For note taking, I prefer pen and paper. For diagramming and brainstorming, I prefer a physical whiteboard. For non-work related scheduling, I prefer marking things on the physical calendar hanging on my wall... or sometimes I'll reach for a post-it note.
For bills, I prefer that my company mail me a paper bill. Especially if accessing the e-bill requires me to have an account with a web app and enable MFA and change my password every 90 days and always have Okta give me problems when I want to check my bill and thus need to jump through these hoops those whopping 12 times per year that I need this information.
Maybe it's because I see how the sausage is made. Maybe it's because I use some sort of eletronic device all day for work. But the last thing I want to do when I need to jot something down quickly is reach for a phone or a laptop. Heck, most of the time I don't even remember (or care) where I left my phone.
There are absolutely benefits to software over paper but they feel hamstrung by the constant desire to roll out the next UI paradigm. Sooner or later the set of constraints between device, OS and app versions forces an upgrade. Security updates should be the only reason to even hint at that possibility IMO.
Maybe I’m just too close to the problem. If I squint enough I can see how a pen running out of ink is like an app crash, and replacing the pen/ink has a real, nonzero environmental cost. I’m not sure how to amortize the costs of device manufacture and software development across all bugs, and compare that to the costs/benefits of pen and paper. There is some shade of rose on my glasses, no doubt.
I need more information, but I sense it’s not the kind of information that is important to many people, and especially corporations, to gather.
Interesting analogy. I think a closer analogy to a pen running out of ink and having to grab another pen, is a laptop battery running low and having to be plugged in.
I do art on paper and even I don't go through 500 pages in a year. It's at work, things like 60 page reports that need to be printed for submission (and then get printed 2x or 3x again because you can replicate it).
The ease of printing documents is the culprit, you can just replicate large physical artifacts again and again. You can't do that with your personal notes that probably only exist as unique artifacts and maybe get scanned into a digital archive.
Except for the most obsessive & technically skilled archivists, nobody will have any photos/documents from today in 100-150 years.
I suspect that many people associate durability with electronic media simply because it becomes obsolete so rapidly that we don't experience it in the same way. We don't know whether that dusty floppy disk or CD-R is readable since we disposed of our last computer with a drive, or we associate the failure of a flash drive with a cheap drive rather than the intrinsic properties of the media, or we attribute it to abuse. We rarely have the opportunity to use something until it is worn out, or pick it up after a quarter century in storage.
Modern media is incredibly fragile. The chief advantage it has (in terms of longevity) is its digital nature, in our ability to reproduce it exactly. Yet that is only an advantage if we actively maintain our archives.
You can to the same extent that you can access a smart phone on the go. You just have to remember to bring it with you. Given how often I "forget" my smart phone at home, the "access anywhere" isn't a huge selling feature for most things to me. While I do use web-based email, I tend to prefer things like paper tickets for events and paper receipts because I actually find them to be more convenient than digital. This is because having to have a smart phone with me at all times that could get lost, stolen, damaged, malfunction etc. and is a single point of failure in the event thereof is the polar opposite of my definition of convenience.
No one has made the argument that paper is without problems. Only that it has way fewer problems than digital. That, and that the businesses and shills that are trying to force digital-everything are evil monsters that belong in the same rung of hell typically reserved for murderers and people who talk at movie theatres.
And when you're dealing with a high quantity of information, good luck searching through thousands of sheets of paper for something.
The moment you introduce software and internet connectivity is the moment you invite fragility and inscrutability.
I have swung back around and now buy many physical books/blurays/etc for things I really love or think are important because my faith that companies/govt won't decide I cant have that version anymore is very low.
With a computing device, only if you are certain there is no wifi/bluetooth/cellular/etc hardware inside the device, can you have a similar trust. And the days are rapidly coming when there's no such thing as a device without such hardware, not even a watch.
With computing devices, you do get the ability to encrypt data at rest, so for example, a locked physical paper diary is less secure in that sense than an encrypted text file. But the possible number of actors that would attempt to break the security for a physical paper document is much lower, only whoever is nearby, not everyone on the entire internet.
