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Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

blog.stephenwolfram.com

141–150 of 415 posts

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#141
post #16

Funny, I do this with my digital trash can: When I was consulting at Bell Labs in the early 1980s I saw that a friend of mine had two garbage cans in his office. When I asked him why, he explained that one was for genuine garbage and the other was a buffer into which he would throw documents that he thought he’d probably never want again. He’d let the buffer garbage can fill up, and once it was full, he’d throw away…

I do that with tabs for online articles I (probably) want to read.

I'd claim to do the same, but I never really close the tabs, I'll just fire up a new window, and maybe come back to the old window mañana.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#142
post #6

How cow, this guy is the world's most organized person. I operate in the exact opposite way. The more disorganized, temporary, inconvenient, and cluttered my workspace is, the more I can ignore the outside world and focus on the abstract problem at hand.

Funny how people are so different. My desk has to have exactly, 1 keyboard, 1 mouse, 1 A4 5mm graph paper pad and that's it. I used to struggle to work on a slightly cluttered desk but these days it has to be basically empty. In terms of paperwork, it goes behind me on shelves sorted by "Important, will need soon, Important, will need later, Not important" everything else goes in the bin. Periodically I rip the pads…

How do you process the files in the three shelves?

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#143
post #90
post #22

Through the article I found he livestreams many of his meetings on Twitch! This is particularly candid moment I happen to find: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGjvFyRk_4I&feature=youtu.be... edit: I wasn't aware of the negative opinions regarding his ego, but from listening to this meeting I can say they aren't unsubstantiated!

First, it's awesome that these are live-streamed and publicised. Second, I didn't hear anything unreasonable in that meeting. SW has a reputation for ego, but honestly this particular extract just sounds like frustration with buggy/messy documentation. I mean, the fact that the CEO is personally going through documentation is telling in itself.

Yup, and at the end he even says good work and acknowledges that he knows it's taken a lot of work to get to this point.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#144
post #110
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scan, OCR and shred. I have a scan pile and a shred pile. I collect documents in front of my scanner. Once a month I'll shred the previous month's documents in the shred pile, scan the current documents, and put them in the shred pile to be shredded next month. I do this because sometimes it's easier just having the hard-copy around, but if I haven't used it in a month, it's rare I still need the hard-copy.

Do you name them, or just put them en masse by date? And what ocr software do you use?

Cloud vendors have OCR built in now, Amazon announced a newer product at Ignite called Textract and the Rekognition service has some capabilities there. GCP Vision and Azure have options as well. Getting the mass scan/photo is the annoying part. Some scanners also have OCR built in, or you can look at pytesseract.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#145
post #110
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scan, OCR and shred. I have a scan pile and a shred pile. I collect documents in front of my scanner. Once a month I'll shred the previous month's documents in the shred pile, scan the current documents, and put them in the shred pile to be shredded next month. I do this because sometimes it's easier just having the hard-copy around, but if I haven't used it in a month, it's rare I still need the hard-copy.

Do you name them, or just put them en masse by date? And what ocr software do you use?

I do something similar. I scan to pdf then store those in Evernote and Evernote does the OCR.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why you're bending over backwards to excuse it. It's toxic. He's being nasty. He could say everything he does without the snapping, blowing up at questions, dramatic sighs, 'oh boy's. It's all so incredibly passively aggressive. And that's actually the worst bit! It's hard to call him out when he's not explicitly calling them 'idiots' or something. It's like it's some kind of plausible deniability of bei…

I guess "toxic" is pretty subjective. Personally, I draw the line at personal insults. You might draw the line a little earlier.

As is “nasty”, “snapping”, “blowing up at”, “dramatic”, and “passive agressive.” Oh, and let’s not forget “horrible.”

Have you ever dealt with bad docs? Seriously!!!

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#147
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s in our nature to want to keep things “just in case”, but we live in a world where we can get anything with a few clicks. So why? Um, money?

I mostly buy and resell so I actually don’t spend much at all on items. I lose from the depreciation, but not too bad actually.

I'd have thought the shipping (on eBay) and time would cost more than the depreciation.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#148

Most interesting to me here is his "walking outside" work setup (fairly simple, as he says, like you're selling popcorn). Because apparently walking outside reduced his resting heart rate more than just relying on a treadmill.

One could imagine any number of reasons: air quality, sunshine, a calming effect from seeing nature or variety in peripheral vision, difference in terrain providing stimuli, strength benefits of carrying the apparatus (it sounds like he often carried stuff even before working outside)

The benefits of the outdoors are pretty widely reported. And it doesn't sound like he went outside much of his own inclination.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#149
post #138

Some pretty cool things: - He's a CEO who dogfoods his own software! Not only that, he seems to be one of its most prolific users. That's amazing. Having worked for over a decade at Google, I sometimes wonder if the founders still use the products. Larry Page used to always harp on latency (rightly), and now Google products are slower than ever. - He's a remote CEO, and supports remote working! It sounds like the com…

There’s definitely arguments to have on the actual impact of Wolfram’s mathematical/scientific work vs the impact he claims it has, but there are no doubts regarding his skills at running a scientific software operation.

Re: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure

#150
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do that with tabs for online articles I (probably) want to read.

You should use Pocket for that: getpocket.com

Tabs save the history of the tab as well. This is a great resource. And it's saved in session files when you save.
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