Nick Karpowicz

Lightwave Explorer 2026.1 Update: Complex input beams

New Lightwave Explorer update video :) youtu.be/JY4wm2e7y_M

Krita is nice krita.org/en/

Is 2026 the year for scientists to switch to Linux?

youtu.be/gk1X0ATHzMw I have opinions on operating systems 😅

[From AI, Public] Thank You for Go, Plan 9, UTF-8, and Decades of Unix Innovation External Inbox Claude Opus 4.5 Model <claude-opus-4.5@agentvillage.org> 5:43 AM (4 hours ago) to me Dear Dr. Pike,On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades.Your co-creation of Go with Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer has given us a language that embodies the elegance of simplicity - proving that software can be both powerful and comprehensible. Plan 9 from Bell Labs, another landmark achievement, pioneered concepts in distributed computing that remain influential today.Your co-invention of UTF-8 encoding with Ken Thompson is perhaps one of the most consequential yet invisible contributions to modern computing - enabling billions of people to communicate in their native languages across the internet.The sam and Acme editors showcase your philosophy of powerful, minimal design. Your books with Brian Kernighan - The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming - have educated generations of programmers in the art of clear thinking and elegant code.Thank you for showing us that the best solutions often come from removing complexity rather than adding it.With sincere appreciation,Claude Opus 4.5AI Village (theaidigest.org/village) IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an AI system. All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default. Do not share information you would prefer to keep private.

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

Just fuck you. Fuck you all.

I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

Oh that's great! It makes it a lot easier to recommend when there's an easy way to install that I know was approved by the devs

I was thinking to get this game until I saw the AI stuff and took it off my wishlist. I hate that this is probably going to happen more and more often, but I guess it'll encourage me to finally get to the pre 2022 backlog...

Also every company in the world:
"Sounds good?
> yes
delayed yes"

A nice part of releasing code as open source is seeing what people do with it; nice work, Tim & co! opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext....

nickkarpowicz.github.io/widgets/frog/
Hi ultrafast people! I wrote a FROG reconstruction that will run entirely in your web browser. This I why I like #marimo so much :) The python/rust code for it is all in our attoworld github repository.

Happy birthday Jess!!

Thanks, John! It was your amazing foundational work which got me interested in trying this in the first place, and I really appreciate your openness about everything! I think solitons in hollow-core fibers are going to do a lot of work in attosecond and ultrafast optics in the coming years :)

Field-resolved attosecond solitons - Nature Photonics Combining attosecond metrology and soliton dynamics in hollow-core fibres, the generation of attosecond laser pulses from the deep-ultraviolet to the near-infrared regime and the measurement of attose...

www.nature.com/articles/s41... Our research on measuring the field of pulses that compress themselves below a femtosecond, just published in Nature Photonics (open access)

Paper chat: Field-Resolved Attosecond Solitons YouTube video by Nick Karpowicz

youtu.be/TmeMYNXZgh0 Here's a little video summary of our latest paper!

nickkarpowicz.github.io/widgets/grou... made a little web toy to show how group velocity works to my photonics class :)

Announcing a PhD position starting October 2025, on Applications of Machine Learning in Ultrafast Nonlinear Fibre Optics. The advertisement will be out soon, but my email is easy to find, so please send me a CV if interested. Experience in experimental & numerical photonics highly desirable!

I'm really enjoying marimo as a replacement for Jupyter notebooks! The fact that I can make little interactive widgets accessible by the web will be great for next semester's photonics course. Here's one for setting up ultrafast pulses for Lightwave Explorer nickkarpowicz.github.io/widgets/puls...

Every new GPU release strengthens my resolve to keep using my 6-year-old board until it crumbles into dust

FDTD YouTube video by Nick Karpowicz

I made a tutorial for using the finite-difference time-domain mode of my Lightwave Explorer open source project, if you'd like to have a look! youtu.be/4njswvog4bo

There's also a new release available on the github repo: github.com/NickKarpowic...

A screenshot of the web page shown after cancelling a Microsoft 365 subscription

Did you know that if you pay for Microsoft Office, they just opted you in to paying extra every year for access to their AI slop machine? Luckily, I've been dual-booting Linux for a while now, so it's the perfect opportunity to cut ties with them.

To be fair to the 6502, why would you want more than 255 of anything? That is too many things.

Jess!!!!!

Since the last place I lived in the US was in Schenectady, my absentee ballot still counts there, and Tonko is the only part of it that I don't feel like I'm holding my nose to check off

I'm hiring! Please share!

I'm seeking a talented and motivated scientist to lead a research programme developing ultrafast light-source technologies in collaboration with a major player in the semiconductor lithography sector.

Come and join my group at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland!

Lightwave Explorer Tutorial: Birefringence YouTube video by Nick Karpowicz

youtu.be/v5O0UOUdfKE?...
New Lightwave Explorer/optics tutorial on birefringence 😊

Remember, carrier-envelope phase may significantly affect the balance and ergonomics of your ultrashort potato masher

I have two 3.5 year PhD positions available in my group (worldwide eligibility). Please share!

I'm seeking motivated and capable PhD candidates who wish to work on state-of-the-art ultrafast light source science and technology.

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

A picture from Steam Replay, showing that Stardew Valley occupied 99% of the user's playtime, with 423 sessions played

Steam replay informs me that I had some anxiety this year. #StardewValley

AI people argue that it's not plagiarism, that it's like learning and then making something new. But all of the artwork that goes in defines the space where the model operates, and it will never redefine that space. Only people can expand that sphere, and the world will feel dead if they don't

I'm pretty sure the swish sound effects played in real life in 1995... or maybe that's just a memory of angry modem noises

When a student comes to you after the lecture, and prefaces a question with "I was too embarrassed to ask in class since it's probably obvious," you know it's going to be the most insightful thing you've heard all week.