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I don't really like this. I think the author let their own personal issues lead to the destruction of knowledge. I relate to the issues, but the nuclear option

by 1dom 1y ago

I don't really like this. I think the author let their own personal issues lead to the destruction of knowledge. I relate to the issues, but the nuclear option seems extreme. They could have just left their library for a bit, there was no need to burn it to the ground. "I've just lobotomised myself and I look forward to having to relearn everything and doing it all again". If nothing else, in 7 years time, they'll regret not being able to compare how their new manifestation of internal knowledge anxiety compares to their previous. There was no need to do this. Please anyone, if you're considering this, just zip them up and put them on a usb or cloud storage somewhere out of the way - that's a lot harder to regret.

manmal 1y ago
The problem with hoarding is that, on the whole, the hoarded items are worthless. There’s too much noise and too little signal. Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found daunting. Hoarders usually need help from the outside, and if they don’t get that help, it’s IMO fair to throw it all out.
- noisy_boy 1y ago
  > Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found daunting. Who knows what are gems are what are not? I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. Or maybe they will consider it all junk and just get rid of it. But I can't be the judge of that now, I can only be the custodian.
  - manmal 1y ago
    You are perfectly describing the issue when sorting out a hoarder‘s stuff. There‘s no way of knowing what‘s precious and what not for most of the things. There might be some obvious things (wooden furniture / ISO documents that are still relevant), but the rest goes in the trash usually. > One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them My mother used to say the same thing. But I‘m not looking at that old stuff, ever. Maybe your kids will. It’s your decision whether it’s worse to be false negative or false positive here. If the stuff is not taking up too much space, it’s probably a good idea to keep it. Hoarding is something else though.
    - noisy_boy 1y ago
      I'll take my chances on the off chance that my child will see their primary 2 report card scan after many years and say "oh my god I can't believe it..."
      - sanswork 1y ago
        My mom kept everything like that. The structured stuff like baby books and photo albums with labels and stories are great. The boxes of report cards from when I was 7 were a momentary amusement before they were recycled. The school work and random other things were just annoying to have to sort through.
        noisy_boy 1y ago
        I would have been stoked to see the evidence of her sentimentality if that was my mother (my dad kept my stuff and I liked that very much). I guess we are all different people will different emotional reactions. Also I know nothing about you or your life so maybe your reaction is totally warranted.
        astura 1y ago
        Of course you would have been m stoked, hoarders enjoy hoards. It's a tautology. What you fail to understand is the vast majority of people are not hoarders and don't enjoy hoards.
        kaashif 1y ago
        I would enjoy a digital hoard of stuff like that, but not a physical hoard. I have since digitized all of the stuff my parents hoarded and got rid of a lot of the physical items. It doesn't really cost me anything on an ongoing basis to have this huge digital dump of files sitting around. It was a one time effort to scan everything. If my parents had done that and just left a huge archive of digital files, that would be fine. If people feel neutrally about digital hoards, that makes sense.
  - dist-epoch 1y ago
    Realistically they will use an AI to find the gems.
    - noisy_boy 1y ago
      I'll be happy if they atleast try, AI or no AI :) And if they don't, thats ok too!
  - michaelt 1y ago
    > Who knows what are gems are what are not? In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about.
    - diggan 1y ago
      > In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about. Well, yeah, if they say it has no value, then obviously it has no value to them, no one could claim otherwise. I guess the context in this thread kind of shifted to it might still be valuable to someone, even if it isn't valuable to them. There been a lot of cases in history where very smart people judged their own journals to not be very valuable (to them) so they think nothing of it, then 100 years later someone discovers the journal together with a ton of valuable (to the world) nuggets in it.
    - account42 1y ago
      Will their future self agree with that assessment though?
  - al_borland 1y ago
    You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead of getting rid of them.
    - noisy_boy 1y ago
      > You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead of getting rid of them. He can't give them to you if he threw it away. Also, he can ask that question to you because your choices and preferences are, to a large extent, set. The same stuff, that my child would throw away without hesitation few years ago, is now "precious memories" and not to be disturbed. The emotional value of things doesn't follow much logic and has massive volatility until adulthood. I mean I totally understand that me keeping bunch of stuff isn't a guarantee that they will find what they value at that point of time. Maybe the lego-shaped eraser would be the most interesting piece of stationary they will remember; doesn't mean I can hoard every piece of stationary. Digital stuff is different though - my SSD doesn't bulge just because I'm putting more files holding snippets of life on it.
      - al_borland 1y ago
