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People who can't give up paper

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Re: People who can't give up paper

#131

Post by II2II »

fragmede wrote: post #117
clnq wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fireproof safe's, aren't. A thief could steal it out of your house, you can't access it on the go, it'll get water damaged and mold and rot. The ink will fade. You won't have a drive to read the floppy disk/CD-rom/DVD/USB-A flash drive. You can't grep it and unless you meticulously organize it, it's a jumbled pile of unopened envelopes. Cloud and digital isn't the be all and end all, but there are plenty of problems…

Mold is a failure mode for floppy disks and water is a failure mode for many electronic storage media or the tools we use to read them.

I suspect that many people associate durability with electronic media simply because it becomes obsolete so rapidly that we don't experience it in the same way. We don't know whether that dusty floppy disk or CD-R is readable since we disposed of our last computer with a drive, or we associate the failure of a flash drive with a cheap drive rather than the intrinsic properties of the media, or we attribute it to abuse. We rarely have the opportunity to use something until it is worn out, or pick it up after a quarter century in storage.

Modern media is incredibly fragile. The chief advantage it has (in terms of longevity) is its digital nature, in our ability to reproduce it exactly. Yet that is only an advantage if we actively maintain our archives.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#132

Post by hoseja »

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.

Modern paper will disintegrate over time, something with acid.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#133

Post by ChatGTP »

Does anyone use a paper day planner ?

I gave mine up and tried to go digital, but I just haven't found anything I like. Google Cal has been ok, but I hate the way I had to maintain a personal and private version of my planner. I was worried if I got laid off I'd lose access to my stuff. This is basically a concern with any planning software for me. The app turns to shit or the company goes bust and that's it. I have to invent some new way of managing my time.

Even with my iPad Pro + Pencil, I'm not satisfied yet. I still find just writing a comma cumbersome on the iPad pro.

I'm going to buy a paper day planner again because I've never been so unorganized since I quit the paper planner. I feel kind of guilty because I'm not taking advantage of all the amazing modern cloud, AI crazy amazing tech to plan my life...

Re: People who can't give up paper

#134

Post by DharmaPolice »

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.

I think this depends on lifestyle. I know that if there's vital information on a piece of paper I need to photograph it (or type it up) and email it to myself because the paper will be lost/destroyed before too long. I could invest in a fireproof safe but it'd be another thing to move and take up space which I don't have a huge amount of. Something emailed to multiple email providers and copies stored in Dropbox, etc is unlikely to lost.

And when you're dealing with a high quantity of information, good luck searching through thousands of sheets of paper for something.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#135

Post by bhandziuk »

brightsize wrote: post #38
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.

Re: hiking, your comment reminded me of this recent write-up in the Seattle Times. It's hard to imagine serious hikers hitting the trail in the PNW without at least one person in the party carrying the relevant Green Trails paper maps, but I suppose they exist. https://www.seattletimes.com/life/outdoors/seattle-mapmaker-... “Your devices aren’t big enough to show you the context at any level of detail that from our p…

I got lazy about this when moving from Washington to Colorado. Many hours in Colorado are so exposed I can still basically see the car some 8 miles later and 6000 ft up.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#136

Post by throwaway87651 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #69

Bound lab books with printed numbers on the pages are, I am led to believe, at the forefront of any technical defence of a patent or discovery. You just can’t fake ‘em. This is why I record all my ideas in a lab journal — a cargo cult it may be but we’ll see who’s laughing when I finally invent homomorphic encryption / perpetual motion / alchemy!

That's no longer true. The US used to use "first to invent" to determine patent rights, but it was changed to "first to file" in 2013. It's no longer necessary to prove when you first invented something, it's now just a matter of checking filing dates.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_i...

Re: People who can't give up paper

#137

Post by yomlica8 »

II2II wrote: post #131
fragmede wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fireproof safe's, aren't. A thief could steal it out of your house, you can't access it on the go, it'll get water damaged and mold and rot. The ink will fade. You won't have a drive to read the floppy disk/CD-rom/DVD/USB-A flash drive. You can't grep it and unless you meticulously organize it, it's a jumbled pile of unopened envelopes. Cloud and digital isn't the be all and end all, but there are plenty of problems…

Mold is a failure mode for floppy disks and water is a failure mode for many electronic storage media or the tools we use to read them. I suspect that many people associate durability with electronic media simply because it becomes obsolete so rapidly that we don't experience it in the same way. We don't know whether that dusty floppy disk or CD-R is readable since we disposed of our last computer with a drive, or we…

One unexpected issue with digital media is changing manufacturing quality and an inability to identify it until it is to late. Early stage floppy disks and CDs actually were pretty reliable but by the tail end so much cost saving had happened in manufacturing they'd turned to crap.

The same thing has happened with flash drives already, how do you identify a good flash drive? If you aren't careful you'll end up with a counterfeit but even the genuine articles have shaky reputations and manufacturers change the internal parts all the time.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#138

Post by wnkrshm »

sixstringtheory wrote: post #28
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…

Same, iOS developer here. Maybe if software were treated less like fashion that had to constantly be updated, resulting in a neverending revolving door of bugs and new waves of learning curves, and instead like a focused tool, it could catch up more to paper. There are absolutely benefits to software over paper but they feel hamstrung by the constant desire to roll out the next UI paradigm. Sooner or later the set of…

I feel it's also a scaling issue: If you wanted to do all of the digital bookkeeping of today on paper, that would be perhaps impossible. I don't think personal note-taking is in any way a large contribution to paper use.

I do art on paper and even I don't go through 500 pages in a year. It's at work, things like 60 page reports that need to be printed for submission (and then get printed 2x or 3x again because you can replicate it).

The ease of printing documents is the culprit, you can just replicate large physical artifacts again and again. You can't do that with your personal notes that probably only exist as unique artifacts and maybe get scanned into a digital archive.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#139

Post by galleywest200 »

I have had sweaty hands my entire life. Pen and paper can be frustrating when your paper gets soaked and you cannot write on it any longer, the ink smears from your hands, etc. I don't want to wear a glove every time I want to write something.

For designing something I will take the time to physically draw it, but for any notes I need to be able to access regularly I will use a digital version.

Re: People who can't give up paper

#140

Post by patrickthebold »

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…

I'm with you except for the bills. Incoming physical mail is hard (for me) to deal with. Also, most things are set up through my bank to auto-pay. I check the first of the month what's going on.
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