On the other hand, I do have a friend who, while he was Dean, had his email on three day delay. The theory: only those problems which were still problems after 72 hours were worth addressing at a super-departmental level.
> while he was Dean, had his email on three day delay.
I'm a professor. I can't help but think that this is a terrible idea.
As Dean, it is your job to enable the faculty members and department chairs who report to you. To figure out what obstacles they face, and remove them when possible. To figure out who is doing good work -- especially of the sort that goes unnoticed. To sort through requests for money and other resources, and to figure out who will put these resources to good use.
In other words, the same as any manager at any organization.
If it's important enough to not tolerate a 72-hour delay, email is a completely inappropriate medium through which it should be communicated. A competent worker would certainly be aware of that.
The medium is part of the message. Avoid sending the wrong message.
If you don't want to use email, fine. But this is work, not your personal jollies. I'm sure this guy would have pitched a fit if the people below him decided not to see him in person until they ran 3 laps around the building, or whatever ridiculous requirement they dreamt up.
Of course, plenty of people here would toss a fit if someone were to call their phone. It's also worth noting that your perceived crisis may not be my crisis.
There is a clear heirarchy of media ordered by immediacy.
- face-to-face
- phone call
- text messaging (through whatever: SMS, IRC, message flavour of the month...)
- email
- longhand on stationery
Note that immediacy and importance are orthogonal.
There is no contradiction there. You still will be solving problems and enabling, just with some low-pass filter in front. Which is (mostly) good. Less noice, higher the quality.
"I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.'"
This is my goal. Avoiding unnecessary stress and interruptions is a bigger goal for me than creating more wealth.
It's not an age thing though. I'm 37. I still happily communicate with other people, but ideally it's only when I make or take the time for it. That's why I worked from home, in a rural area, trying to get to 100% 'passive' income by the end of 2021.
I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket, so I am growing income streams from subscriptions, ads and affiliate partnerships. I target niches without a lot of competition. The amount of customer support is negligible, customers are happy and everything is automated, apart from invoicing.
Don't know if you're serious or trying to be funny, but I'll bite:
Around here, or in the Maker Community, "passive income" is referring to something that you put in a lot of effort into in such a way that when left alone, it keeps producing value for other people without your continuous supervision.
Examples would include writing a (e)Book; creating "side dish" type products, like eCommerce plugins or themes, creating a video course, or even having an entire SaaS, and then hiring people who then slowly replace you.
Interestingly, begging for money on a street corner would not fall under this definition, since it wouldn't work without you being physically there, generating the income.
I believe in this case, social parasitism refers to rent seeking, essentially. So, some of your examples are indeed examples of it. For example, if you're not contributing to a SaaS anymore, you are just collecting rent from it, which, at least after a while, it is a form of social parasitism. Of course, selling a book and living off of mew sales is not.
Writing a book and selling copies of it is a perfect example of a productive activity. How on earth writing a book can be construed as a "passive" activity?
A clear example of non-productive (parasitic) activity is renting real state that you inherited. You are extracting, continuously, a lot of money from society without having ever produced anything of value. I do not understand by what crazy mechanism this is regarded as a socially acceptable thing to do.
Would it be different if I rented real estate that I bought with money I earned with my labor? In that case, I would say that your beef is with inheritance, not rent.
It can be parasitic or not, depending on what you do.
If you inherit an expensive property in your twenties, and you stop studying and live off rent, then yes, you have become an unproductive "parasite".
If, otherwise, you rent the property for a couple of years while you finish your studies and save some money for reforming it before going to live there (or sell it)... then of course you are not a parasite.
In the first case, it's because my rich father died and I inherited; in the second case, it's because I worked 10 years as a highly successful professional, which allowed me to buy the property.
Am I a parasite in the first case? Am I a parasite in the second?
Variant: am I a parasite if instead of having inherited / buying property, I inherited / bought a large amount of stock in index funds and I live off market returns?
Doing some non-productive things in your life does not mean at all that you are a parasite.
But if, at the end of your life, your contribution has been grossly negative, then I guess that you have been.
Listen, I don't even think that being a small-scale parasite is a morally horrendous thing. If you are happy, that's OK, you are not really hurting anybody. I'm just very sad that all of our cities are teeming with large-scale ones!
You still need consumables in that example that you probably don't produce unless somehow you inherited a farm and the labor and management required to maintain it. By spending money on clean water, food, electric and whatever else you might value, you contribute to humanity in that sense, IMO.
If it only were possible to tell the general impact of our actions... Maybe my vanilla open source commits will, down the road, enable Skynet. Or maybe they'll help finding a cure for cancer. Or maybe they'll have no major impact at all. There's no way of determining that.
I fail to see the difference between SaaS and book sales.
People are still working to sell new copies of the book you wrote 10 years ago - it needs to be printed, distributed, sold to the customer (and maybe shipped to him afterwords). In the same way, SaaS needs to be maintained and operated.
In both cases someone gets to do the ongoing work, and someone gets paid for the original work.
Why do you think they are qualitatively different?
That is absolutely not what rent-seeking means. Users of the SaaS are still gaining value from it -- otherwise they wouldn't be using it anymore.
It is only economic rent, and rent-seeking behavior, if the OP instead focuses their energy on (for example) making it so that it is illegal to use anything other than their SaaS application for that particular purpose.
In the phrase “rent seeking” the word "rent" does not refer specifically to payment on a lease but rather to Adam Smith's division of incomes into profit, wage, and rent.
Yes, but he used the word "rent" for a reason, he didn't make up a brand new meaning for it! Paying rent to the person who legally owns a piece of land is definitely included. In general, income from being recognized by the government as owning a resource of which there is a fixed quantity, and which everyone needs (you have to live somewhere, and in Smith's time if you were a peasant you have to raise crops somewhere to survive; and the government says you have to pay someone for that land, the people the government recognizes as the owners).
Land is actually the main thing Adam Smith was talking about, with other things being extensions by analogy from that.