        My dad has kept a lot of stuff. If he kept what I mentioned, I don’t know. But I do hope he goes through his stuff and pairs down before he passes, and if he does, I’m glad he asked. But you’re right, they the kids need to be grown before that question becomes valuable. I’ve known several people who had to go through their parent’s entire lifetime of accumulated stuff and it was quite the job. Dumpsters were rented. It was a big burden to leave the kids. Digital stuff will also be a lot to go through. My dad has hundreds of thousands of photos, backed up in triplicate. I was helping him clean the basement once and found 5 1/4 inch floppy disks labeled “backup” from the 80s. He’s kept all digital files. Many of them are locked into various proprietary apps as well. So I’ll likely need to spend months going through it all, while everything is still working, to see what is worth saving, and migrating it into a format I can manage. It will be a massive project, on top of the physical stuff. I’m hoping I can talk the rest of the family into an estate sale for the physical stuff, but the digital stuff is arguably the bigger job, with no way to outsource it. There is also the question of corruption, or simply being able to read older files. I grabbed some documents I had saved on his computer back in high school about 15 years later. I had saved them as rtf files at the time so they would be more portable. I tried off and on for a week or two to read them in more modern times and it was a no-go. I could get sections, but not the whole thing. I don’t know if the rtf standard changed or the files were simply corrupt, but they were basically trash. I’m sure I’ll run into a lot of that as well.
  - astura 1y ago
    OMG, this is so dumb, your children don't want your hoard; at least admit your hoarding for yourself, not them.
    - noisy_boy 1y ago
      Speak for yourself and stop projecting your opinions on others. You don't speak for me or my children.
    - achierius 1y ago
      I want my parent's hoard :) Does that make me a... vicarious hoarder? What point are you trying to make? If you keep knick-knacks for the sake of others, you're a hoarder and should admit it's actually just for yourself -- if you enjoy someone else's knick-knacks which they saved for you, you're also a hoarder?
    - account42 1y ago
      You don't know what your children will want. Not everyone is as disinterested as you are.
  - sotix 1y ago
    > I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. My sister and I have an agreement to trash my mom’s hoard of our school stuff she refuses to get rid of that we don’t want. All it does is bring us stress. If they made physical art like clay pots in a kiln, keep it for yourself if they don’t want it. If it’s something you can scan, I doubt it’s worth keeping and makes it much harder to find signal in the noise when too much is scanned.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      When my mother passed and we had to clean out my parent's house, she had boxes of the same kinds of things. Old report cards, drawings and school work from 40+ years ago. It was nice to see that she cared to save it but it was of no interest beyond that. And it was pretty clear that she herself never looked at it, as the boxes were packed away in closets and obviously hadn't been touched since they were put there. Stuff causes stress. It's really true. Even if it's mostly out of the way, every time you see it it will cause some stress about whether it should be moved, reorganized, saved, or thrown away. The house I grew up in was always cluttered and I'm bad about it myself. Every once in a while I will order a roll-off dumpster to the house and get rid of things that have accumulated over the past 10 years or so. It's a relief but then it starts over again. If there's one habit I wish I had it would be to regularly and ruthlessly get rid of stuff that I don't use anymore.
      - ikr678 1y ago
        I'm no contact with the parent that has my childhood home. As a result of this I've become very unsentimental, after a few painful years of trying to retrieve the few items I cared about, only for that parent to realise they had value to me and use them for leverage. I have given up on stuff in general. I am not exactly a minimalist, but I freely give away and loan things to people who might get more value put of them, it's enabled me to move across the country multiple times for good opportunities at very little notice.
- KHRZ 1y ago
  We just entered the era where LLMs could mine his gems for him though.
  - alternatex 1y ago
    I find it wild to suggest an LLM would be better at scouring data for gems than the person who wrote them. LLMs are better than us at going through large amounts of data, and that's it. They have no idea what is valuable there.
    - diggan 1y ago
      > I find it wild to suggest an LLM would be better at scouring data for gems than the person who wrote them I mean, "an out there" idea sure, but wild? There are plenty of cases where people underestimated their own worth and value, and the potential impact of their ideas. Sometimes it's valuable to have outsiders perspective on things. Old war veterans might not think twice about their love-letters between them and their partner, but taken together with a large collection of letters, historians can build new perspectives that we weren't able to see before. > They have no idea what is valuable there. Of course an LLM wouldn't know what is "valuable". It would require a person to have an idea of what could be valuable, and program the LLM to surface based on that, together with more things. For example, I could imagine if I setup an LLM with the prompt "Highlight perspectives that you think are conflicting with other stated perspectives" to go through my own second-brain, it could reveal something I haven't considered before, granted it'll be able to freely query the db and so on.
    - sotix 1y ago
      Agreed. LLMs have no taste.
- tareqak 1y ago
  With respect to knowledge and notes, I would say that the knowledge (gems) may not be worthless in an absolute sense but its relevance may no longer be worth the cost of keeping said knowledge organized under a given person’s organization scheme. For what it is worth, I still find it frustrating when I cannot find a certain piece of information that I am looking for but I know exists because I came across it before but didn’t record it at the time. However, I also appreciate being able to forget distressing events that would find ways to remind me about their existence. I guess all of this may depend on the exact definitions of knowledge, data, and memory, and how an individual reckons with acquiring, organizing, and forgetting information.
- qwertox 1y ago
  That's an effort that can be handled by an AI.
  - manmal 1y ago
    LLMs have no idea what’s really interesting to you as a person. You can try to include all the topics of interest in the prompt, but the result won’t be desirable.
- motorest 1y ago
  > The problem with hoarding is that, on the whole, the hoarded items are worthless. There’s too much noise and too little signal. I don't think that's a problem. What turns logs into a problem is misplaced expectations on what is their purpose and how you should use them. Logs are collected with the express purpose of being ignored, and as a safeguard in case in the future you need to check an audit trail of what you were doing. After a while, once the odds of those logs providing any value drops enough, you can safely delete them. Your tool is only as good as you make it out to be.
