A place to collect the things I learn, figure out, or find interesting.
Even a global treaty pausing all new training of frontier AI models, would leave a lot of room for existing models to continue to disrupt. Our existing workflows weren’t designed with AI agents in mind and there’s abundant low hanging fruit for optimization. Every time I use Codex or Claude Code, I learn something new, and there’s plenty of things I just don’t have time to try. Beyond code there’s…
I often notice people advertising their custom skills as a solution to your agentic programming problems. They’ll provide you some genuinely useful advice, then cap it off by offering you skills that operationalizes their advice. I found the failure modes and tips identified in Software Fundamentals Matter More Than Ever insightful. I never thought about having a glossary of shared vocabulary to…
My dream programming language would be able to express the syntax and semantics of every other programming language idiomatically. In this framing a good programming language would have few builtins 1 but would still be able to manifest many more specific features as library definitions. I take a very general view of features. Optimizations are included in this list because in order practically…
I use Neovim for 95%+ of my writing, both prose and code. I originally picked Vim over Emacs because I liked its modal text editing. Over the following years I’ve honed it to my preferences, building up over ~4000 lines of configuration. I’ve flirted with switching to Emacs with evil-mode for a better plugin ecosystem, but Vim is too deeply engraved in my muscle memory to move away from. Lua vs…
I hesitated a lot when first getting into anime idol music. I was definitely a little self-conscious that the album art can get fairly suggestive. 13+ album art with characters wearing swimsuits But more importantly I feared its complexity would render my music cluttered and unnavigable. I mostly engaged with my music navigationally as opposed to searching . I liked to select a genre, an artist…
I’ve been increasingly interested in mindfulness over the past year, starting to meditate about ~2 months ago. Overall, it has been fairly transformative in terms of my qualitative stress and overall sense of well being. These are activities that didn’t seem mindful, but I ended up finding meditation like benefits in. Playing Riichi Mahjong I originally learned Riichi Mahjong at work. When Mahjong…
In Hearthstone, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic the Gathering, or really any TCG the winner of a match is sometimes predetermined before either player has taken their first turn. Control decks are hyperspecialized to clear the tiny minions produced by an aggro deck, then grind them out with more valuable cards. Aggro decks will usually swarm the board and beat down a combo deck player before they manage to set up…
If you’re familiar with spaced repetition systems, this should work as a standalone post. This is the last post of a 3 post series. The first two posts explain WaniKani and jpdb.io in more detail. WaniKani tries very hard to make learning Japanese foolproof. They don’t let you grade yourself or undo mistakes they want to protect you from “the illusion of knowing”. They don’t offer the ability to…
I recommend reading yesterday’s post discussing my follies with WaniKani the first time I tried learning Kanji. Over a year and a trip to Japan passed before I made a serious effort at studying Japanese again. WaniKani had failed me in several ways, and I was reluctant to try a spaced repetition system that wouldn’t solve them. I wanted something that would adapt to my existing Japanese knowledge,…
This is part 1 of a ~3 part post. This part explains how WaniKani works through my first experience and follies using a spaced repetition system. Japanese is one of the world’s most difficult writing systems. Compared with English, Hiragana and Katagana are simple phonetic alphabets. Their pronunciation is always consistent, and across both alphabets there’s just ~92 distinct characters plus a…