Nigel Hanlon

Landmarks along the way.

What I work with.

Field notes.

Independent experiments on how language models work. I build the controls before I believe a result, and I publish the ones that fail.

Fifteen years, charted.

I grew up on a farm in rural Ireland. My dad was a mechanic, and I spent most of my childhood with oil on my hands and grease under my nails, helping him fix farm machinery. It taught me how mechanical things are designed, how they fit together, and how timing can make or break something. It's also why I took apart so many toys as a kid. I was a menace with a screwdriver.

Our first PC was a Packard Bell with a 166MHz Pentium and 8MB of RAM. I saved up for my own, built websites in Word, and then my cousin dropped off a big heavy book called Corel Linux. I installed it and made a huge mess of my PC. Linux back then had no safety rails, but you learned either way. Those nights at a glowing screen well past midnight, feeling triumphant when hello world compiled, are still how I learn.

Richard Feynman said "What I cannot create, I do not understand." That's my brain in a nutshell. I want the why underneath things, and I get there by taking the thing apart and building it again, hopefully a bit better.

I'm autistic, so I don't see the world like most people. Everything is the sum of different parts working together, be that nature, code or the thoughts in our heads. Understanding the world helps me understand myself.

On stage.