  - manmal 1y ago
    Tools like honeycomb (and observability 2.0 in general) do so well exactly because they solve the very real problem of drowning in log data.
- 1dom 1y ago
  I don't disagree with anything you're saying apart from the last few words. The solution to this problem is the same it has been for literally centuries: archiving. The whole point of an archive is that it's out of the way and takes no effort, even more so a digital one. But if you have/need/want the time/space, you or someone else can check it, and find a gem.
  - layer8 1y ago
    As someone who by now has decades of nested digital archives of archives, those still have a psychological weight that sometimes surfaces when I am reminded of their existence. It’s not clear to me they really constitute a net benefit.
    - account42 1y ago
      That weight is not inherent to the archive but something you yourself are manifesting. It's a mindset problem.
  - manmal 1y ago
    If it’s not weighing you down that you have to do put in this effort later, then sure.
    - account42 1y ago
      You don't have to put in the effort later. You have the opportunity to put in the effort if you deem it worth the cost then - something you cannot predict now.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  If they’re worthless then give them away
- zahlman 1y ago
  Counterpoint: data hoarding is not like physical hoarding (or at least, it hasn't been up to this point), because we've lived through an era of exponentially increasing storage capacity (with file sizes to match, in many cases). I still have a folder full of notes from several of my university courses, grouped by course. Some of it is source code (either the lecturer's or my own); some is assignment text (in a mixture of plain text, PDF, legacy .doc, etc.). There aren't any repositories because this was many years before Git existed and professors back then apparently didn't think we needed to be taught about the systems that did exist. But why not keep it? The whole collection is smaller than, say, the OpenBLAS shared library that comes with a NumPy installation. It's maybe 1% of the size of the ISO for a modern desktop Linux distribution. It's part of a folder with even older stuff - all the way back to toy Turing programs I wrote as a child. There are countless random files that are probably poorly organized internally, that I'll likely never revisit with any good reason. But the whole thing is less data than I'd likely end up downloading if I spent an hour on YouTube or Twitch. The ability to store it permanently costs me literally pennies, amortized over the cost of the drive. ... And yet, the size of modern applications still bothers me. It feels almost disrespectful, somehow. Old habits die hard, I guess.
  - achierius 1y ago
    > And yet, the size of modern applications still bothers me. It feels almost disrespectful, somehow. Old habits die hard, I guess. Data size != memory size, and even memory size != binary size. It's totally fair to rail against the program text, and associated application data, that have to be loaded onto your machine in order for you to do something as simple as send a message on Slack -- RAM, unlike cold storage space, has not grown quite so exponentially, and wasting that space is expensive. And of course, the larger the binary, the slower the program, and the worse your programs will interface with other ones on the system.
    - account42 1y ago
      RAM has grown quite a bit and the only reason it hasn't grown as exponentially is because it is essentially a cache for permanent storage. For caches speed is much more important and speed is very much still a trade off.
johanneskanybal 1y ago
I mean most of us don’t keep any organized notes and are fine. I can giggle sometimes when I find old notepads from the past but nothing I’d miss. Sounds like the author for sure made an obvious choice even if that doesen’t mean you have to do the same.
Veen 1y ago
It’s not knowledge unless they actually know it. It’s just a collection of information.
qwertox 1y ago
Let alone the fact that he could have fed an assistant with that information in 3 or 5 years, and would never have had to bother with that information again, but would be able to talk about it and ask in huge detail about things that were once relevant. The AI would have enough information on how he wants the data to be structured, it could have kept doing it for him.
- jen729w 1y ago
  Her. Her name is in the goddamn URL. Joan.
  - N7lo4nl34akaoSN 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_(given_name) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_(given_name)
  - account42 1y ago
    How is this relevant to the discussion?
alganet 1y ago
It's a commitment. Note that the author also struggled with sobriety. Likely, this whole "library" was causing unhealthy behavior. Commitments are important.
latexr 1y ago
> I think the author let their own personal issues lead to the destruction of knowledge. Conversely, I think you’re letting your own personal views stand in the way of empathy and recognising what is best for another. There was no “destruction of knowledge”. It was a collection of notes which was never going to be looked at again and was causing stress to the author. Written knowledge which isn’t read is as useless at that which isn’t written in the first place. Would you also decry someone for not having written the note in the first place? > They could have just left their library for a bit, there was no need to burn it to the ground. It was not a library. I bet that for the author it felt closer a hoarder’s house with stacks of scattered newspapers. > "I've just lobotomised myself and I look forward to having to relearn everything and doing it all again". Absurd. Deleting written notes does not make you immediately forget everything that was written on them. The lessons they needed, they internalised. The ones they didn’t weren’t important anyway. Sure, there may have been some good notes in there, but not in enough quantity and quality to warrant wading though them all and justify the extra anxiety the existence of these lists caused. > If nothing else, in 7 years time, they'll regret No, they will not. Signed, someone who learned to delete relentlessly and is much happier for it. Maybe you would regret it. That says nothing about other people. If anything, I’d regret the years when I didn’t delete stuff. > There was no need to do this. Yes, there was. The author needed it for their mental well-being and development. Let them be. Everyone copes with life in different ways. We’re all going to die, all your notes will be meaningless in the end. > Please anyone, if you're considering this, just zip them up and put them on a usb or cloud storage somewhere out of the way - that's a lot harder to regret. No, everyone should do what makes sense for them personally. Having the thing “out of the way” is not the same as having it gone. It’s a very different feeling, like saving a memento from an unhealthy relationship VS throwing it away. There is freedom in deciding to let go without recourse. I for one applaud the author and wish them the best. I’m sure they struggled with the decision and it took some courage to go through with it. They did the right thing for themselves and that’s what matters.
