Avoiding Linkedin Brain

I've always in the back of my mind wondered what a story, or video game, would be like where you played the part of a common NPC (like an innkeeper or something) in a big RPG where the big evil demon lord rises to power and the heroes of the story go to save the day. And all you do is go through your routines and watch the world change around you. Now I don't need to make that game because I get to live the concept firsthand? And it's terrible? *sigh

I'm always a little amused at how, when I'm ever forced to used LinkedIn for anything, their algorithm inevitably manages to show at least a couple of posts from people who take there "data professional personal" way too seriously. I'm sure most of you recognize the signs of LinkedIn Brain... where everything is about work or tied into work and obsessive grind. The sort of post that starts "I saw a beautiful sunset..." and the immediately transitions into utter nonsense like "... and here's 5 ways it taught me to build data pipelines better".

Now, I categorically dislike reading those posts since I find them disingenuous at best, but the reason why I say they amuse me is because after 5 years of writing this newsletter constantly, I often catch myself treading along a similar sort of path. Readers can often see this since I usually open with whatever situation or off-beat thought happened to inspire the week's post. Since I rarely comment on news or other newsletters, the primary source of post inspiration almost necessarily falls from whatever web of free associations lead me to a data topic.

Luckily, data and measurement is a universally applicable topic, and my somewhat neurodivergent brain is more than happy to discover links to joyful stories and ideas while doing mundane things like driving to the store, using a ruler, or paying a water bill. Even now I'm wondering when I'll have time to dig into figuring out how scientist measure "sharpness" (tl;dr there's no one definition, let alone) because I've recently had to sharpen my kitchen knives. There's also a bottle of glue in front of me and how is "stickiness" even measured?