erganemic

Off the top of my head, all PKMs make trade-offs on discoverability, portability, maintainability, and ease of recall. Broadly, "discoverability" is how likely you are to stumble on something you'd forgotten (just recently, I found a file in my "taxes" directory listing all the documents I needed last year, which was a big help, and which I did not remember writing), "portability" is how resistant the system is to a company shutting down/project being abandoned, "maintainability" is how easy to keep your system consistent with its principles (including inserting a new note), and "ease of recall" is how easy it is to find something if you know you're looking for it.

When thinking about a lifelong PKM, I feel like I value portability more than most; something highly tied to a particular company like Notion is right out for me, and I'm leery of stuff like Obsidian or even org-roam, since even if the entries in those systems are just text, I just know that someday the logic that ties them together will stop being developed/maintained and I'll have to migrate.

I feel confident in directory structures and text files as long-term mediums though, and so JD is appealing to me, but its maintainability (specifically the cognitive load around inserting a new note) is such a stumbling block for actually creating content for it. Not to mention the primary thing it trades maintainability off for (ease of recall) is almost entirely solved by search functionality, leaving discoverability as the only benefit over just chucking everything in a flat "notes" directory.

I do something PARA-adjacent now, and I might just commit to that, although denote is interesting as an Emacs user for a slightly more portable tagging- and search-based option.

I wish I knew more interesting games that could be played with a standard deck. My wife and I travel a lot and there's something I find deeply appealing about being able to walk into any gas station, corner shop, or airport store anywhere in the world and come out with a dependency-free way of entertaining yourself (or even making friends!), and I feel like I don't know enough games that take advantage of that.

That being said, I do have a few standbys:

Bullshit's a favorite for semi-large groups: https://www.pagat.com/beating/cheat.html

Egyptian Ratscrew is my pick for 3-5 players (although I'd caution it against playing it in quiet public spaces): https://waste.org/~oliviax/cards/ratscrew.html

Lastly, Duel 52 is a recent favorite for just my wife and I to play, and very much in the vein of Cuttle: http://juddmadden.com/duel52/

That's interesting! My wife and I both pictured him as masculine. In my case, as a cis, bi man who's honestly evaluated how I play my gender, it was because a lot of the way Murderbot feels about being amidst humans is IMO just dead-on how a lot of men feel being amidst women?

Like "everyone here is a little wary of me, and I can't even really blame them for it, because I just categorically am a more threatening presence."

Contra to a lot of what's being said in this thread, I think a lot of smart people get stuck in the trap of overvaluing quality of input relative to quantity of input. Put another way: the bitter lesson applies to the AI inside your skull too.

People aren't angry/worried because they don't have a competitive advantage any more--people are angry/worried because they sense (I think correctly!) that AI will eliminate the part of their work that they find enjoyable.

Artists, by and large, don't do art because they enjoy having art--they do art because they like /the process/ of producing art. If that process can be done faster and better by AI, then yeah, sure, they /might/ be able to still do art for a living (some artists will be able to leverage their experience to maintain an advantage; other, less flexible ones will lose work)--but the work they do will likely not be commensurate to the work they were doing before, and will likely be less enjoyable to them.

The thing that worries people about AI is that it'll make all creatives into middle-managers.

I'm really impressed with the strides Emacs has made recently: native compilation, project.el, eglot, and now tree-sitter?

As a user who hadn't kept up with development news until recently, I'd always mentally sorted Emacs into the same taxonomy as stuff like `find`: old, powerful, with a clunky interface and a stodgy resistance to updating how it does things (though not without reason).

I'm increasingly feeling like that's an unfair classification on my part--I'm genuinely super excited to see where Emacs is in 5 years.

I adopted GTD right before I left college, and I sometimes wonder how I ever would have managed to adapt to the explosion of tiny, attention-grabbing tasks that adult life supplies without it. Admittedly, it feels a little clunky and "enterprise-grade" in places, but the underlying principles are so rock-solid and obvious-in-hindsight it feels magical.

Plus, org-mode really helps to make the over-engineered parts more frictionless--I run my life off of org-agenda now, where creating a new project, capturing tasks for it, and refiling them as needed are only a few keystrokes away. Keeping with the theme of hyped productivity books, I also take inspiration from Deep Work to tag certain actions as being ":deep:", so that after clocking into those tasks, I can look at a clock report at the end of the day/week to understand how many hours I actually spent working on "important" stuff. It's very motivating to make that number go up!

I know not everyone feels the need to be so intentional about their productivity landscape--indeed, a lot of very naturally productive people I know explicitly /don't/. But for those of us who aren't one of those magicians, I highly recommend putting some thought into at least a bare-bones system.

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us."

