We’ve been distracted these past few months by getting certified as wildland firefighters, learning to drive excavators, competing in running races, and suffering from technological breakdowns. Now, these activities have abated, allowing us to spend enough time staring into space to produce another batch of articles.

These articles are still part of #100DaysToOffload, but a few of them are more in-depth.

My favourites are probably Curation and Its Side Effects and Treat People as Flowers.

Runners up: my list of petty (and not so petty) grievances with AI, and the story of my lifelong, Sisyphean struggle with bookworm pronunciation syndrome. There are several others that I really enjoyed writing, which I’ll let you discover for yourself.

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; misinformation. Also, I’m kind of tired of everything being about AI, which is why I have

The AutodidactsCuriositry

How I find the email addresses of public figures 🔒

This post is for paid members only

The AutodidactsCuriositry

An indie blog’s directory of indie blog directories

Blogs are back. RSS is cool again. (Said the blogger to his RSS feed.) Here is a collection of small, independent directories of blogs, personal websites, and smol/indie/slow/human web sites that I’ve run across and bookmarked. Most of them accept submissions. Some of them have RSS

The AutodidactsCuriositry

Ideas Evolve in Dialogue

You can sort of have a conversation with a book. I sometimes write rude comments in the margins when I disagree with the author. But the Stoics recommend that when you’re insulted, you just ignore it. Books are incredibly advanced stoics in this regard. And it’s kind of

The AutodidactsCuriositry

Old site, new site bookmarklets

A small utility that’s surprisingly useful during website migrations

The AutodidactsCuriositry

Sheep Music & Wedding Bands

On knowledge gaps and bookworm pronunciation syndrome

The AutodidactsCuriositry

Some thoughts about backing up, which occurred to me after my laptop abruptly expired

I had other plans for what to write about, and also plans for the day that didn’t involve disassembling my connection to the outside world with a screwdriver

The AutodidactsCuriositry

My criteria for a good Linux developer laptop

Well-built, cheap, and fast: I pick all three.

The AutodidactsCuriositry

The butterfly effect of revenge bedtime procrastination

Wasting time isn’t bad because it wastes time

The AutodidactsCuriositry

Curation and its side effects

Some fundamentals about how it works, and what to do when it doesn’t

The AutodidactsCuriositry

Bothering to understand

First it makes you slow, then it makes you fast (maybe)

The AutodidactsCuriositry

Delusional Optimism & the Art of Sneaking Up on Your Goals

You can succeed, but you can’t fail — because you aren’t officially trying

The AutodidactsCuriositry

The art of getting back on one’s horse

It’s a long process

The AutodidactsCuriositry

The bid-ask spread on used physical goods

For most of my life I fundamentally misunderstood buy & sell prices

The AutodidactsCuriositry

All Polymarket temperature markets missing, along with the money bet on them

Along with the money bet on them?

The AutodidactsCuriositry

How to drain pasta without a colander, without burning yourself

A cooking tip for unusually bright cave people

The AutodidactsCuriositry

20 years of Linux and I finally started using job control

And it’s amazing

The AutodidactsCuriositry

Backpack Activation Energy

Portrait of a gumption trap

The AutodidactsCuriositry

Bookmarklet: Copy Ghost Post ID to Clipboard

Save several milliseconds with two lines of JavaScript

The AutodidactsCuriositry

The search for a good offline dictionary for Linux

… proved longer than expected

The AutodidactsCuriositry

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 an acknowledgement

The AutodidactsCuriositry

Let’s call ’em “aigents”

The portmanteau is overdue

The AutodidactsCuriositry

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

The AutodidactsCuriositry

What Should We Optimize Away?

Optimize away optimizing away

The AutodidactsCuriositry

Thanks for reading — some of you, for over a decade!

The Autodidacts