsky.social
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?
unixpickle.bsky.social
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.
unixpickle.bsky.social
Why don't we have a programming language for deep learning where dtypes and shapes are part of the type system?
unixpickle.bsky.social
The "baseball Karen" has a narrow opportunity to start a podcast and scam millions of people with a memecoin.
unixpickle.bsky.social
completely messed up that I can try to type `10.9.0.4` and instead type `10.9.04` and it still works.
unixpickle.bsky.social
Pure evil: "you just checked out, you have exactly two minutes to get 20% off something else"
unixpickle.bsky.social
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.
unixpickle.bsky.social
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.
unixpickle.bsky.social
Apparently I am anonymous.
unixpickle.bsky.social
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.
unixpickle.bsky.social
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 ...
unixpickle.bsky.social
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?"