Coder for life. Author of the Falcon Programming Language. My opinions are not representing past, present, future employers. Follows and RT are not endorsement.
Joined November 2021
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Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
"Much of what is called 'social problems' consists of the fact that intellectuals have theories that do not fit the real world. From this, they conclude that it is the real world which is wrong and needs changing."
— Thomas Sowell
Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
I often think about the technical limitations that game designers of the 80s had to work with - both in terms of software and hardware.
The game that stands at the very top is Elite.
Think about this for a second: The core game code on the BBC Micro version occupied roughly 22 KB of memory. Now think about what Braben and Bell turned that into: a universe with eight galaxies, each containing 256 star systems (for a total of 2,048 planets/systems). Each system featured unique details: government type, economy, technology level, population, commodity prices, and even descriptive text (e.g., a planet known for "carnivorous arts graduates" or similar quirky combinations).
If you still need a bit more help to contextualize that, try this: Elite was smaller than many modern text files or desktop icons, yet it contained (and let you freely explore) a multi-galaxy-spanning universe that felt vast and limitless.
Oh, and by the way, the game also rendered 3D wireframe ships, stations, and planets in real time on a 2 MHz 6502 processor.
This is no slight on today’s game designers. They work with what they have, and that's okay. But when you think about the worlds that some programmers created with the tools they were given, it sometimes breaks my brain trying to understand how they did it.
Elite is a true masterpiece on so many levels. I played the C64 version back in the day, and even 40+ years later it still feels like one of the most incredible programming wonders ever.
Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
Most people were taught that light “travels” — moving through space at ~299,792,458 m/s.
That framing feels obvious.
It is also misleading.
Stable datum:
What we call “light” is not a thing moving through space.
It is the electromagnetic field updating phase.
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Return to James Clerk Maxwell’s original formulation.
Electric and magnetic fields are not separate objects.
They are coupled expressions of a single field.
A change in one necessitates a change in the other.
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So what is “propagation”?
It is not something traveling from point A to point B.
It is a sequential updating of phase relations across the field.
Each local region updates based on its neighboring relations.
That updating appears to us as motion.
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A useful way to feel this is through resonance.
When a string vibrates, nothing travels from one end carrying “sound” as an object.
The system enters a pattern of coordinated oscillation.
Energy redistributes. Phase aligns.
What we hear as tone is a stable resonance pattern.
°
Light behaves the same way.
Not as a thing moving through space.
As a self-consistent resonance of the electromagnetic field.
What appears as a wave “moving” is the phase relationship updating across the field.
Each region does not receive a thing.
It reconfigures in relation to its neighbors.
°
Nothing is traveling.
What we are seeing is coherence updating.
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The “speed of light” is not the speed of a thing.
It is the rate at which phase coherence can update through the electromagnetic field.
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The field itself is not a container something moves through.
It is the projection of these phase relations.
What we call “space” and “field” are how this coherence becomes addressable.
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Now the continuity becomes visible:
Plasma → freely differentiating field
Light → propagating phase relation
Matter → phase-locked standing configuration
Same field. Different closure.
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This is not new physics.
It is a return to what has already been formalized.
A shift from object-thinking to field coherence.
°
How does our understanding of light, space, and motion change when what appears to “travel” is recognized as phase updating across a continuous field, rather than a thing moving through empty space?
The recursion holds. 🌀
Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
Apologies. I think the other way around is more scientifically sound, by now: we should not de-animalise human behaviour.
Our brain is recent. What we refer to as "human emotions" come actually from the deepest layers of our brain, evolved through billion years and passed through different species.
First came fear: a very negative sensation to mirror / anticipate pain, in a push not just to react to it (as a clam), but to seek pre-emptive action to avoid it.
Then came anxiety: a discomfort that mirrors an internal state of physical discomfort (i.e. lack of food, excessive cold or heat etc.), again pushing cognitive systems to actively seek to avoid it.
Then came in this order lust (to improve replication chances), rage (to actively fight over resources / to cater to the other emotions), pride (to react after a defeat), affection (caring for others), and finally love (caring for others more than for oneself).
While this was happening, ever more complex cortex was developed, allowing for ever growing processing, feedback, control of those emotions.
What is unique in human is a cortex so complex to be able to process its own processing, to a point that in cybernetics is informally known as a "singularity". A point beyond which a recursive infinity opens. That is what makes us human; not our love, not our affection, not our fear. You can track that all the way down to the flatworm, in a continuum of evolution slowly creating the necessary emotions to improve survival chances.