- Ecclesiastes 1:9-10, KJV

Think of the distinction between "over the board" and "online" as kind of like the distinction between "NBA game" and "pickup game". Even that might be understating it. The levels of importance are radically different.

Also, think about how much harder it would be to cheat over the board. You might use hidden devices, accomplices, secret signals--compare that to an online game where all you need to do is switch over to another tab to check the engine. Cheating OTB requires a significantly greater degree of forethought, planning, and commitment--a persistent and repeated willingness to cheat that is way less acceptable than an online player getting tilted and looking at an engine. Still cheating, yeah--but at least it's not premeditated.

I can second the comments that a solid E ink device makes reading pdf/epub stuff a lot more enjoyable, and I greatly prefer it to reading on a traditional screen.

That said, for exactly the class of books (didactic/reference) that your question calls out, there's no substitute for physical books. For me, so much of reading a book meant to instruct involves flipping back quickly to an earlier chapter to refresh my memory on the exact definition of a concept, or paging rapidly through a section to see what headings it covers, or switching from a page in one part of the book to a page in an entirely different part so I can compare their content. There just isn't a frictionless analogue for this, even with E ink devices: and when you're trying to learn stuff, a solution with friction is barely a solution at all.

I used Corpspeak pretty much exclusively for the year I spent as an entry-level analyst at a consulting firm, because--as a consequence of all the points mentioned in this article--it was cognitively easier. If writing is like creating a painting from scratch, Corpspeak is like a coloring book. Instead of mixing your own paint, you pick from a finite number of predefined crayons. Instead of needing to decide on a subject and composition, you just need to pick what image you want to fill in.

Corpspeak abounds in places that value "being in motion" over "getting results", since when you use Corpspeak, you don't actually have to think about what the best course of action is--the best course of action is always "organizing a connect with the relevant subject matter experts to draft action items for a discovery yada-yada-yada". This requires zero thought--it just requires knowing a list of buzzwords and being able to string them together. This is really easy to do! When promotion season came around, I was asked to write a report of why I deserved one, and I wrote 1200 words in a half hour--that's 40 wpm, about the average typing speed of someone just copying text! And I was complimented on the thoroughness and perspicacity of what I wrote. I got the promotion--just in time for me to find a better opportunity and bounce.

Nevertheless, I do believe there's value in Corpspeak. The reality at most companies (even ones you care about) is that a lot of the communicating you do is more-or-less inconsequential, and doesn't actually need to have a lot of care and thought put into it--and being able to let your eyes glaze over and engage in the conversational equivalent of cruise control saves cognitive resources for stuff that actually matters.

I'm not sure how you read my previous comment and concluded my objection was to people having fun in a way I don't like. To be super reductive: I think it's better to not play D&D at all if the only way you can see to have fun with it is by lying to your friends in order to provoke a certain emotional response in them.

The relation this has to my top-level comment is that both anecdotally and through "actual play" media, I've noticed that DMs who don't care about the /systems/ of D&D made to enable player choice instead care about using the /vehicle/ of D&D to tell their own story, and that they're willing to steamroll the agency of the characters to do so. I believe /the essential promise/ of D&D is player choice--no one would agree to meet up if they knew you were just going to read your unfinished fantasy novel at them for three hours, they come because they believe they'll get to make choices and have those choices affect things. As such, I'm leery of DMs who (in my experience) are willing to shove mechanics that enable player choice to the side in order to tell the story they want to.

I don't think this is an unreasonable perspective, and I'm a little confused since it seems like you didn't engage with my previous comment at all?

The specific person I'm talking about was telling their players that the stakes were real: they were calling for rolls (not attack rolls or saving throws, mind: those are too complicated, just anonymous rolls that were immediately ignored), whittling down the party members until they're just on the verge of death, and then--a miraculous recovery! Victory snatched from the jaws of defeat!

Yeah, they might be having fun in the moment, but someone in that thread asked whether their party knew that all their triumphs were predetermined, and the OP replied in the negative. "You should really either fess up to it being railroaded or try to make it less so," someone advised. "Otherwise, they're gonna find out, feel like morons for getting emotionally invested in what's basically a puppet show, feel like double morons for believing you all the times you assured them that their miraculous victories were real, and never want to play again."

The OP took immediate offense to the idea that people are sensitive to having their emotions manipulated via lies, and went on a multi-paragraph rant that basically amounted to "my players are idiots who don't know what they want and will never find out, and even if they did they'd thank me for my awesome storytelling, and basically when you think about it I have to take away their agency because otherwise they might mess up my plans."

Moreover, I maintain that lines of reasoning like that are more common amongst people who want to play D&D while ignoring all its systematic, rules-based elements. "I should be able to control my players at my whim" and "it's unnecessary to have objective ways to resolve a success or failure except through my fiat" are complementary beliefs, and a person attracted to one is more likely to be attracted to the other.

