3 ms·

When I was younger I worried a little bit about this but now I'm perfectly happy to use my brain as an index instead of a data warehouse. As in, I don't bother

When I was younger I worried a little bit about this but now I'm perfectly happy to use my brain as an index instead of a data warehouse. As in, I don't bother committing to memory things that I can reach out and grab if they fall out of my "cache". As others have noted, I regularly reach out to SO/Internet to "remember" how to do basic language features if I haven't worked in said language recently or I've just forgotten the syntax. I can speed 5min+ racking my brain and/or reading docs or I can search and find it in a few seconds. Often I just need to see an example to "remember" or kick start myself.

monkeybutton 5y ago
The problem for me now is my mental index can suffer from link rot. For programming its okay because this doesn't happen often. But for other topics when a site or blog with the details of how something works disappears from the internet its very disorienting. Like you unlearned it. I guess this is why people get into archiving content.
- svnt 5y ago
  Evernote’s web clipper and notebook system is quite good for this. It is the only service I’ve consistently paid for over the last decade.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  You're right. It is. I'm thinking about setting up some sort of archiving web proxy on my home network to archive most of the pages I visit. I'm not sure if that will turn out to be any more useful than searching the Google index, but, at least it'll be a fun project. :-)
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    That could be really interesting to analyze after a year or so. Look for trends in usage like a Fitbit for your browsing habits.
mindcrime 5y ago
The things I wind up having to Google / SO are things like "How to setup a Spring Boot app with Spring Data JPA for data access". There are just so many fiddly details: the exact list of dependencies to put into your pom, the various required annotations (@EnableJpaRepositories or whatever, etc., yada yada), the various properties that have to be configured for a Datasource, etc. There's no way I'm committing all of that stuff to memory, especially when it's easy enough to look up (or better yet, build a trivial "hello world" project with everything already done, and store it off to the side as a template).
awillen 5y ago
I think this is the bigger point - the difference between internal and external knowledge has become much less important because the external knowledge is always easily available. I have a friend who prides himself on knowing all manner of both sports and history trivia - he could walk you through who won every NBA championship and who was in their starting lineup for the finals off the top of his head. Meanwhile, I'm a Lakers fan and I remember they had a threepeat in the early 2000s, but I don't know the years off the top of my head. Who cares? I can Google it if I need the details.

monkeybutton 5y ago

The problem for me now is my mental index can suffer from link rot. For programming its okay because this doesn't happen often. But for other topics when a site or blog with the details of how something works disappears from the internet its very disorienting. Like you unlearned it. I guess this is why people get into archiving content.

svnt 5y ago
Evernote’s web clipper and notebook system is quite good for this. It is the only service I’ve consistently paid for over the last decade.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
You're right. It is. I'm thinking about setting up some sort of archiving web proxy on my home network to archive most of the pages I visit. I'm not sure if that will turn out to be any more useful than searching the Google index, but, at least it'll be a fun project. :-)
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  That could be really interesting to analyze after a year or so. Look for trends in usage like a Fitbit for your browsing habits.

mindcrime 5y ago

The things I wind up having to Google / SO are things like "How to setup a Spring Boot app with Spring Data JPA for data access". There are just so many fiddly details: the exact list of dependencies to put into your pom, the various required annotations (@EnableJpaRepositories or whatever, etc., yada yada), the various properties that have to be configured for a Datasource, etc. There's no way I'm committing all of that stuff to memory, especially when it's easy enough to look up (or better yet, build a trivial "hello world" project with everything already done, and store it off to the side as a template).

awillen 5y ago

I think this is the bigger point - the difference between internal and external knowledge has become much less important because the external knowledge is always easily available. I have a friend who prides himself on knowing all manner of both sports and history trivia - he could walk you through who won every NBA championship and who was in their starting lineup for the finals off the top of his head. Meanwhile, I'm a Lakers fan and I remember they had a threepeat in the early 2000s, but I don't know the years off the top of my head. Who cares? I can Google it if I need the details.