Currently curious about: paying attention and not becoming jaded, the renaissance of the kind/quiet/thoughtful/independent web, long-distance trail running, learning Spanish, applied philosophy, learning how to learn, folk music, reading, Linux sysadmin tips.
For a while I have wanted to create a lookup table that maps concepts people describe using computer metaphors to their biological/ecological/??? equivalent, which in some cases might be more accurate, or at least more fresh.
I don't. Except for long-tail keywords, Marginalia Search / Kagi Small Web / Wiby / Million Short are better options, or one of the many blog/small web directories that have made the frontpage in recent months.
Qwen3.5 9b seems to be fairly competent at OCR and text formatting cleanup running in llama.cpp on CPU, albeit slow. However, I have compiled it umpteen ways and still haven't gotten GPU offloading working properly (which I had with Ollama), on an old 1650 Ti with 4GB VRAM (it tries to allocate too much memory).
- It feels like I know all the efficient keybindings, but when someone looks over my shoulder, I become conscious of how much time I spend mashing Esc/CapsLock and i/I/a/A/o/O, compared to how much editing actually happens.
- I have nomouse mode on, to try to learn modal editors properly. But the mouse is actually fairly fast for getting to a specific cursor position. In theory, using Helix motions could be faster (and there's gw if I don't know what motion to use). In practice, the mental process of turning a point on the coordinate plane into the correct series of motions (including i) feels vastly slower.
Still, Vim, Helix, etc are incredible for structural manipulation of text, and I miss what they provide any time I edit text somewhere else, even with the universal keybindings that are available for navigating/selecting/deleting words, lines, etc. I tried Vim mode in Zed and it just didn't cut it.
Some things about Helix that I particularly like: speed and stability (no weird lag on visual block insert!), the jump to diagnostics/changes pattern (]d <Space>a is a surprisingly nice spellcheck interface, with <Space>d for the overview), the jumplist, and the good-by-default fuzzy pickers.
This has been my main editor for prose and code for a few years now (Sublime Text -> Atom -> Vim -> Helix). Overall, it has been great. Many LSPs work almost out-of-the-box, and my config is a fraction the size of my old .vimrc.
Surprisingly, it didn’t take that long to update my Vim muscle memory. Days or weeks, maybe? However, I still have mixed feelings about modal editors in general, and most of my gripes with Helix are actually about modal editors and/or console editors in general.
Last night, I published a directory of indie blog directories on my (indie) blog.
ramkarthikk had built a directory of indie blogs, which included my blog’s RSS feed, and found my directory of directories post in the directory he had built.
This morning, he emailed me with the story of how he found my post, and asked if I’d consider adding his directory to my directory of directories. His directory was so nice I added it to my directory of directories and posted it here :)
This, I think, it how the indieweb is supposed to work.
Essays on technology, philosophy & amateur neuroscience:
www.autodidacts.io
A portfolio of sorts, listing some of my web projects:
www.curiositry.com
@curiositry on GitHub/SourceHut and Twitter.