The "profiting from regulation" sense of "rent" is an extension of the plain meaning of "rent", but not mainly what Smith was actually talking about at all. Not sure if Smith in his time and place even talked about the "regulatory" aspect. Ordinary rent in it's plain meaning is what he was mainly talking about. The others are extensions by metaphor or analogy from it!
Adam Smith quotes:
> "The whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country, or what comes to the same thing, the whole price of that annual produce, naturally divides itself, it has already been observed, into three parts; the rent of land, the wages of labour, and the profits of stock; and constitutes a revenue to three different orders of people; to those who live by rent, to those who live by wages, and to those who live by profit. These are the three great, original, and constituent orders of every civilised society, from whose revenue that of every other order is ultimately derived."
[The three divisions of income you speak of -- "the rent of land" is pretty clear, this isn't a weird meaning of 'rent' but the plain one!]
> "As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
> "The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give."
> "The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own. "
It absolutely is the definition of rent-seeking. That doesn't make it bad.
If I wrote a book, government grants me a limited monopoly on production of that book, and I can collect rent (in an economic sense) from anyone who wants to reproduce that book. That's a good thing.
A difference comes in that with land, the underlying resource is limited. With books, it isn't. We're both collecting rents, but on something different. That difference translates into why it's helpful to incentivize writing books, but not helpful to incentivize consolidation of land among a few landlords.
Over time, the two converge, though. If copyright still applied to works from 1500, it would be crippling to society. People couldn't build from a collective intellectual commons, since it'd all be locked up. The people who collected rents on those works would have less incentive to work, not more, despite having no relation to their creation. Whoever owned the rights to the work of de Vinci would have tremendous income based on no contribution to society. It would create a new feudalism or nobility.
That's why the copyright and patent clause in the US Constitution guarantees copyrights and patents only for a limited term.
Rent-collecting on Mickey Mouse works incentivized Walt Disney to create Mickey. That was a obviously a good thing. Rent-collecting on Mickey Mouse now a century later isn't incentivizing anything except for extra profits to a megacorp, and limiting others' ability to build off of Walt's work. That's obviously a bad thing.
If you build a SaaS, and you collect rent from it, more power to you. If your grandchildren's grandchildren don't need to work because they're still collecting rent, we've messed something up.
TL;DR: rent seeking != parasitic. Both are distinct economic concepts.
No one is extending anything. It's a term in economics and in public choice theory.
The short definition is "seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth." In this context, "creating new wealth" has a specific definition as well. Sitting on a SaaS service, or charging license fees for software I wrote a decade ago isn't it. Building a house and getting paid for clearly is.
Rent-seeking is usually bas, but it isn't always bad. Creating wealthy early on in your life, and then sitting on passive wealth generation feels okay to me. However, if you have a legacy family where wealth was last created 500 years ago, and everyone is extracting wealth by virtue of having been born into the right family, that's not okay. Your values may differ. That's okay too. Values differ between individuals and cultures.
No. The welfare state (and the UBI) are great social constructions! Unfortunately, they are in danger precisely by the parasitic activities of rent-seekers.
Yes. Much better that younger generations are involuntarily paying for you not to work than people are voluntarily paying for your SaaS/book/property/etc. /s
As a member of the younger generation that pays nearly 50% of my salary in taxes, I agree. I love my country and I love to pay taxes for it to be better!
I do not understand why do you say it is involuntary, however? In a democratic country the amount of taxation is agreed upon by the majority.
I'm working my ass off so that I won't have to work on what other people want me to do. I want to create the changes I want to see in the world, but right now that's not economically possible without amassing capital.
If that amounts to me "parasitically" rent-seeking, then I'm sorry. I'm all in on that plan.
There are structural parasitic aspects to modern society. The distortions that result -- 0.1% owns nearly everything -- are the issue.
No one is saying every person has to labor everyday of their life. Get rid of the distortions of the current set up and you will very likely have meaningful savings when you reach a reasonable retirement age.
I am not in favor of UBI. In my experience, you are never given anything for free in this universe. An entire society dependent on the "welfare state" for life support? What if you say the "wrong thing" or think the wrong thing according to the "welfare state" that is putting food on your table and paying the rent?
Real passive income does not exist, that's why I put it between quotes.
If you rent out an office building, like me, you have tenants, you have to do maintenance, you have risks.
I also have a Saas with clients that I want to keep happy by improving the service proactively. I have free websites with a lot of very useful information and a tasteful amount of ads. That requires work. For mee it's stress free work as I don't have many deadlines, but that was the goal.
I don't know why you think I'm a parasite. I am providing a service. If the users of that service are happy, then what is exactly is the problem?
By the way, I rebuilt the office building myself. It took over 2 years. It took all my evenings and weekends, it was funded by my own money and a small loan from a bank that I paid back. I also built the office I'm sitting in right now from the ground up. I even made the desk myself. I worked hard to get where I am and I enjoyed doing it.
I don't consider myself a parasite for choosing to focus on stress free work with recurring revenue. It's not easy. It's not lazy. It's a choice.
Maybe there are better non-dehumanizing terms? Honestly, this term is basically the gist of nazi terminology 33-45, creating a mental analogy of a human group to animal pests.
Similar age to you (40) and I've noticed as I've gotten older that distractions are vastly more costly for me.
Til recently I was in an open office, gone 100% remote again (new role starts in a few weeks) and beyond working in an environment I control the thing I am most looking forwards to is the ability to control the distractions and environment (other than the furry ninja's at least).
I think what Knuth means here is that he has consumed enough information in his life that he has now stopped consuming any more of it and is only generating new information instead.
Well, he only gets to do this because he's achieved some measure of success in his life, right? I dare others not so distinguished to try and reproduce his approach.
I would take a middle of the road approach and say that you should be incredibly sparing with who you give your email and maybe have a custom spam filter so you only get a few really important emails per month.
This approach certainly gets rid of a lot of unnecessary communication. It is like a special spam filter. Not many people will go through with writing a real letter. For most requests it's probably not worth it for them. Et voila... filtered.
If you don't need anyone reaching you this seems like a good strategy.
