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People who can't give up paper

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Re: People who can't give up paper

#81

Post by dieselgate »

the_snooze wrote: post #45
gspencley wrote: post #17

I've worked in tech as a software engineer developing web applications for 25 years and I'm one of these people. For note taking, I prefer pen and paper. For diagramming and brainstorming, I prefer a physical whiteboard. For non-work related scheduling, I prefer marking things on the physical calendar hanging on my wall... or sometimes I'll reach for a post-it note. For bills, I prefer that my company mail me a paper…

Paper just works . Whether it's for notes, menus, or voting, paper has a lot of really desirable properties: it's cheap, easily understood, minimal room for external dependencies or BS. The moment you introduce software and internet connectivity is the moment you invite fragility and inscrutability.

"..the simplest thing that works but not any simpler"

Re: People who can't give up paper

#82

Post by ghaff »

tivert wrote: post #80
eternityforest wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think paper probably really does have value for mental retention, but digital is so convenient it's easy to totally forget paper is a thing. Paper is easier to annotate, but if you didn't grow up with lots of paper, you don't notice, because annotating isn't something you think about, you mostly think in terms of quoting and leaving a comment. The medium shapes your thinking, and the stuff that's hard to do on pape…

> Paper is easier to annotate, but if you didn't grow up with lots of paper, you don't notice, because annotating isn't something you think about, you mostly think in terms of quoting and leaving a comment. In other words, people can be fine with worse because they don't know better. One of the things that should be a deep embarrassment to the technology industry is its failure to replicate some of the strengths of p…

Years ago I said something along these lines to the CTO of Novell and didn’t get a very satisfactory response.

I do think shared collaborative documents have filled a bigger void than many expected. But I still feel the current situation is unsatisfactory.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#83

Post by ghaff »

cracrecry wrote: post #32
karaterobot wrote: post #19

> Paper, it seems, still rules the waves. You'd be crazy to get rid of paper charts on a boat, for the same reason any hiker is instructed to carry a paper map, and the smart ones actually do it. Yeah, the primary system will be GPS, but that system requires a lot of things to be functioning which may not always be functioning. You need a backup, and paper is perfect for that.

>any hiker is instructed to carry a paper map The best maps are cloth maps. They are amazing as you can bend those, put over a stone, rain could go over.

Tyvek works fine. But really anything is better than nothing if you know how to use it.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#84

Post by bluGill »

mikestew wrote: post #73
agumonkey wrote: post #24

for everybody still on physical medium (be it paper, board, whatever), did you try to leverage digital tools thinking it would allow wider expressiveness, faster iteration, more precision and yet came back to paper ? if so do you think it's due to cultural habit (being raised on pen and paper) or maybe a neurological need (paper requires more psycho/physical stimulation, you have to draw geometries, letters, organise…

for everybody still on physical medium (be it paper, board, whatever), did you try to leverage digital tools thinking it would allow wider expressiveness, faster iteration, more precision and yet came back to paper ? Dude, I have been trying digital tools since I thought that one of these things[0] would replace my Franklin Planner. I'll save you a click, that was over 30 years ago. Yeah, I use the hell out of some d…

Digital is worse than paper because with paper you need to copy and clean up your todo list often (typically daily, though other things can work) That means every item you didn't do is reviewed to see if you still care enough to put in the effort to copy it. digital systems make it easy to keep a long list of things you want to do eventually, but in reality never will, and soon you can't find in the long list things you really must do now.

If you use your digital todo list for things that you must do by a deadline it works well. Digital tools are good for the yearly tasks list "buy birthday card for my sister" - knowing that you can then decide when it pops up if you will buy one or not. Digital tools make it too easy to put things in like "investigate interesting widget you just heard about when money isn't so tight", and then they clutter the list with things odds are you won't do.

If you have a digital todo list you are allowed to have 2 things that you must do today, and 10 things you must do sometime in the next week (numbers are debatable). If you have more than that something must go. If it isn't in the next two weeks put it on the calendar not the todo list so it doesn't pop up until you need to do it. (todo lists that integrate with your calendar are good at this!) Actually I've found my todo list works best if instead I use my calendar to block of time - I have a short presentation to give in a couple weeks so I have one hour a week to work on it.

I have dysgraphia which means I cannot read my own writing. As such digital solutions have a higher interest for me. However there are things people using paper can do that I do not have a good replacement for. Things are working for me, but writing is a much better system if only I could use it.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#85

Post by [deleted] »

agumonkey wrote: post #24

for everybody still on physical medium (be it paper, board, whatever), did you try to leverage digital tools thinking it would allow wider expressiveness, faster iteration, more precision and yet came back to paper ? if so do you think it's due to cultural habit (being raised on pen and paper) or maybe a neurological need (paper requires more psycho/physical stimulation, you have to draw geometries, letters, organise…

[deleted]

Re: People who can't give up paper

#86

Post by V__ »

dboreham wrote: post #64
V__ wrote: post #30

One of the great festures of using paper is, that it exists physically. I can see my stack of to-dos or bills or notes and this also helps remembeing where what what is. I don't have this experience using digital. My brain just remembers computer as the general location. I loose all spacial intuition. On the other side, this is great for anything I don't want to remember.

