Nick Winter's Blog | My Experiences in Gray Swan AI’s Ultimate Jailbreaking Championship
A quick jaunt into the world of red-teaming turned into a month-long free-fall down the rabbit hole of AI psycho-warfare
Nick Winter's Blog
Writings from Nick Winter, founder of CodeCombat and Skritter and author of The Motivation Hacker.
Latest posts
Nick Winter's Blog | Ruby's Vocabulary Acquisition
I tracked every word that Ruby learned to say in the first 2.5 years of life, analyzing vocab compared to her brothers.
Nick Winter's Blog | Tenth Year Book Sales
In which I ignore how many copies of The Motivation Hacker I sold for six years, then "just" ask the AI.
Nick Winter's Blog | Christmas Gift Ideas – ChatGPT vs. Google
In which I have a magical Christmas shopping experience with the AI
Nick Winter's Blog | Meet Ruby
Photos from the first few weeks of baby Ruby's life
Nick Winter's Blog | Clark's Vocabulary Acquisition
I tracked every word that Clark learned to say in the first 2.5 years of life, graphing it and comparing it to Max's.
Nick Winter's Blog | Willpower and Success Spirals
I was talking to a friend who seemed to be independently rediscovering what he called self-referential motivation: m...
Nick Winter's Blog | Active vs. Passive Learning, or Production vs. Recognition
Here's another concept from language learning pedagogy (see also Extensive vs. Intensive Learning): the difference b...
Nick Winter's Blog | Extensive vs. Intensive Learning
In language learning, there's a slightly obscure but useful concept of "extensive reading" vs. "intensive reading". ...
Nick Winter's Blog | Getting better at making accurate predictions with PredictionBook
I use a site called PredictionBook to make predictions, say how likely I think they are to occur, and then later jud...
Nick Winter's Blog | Murphyjitsu
Humans are naturally bad at predictions. Being bad at predictions, and figuring out how to make better ones, sounds ...
Nick Winter's Blog | Meet Clark
Now I have two kids. So far, it's pretty similar to just having one kid. The time and energy needed to sustain doubl...
Nick Winter's Blog | Fourth Year Book Sales
I always love it when people share revenue data for their apps / games / books / works, and it's been four years sin...
Nick Winter's Blog | Max's Vocabulary Acquisition
Max's vocabulary started exploding around 15-17 months old. I started writing down everything he could say (with und...
Nick Winter's Blog | Video: Max's Second Year
Max recently turned two, so I made another video! See also the video I made for his first year....
Nick Winter's Blog | How to Really Make an Impression When Speaking Chinese
I just got back from a business trip to China, where I visited Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. I listened to and s...
Nick Winter's Blog | Video: Max's First Year
Since Max turned one last week, I made a poignant video of poignancy showing him growing up over the past year....
Nick Winter's Blog | MealSquares, the Ultimate Lifehacker Food
I used to eat food. I still do, but I used to, too.You have probably heard of Soylent, the liquid meal replacement w...
Nick Winter's Blog | Surprises From Max's First Four Months
Baby Max is four months old today. I posted when he was one month, talking about what a difficult little demon he wa...
Nick Winter's Blog | Bantling: Name Your Baby With Algorithms
When Chloe and I were trying to come up with baby names, every conversation would go something like this:Chloe: "New...
Nick Winter's Blog | Meet Max
We have reproduced! Max is one month old now. Here's his birth announcement photo, where he looks adorable:Apart fro...
Nick Winter's Blog | Second Year Book Sales
I always love it when people share revenue data for their apps / games / books / works, and it's been two years sinc...
Nick Winter's Blog | Calibrating Spending
When I was a kid, I didn't work. I got a tiny allowance ($5 per week, or maybe per month), and every now and then I'...
Nick Winter's Blog | Anonymously Admonish Me, Please
It's that time again where I become a better person. Help me out, would ya? Follow this link to give me anonymous ad...
Nick Winter's Blog | Just What's Up
Here are some of the posts I want to write: experiential sampling tools, the butter eating competition story, experi...
