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Knuth Airgaps and Knuth Buffers
- marginalia_nu 3y agoIn general, I think it's a good idea to be deliberate and judicious about your information diet. In my experience, the more low-quality information you've got in your head, the fewer interesting ideas will emerge. Mainlining social media is very much like watering the fields with Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator.
- svilen_dobrev 3y agothey say "you are what you eat" - physically and "you are what you perceive" - mentally.. so yeah, some (sometimes soft, sometimes drastic) hygiene is the way..
- 082349872349872 3y agoI like the pond metaphor: if you want to see the bottom of the pond, it has to have been still enough for long enough for suspended sediment to have settled. And if there's enough wind for the surface to be choppy, you won't see past that, much less to any turbid layers. > Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. — DEK
- timcavel 3y ago[dead]
- cfr2023 3y agoFast or close to real-time capture can encourage sloppy thinking and carelessness, neither of which Knuth is known for.
- utopcell 3y agoI subscribe to the idea of Knuth buffers when developing algorithms. They always first go on a piece of paper before they ever see a terminal. Slowing down the process and avoiding distractions helps the process tremendously.
- stuff4ben 3y agopaper or whiteboard for me too. I sometimes find paper too messy and too "constrained" I guess is the right word. A largish personal whiteboard in my cubicle was perfect for algorithm development or just putting down the flow of a app I was writing.
- finnh 3y agoI suspect Neal Stephenson has stopped composing on paper, given the precipitous decline in quality since Seveneves (or thereabouts; opinions may vary).
- rtkwe 3y agoI think "Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell" was still pretty good. [0] I haven't been able to finish Termination Shock though. Too much "big rich guy will come save us" in the early parts for me. [0] Though maybe that's just the hilarity of finally finding out who/what Enoch Root is after 4 books and many thousands of pages.
- KineticLensman 3y agoYes, I thought 'Fall' was okay, and definitely better than the second half of Seveneves. I also liked the way the Enoch Root conundrum was solved, although I'm not sure 'hilarity' is the term I'd use. His real turkey, to me, was The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O [0], although he wasn't the sole author. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_D.O.D.O https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_D.O.D.O.
- rtkwe 3y agoI think DODO really suffered with Neal's style of not explaining things to the reader that works well in things like Anathem but less well in a slightly madcap time travel story. I wonder if it would flow better on a second read where you had more info about what was going on, I remember spending a lot of time trying to figure out what was supposed to be happening and where the story was going and coming from. For Seveneves the roughest part for me was actually the end of act 1 with all the mistakes you could see a mile off and act 2 had a lot of really fun stuff I won't mention for spoilery reasons but the adaptation of the whip and chain stuff that came up win act 1 was honestly a lot of fun for me.
- KineticLensman 3y ago> act 2 had a lot of really fun stuff I won't mention for spoilery reasons Yes, there was some superb world building (notably the space habitats and transportation, as you suggest) in act 2 but (unfortunately) I felt that the plot didn't match it.
- surprisetalk 3y agoThanks for submitting, Mr. Schmudde! I'm eagerly awaiting your next post on Beyond the Frame :) [1] https://schmud.de https://schmud.de
- wespiser_2018 3y agoIf you ever try to get a knuth check, you'll receive back a printed copy of your email, along with his hand written notes and a response. Really cool!
- tjr 3y agoI once received such a letter, in which Knuth explained how my bug report was in fact mistaken. I wrote back to him (on the same printout paper) to thank him for his reply, and included a check for $2.56. He cashed it!
- utopcell 3y ago(-:
- Tomte 3y agoI got back a comic, and another time a T-Shirt (with the MMIX instruction set).
- bee_rider 3y agoPencil and paper is the best environment for working out anything at all difficult. It would be nice if there were an environment to take a picture of written pseudo code and/or equations and spit out some matlab, numpy, or eigen code.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoI'm partial to chalk, myself. The process of filling a board, erasing the parts that are no longer needed, then filling the board again distills your work down to the key ideas. And I just hate dry erase markers.
- globular-toast 3y agoYep. I know a problem is interesting if I reach for the pencil and paper. It's been on my desk today, which is good. My PhD supervisor got me into writing with pencil and paper. I wrote near enough my entire thesis that way. It was only transcribed to computer for typesetting after it had been proofread at least once.
- ahartmetz 3y agoI like nothing (a walk) and a plaintext file when I need to remember many details. Computers are distracting.
- nextaccountic 3y agoI don't know about paper, but having a large whiteboard in your room is amazing. A wacom tablet is great too.
- Alex3917 3y agoThe idea that Knuth doesn't use email is basically just a practical joke that got out of hand. He actually received 31,997 and sent 19,910 emails between 1999 and 2019, and that's only including the emails from his work account at Stanford. Sure, he uses email much less than you would expect from someone of has stature, but he still uses email about as much as the average person.