I also like the spatial context, but tend to misplace paper. Suggest to try using multiple desktops: one for work project A, another for personal email, etc. Open a browser tab or text editor window on the top left of each desktop with a note about what this one is for. In the case of work projects that tab will often be the bug report covering the task at hand. This way when I get defocused, it's a simple process to…

Thanks for the suggestions. Somehow, I never thought about using virtual desktops, but it sounds intriguing.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#87

Post by didntcheck »

dogman144 wrote: post #43

Really dislike the “give up” terminology and related digital nudging in group/out group. Just like I can’t give up: - paperless billing bc I’d like ironclad proof I’ve paid my mortgage off and have experienced plenty of database failures - driving without an insurance black box plugged into my car for a few % off my insurance - cash because it saves the small business a few % points and I’ve (/s) never seen a POS cra…

The notion that paper letters are more authentic than digital has always confused me. If you can forge a realistic-looking PDF, you can also print it. On the other hand, an email still on Gmail's servers with headers showing its authenticated origin, or a document held in escrow by Docusign, seems like far more rigorous evidence in a hypothetical court dispute. And I'd have my bank statements as corroborating evidence, rather than relying on one company

Ideally, companies would have well-known public keys and sign every PDF they send you. In practice, they don't, but it's not even (feasibly) possible to sign a paper letter, unless we're still counting a printed squiggle as some sort of proof. Holograms and other genuinely hard-to-print marks are presumably very effective against non-sophisticated forgers, but I only see them on a few government documents, not mortgage papers

Also I'm aware that printers print identifying dots, and that is probably the downfall of many amateur forgers, but only because it allows you to find a smoking gun if the document is forged (and the printer was suspected a priori). But I imagine it's a lot harder to use that in the other direction, where a customer wants to prove a document did come from some company, as they'll presumably struggle to get their hands on the signatures of all the company's printers

Re: People who can't give up paper

#88

Post by dogman144 »

histriosum wrote: post #55
dogman144 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ll know the value of it when your electronics bork out in a no-fail situation. Or it’s a stress situation and the quick reference chart on paper can be eyeballed while the iPad requires a couple clicks. It happens eventually.

Three independent electronic devices (two tablets and a phone) running different operating systems would need to fail. And for this to then become an emergency, I would need to be in IMC, also have my onboard installed GPS fail, along with all installed radio equipment. Short of an EMP event or wildly bad decision making on my part, the risk of this is vanishingly small.

That is usually the response!

From another angle, there’s a lot of hubris in refusing to carry analog backups that are a meaninglessly small addition to a packing list vs their risk benefits… which is the only ultimate job for a pilot.

It takes one oversight to not charge a phone, or it gets cold in the cockpit and battery drops, suddenly you’re down to two systems, risk jumps, odds one fails…

Military pilots still fly with paper charts and darts for a reason.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#89

Post by jjav »

clnq wrote: post #70
gspencley wrote: post #17

I've worked in tech as a software engineer developing web applications for 25 years and I'm one of these people. For note taking, I prefer pen and paper. For diagramming and brainstorming, I prefer a physical whiteboard. For non-work related scheduling, I prefer marking things on the physical calendar hanging on my wall... or sometimes I'll reach for a post-it note. For bills, I prefer that my company mail me a paper…

Pen and paper doesn't have many failure modes. Put it in a fireproof safe, and it will outlive most digital media. No hacker in a foreign country will steal it, no one will encrypt it, no cloud provider will lose it, and no government will read it, no SSD will byte-rot it. There's really not much to be said against pen and paper.

Indeed. I have family books from the 1800s and photo albums from the early 1900s. Zero effort was put into preserving these, they were just left on a shelf, occasionally moving from generation to generation.

Except for the most obsessive & technically skilled archivists, nobody will have any photos/documents from today in 100-150 years.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#90

Post by dogman144 »

eternityforest wrote: post #75
dogman144 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya, lunacy to do any outdoors without paper map + compass beyond the there-and-back loop where you can still hear car traffic.

Does anyone know how to use a map and compass? I don't think I could outside a city. Everyone talks about the physical maps, but the bigger issue is without the skill the map is useless, and if you've always had a phone, the true terror of being lost and alone might not enter your mind till you're there. I guess I'm lucky that I often forget my charger and wind up having no clue where I am and trying to get back by a…

I do not know anyone serious about the outdoors that does not know how to use a map and compass.

Extremely straightforward to learn.

I hike with a Garmin foretrex, I route plan and land nav when out there with a map. The garmin sanity checks me once in a while.

There is a significant amount of bad stuff that can go very wrong, to start, just bc your Garmin’s altimeter and calibration is bugging out while you mindlessly follow. And when you’re in areas where this matters (ie “can I hear street noise” judgment”), the out of the box technical land navigation tools tend to not work out of the box.

I’ve had an updated and calibrated Garmin put me 5-600m away from where I definitely was via map, compass triangulation and then sanity check with a iPhone b/c the difference really surprised me. 5-600m difference is quite consequential. Mix in Garmin using optionally Glonass (Russian satellites), there’s just a lot of stuff that can go sideways. Easy enough to buy a compass, map protector, local map. Even something like knowing what and how to shoot an emergency azimuth can solve an otherwise crisis situation.

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