- 1dom 1y ago
  We're not going to agree here, we're going to descend into stupid walls of texts. I'll give you one more, but I probably wont respond. It's not personal, it's just not valuable for either of us. > There was no “destruction of knowledge”. It was a collection of notes which was never going to be looked at again and was causing stress to the author. Written knowledge which isn’t read is as useless at that which isn’t written in the first place. Would you also decry someone for not having written the note in the first place? I disagree that there was no destruction of knowledge. Even if the author is just copy/pasting from random sources, the link and choice of putting those 2 copies in the same folder is a bit of knowledge, a link solidified with an action. We have different ideas of what constitutes knowledge, I think you know you're being ridiculous if you're sincerely trying to argue that 7 years worth of notes doesn't have a single new contribution of any value to anything or anyone at all. I do decry people who don't take personal notes. > It was not a library. I bet that for the author it felt closer a hoarder’s house with stacks of scattered newspapers. I totally agree that's how the author felt - they let their own negative feelings towards what they've created destroy something which could be valuable to others. > Absurd. Deleting written notes does not make you immediately forget everything that was written on them. The lessons they needed, they internalised. The ones they didn’t weren’t important anyway. Sure, there may have been some good notes in there, but not in enough quantity and quality to warrant wading though them all and justify the extra anxiety the existence of these lists caused. What's even your point here? You start saying how notes aren't even needed and are pointless to be written down, then you argue that maybe there is some value in them written down, and then come back to support my argument that the author's own personal feelings have lead to the destruction of something valuable. > No, they will not. Signed, someone who learned to delete relentlessly and is much happier for it. > Maybe you would regret it. That says nothing about other people. If anything, I’d regret the years when I didn’t delete stuff. Ignorance is bliss: you can't get upset about the things you don't know any more. Knowledge is hard. Your position about not regretting throwing away potential personal knowledge and memories isn't a position I've heard from anyone over (*edited typo) the age of 50. You don't regret it just like the author doesn't, I think you have a future of denial or upset. > Yes, there was. The author needed it for their mental well-being and development. Let them be. Everyone copes with life in different ways. We’re all going to die, all your notes will be meaningless in the end. There's other ways to deal with information overload, like proper archiving. We're all going to die, and the only reason why have a culture or knowledge as a species is because everyone else hasn't done what this person is doing. > No, everyone should do what makes sense for them personally. > Having the thing “out of the way” is not the same as having it gone. It’s a very different feeling, like saving a memento from an unhealthy relationship VS throwing it away. There is freedom in deciding to let go without recourse. Congratulations with the individualism, you made yourself feel free by burning books. If that makes you happy - you do you, I don't care - but don't act like it's benefit anyone else other than the person struggling with the feeling of information overload.
crsv 1y ago
It’s the thought organization equivalent of the Britany Spears head shaving. It’s a mental breakdown and the person suffering from the mental health issue at its root is processing their behavior by writing about it. It’s mental illness.
- jen729w 1y ago
  Deleting notes to mental illness is quite the leap.
  - crsv 1y ago
    So you didn’t actually take the time to read the article.
    - escapedmoose 1y ago
      Nowhere in the article did this seem to equate to a “mental breakdown” in my view either. Your perspective on this might be flavored by your own non-universal values/experiences.
bovermyer 1y ago
This sounds like it came from a place of fear. This is not an indictment, incidentally; just an observation. You choose language like "nuclear" and "destruction" and "lobotomise" and end with a plea to not make similar choices. I'm in my forties. I have gone through multiple cycles of collecting and purging. How that feels has changed over the years. Sometimes I have regretted getting rid of some things, but that frequency is far, far lower than the number of times I haven't cared or even noticed. And those times I have regretted it have not resulted in obsessive thinking about what I've lost or what might have been. Further, having a "reset" has proven valuable on more than one occasion, as it opens up new pathways that I might otherwise have not even considered. You speak of relearning everything as if it's forcing yourself to repeat the same path all over again, with no new learning and just a pointless sacrifice of what little time we have. In my experience, "relearning" usually entails discovering entirely new experiences and paths to knowledge along a general set of guidelines through half-memories. To put it another way, starting over is not guaranteed suffering, it's an opportunity to discover new things.
627467 1y ago
> I've just lobotomised myself Good thing they didn't actually lobotomized themselves, right? Why is his carbon storage system not enough? Do you need to keep you RAM data persistent as well as your ROM data?
- account42 1y ago
  I don't know about him but my carbon storage system is quite limited - both in total storage capacity as well as in error correction or even detection which should be basic features for long term archival.

