4 ms·

I've reached a steady state where the rate of learning matches the rate of forgetting

TeMPOraL 8mo ago
That's one of several possibilities. I've reached a different steady state - one where the velocity of work exceeds the rate at which I can learn enough to fully understand the task at hand.
bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
to fix that you basically need to switch specialty or focus. A difficult thing to do if you are employed of course.
sph 8mo ago
How old are you? At 39 (20 years of professional experience) I've forgotten more things in this field than I'm comfortable with today. I find it a bit sad that I've completely lost my Win32 reverse engineering skills I had in my teens, which have been replaced by nonsense like Kubernetes and aligning content with CSS Grid. And I must admit my appetite in learning new technologies has lessened dramatically in the past decade; to be fair, it gets to a point that most new ideas are just rehashing of older ones. When you know half a dozen programming languages or web frameworks, the next one takes you a couple hours to get comfortable with.
- doix 8mo ago
  > I've forgotten more things in this field than I'm comfortable with today. I find it a bit sad that I've completely lost my Win32 reverse engineering skills I had in my teens I'm a bit younger (33) but you'd be surprised how fast it comes back. I hadn't touched x86 assembly for probably 10 years at one point. Then someone asked a question in a modding community for an ancient game and after spending a few hours it mostly came back to me. I'm sure if you had to reverse engineer some win32 applications, it'd come back quickly.
  - mickeyp 8mo ago
    SoftICE gang represent :-) That's a skill onto itself, and I mean the general stuff does not fade or at least come back quickly. But there's a lot of the tail end that's just difficult to recall because it's obscure. How exactly did I hook Delphi apps' TForm handling system instead of breakpointing GetWindowTextA and friends? I mean... I just cannot remember. It wasn't super easy either.
  - Agentlien 8mo ago
    I want to second this. I'm 38 and I used to do some debugging and reverse engineering during my university days (2006-2011). Since then I've mainly avoided looking at assembly since I mostly work in C++ systems or HLSL. These last few months, however, I've had to spend a lot of time debugging via disassembly for my work. It felt really slow at first, but then it came back to me and now it's really natural again.
- nkrisc 8mo ago
  You can’t keep infinite knowledge in your brain. You forget skills you don’t use. Barring some pathology, if you’re doing something every day you won’t forget it. If you’ve forgotten your Win32 reverse engineering skills I’m guessing you haven’t done much of that in a long time. That said, it’s hard to truly forget something once you’ve learned it. If you had to start doing it again today, you’d learn it much faster this time than the first.
  - Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
    > You can’t keep infinite knowledge in your brain. For what it’s worth—it’s not entirely clear that this is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia The human brain seemingly has the capability to remember (virtually?) infinite amounts of information. It’s just that most of us… don’t.
    - nkrisc 8mo ago
      > It’s just that most of us… don’t. Ok, so my statement is essentially correct. Most of us can not keep infinite information in our brain.
      - ploum 8mo ago
        It is also a matter of choice. I don’t remember any news trivia, I don’t engage with "people news" and, to be honest, I forget a lot of what people tell me about random subject. It has two huge benefits: nearly infinite memory for truly interesting stuff and still looking friendly to people who tell me the same stuff all the times. Side-effect: my wife is not always happy that I forgot about "non-interesting" stuff which are still important ;-)
      - Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
        I do take your point. But the point I’m trying to emphasize is that the brain isn’t like a hard drive that fills up. It’s a muscle that can potentially hold more. I’m not sure if this is in the Wikipedia article, but when I last read about this, years ago, there seemed to be a link between Hyperthymesia and OCD. Brain scans suggested the key was in how these individuals organize the information in their brain, so that it’s easy for them retrieve. Before the printing press was common, it was common for scholars to memorize entire books. I absolutely cannot do this. When technology made memorization less necessary, our memories shrank. Actually shrank, not merely changing what facts to focus on. And to be clear, I would never advocate going back to the middle ages! But we did lose something.
- thesz 8mo ago
  > When you know half a dozen programming languages or web frameworks, the next one takes you a couple hours to get comfortable with. Learn yourself relational algebra. It invariantly will lead you to optimization problems and these will also invariantly lead you to equality saturation that is most effectively implemented with... generalized join from relational algebra! Also, relational algebra implements content-addressable storage (CAS), which is essential for data flow computing paradigm. Thus, you will have a window into CPU design. At 54 (36 years of professional experience) I find these rondos fascinating.
- steve_adams_86 8mo ago
  > I must admit my appetite in learning new technologies has lessened dramatically in the past decade; I felt like that for a while, but I seem to be finding new challenges again. Lately I've been deep-diving on data pipelines and embedded systems. Sometimes I find problems that are easy enough to solve by brute force, but elegant solutions are not obvious at all. It's a lot of fun. It could be that you're way ahead of me and I'll wind up feeling like that again.
everdrive 8mo ago
But just think, there's a whole new framework that isn't better but is trendy. You can recycle a lot of your knowledge and "learn new things" that won't matter in five years. Isn't that great?
epolanski 8mo ago
I use spaced repetition for stuff I care for. I use remnote for that. I write cards and quizzes for all kind of stuff, and I tend to retain it for years after having it practiced with the low friction of spaced repetition.