It's easy not to have email if you have a secretary who filters and prints out the incoming messages for you.
I guess he never orders anything on the net, doesn't use any online services, because those usually require an email address where the receipts and acknowledgements are sent.
> personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them.
The more worrying fact to me, is not MegaCorp will be providing it, but that it's possible that self-hosting would be technologically infeasible. That is, even if MegaCorp gives you a free and open copy of personal assistant, it's still not practical run it on your own hardware - massive computing power and storage is required to operate it, and massive data is needed to train (and continue to train) the machine learning model. Only MegaCorp can afford to run it, and provide it as a service.
This has already happened in web search, content recommendation, speech recognition, machine translation, and many more applications. It's simply impossible to run your own speech recognition or machine translation package that has a comparable quality to Google's.
And these technologies will eventually become an integral part of life in a future society - e.g. When you must use machine translation or personal assistant in your daily life, and when only MegaCorp can provide a high-quality solution, it's a recipe of disaster. It's Ghost in the Shell.
Unfortunately, I'm definitely seeing it as a very likely outcome.
The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law - which is, fortunately, not entirely impossible if alternative computing technologies are developed in the future. But still, there's still the ML training problem.
> The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law
No, economies of scale will always result in some services being cheaper to centralize.
I think the same will happen with 3D printing and solar panels. No matter how cheap they get, it's always even cheaper for the power company to build a huge solar farm, or for me to order a printed part online and have it shipped. (For small batches anyway)
Services like search and speech recognition and translation that benefit from having large datasets to work with, also need fast Internet connections to keep that data updated.
So in 2020 my $100 might buy as much CPU as Google's $80, but it only buys as much network transfer as Google's $10.
The ratio is probably worse if you consider that self-hosted or even federated search means all the web scraping has to be replicated to 100x or 1,000x more databases than Google has to manage even with their CDNs. Redundancy is not free.
I want it to work too, but I don't think centralization is a technical problem with a technical solution. We're fighting uphill against a law of economics. Not even capitalism, either, economics itself as a law of nature.
>> The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law
> services being cheaper to centralize.
You are talking about its relative cost, while I'm talking about the mere possibility.
Back in the early 80s, having a personal workstation (not a home computer) to process private information was nearly an impossibility, not simply because it's cheaper to centralize but because it's technologically prohibitive. Even in the early 90s, I still read stories about how a hacker in a crypto community needed to import his private key every time he comes to work in the morning to read some personal messages, and to remove it again at the end of the day. The server could not be trusted and there was no alternative.
And today, everyone uses Gmail and the same privacy problem is still here - the server can't be trusted, but at least, if you are personally willing to spend some money and energy on your project, it's possible to host your own. It'll never be mainstream, yes, but it's possible and Moore's Law enabled it.
Maching translation, or personal assistant, on the other hand, now resembles a "personal-workstation-in-the-80s" problem. If computing power continues to advance according to Moore's Law, at least it's going to be a "Gmail-in-the-20s" problem after a decade or two.
> We're fighting uphill against a law of economics.
Moore's Law and personal computing, regardless of how sufficient or insufficient, is historically a balancing force. If this force continues to act upon, the level of centralization of future software applications will still be imaginable to us.
But if it ceases to exist, things will become much worse.
> This has already happened in web search, content recommendation, speech recognition, machine translation, and many more applications. It's simply impossible to run your own speech recognition or machine translation package that has a comparable quality to Google's.
I don't really agree with that. All of these things can be done on your own machine, and generally comparably or even in a superior fashion to Google. Bear in mind that Google has to focus on a very long tail of "serving every single user", whereas your software has to serve you.
This means your speech recognition needs to support your speech, not the speech of every accent and dialect on earth. Your content recommendation can be limited to types of content that are even peripherally of interest to you, and likely in a limited subset of languages.
Basically any amount of data and processing Google needs to do something for everyone, you can massively subset for just yourself. The biggest issue is that most of the data and code that companies like Google are using is proprietary, so good luck getting a copy to run.
Good counterpoint. So far I don't have any new idea to add to this discussion, all I can do is upvoting.
Just a quick response here:
> This means your speech recognition needs to support your speech, not the speech of every accent and dialect on earth.
What about machine translation? I don't need French, German, or Russian translation, until the day I need it... Hypothetically, combining it with speech recognition, it will create a perfect platform for wiretapping conversations.
I'm not inherently opposed to bouncing out to someone else's service when you need something you didn't expect. If you suddenly need to translate Russian, use a service maybe, and then start up running a Russian->English service on your own hardware if you expect to need it frequently going forwards.
Apple does their speech to text entirely on-device for phones (I just did a quick dictation test in airplane mode to verify. I think the watch offloads the process to the phone). It astonishes me just how much computing power is in my pocket.
> My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them.
My worry is built on your worry; I worry that people won't even think of using their self control to say no to this, but will wait breathless for some third party to save them from their own bad decisions.
I've spent many hours playing AI Dungeon, a text adventure game powered by GPT-3 (unlocking it requires payment). You input an arbitrary body of text, and GPT-3 keeps writing the story for you. You press enter, and the AI writes a new line. There are some serious limitations, but still, sometimes the plots are surprisingly creatively, as if the characters are alive, and I couldn't wait to see what follows it (it's rate-limited).
I always think Machine Learning is merely a useful and flexible pattern recognition machine that can be trained, anything beyond that is all media hype and marketing, there's nothing to see here.
Now my opinion has changed - if a pattern recognition machine that contains no breakthrough (GPT-3) can be surprisingly intelligent if you throw a lot of data to it, any new development cannot be worse than that. I'm now a true believer on the feasibility of AI assistants.
I’m curious how you can be “playing” this for hours and hours. Isn’t AI Dungeon mostly just a toy, not a real game? There isn’t any goal, there’s nothing to figure out, there isn’t even a coherent state that I’m aware of.
And that’s why I disagree with the claim that GPT-3 is in any way intelligent. It’s a chameleon. Or a Chinese room [1].