by 1dom 1y ago

manmal 1y ago

The problem with hoarding is that, on the whole, the hoarded items are worthless. There’s too much noise and too little signal. Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found daunting. Hoarders usually need help from the outside, and if they don’t get that help, it’s IMO fair to throw it all out.

noisy_boy 1y ago
> Finding the gems takes an active effort, which author found daunting. Who knows what are gems are what are not? I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. Or maybe they will consider it all junk and just get rid of it. But I can't be the judge of that now, I can only be the custodian.
- manmal 1y ago
  You are perfectly describing the issue when sorting out a hoarder‘s stuff. There‘s no way of knowing what‘s precious and what not for most of the things. There might be some obvious things (wooden furniture / ISO documents that are still relevant), but the rest goes in the trash usually. > One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them My mother used to say the same thing. But I‘m not looking at that old stuff, ever. Maybe your kids will. It’s your decision whether it’s worse to be false negative or false positive here. If the stuff is not taking up too much space, it’s probably a good idea to keep it. Hoarding is something else though.
  - noisy_boy 1y ago
    I'll take my chances on the off chance that my child will see their primary 2 report card scan after many years and say "oh my god I can't believe it..."
    - sanswork 1y ago
      My mom kept everything like that. The structured stuff like baby books and photo albums with labels and stories are great. The boxes of report cards from when I was 7 were a momentary amusement before they were recycled. The school work and random other things were just annoying to have to sort through.
      - noisy_boy 1y ago
        I would have been stoked to see the evidence of her sentimentality if that was my mother (my dad kept my stuff and I liked that very much). I guess we are all different people will different emotional reactions. Also I know nothing about you or your life so maybe your reaction is totally warranted.
        astura 1y ago
        Of course you would have been m stoked, hoarders enjoy hoards. It's a tautology. What you fail to understand is the vast majority of people are not hoarders and don't enjoy hoards.
        kaashif 1y ago
        I would enjoy a digital hoard of stuff like that, but not a physical hoard. I have since digitized all of the stuff my parents hoarded and got rid of a lot of the physical items. It doesn't really cost me anything on an ongoing basis to have this huge digital dump of files sitting around. It was a one time effort to scan everything. If my parents had done that and just left a huge archive of digital files, that would be fine. If people feel neutrally about digital hoards, that makes sense.
- dist-epoch 1y ago
  Realistically they will use an AI to find the gems.
  - noisy_boy 1y ago
    I'll be happy if they atleast try, AI or no AI :) And if they don't, thats ok too!
- michaelt 1y ago
  > Who knows what are gems are what are not? In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about. Well, yeah, if they say it has no value, then obviously it has no value to them, no one could claim otherwise. I guess the context in this thread kind of shifted to it might still be valuable to someone, even if it isn't valuable to them. There been a lot of cases in history where very smart people judged their own journals to not be very valuable (to them) so they think nothing of it, then 100 years later someone discovers the journal together with a ton of valuable (to the world) nuggets in it.
  - account42 1y ago
    Will their future self agree with that assessment though?
- al_borland 1y ago
  You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead of getting rid of them.
  - noisy_boy 1y ago
    > You can ask your kids what those gems are. My dad ask me this a few months ago. I brought up some knick knacks he had in his office when I was growing up. I'm not sure if he still has them or not, but if he does, if he ever goes through his hoard, he'll know to send those my way instead of getting rid of them. He can't give them to you if he threw it away. Also, he can ask that question to you because your choices and preferences are, to a large extent, set. The same stuff, that my child would throw away without hesitation few years ago, is now "precious memories" and not to be disturbed. The emotional value of things doesn't follow much logic and has massive volatility until adulthood. I mean I totally understand that me keeping bunch of stuff isn't a guarantee that they will find what they value at that point of time. Maybe the lego-shaped eraser would be the most interesting piece of stationary they will remember; doesn't mean I can hoard every piece of stationary. Digital stuff is different though - my SSD doesn't bulge just because I'm putting more files holding snippets of life on it.
    - al_borland 1y ago
      My dad has kept a lot of stuff. If he kept what I mentioned, I don’t know. But I do hope he goes through his stuff and pairs down before he passes, and if he does, I’m glad he asked. But you’re right, they the kids need to be grown before that question becomes valuable. I’ve known several people who had to go through their parent’s entire lifetime of accumulated stuff and it was quite the job. Dumpsters were rented. It was a big burden to leave the kids. Digital stuff will also be a lot to go through. My dad has hundreds of thousands of photos, backed up in triplicate. I was helping him clean the basement once and found 5 1/4 inch floppy disks labeled “backup” from the 80s. He’s kept all digital files. Many of them are locked into various proprietary apps as well. So I’ll likely need to spend months going through it all, while everything is still working, to see what is worth saving, and migrating it into a format I can manage. It will be a massive project, on top of the physical stuff. I’m hoping I can talk the rest of the family into an estate sale for the physical stuff, but the digital stuff is arguably the bigger job, with no way to outsource it. There is also the question of corruption, or simply being able to read older files. I grabbed some documents I had saved on his computer back in high school about 15 years later. I had saved them as rtf files at the time so they would be more portable. I tried off and on for a week or two to read them in more modern times and it was a no-go. I could get sections, but not the whole thing. I don’t know if the rtf standard changed or the files were simply corrupt, but they were basically trash. I’m sure I’ll run into a lot of that as well.
- astura 1y ago
  OMG, this is so dumb, your children don't want your hoard; at least admit your hoarding for yourself, not them.
  - noisy_boy 1y ago
    Speak for yourself and stop projecting your opinions on others. You don't speak for me or my children.
  - achierius 1y ago
    I want my parent's hoard :) Does that make me a... vicarious hoarder? What point are you trying to make? If you keep knick-knacks for the sake of others, you're a hoarder and should admit it's actually just for yourself -- if you enjoy someone else's knick-knacks which they saved for you, you're also a hoarder?
  - account42 1y ago
    You don't know what your children will want. Not everyone is as disinterested as you are.
- sotix 1y ago
