cmart's blog

This is not how most people use them, but there is a way for LLM agents to bring your mind and fingers closer to the code instead of further away, so that you feel more practiced, not out-of-touch.

Calls to Action Read the draft protocol and tell cmart your comments.

By this, I mean: every assembly of people tends toward unstructured, meandering conversation about topics unrelated to the purpose of the assembly.

Table of Contents: Preamble Obvious Physical Stuff Convenient Facts Three Rules What Follows / Other Thoughts Disclaimers Preamble (Skip the first paragraph if you’ve heard 50 things that rhyme with it in the past week.)

Dumb startup idea: rent an old shipping store with many cubby holes or lock boxes.

How much time do dogs spend uncomfortably needing to poop?

Top story: CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, CBS, NPR.

When computering outside the home, instead of a cafe, consider a counter-service restaurant with booths.

After noticing that browsers don’t have a ‘make this tab dumb and static’ button, I found SingleFile: a Mozilla-recommended extension that gets very close.

Firefox all major browsers don’t seem to have a mechanism to stop execution of scripts in a tab while allowing continued scrolling of already-rendered content.

I had the common 2020 experience of scrolling infinitely on Facebook and Twitter, then feeling worse for having done so.

Baaa!

(Previously: No Screens Cafe) At the Cowork Cafe, you can look at your little screen when you’re supposed to be looking at your medium-size screen.

Update: for posts published since August 2026, I’ve also started using the no-ai-use tag for posts that go further than this disclosure.

Subscriptions are a little different here!

Claude has a very distinctive writing style: short punchy sentences and eyeball kicks.

I, a human, write every word of this blog in my own voice.

Some brief meta:

Why skip past the why When someone says “I run Qwen 3.6 at 25 tokens per second”, or makes any similar performance claim about their self-hosted LLM setup, this is only meaningful if we know several other things.

I routinely use a bicycle for trips that people cannot conceive of, like picking up my partner from the airport, at night, after it rained all day.

Oh no, a listicle!

I want to dispel the misconception that using an Android phone means living within Google’s panopticon of data collection and advertising.

Let me just explain how I got here.

Humans drink some coffee, but moreso, we drink tea.

I really don’t want this to happen, but imagine you return from vacation.

To avoid grade inflation, I use the cmart rating system: -2 is quite bad. -1 is sorta bad. 0 is meh / okay.

Learned: if you’re working remotely, but you want to bring back the daily experience of going to an office with some friendly people, maybe don’t start a coworking space.

A friend showed me Simple, Non-Commercial, Open Source Notes.

Warnings: This topic, personal eating habits, is tired.

It seems that you want my help making a personnel decision?

I sponsor development of technologies that answer to their users’ own interests, rather than the interests of megacorps (who harvest users’ data and attention, extract rents, impose lock-in, and so on).

Every major city in the USA provides transportation as a public service. 1 Not only streets, but also vehicles, with professionals who drive them, and anyone can ride these vehicles, for a price between free and cheap!

If you don’t know what a Framework laptop is, go read someone else’s review first.

No Screens Cafe At the No Screens Cafe, you can enjoy coffee, tea, and scones.

You might think paper writing is obsolete, or there aren’t interesting developments in writing technology anymore.

September 2026 edit: Code Commons actually happened!

You may wish to see this blog’s AI use policy.

Background (talk about blog.c-mart.in) Planning and Design Things I Want in a Blog Compose with Markdown.