The New Left Behind

Tue 09 June 2026

Frontier LLMs continue to get more and more powerful, exactly as expected. Yet despite their increased usefulness, a camp of AI skeptics and never-LLMers is emerging - Zig goes as far as a Strict No LLM / No AI Policy!

There was some merit to this, early LLMs genuinely needed close supervision and technical expertise to produce high-quality code, and overly enthusiastic early adopters produced a lot of slop and spam. However this is increasingly not the case anymore with current models, just as these policies and ideas are becoming more popular.

Instead, the correct move with LLMs ...

Kanji Poster

Thu 03 October 2019

This weekend, I started building a Python script to make a poster using the 2200 kanji included in jōyō kanji list as well as the extra kanji covered in WaniKani.

I'm still experimenting with different ways of ordering and coloring the kanji; for now I've ordered them according to how they appear in Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, and colored them by the log of their frequency in some texts I had.

You can find an example pdf in my github project.

Master one skill at a time instead of learning many at once

Thu 13 June 2019

Every skill has both a cost to maintain and a cost to learn. Take the case of learning a language: You need to spend some time every day rehearsing vocabulary and grammar you already learned so you don't forget (maintain), then you can also study new words and grammar points (learn).

The maintenance is a fixed cost - you need to spend this time just to not forget what you already know. As you get better, this cost goes down. Either because you can integrate the skill in your normal routine - read news in foreign languages - or ...

WaniKani on Anki

Sat 30 July 2016

WaniKani has long been my favorite way of studying Kanji, but I've always disliked the need to type in every single reading and meaning. At 300 reviews a day that's a lot of typing!

Today I finally had enough. First I considered making a user script for WaniKani to make it work a bit more like Anki (where you don't type the answer at all, you simply indicate how well you knew it with one tap). But then I realized that I might as well just use Anki directly.

I quickly found wanikanitoanki.com, which is great to export ...

Taking Notes

Tue 04 November 2014

I always thought taking notes was a waste of time. Surely you could just look back at the slides if you forgot something?

But I realized I might have had it backwards all this time. What if you take notes not to have something to refer to, but because it forces you to listen with greater attention and strengthens your memory?

To really take notes you need to understand the subject well enough to pick out the key phrases and concepts in real time, all while the lecturer is speaking on and on. It's similar to how actually ...

Reading Fluent Forever

Sat 30 August 2014

After being tempted for a good while, I finally read Gabriel Wyner's Fluent Forever. It's a solid introduction to language learning and teaches you a lot of good techniques. While I knew most of it already in theory, I hadn't put everything into practice yet, so reading it was a good way to take a look at my own language learning and see what I could improve.

Introduction: Stab, Stab, Stab

Gabriel starts of with 3 basic keys to language learning:

1. Learn pronunciation fast
2. Don't translate
3. Use SRS

He then recommends to ...

Beemind your Papers

Sun 20 July 2014

If you've seen my post on motivation hacking then you know that I'm using Beeminder to track a wide variety of things. I try everything I can to automate the tracking - import learning data directly from Duolingo, have a custom script poll WaniKani for my current level, track how long I practice piano by reading midi output over USB, integrating with Runkeeper to track how often I run, etc.

Now I've also found a good way to track the papers I read: Every paper I'm interested in I add to Mendeley. Then once I've actually read it I ...

Motivation Hacking

Sat 05 July 2014

After Anna recommended that I read The Motivation Hacker, I went down the rabbit hole. I had already discovered Beeminder the day before, and now I was truly motivated to set myself up with some goals.

You can see them on my public goal page, but for now they are primarily about keeping up my language studies, spending a bit more time on piano and making sure I go for a run regularly. I'm not sure if I actually care about the money betting features, but just seeing the steady line of past effort is quite interesting and ...

Halfway There

Sat 05 July 2014

Just recently, I passed an important milestone for my Japanese: 1000 Kanji learned. That's half the way to the official 2000 you supposedly need to read everyday newspapers, as well as other normal texts.

And indeed I have started to read Manga, Naruto and Death Note for now. It is still quite difficult to read, often I don't know what a sentence is supposed to mean, but luckily English translations are readily available on the Internet (I mostly use mangafox).

I've also built some dynamic grammar flashcards for Anki, though I have yet to use them. Oh ...

On Learning Languages

Tue 25 March 2014

I've made an attempt at summarizing everything I know about learning languages into one page, also adding useful resources and books. It's both a personal reference and in the hopes that it will be useful to somebody else - it will certainly be nice to have when making recommendations to friends, be able to point them at a single resource.

Feel free to message me if I left out some essential book or grammar guide, I'll be happy to include them and use them myself!