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Allen Pike

@allenpike.com

Building Forestwalk.ai, hosting Infer and It Shipped That Way, and writing about software and other tricky things. ⭐️ Vancouver • @apike elsewhere • allenpike.com

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25.04.2023
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Latest posts by Allen Pike @allenpike.com

Right?! “Here is ChatGPT’s imagination of what our food might look like” is a red flag. Nobody was using stock photos on their menus before? 🤔 Or were they

05.03.2026 21:27 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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When Apple Intelligence first rolled out in 2024, I had to turn off the Priority Notifications feature because of poor reasoning.

But trying it now, after all the advancements we’ve seen since then, you can see they’ve really dialed in what is urgent

01.03.2026 21:56 👍 6 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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Launch Now On trading comfort for speed.

Launch Now: On putting things in front of people, early and often.

allenpike.com/2026/launch-...

01.03.2026 06:03 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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How Two Spies Closes Cities A little story about iterative experimentation.

I claimed in 2022 that there wasn't a mathematically pure way to solve a particular graph problem, but have now added an addendum: I'm happy to report that a ML researcher at Tiktok has proven me wrong! 🧮 allenpike.com/2022/how-to-...

26.02.2026 20:30 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Thanks, Dave! I just added an addendum with info a couple of folks from Google have sent in about the bug.

12.02.2026 00:00 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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A Broken Heart Or, getting a 100x speedup with one dumb line of code.

A Broken Heart: Getting a 100x speedup by changing one dumb line of code

allenpike.com/2026/a-broke...

01.02.2026 07:02 👍 6 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 2

- But Google knows "allen pike" is a "person" search.
- And "allen pike" has a similar embedding to the username "apike".
- And ”apike" has a similar embedding, as a typo, to "spike".

So, Google relates "allen pike” to “Spike Jonze". And that's why AI devs need good tracing and analysis tooling 🫠

29.01.2026 21:59 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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As systems include more layers of AI, it gets difficult to intuit why they behave as they do. For example, why is one of the Google results for “allen pike" the Wikipedia page for director Spike Jonze?

Zero people searching for Allen Pike are looking for info on Spike Jonze!

29.01.2026 21:59 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Despite the challenges, it's exciting to imagine that 2026 could be the year where AI becomes able to complete multi-day tasks, perform useful household robotics work, or even produce working CSS layouts where only part of the screen scrolls

22.01.2026 21:40 👍 17 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

TIL there's a cracked Node dev working from Camano Island (number 10 for me, so far). I feel like the different islands should have rarities and different points. For example obviously Vancouver Island is only 1 point, but if you can collect Galiano or Guemes or something, that should be worth more

14.01.2026 19:47 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

One fact about the Pacific Northwest is that half of its software talent is in the cities, and the other half live on random-ass islands you've probably never heard of. The longer you live here, the more islands you'll learn that some talented developer is currently working from.

14.01.2026 19:47 👍 3 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0
A delete confirmation dialog that forces you to type your OWN full name to confirm deletion.

A delete confirmation dialog that forces you to type your OWN full name to confirm deletion.

It's a common pattern to make users type "DELETE", or even the name of what they're deleting, for irreversible delete actions. This forces them to think before potentially deleting something critical.

Intercom takes this to a new level, forcing you to consider: "Should I be the one deleting this?"

13.01.2026 22:46 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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A Box of Many Inputs On browsers, local classifiers, and Roger Rabbit.

A Box of Many Inputs: On browser address bars, local AI, and Roger Rabbit.

allenpike.com/2025/a-box-o...

31.12.2025 20:38 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Talking to people about this, I’ve learned that people are more happy to type on their phones than I am 💫

06.12.2025 17:29 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Why is ChatGPT for Mac So… Bad? - Allen Pike

An addendum: Why is ChatGPT for Mac So… Bad?

allenpike.com/2025/why-is-...

06.12.2025 07:14 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Why is ChatGPT for Mac So Good? Claude, Copilot, and making a good desktop app.

Why is ChatGPT for Mac so good? A look at the the different AI labs' approaches to the Mac, and the opportunities therein.

allenpike.com/2025/why-is-...

01.12.2025 16:01 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 2 📌 0
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Building open AI to cure or prevent all disease by 2110 (w/ Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan) The CZI has acquired EvoScale, established the first 10,000 GPU cluster for bio research, open sourced the largest atlas of human cell types, and gone all in on AI x Bio for its 2nd decade.

