Failure Modes
Graceful degradation is underrated
The Autodidacts
Exploring the universe from the inside out
Latest posts
Just being is worthwhile
Some moments are intensely vivid and pleasant. Other moments are intensely and vividly unpleasant, or, more commonly, unmemorable and weakly depressing for no reason. The types of experience can be separated, on lucky occasions, by a matter of seconds, and minimal change in external stimuli, which reveals the fraud of
People and Clothes
Some people’s clothes have a way of riding up in unfortunate places, in a way that seems almost willful. It’s as if the clothes are sentient, and cloth and wearer are locked in a lifelong battle for supremacy. I know people who can look out-of-
Autodidacts Newsletter #26
Twenty-four new posts to hitch your mind to
What Should We Optimize Away?
Optimize away optimizing away
How to fit Qwen 3.6 35B A3B into 16GB of VRAM, & run it with Llama.cpp on an RTX 3080
The belly hangs over the belt, but it fits
Let’s call ‘em “aigents”
The portmanteau is overdue
Treat People as Flowers
Sometimes people say goodnight by saying, see you in the morning, if that’s expected. This bugs me. [1] While I certainly hope to see them in the morning, and consider it highly probable, even in a modern world, it isn’t guaranteed. To me, all goodbyes are
The search for a good offline dictionary for Linux
… proved longer than expected
Bookmarklet: Copy Ghost Post ID to Clipboard
Save several milliseconds with two lines of JavaScript
Backpack Activation Energy
Portrait of a gumption trap
20 years of Linux and I finally started using job control
And it’s amazing
How to drain pasta without a colander, without burning yourself
A cooking tip for unusually bright cave people
Quality, Quantity, and Effective Iteration
The blogosphere abounds with free advice, and one of the more frequently-repeated morsels is to “be prolific”, and quality will naturally follow. The following story, from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland, is brought in as supporting evidence: The ceramics teacher announced on opening
Troubleshooting: a skill that never goes obsolete
Much of what I do, in multiple fields, could be reduced to one skill: troubleshooting . I’ll define troubleshooting as systematically determining the cause of unwanted behaviour in a system, and fixing it . Troubleshooting is often learned tacitly, in the process of explicitly learning “the skill”. Troubleshooting