If I had something I really didn't want to get out, these days, I'd be much more likely to recommend the use of a notebook in a safe than an encrypted file on a laptop or phone or something. It doesn't matter how encrypted it is if my device gets compromised.
(If it had to be electronic, it'd be a laptop with no working networking hardware, in a safe.)
Good news everyone, Paper supports MSPen 2.3.4.5.3.2...., GPen 1.10.1.0.11 "Lumpsucker", iPen 4.2.0 (8 new colors!), and the AmaWEbLumberPen (AWELP)
We're happy to report we've solved the issue of Paper randomly vanishing from your house, and reappearing on your roof.
Security exploits with D4r|<9@nc1l and Y+e()v+ have been discovered, and we're working on a fix. In the meantime, please update your Paper password (remember not to write it down)
Minor issues with Paper flickering (and in a limited user group causing epilepsy seizures and incontinence) have been mitigated.
We're aware of Paper occasionally causing i#Desk models to collapse, and working to close the loop.
We're also happy to report we've been sold to ShredderCo.! Congratulations to the team for going the extra mile, and we expect a bright future in their exciting and challenging area of business.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/16hqcly/good_news_ev...
I just love the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil made with good quality wood and the feel of it gliding across the paper. There’s a friction and give to it that you can’t get with a touch screen made of hard glass. No matter how good the stylus or what coating you put on the screen, it’ll never have the (cushiony, slightly rough but smooth) feel of a good writing pad or notebook.
And of course it’s fairly easy to digitize your handwritten scribbles, if that’s what you want to do. I just use a scanner app on my phone and take a picture. The app detects the borders of the page and corrects the geometry automatically. I also have it convert the colours down to 1-bit for maximum contrast and to get the background solid white. But that’s only when I need to send it somewhere, otherwise I don’t bother scanning.
Hate is a strong word, and I hate typing on phones or tablets by trying to hit small shapes behind glass with the tips of my fingers.
I like the feel of pencils, particularly softer ones like 2B, 3B, or 4B, on paper, preferably those with texture like recycled brown paper that is often used as a tablecloth in Italian trattorias, the good ones, that aren’t too expensive.
The smell of pencil lead and paper and the sound that a pencil marking paper makes both help me absorb and remember things.
Betty Edwards wrote Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and Frank R. Wilson wrote The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. Both warmly recommended.
You immediately get to mix text, tables and pictures. You can do it however you want. You can arrange it however you want.
Nothing beats this. Digital tools might be good at organizing old notes but I feel it is not necessary most of the time.
I feel the same, only without the maybe.
It just struck me that taking a picture of the white board and sending it to the printer would add up to acceptable use of technology. I have no idea why I never thought of that before. It seems actually nice to uses. (provided you delete the picture from drives, clouds, backups and trashcans)
You'd be crazy to get rid of paper charts on a boat, for the same reason any hiker is instructed to carry a paper map, and the smart ones actually do it. Yeah, the primary system will be GPS, but that system requires a lot of things to be functioning which may not always be functioning. You need a backup, and paper is perfect for that.
https://www.seattletimes.com/life/outdoors/seattle-mapmaker-...
“Your devices aren’t big enough to show you the context at any level of detail that from our point of view would be useful,” he said, citing the possibility of needing to find an escape route in a wildfire. “If you unfold a map, you can see where you are and get a better handle on where you can go.”
Coburn’s stewardship also resulted in the durable quality of today’s Green Trails maps. Made of Polyart tearproof synthetic paper, with special ink to shade topographic relief, and printed at Capitol City Press in Olympia, these maps have a clear selling point: waterproof, solar-powered, no batteries required."
The best maps are cloth maps. They are amazing as you can bend those, put over a stone, rain could go over.
Everyone talks about the physical maps, but the bigger issue is without the skill the map is useless, and if you've always had a phone, the true terror of being lost and alone might not enter your mind till you're there.
I guess I'm lucky that I often forget my charger and wind up having no clue where I am and trying to get back by asking directions, I'm well aware of how awful it is to have no idea where you are or what direction you're facing or if you're in the right city!
Extremely straightforward to learn.
I hike with a Garmin foretrex, I route plan and land nav when out there with a map. The garmin sanity checks me once in a while.
