2025-10-01 11:56:10
I have struggled, struggled with to do lists.
I cannot overstate just how much I’ve struggled. You could say there are these things called to do lists, and I’ve struggled with them. Struggled.
I’ve struggled to choose one. Every to do list system comes with its own set of helpful features that I appreciate, and limitations or quirks I find frustrating enough to quit. Yes, I’ve tried the one you use, or are about to recommend. Web, mobile, console, desktop, text, LISP, paper, I’ve tried them all.
I’ve struggled to stick with one. There comes this euphoric moment when I’ve imported lists from other places into a new system, because the items are once again organised, neat, and actionable. Dependencies are graphed, projects are defined, timelines are locked in. Surely this, this will be the one where I get this right! Right? Then I don’t use it, and it becomes stale, and I resent it, and I start a new one. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Not using it… there’s the other struggle. Once I instantiate a new to do list system of any kind, I struggle to maintain focus. I don’t check it. I don’t tick things off I finish. I don’t update tasks in progress. I don’t add new tasks. This inevitably leads me to distrust the system, and instead rely on my memory for tasks, which doesn’t scale beyond the last half a dozen things I want or need to do.
I don’t have this issue in other aspects of my life, weirdly enough. My calendar is (mostly) a source of truth, despite the best efforts of mobile and desktop software to break it in new and wonderful ways on a regular basis. Clara’s and my finance spreadsheet is the centre of our world, and I trust it absolutely. My email inboxes are spotless.
So why aren’t to do lists the same? Why can’t I seem to choose, use, and maintain a task management system for more than a fortnight or so at a time before my optimism is supplanted with dread, and I throw it away in a fit of frustration?
An earlier draft of this post said that all to do list systems suck, but I’ve since come to realise the common denominator is me. People evidently find value in these tools, or they wouldn’t exist. Why can’t I find one that fits my weird brain? It’s not like there’s a dearth of mobile applications with tick box icons, or systems people have devised using their preferred tooling.
Remember the Hipster PDA? Remember… PDAs? What about paper? Am I overthinking sync? Am I making the tasks themselves too complicated? Is it an issue with attention spans? I should get that checked out. I’m sure it’s on a to do list somewhere. Which one? Where am I? Where is this panic coming from? Why can’t I remember this stuff!?
Ironically, the web task management tool we use at work is the only system I’ve maintained long term. I can’t stand it; I find it clunky and slow with a frustrating UI that takes far too much time to maintain and entrenches bad interpersonal habits (let’s leave it at that). But I don’t have a choice.
Wait, fuck. Maybe that’s it. I need to pick a system and say “no, Ruben, I don’t care that it takes a gigabyte of dynamic scripts to load a kilobyte of text, you’re using this! You don’t have a choice!” It’s not the tool. It’s not the tool. Or is it?
I’d still prefer to have something that fits though. Like our budget, or my calendar, or email, or my GU trousers. Does GU have a task manager? DO WITH GU. They can have that.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-01.
2025-10-01 11:56:10
I have struggled, struggled with to do lists.
I cannot overstate just how much I’ve struggled. You could say there are these things called to do lists, and I’ve struggled with them. Struggled.
I’ve struggled to choose one. Every to do list system comes with its own set of helpful features that I appreciate, and limitations or quirks I find frustrating enough to quit. Yes, I’ve tried the one you use, or are about to recommend. Web, mobile, console, desktop, text, LISP, paper, I’ve tried them all.
I’ve struggled to stick with one. There comes this euphoric moment when I’ve imported lists from other places into a new system, because the items are once again organised, neat, and actionable. Dependencies are graphed, projects are defined, timelines are locked in. Surely this, this will be the one where I get this right! Right? Then I don’t use it, and it becomes stale, and I resent it, and I start a new one. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Not using it… there’s the other struggle. Once I instantiate a new to do list system of any kind, I struggle to maintain focus. I don’t check it. I don’t tick things off I finish. I don’t update tasks in progress. I don’t add new tasks. This inevitably leads me to distrust the system, and instead rely on my memory for tasks, which doesn’t scale beyond the last half a dozen things I want or need to do.
I don’t have this issue in other aspects of my life, weirdly enough. My calendar is (mostly) a source of truth, despite the best efforts of mobile and desktop software to break it in new and wonderful ways on a regular basis. Clara’s and my finance spreadsheet is the centre of our world, and I trust it absolutely. My email inboxes are spotless.
So why aren’t to do lists the same? Why can’t I seem to choose, use, and maintain a task management system for more than a fortnight or so at a time before my optimism is supplanted with dread, and I throw it away in a fit of frustration?
