The Autodidacts

Exploring the universe from the inside out

Autodidacts Newsletter #17

A mere month after our last newsletter, we have three new posts of varying excellent quality for you.

We have an in-depth article about ethical affiliate marketing (we tried to avoid doing too much virtue signalling...), including actionable steps to take, and code to use on your own blog:

Is it possible to use affiliate links without turning into a sleazy affiliate marketer?
There aren’t many good ways to monetize a blog. Ads degrade the reader’s experience; membership paywalls restrict reach; sponsorships restrict freedom. Affiliate links have the potential to be a non-destructive monetization option. In theory, affiliate links needn’t have any effect on the reader’s…

We have a brand-new and somewhat cheeky article about social interactions as prompt-completion:

Expectation Fields are Real
My brother expects everyone to be nice. I expect everyone is out to get me. Surprising no one, it seems like everyone my brother meets is nice, and everyone I meet is out to get me. (When we are both talking to someone, our expectations clash, and the person is

And finally, we have a tiny boring listicle about (not again) hosting Ghost on Fly!

A few more things I’ve learned about self-hosting Ghost on Fly’s free tier
Following on from my previous two posts on the topic, here are some additional things I’ve learned running this blog for free on Fly: 1. You can survive a HackerNews traffic spike, without scaling. However, your access logs will pile up. One of my posts made it to #3

Thanks for reading!