  > I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. My sister and I have an agreement to trash my mom’s hoard of our school stuff she refuses to get rid of that we don’t want. All it does is bring us stress. If they made physical art like clay pots in a kiln, keep it for yourself if they don’t want it. If it’s something you can scan, I doubt it’s worth keeping and makes it much harder to find signal in the noise when too much is scanned.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    When my mother passed and we had to clean out my parent's house, she had boxes of the same kinds of things. Old report cards, drawings and school work from 40+ years ago. It was nice to see that she cared to save it but it was of no interest beyond that. And it was pretty clear that she herself never looked at it, as the boxes were packed away in closets and obviously hadn't been touched since they were put there. Stuff causes stress. It's really true. Even if it's mostly out of the way, every time you see it it will cause some stress about whether it should be moved, reorganized, saved, or thrown away. The house I grew up in was always cluttered and I'm bad about it myself. Every once in a while I will order a roll-off dumpster to the house and get rid of things that have accumulated over the past 10 years or so. It's a relief but then it starts over again. If there's one habit I wish I had it would be to regularly and ruthlessly get rid of stuff that I don't use anymore.
    - ikr678 1y ago
      I'm no contact with the parent that has my childhood home. As a result of this I've become very unsentimental, after a few painful years of trying to retrieve the few items I cared about, only for that parent to realise they had value to me and use them for leverage. I have given up on stuff in general. I am not exactly a minimalist, but I freely give away and loan things to people who might get more value put of them, it's enabled me to move across the country multiple times for good opportunities at very little notice.
KHRZ 1y ago
We just entered the era where LLMs could mine his gems for him though.
- alternatex 1y ago
  I find it wild to suggest an LLM would be better at scouring data for gems than the person who wrote them. LLMs are better than us at going through large amounts of data, and that's it. They have no idea what is valuable there.
  - diggan 1y ago
    > I find it wild to suggest an LLM would be better at scouring data for gems than the person who wrote them I mean, "an out there" idea sure, but wild? There are plenty of cases where people underestimated their own worth and value, and the potential impact of their ideas. Sometimes it's valuable to have outsiders perspective on things. Old war veterans might not think twice about their love-letters between them and their partner, but taken together with a large collection of letters, historians can build new perspectives that we weren't able to see before. > They have no idea what is valuable there. Of course an LLM wouldn't know what is "valuable". It would require a person to have an idea of what could be valuable, and program the LLM to surface based on that, together with more things. For example, I could imagine if I setup an LLM with the prompt "Highlight perspectives that you think are conflicting with other stated perspectives" to go through my own second-brain, it could reveal something I haven't considered before, granted it'll be able to freely query the db and so on.
  - sotix 1y ago
    Agreed. LLMs have no taste.
tareqak 1y ago
With respect to knowledge and notes, I would say that the knowledge (gems) may not be worthless in an absolute sense but its relevance may no longer be worth the cost of keeping said knowledge organized under a given person’s organization scheme. For what it is worth, I still find it frustrating when I cannot find a certain piece of information that I am looking for but I know exists because I came across it before but didn’t record it at the time. However, I also appreciate being able to forget distressing events that would find ways to remind me about their existence. I guess all of this may depend on the exact definitions of knowledge, data, and memory, and how an individual reckons with acquiring, organizing, and forgetting information.
qwertox 1y ago
That's an effort that can be handled by an AI.
- manmal 1y ago
  LLMs have no idea what’s really interesting to you as a person. You can try to include all the topics of interest in the prompt, but the result won’t be desirable.
motorest 1y ago
> The problem with hoarding is that, on the whole, the hoarded items are worthless. There’s too much noise and too little signal. I don't think that's a problem. What turns logs into a problem is misplaced expectations on what is their purpose and how you should use them. Logs are collected with the express purpose of being ignored, and as a safeguard in case in the future you need to check an audit trail of what you were doing. After a while, once the odds of those logs providing any value drops enough, you can safely delete them. Your tool is only as good as you make it out to be.
- manmal 1y ago
  Tools like honeycomb (and observability 2.0 in general) do so well exactly because they solve the very real problem of drowning in log data.
1dom 1y ago
I don't disagree with anything you're saying apart from the last few words. The solution to this problem is the same it has been for literally centuries: archiving. The whole point of an archive is that it's out of the way and takes no effort, even more so a digital one. But if you have/need/want the time/space, you or someone else can check it, and find a gem.
- layer8 1y ago
  As someone who by now has decades of nested digital archives of archives, those still have a psychological weight that sometimes surfaces when I am reminded of their existence. It’s not clear to me they really constitute a net benefit.
  - account42 1y ago
    That weight is not inherent to the archive but something you yourself are manifesting. It's a mindset problem.
- manmal 1y ago
  If it’s not weighing you down that you have to do put in this effort later, then sure.
  - account42 1y ago
    You don't have to put in the effort later. You have the opportunity to put in the effort if you deem it worth the cost then - something you cannot predict now.
deadbabe 1y ago
If they’re worthless then give them away
zahlman 1y ago
Counterpoint: data hoarding is not like physical hoarding (or at least, it hasn't been up to this point), because we've lived through an era of exponentially increasing storage capacity (with file sizes to match, in many cases). I still have a folder full of notes from several of my university courses, grouped by course. Some of it is source code (either the lecturer's or my own); some is assignment text (in a mixture of plain text, PDF, legacy .doc, etc.). There aren't any repositories because this was many years before Git existed and professors back then apparently didn't think we needed to be taught about the systems that did exist. But why not keep it? The whole collection is smaller than, say, the OpenBLAS shared library that comes with a NumPy installation. It's maybe 1% of the size of the ISO for a modern desktop Linux distribution. It's part of a folder with even older stuff - all the way back to toy Turing programs I wrote as a child. There are countless random files that are probably poorly organized internally, that I'll likely never revisit with any good reason. But the whole thing is less data than I'd likely end up downloading if I spent an hour on YouTube or Twitch. The ability to store it permanently costs me literally pennies, amortized over the cost of the drive. ... And yet, the size of modern applications still bothers me. It feels almost disrespectful, somehow. Old habits die hard, I guess.
- achierius 1y ago
  > And yet, the size of modern applications still bothers me. It feels almost disrespectful, somehow. Old habits die hard, I guess. Data size != memory size, and even memory size != binary size. It's totally fair to rail against the program text, and associated application data, that have to be loaded onto your machine in order for you to do something as simple as send a message on Slack -- RAM, unlike cold storage space, has not grown quite so exponentially, and wasting that space is expensive. And of course, the larger the binary, the slower the program, and the worse your programs will interface with other ones on the system.
  - account42 1y ago
    RAM has grown quite a bit and the only reason it hasn't grown as exponentially is because it is essentially a cache for permanent storage. For caches speed is much more important and speed is very much still a trade off.