There is a significant amount of bad stuff that can go very wrong, to start, just bc your Garmin’s altimeter and calibration is bugging out while you mindlessly follow. And when you’re in areas where this matters (ie “can I hear street noise” judgment”), the out of the box technical land navigation tools tend to not work out of the box.
I’ve had an updated and calibrated Garmin put me 5-600m away from where I definitely was via map, compass triangulation and then sanity check with a iPhone b/c the difference really surprised me. 5-600m difference is quite consequential. Mix in Garmin using optionally Glonass (Russian satellites), there’s just a lot of stuff that can go sideways. Easy enough to buy a compass, map protector, local map. Even something like knowing what and how to shoot an emergency azimuth can solve an otherwise crisis situation.
I’m not religious about it for simple trips where I know where I’m staying but I definitely make a printout for anything more complex—but I bet a lot of people don’t.
God helped & Rome airport had public computer terminals at airport. Found some scrap paper, & drew the general directions to hotel.
I can bet a notes written today in a paper notebook - would be accessible 200+ years from now. compared to notes written in some notebook app.
whether inaccessibility is due to data damage, lost passwords etc. whereas with a notebook as long as it's not damaged by fire. it should be good. also invest in waterproof paper notebooks i.e stone-paper.
I think it's the opposite, at least if you use obsidian or just md files. With paper notes, they can get lost more easily, there are no backups. In many countries, termites are a real problem (tell that to my damaged comic books and magic cards). If you use md files (which are just text files) + git/cloud/external drive backups, you are unlikely to lose them
I’m not disagreeing that it’s wonderful to be able to make multiple backups, offsite storage, etc of digital data, I’m just making sure you understand how difficult it is to keep digital data stored long term without significant attention to that desire.
Dropping some markdown in git is not a long-term (using 200 yrs as my example) plan.
I spent years and years working in a newspaper publisher trying to preserve the output digitally and it required serious investment (network storage, auto backup to LTO tapes, and verifying recovery is possible years later). It was and almost always is easier to ship two or three copies of the physical paper to separate storage facilities. I had to remind folks countless times that things like a dvd-r or cd-r have a maximal lifetime where we can trust that the data is retrievable.
Maybe long term storage of personal data will have some future breakthroughs that make it dead simple to trust they can be viewable in 200+ years but today that’s not the case.
I will say that most personal data (sans photos imo) isn’t useful after a few years (maybe 10+) and digital options are great for that. But for stuff we want to keep for centuries, it’s extremely hard and expensive today.
although I doubt my personal notes will be necessary in 200+ years
However most of us don't need that either. There are very few things you care about. I threw my kindergarten art out long ago when I realized I wasn't interested in seeing how I improved (back then I thought it would be cool to look back and see). There are things I have done I will care about, but not too many.
I can guarantee with total certainty that github & cloudprovider & your external drives will not exist in 200 years. Probably not even in 50.
If you want to leave anything at all (photos, documents) for your grandchildren to see, how would you do it?
tell me you don't know how doing backups work without telling me your don't know how doing backups work
I bet if you got a sheet of granite and chiseled them into the granite, they would have a far better chance of surviving that a paper notebook.
if so do you think it's due to cultural habit (being raised on pen and paper) or maybe a neurological need (paper requires more psycho/physical stimulation, you have to draw geometries, letters, organise.. that cost might be actually beneficial for your brain way of working)
Dude, I have been trying digital tools since I thought that one of these things[0] would replace my Franklin Planner. I'll save you a click, that was over 30 years ago. Yeah, I use the hell out of some digital tools ("hey dingus, add bananas to the <shared family> grocery list"). But the first thing I grab in the morning is a paper notebook[1] to plan my day, using the "bullet journal" style that I've settled on these past few years. Every digital tool I've tried just turns into an abyss-like dumping ground where tasks go to die (and never get completed).