I think to have real intelligence you need a model for reality, not just a language model. Otherwise you can do nothing more than parrot and remix the words of others. Parrots are entertaining companions though.
It's not like a video game, but it's not a toy either. To get good results you have to direct it and be mindful of its limitations, but if you're willing to approach it as a human-assisted story building application rather than a game, it's easy to put some hours into.
It's hard to have such a secretary and printing opportunities nowadays. In academia across Europe, I am hearing complaints that department secretaries are overworked or reduced to part-time status (even as the number of administrative personnel elsewhere in the uni is ballooning), and printing is limited by quotas after which soon one has to start paying out of pocket for printouts. Even grayhaired tenured faculty are feeling the pinch.
On the one hand, university is changing a lot in Europe with less funding from governments and more and more fundraising from private companies.
Then there's the point that some professors (or universities at all) really have to leave their ivory towers. Cutting their funding (or secretaries) works wonders in getting those people to move and care about things again.
Then there's the point that one should really ask what needs to be printed and what not. My university life/education fits on a USB-drive and three file folders with notes I made. I know students who have a whole wall filled with folders. Did they really need to copy whole books and whatnot? I doubt it.
At last there's some ecological considerations, too. But that's not really forced, it's more a "nice to have" for the image of the university...
I used to run network printing for a 35,000 student university in the US. For some reason, the administration insisted that ICT provide printers free of charge to departments. When I started, we had 1 printer per 3 full time employees and the average student printed 150 pages per semester. Some students and faculty printed entire textbooks. Each page cost $0.03 all-in. When ICT funding was easy, eating the $350,000/year didn't matter as much, but when state appropriations dried up...well, print cards, quotas, and penny pinching became the norm.
I used to teach the TeX User Group LaTeX classes around 1989–93. The students were almost entirely math department secretaries who were charged with typing up professors' handwritten manuscripts. When I did a couple rounds of grad school in 2002–6, both unis had a department secretary but they worked strictly administrative tasks for the department as a whole (and to a lesser extent for the department chair). There wasn't a prof who didn't do their own typing.
I agree. I fear people look at this situation in a different light than say the current president of the United States who, while he does have an email address, admittely does not write emails or read them directly. Knuth is admired and this is a pleasant quirk; the POTUS appears an old, out-of-touch dinosaur.
I'm not judging either; my initial thoughts were just of the different perceptions for similar unique and rare circumstances.
I think he explains pretty clearly up front why his job makes this circumstance appropriate - on the bottom of things. I can’t think of anyone who should be more on top of things than a president.
While I greatly admire Knuth, I've never thought he wasn't a dinosaur. I don't look down on my grandmother for being confused when she's trying to use email, and I don't look down on Knuth for abandoning it in the 90s.
I guess it comes down to whether you think technological dinosaur is an insult or an observation.
It seems that the current POTUS knows how to use Twitter directly, which is probably generally considered more modern and "in-touch" than email. Maybe, then, the perception of him that you described wouldn't be based on the technology he uses to communicate.
It was 1990. No one was really ordering stuff over the internet yet. Commercial commerce was still sort of a taboo since, by and large, it was funded by public research monies.
Now? He probably has some webmail account so he can sign up for online banking, utility accounts, and all the other mundane stuff people do online which would have been science fiction back then.
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The amount of connectedness is a spectrum. DK [1] is at one extreme end of the spectrum, the other end is getting a notification at any time of the day or night when you get an email and immediately reading it.
We all have different jobs, and all jobs require different amounts of connectedness. But if you want, you can move slowly towards DK's end of the spectrum. I don't have email on my phone, for instance. While inconvenient sometimes, the benefits outweigh the costs. And when I want to do deep work, I close Thunderbird.
I don't understand this, can't we just grow more trees? Reading emails is a huge waste of time and I don't see how we can produce much more of that, let alone produce more Donald Knuths.
> I don't understand this, can't we just grow more trees?
Sure.
But you also have to transport people to the forests where they grow, operate machines to cut them down and trim them, transport them to pulp mills, use a lot of water to generate the pulp (often add bleach to whiten it), and then distribute the final product. There's also the create of printers and ink/toner.
And once DK has spent 30-60s reading the printout, it gets tossed into (hopefully) the blue pin where more energy is spent trying to recycle it.
And a lot of the energy used is generated from fossil fuels.
> My boss did his PhD at Stanford. The story goes that one day he walked straight into Knuth's office, while he had the door open. Knuth says "Oh dear, I seem to have made a mistake. Could you close the door please?". Boss closes the door. Knuth says "No, from the other side".
Source: reddit
Like most people who say they're going to quit something he probably just started using it again when he realised it was useful and maybe even essential, and didn't bother to update this webpage. It's been 30 years after all.
I was curious about this “Ursula N. Owen”, thinking perhaps she was an assistant of Knuth’s back in the 90s. It turns out that it’s a pseudonym sometimes used by Knuth himself, and is a reference to “U.N. Owen”, a character from And Then There Were None, a best-selling Agatha Christie novel first published in 1939 and one of the best-selling books of all time. The name “UN Owen” itself is a play on “unknown”, and I like to think of Donald chuckling to himself whenever he used that pseudonym.
I met DK when he was visiting my university. So "his" office was the office he was assigned when visiting. He is the most wonderful person you can imagine. He came to my office and he introduced himself in the most affable way. We socialised quite a lot for the duration of his visit. I went into his office because he wanted to show me some proofs on his whiteboard, that he was very excited about. There was a email client on the screen but I didn't pry, I just noticed it.
Also, it is pretty much absurd to believe that someone who is on the faculty of a university, where all business is conducted via email, will not read email.
Basically, what he is saying is that he will not read your email.
Over the last three years, I have sent 12 emails to him, at the two addresses mentioned on the page (all were bug reports, as he says that's the only kind of email he accepts). Of these, 11 were processed in the way indicated on the page: several weeks later, I got a reply in my (postal) mailbox, with Knuth's replies in pencil over a printout of my email. For the other one, I got a two-line reply by email, saying thanks and that an updated version had been uploaded. (This was a correction to a section he was writing, that I sent immediately after a talk he gave about it. Interestingly, the "from" address on the email was that of his secretary—who comes in once a week AFAIK—but signed "-- Don".)
