Personal

One of the things I love in our post “ChatGPT Moment” era is the fact that I increasingly get to follow through on more and more side projects. One of the things I find ridiculous in our 2025 post “ChatGPT Moment” era is the fact that there are still a ton of blogs that don’t have a way for me to subscribe, be it through a proprietary service or a standardized RSS feed. ...

tl;dr Next time you read, see, hear, give, get, ideate or invent a mantra, just remember that “every mantra has a counter-mantra, including this one.” Tweet Sized Advice The Startup Seesaw Tools vs Solutions For every Mantra, there is an equal and opposite Counter-Mantra Concluding Thoughts Appendix Tweet Sized Advice For the better part of a decade now, I feel like at least once a week I’m either on the giving or receiving end of “tweet-sized *advice” *that’s intended to solve large, complex problems. ...

tl;dr This is a cross-post from our blog at grove.city. An explanation of what pokt.network is through a series of analogies. Don’t have enough time to read? See the x-thread here. Subscribe if you want to be notified of when we post about a series of 7 use-cases! Table of Contents Table of Contents The Power of Analogies Relay Mining — An Incentive for Network Requests Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Analogies 7. Application Layer: Uber for Network Requests ...

I’ve been using ChatGPT since the first day it launched, have gone to dozens of AI events over the last couple of years, and feel like I finally have to say quite part out loud: vibe checks** are how 99% of LLM “evals” are done in practice today**. Quantitative benchmarks, evaluations, and verification are critical to the 1% tail-end, but a vibe check is the good enough solution. This is what most LLM developers and day-to-day but are afraid to admit due to the lack of rigour. ...

The Road to a Personal Computer In the mid-90s, my family got their first computer. I vividly remember the Windows 95 logo loading up on the screen as I booted a computer up for the first time. Later that day, two things happened: I visited lego.com for about 5-10 minutes. I remember asking why there’s a limit to how long I could spend on the web 😅 I loaded up a floppy disk with Doom II. This experience scarred me from playing first-person shooters for almost a decade 😓 ...

I generally reserve my substack for blogging and writing down some of my ideas and reflections. However, on my personal site (olshansky.info), I also rate and capture my thoughts and reviews of books I’ve read or movies/tv I’ve watched. These are usually rougher and not as edited (I apologize in advance), but I wanted to do a one-time cross-post here so it is more discoverable in the future. In this one, I share my review of Barbie and The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. ...

The Exposition: Roll Camera on Your Average Movie Watcher Not much different from your typical consumer, I’ve been a fan of films and TV shows since I was a kid. The genres have changed and my viewing frequency has dropped, but the essence remains. Once streaming became available, I never got into the habit of binging shows with the exception of a few cases (cough Lost cough); if I really like a show, I try to prolong that experience for as long as possible. About a decade ago, I realized that I was investing so many hours consuming the hard work and passion of others, so it seemed fair to spend a few minutes leaving a public rating or review. That’s when Olshansky’s Rotten Tomatoes account was born 🍅. ...

“You’ll never use most of the things you learn in College.” - Olshansky circa 2014 There was a time when I thought that most of what I learnt in College was pointless since it didn’t apply to my day-to-day work. However, as time passes, I increasingly reflect on how fortunate I was to be exposed to so many concepts across various fields. Most importantly, it teaches you to think, learn and work, but I’ll save the details for another post. ...

This post was rejected by Seeking Alpha Editors so am sharing it here instead. Summary Disney’s strong brand can be trusted in uncertain macro-economic times COVID and Iger’s leave of absence was a transient hurdle Disney has hopped over Disney Plus keeps growing, and Disney Parks are returning Bob Iger is coming back to a strong & supportive team Disney shares are at a long-term low with relatively solid financials ...

Could you split this into two PRs, please? Could you please approve this so I can merge it in? Why are you implementing XXX using A rather than B? NIT: extra space In the context of code reviews, I’ve found myself on both the giving and receiving end of these types of comments more than once. I must say that the following tweet still rings true today: Having worked on production systems at large companies, internal systems at mid-size companies and most recently joining a small and agile team, I increasingly realize that the purpose of code reviews depends on the stage and size of both the team and project. For example, for a mature, production-grade, critical system at a large established company: ...

I remember thinking I had the foundation to tackle any problem that came my way around the time that I was graduating from College. Having studied a lot of theory in school, I believed that anything could be done by applying the concepts I had learned. With every year that goes by in the workforce, the number of things I find to learn and get better at far outpaces those I actually get to. This makes me both excited and scared of how I’ll feel in another 10 years. ...

Prior to my senior year in College, I made my way through the Hunger Games Trilogy. I read all three books back-to-back in a relatively short period of time. Having spent so much time in Suzanne Collins’ world and writing, I felt as if her writing style had rubbed off on me at the time. On my first day of my senior year in College, I felt an overwhelming sensation to write something as I exited the subway. It took approximately 7 minutes to walk from the subway to the building where most of my classes were held, during which I wrote the piece below. The content is utter nonsense, but I think it really captures writing style and essence of the hunger games in some way. ...