That's why I say (maybe too tersely) "That's not D&D." Because the fundamental element of D&D--the thing that separates it from a book or movie!--is player choice. And if you have decided that a version of the game where you can enforce your will randomly--beholden to no rules--is the one that aligns with how you want to DM...well, it's not impossible to do that right, but I'm leery of any decision that makes it easier for you to stomp on player choice.

I've heard people accusing Suckless of gatekeeping, which is fair--when you consider their decidedly /documentation-lite/ approach, it'd be a stretch to call them accessible.

However, I'm starting to increasingly believe that gatekeeping is both good and necessary for movements to maintain their identity.

This is an inherently clickbait-y statement to make: isn't gatekeeping pretty indefensible? Yes--and no.

By way of illustration, let's talk about Dungeons and Dragons. I'm young enough to be a greenhorn by pretty much any standard, but I got into D&D before its meteoric rise back to cultural significance on the back of properties like Critical Role and Stranger Things, which has left me feeling like a dyed-in-the-wool TTRPG curmudgeon. I see people on Reddit complaining about 5e (the current iteration of D&D) all the time: there are too many rules, combat is boring and drawn out (since all people really want to do is roleplay), keeping track of health and statuses is impossible...the list goes on.

The issue is both immediately clear and a massive faux pas to point out within the community: these people shouldn’t be playing D&D.

As adversarial as that last statement might seem, try reading it not as a judgement--but as a suggestion. If you want a rules-lite improv romp with your friends that handwaves combat and emphasizes roleplay /you shouldn’t be playing D&D/. The system itself is built for a purpose that will be fighting you at every step of the way!

These people won't be happy until they start using a TTRPG system that better accomplishes what they want, and at the same time, they'll be massively pissed off at anyone who tries to tell them so.

"I think I finally fixed D&D!" I heard someone on Reddit excitedly explain. "I just make up all the monsters' dice rolls and abilities and do whatever feels most cinematic, my party loves it!"

"That's not D&D," I want to say. "That's make-believe that involves you lying to your friends."

Instead, I suggest another system that might be more conducive to their style, and I get called a gatekeeper.

I mean, you might as well say: "I want to run minimal, lightweight software written in C that expects you to understand and modify its source code, but I want some kind of configuration engine for it, since I don't know C and can't read its source code!"

Coming up with algorithms on the spot isn't a viable strategy for technical interviews any more, even if you're a super-genius. Here's a question that the page author claims took Donald Knuth 24 hours to solve [1], which is classified on Leetcode as a Medium(!) difficulty question [2]. Leetcode Medium questions are typically the cut-off point for most FAANG-tier interview questions--and while this is a hard medium, I know someone who got a variation of it at a Meta interview, and was expected to solve it in 30 minutes. So unless you're 48 times faster at inferring algorithms than one of the best algorists in the world, memorizing tricks is the game you have to play if you want a FAANG-adjacent job!

Of course, then the natural reaction is "if your hiring process would pass on Donald Knuth, your hiring process is broken," which is absolutely true, already known, and (apparently) deemed acceptable.

[1] https://keithschwarz.com/interesting/code/?dir=find-duplicat...

[2] https://leetcode.com/problems/find-the-duplicate-number/

I've had a background interest in getting involved in CTFs for a while now, but haven't yet made it a point to overcome the activation energy to do anything beyond Overthewire's Bandit. I'd be interested in hearing how other people coming from a pure software engineering background (+ associated Linux knowledge) got started. I run into a dependency graph where I'd like to join a team and learn from others, but I need some baseline skill to do that, which requires either a top-down approach of what feels like memorizing tricks that may-or-may-not apply to a given box, or a bottom-up approach of spending a ton of time learning about the fundamentals of networking and file systems (which is often nontrivial to convert into techniques that can be used in CTFs). I know for stuff like this the key is to just get started, and the understanding will follow, but I'm curious if anyone has any recommendations for how to do that.

I commented on the last post about Google hiring slowdowns, hoping that it wouldn't hit technical workers as hard, but it looks like that's not the case. I've got an L3 interview literally tomorrow. Can anyone with more insight into hiring practices comment on whether that's just a complete wash? (Outside of getting more interview experience, that is).

I know getting an offer "two weeks" (yeah, right) from now isn't gonna happen, but is there anything measurable I actually gain from doing well on the interview, e.g. skipping the phone screen or giving more positive data to the hiring committee if I end up applying again?

Oof, I've got an L3 interview with Google in a little over a week. Hearing about hiring slowdowns like this is making me wish I'd been more aggressive with my interview timeline, but I'm not sure I've prepared enough as-is. If I'd gone any faster I /definitely/ wouldn't have had enough time to refresh on DS&A and grind out Leetcode.