An earlier draft of this post said that all to do list systems suck, but I’ve since come to realise the common denominator is me. People evidently find value in these tools, or they wouldn’t exist. Why can’t I find one that fits my weird brain? It’s not like there’s a dearth of mobile applications with tick box icons, or systems people have devised using their preferred tooling.
Remember the Hipster PDA? Remember… PDAs? What about paper? Am I overthinking sync? Am I making the tasks themselves too complicated? Is it an issue with attention spans? I should get that checked out. I’m sure it’s on a to do list somewhere. Which one? Where am I? Where is this panic coming from? Why can’t I remember this stuff!?
Ironically, the web task management tool we use at work is the only system I’ve maintained long term. I can’t stand it; I find it clunky and slow with a frustrating UI that takes far too much time to maintain and entrenches bad interpersonal habits (let’s leave it at that). But I don’t have a choice.
Wait, fuck. Maybe that’s it. I need to pick a system and say “no, Ruben, I don’t care that it takes a gigabyte of dynamic scripts to load a kilobyte of text, you’re using this! You don’t have a choice!” It’s not the tool. It’s not the tool. Or is it?
I’d still prefer to have something that fits though. Like our budget, or my calendar, or email, or my GU trousers. Does GU have a task manager? DO WITH GU. They can have that.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-01.
2025-10-01 11:24:40
On Monday I quoted a great news report by John Walker, but it only clicked today he was writing for Kotaku. I didn’t read them back in the day, in part because they were published by the same Gawker Media outfit behind Gizmodo. If the name rings a bell here, Sam Biddle ran a story in 2012 asking if his readers were willing to look as stupid as I did for the unannounced Apple Watch, and included a photo of me with an iPod Nano.
(My sister worked at the Fruit Company at the time, and told me the Sydney office were all over the story, not least because their colleague’s brother was being used to illustrate it. I was… also surprised).
I left a comment saying I didn’t appreciate my likeness being used to sell ads on their clickbait junk. They responded claiming my Creative Commons licence permitted their use, as though that absolved them of their poor taste. Bemused, I replied that they’d violated the non-commercial clause of the licence; something you’d think a reputable and trustworthy organisation like Gawker would check before erroneously leaning on it as a moral and legal defense (who knows, maybe their lawyers were still tied up defending their “journalists” for theft). Eventually they took the post down, and sent me a non-apology discussing their “intentions” without taking responsibility.
This has happened at least a dozen times, across multiple news organisations and bloggers over the years. People take my words and images, use them in inappropriate ways, and I hear about it after the fact. At some point last year I gave up chasing them down.
I bring this up now as a tangential example of what’s happening in the IT industry more broadly. Developers who provide key parts of Internet infrastructure, far more important than any of my words, are being treated as an afterthought… or worse, as free tech support. A friend of a friend who maintains a well-known project, regularly receives demands from Fortune 500 companies, naturally without any offer for compensation for their time or efforts. Surprising nobody, when they raise the idea of support contracts, these companies ignore them or throw down baseless legal threats.
It’s the entitlement that gets me. Gawker thought they could legally get away with mistreating their free image source, as though the licence absolved them of journalistic integrity and class. Firms with fat profit margins think they can demand anything from maintainers of small projects, and have the gall to not offer anything in return. Gen-“AI” companies think they can hammer yours and my sites to train their models for free, and have us pay for the externalities like bandwidth and server capacity for the privilege.
Tighter licence requirements (such as copyleft) is proposed as a solution, but as I wrote in my recent post about one such suggestion, this is an ill-fated technocratic solution to a social problem. Meanwhile, armchair experts will dismiss ethical concerns on the basis it’s legal, as though the two concerns are in any way equivalent.
We need to tackle this entitlement attitude, or nothing will change. This starts by treating people who provide you free stuff well. Even if you don’t care about the ethics (a phrase I’m tired of writing), you’ll almost certainly get more of what you want when you grant people respect. Throwing some money at them when you need their help also goes a long way. I know, groundbreaking stuff! If you’re at a company that relies on open source software, or free media, or any other use of the Commons, ask how they’re contributing back.
In the meantime, Kotaku seem to be owned by different people now, so that’s… good! More John Walker, less Sam Biddle please.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-10-01.
2025-09-30 21:39:00
It’s the last #SciArtSeptember post, that series of prompts for data visualisation scientists and artists that I used for writing instead, on account of the topics being fun. I wanted to thank @kristinHenry again for the ideas, even if I perhaps used them in other ways.
