> 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.
Anyway, Knuth's secretary (shared with several other faculty members) retired from Stanford several years ago (he dedicated one of his books to her), and although he hasn't updated the page, in fact he does all his own email now. (There is someone who comes in once a week to send his replies in the post — if you email Knuth about a bug you may get a reply a few months later from this person, asking for your postal address to mail you the reply: this will be a printout of your email, with Knuth's reply in pencil… and an enclosed cheque if your report/suggestion was accepted.)
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.
It's not easy to make the same on a personal account (at least without a personal domain name) but still can be done.
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)
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.
> 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
so yeah, some (sometimes soft, sometimes drastic) hygiene is the way..
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.
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.
Computers are distracting.
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"
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!
I'm eagerly awaiting your next post on Beyond the Frame :)
It saddens me that the most accessible repositories of information are those that, allegedly, dumb me down.
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" ?
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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.
As an aside, ThriftBooks has been amazing for increasing my collection! I;ve gotten so many books for cheap
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
Could have been his secretary in his assignment.
That's at least what his Stanford site suggests
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.