I don't know why, maybe it's the lack of spatiality with digital tools. Or an abstraction too far, I don't know. I just know that I'd been pounding that square peg into that round hole for decades, until I finally just gave in went back to paper. Bullet journal style, nice notebook, and a nice fountain pen works for me for most of my organization, and it's probably what I'll stick with.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Wizard [1] https://www.leuchtturm1917.us
If you use your digital todo list for things that you must do by a deadline it works well. Digital tools are good for the yearly tasks list "buy birthday card for my sister" - knowing that you can then decide when it pops up if you will buy one or not. Digital tools make it too easy to put things in like "investigate interesting widget you just heard about when money isn't so tight", and then they clutter the list with things odds are you won't do.
If you have a digital todo list you are allowed to have 2 things that you must do today, and 10 things you must do sometime in the next week (numbers are debatable). If you have more than that something must go. If it isn't in the next two weeks put it on the calendar not the todo list so it doesn't pop up until you need to do it. (todo lists that integrate with your calendar are good at this!) Actually I've found my todo list works best if instead I use my calendar to block of time - I have a short presentation to give in a couple weeks so I have one hour a week to work on it.
I have dysgraphia which means I cannot read my own writing. As such digital solutions have a higher interest for me. However there are things people using paper can do that I do not have a good replacement for. Things are working for me, but writing is a much better system if only I could use it.
- it removes stimuli (you move less, you touch less)
- it removes cost (undo is near free, unlike erasing on paper)
- it offers too much distraction / choice
I really feel that my brain loves (deeply) having to deal with multiple sensory inputs and making sense of them from physical to conceptual. Maybe that's why having tools "too powerful" is detrimental somehow.
Just a thought
There is some of that. But pen and paper has other benefits that are hard to match:
- Pen & Paper works even if there is a service disruption / outage
- Pen & Paper works even if the device's battery dies or the power goes out
- Pen & Paper is fast. I don't need to unlock the screen, I don't experience progressive sluggishness due to memory leaks, analytics / telemetry running in the background or feature/library bloat
- Pen & Paper doesn't send everything that I'm writing to some remote server for analytics purposes
- Pen & Paper has never crashed on me
- I get to decide if and when I want the newest version of pen/paper. I don't ever reach for Pen & Paper to discover that some product owner has pushed a change on me without my opt-in / consent.
- Pen & Paper works in virtually every envrionment, regardless of whether I'm wearing gloves or my hands are cold (though admittedly cold hands can slow down the writing process, but much less so than trying to use a touch-screen or keyboard).
- Pen & Paper is often easier to read (assuming the hand-writing is legible, which is admittedly hit or miss, but it causes much less eye fatigue than staring at a screen).
- Pen & Paper doesn't distract me with spell/grammar checks that I don't need in the moment. Disabling / re-enabling these features is time consuming.
- Pen & Paper is a technology that has truly stood the test of time. The fact that it continues to persist into the digital age is very telling. Sometimes "simple & works" beats new and featureful but complicated.
The manufacturer of the pen or paper can't remove your access to using them because they decided to chance licensing.
Said manufacturers can't force push an update that suddenly makes your old writing unusable.
There is no hope
Thought I'd drop a line
The weather here is fine
But day and night it blares
Commanding through loudspeakers:
"Metal is tough, metal will sheen
Metal won't rust when oiled and cleaned
Metal is tough, metal will sheen
Metal will rule in my master scheme"
-- Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Mittageisen"
- Tactile feeling and aesthetics. My writing is not very beautiful, but a stack of papers filled with my notes and diagrams is very inspiring.
- Paper is an offline, distraction-free medium. I think better with paper. Maybe it is a cultural habit.
- Paper won't disappear one day due to bad battery, untested OS update, malware, EOL for cloud service etc. Losing a couple of sheets of paper is easier than electronic device. But when speaking about losing a bulk of notes, it is much easier to lose it electronically than physically.
- Paper is forgiving. I can draw quick-and-dirty diagram in a minute and move on. It is hard to draw quick-and-dirty diagram on a computer. I will spend at least a couple of minutes deciding which app will be more convenient to draw this diagram, about ten minutes fighting an app, and up to an hour fighting my perfectionism, placing all shapes in proper places in grid.
- A sheet of paper is bounded, which helps with internal distractions. If I need to make a TODO list, I will take a smaller sheet, and fit all important things there.
- When you have large desk, you can spread a lot of paper sheets on it and see it all at the same time. Rearrange it, put it in stacks by some criterion, and so on. And neither scrolling nor list of thumbnails work as good as flipping through a paper book.
