The-Medium-Is-the-Message on Andrew Quinn's TILs

Claude Code disproportionately benefits those who touch type

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I use Claude Code. I like Claude Code. According to Steve Yegge’s Eight-Circuit Model of Claudesciousness, I’m a pretty solid Stage 6, edging into 7 on heavy days. I think most engineers, most of the time, can get most of their work done faster with one of these tools than not, although the force multiplier of that speedup is probably not as extreme as it is in my case. Why is that?

The language learning "Delta" Anki card pattern

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

+--------------------------+------------------------------------------+
|       L2, fixable        |              L1, intention               |
+--------------------------+------------------------------------------+
|        L2, fixed         |   L1, (fixable -> fixed) explanation     |
+--------------------------+------------------------------------------+

The above 2x2 layout for Anki cards, which I call a “comprehensible delta”, is one of the best things I’ve happened upon in a while for learning another language. Let’s say you are learning Finnish, and you want to say

What I would recommend to teens in 2024 who want to get into development

Sun, 08 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Layers of abstraction for me, not for thee

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Consider the problem of “how do I run more than 1 terminal at a time”. At this moment, I have at least 5 different ways I can effectively solve this issue:

I can, from a different physical computer, SSH in to a new session.
I can, from the same physical computer, switch to a different tty session with … C-S-F2 through 6 or something. (Rare, but sometimes it comes in really handy.)
I can, in the same user session, open 2 separate windows of a terminal emulator.
I can, in the same terminal emulator, open a new tab.
I can, in the same emulated terminal, run tmux and open a new pane.

There are yet more exotic options like Serial over LAN that I’m only theoretically aware of.

Software engineers as mental athletes

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week I achieved a modest personal dream of mine I’ve had since I was a high schooler: I purchased a proper standing desk, with a low-profile treadmill underneath.

The total cost for a setup here in Finland came out to only about $350, something I can easily afford with a week’s take-home pay. The primary hurdle for me was psychological: How could I justify spending so much money on a more ergonomic setup when I’m not even sure this whole “software engineering” thing will work out for me? Nevermind that I taught myself to program at 14 from a Civ 4 hacking tutorial, nevermind that I’ve been living my life as a budget cyborg for the last 15 years, nevermind that every job I’ve ever had post-college has been at least 60% WFH – how could I be sure this investment in my home office will pay itself back?

Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions.

The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the app. You’re 80% sure you know how to handle the infra you’ll need to get it online. And you’re 70% sure you know how to get your first customer. What is your chance of successfully going from zero to first customer? 0.9 * 0.8 * 0.7 = a little over 0.5. That’s … a lot less encouraging than any of the previous numbers, if you buy my multi-step modelling.

Check my math - NixOS vs the Most Complicated Program on Earth (MCPOE)

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine you had the Most Complicated Program On Earth (MCPOE), with 1,000,000 dependencies.

Every dependency must be build correctly exactly right or the MCPOE will fail to compile. MCPOE’s 10x dev team chose their packages so that each dependency has only a 1/1,000,000 chance of having something go wrong when you’re installing them - maybe a whitespace character snuck into the wrong build script, maybe solar wind hit the build computer. What are the chances that you will install MCPOE correctly?

Beware those who promise increasing marginal returns

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The law of diminishing returns needs no introduction. Your second slice of pizza is less satisfying than your first. Your second million dollars is less valuable to you, personally. If you think econ 101 has any life wisdom to impart, it deserves being elevated to the status of “life heuristic” - especially because, unlike some other concepts in econ 101 (comparative advantage anyone?) it feels true in a boring way, not in an actively counterintuitive way.

The unreasonable effectiveness of VMs in hacker pedagogy

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a secret. If you have Vagrant and VirtualBox installed, and your colleague does too, then you can both bring up an near-totally identical blank slate Debian 12 Linux VM by running

mkdir tutorial/
cd tutorial/

vagrant init debian/bookworm64
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

. This works regardless of whether you or they are on Linux, Mac¹, BSD, or even Windows. (Through the magic of aliasing, mkdir and cd even work in PowerShell.)

Speed paint videos for software installations

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Shell Bling Ubuntu and finstem now have what I’m calling “speed paints” of how someone, starting from scratch on a standard Ubuntu VM, might install the programs.

This came out of me realizing ffmpeg makes speeding up a video recording of a VirtualBox session a one-line operation:

`1`	`ffmpeg -i output.webm -filter:v "setpts=0.1*PTS" -an output-fast.webm`

When I watched them back, I realized it gave me a really good sense of what the installation should feel and look like, even if I hadn’t actually tried it yet. That in turn made me think “Oh, installing this thing really isn’t that bad after all.” So I decided it was worth including.

Things Word has that SSGs, by and large, don't

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Recommendations appreciated.

Disclaimer: Most of these make little sense in an Internet medium anyway.

An index. An index simply lists the terms and topics discussed in a document, along with the pages they are listed on.
A glossary. Could be as simple as a CSV file of terms and definitions, or as complex as a whole extra glossary/ folder.
Related: A “Acronyms and Abbreviations” section. Even moreso than the last, this could be a simple CSV.
A built-in site-wide search function. Word gets around this by having everything open at once.
A list of tables. Huge if you want your dead-trees books to match your shiny new website.
A list of figures. Ditto.
A list of referenced external documents. CSV! Say it with me!

The reason I compiled this list was because I decided to investigate whether I could use Hugo at work to generate our client-facing documentation. Currently we are using an unholy combination of Word and Confluence, and I figured that the magic of Git might help us keep our docs updated in a more sane way.