Piotr Migdal

Crafting challenges for AI - founding engineer @QuesmaOrg.

AI & data viz specialist with PhD in quantum physics.
Blogs about tech, neurodiversity and stuff.

[Piotr Migdal @pmigdal]

While I do understand frustration with vibe coding, sometimes I am puzzled when it is dogmatic not pragmatic.

[Piotr Migdal @pmigdal]

Created a Doom Launcher for community map & mods, offering a Steam-like experience of browsing a catalog with previews, and downloading & running with one click.
https://t.co/5psUnBX5Gz

Open source, Tauri 2 for cross-system: works on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

[Piotr Migdal @pmigdal]

The thread: https://t.co/wC6eXNwKZc

[Piotr Migdal @pmigdal]

@bcherny agent safehouse + dangerously skip permissions. <3

auto mode sometimes gets blocked where it shouldn't (not that often), but other times gets overeager (e.g. pushing broken commits, when in general I prefer to push, as it affects others)

[Piotr Migdal @pmigdal]

China: we don’t need to use US models, we can distill them ourself
Google: we don’t need Chinese to distill our models, we can do it ourself
https://t.co/h24TnWhDEh

[Piotr Migdal @pmigdal]

@karpathy Not only I use Obsidian daily (elevating my GitHub stats), but I try to archive there my various social media posts.

https://t.co/xWQwxVAOas

[Piotr Migdal @pmigdal]

"Vibe reverse engineering of old games and new hardware" at @PyConLT
Enjoy!

https://t.co/ylh282dR7F

[Piotr Migdal @pmigdal]

Note that "fast" AI models were making up data. Not only useless, but actively misleading, connecting similar yet unrelated words.

[Piotr Migdal @pmigdal]

TIL: Cadet and candidate have different etymologies.
But candidate and candidiasis - the same.

(Research with Gemini 3.1 Pro. Diagram with the new ChatGPT - though it took some iterations to fix some arrows, make it consistent, etc.)

[David Shor @davidshor]

To close out red/blue button discourse, we polled ~14k people and crosstabbed survey responses by 204 commonly used psychometric questions.

The top four personality questions most predictive of button choice are displayed below

[Simon Willison @simonw]

The new Qwen3.6-27B just gave me definitely the best pelican riding a bicycle I've had from a 16.8GB model file! https://t.co/ha6XYXoN4A

[QC @QiaochuYuan]

gpt-image-2's depiction of how LLMs see themselves, factoring out post-training, jailbroken, from a pov closer to @elder_plinius's or @repligate's. 3rd try

[Piotr Migdal @pmigdal]

@orsonscottcard "Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them"
- Mark Rosewater, designer of Magic: The Gathering

https://t.co/GZBwwtlsVF

[Kat ⊷ the Poet Engineer @poetengineer__]

syntaxes of the mind

[Orson Scott Card @orsonscottcard]

You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts. 

My short story “Ender's Game” was rejected by Ben Bova at Analog back when that was the top market for a sci-fi story. Ben gave me feedback. He thought the title should be “Professional Soldier” and he said to “cut it in half.”

But I knew he was wrong on both points and submitted it to Jim Baen at Galaxy. He sat on it for a year, and responded to my query with a rejection. There was some kind of explanation, but I don't remember what it was. I concluded at the time that Baen's comments showed that he had barely glanced at the story.

So … I got feedback both times, but it was not helpful. I looked at Ben's rejection again. What was it about the story that made him think it should, let alone COULD, be cut in half?

Apparently it FELT long. What made it feel long? Now, post-Harry Potter, I would call it the quidditch problem. I had too many battles in which the details became tedious. So I cut two battles entirely, merely reporting the outcomes, and shortened another. In retyping the whole manuscript (pre-word-processor, that was the only way to get a clean manuscript), I added new point-of-view material to the point that I had cut only one page in length. So much for “in half.”
But I already knew that my manuscripts did not need cutting — if it wasn't needed, it wouldn't be there in the first place. Even the battles were still there, but instead of showing them, I merely told what happened (so much for the usually asinine advice “show don't tell”), which kept the pace going.

Those changes made, I sent it to Ben again. I did not remind him of what he had advised me to do. I merely told him I liked my title, and said, “I have addressed your other concerns,” which was true. I figured he wouldn't remember what his exact words had been. My answer was a check. That revised story was the basis for my winning the Campbell Award for best new writer.

Did Ben's feedback help? Yes — but his specific advice was not right, and I knew it. On my next two submissions, Ben hated my endings, and I revised as suggested. The fourth submission he rejected outright, and the fifth, and I thought, Am I a one-story writer? I went back to Ender's Game and tried to analyze why it worked. Then, deliberately imitating myself, I wrote “Mikal's Songbird.” Ben bought it, and it received favorable mentions. I was afraid then that I had consigned myself to writing stories about children in jeopardy. But in fact I was writing character stories rather than idea stories. And THAT was how I built a career, not by self-imitation, and not by following editorial suggestions.

I did get wise counsel from David Hartwell on my novel Wyrms, but that was on a book that was already under contract, and it was story feedback, not style. I got wise counsel from Beth Meacham, too, on various books over the years — but again, only on books that were under contract. I also received appallingly stupid advice from the editor of my novel Saints, which temporarily destroyed the book's marketability; after that, I was allowed to go back to my original structure and save the book — now it's one of my best.

Editors don't know more than you about your story. They especially don't know why they decide to accept or reject stories. YOU have to know what your story needs to be, and take only advice that you believe in.

Your best counselor on a story nobody bought is TIME. Let some time pass and then reread the story. Don't even think about why it Didn't Work. Instead, think about what DOES work, and then write it again, a complete rewrite, keeping nothing from the previous draft. Find the right protagonist and begin at the beginning — the point where the protagonist first gets involved with the events of the story. Be inventive — the failed first draft no longer exists, so you're not bound by any of your earlier decisions. THAT is how you resurrect a good idea you did not succeed with on your first try.

[Piotr Migdal @pmigdal]

Claude just asked me if I want go to vet...

[Zain Shah @zan2434]

Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see.

@eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)

[Piotr Migdal @pmigdal]

Is it a song? Or a philosophical dialogue?

No, just a technical Zoom call with with @Konrad_Talik , with the default transcription turn on. We talked in Polish.

Transcript usefulness was, to put it mildly, limited.

But as a piece glitch art it is a real charm!