- esafak 3y agoI believe you but he does seem not to want to receive email because the page seems serious and it is still up.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alright2565 3y agocitation please?
- croes 3y agoHow do you know he received and wrote the mails. Could have been his secretary in his assignment. That's at least what his Stanford site suggests https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
- nabla9 3y agoHe has a secretary to do that.
- powera 3y agoThis appears to be a reference to https://epadd.stanford.edu/epadd/collection-detail?collection=ePADD%20archive%20of%20Don%20Knuth-Discovery https://epadd.stanford.edu/epadd/collection-detail?collectio... - a collection of "Don Knuth" emails. The public versions are very redacted, but: 1) they seem to all be from his secretary, not him 2) most of the messages are not dictation or direct copies of messages Knuth wrote elsewhere.
- ginko 3y agoThe possibility of having a personal secretary seems almost as outlandish as having a butler. No idea how much higher I'd need to go in my current company's org chart to get to that, but it'd be pretty damn high.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoThis in particular seems like a task an LLM might do a decent job at. A prompt like > You are esteemed computer scientist Donald Knuth's secretary. Your task is to determine which email is prioritized for immediate delivery, and which email is to be gathered and read at a later date. Label them "IMMEDIATE" or "LATER"
- tangjurine 3y agoI hear you can hire a part time one pretty cheaply
- pianoben 3y agoAt my company, one must be a VP to have an admin, and even then, the admins are shared across the VPs. Only some of the C-suite have dedicated personal admins, in fact. It's a dying luxury.
- 082349872349872 3y agoBack when I was a summer intern, I shared a secretary. At the time I had thought I was slumming it because I was in a cubicle, instead of (at my previous summer job) an office with a door. O tempora o mores!
- ranting-moth 3y agoKnuth is such a likeable man. I get the same feeling watching him talk as I get watching a very experienced woodworker using his hands to create a masterpiece.
- ablyveiled 3y agoI wonder if internet access and instant-entry is /necessarily/ a distraction or impediment to deep thought, or it could be stomached to the effect of great productivity with an especially sharpened mind. It saddens me that the most accessible repositories of information are those that, allegedly, dumb me down.
- burnished 3y agoMy experience is that its mostly an impediment, see socializing here instead of thinking deeply. But I've also used the internet to great effect when getting up to speed on a research topic because I had lots of access to high quality texts and tools (citation manager for tracking, spreadsheet for glossary of terms). Notably that didn't involve any communications, just searches.
- chubot 3y agoOne thing I've found comically underestimated is books. It's not whether the information is physical or electronic, but what actual corpus of information is available. There is A LOT of information in printed books that is not on the Internet. There was a project to put all books on the Internet -- Google Books -- but that famously got tied up in lawsuits. As a result, if your information diet consists of the Internet and not books, you're missing out. I occasionally write something "obvious" from a book on my blog, and people are like "wow how did you figure that out" ? --- For what Knuth is doing, he certainly doesn't need to read much on the Internet. Most of it is in books, or at the Stanford library (or whichever library he goes to). He's probably so busy with books that the Internet seems UNINTERESTING. If you want access to newer publications, the Internet is more efficient, but those are also available to the library. (Sadly, Scihub is the best source for those without university access.) So yeah I'd say 3 main repos of knowledge are: the open Internet, printed books, and Scihub, and many people today only use the first one.
- superb_dev 3y agoI've been getting deep into computer graphics recently, and having a handful of in-depth books on the subject has been immensely helpful. I don't have to spend time scouring terrible google results for answers when I don't even know the question As an aside, ThriftBooks has been amazing for increasing my collection! I;ve gotten so many books for cheap
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y ago> I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. > I have a wonderful secretary who looks at the incoming postal mail and separates out anything that she knows I’ve been looking forward to seeing urgently. Everything else goes into a buffer storage area, which I empty periodically. Wow having someone do stuff for you is nice. Such deep insight. One day I wish I can afford to have someone do stuff for me so I too can experience this insight.
- Rygian 3y agoI don't think an assistant is something you afford, so much as something your job requires.
- kristjank 3y agoSometimes that someone can be a thing, not a worker. I know that a couple of carefully crafted email filters increased my productivity almost twice and cut down unnecessary screen time almost completely. Knowing your vices can be more than half of the solution sometimes.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoI managed to cut down the team lead's daily mail ingress from 3000 mails to sub 300 buy pushing the changes through the org to use a named distribution groups and other minor tweaks. It's not easy to make the same on a personal account (at least without a personal domain name) but still can be done.
- fyokdrigd 3y agonot to mention living in a time you didn't need an email to get a driver's license. heck in brazil, southafrica and some parts of india you cannot even get one without a freaking whatsapp (which you cannot get without a mobile phone account (which you cannot get without a bank account (which...))) the other day i also had to take a selfie in a government owned app which required a phone with active google play store service, to allow me to see my own data, with no alternative method (being implemented so they say)