That's one of several possibilities. I've reached a different steady state - one where the velocity of work exceeds the rate at which I can learn enough to fully understand the task at hand.

bryanrasmussen 8mo ago

to fix that you basically need to switch specialty or focus. A difficult thing to do if you are employed of course.

sph 8mo ago

How old are you? At 39 (20 years of professional experience) I've forgotten more things in this field than I'm comfortable with today. I find it a bit sad that I've completely lost my Win32 reverse engineering skills I had in my teens, which have been replaced by nonsense like Kubernetes and aligning content with CSS Grid. And I must admit my appetite in learning new technologies has lessened dramatically in the past decade; to be fair, it gets to a point that most new ideas are just rehashing of older ones. When you know half a dozen programming languages or web frameworks, the next one takes you a couple hours to get comfortable with.

doix 8mo ago
> I've forgotten more things in this field than I'm comfortable with today. I find it a bit sad that I've completely lost my Win32 reverse engineering skills I had in my teens I'm a bit younger (33) but you'd be surprised how fast it comes back. I hadn't touched x86 assembly for probably 10 years at one point. Then someone asked a question in a modding community for an ancient game and after spending a few hours it mostly came back to me. I'm sure if you had to reverse engineer some win32 applications, it'd come back quickly.
- mickeyp 8mo ago
  SoftICE gang represent :-) That's a skill onto itself, and I mean the general stuff does not fade or at least come back quickly. But there's a lot of the tail end that's just difficult to recall because it's obscure. How exactly did I hook Delphi apps' TForm handling system instead of breakpointing GetWindowTextA and friends? I mean... I just cannot remember. It wasn't super easy either.
- Agentlien 8mo ago
  I want to second this. I'm 38 and I used to do some debugging and reverse engineering during my university days (2006-2011). Since then I've mainly avoided looking at assembly since I mostly work in C++ systems or HLSL. These last few months, however, I've had to spend a lot of time debugging via disassembly for my work. It felt really slow at first, but then it came back to me and now it's really natural again.
nkrisc 8mo ago
You can’t keep infinite knowledge in your brain. You forget skills you don’t use. Barring some pathology, if you’re doing something every day you won’t forget it. If you’ve forgotten your Win32 reverse engineering skills I’m guessing you haven’t done much of that in a long time. That said, it’s hard to truly forget something once you’ve learned it. If you had to start doing it again today, you’d learn it much faster this time than the first.
- Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
  > You can’t keep infinite knowledge in your brain. For what it’s worth—it’s not entirely clear that this is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia The human brain seemingly has the capability to remember (virtually?) infinite amounts of information. It’s just that most of us… don’t.
  - nkrisc 8mo ago
    > It’s just that most of us… don’t. Ok, so my statement is essentially correct. Most of us can not keep infinite information in our brain.
    - ploum 8mo ago
      It is also a matter of choice. I don’t remember any news trivia, I don’t engage with "people news" and, to be honest, I forget a lot of what people tell me about random subject. It has two huge benefits: nearly infinite memory for truly interesting stuff and still looking friendly to people who tell me the same stuff all the times. Side-effect: my wife is not always happy that I forgot about "non-interesting" stuff which are still important ;-)
    - Wowfunhappy 8mo ago
      I do take your point. But the point I’m trying to emphasize is that the brain isn’t like a hard drive that fills up. It’s a muscle that can potentially hold more. I’m not sure if this is in the Wikipedia article, but when I last read about this, years ago, there seemed to be a link between Hyperthymesia and OCD. Brain scans suggested the key was in how these individuals organize the information in their brain, so that it’s easy for them retrieve. Before the printing press was common, it was common for scholars to memorize entire books. I absolutely cannot do this. When technology made memorization less necessary, our memories shrank. Actually shrank, not merely changing what facts to focus on. And to be clear, I would never advocate going back to the middle ages! But we did lose something.
thesz 8mo ago
> When you know half a dozen programming languages or web frameworks, the next one takes you a couple hours to get comfortable with. Learn yourself relational algebra. It invariantly will lead you to optimization problems and these will also invariantly lead you to equality saturation that is most effectively implemented with... generalized join from relational algebra! Also, relational algebra implements content-addressable storage (CAS), which is essential for data flow computing paradigm. Thus, you will have a window into CPU design. At 54 (36 years of professional experience) I find these rondos fascinating.
steve_adams_86 8mo ago
> I must admit my appetite in learning new technologies has lessened dramatically in the past decade; I felt like that for a while, but I seem to be finding new challenges again. Lately I've been deep-diving on data pipelines and embedded systems. Sometimes I find problems that are easy enough to solve by brute force, but elegant solutions are not obvious at all. It's a lot of fun. It could be that you're way ahead of me and I'll wind up feeling like that again.

everdrive 8mo ago

But just think, there's a whole new framework that isn't better but is trendy. You can recycle a lot of your knowledge and "learn new things" that won't matter in five years. Isn't that great?

epolanski 8mo ago

I use spaced repetition for stuff I care for. I use remnote for that. I write cards and quizzes for all kind of stuff, and I tend to retain it for years after having it practiced with the low friction of spaced repetition.