Disadvantages are:
- Lack of search function. I didn't try Apple Notes document scanning recently, maybe some kind of handwriting recognition is there and it will be enough to just take photos of all my notes.
- Portability: I need a desk with enough free space for both laptop and papers (so, mostly in terms of depth - probably a problem for open space offices).
I have some hopes for Apple Vision Pro (maybe in V2 or V3). I think it has a potential to bring some of these advantages to digital world :)
For instance: paper documents are generally more robust/reliable (as a practical matter), easily attached to physical items, and easier to annotate than any kind of digital document. Digital input methods are usually pretty awful, especially when you don't have the luxury of fumbling around for a few seconds (or more) with each input.
IMHO, any reasonable-aware tech professional should be able to understand that. Especially given how frequently computer technology objectively sucks.
Paper is easier to annotate, but if you didn't grow up with lots of paper, you don't notice, because annotating isn't something you think about, you mostly think in terms of quoting and leaving a comment.
The medium shapes your thinking, and the stuff that's hard to do on paper doesn't really occur to you as something you'd want to do, unless you're deeply familiar with it. Just like any technology.
Perhaps that's the big benefit, adding more variety of ways of thinking.
In other words, people can be fine with worse because they don't know better.
One of the things that should be a deep embarrassment to the technology industry is its failure to replicate some of the strengths of paper and make them ubiquitous across platforms. Things actually seem to be settling for a lowest-common-denominator that's getting ever lower (e.g. people regularly resort to screenshotting text in 2023).
> Perhaps that's the big benefit, adding more variety of ways of thinking.
One of the strengths of paper is its flexibility: you can make pretty much any mark you want, not just marks approved and implemented by some 3rd party. You seem to be describing a situation where technical limitations (of digital systems) are so ingrained in people's thought processes that they have trouble thinking outside the little box they've been given.
The paradigm is "I can very, very, easily make this set of marks, and I'm gonna build my process around them" rather than "I can make any mark I want and I'll spend the time to figure out exactly what marks and what process to use".
It's incredibly easy and convenient, since it's all a prepackaged process with really only one medium, linear text, that only needs a tiny fraction of the skill... but we probably are losing something in the process.
I never got into paper or handwriting, and gave up on drawing pretty quick after discovering how much harder it is than I expected, so I never really felt anything missing from paper when moving to digital, but thinking more about it, I definitely do think the tech shapes my thoughts pretty heavily, ideas that are hard to express with current tech rarely occur to me, if I'm designing something physical I'll probably be thinking in the 2.5D way that you do with CAD without really understanding 3D structures, etc.
I tried to get into paper notetaking for quite a while(but found the level of attention to each letter needed to be kind of exhausting) and I tried to learn art drawing, but I never really paid much attention to or thought about the idea of trying to get into any kind of sketching or diagramming on paper, it's not as heavily talked about as text notetaking, perhaps I should try as an experiment.
I do think shared collaborative documents have filled a bigger void than many expected. But I still feel the current situation is unsatisfactory.
This lack of ubiquity of features happens because proprietary systems aren't interested in supporting other systems' features, because they're competing. It's literally caused by capitalism.
This is something I eternally argue with so many people. I can't understand this blind assumption that something made more recently is better just because.
Better is better. Something new may or may not be better, need to evaluate. Way too often new means a regression on functionality, which is worse.
'"Legacy" is not a pejorative. Do not use it as such.'
In an aviation context I mostly use an iPad these days (learned to fly long before iPads were a thing) but I carry some backup paper charts. I've had chargers fail mid-trip and the electronic flight bag apps are real power hogs. And that's not to mention the ever-present threat of GPS failure, which is very real.
I have no specialist knowledge but my theory is this is at least partly down to the fact that it utilises our highly evolved fine motor control system. Compared to prodding chimpishly at a glass screen, using paper and pens/tools requires a more intricate system of movement and tactile feedback, which implies a more elaborate dance of of neurons and neurotransmitters in the brain and nervous system – and somehow our capacity to "think" is boosted by this extra activity.