johanneskanybal 1y ago

I mean most of us don’t keep any organized notes and are fine. I can giggle sometimes when I find old notepads from the past but nothing I’d miss. Sounds like the author for sure made an obvious choice even if that doesen’t mean you have to do the same.

Veen 1y ago

It’s not knowledge unless they actually know it. It’s just a collection of information.

qwertox 1y ago

Let alone the fact that he could have fed an assistant with that information in 3 or 5 years, and would never have had to bother with that information again, but would be able to talk about it and ask in huge detail about things that were once relevant. The AI would have enough information on how he wants the data to be structured, it could have kept doing it for him.

jen729w 1y ago
Her. Her name is in the goddamn URL. Joan.
- N7lo4nl34akaoSN 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_(given_name) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_(given_name)
- account42 1y ago
  How is this relevant to the discussion?

alganet 1y ago

It's a commitment. Note that the author also struggled with sobriety. Likely, this whole "library" was causing unhealthy behavior. Commitments are important.

latexr 1y ago

> I think the author let their own personal issues lead to the destruction of knowledge. Conversely, I think you’re letting your own personal views stand in the way of empathy and recognising what is best for another. There was no “destruction of knowledge”. It was a collection of notes which was never going to be looked at again and was causing stress to the author. Written knowledge which isn’t read is as useless at that which isn’t written in the first place. Would you also decry someone for not having written the note in the first place? > They could have just left their library for a bit, there was no need to burn it to the ground. It was not a library. I bet that for the author it felt closer a hoarder’s house with stacks of scattered newspapers. > "I've just lobotomised myself and I look forward to having to relearn everything and doing it all again". Absurd. Deleting written notes does not make you immediately forget everything that was written on them. The lessons they needed, they internalised. The ones they didn’t weren’t important anyway. Sure, there may have been some good notes in there, but not in enough quantity and quality to warrant wading though them all and justify the extra anxiety the existence of these lists caused. > If nothing else, in 7 years time, they'll regret No, they will not. Signed, someone who learned to delete relentlessly and is much happier for it. Maybe you would regret it. That says nothing about other people. If anything, I’d regret the years when I didn’t delete stuff. > There was no need to do this. Yes, there was. The author needed it for their mental well-being and development. Let them be. Everyone copes with life in different ways. We’re all going to die, all your notes will be meaningless in the end. > Please anyone, if you're considering this, just zip them up and put them on a usb or cloud storage somewhere out of the way - that's a lot harder to regret. No, everyone should do what makes sense for them personally. Having the thing “out of the way” is not the same as having it gone. It’s a very different feeling, like saving a memento from an unhealthy relationship VS throwing it away. There is freedom in deciding to let go without recourse. I for one applaud the author and wish them the best. I’m sure they struggled with the decision and it took some courage to go through with it. They did the right thing for themselves and that’s what matters.