So I think the content on this page is still substantially true, with rare exceptions.
I always found it hilarious that this guy was fed up with email 5 fucking years before the first machine was connected to Internet in my Central European country.
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."
- William Gibson
Your comment adds a funny twist to this well-known quote. Usually it's said in the context of "someone has cool high-tech stuff that other people don't have." But the reverse is true, too; the Sentinel Islanders [1] have so far avoided the "future" of managing your inbox.
For many open source contributors and maintainers, it's always not an option to "be on the bottom of things".
Patches (for some projects) flow via e-mail.
So there's some decent amount of "being on top of things". Not at the rate of "I need to feverishly refresh my Inbox every 2 minutes", but "I ought process these patches/designs/bug e-mails at some sane rate that doesn't drive me bonkers". (Which can be done effectively with venerable tools like Mutt, et al; refer to the recent thread on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676 – "Mutt email client 25 years old")
This is just saying the boring truth that there's different kind of e-mail—the draining, unproductive long threads that don't go anywhere and the "get the work done"-style patches/designs/bug work e-mails.
Oh how I wish I sometimes had the choice to be on the bottom of things. :-)
Though I sometimes do get pretty close to disconnecting myself if I have some difficult or urgent task, and on vacation of course. If the world around us cannot survive with us leaving for a week or two, there's a problem on both sides!
I hear you. :-) I never cease to be amazed at how seasoned maintainers like you handle the sheer volume of public email, while continuing to stay effective over the years, healthy disconnection, and setting an example to emulate on how to conduct oneself in public.
(On the problem you refer to, some of us here will recognise that well-meaning FOSS developer who starts getting anxious to take a two-week vacation with the family because "there's no one else who is able to process the core pull requests" for their project.)
> Perhaps we should just add a (small) price to sending email?
Might work better if the fee is returned unless the recipient explicitly rejects payment within some set time window (which might be automated by or for the recipient, e.g., as part of a spam filter.)
There were attempts to introduce computing costs required to deliver a message.
Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam. Bitmessage uses proof of work to combat spam as well. Though those approaches do not seem to be popular.
My guess is that spammers can operate at scale, rent or buy GPUs, may be even build ASICs. So they'll have very cheap work. While ordinary person will use some cheap 5-year old Android phone which would spend a lot of time and battery to compute that kind of work.
It might reduce amount of extremely low-quality spam. But I guess that kind of spam is easily detectable by something like default spamassassin setup anyway.
Lex Fridman had an interesting interview with Don Knuth close to his 82nd birthday[0]. It's fascinating to learn how much energy he still spends at verifying and investigating each aspect of newly published algorithms. E-mail would probably cut away too much time from what he considers more important.
Interesting. I remember having written an email to Donald Knuth about 15 years ago. And, surprise surprise, I got a reply! In retrospect, my question was extremely naive. However, I am still thankful for a honest answer.
> Of course, "email" has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.
There used to be a thing called 'Basicode' [1], one of the first attempts to create a cross-platform language for microcomputers. Basicode consisted of the programming language itself which was a rather limited dialect of BASIC, a number of transcoders from this basicode BASIC dialect to the native BASIC versions for several microcomputers and - which is what made me think of it - a universal audio data transmission standard which was used to transmit Basicode programs over the aether to users. Basicode was started in the Netherlands by the 'Hobbyscooop' radio show but gained popularity elsewhere as well, notably also in the former German Democratic Republic. I still have the original Basicode book somewhere in a box in the barn, along with the Commodore 64 which I used it with. To be honest I quickly got bored with Basicode since the programs received through the radio were rather underwhelming compared to what I could make the thing do myself by programming it in assembly (6502 might be limited but it is a good starting architecture for budding assembly programmers).
My first experience with email was the summer of 1984 on the VAX/VMS systems at IIT at a summer institute. That was when I created my first e-zine called Stuff which was mostly gossip about the staff and my fellow high school students. What I remember more than anything else was that I had discovered that putting ^H at the beginning of a line would make the letters of that line print at double height if you printed the file on the line printer.
Ok. Well, I guess ‘social media’ is a nonstarter for him.
OTOH, maybe his insight says something about our addiction to social media. He has a real life and the rest of us have less of it. Who knew that computer scientists could craft a tool that Could steal our lives.
My favorite Knuth quote is from his FAQ on being retired[1]
> Being a retired professor is a lot like being an ordinary professor, except that you don't have to write research proposals, administer grants, or sit in committee meetings. Also, you don't get paid.
I had a few exchanges with DEK back in the 80s. Even then he had his secretary filtering his e-mail and if a response was warranted, she would request a postal address so he could send his answer handwritten on a printout of the e-mail. I still have those answers in a box along with other correspondence from the era.
The intensely loyal Phyllis Winkler. You couldn’t even get into DEK’s office without going through hers, which I think was a unique arrangement in Margaret Jacks Hall.
I also had a few such exchanges (mine would have been at the end of the 80s or early 90s, I think) -- by snail-mail in both directions. His replies came in envelopes addressed to me as "Dr. ..." or even once as "Prof. ...", which I found pleasantly amusing, as I hadn't actually graduated from anywhere, let alone reached such exalted heights.
(His usual form of reply, as I recall it, would be a note pencilled on a copy of my letter.)
I often got email addressed to Prof. Hosek or Dr. Hosek when I was in undergrad courtesy of my activity in the TeX world. I don't think I've gotten any such misattribution once after actually getting a degree, even when I was teaching college as an adjunct.
I wonder what Knuth thinks of Slack and instant messaging then!
Emails feels pretty low pressure to me. I don't need to answer it today -- or, in some cases, ever -- whereas Slack and similar messaging systems come with the expectation that you must answer ASAP. Surely you've seen the message, why aren't you typing an answer yet? It's very high pressure.