Re: GPS failure, that's orthogonal to the paper argument, since paper doesn't provide GPS either..
I personally am looking forward to the day when paper charts stop being printed! Huge waste of resources that could be better allocated..
Paper provides the VOR frequencies and visual navigation info, and approach procedures if you're really in a bind. It's also cheaper than a second tablet.
I'm quite happy to use pilotage to navigate, but lugging four sectionals around is a waste of my time and a waste of the FAAs resources to print. My state won the "let's see how annoying we can make these sectional divisions" contest. Just my local flying area is split onto three charts.
It happens eventually.
Short of an EMP event or wildly bad decision making on my part, the risk of this is vanishingly small.
* Paper does not run out of battery. On a ship where you need to be able to navigate whether or not the computer fails, this is a feature. My brother-in-law tells a story of when he was an air traffic controller in the military. Every so often they told them they had to turn off their computers and navigate the pilots in the air using paper to make sure they knew how to do it in case the computers failed and the power turned off.
* Paper cannot be hacked. In the article, Russian intelligence and MI5 were mentioned, as well as paper prescriptions. Of all highly secure mediums, paper is the most convenient.
* Paper is just handy. I use it right now to print out knitting patterns and write notes on them. I don't have to find some app to annotate the pattern I can just write directly on the paper. For what it is, paper is the default because it is so fully featured.
Typewriters, however, are a different story, and the Soviets managed to bug IBM Selectrics during the Cold War:
<https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-crazy-story-of-how-soviet-russ...>
Several related HN discussions: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16246432> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31965969> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21998774>
I found a link in one of the linked discussions which is quite a bit more in depth than the ieee article, for those interested:
But when the new digital systems back up, it's invisible. What's a few hundred thousand rows to a modern database?
Suggest to try using multiple desktops: one for work project A, another for personal email, etc. Open a browser tab or text editor window on the top left of each desktop with a note about what this one is for. In the case of work projects that tab will often be the bug report covering the task at hand. This way when I get defocused, it's a simple process to tab between the desktops, reading the index tab to reacquire wtf this screen was for.
Just like I can’t give up:
- paperless billing bc I’d like ironclad proof I’ve paid my mortgage off and have experienced plenty of database failures
- driving without an insurance black box plugged into my car for a few % off my insurance
- cash because it saves the small business a few % points and I’ve (/s) never seen a POS crash and burn before
- paper maps bc you’re completely insane to do outdoors stuff without a paper map and analog compass. When you have the emergency that needs it, you’ll understand.
The best success IT has had is convincing the world that the digital metaphor is as good, No… better! A total replacement! Stop killing the environment paper-man! … than the analog thing.
I have no idea how you can work in and around technology and have this mindset. I get sketched flying on software-defined airplanes these days even. If the scheduling software falls over under load.. I’m sure that implies every other airline software is A+!
Ideally, companies would have well-known public keys and sign every PDF they send you. In practice, they don't, but it's not even (feasibly) possible to sign a paper letter, unless we're still counting a printed squiggle as some sort of proof. Holograms and other genuinely hard-to-print marks are presumably very effective against non-sophisticated forgers, but I only see them on a few government documents, not mortgage papers
Also I'm aware that printers print identifying dots, and that is probably the downfall of many amateur forgers, but only because it allows you to find a smoking gun if the document is forged (and the printer was suspected a priori). But I imagine it's a lot harder to use that in the other direction, where a customer wants to prove a document did come from some company, as they'll presumably struggle to get their hands on the signatures of all the company's printers
- a paper letter with an audit trail through the postal system
- a printed out email to include headers that has the customer service rep +1’ing a total loan payment went through
- etc
It’s not an everyday thing but it seems like lunacy to rely on essentially a servicenow queue for any important state change that relies on corporate trust of your actions that took away a revenue stream for them.
Secondarily, hearing about our risks of EMPs from solar flares (or even in war scenarios), or in case of electrical grid collapse (a not-impossible scenario in some countries), paper is the only way I'll have survival knowledge available to me.
This is why I record all my ideas in a lab journal — a cargo cult it may be but we’ll see who’s laughing when I finally invent homomorphic encryption / perpetual motion / alchemy!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_i...
