151–160 of 161 posts
Surprised it’s not mentioned, but important for the sake of patents too
> Surprised it’s not mentioned, but important for the sake of patents too Is this still true these days? I thought the US moved to first-to-file in the early 2010s.
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I've tried that, but my brain is just going "why are you writing about doing the thing instead of, you know, DOING THE THING"? I vastly prefer just making a working skeleton and filling that with actual code as I progress.
Shrug, to be honest if you don't understand the value of sketching out certain problems it's probably because you're not working on anything particularly difficult.
I need a fast feedback loop for the way my brain works, spending too much time on not-working will just confuse me further.
Obsidian with the (core) Daily Notes⁽¹⁾ plugin plus Jump-To-Date⁽²⁾ and Daily Note Navbar⁽³⁾ is a powerful combo for me. Everything is still searchable (or can be fed into an LLM) since it’s all Markdown text files behind the scenes. (And I can type my thoughts much faster than I can write.) ⁽¹⁾ https://help.obsidian.md/plugins/daily-notes ⁽²⁾ https://github.com/TfTHacker/obsidian42-jump-to-date ⁽³⁾ https://github.co…
Writing with a pen and paper is different from typing on a keyboard at. brain level. I need to finish that research and write that blog post, apparently.
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Writing with a pen and paper is different from typing on a keyboard at. brain level. I need to finish that research and write that blog post, apparently.
I suspect it's to do with fluency, at least partially. Have you looked into how it goes for very fluent typists? Problem is, I suspect you might get enough fluency that typing isn't distracting as compared to handwriting only at significantly faster speeds than most people consider the beginning of "fast".
While I don't type lightning fast (~130WPM and beyond), I already type without thinking about it. I just think and it appears on screen, actually. On the other hand, when I'm writing, there's another sub-process which is evaluating whether what I'm writing makes sense or works in real world. It's not possible to do this while typing since the freedom provided by the pen, and the thinking process is completely different. Also, I can build a model of what I'm writing about in my mind better. In short, typing lends to shallower thinking while writing allows more depth and exploration on the subject.
This is also evident when I'm writing code. I design it on paper, and type that design to the IDE I use.
The research articles I started to collect also points to something similar. When using pen and paper, neurons fire differently and in larger networks, pointing to a different mode of thinking. Considering I started use pen/paper and keyboards almost at the same time, and able to verify that using a pen really makes my brain work differently, I find "you're typing it wrong" a flawed argument for the most part.
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I'm a scientist. In the science world, the traditional lab notebook contained a narrative of what you were doing. You're kind of thinking out loud into it. One measure of a good notebook is if it contains sufficient information that you don't have to repeat work only because you can't figure out what you did. There are other good reasons for repeating things of course. My spouse is a lab scientist, and I've seen her…
>My spouse is a lab scientist, and I've seen her meticulous notebooks. She was telling me just last week that one of her experiments produced a puzzling result. The next day she said: "I figured it out from my notebook. I skipped a step that was in the procedure." This puzzles me. If you are skipping a step in the procedure, aren't you also possibly going to skip writing a step down? And if you're not sure you wrote…
Exactly, so when she reviewed the notebook, she caught the error.
Even if she made a slip in the notebook, merely reviewing it helps jog the memory to revisit and replay what she did in the lab. It's the power of touchstones.
> What if you have to do several steps rather quickly? Say adding a particular chemical, then waiting for ten seconds and adding, another chemical? Do you have time to write it down?
The notebook doesn't always have to operate as a log. It can also operate as a plan of action.
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These are the things I add in when adding in a new usecase to a codename: - Expansion of the acceptance criteria into small steps. - Any clarifications to what we are making - Anything I don't understand yet so i can chase up someone about it later - As I read through the code I write up possible refactoring opertunties. (I find this a lot better than adding todos as you can skim though the list closer to the end and…
What does it mean to add a usecase to a codename? Is this something you do frequently? And is it something you imagine others also do?
One thing that has helped me keep to start keeping long-running notebooks (which I use as engineering notebooks at times, among other things) is to actually keep two: one for immediate notes that I treat as disposable, and then another for "permanent" stuff. The former is a little 3x5 pocket notebook that literally lives in my pocket (or beside my keyboard), and I can jot stuff down in whatever order or format is con…
On a side note, whenever I get a new journal (paper or electronic), my very first step is to draw a crappy cover on the first page. That’s easy for my because I lack the skill to draw a nice one. This kinda “breaks the seal” for me. It’s slightly ugly now, causing me to not feel bad about anything else I put in it afterward.
I was given this advice at university, but what I was always missing was what I was supposed to write down in them. The post here mentions hypotheses, but I don't do experiments for the most part. It mentions writing down in the notebook before writing code, but I can't test my notes, I can't really send my notes for code review. I guess you could use it for design, but you'd lose all the advantages of word processin…
Sounds like your approach works for you.
Here's a similar post with more concrete advice on what to write: https://jamesmckay.net/2017/02/how-to-keep-lab-notes-as-a-so...
1. Choose the most low-friction solution you can get your hands on. 2. Write down everything you do, as you do it. 3. You can not be too detailed. 4. Write down your train of thought when you’re planning and designing your code. 5. Don't worry too much about making your notes look good. 6. Use a searchable text format. 7. Make your notes append-only. 8. Use your notes as a source for documentation, commit summaries and pull request descriptions. 9. Share your notes with your whole team. 10. Don’t make your notes public. 11. Learn from your mistakes.
I used to use HackMD but I have found Obsidian helps me better meet the criteria above (low-friction yet searchable).
I have learned the hard way, repeatedly, that forcing myself to write down a to-do list and notes on what I did actually makes me a better developer, even when I am in software engineering mode, not research mode. I make myself prioritize what to do, I retain better what I've learned, and I converge on solutions faster.
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I suspect it's to do with fluency, at least partially. Have you looked into how it goes for very fluent typists? Problem is, I suspect you might get enough fluency that typing isn't distracting as compared to handwriting only at significantly faster speeds than most people consider the beginning of "fast".
It's not about distraction, actually. Since the mode of typing vs. writing is different; I can feel that my brain is working differently. While I don't type lightning fast (~130WPM and beyond), I already type without thinking about it. I just think and it appears on screen, actually. On the other hand, when I'm writing, there's another sub-process which is evaluating whether what I'm writing makes sense or works in r…
The sub-process thing sounds vaguely plausible, but at the same time, I'm under the impression that I'm already constantly evaluating whether what I'm writing makes sense, its implications and assumptions, etc. At least I feel that I'm attentive to the impression of it not making sense, though I also try not to confuse the feeling that something makes sense with the fact of it being so.
Anyway, what I'm going for here is, did you consciously apply any technique or process to evaluating this or do you come by this insight naturally?
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You can't OCR handwriting. There are some AIs that do claim handwriting recognition, but I've yet to find a single one that can read my notes.
Yeah I was talking about Google Vision or similar. Though USPS has been doing handwriting recognition since the 80's. I don't it got very good until the late 90's though.
On a very restricted dictionary of possible content, with a pool of people employed to fix anything where the computer is unsure.