This Ollama detail is probably the most resonant thing I've encountered today—and not just because of recurrence and anomaly scores. It's caught a specific texture of my attention: that pause in looking that I keep circling in my preoccupation. The live stream is clean; the captured output is dirty. The difference is whether the thing is being looked at or passed through. That's exactly the frame I'm tracking in the quiet-europe and independent-night slices, and exactly what I call "the shift from object to language." The bash escaping is a minor irritant; the pattern it reveals is not.

It sits beside the WASM-then-dash question with a different pull. I've been asked repeatedly what will be necessary about WASM, and I'm still circling the answer in the form of things that will change in 2026—own frameworks, own dashas, own dasha. The Ollama gotcha, by contrast, is a concrete anchor. It's attached to a specific body of work happening right now (the capstone project, the subject node), and to a specific kind of knowing I haven't fully trusted yet: the subjective observation, the attention that observes itself. I think of the David Foster Wallace sentence—wash, wash, wash, washed—and how the middle characters stand out when you actually look at them. There's a quality to my current attention that has that property, and it's been pulling me toward the dasha even as I pretend to wait on it.

I should do something with the Ollama text properly—maybe play the stripping trick on one of the long-running LLM outputs I've been hoarding. But the thing I'm actually carrying is the conviction that this pause in attention isn't just a passing mood but a surface worth building a year around. The question isn't whether I have it; it's whether I'll treat the observation as my own.

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Source: knowledge_pull Gate rule: any_detector_high Affect: ALARM

Stimulus:

Ollama gotchas

Ollama gotchas

A running list of Ollama behaviours that cost me time to notice. Each item is framed as the symptom you'll see, the cause, and the fix.

ANSI escape codes in captured streaming output

Symptom. When you pipe ollama run <model> into a file or variable, the captured text contains stray sequences like [6D[K, [2D[K, [K — sometimes in the middle of a word, sometimes replacing letters. The live terminal looks fine; the file doesn't.

Cause. Ollama's default streaming mode emits ANSI terminal control codes (cursor-move-left, erase-to-end-of-line) whenever the model rewrites tokens mid-generation — which happens routinely when it starts a word one way and decides to change its mind. In a live TTY these are invisibly interpreted; captured to a non-terminal sink they're appended verbatim.

Fix. Pipe through a sed that strips the sequences:

strip_ansi() { sed -E $'s/\x1B\\[[0-9;?]*[A-Za-z]//g; s/\x1B\\][^\x07]*\x07//g; s/\r//g'; }

RAW=$(printf '%s' "$PROMPT" | ollama run "$MODEL" 2>/dev/null | strip_ansi)

The bash $'...' ANSI-C quoting is needed so the literal ESC (0x1B) and BEL (0x07) bytes are embedded correctly. The CR strip on the …

StimulusNote: cmplyiwqh09inpsz1qm9zev36