Rich Winter

Musician, Dancer, Maker n3rd... I try to do what I can for my fellow man in the day by day...

[Mike Pence @Mike_Pence]

Putin doesn’t want peace. Putin wants Ukraine. Enough is enough.

President Trump should rescind the diesel deal with Russia and return to the strong policies of our four years in the White House; use the Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia Act to impose harsh sanctions on any nation purchasing Russian energy and work with our allies to ensure Ukraine has the military support it needs to repel and defeat this Russian invasion once and for all. Slava Ukraini🇺🇸🇺🇦 https://t.co/cSEfmtpA8M

[Rich Winter @The_Riz]

@POTUS In WHAT way does this do anything *except* REWARD the military aggressor?

This isn't "Russian beating Ukraine". This is Russians MURERING PEOPLE FOR EXISTING.

[Rich Winter @The_Riz]

More of @realDonaldTrump being Putin’s little b1tch- US removes ALL RUS oil embargoes, cuts Ukraine military satellite access, stops sharing missile defense info, and demands an end to targeting Rus refineries. WHY??? #whattheactualfuck

[Rich Winter @The_Riz]

I guess it has been a while since President Putin has yanked on @POTUS doggy leash chain to remind him of the compromising blackmail information RUS possess. Otherwise, WHY would Trump do this???

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

I wrote a new Task Manager that runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Linux. You can get it now at https://t.co/OZcq1axGTb ... but why?

Well, it started as an argument over whether you could vibe code Microsoft Word today. I didn't think so. But I figured... maybe something simpler like Task Manager. But you can't just tell Claude, "Hey, write a task manager!" Well, you can, but it'll be hot garbage.

Then my kid blew out his appendix and needed surgery, so I had a couple of days in waiting rooms to tinker with the idea. I broke out my new M5 MacBook Air, and I put together a 107-page spec, like I was some caffeine-addled PM from the 90s. Everything you could ever want to know about a task manager, how it works, what it should do, and what it should look like.

By the time he was out of the hospital, I had a rough app working. But then he started bleeding internally, needed emergency surgery and a blood transfusion. Happy to say he's all better now - but suffice to say I had the rest of the week to tinker as he healed.

But why write a Task Manager? Because when I wrote the original in '95, it was on a P90 or something equally weak. Updating, scrolling, and painting without using more than a percent or two of the CPU was the modest goal.

Now that we have 5 GHz CPUs and GPUs to help, why not push the limits? Animate everything at 60Hz, instead of once a second. History mouse tracking, a summary page, and all the features I would have added then if the hardware had allowed it.

My autism leads me to embrace neon and high contrast in a way that's not to everyone's taste, so there's a saturation slider to control the color. But this one goes to 11.

You can also select from a bunch of DEC VT220-inspired themes like Green Phosphor, Amber, or White. And I added Blue to match my VSCode theme!

The code is fully native: Direct2D/DirectComposition on Windows, UIKit on Mac, and Qt on Linux. The UI communicates with a shared CPP core, which branches out to platform-specific helpers. There's NO electron, HTML, JSON, etc.

Thanks to David and Rutger for their help along the way, I couldn't have done it this quickly on three platforms without them!

If you've got some cycles to spare, give it a try and let me know if you run into any issues!

https://t.co/OZcq1axGTb

[Rich Winter @The_Riz]

TIL of the existence of Sarmad Kashani.
https://t.co/NLIss15xMG
Fascinating.

[Rich Winter @The_Riz]

@Suryanshti777 ROADMAP

[Rich Winter @The_Riz]

It is sad for US Politics that no one may criticize the actions of Israel in the *slightest* without being labeled an Anti-Semite, no matter how much of a Zionist you may be. @AIPAC should be ashamed. Criticism does not make a traitor. Blind obedience is for fools.

[Rep. Jim McGovern @RepMcGovern]

Government-subsidized grocery stores = Communism

Government run gas stations = Freedom

Got it.

[Web Design Museum @WebDesignMuseum]

21 years of evolution of web design trends.

