The Autodidacts

I like building things: it makes me happy. Learning and discovering things is a close second, but building is more satisfactory. Since I'm not that good at actually, you know, building things, the thrill of "building", in my case, has mostly come from wri

Note: this post is part of #100DaysToOffload, a challenge to publish 100 posts in 365 days. These posts are generally shorter and less polished than our normal posts; expect typos and unfiltered thoughts! View more posts in this series. I've been using Li

A lot of thought and talk goes into how good things are, when they're new, and the review industry is big business. A smaller amount of thought goes into durability, but some people do think about it: there are products with lifetime warranties, the buy i

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, an

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-place in a

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 enoug

Consider the dishwasher. Dishwashers are great: I really, really like having a dishwasher. Growing up, we didn't have a dishwasher. Much time was spent immersing plates in soapy water. Now, a house that doesn't have a dishwasher seems lacking. I recently

I have been informed by the internet that using Ollama is passé. Though it's easy to get set up and use, and popular with rank beginners like The Autodidacts, power users balk at the fact that: Performance is worse than llama.cpp et al. It's a VC-backed s

Every one's talking about their agents. What agents are we talking about - secret agents? casting agents? foreign agents? literary agents? cleaning agents? (this slop is just full of ionic and non-ironic surfactants-). Oh, oh, AI agents. I dislike ambigui

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 a