Requiring someone to fiddle with a poorly-designed app to record momentary bookkeeping is downright obnoxious and will not stand for it.
I’ve also seen little magnets which would be cleaner.
But it's never something I just casually reach for, the thought of using physical media just doesn't really ever occur to me unless I'm specifically going out of my way. Digital is so much easier, no fighting your hands to make the letters readable, no worrying about losing anything, no need to physically sort things, no need to have dedicated space and time for it thanks to the portability and durability of the screen.
The UI changes, apps go obsolete, but keeping up is just a matter of stuff you can learn on a random blog, not stuff that requires the long, hard process of figuring out how to translate thoughts into spatial patterns, which nobody can even describe really.
It seems like using paper at least occasionally is probably a good idea. It's definitely gotten easier now that we have cheap space pens and A5 format binders that are a little more convenient than full pages.
1. Drawing is laborious on a computer, and it rarely needs to be precise. It gives me eyestrain headaches and wrist fatigue. I still draw things like simple wiring schematics and flow diagrams by hand, take a pic with my phone, paste into Jupyter.
2. Sheet music. My kids have the latest tech (Apple 12" tablet, Apple pencil, page turning pedal) but I haven't upgraded yet. Also, the "charts" for one of my bands have not been digitized. Someday, but not yet. My notebook computer in tablet mode might be an option.
3 Meeting notes, just because I don't want to have a device in front of me when I'm having face-to-face discussions. The time is too precious.
that's why we all keep using it for maps.
Among other things, Yang has found that the very existence of those visual representations matters greatly: designers who do even basic, preliminary sketching consistently generate more design ideas. As she and a coauthor wrote in a 2007 paper, there is “an important interplay between a designer’s ability to sketch and their ability to visualize in their heads or through prototypes.” She has even found that if designers aren’t highly skilled at drawing, that doesn’t affect the quality of their final design outcomes; it just matters that they draw at all.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1063906/design-c...
Whiteboarding also falls into this realm ... not paper, but it enables the act of sketching without a digital intermediary.
While there are digital versions of this, nothing really matches the broad awareness of the field like just having the 2 meter by 3 meter map stretched out on the play space with all the pieces mid-game. Monitors feel like looking at the world through a straw in this context and the tactile ability to pick up pieces and try out scenarios can't be replicated with a mouse or even touchscreen.
Any technological solution would have to be able to display such a large piece of paper without scrolling, at retina display levels of quality. The closest technology I've seen that sort of "got it" was the early Microsoft cocktail table where you could put phones and controls and such on the screen directly. From those early concept ideas we ended up with the Surface Studio and dial I guess, but it's not a 2x3m retina display with thousands of game pieces, sometimes stacked.
When you pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Paper is a tool and a good one. It is simple, flexible, and most of all reliable.
You'd be laughed out of the room for suggesting that Wi-Fi connected e-hammers [0] are the way of the future, and when will the last old fogeys finally get with the times and throw away their old dumb hammer?
[0] I mean is it really even hammering without an oled screen that shows you how much force you're swinging with? And don't forget about the proprietary app that graphs your hammer swings for you. The light glaze of gamification (try for the biggest force!) will distract you from the personal data it's hoovering up to sell. Yes it definitely needs your precise location for Home Depot Hammer Hard Coupon Rewards (TM).
I won't touch on preferring paper for visualizing thoughts because that's just preference, but seeing people prefer paper invoices over digital ones is just sad to see. On a conceptual level digital should always be preferrable, but we somehow managed to screw the inplementation up so bad that it's worse than no implementation.
Why do we need to overcomplicate everything?
My only concern with moving entirely to digital is that it is not strictly better. Digital should be the best way to consume media but it often isn't. I don't own the digital media like I do with physical media. Buying brand new digital media is also waaay more expensive then getting used books on Ebay. This is all on top of the fact that we can barely keep services around for more than 10 years without them going away and being stuck with proprietary formats that are not accessible anymore.
I am concerned for the day where everything is all digital, and then something catastrophic happens and we lose a significant chunk of our information. But maybe I'm just giving myself FUD
In between the two prints he let me mark the page however I wanted so I could be sure it was the same physical page coming back out.