I love email. Every attempt at replacing it with something "better" upsets me.
I honestly thought of doing a blog post where I take these words and replace email with Slack. I have issues with email that my PM is trying hard to get me to delegate more to her and others so I can focus on the higher value work. Slack I actually am on the verge of hating. Especially when every client wants to communicate via their private Slack instead of much saner email and GitHub issues. The worst thing about Slack is the non-federated nature of it. It is practically impossible when you work with more than a dozen startups and other organizations all who have their own.
> `I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.' --- Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker
Loved this quote from Umberto Eco. RIP. (died in 2016)
Not everyone in tech has a smartphone. I know a fairly senior manager at a well-known Silicon Valley company who only got one when he joined that company and they gave him one he needed to use for work.
164 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadOn the other hand, I do have a friend who, while he was Dean, had his email on three day delay. The theory: only those problems which were still problems after 72 hours were worth addressing at a super-departmental level.
I'm a professor. I can't help but think that this is a terrible idea.
As Dean, it is your job to enable the faculty members and department chairs who report to you. To figure out what obstacles they face, and remove them when possible. To figure out who is doing good work -- especially of the sort that goes unnoticed. To sort through requests for money and other resources, and to figure out who will put these resources to good use.
In other words, the same as any manager at any organization.
The medium is part of the message. Avoid sending the wrong message.
Note that immediacy and importance are orthogonal.
This is my goal. Avoiding unnecessary stress and interruptions is a bigger goal for me than creating more wealth.
It's not an age thing though. I'm 37. I still happily communicate with other people, but ideally it's only when I make or take the time for it. That's why I worked from home, in a rural area, trying to get to 100% 'passive' income by the end of 2021.
Around here, or in the Maker Community, "passive income" is referring to something that you put in a lot of effort into in such a way that when left alone, it keeps producing value for other people without your continuous supervision.
Examples would include writing a (e)Book; creating "side dish" type products, like eCommerce plugins or themes, creating a video course, or even having an entire SaaS, and then hiring people who then slowly replace you.
Interestingly, begging for money on a street corner would not fall under this definition, since it wouldn't work without you being physically there, generating the income.
Did that clear things up?
Writing a book and selling copies of it is a perfect example of a productive activity. How on earth writing a book can be construed as a "passive" activity?
A clear example of non-productive (parasitic) activity is renting real state that you inherited. You are extracting, continuously, a lot of money from society without having ever produced anything of value. I do not understand by what crazy mechanism this is regarded as a socially acceptable thing to do.
If you inherit an expensive property in your twenties, and you stop studying and live off rent, then yes, you have become an unproductive "parasite".
If, otherwise, you rent the property for a couple of years while you finish your studies and save some money for reforming it before going to live there (or sell it)... then of course you are not a parasite.
Let's say I live out of rent from my mid-30s.
In the first case, it's because my rich father died and I inherited; in the second case, it's because I worked 10 years as a highly successful professional, which allowed me to buy the property.
Am I a parasite in the first case? Am I a parasite in the second?
Variant: am I a parasite if instead of having inherited / buying property, I inherited / bought a large amount of stock in index funds and I live off market returns?
But if, at the end of your life, your contribution has been grossly negative, then I guess that you have been.
Listen, I don't even think that being a small-scale parasite is a morally horrendous thing. If you are happy, that's OK, you are not really hurting anybody. I'm just very sad that all of our cities are teeming with large-scale ones!
Why do you think they are qualitatively different?
It is only economic rent, and rent-seeking behavior, if the OP instead focuses their energy on (for example) making it so that it is illegal to use anything other than their SaaS application for that particular purpose.
Land is actually the main thing Adam Smith was talking about, with other things being extensions by analogy from that.
The "profiting from regulation" sense of "rent" is an extension of the plain meaning of "rent", but not mainly what Smith was actually talking about at all. Not sure if Smith in his time and place even talked about the "regulatory" aspect. Ordinary rent in it's plain meaning is what he was mainly talking about. The others are extensions by metaphor or analogy from it!
Adam Smith quotes:
> "The whole annual produce of the land and labour of every country, or what comes to the same thing, the whole price of that annual produce, naturally divides itself, it has already been observed, into three parts; the rent of land, the wages of labour, and the profits of stock; and constitutes a revenue to three different orders of people; to those who live by rent, to those who live by wages, and to those who live by profit. These are the three great, original, and constituent orders of every civilised society, from whose revenue that of every other order is ultimately derived."
[The three divisions of income you speak of -- "the rent of land" is pretty clear, this isn't a weird meaning of 'rent' but the plain one!]
> "As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce."
> "The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what he can afford to take; but to what the farmer can afford to give."
> "The landlord demands a rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed, however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if they had been all made by his own. "
If I wrote a book, government grants me a limited monopoly on production of that book, and I can collect rent (in an economic sense) from anyone who wants to reproduce that book. That's a good thing.
A difference comes in that with land, the underlying resource is limited. With books, it isn't. We're both collecting rents, but on something different. That difference translates into why it's helpful to incentivize writing books, but not helpful to incentivize consolidation of land among a few landlords.
Over time, the two converge, though. If copyright still applied to works from 1500, it would be crippling to society. People couldn't build from a collective intellectual commons, since it'd all be locked up. The people who collected rents on those works would have less incentive to work, not more, despite having no relation to their creation. Whoever owned the rights to the work of de Vinci would have tremendous income based on no contribution to society. It would create a new feudalism or nobility.
That's why the copyright and patent clause in the US Constitution guarantees copyrights and patents only for a limited term.
Rent-collecting on Mickey Mouse works incentivized Walt Disney to create Mickey. That was a obviously a good thing. Rent-collecting on Mickey Mouse now a century later isn't incentivizing anything except for extra profits to a megacorp, and limiting others' ability to build off of Walt's work. That's obviously a bad thing.
If you build a SaaS, and you collect rent from it, more power to you. If your grandchildren's grandchildren don't need to work because they're still collecting rent, we've messed something up.
TL;DR: rent seeking != parasitic. Both are distinct economic concepts.