Nick Winter's Blog | Maniacs, Minimalists, and Mega-Hike
ManiacsInspired by my 120-Hour Workweek Epic Coding Time-lapse video, Bethany and Danny over at Beeminder have done ...
Nick Winter's Blog | The Motivation Hacker: Now in Paperback
Reader Raj Bapna has formatted The Motivation Hacker into a paperback, so you can now get one and do your normal boo...
Nick Winter's Blog | What If You Could Copy Yourself?
There's a thought experiment people use when they think about possible future technologies like teleportation and cr...
Nick Winter's Blog | My .emacs
Emacs wizards will tell you that it is not merely a text editor, but an operating system; not just a way to work, bu...
Nick Winter's Blog | First Year Book Sales
I always love it when people share revenue data for their apps / games / books / works, and it's been a year since T...
Nick Winter's Blog | Probs Some Techie Millionaire Too Good for Shoes
This is the 2nd time I've seen this kid, both times with a burrito, and NO shoes. It's in SOMA, and he has a fancy b...
Nick Winter's Blog | Demo Day Done
A month before Y Combinator Demo Day, I resolved to be as productive as possible for 30 days, since they say that th...
Nick Winter's Blog | Startup Blogging
Here are the last six posts I've written for the CodeCombat blog over the past few months. Look at the view counts:T...
Nick Winter's Blog | Badass Points
04:06. The wake light has gradually brightened to 20% brightness, but I cut it off early. It's time to rise, silentl...
Nick Winter's Blog | The Tetris Effect and Markov Paul Graham
My head obsesses. I get songs stuck in my head so badly that I have to leave the room when "I'm On A Boat" comes on,...
Nick Winter's Blog | The Time I Flushed My New iPhone Down the Toilet
Here's an old post from 2011-11-21 I thought I'd save from Google+. It is just two years old and already my G+ histo...
Nick Winter's Blog | Unnecessary Things
After a reader asked about why I don't use shower products on the cold showers post comments, I started thinking of ...
Nick Winter's Blog | Cold Showers, Tested
A few months ago, I set out to test cold showers. Here's what I wrote for my experimental mission statement:People a...
Nick Winter's Blog | The 120-Hour Workweek - Epic Coding Time-Lapse
Last week I set out to see how many hours of programming work I could do in one week on CodeCombat, our multiplayer ...
Nick Winter's Blog | Upcoming Maniac Week
Starting Monday morning at 04:00, and ending the next Monday at 03:59, I'm going to see how many hours of CodeCombat...
Nick Winter's Blog | CodeCombat in Y Combinator
Originally posted on the CodeCombat blog.What a crazy weekend! We launched our beta on Friday morning by posting to ...
Nick Winter's Blog | Help Me Become a Better Conversationalist
Watch out: I use "I" 54 times in this post, so this will be boring if you, like me, aren't interested in hearing me ...
Nick Winter's Blog | Aftermath: The Motivation Hacker
It's been almost six months since I published The Motivation Hacker, my book on how to get yourself to want to do wh...
Nick Winter's Blog | Magic Towel Pull-Ups
For a few months in the beginning of 2012, the only exercise I got was doing 10-20 sets of pull-ups a day. I was hac...
Nick Winter's Blog | Mother-In-Law's Tongue, Areca Palm, Money Plant
These are the three plants I have out of my 99 things. I went to a plant nursery and bought them after my friend Dav...
Nick Winter's Blog | Breathing slower?
I was thinking of 1) setting something up where I could monitor my breath rate while working at my computer and 2) u...
Nick Winter's Blog | Extreme Learning
Yesterday, I went down to the Institute for the Future for a workshop on "extreme learning". There were many diverse...
Nick Winter's Blog | Stress Fractures
During the hike up King's Peak (wild bachelor party, I know), I was a lithe gecko gliding up the trail. When going d...
Nick Winter's Blog | Telepath Logger Now Open Source
A while ago I was working with Yoni on Telepath, a project to make your laptop do passive machine learning on your e...
Nick Winter's Blog | Spiraling Into Control
I wrote this as a guest post on the Beeminder blog — comments can live there.It’s dark. Warm. Safe. You’re in bed, a...