I know the consensus on HN is that FAANG is nothing special (and not that hard to get into!), but for a recent grad with mediocre internships from the pandemic and minimal opportunities for development in the role I'm currently in, getting clout like that on my resume early in my career would be awesome. Here's hoping the slowdowns really don't end up hitting technical roles as hard.

I see the view you express here pretty frequently--that older generations have /always/ viewed any new cultural development as a sign of moral/intellectual degradation, and--surprise!--it never really is. I do tend to agree that most fears about the new crop of addictive social media engagement engines is just handwringing, just like it was for TV, or music, or radio, or books.

That being said, just because coffee and methamphetamine have comparable effects on paper doesn't mean that they pose the same level of risk. A difference of degree is still a difference, and at least from my own experiences I'm starting to wonder if the human brain is biologically equipped to handle the addictive overstimulation modern life exposes it to.

I also had to adapt my handwriting - halfway through my math degree, my inability to tell symbols apart genuinely started to become a problem. I ended up having to use a horizontal bar on 'z' to tell it apart from '2', and added a loop on the tail of my 'y's to keep them from looking like a wayward 'x', both of which persisted into my normal handwriting.

(And I still swear that my differential equations professor wrote problems that used mu, 'u', 'v', and nu at the same time as a prank on people with bad handwriting.)

This is something I've thought about a lot; I ended up compiling tips on learning from a variety of different sources into a master document that I go back to every once in a while to see if there's any new things I can implement [0].

I only integrate one or two practices at a time, and I stopped short of implementing SRS or a Zettelkasten because I began to realize I was spending too much time on productivity to actually get anything done. I'll probably return to them later - I think SRS especially gets a bad rap from people who like to think about things conceptually as "just being rote memorization", but IMO the human brain is not a computer for Platonic objects. It thrives on hard data and real-world examples, and "memorizing" components or instances of a particular concept so they're at hand for effortless retrieval just makes connecting them to existing ideas easier (which is arguably all understanding things is).

[0] https://pastebin.com/sk6iNDpp

Every time this topic crops up I'm struck with the seemingly-impossible challenge of people comparing qualia (especially through a text medium!).

I've had conversations with friends before - some of who are artists - who had heard about aphantasia, and were vaguely despondent at the idea that they had it and were missing out on this magical imaginative power. Needless to say, when 4 out of 7 people at a dinner party think they have a condition that affects 2% of the population, it rings some alarm bells to me - and after describing my own (phantasic) visualization ability and my wife corroborating with something similar, all 4 of them reacted with shock: "but that's exactly what it's like for me too!".

I think the nature of describing qualia confuses a lot of people - for starters, people vastly overestimate their ability to picture things mentally. When asked to draw a stick diagram of a bicycle from memory, people make mistakes that they never would if they actually had a picture of a bicycle in front of them. Even if they didn't have the artistic skill to make a "good" drawing from reference, at least they wouldn't connect the chain to both wheels! However, these same people, when asked by aphantasics if they can "see the bike in their mind, like they're looking at a picture of one" will happily respond in the affirmative and ride off (swerving wildly, since their bike has the handlebars in front of the front wheel).

My wife was one such person - she's a pretty successful freelance artist, and I have little doubt that her ability to visualize is significantly better than mine, and she said that when she closed her eyes and imagined something, she really saw it, like she was watching a movie. I reacted with confusion; for me (I said), if I picture an apple, I still only see black with my eyes, but my brain is recalling apples it's seen before and telling itself to process that information as if it were coming from my eyes. Even though my real eyes see black, I am "believing really hard" that this apple is information that's coming from my eyes, and when I visualize it in my head, it feels like I'm seeing it. She chewed on this for a couple minutes, asked some clarifying questions, and finally said "I think that might be what I'm doing too." It seems like she does have a greater visualization ability than me - having a broader visual library due to her experience with art, she has higher-quality and more numerous "chunks" of structure she uses to compose mental scenes. However, the really remarkable thing is that she can "believe harder" than me. I'm always vaguely conscious that I'm "really" seeing black, but she's stated that she gets so convinced that she's seeing stuff with her eyes, it's on the border of hallucination. Weirdly, after we had this conversation, she stated that she had more trouble creating art for a week afterwards; I'd inadvertently "shaken her belief" that she was seeing things and - like a self-fulfilling prophecy - when she didn't believe she was seeing things in her mind's eye, she couldn't do it with the same vividness anymore (she's since "recovered").

I suppose it's possible that 6/7 people at that dinner party did have aphantasia, and we were all just stumbling around reassuring each other that we weren't really mind-blind - but that would either be a minor statistical miracle or raise some interesting questions about what personality traits aphantasics have that make them more likely to be friends :)