The short definition is "seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth." In this context, "creating new wealth" has a specific definition as well. Sitting on a SaaS service, or charging license fees for software I wrote a decade ago isn't it. Building a house and getting paid for clearly is.
Rent-seeking is usually bas, but it isn't always bad. Creating wealthy early on in your life, and then sitting on passive wealth generation feels okay to me. However, if you have a legacy family where wealth was last created 500 years ago, and everyone is extracting wealth by virtue of having been born into the right family, that's not okay. Your values may differ. That's okay too. Values differ between individuals and cultures.
If my investments yield enough for me to live on, that's my business and my doing.
I do not understand why do you say it is involuntary, however? In a democratic country the amount of taxation is agreed upon by the majority.
If that amounts to me "parasitically" rent-seeking, then I'm sorry. I'm all in on that plan.
No one is saying every person has to labor everyday of their life. Get rid of the distortions of the current set up and you will very likely have meaningful savings when you reach a reasonable retirement age.
I am not in favor of UBI. In my experience, you are never given anything for free in this universe. An entire society dependent on the "welfare state" for life support? What if you say the "wrong thing" or think the wrong thing according to the "welfare state" that is putting food on your table and paying the rent?
If you rent out an office building, like me, you have tenants, you have to do maintenance, you have risks.
I also have a Saas with clients that I want to keep happy by improving the service proactively. I have free websites with a lot of very useful information and a tasteful amount of ads. That requires work. For mee it's stress free work as I don't have many deadlines, but that was the goal.
I don't know why you think I'm a parasite. I am providing a service. If the users of that service are happy, then what is exactly is the problem?
By the way, I rebuilt the office building myself. It took over 2 years. It took all my evenings and weekends, it was funded by my own money and a small loan from a bank that I paid back. I also built the office I'm sitting in right now from the ground up. I even made the desk myself. I worked hard to get where I am and I enjoyed doing it.
I don't consider myself a parasite for choosing to focus on stress free work with recurring revenue. It's not easy. It's not lazy. It's a choice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
An object unable to receive messages is soon marked for garbage collection.
Oh, I get sent a lot of messages. What I receive is a different story.
Til recently I was in an open office, gone 100% remote again (new role starts in a few weeks) and beyond working in an environment I control the thing I am most looking forwards to is the ability to control the distractions and environment (other than the furry ninja's at least).
If I can do it, so can you.
If you want me immediately, call me, message me, or walk over to me (well, pre-COVID, anyway).
I'm confident I'm not as distinguished or successful as Donald Knuth.
If you don't need anyone reaching you this seems like a good strategy.
I guess he never orders anything on the net, doesn't use any online services, because those usually require an email address where the receipts and acknowledgements are sent.
My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them.
The more worrying fact to me, is not MegaCorp will be providing it, but that it's possible that self-hosting would be technologically infeasible. That is, even if MegaCorp gives you a free and open copy of personal assistant, it's still not practical run it on your own hardware - massive computing power and storage is required to operate it, and massive data is needed to train (and continue to train) the machine learning model. Only MegaCorp can afford to run it, and provide it as a service.
This has already happened in web search, content recommendation, speech recognition, machine translation, and many more applications. It's simply impossible to run your own speech recognition or machine translation package that has a comparable quality to Google's.
And these technologies will eventually become an integral part of life in a future society - e.g. When you must use machine translation or personal assistant in your daily life, and when only MegaCorp can provide a high-quality solution, it's a recipe of disaster. It's Ghost in the Shell.
Unfortunately, I'm definitely seeing it as a very likely outcome.
The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law - which is, fortunately, not entirely impossible if alternative computing technologies are developed in the future. But still, there's still the ML training problem.
No, economies of scale will always result in some services being cheaper to centralize.
I think the same will happen with 3D printing and solar panels. No matter how cheap they get, it's always even cheaper for the power company to build a huge solar farm, or for me to order a printed part online and have it shipped. (For small batches anyway)
Services like search and speech recognition and translation that benefit from having large datasets to work with, also need fast Internet connections to keep that data updated.
So in 2020 my $100 might buy as much CPU as Google's $80, but it only buys as much network transfer as Google's $10.
The ratio is probably worse if you consider that self-hosted or even federated search means all the web scraping has to be replicated to 100x or 1,000x more databases than Google has to manage even with their CDNs. Redundancy is not free.
I want it to work too, but I don't think centralization is a technical problem with a technical solution. We're fighting uphill against a law of economics. Not even capitalism, either, economics itself as a law of nature.
> services being cheaper to centralize.
You are talking about its relative cost, while I'm talking about the mere possibility.
Back in the early 80s, having a personal workstation (not a home computer) to process private information was nearly an impossibility, not simply because it's cheaper to centralize but because it's technologically prohibitive. Even in the early 90s, I still read stories about how a hacker in a crypto community needed to import his private key every time he comes to work in the morning to read some personal messages, and to remove it again at the end of the day. The server could not be trusted and there was no alternative.
And today, everyone uses Gmail and the same privacy problem is still here - the server can't be trusted, but at least, if you are personally willing to spend some money and energy on your project, it's possible to host your own. It'll never be mainstream, yes, but it's possible and Moore's Law enabled it.
Maching translation, or personal assistant, on the other hand, now resembles a "personal-workstation-in-the-80s" problem. If computing power continues to advance according to Moore's Law, at least it's going to be a "Gmail-in-the-20s" problem after a decade or two.
> We're fighting uphill against a law of economics.
Moore's Law and personal computing, regardless of how sufficient or insufficient, is historically a balancing force. If this force continues to act upon, the level of centralization of future software applications will still be imaginable to us.
But if it ceases to exist, things will become much worse.
That is all I wanted to say.
I don't really agree with that. All of these things can be done on your own machine, and generally comparably or even in a superior fashion to Google. Bear in mind that Google has to focus on a very long tail of "serving every single user", whereas your software has to serve you.
This means your speech recognition needs to support your speech, not the speech of every accent and dialect on earth. Your content recommendation can be limited to types of content that are even peripherally of interest to you, and likely in a limited subset of languages.
