The Autodidacts
Exploring the universe from the inside out
- Posts
- 142 from 1 Oct 2014 to 6 Nov 2026
- Posting
- weekly (95 in the last year)
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- personal blog
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2026 94
- The Psychology of Letting Go
- Feeling The Caffeine Wake Up Your Body
- A Yes Person’s Guide to Saying No
- The Command Line as Franken-REPL
- A Local AI Stack for Language Learning
- Curiosity Traps
- Listening to music as an active process
- TIL how to deeplink all the things
- How to copy URLs of multiple Firefox tabs without installing an extension
- Older than the dog
- Ode to Metadata
- How to fit Qwen3.8-27B into 16GB of VRAM and run it on a single RTX 3080 card: the best quantizations and Llama.cpp flags I've found
- Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand
- The Hopefully Eventually Ultimate Desktop Linux Troubleshooting Guide: Recovering from Crashes and Freezes
- Failure Modes
- Just being is worthwhile
- People and Clothes
- Autodidacts Newsletter #26
- What Should We Optimize Away?
- How to fit Qwen 3.6 35B A3B into 16GB of VRAM, & run it with Llama.cpp on an RTX 3080
- Let’s call ‘em “aigents”
- Treat People as Flowers
- The search for a good offline dictionary for Linux
- Backpack Activation Energy
- Bookmarklet: Copy Ghost Post ID to Clipboard
- 20 years of Linux and I finally started using job control
- How to drain pasta without a colander, without burning yourself
- All Polymarket temperature markets have disappeared
- The bid-ask spread on used physical goods
- The art of getting back on one’s horse
- Delusional Optimism & the Art of Sneaking Up on Your Goals
- Bothering to understand
- Curation and its side effects
- My criteria for a good Linux developer laptop
- The butterfly effect of revenge bedtime procrastination
- Some thoughts about backing up, which occurred to me after my laptop abruptly expired
- Sheep Music & Wedding Bands
- Old site, new site bookmarklets
- I’m trying #100DaysToOffload
- Ideas Evolve in Dialogue
- An indie blog’s directory of indie blog directories
- How I find the email addresses of public figures 🔒
- Underrated reasons to dislike AI
- We don’t know until the end, and it’s never the end
- It’s surprisingly hard to reliably paste the current date at the cursor on Linux
- Paste clipboard contents in places where you can’t paste
- The Fewer Ingredients The Better
- Social Cache Busting
- The Evening Writing Effect
- De-optimize your search terms to skip the SEO slop
- PSA: local AI handwriting recognition is usable now
- TIL how to accidentally overwrite a decade worth of data in LibreOffice calc
- Taking responsibility for my energy levels
- Sonder is a word I like
- An unexpected benefit of docking my laptop beside my desk
- A strange workaround for when the capacitive touch screen of your e-reader isn’t responding to dry fingers: use your nose
- Handy.computer is the Linux dictation app I've always wanted.
- Maybe don’t optimize conversion rate?
- Insomnia isn’t a waste of time
- How to increase Ollama context length
- Star rating support has been merged into the Readeck KOReader plugin
- Something good happened to my memory, and I have a theory about what caused it
- How to pause and resume a resource-intensive process on Linux with SIGSTOP: specifically, Ollama LLM inference
- OCR Typewritten Documents with a Local Vision Model (Qwen3-VL:8B + Ollama)
- An extremely silly bug
- In Praise of Earnestness
- Script: bulk star Readeck entries by URL (with URL cleaning)
- Script: bulk star Wallabag entries by URL
- A basic way to hotreload an AppImage
- My free Silver price API now has an RSS feed with the day’s bid price
- You’re in a computer literacy filter bubble
- I fixed my crashing AWS t2.micro instance by adding swap
- It’s 2026 and LibreOffice Calc still can’t parse JSON API responses without a plugin
- My Free Daily Silver Price API is Live
- Dostoyevsky isn’t difficult
- I couldn’t find a free Silver price API — so I’m making one
- The Benefits of Creating a Personal Shorthand of Symbols
- Human beings are waterproof
- First impressions of Readeck
- Finally, an open-source dictation app for Linux that actually works
- Split Testing in ~50 lines of JavaScript
- A Fish shortcut for rapidly appending clipboard data to text files
- What’s the end game for Ghost newsletter sign-up spam?
- How to Migrate Kobo eReader Books & Annotations to a New Device
- Script: export post as Markdown via Ghost Admin API
- Create custom filtered RSS feeds in Ghost, the easy way
- Regex is horrible, yet regex is amazing
- Wallabag wins, despite its flaws
- Sleep is a continuum
- Patching KOReader Wallabag Plugin to add star support
- A list of public Wallabag instances that seem legit
- An unsolved question in sleep science
- Filtering RSS feeds by tag
- Cerelog’s ESP-EEG is a new 8 channel biosensing board at a hobbyist-friendly price
2025 5
2024 10
- Days Are Easily Made
- How to Get the Most Out of a Conference
- Implementing Elegant Timing
- How to use an Aeropress without it blowing up in your face
- Treating Everything as Practice
- The Joy of Selective Attention
- Perfectionism is optimizing at the wrong scale
- The One-Hour Principle
- The Grug Brained Writer
- I cured my mysterious, debilitating seasonal rash with an ultra-low-carb Ketogenic diet (n=1) 🔒
2023 9
2022 13
- How is it that people can be annoying without doing anything?
- Expectation Fields
- Is it possible to use affiliate links without turning into a sleazy affiliate marketer?
- Elon Musk could be reading this blogpost
- Taxonomy is Hard
- Why I Don’t Comment on the Internet 🔒
- My strategies for using technology without being used by it
- Overthunk Note-taking Workflows
- Opinions Are Optional
- How to get your "How to get your blog post on the front page of HN" blog post on the front page of HN
- What Game Are You Playing?
- Host a Ghost 6.0 Blog for Free on Fly.io In 1 Minute — SQLite edition
- Self Governance 101: The Legislative Branch