Nicholas Sliter 🌐

Lead SWE at Popeyes. Alum @Middlebury College. Math and CS. Developer of

[Nicholas Sliter 🌐 @Nicholas_Sliter]

Come see my presentation on COURSERANK at the 2023 Middlebury Spring Symposium!
https://t.co/2AbWSkPQG3

[frye @___frye]

two findings, and one that collapses the whole decision tree.

first: you haven’t sent your post. it’s sitting dormant in the text field — no bytes have touched the wire.

second, and arguably worse: you’re attempting to cancel your post. flagging this, because it’s the kind of mistake that drops genuine data.

your call on how to proceed:

1): save your draft. it’ll survive byte-accurate in the store, with the API call wedged until you revisit the decision.

2): discard your draft. no API call, no fan-out. i’ll add a note so a future session doesn’t re-up the dropped post by mistake.

[Ross Lazer @rosslazer]

this is largely the sentiment in the company slack

[Nicholas Sliter 🌐 @Nicholas_Sliter]

@volvoshine @RyansRankings Missing the Grove!

[atlas @creatine_cycle]

hey fable nice job on the jacobian conjecture now could you please use the doordash cli to order me popeyes 5-piece chicken tenders

[sohail @sohailmo]

when you ship that slop PR thinking you have a ‘way’ with agents, you’ve immediately impacted the trust people within the org have for you

the opposite tends to be more impressive - absorbing info/tribal knowledge/culture/politics for an extended time before taking action

3/n

[lisatomic @lisatomic5]

to be clear I'm fascinated and impressed by LLMs nearly daily but my god they are actually still so stupid at every single thing that isn't just writing code

they are bad at software (still), awful at data science, designing experiments, interpreting results, identifying actual gaps in published research, articulating actually interesting questions, writing anything up empirically-- they have no taste, they think extremely narrowly

and it's frustratingly hard to tell because they are writing stupid things *in the style of smart things*! and we are not used to that because until now that wasn't that common!

[McFranchisee @McFranchisee]

Every penny counts…

Ray Kroc always said that @McDonald's is a penny business. Sometimes with $1M remodels or 100k digital menu boards, we forget that a penny makes a difference.

I know you are getting sick of me talking about our Fried Apple Pie for America's 250th, but its impact can be felt. In the restaurant biz, average check size is a key metric. To increase it, you can raise prices, introduce higher-priced products (shift in pmix), or suggestively sell an add-on. That add-on needs to be simple, provide value, be desirable, and create a repeatable purchase. The Fried Pie hits every box.

Almost half of my average check increase has come from this one product this week, driving impact on sales. Here's the crazy part: the promotion starts on Tuesday. We are just in soft launch with no promotional activity, just word of mouth. I have one restaurant selling 5x vs baked.

What are your favorite restaurant add-ons or ones McD should offer?

[Jeff Amico @_jamico]

Miami tech scene failed because they put it in Wynwood instead of Coconut Grove.

This can be fixed!

[Nicholas Sliter 🌐 @Nicholas_Sliter]

@champtgram Everyone understands it, it's the fucking grove

[Yacine Mahdid @yacinelearning]

whenever I talk to a researcher that worked both in cutting edge and practical applications they always like:

“yeah the research stuff is cool, but tbh most of the gains in industry is just going in and cleaning the data”

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

this is art

[Katelyn Mei @MeiKatelyn]

🚨🎉Excited to announce that our paper “Grok in the Wild: Characterizing the Roles and Uses of Large Language Models on Social Media” is accepted at @icwsm 2026! In this paper, we investigate how, when, and to what effect Grok is used on X.

🧵1/n thread

[Nicholas Sliter 🌐 @Nicholas_Sliter]

@tunguz There's an infinite number of features you could generate from joining related tables

[Vic 📠 @VicVijayakumar]

The secret to being a 10x engineer is to live on the east coast and get in 3+ hours of deep work before your west coast coworkers are awake

[Nicholas Sliter 🌐 @Nicholas_Sliter]

@marcportermagee Try monthly with doggy daycare

[Nicholas Sliter 🌐 @Nicholas_Sliter]

@SamNewby_ CSV

[Nicholas Sliter 🌐 @Nicholas_Sliter]

@yifever "no"

[Nicholas Sliter 🌐 @Nicholas_Sliter]

@ryxcommar Even if a junior can vibevode some solution it doesn't mean they understood the problem or found the optimal solution (which in many cases doesn't even involve any code)

[Nicholas Sliter 🌐 @Nicholas_Sliter]

@ryxcommar IMO it's the exact opposite. Seniors outperform juniors 10x+ because they can independently plan and execute

[Nicholas Sliter 🌐 @Nicholas_Sliter]

@ryxcommar Agency, business knowledge, and communication are the drivers here, not a raw "I've coded for longer"