The ADHD-HTB playbook: hacking the brain that hacks the box
Ten friction-bypassing study methods for grinding HackTheBox with an ADHD brain, plus the two of them I turned into real tools: a Swipe-to-Pwn Anki deck and an htb-operator shell.
welcome, wanderer
Thoughts here are in permanent beta. Humans certified tho.
Each star is a note; each line, an idea that found another. Follow a thread, or wander somewhere unexpected.
recently watered
Learning in public
The operating philosophy of this whole garden: publish the process, not just the conclusions.
Metacognition, Eileen Gu, and the Fear of Going Public
The thing elite performers and good thinkers share is not raw talent; it is metacognition, the skill of watching your own mind. Here is what it is, why putting yourself out there feels so irreversible, and why the spotlight effect means it matters less than you think.
the commonplace
A quieter kind of feed. Endless to scroll, but built to leave you wiser instead of emptier: curated passages, mental models, and lessons from the great thinkers, each paired with a question worth sitting with. No likes, no outrage, no metrics that measure you. Only what you gather.
“You have power over your mind, not outside events.”
the beds
- Offensive Security
How things break: exploitation, red teaming, the attacker's craft.
- Cloud Security
Identity, blast radius, and trust boundaries in other people's computers.
- AI Security
What happens when the new attack surface can read and write language.
- AI
How the models actually work, what they can and can't do, and learning to build with them.
- Cryptography
Codes, keys, and keeping secrets: RSA today, the post-quantum scramble tomorrow.
- Systems Thinking
Feedback loops, incentives, and why complex systems fail sideways.
- Quant Curiosity
Probability, betting, and markets as adversarial systems.
- CTF Field Notes
Puzzles solved and unsolved: write-ups from capture-the-flag seasons.
- Games and Puzzles
Play taken seriously: strategy, riddles, and the hidden math that makes them tick.
- Philosophy
How to think, what's real, and what we owe each other: first principles, ethics, and the unexamined life.
- Life
Living it, not just analyzing it: habits, choices, and figuring things out as you go.
- Psychology
Why we do what we do: biases, motivation, and the wiring behind everyday behavior.
- Meta / Garden
Notes about learning, this site itself, and how the garden is tended.
- Random
The junk drawer: odds, ends, and half-formed sparks that don't fit a neat plot yet.
guided trails
Not sure where to start? A trail is a hand-picked walk through connected notes, and each stop explains why the next one matters.
how things grow here
Seed. A captured spark. Unverified, unpolished, possibly wrong.
Sprout. Taking shape. Has structure and at least one real source or experiment.
Growing. Actively tended. Revisited often, links forming to other notes.
Blooming. Useful to others as-is. Tested ideas, working code, real findings.
Evergreen. Settled and durable. Revised rarely, referenced constantly.