1dom 1y ago
We're not going to agree here, we're going to descend into stupid walls of texts. I'll give you one more, but I probably wont respond. It's not personal, it's just not valuable for either of us. > There was no “destruction of knowledge”. It was a collection of notes which was never going to be looked at again and was causing stress to the author. Written knowledge which isn’t read is as useless at that which isn’t written in the first place. Would you also decry someone for not having written the note in the first place? I disagree that there was no destruction of knowledge. Even if the author is just copy/pasting from random sources, the link and choice of putting those 2 copies in the same folder is a bit of knowledge, a link solidified with an action. We have different ideas of what constitutes knowledge, I think you know you're being ridiculous if you're sincerely trying to argue that 7 years worth of notes doesn't have a single new contribution of any value to anything or anyone at all. I do decry people who don't take personal notes. > It was not a library. I bet that for the author it felt closer a hoarder’s house with stacks of scattered newspapers. I totally agree that's how the author felt - they let their own negative feelings towards what they've created destroy something which could be valuable to others. > Absurd. Deleting written notes does not make you immediately forget everything that was written on them. The lessons they needed, they internalised. The ones they didn’t weren’t important anyway. Sure, there may have been some good notes in there, but not in enough quantity and quality to warrant wading though them all and justify the extra anxiety the existence of these lists caused. What's even your point here? You start saying how notes aren't even needed and are pointless to be written down, then you argue that maybe there is some value in them written down, and then come back to support my argument that the author's own personal feelings have lead to the destruction of something valuable. > No, they will not. Signed, someone who learned to delete relentlessly and is much happier for it. > Maybe you would regret it. That says nothing about other people. If anything, I’d regret the years when I didn’t delete stuff. Ignorance is bliss: you can't get upset about the things you don't know any more. Knowledge is hard. Your position about not regretting throwing away potential personal knowledge and memories isn't a position I've heard from anyone over (*edited typo) the age of 50. You don't regret it just like the author doesn't, I think you have a future of denial or upset. > Yes, there was. The author needed it for their mental well-being and development. Let them be. Everyone copes with life in different ways. We’re all going to die, all your notes will be meaningless in the end. There's other ways to deal with information overload, like proper archiving. We're all going to die, and the only reason why have a culture or knowledge as a species is because everyone else hasn't done what this person is doing. > No, everyone should do what makes sense for them personally. > Having the thing “out of the way” is not the same as having it gone. It’s a very different feeling, like saving a memento from an unhealthy relationship VS throwing it away. There is freedom in deciding to let go without recourse. Congratulations with the individualism, you made yourself feel free by burning books. If that makes you happy - you do you, I don't care - but don't act like it's benefit anyone else other than the person struggling with the feeling of information overload.

crsv 1y ago

It’s the thought organization equivalent of the Britany Spears head shaving. It’s a mental breakdown and the person suffering from the mental health issue at its root is processing their behavior by writing about it. It’s mental illness.

jen729w 1y ago
Deleting notes to mental illness is quite the leap.
- crsv 1y ago
  So you didn’t actually take the time to read the article.
  - escapedmoose 1y ago
    Nowhere in the article did this seem to equate to a “mental breakdown” in my view either. Your perspective on this might be flavored by your own non-universal values/experiences.

bovermyer 1y ago

This sounds like it came from a place of fear. This is not an indictment, incidentally; just an observation. You choose language like "nuclear" and "destruction" and "lobotomise" and end with a plea to not make similar choices. I'm in my forties. I have gone through multiple cycles of collecting and purging. How that feels has changed over the years. Sometimes I have regretted getting rid of some things, but that frequency is far, far lower than the number of times I haven't cared or even noticed. And those times I have regretted it have not resulted in obsessive thinking about what I've lost or what might have been. Further, having a "reset" has proven valuable on more than one occasion, as it opens up new pathways that I might otherwise have not even considered. You speak of relearning everything as if it's forcing yourself to repeat the same path all over again, with no new learning and just a pointless sacrifice of what little time we have. In my experience, "relearning" usually entails discovering entirely new experiences and paths to knowledge along a general set of guidelines through half-memories. To put it another way, starting over is not guaranteed suffering, it's an opportunity to discover new things.

627467 1y ago

> I've just lobotomised myself Good thing they didn't actually lobotomized themselves, right? Why is his carbon storage system not enough? Do you need to keep you RAM data persistent as well as your ROM data?

account42 1y ago
I don't know about him but my carbon storage system is quite limited - both in total storage capacity as well as in error correction or even detection which should be basic features for long term archival.