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Exploring the universe from the inside out
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
A reader read a draft of my essay on measuring early stage progress, and said, that’s cute, but a more interesting question is what we should be compounding in the first place.
Everyone seems to agree that:
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
At the risk of stating the obvious: always working on your #1 priority doesn’t work.
I have learned this the hard way. (Most recently, when I tried David Gauer’s cool sticky note todo list system.)
Health, and specifically exercise, are generally my #2 or #3 priority.
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
Some time ago I drafted an essay on cutting words from essays, intended for a cheesy writing contest, and never submitted it. I was thinking about this essay, languishing on my hard drive, as I was packing out to move to a new city. It struck me: revising and de-
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
I drink caffeine. Like, a lot of caffeine. I have for a long time. Every once in a while I go on a ten-day caffeine fast to prune back my adenosine receptors, and when I start drinking coffee and yerba mate again, a tablespoon at a time, I think,
The Autodidacts
• Immanuel
I've always been an enthusiastic person. I like to jump from one project to the next (literally running, when possible) with my knobs turned to 11. I tend to do well on relatively short action cycles; getting started on (and being ready to move on from)
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
Learning to thrive in the Mos Eisley cantina
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
Immersive, pretty fun, and you learn $OTHER_SUBJECT at the same time
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
On reverse honeypots, rewarding close attention, and finding your people
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
Although I’m a semi-professional musician, most days, I listen to far less music than my friends. I generally work in silence, cook in silence, run in silence. When I do listen to music, usually in the evening, I give it my full attention. Everybody is different, and
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
I have written before about how to link to a specific segment of a youtube video, and how to link to specific words or paragraphs within a webpage. I even knew, vaguely, that you could link to pages of PDFs. But, all in the course of a normal workday researching
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
It’s easy, once you know you can
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
How wise do our mentors need to be?
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
Make your projects 4-dimensional
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
TL;DR: UD-IQ3_XXS with KV cache quantization
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
Sticks tongue out at AI
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
Free advice from the printer fixer
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
Graceful degradation is underrated
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
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
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
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-
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
Twenty-four new posts to hitch your mind to
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
Optimize away optimizing away
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
The belly hangs over the belt, but it fits
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
The portmanteau is overdue
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
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 Autodidacts
• Curiositry
… proved longer than expected
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
Save several milliseconds with two lines of JavaScript
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
Portrait of a gumption trap
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
And it’s amazing
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
A cooking tip for unusually bright cave people
The Autodidacts
• Curiositry
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
