[HN Gopher] Knuth Airgaps and Knuth Buffers
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Knuth Airgaps and Knuth Buffers
Author : schmudde
Score : 137 points
Date : 2023-11-20 12:15 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (taylor.town)
(TXT) w3m dump (taylor.town)
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| they 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 wrote:
| I 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
| cfr2023 wrote:
| Fast or close to real-time capture can encourage sloppy thinking
| and carelessness, neither of which Knuth is known for.
| utopcell wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| paper 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 wrote:
| I suspect Neal Stephenson has stopped composing on paper, given
| the precipitous decline in quality since Seveneves (or
| thereabouts; opinions may vary).
| rtkwe wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Yes, 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.
| rtkwe wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Thanks for submitting, Mr. Schmudde!
|
| I'm eagerly awaiting your next post on Beyond the Frame :)
|
| [1] https://schmud.de
| wespiser_2018 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| (-:
| Tomte wrote:
| I got back a comic, and another time a T-Shirt (with the MMIX
| instruction set).
| bee_rider wrote:
| Pencil 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Yep. 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 wrote:
| I like nothing (a walk) and a plaintext file when I need to
| remember many details.
|
| Computers are distracting.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| I believe you but he does seem not to want to receive email
| because the page seems serious and it is still up.
| alright2565 wrote:
| citation please?
| croes wrote:
| How 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
| nabla9 wrote:
| He has a secretary to do that.
| powera wrote:
| This appears to be a reference to
| 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.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| His secretary may have typed them, but if they were mostly
| written by his secretary then Stanford wouldn't have paid to
| have them archived. Even though the messages are mostly
| redacted, actually going through and doing those redactions
| is still hundreds of hours of work.
| powera wrote:
| "if they were mostly written by his secretary then Stanford
| wouldn't have paid to have them archived." - that is
| straight-up incorrect. Archiving emails is very cheap. And
| the redactions look to have been done programmatically.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| So ePadd redacts everything except the named entities,
| but that still means going through each message by hand
| to ensure that the entities generated by the NLP software
| are correct. Plus the time spent fixing ePadd to make the
| import run correctly with his non-standard email client,
| the time spent negotiating permissions and restrictions
| related to the collection, etc.
|
| C.f.: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3AePADD%2Fepadd++k
| nuth&type...
| ginko wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| I hear you can hire a part time one pretty cheaply
| pianoben wrote:
| At 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 wrote:
| Back 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 wrote:
| Knuth 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| I'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
| chubot wrote:
| Yeah exactly, on top of the library, I buy old used books
| online, and they're dirt cheap, and dense with knowledge
|
| No ads lol!
|
| It's honestly sad to me when I see people scrolling through
| terrible web pages with tiny morsels of information, which
| are often "interested" or wrong.
| kristjank wrote:
| Internet provides first class access to third class
| information. Just a couple days ago I was seeking some
| information relating to my "Intro to DSP" course at uni. After
| an hour combing through a bunch of unclearly stated and poorly
| answered questions on various stackexchange subsites and SEO-
| optimized hellholes, I just libgen'd a book my professor's
| textbook cited and found my answer in a couple minutes.
|
| The question was how the phases add or subtract when looking at
| a phase graph of a cosine wave modulated DFT transform, not
| exactly rocket science.
|
| It seems like the internet has dumbed down to the point where
| its front page is very surface level and always requires
| additional research assistance in the form of SearxNG, AI
| chats, or turning to less SEO prone engines like marginalia or
| even wiby to get good and honest results. I don't think
| adapting to human toxic environments like the current internet
| is a good model for the future, when we already have the tools
| to filter the wheat from the chaff.
| sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I don't think an assistant is something you afford, so much as
| something your job requires.
| kristjank wrote:
| Sometimes 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.
| fyokdrigd wrote:
| not 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)
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(page generated 2023-11-21 23:03 UTC)