He admitted there was no market for such a thing but it was cool to see anyways. This was in the mid 1990s
Paper doesn’t need to go away or be given up. Some uses of it would be better digital.
Digital can’t do everything nor would it be able to handle everything in every way.
I might use paper less, but writing is still invaluable.
I have pencils and post-its in my electronics lab and I use them when working on digital circuits.
For archiving, some cities still have pen drafted mylar that sits in vaults. If you want to revise plans, go to City, check out the mylar with your life, use a razor blade to edit, pen with permanent ink and send back into the vault. New plans are plotted, but still to mylar.
With kids I am curious if they will learn how to handwrite. Will schools even teach how to read handwriting? Some interesting stuff as more goes digital and type printed.
Pen, Pencil, paper still has very great uses.
Also for calendar, you can write it on a paper if you have a calendar on the wall; and, if you want to write notes on a paper next to something that it is relevant to (e.g. program numbers on a radio), then you can do that.
Paper can also be reused (especially if you write on both sides) and recycled, and should be done more; even you might have spare paper that you can write notes, etc.
They also mention package materials. I do think that reusable packaging materials would be better. (Reusable stuff is better in general.)
For note taking, with a pen I cam easily transcribe math formulas. I cant do that with a txt editor.
Ok, so I switch to org-mode and become a tex mode guru. There's still no easy way to make a geometric drawing.
So now I have a tablet. The stylus feels weird, the tablet heavy. The resolution much lower than paper, the GUI, the battery life abysmal compared to paper, the latency anodyne.
But sure, it does everything paper can do.
... that is until I crease the paper to make a geometric figure freed from the limitations of compass and straight edge constructions, a cube [1], a crane to flirt with my neighbor, a bottle opener [2], a makeshift knife [3] or to use as kindling.
[1] I've actually done this to help me visualize crystal structure's interstitials.
[2] Neat trick a frenchman taught me.
[3] really sucks at this, but I did slice an apple with a sheet of printer paper once
I gave mine up and tried to go digital, but I just haven't found anything I like. Google Cal has been ok, but I hate the way I had to maintain a personal and private version of my planner. I was worried if I got laid off I'd lose access to my stuff. This is basically a concern with any planning software for me. The app turns to shit or the company goes bust and that's it. I have to invent some new way of managing my time.
Even with my iPad Pro + Pencil, I'm not satisfied yet. I still find just writing a comma cumbersome on the iPad pro.
I'm going to buy a paper day planner again because I've never been so unorganized since I quit the paper planner. I feel kind of guilty because I'm not taking advantage of all the amazing modern cloud, AI crazy amazing tech to plan my life...
Perhaps because it's so much easier to have an opinion and have that broadcasted.
Over the years I've gradually transitioned all my computing devices to be ones that support pressure sensitive stylus input. Most of my note taking thus ends up being handwritten, but still offering the benefits of digitization.
For me it's the perfect compromise since I always have a device I can access all my years of notes on (although I don't tend to need to access them). With paper notes, I used to just throw them out every few months because they'd pile up and it was clear I wouldn't miss them.
With a pencil you can rest the tip on the paper and you can erase its traces, but it has lateral drag and requires some downward force. The fountain pen requires no force, but you can't rest it on paper or it makes a huge blotch. You can't even leave it uncaped for very long, so it kinda forces you to be writing. The computer allows searching, copying and pasting, but every minor alteration in font or typeface requires cooperation from the software.
Typewriters are paper tech. Drawing tablets are digital. Large physical keyboards can be used with paper (typewriters) or digital (computers).
How different from a piece of paper and a pen is a digital tablet device with a blank canvas that you draw on with a stylus? In what ways?
Just some thoughts.
For designing something I will take the time to physically draw it, but for any notes I need to be able to access regularly I will use a digital version.
Is the impact of printing a paper navigational chart really higher than replacing that chart with an electronic device?
https://www.dw.com/en/germans-use-more-paper-than-any-other-...
I still keep those notebooks for reflection on what I studied. They're very valuable to me, even though I get teased for it. To me, it is like looking at a photograph of your younger brain.
They all have to have an exception in the statute for prisoners as they are stuck using paper for everything.