This is a fun Latent Space episode: they interview Priscilla Chan and her husband about the biology and AI work necessary to cure all diseases. www.latent.space/p/biohub

20.11.2025 07:34 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Cedarloop on Zoom Demo – Nov 2025
Cedarloop on Zoom Demo – Nov 2025 Over the last two weeks at Forestwalk we’ve prototyped a realtime meeting notetaker agent. We think this could help teams get clarity faster, and ultimately have shorter and more useful meetings. If…

Good meetings are clear and short. Over the last couple weeks we’ve prototyped an agent that can join calls and build realtime notes – not a transcript, just clarity on key decisions.

A lot more to do, but having fun with this one 🌱 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2_7...

10.11.2025 19:40 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
OpenAI rates gpt-5-mini 4 lightning bolts in speed

OpenAI rates gpt-5-mini 4 lightning bolts in speed

Finally tried gpt-5-mini on some tasks, hoping at "minimal" reasoning it would be faster than claude-haiku-4.5 or gpt-4.1-mini.

Nope. Two other teams said 5-mini is so slow and unreliable that they can't use it either. Apparently "4 lightning bolts" means "takes 5-10s to process 200 tokens" 💫

06.11.2025 23:05 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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How to Not Get Acquired Distraction management in intense times.

How to Not Get Acquired: An approach for minimizing distraction when trying to do something rather hard. allenpike.com/2025/how-not...

01.11.2025 06:36 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
The most important part of this post-mortem is crammed into a dense paragraph as long as a giraffe's vocal cord

The most important part of this post-mortem is crammed into a dense paragraph as long as a giraffe's vocal cord

While the AWS team has resolved the severe us-east-1 outages, reading this post-mortem makes one thing clear: they are still suffering from a critical shortage of paragraph breaks

23.10.2025 17:49 👍 43 🔁 9 💬 1 📌 1

I would have thought from M2 to M5 you could have gotten the same performance with less chassis but apparently that was not the goal

17.10.2025 18:01 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

“When we released Vision Pro, it provided glimpse of what spatial computing can be. Consistently, though, we’ve heard your concerns about weight and comfort. That’s why we’ve made the M5 Vision Pro 25% heavier – ensuring it is pressing on your nose, cheeks, and face with unprecedented heft”

16.10.2025 22:04 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 1
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UX Entropy Zoom’s arc from hero to hulk.

UX Entropy: How products like Zoom can bloat from hero to hulk.

allenpike.com/2025/ux-entr...

01.10.2025 08:10 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Building Something Big On the pros and cons of the indie path.

Building Something Big: On the pros and cons of the indie path. allenpike.com/2025/buildin...

01.09.2025 06:28 👍 7 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0

This makes me wonder – why doesn't the operating system do this? Like if Slack is on my left screen and a notification comes in, it would be nice to get the sound coming "from" Slack, if I'm wearing stereo headphones?

12.08.2025 21:10 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Cursor's UI is nicer than using Claude Code in a terminal, but one helpful thing about Claude is that you can script hooks. For example, with an agent going on each screen, you can have Claude chime where it needs review or approval – panned left for the left screen, or right for the right. 🔊

12.08.2025 21:10 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Every answer was "Let's be real: you want to know how tall giraffes are, but why are you even asking? We need to go to verified sources – then go BEYOND giraffes and assess all tall mammals. The big picture, man."

07.08.2025 23:19 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
ChatGPT trait hint: "You don't need to compliment me. Adopt the tone of critical thinking, and be willing to revisit and question assumptions. Push me or challenge me to do better. When something might not be true, equivocate - for example, use phrases like “might be” or “is probably”, or mention relevant tradeoffs. In voice mode, speak quickly."

ChatGPT trait hint: "You don't need to compliment me. Adopt the tone of critical thinking, and be willing to revisit and question assumptions. Push me or challenge me to do better. When something might not be true, equivocate - for example, use phrases like “might be” or “is probably”, or mention relevant tradeoffs. In voice mode, speak quickly."

If you're getting weird behaviour from ChatGPT 5, check "What traits should ChatGPT have?" under Customize ChatGPT. I had this prompt there to help 4o be more critical, but they trained GPT-5 to be more critical by default, so the prompt pushed it into overcaffeinated paranoia.

07.08.2025 23:19 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
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Getting Tied Up On little things that get in the way.

Getting Tied Up: On little things that get in the way.

allenpike.com/2025/getting...

01.08.2025 07:26 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0