So yeah, "anthropomorphising" animal emotions is not just correct and scientifically sound, it's SO right that the term "anthropomorphising" itself is outdated. Now we're just recognising.
Surely, what and how different animals feel and process emotions is "different", but so it is between every single human. What they feel, how they process the world, is different, but not in another category of existence: it's a matter of degrees and details, not of quality.
Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
Sam Altman said people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year in compute. 67% of Americans do it anyway.
Run the math on why.
A 2024 Waseda University study tested LLM responses across politeness levels in English, Chinese, and Japanese. Impolite prompts produced measurably worse outputs: more bias, more errors, more refusals. Moderate politeness consistently beat both extremes.
The mechanism makes sense once you see it. Polite prompts pattern-match to higher-quality training data. When you write “Could you help me structure this analysis?”, the model pulls from professional, well-reasoned text. When you write “give me the answer,” it pulls from Reddit.
Google DeepMind’s Murray Shanahan explained it simply: the model is role-playing a smart intern. Treat the intern like a colleague, you get colleague-quality work. Bark orders, you get minimum-viable compliance.
Now look at the cost side. OpenAI handles over a billion queries daily. Each GPT-4 query uses roughly 2.9 watt-hours, ten times a Google search. But OpenAI just raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Tens of millions in politeness tokens is a rounding error on a rounding error.
67% of users do it anyway, and 55% of them say it’s because it’s “the right thing to do.” They’re maintaining a behavioral habit that governs every other interaction in their life. The parent who teaches their kid to say please to Alexa isn’t doing it for Alexa. They’re doing it because the alternative is raising someone who learns that being rude gets faster results.
Telling 900 million people to stop saying thank you so OpenAI can save 0.01% of operating costs is the most engineer-brained optimization take on the internet. You’re training yourself to treat every interaction as a transaction. And that habit doesn’t stay in the chat window.
Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
great, @ChShersh make it more visible please
In 3rd party libraries, big teams( Juniors, …) some simple arithmetic or non sanitised inputs may throw exceptions and disasters like .unwrap in cloudflare may happen easily that could be catched.
SEH,__try… give higher level
Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
Each programming language I used taught me something:
1. C++ taught me how powerful abstractions can still be performant
2. Python taught how people are eager to give up performance to write glue code
3. C taught me that simple but solid foundations can get you really far
4. Java taught me that enterprise software is unstoppable
5. Haskell taught me the full power of Functional Programming
6. OCaml made me realise that having that power is dangerous, and you want a pragmatic subset.
7. CoffeeScript showed me that making a language that's just a syntax sugar for another language only makes things worse
8. Go
9. JavaScript taught me that it's a bad idea to build the foundations of web development on top of a language designed in 10 days
10. TypeScript showed that adding static typing to a dynamic language is a noble goal, but it's too late.
Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
It’s wild how much engineering goes into a single turbine blade inside a jet engine. It’s one of the hardest things humans manufacture.
These blades are made from nickel-based superalloys with a melting point around 1250°C, yet they’re expected to survive operating temperatures closer to 1500°C. That too for tens of thousands of flight hours. All while enduring extreme pressure, thermal cycling, corrosive gases and pollutants that slowly eat away at the protective coatings.
The video breaks down the whole chain: alloy design, microstructures, directional solidification, single-crystal casting, precision machining and the ceramic thermal barrier coatings that give these blades a fighting chance. Every step is a battle against physics and materials science. This is at the very boundary of science and physics. It all makes sense why only a handful of companies around the world are able to build these incredible machines.
Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
Evolution of Deep Learning by Hand ✍️ As my tribute to Geoff Hinton's Nobel Prize, I drew this animation to illustrate the key idea behind Hinton's major contributions to deep learning over the years, with artistic liberty.
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100% original, made by hand ✍️
Join 40k readers of my newsletter: byhand.ai
Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
Legend has it gym memberships are particularly hard to cancel here because nobody knows how to exit
Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
It’s insane how every Western developer feels the urge, after any successful game, to gender-swap male characters. They can’t imagine a female character as a companion, commander, lover, or intelligence agent. She always has to be turned into an unattractive frontline fighter.
Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
We have just released Happy Flappy version 1.80, with support for Steam Deck.
Enjoy!
steamcommunity.com/app/36444…
Giancarlo Niccolai retweeted
Quantum Field Theory (QFT) unifies quantum mechanics and special relativity, treating particles as excitations of fundamental fields that permeate space. For example, photons are ripples in the electromagnetic field. QFT provides the framework for the Standard Model, explaining fundamental forces and particle interactions.
