Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Some days I'm tempted to go full-on Donald Knuth, but with social media rather than email:

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.

My secretary also prints out all nonspam email messages addressed to taocp@cs.stanford.edu or knuth-bug@cs.stanford.edu, so that I can reply with written comments when I have a chance.

For many years I've kept my notes using plain text files and have always used Git for tracking changes and as a sort of backup. It occurred to me today that I've never once needed it.

I've noticed that my affinity for a piece of software can be predicted based on the Youtube content about it. If Youtube is littered with hundreds of nearly-identical videos with by-the-book thumbnails from "content creators" looking for subscriptions or selling online "courses", I'm probably not going to like the software. (See Obsidian or Notion).

On the other hand, check out videos about Emacs or TiddlyWiki. Those are mostly bare-bones, hastily-made videos with someone speaking awkwardly with no script and poor sound quality. Now that is the sign of useful software! :).