Ruskin Constant

...so you can get better acquainted with one of my favourite series without worrying about nightmare triggers. I get the urge to bring up episodes of Black Mirror in conversation a lot; often because they're fascinating commentary on current technology trends, but mostly because I love how you're not guaranteed a hollywood happy ending. However, that lack of guardrails against diving into deeply bleak themes and/or visuals put off a lot of people. They'll tell me "oh I don't watch Black Mirro...

Back in the day, before Facebook had a user-hostile home feed and was generally less problematic, folks would earnestly spend time to fill out their profile page. I'm talking the whole shebang, not just name and hometown but notable quotes, favourite movies, favourite books etc. You would even join a few public groups to show what tribes you're proud claim as your own. The result was a mildly thrilling perusal of profiles of new friends you just met. "Of course they love that band I do too! So c...

When each of your team is working on the most important tasks, then each completion brings relief and joy. This week, I found myself genuinely whooping with excitement when my team would let me know they were finished with their work. I realised that it was because each new task marked as done reflected either meaningful progress along the critical path of their project and/or new knowledge that helped de-risk unknown timelines or ideas as part of some research. Basically, their priorities were...

Often when I find myself stuck trying to make progress on a coding task, I wrestle with it on my own for longer than I should do. Then I "give in" and try to find a person that can help. The magic tends to happen in the process of formulating the question; the journey of structuring my frustration into a clear context, expected outcome vs. actual outcome with an attempt to reason why I'm not getting the desired result. Stepping through that sequence frequently unearths the flaw / inconsistency i...

Current Month Goals normally just 3 bullets here, typically along the lines of do workout more, read more, write more Happenings what's been happening I'm proud of... ...? Joy whatever made me laugh out loud most recently TIL new knowledge I will do better... facing up to my laundry list of imperfections & cringe Random thoughts those woodchucks do be chucking wood Gratitude at least 3 bullets Mood right now= ...

"Nothing good happens at a party after 2am"... When you realise that the extra benefit from adding more of something is getting smaller or even inverting to actual harm then it's time to reassess what you're doing. Such a simple yet powerful concept, typically discovered as part of an intro to economics or business...then quickly reapplied to areas of your life where you've been waiting for the right sounding excuse to quit doing things. Things that you always had a feeling you should stop bu...

Dabbling with the new large language models has been particularly delightful when I lean into outsourcing the kind of minor tasks that I'm perfectly capable of doing and yet there's the slightest emotional friction to actually getting it done. Most recently, I had to send an SMS message from an estate agent to put in an offer on a property so I asked ChatGPT to draft the message instead. I know. It's ridiculous, truly. The analog equivalent would be handing my phone to a personal assistant and p...

Is there such a thing as personally wholesome social media? What's the limit to how many relationships you can or should reasonably try to sustain? Maybe if you need software to keep up to date and to keep folks updated then you've already hit that limit? It's already clear that there's business value in being able to get a message in front of a bunch of people; but is there actual personal value in contributing to and trying to drink from a crowdsourced feed of unfiltered content at a volume a...

Of the various bits of written content I've authored publicly, the pieces that seem to provoke the most discussion and joy are generally those that dive into how my partner and I have approached making some big personal decisions. For example, choosing a new country to live in, or deciding how to track our money, or what to do with our precious date nights. I suspect the appeal is in how there's a certain glee imagining yourself in a novel "what-if" scenario - not too dissimilar to the way a goo...

I think the mark of a useful discovery-writing exercise is when you end up in mental place that you couldn't foresee when you started out. It's the reward for trusting the process enough to continue even when it doesn't feel like you're travelling very far or to anywhere profound. But then you stop, and you take stock of how far you've come and it feels sublime. Who would have thought this great thing...is great?? Somehow that's still a surprising sensation even when you rationally know tha...

There's a Venn diagram between "what I like", "what I'm good at", and "what earns money" wherein the overlap between all 3 categories should be where you qualify a career opportunity worthy of pursuit. The trouble is that you typically try to make a decision on that as a teenager, well before you have much knowledge of the kind of things that earn money (aka legitimate problems and/or value propositions). Not only have you not experienced that much of adult society yet, but the landscape of jobs...

Once you've gathered your tools, you need to do something with them. I feel swamped in a tech bubble moment where there's a lot of tool-building and conversations about tools and their potential for building more tools. I.e. AI and tech, and it's potential for helping folks build more platforms for AI and tech etc. etc. However, I feel like I'm missing exposure to activity where those tools are in use for an external end purpose. Everyone is so focused on the shovels for the gold rush, but wha...

"Start where you are, use what you have" person A: "I could have done that" person B: "yeah, but you didn't" It's much easier to improve something that exists, than something that doesn't. Rather, you can't improve what doesn't exist and getting into existence is a task that should be approached without too much scrutiny. Or without any scrutiny. I can already feel my mind fizzing with all kinds of hypothetical arguments justifying why it's good to stop a creation before its genesis. If a...

"Produce more than you consume" ...is some advice that I came across recently. It was in the context of ways to get rich or something self-helpy like that but it spoke to me on a personal level because I've been reflecting that I don't create as much as I used to. In fact, I consume more than ever before, probably. At least it feels that way because there's certainly a lot more to consume. For example, there's the ever renewed crowdsourced content feed from the likes of Youtube and other so...