The Autodidacts

Exploring the universe from the inside out

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Curiositry

I write and build things.

Canada’s wet west coast http://curiositry.com Curiositry Curiositry Curiositry has published 126 posts:

How I find the email addresses of public figures 🔒

This post is for paid members only … »

Underrated reasons to dislike AI

The big arguments for and against AI have been endlessly discussed, and I don’t feel I have much to add. AGI and existential risk; human obsolescence; power use; cybersecurity; safety + censorship; slop; … »

Autodidacts Newsletter #25

25 new human-written posts … »

We don’t know until the end, and it’s never the end

Judging a book by its content doesn’t work either … »

It’s surprisingly hard to reliably paste the current date at the cursor on Linux

It’s surprisingly hard to reliably paste the current date at the cursor on Linux

Long, long ago, in a dotfiles directory far away, I had this snippet: bindsym control+semicolon exec date '+%Y-%m-%d' | tr -d "\n" | xsel -i -b && … »

code screenshot

Paste clipboard contents in places where you can’t paste

Use AutoKey send_keys() to put clipboard content places where it can't normally be put … »

My borscht doesn’t look nearly this nice, but it tastes good. (Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Borscht_with_bread.jpg)

The Fewer Ingredients The Better

Good quality ingredients hardly need seasoning. I only need to add spices if I’ve burnt the soup. … »

Social Cache Busting

Social Cache Busting

How do you ask questions that people don’t just hippopotamus? … »

Old Man Writing by Candlelight by Hendrick ter Brugghen

The Evening Writing Effect

Time for some night-owl counter-propaganda … »

Venn diagram of what people search engine optimize for, and what people actually search for

De-optimize your search terms to skip the SEO slop

Finding the human in a sea of sales … »

Qwen3-VL:8B local AI handwriting recognition demo output from Ollama, with unwanted corrections

PSA: local AI handwriting recognition is usable now

To my delight and surprise, local Qwen3-VL:8b WER is acceptable, even on my cryptic handwriting … »

Watch out for LibreOffice calc multi-sheet edit

TIL how to accidentally overwrite a decade worth of data in LibreOffice calc

And also, how to restore from my backup with similar single-keystroke efficiency … »

Taking responsibility for my energy levels

Taking responsibility for my energy levels

Bootstrapping mitochondrial function one flax seed at a time … »

Sona Jobarteh tuning her Kora

Sonder is a word I like

At a certain point in my life it dawned on me that other people are people too. That guy bent over with Fentanyl? A whole world: boyhood, rites of passage, dreams, regrets, memories, … »

An unexpected benefit of docking my laptop beside my desk

I can run Performance profile all the time … »

A strange workaround for when the capacitive touch screen of your e-reader isn’t responding to dry fingers: use your nose

No, really. … »

Handy.computer interface - an open source dictation app for Linux, Mac, and Windows, powered by Whisper or NVIDIA Parakeet, that puts the transcribed text at your cursor.

Handy.computer is the Linux dictation app I've always wanted.

and this post is written with it. … »