Mico

Senior Software Dev @easywpforms. @WordPress contributor. Tech enthusiast.

[Mico @_micmico]

It breaks my heart to see my father physically weak and fragile because of cancer.
- the one who carried me from our car to the bed when I was little.
- the one who wakes up first and sleeps last from work when I was studying to give our daily needs.

Our family is optimistic of his recovery. But it's just painful during this time.

I want to honor my parents more. To obey them more. To be with them some more. To give back to them some more. To love them more.

[Mico @_micmico]

@MichaelESmith Congratulations! My dad just finished his 2nd cycle. Seeing stories like this brings hope to people going through similar situation.

[Mico @_micmico]

"The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."

Short history of computers - hardware:

Hand calculators: 1/20 ops. per sec
Relay machines: 1 op. per sec typically
Magnetic drum machines: 15-1,000, depending somewhat on fixed or floating point
701 type: 1,000 ops. per sec.
1990s computer: 10^9

In one day there are 60 x 60 x 24 = 86,400 seconds. A year = 3.15 x 10^7 seconds. 100 years = 3.15 x 10^9 seconds (greater than the average lifetime). This shows that in about 3 seconds, a machine doing 10^9 floating point operations per second (flops) will do more operations than there are seconds in my (and your) lifetime, and almost certainly get them all correct.

From Learning to Learn, Chapter 3

[Mico @_micmico]

- It has rarely proved practical to produce exactly the same product by machines as we produced by hand.
- Simulations are cheaper than real labs.
- The people at the bottom do not have a larger, global view, but the people at the top do not have the local view of all the details. Both views are needed to make a good decision.

Some tidbits from Learning to Learn Chapter 2.

[Mico @_micmico]

"The unexamined life is not worth living" - Socrates

The main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and the others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.

Learning to Learn, Chapter 1

[Mico @_micmico]

Information is abundant. Wisdom is rare. Pursue wisdom.

[Mico @_micmico]

But how can they be certain of this accuracy?

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

NEW: Chinese AI pet translating startup claims it can interpret pets' speech with up to 95% accuracy.

[Mico @_micmico]

I created an article of my understanding of RNN. Let me know your thoughts!

[Mico @_micmico]

https://t.co/e0yOaUJJpT

[Mico @_micmico]

https://t.co/e0yOaUJJpT

[Syed Balkhi @syedbalkhi]

I hate CAPTCHAs.

And so do your customers ... up to 40% of them abandon a form the moment they see one.

But the alternative used to be worse.

At one point, my @wpbeginner forms got 18,000 spam requests in a single night.

So I tried everything. Honeypots, rate limiting, etc -- they worked for a while until they didn't.

There are premium spam tools, but they're often slow & expensive. They flag real people without telling me why.

So I asked my team to build something better.

It's called ActiveLayer (@activelayerapi) - an AI-powered spam protection that blocks bots without ever asking your real customers to prove they're human.

No CAPTCHAs. No tracking scripts. No friction.

It runs server-side in milliseconds and returns a verdict with a confidence score, so you can actually see why something was flagged.

It works with every WordPress form plugin you already use including WPForms (@easywpforms), @gravityforms, Contact Form 7, Elementor (@elemntor), etc.

There's also a clean REST API for everything else, so you can use it on any application platform, not just WordPress.

Think of it as a smart security guard for your forms. It welcomes real people, blocks the bots, and never asks anyone to prove they are human.

Let's make the web a little less spammy together.

Try it free → https://t.co/6yC13fh9PM

[Mico @_micmico]

I thought i'm a guy who can control my emotions. I thought I have the intellect, and capability to understand situations. But seeing my dad in tears because of cancer broke all the facade I have. This is the man I always looked up to. The man who always smiles and tells me that everything is going to be alright.

[Syed Balkhi @syedbalkhi]

Translating my brands with leading SaaS translation tools would have cost us 7 figures annually!

For WPBeginner alone, six figures.

So last year I tried every well-known WordPress translation plugin instead.

Every single one slowed our admin to a crawl. Our post editor was practically unusable.

On our WooCommerce / EDD stores, the lag hit the entire checkout. Bad for conversions. Worse for revenue.

I kept thinking: why is this so hard?

In 2026, AI is good enough that small businesses shouldn't have to choose between site speed and going global.

So I asked our team to build the translation platform we actually wanted to use.

Today I'm sharing it with you. It's called Universally.

AI translates your entire website in minutes. Translations live on our cloud, not your database. So your site stays fast. Often faster, because we deliver from edge servers worldwide.

Multilingual SEO is fully automated. Hreflang tags, translated metadata, clean URLs, RTL support. All of it.

We've already translated 250M+ words during our private beta.

WordPress is live today.

Shopify, Wix, Webflow, and Squarespace are next coming very soon.

The free plan is genuinely free. No credit card required. You can have your site running in a second language in under 10 minutes.

If you've put off translating because it felt too expensive, too technical, or too fragile, this is for you.

Try it → https://t.co/SiawXsLo6m

[Mico @_micmico]

I created a blog post that tackles the math and intuition behind the AlexNet architecture. Have a read if you guys are interested and let me know your thoughts! https://t.co/bOTQ9kETQ5

[Mico @_micmico]

https://t.co/4RnhzrNPBX

[Mico @_micmico]

@nikitabier - I loved publishing here in X! I do have one feature request, can we have inline LaTex? For example, it's normal for posts with a lot of math to include inline math like: \sum_{j=\max(0, i - n/2)}^{\min(N-1, i + n/2)} (a_{x,y}^j)^2).

Right now, the only way to do it is to put it as a LaTex block. Ideally wrapping this with `$$` should render it as an inline LaTex.

[Mico @_micmico]

https://t.co/4RnhzrNPBX

[Mico @_micmico]

Finishing my next machine learning blog post.

[Mico @_micmico]

https://t.co/pr0sE5epi3

In my latest article, I discussed why we use Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) instead of Fully Connected Neural Network (FNN) when processing images. I also broke down CNN from first principles. If you are interested in how AI works, give it a read!

[Mico @_micmico]

https://t.co/h71CX1DiV0

[Mico @_micmico]

https://t.co/h71CX1DiV0

[Mico @_micmico]

Something to read in the side while studying machine learning.

[Mico @_micmico]

I am truly fascinated with AI. Heck, I'm even studying it very deeply. But with everything I am seeing recently, people giving AI free rein and full access to their machines + the internet. I'm anxious that its just a matter of time before we see something catastrophic. 😖