Autodidacts Newsletter #25

It’s unclear how long human thought and human writing will remain relevant, so we are growing hay while the sun shines, and before the autonomous tractors make such efforts seem quaint.

Here are 25 new human-written posts, fresh this month, only some of which are about AI.

For those who are new: in 2026, we took on a writing challenge that’s a departure from usual Autodidacts deep dives. This newsletter is the Q2 report, covering posts written in February (posts 26–50-ish of 100).

If you’re in a hurry: my favourites are probably In Praise of Earnestness __(not necessarily the most well-written, but something I feel strongly about) and Sonder is a word I like __(more experimental style, and another topic I’ve been thinking about a lot).

I enjoyed writing about not being fake in social interactions (and helping other people escape from their tapeloops), semi-accidentally improving my memory, feeling more creative in the evening, the benefits of simplicity, bothering to eat flax and do pushups when I feel like a wet rag, and making my chronic insomnia productive.

A number of posts are on using local AI for optical character recognition and dictation: boring if you’re not interested in that, but quite a breakthrough in my workflow. You’ll also find assorted tech tutorials, and a few additions to my read-it-later migration saga (including a suggestion to use your nose as a touchscreen stylus).

Here are this month’s posts!

My Silver price API now has an RSS feed with the day’s bid priceAlso, I now know about RFC-822 dates, which is not something I was interested in learning aboutThe AutodidactsCuriositryA basic way to hotreload an AppImageRepack and run every time you hit saveThe AutodidactsCuriositryScript: bulk star Wallabag entries by URLUseful if you imported from Pocket CSV, and it didn’t include your favouritesThe AutodidactsCuriositryScript: bulk star Readeck entries by URL (with URL cleaning)A better version of the script I wrote for WallabagThe AutodidactsCuriositryIn Praise of EarnestnessLet’s make it cool again, because it is.The AutodidactsCuriositryAn extremely silly bug🐞The AutodidactsCuriositryOCR Typewritten Documents with a Local Vision Model (Qwen3-VL:8B + Ollama)It’s now possible to get results better than Tesseract, without relying on cloud servicesThe AutodidactsCuriositryHow to pause and resume a resource-intensive process on Linux with SIGSTOP: specifically, Ollama LLM inferenceKeep your system resources to yourself when you need them, and put them to good use when you don’tThe AutodidactsCuriositrySomething good happened to my memory, and I have a theory about what caused itAccidental strength training for the hippocampusThe AutodidactsCuriositryStar rating support has been merged into the Readeck KOReader pluginI ported over the patch I wrote for the Wallabag plugin, and improved itThe AutodidactsCuriositryHow to increase Ollama context lengthOLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH environment variable didn’t have an effect, but there’s another wayThe AutodidactsCuriositryInsomnia isn’t a waste of timeSub-clinical insomnia is endemic among the people I know. And I’ve rarely heard anyone say anything good about it. We all know how important good sleep is for good health, and about the increase in heart attacks when daylight savings time kicks in, and that getting less than 6hrsThe AutodidactsCuriositryMaybe don’t optimize conversion rate?Some of the most interesting people are allergic to funnelsThe AutodidactsCuriositryHandy.computer is the Linux dictation app I’ve always wanted.and this post is written with it.The AutodidactsCuriositryA strange workaround for when the capacitive touch screen of your e-reader isn’t responding to dry fingers: use your noseNo, really.The AutodidactsCuriositryAn unexpected benefit of docking my laptop beside my deskI can run Performance profile all the timeThe AutodidactsCuriositrySonder is a word I likeAt 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, crushes — the works. The evil billionaire? Old wounds, sincere beliefs, time with grandchildren — playing Legos — staring atThe AutodidactsCuriositryTaking responsibility for my energy levelsBootstrapping mitochondrial function one flax seed at a timeThe AutodidactsCuriositryTIL how to accidentally overwrite a decade worth of data in LibreOffice calcAnd also, how to restore from my backup with similar single-keystroke efficiencyThe AutodidactsCuriositryPSA: local AI handwriting recognition is usable nowTo my delight and surprise, local Qwen3-VL:8b WER is acceptable, even on my cryptic handwritingThe AutodidactsCuriositryDe-optimize your search terms to skip the SEO slopFinding the human in a sea of salesThe AutodidactsCuriositryThe Evening Writing EffectTime for some night-owl counter-propagandaThe AutodidactsCuriositrySocial Cache BustingHow do you ask questions that people don’t just hippopotamus?The AutodidactsCuriositryThe Fewer Ingredients The BetterGood quality ingredients hardly need seasoning. I only need to add spices if I’ve burnt the soup.The AutodidactsCuriositryPaste clipboard contents in places where you can’t pasteUse AutoKey send_keys() to put clipboard content places where it can’t normally be putThe AutodidactsCuriositryIt’s surprisingly hard to reliably paste the current date at the cursor on LinuxLong, 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 && xdotool sleep 0.5 key “ctrl+v” Isn’t it a beauty? But it worked, in i3 on X11. I devoted 500The AutodidactsCuriositryWe don’t know until the end, and it’s never the endJudging a book by its content doesn’t work eitherThe AutodidactsCuriositry

The questions, corrections, comments, kind words, and good advice we receive by email from strangers and long-time readers means a lot. Thank you! We are also grateful for the donations and paid subscriptions that cover our expenses and keep morale up.

We hope to have another 25 new posts for you by the end of march.

The Autodidacts