Rosie Campbell

Trying to get less confused, live a good life, and make a better world. Topics include productivity, systems, philosophy, and more.

How-tos

How to not kill houseplants

I'm a serial plant murderer. Well, I suppose it's actually plantslaughter, as they were all accidents. Regardless, despite my good intentions I never successfully kept a plant alive until 2020. Instructions on how to care for plants often seem similar to me to recipe instructions—they assume a whole bunch

Choosing a blogging platform

As I mentioned in my recent newsletter, I've been spending a lot of time during lockdown trying out different web platforms to host my personal website and blog. The main factors I was interested in were: Ease of setup and maintenance: I find it very easy to procrastinate on writing

Reviews

Stuff I Recommend You Buy and Use

I used to rely a lot on star-ratings of products to help me decide what to buy, but I’ve found them to be increasingly unhelpful as an indicator of whether or not I’ll be happy with the purchase, presumably because there are now so many fake reviews and

90+ Useful Mental Models, Frameworks, and Concepts

Mental models can help us understand the world and make better decisions. I’m collecting a list (in no particular order) of the ones I find most helpful and use most frequently. The ones in bold are ones I find particularly useful or impactful. This list is not exhaustive — it

Reviews

Six Months With My Electric Scooter: A Review of the Xiaomi M365

(This article contains affiliate links) As I took a wobbly ride on a rented electric scooter earlier this year, my first thought was “this is not for me…” I couldn’t figure out where to comfortably put my feet, and I found myself gripping tightly onto the handlebars as the

How-tos

Demystifying Deep Neural Networks

Deep learning is a big topic and it can be pretty difficult to know where to start. When I first began learning about it, I found myself wading through very technical explanations with unfamiliar terminology and it was hard to abstract this away and develop an intuitive understanding of what