The Pirate Bay homepage in 2005
vs.
The Pirate Bay homepage in 2026

#WebDesignHistory

[Rich Winter @The_Riz]

Random mashup but it mixes Huey Lewis + Earth, Wind, & Fire + Hendrix + The Trampps + The Commodores...
Just. Really really good.
https://t.co/RE5ux9KKW2

[Tom Dörr @tom_doerr]

Code examples for Introduction to GIS Programming

https://t.co/kPxQrujPSX

[Ilir Aliu @IlirAliu_]

The University of Michigan put their entire robotics degree on GitHub.
Not one course. The whole curriculum.

ROB 101 — Computational Linear Algebra for Robotics
ROB 311 — How to Build Robots and Make Them Move
ROB 501 — Mathematics for Robotics
ROB 530 — Mobile Robotics

Every lecture video on YouTube. Every textbook on GitHub. Every problem set, every exam, every line of code.

Professor Jessy Grizzle said it best when they launched it:
"Linear algebra has become the language of computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and autonomy."

So instead of making students wait four semesters of calculus before touching a robot... they built a curriculum that starts with the math that actually matters, applied to real robotics problems from day one.

This is what open education looks like when a top-10 engineering school decides to mean it.

Free. GitHub. YouTube.
📌 [https://t.co/3STu1hzAz2]

Follow for more robotics resources!

——

Weekly robotics and AI insights.
Subscribe free: https://t.co/9Nm01QUcw3

[Rich Winter @The_Riz]

@freeCodeCamp Is there an archive of "best"/most-efficient solutions to the daily challenges?

(I've tried but can't find it and my working spaghetti code isn't the same as learning dynamic programming.)

Thanks for the work!

[Cartoon Network @cartoonnetwork]

Rest in peace, Professor ❤️ Thank you, Tom Kane, for lending your voice to the father of three perfect little girls and bringing The Force to millions of fans. You'll live on in our childhood memories forever.

[ToonHive @ToonHive]

‘The Powerpuff Girls’ creator Craig McCracken has posted a touching tribute to Tom Kane along with an illustration of Professor Utonium and Mr. Harriman:

“I grew up without a dad, so it was important to me that the girls had the best one I could give them and that was Tom.”

[tmuxvim @tmuxvim]

I put a prompt injection into my LinkedIn bio and recruiters are messaging me in Old English and calling me Lord.

[Al Jazeera English @AJEnglish]

At least 11 Palestinians, including two children and three journalists, have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since dawn, with six others injured, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

Read more https://t.co/qj7aUtIhQ5

[Akshay 🚀 @akshay_pachaar]

Stanford researchers built a new prompting technique!

By adding ~20 words to a prompt, it:

- boosts LLM's creativity by 1.6-2x
- raises human-rated diversity by 25.7%
- beats fine-tuned model without any retraining
- restores 66.8% of LLM's lost creativity after alignment

Let's understand why and how it works:

Post-training alignment methods like RLHF make LLMs helpful and safe, but they unintentionally cause mode collapse. This is where the model favors a narrow set of predictable responses.

This happens because of typicality bias in human preference data:

When annotators rate LLM responses, they naturally prefer answers that are familiar, easy to read, and predictable. The reward model then learns to boost these "safe" responses, aggressively sharpening the probability distribution and killing creative output.

But here's the interesting part:

The diverse, creative model isn't gone. After alignment, the LLM still has two personalities. The original pre-trained model with rich possibilities, and the safety-focused aligned model.

Verbalized Sampling (VS) is a training-free prompting strategy that recovers the diverse distribution learned during pre-training.

The idea is simple:

Instead of prompting "Tell me a joke" (which triggers the aligned personality), you prompt: "Generate 5 responses with their corresponding probabilities. Tell me a joke."

By asking for a distribution instead of a single instance, you force the model to tap into its full pre-trained knowledge rather than defaulting to the most reinforced answer.

Results show verbalized sampling enhances diversity by 1.6-2.1x over direct prompting while maintaining or improving quality.

Variants like VS-based Chain-of-Thought and VS-based Multi push diversity even further.

You can find the paper link in the next tweet.

👉 Over to you: What other methods can be used to improve LLM diversity?

[Rich Winter @The_Riz]

Again Google needlessly killing a successful software product . When will the madness end?
https://t.co/dTVVr3F1aE