Accrete and accretion are two terms I remember from those childhood space magazines my dad used to buy me; most likely Quest. The cover of one of my favourite issues had an artist’s rendition of newly-formed star, in what I now know to be a protoplanetary disk. We now have actual space photographs of these taking shape, as taken in 2014 from the ALMA Observatory in Chile:
Space is so beautiful, and I feel privileged to be alive when images like these are feasible. We’re seeing into space in ways none of our ancestors could have. It’s the same feeling I got when seeing the heart in Pluto from the New Horizons probe in 2015.
As an aside, I’ve always wanted to go to Chile. Do you reckon ALMA has a visitors centre and/or museum?
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-09-30.
2025-09-29 08:40:20
This #SciArtSeptember prompt is about art today! Me, taking an art prompt and using it to discuss art instead of whatever tenuous link I’m drawing to another topic I’m thinking about? Never.
Last weekend I was at an art exhibition put on by one of the local community collages. My father in law had a few exhibits that were shockingly good (and he may have offered more of them for our walls), but I was also interested in seeing what his classmates had put together.
I was floored at how good so much of this art was. Clara and I an art gallery and museum nerds, and these works by students of all ages and abilities rivalled some of what we’d seen in expensive galleries with huge walls, hushed voices, and entry fees. Even ones that looked simplistic at first glance were surprisingly detailed upon closer inspection. You don’t realise how much texture can play with light in interesting ways until you see pictures in person, rather than a computer screen.
The organisers also did a great job presenting what must have been a challenging collection. Some of the cheeky framing was fun too, like this bread board for a platter of veggies:
But this one stopped me in my tracks. This was The Universe Awakens by Maria Tse, who turned out to be a family friend of Clara’s folks. The room was packed, so this was the only angle from which I could quickly snap a photo. The clever hexagonal cardboard box with a cat was also one of hers!
The photo doesn’t do the depth, colour, and detail justice. The scattering of stars along the top also vividly reminded me of a mural my late mum had painted on one of my first bedroom walls, before we were transferred interstate again and she had to paint over it before selling up. It was enough to make me choke up. Clara and I checked the budget spreadsheet on our phone, and for the first time we reserved an artwork from an exhibition :’).
For those of you who follow me on Mastodon, this is also why my profile has this scaled-down background of the lead characters from Expelled from Paradise by the movie’s lead artist Saitom. I have this in one of his art books, and again, the scanned image on a computer screen doesn’t do the colour justice.
It’s not just the stars, its the scattering of different sizes, the clouds of colour in the nebulas, and the depth of the landscape. I love that it harkens back to that wall I had as a kid, but the characters tie it to the present.
I’m chuffed we now have a painting by a friend that brings this visual back into my life again. Scattering!
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-09-29.
2025-09-29 07:23:27
A has-been social network didn’t have a great tech demo involving generative “AI”, but we did get this great analaysis:
The AI being hyped right now is not AI at all. It’s really important that we all acknowledge this, that the world is selling itself a multi-billion-dollar lemon: predictive text engines that have nothing intelligent about them. They’re giant sorting machines, which is why they’re so good at identifying patterns in scientific research, and could genuinely advance medicine in wonderful ways. But what they cannot do is think, and as such, it’s a collective mass-delusion that these systems have any use in our day-to-day lives beyond plagiarism.
These reasons John cites are why I don’t agree with those trying to convince me that gen-“AI” isn’t just another exploitative, unsustainable bubble sold by charlatans whom I’m not even convinced believe the hype themselves.
But that leads me to something interesting I’ve noticed of late. I’ve had some… aggressive pushback recently on my gen-“AI” stance, both in email and on Mastodon. This is telling, and suggests they’re worrying about the public’s perception of their tech to an extent they weren’t before. You know you’re in trouble when even the mainstream press are realising you’re pushing a financially unsustainable bubble without ROI. These should be the easiest people to bamboozle with vague, indeterminate, non-falsifiable promises of future stratospheric growth and utility.
The conflation of gen-“AI” with machine learning is also a motte-and-bailey I wasn’t expecting, but it’s clearly a last-ditch attempt to legitimise this tech. One person told me in phonebook-length Mastodon post I was wrong about ChatGPT because it cured their cancer and developed COVID vaccines; claims I’d find deeply distasteful even without my lived experience and close family history.
I’m willing to entertain the idea I’m wrong about all of this. If these tools did even a tenth of what its proponents claim, it’d be incredible. But if those defences are all they’ve got, frankly I remain underwhelmed. My name isn’t even Frank, despite what this “agentic” chatbot keeps insisting.
Anyway, I’m taking this as good news! The sooner we can get ourselves out from under this mountain of opportunity costs, the sooner we can reallocate these resources to things that help the world. The potential is enormous… and frankly I’m giddy about the possibilities. There’s that Frank guy again.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-09-29.
