Curiositry

Ah, makes sense. Thank you! I will update my blogpost with these clarifications.

This is a super cool project! Probably the most interesting neurotech hardware I've run across since OpenBCI was released.

It would be great to see a side-by-side comparison of Cerelog and OpenBCI data from the same session/patient.

A few questions:

- Could you clarify which parts of the project are licenced MIT, which are CC-BY-SA, and which are CC-BY-NC-SA? It seemed like the guide and the README had more restrictive language than the actual license file.

- What made you decide to start fresh, rather than adding the features you needed to the OpenBCI?

Currently supported devices lists Kindle Touch: https://github.com/Quill-OS/quill/wiki#currently-supported-d...

I second your comment about referring back to sysadmin posts. I do this all the time! Sometimes I even find my own old blogposts in Google.

And I still get a steady trickle of grateful comments/emails in response to a tossed-off post about getting Linux scanner drivers working, many of which are genuinely moving to read.

I started blogging long before AI became mainstream, but I'd say: totally worth it.

Re blockers:

- Novelty: I routinely search for very niche, "boring" information, and am disappointed by how few in-depth blogposts I find.

- “AI can explain most topics better than I can”. I doubt it! I rarely find current AI as valuable as a good blog post. It tends to be shallow and regress to the mean, and b/c of hallucinations it's untrustworthy, so a lot of time is wasted fact-checking.

- Fear of shipping: if it isn't relevant, nobody will read it (unless you're already famous)

Re questions:

- What made it worth it for you?

Clarifying my thoughts, connecting with strangers who think about the same things, the leverage "having a platform" produces (it opens a lot of doors), and gaining prestige in certain niches.

- What kinds of posts actually worked (for learning, career, network, opportunities)?

I don't think this is simple to answer until the heat death of the universe. Traffic stats is a very poor estimator of value delivered. Which posts I am most proud of, and how much traffic they got, are weakly correlated.

- Any practical format that lowers the bar (length, cadence, themes)?

Things that you are obsessed with. It's a tonne of work writing a good post, and sometimes you publish it and nobody cares, so it has to be intrinsically rewarding.

- If you were starting today, what would you do differently?

I don't know! Probably put less effort into trying to appear intelligent/impressive, which rarely works anyway.

These are my off-the-top thoughts based on over a decade of blogging.

FZF, Ripgrep, Fish, fd-find, Helix, Lazygit, ripgrep-all, ffmpeg, and pandoc are the ones that spring to mind.

I have been tinkering on a little price drop alert scraper written in Python. It's run as a cron job, and every day it checks the prices of a list of urls (my clothing staples from various outdoor retailers, mostly) and sends me an email with any products that have gone on sale.

I've been running it for over a year, but now I have fixed it up and made a little landing page to see if there's interest for a stupid-simple price watch service like this (no need to install an extension or create an account):

https://www.curiositry.com/price-drop-alert/

I tried to use pandoc+revealJS, then tried presenterm (which was really nice but didn't give me enough control over font sizes), and then settled on Marp, which worked great.

Yes, but you also need to be smart enough to operate magic cloud platforms, and be a paying customer. I am neither.

Thank you :) I'm here just slow at typing.

Based on the timestamps, it could only be. But this story, timestamps notwithstanding, was submitted by suprisetalk ~2 days ago.

Then it was placed in news.ycombinator.com/pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool?next=43176091), and got two comments; credit_guy's comment was one of them.

Then, today, it hit the frontpage.

Notice that if you mouse over "9 hours ago" on the story it shows the timestamp 2025-02-25. 9 hours ago was not 2025-02-25. If you mouse over the "7 hours ago" on credit_guy's comment, the timestamp shows 2025-02-26. One day after it was submitted, two days before it made the frontpage.

Touché

This is a fascinating take. I have been thinking about your comment for two days.

I think you're right in some cases (when working in a field one has mastered, for example), and I think I could probably go in the direction of getting it right the first time.

But the way I see it, any time I'm doing something new or innovative, I'm doing something I don't know how to do, which takes trial and error; and troubleshooting is basically figuring things out by trial and error, in a systematic way.

Though a lot of time it is used for fixing bugs, I think troubleshooting as a skill and mindset is equally useful for creating new things, where you are solving for something.

Thanks for posting an archive link. My site has survived previous HN traffic spikes on Fly.io's free tier, but 256mb of RAM wasn't quite adequate this time :)

Yes, sorry. I have scaled up my hosting and it's back :)

I self-host Ghost on free-tier cloud hosting, which ticks all your boxes if you have some sysadmin skills. (PikaPods is the cheapest managed Ghost hosting I know of.)

I also really like the philosophy of Bear Blog and Matoara Blog. I don't think Bear has newsletter sending, but Matoara does.

A few years ago I doggedly tried to switch to Nyxt for everyday use. I really liked the concept, but at the time, it was too buggy, and constantly crashed on me. I'm going give it another shot.

Option to use a local LLM?

Ghost, self-hosted on Fly.io free tier

Mostly by building things that needed complex RegEx, and debugging my regular expressions with https://regexr.com/.

Good point. I tried it without it, and for some reason it didn't work. I didn't feel like figuring out why, so I left it. (My excuse was that in the future using an env var could let me set my default checking duration for the day/session without editing and reloading my .bashrc; obviously I'd have to check whether it was already set rather than just overwriting it, though.)

sleep 30m; checking 60m

I was not aware of that etymological aspect of dorking (I assumed it was an extension of dork, in the sense of nerd; and I did not know the etymology of dork).

What alternative alternative term do your recommend?

Two of my brothers and I share one blog, covering programming, philosophy, self-improvement, and anything else that fascinates us:

https://www.autodidacts.io/

Thanks, edited title.

I agree social dynamics are more complex than this (potentially childish) analysis.

Though I mentioned humour and fitting in, you're right that I didn’t really address the use of profanity to build rapport/break down formality/establish intimacy, and adjust the tone of a conversation in other ways. (Some aspects of that were on my list of things to add, but I never got around to it.)

> I get the feeling this guy doesn’t have too many close friends.

Thankfully, despite this essay & other indications to the contrary, I have a reasonable number of wonderful close friends (I’m sometimes as surprised as you), some of whom swear, and some of whom don't. I sometimes appreciate swearing, and sometimes find it grating. But I find that overuse of swearing usually detracts from a conversation, which is why I wrote up my argument for why there are potentially maybe possibly valid philosophical and pragmatic reasons for adults to consider swearing less.

Yes, that is problematic :) However, different cultures use swearing very differently (and it seems the attitude that sometimes goes along with swearing in my culture doesn't always go along with swearing in other cultures), and swearing is a very tiny part of a culture, so would have very little effect at that level even if it was as "dumb" in other cultures as I think it is in mine.

I appreciate your thoughtful comment.

The essay got rather bloated trying to address all the possible counter-arguments, the scientific research, and the potential caveats; and despite my efforts to tone down the moral grandstanding, a lot slipped through. I should probably re-write it as a shorter essay with a thousands footnotes, "Why I Don't Swear".

> suggesting that everyone should always be worried about offending others nearby, instead of expressing themselves when they need to.

Always worrying about it wouldn't be healthy, but to me it seems like a good idea to at least consider the potential negative effects self-expression may have on others, and weight that against the benefits of self-expression.

This is unfortunately the case, which is why I start the essay with caveat that it hopefully applies to people with my cultural background who swear, and may not apply beyond that.