Vinnie Falco 🍊

@Xmusknewsx John Connor

@KarenBassLA LOL imagine thinking that an endorsement from Jane Fonda is beneficial :)

Angelenos need leaders willing to stand up and speak out. Jane has never been afraid to do either

@Heavenly_Race_ I'm going to see your call and raise: I consciously adapt my register when the person is at a different level below me, so they can understand me. Well, I make sure to not deply my rhetorical set pieces that depend on a more broad knowledge base than what is average.

Follow me on Substack: @h1storymedia/note/p-194676060?r=6uhqc0&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@h1storymedia/…

Once you hit about a 20-point IQ gap, communication starts to completely break down. It's not that the lower IQ person is "stupid" (although that can often be the case) or the higher one is arrogant, it's that you're literally operating on different systems. A 20 point difference (roughly 1.3 standard deviations) means: Vocabulary and abstraction levels diverge sharply. What feels like crystal clear logic to one side sounds like vague, pretentious word salad to the other. Jokes land flat. Metaphors get taken literally. Complex cause and effect chains get simplified into "this good, that bad." Different time horizons and pattern recognition. One person thinks in months or years and sees systems, the other is locked into days or immediate rewards. Trying to explain second order effects feels like speaking another language. Also, processing speed and working memory gaps. The higher IQ person is already three steps ahead, getting impatient. The lower IQ person feels talked down to or overwhelmed. Both walk away frustrated. Both have wasted each others time.

@mitchellh A precise definition of slop is helpful: uncompressed LLM outputs. More here: #compression-creates-quality" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">github.com/cppalliance/to…

AI slop is good, actually. Slop is what enables fast parallel experimentation. The etiquette and skill is understanding the boundaries of where slop exists and the extent to which it should be cleaned up and how. A few examples: I’m working on the internals of some system right now. The API and GUI of this thing is fully zero shame slop. It’s horrible. But it lets me focus on the core quality while shipping a usable piece of alpha quality software to testers (transparent about the slop frontend). Similarly, this system has plugins. We sent agents in Ralph loops overnight to generate dozens of plugins. The plugins are slop. The quality is bad. The plugin API/SDK is absolutely not done. But we can test a full GUI with a full plugin ecosystem. When we change the API, we can regenerate them all. The cost of change is just tokens, the velocity is incomparable to before. I built Terraform. We tested and shipped TF 0.1 with about 3 very weak providers. Because we ran out of time. Building was slow. And when we changed our SDK the cost was immense. Totally different today, 10 years later. Today, I would’ve slop generated 100 providers (again, with transparency and cleanup later, but just to prove it out). As an anti example, I would not PR this (without prior warning) to another project. I would not throw this onto customers without full review or transparency (as I’m already doing). I would not accept first pass slop. It’s almost never right. Slop is a tool. And like anything else it’s not blanket bad or good. The context is everything.

My new favorite prompt: "git amend the top commit message make it grand"

If you're hand rolling an observer list with raw pointers and manual unsubscribe, stop This exact pattern can take down production systems. A listener gets destroyed, nobody tells the signal, and now you're debugging a segfault at 3 AM. There's a better way 🧵👇

Bitcoin-Core: The Self-Sealing Institution The protocol's repository owners are an abandoned institution operating behind a functional maintenance facade. vinniefalco.com/p/bitcoin-core…

@megamor2 I ran a red-team tool called the Advocatus Diaboli on the first paper "From Directions to Regions..." and I would be curious to know if the results are meaningful (standard warning about AI output applies) gist.github.com/vinniefalco/20…

3 papers accepted at #ICML2026 🇰🇷🎉 🔸 From Directions to Regions: Decomposing Activations in Language Models via Local Geometry arxiv.org/abs/2602.02464 🔸 Interpretability can be Actionable …able-interpretability-guide.github.io 🔸Hallucinations Undermine Trust; Metacognition is a Way Forward (out soon) @_galyo @ymatias Congrats to all collaborators!

@megamor2 Very nice work. Just out of curiosity, have you red-teamed the paper?

@kdaigle @mitchellh As if "work" was the missing thing.

@mitchellh I'm sorry, @mitchellh. The team is going to keep working to make GitHub something you can come back to with real proof, not words. Until then, I'll still be cheering on Ghostty as a user.

Ghostty is leaving GitHub. I'm GitHub user 1299, joined Feb 2008. I've visited GitHub almost every single day for over 18 years. It's never been a question for me where I'd put my projects: always GitHub. I'm super sad to say this, but its time to go. mitchellh.com/writing/ghostt…

@GergelyOrosz Human slop

Had to do a double take on this: Snap generates $6B of revenue, has 450M+ daily active users, and yet it’s valued at $9B (!!!) When you go down the rabbit hole to understand why this terribly low valuation, you learn very very interesting stuff about Snap+about the ads business

Boost.Decimal — IEEE 754 decimal floating point for C++ Significands stored in base-10, not binary. No more representation errors. No more rounding hacks decimal32_t · decimal64_t · decimal128_t. Plus fast non-IEEE variants for when you need throughput over strict conformance Full , , , and rounding mode support. Header-only. No dependencies. C++14 and up If you've been using integers or fixed-point to dodge binary FP in finance, embedded, or scientific code, this is the real fix

High-quality AI-assisted fiction is real. vinniefalco.com/p/the-novelist…

@adamfisk @gbildson Working on a book at the moment... took a little break from C++. Check out my latest project corosio.org (being worked on by my team).

@FalcoVinnie Hahah what's up @FalcoVinnie?!? Long time. @gbildson suggested I add you.

@adamfisk Interesting website you have there

@meowkoteeq selection bias

Never met a nix user who has reproduced