Basically any amount of data and processing Google needs to do something for everyone, you can massively subset for just yourself. The biggest issue is that most of the data and code that companies like Google are using is proprietary, so good luck getting a copy to run.
Just a quick response here:
> This means your speech recognition needs to support your speech, not the speech of every accent and dialect on earth.
What about machine translation? I don't need French, German, or Russian translation, until the day I need it... Hypothetically, combining it with speech recognition, it will create a perfect platform for wiretapping conversations.
That's all but guaranteed if it's any time in the next decade or so.
My worry is built on your worry; I worry that people won't even think of using their self control to say no to this, but will wait breathless for some third party to save them from their own bad decisions.
I always think Machine Learning is merely a useful and flexible pattern recognition machine that can be trained, anything beyond that is all media hype and marketing, there's nothing to see here.
Now my opinion has changed - if a pattern recognition machine that contains no breakthrough (GPT-3) can be surprisingly intelligent if you throw a lot of data to it, any new development cannot be worse than that. I'm now a true believer on the feasibility of AI assistants.
And that’s why I disagree with the claim that GPT-3 is in any way intelligent. It’s a chameleon. Or a Chinese room [1].
I think to have real intelligence you need a model for reality, not just a language model. Otherwise you can do nothing more than parrot and remix the words of others. Parrots are entertaining companions though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
On the one hand, university is changing a lot in Europe with less funding from governments and more and more fundraising from private companies.
Then there's the point that some professors (or universities at all) really have to leave their ivory towers. Cutting their funding (or secretaries) works wonders in getting those people to move and care about things again.
Then there's the point that one should really ask what needs to be printed and what not. My university life/education fits on a USB-drive and three file folders with notes I made. I know students who have a whole wall filled with folders. Did they really need to copy whole books and whatnot? I doubt it.
At last there's some ecological considerations, too. But that's not really forced, it's more a "nice to have" for the image of the university...
I'm not judging either; my initial thoughts were just of the different perceptions for similar unique and rare circumstances.
I guess it comes down to whether you think technological dinosaur is an insult or an observation.
Now? He probably has some webmail account so he can sign up for online banking, utility accounts, and all the other mundane stuff people do online which would have been science fiction back then.
We all have different jobs, and all jobs require different amounts of connectedness. But if you want, you can move slowly towards DK's end of the spectrum. I don't have email on my phone, for instance. While inconvenient sometimes, the benefits outweigh the costs. And when I want to do deep work, I close Thunderbird.
[1] Such appropriate initials.
Sure.
But you also have to transport people to the forests where they grow, operate machines to cut them down and trim them, transport them to pulp mills, use a lot of water to generate the pulp (often add bleach to whiten it), and then distribute the final product. There's also the create of printers and ink/toner.
And once DK has spent 30-60s reading the printout, it gets tossed into (hopefully) the blue pin where more energy is spent trying to recycle it.
And a lot of the energy used is generated from fossil fuels.
From the postscript on https://ryanwaggoner.substack.com/p/could-you-delete-your-em...
Well, internet archive verifies it existed on the web in 1997.
https://web.archive.org/web/19970526031736/https://www-cs-fa...
Also, it is pretty much absurd to believe that someone who is on the faculty of a university, where all business is conducted via email, will not read email.
Basically, what he is saying is that he will not read your email.
So I think the content on this page is still substantially true, with rare exceptions.
- William Gibson
Your comment adds a funny twist to this well-known quote. Usually it's said in the context of "someone has cool high-tech stuff that other people don't have." But the reverse is true, too; the Sentinel Islanders [1] have so far avoided the "future" of managing your inbox.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island
Patches (for some projects) flow via e-mail.
So there's some decent amount of "being on top of things". Not at the rate of "I need to feverishly refresh my Inbox every 2 minutes", but "I ought process these patches/designs/bug e-mails at some sane rate that doesn't drive me bonkers". (Which can be done effectively with venerable tools like Mutt, et al; refer to the recent thread on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676 – "Mutt email client 25 years old")
This is just saying the boring truth that there's different kind of e-mail—the draining, unproductive long threads that don't go anywhere and the "get the work done"-style patches/designs/bug work e-mails.
Though I sometimes do get pretty close to disconnecting myself if I have some difficult or urgent task, and on vacation of course. If the world around us cannot survive with us leaving for a week or two, there's a problem on both sides!
(On the problem you refer to, some of us here will recognise that well-meaning FOSS developer who starts getting anxious to take a two-week vacation with the family because "there's no one else who is able to process the core pull requests" for their project.)
Perhaps we should just add a (small) price to sending email?
Might work better if the fee is returned unless the recipient explicitly rejects payment within some set time window (which might be automated by or for the recipient, e.g., as part of a spam filter.)
Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam. Bitmessage uses proof of work to combat spam as well. Though those approaches do not seem to be popular.
My guess is that spammers can operate at scale, rent or buy GPUs, may be even build ASICs. So they'll have very cheap work. While ordinary person will use some cheap 5-year old Android phone which would spend a lot of time and battery to compute that kind of work.
It might reduce amount of extremely low-quality spam. But I guess that kind of spam is easily detectable by something like default spamassassin setup anyway.
[0]: https://youtu.be/2BdBfsXbST8
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émail_(verre)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_(glazuur)
Electronically yours,
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE
Along the same vein Paul Allen and Bill Gates started off doing business as “Micro-Soft”. [1]
[1]: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1995... "Fortune, 2 Oct 1995"
OTOH, maybe his insight says something about our addiction to social media. He has a real life and the rest of us have less of it. Who knew that computer scientists could craft a tool that Could steal our lives.
> Being a retired professor is a lot like being an ordinary professor, except that you don't have to write research proposals, administer grants, or sit in committee meetings. Also, you don't get paid.
[1] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html
UPDATE2: How the World’s Most Famous Computer Scientist Checks E-mail Only Once Every Three Months:
https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2008/07/17/bonus-post-how-th...
I find past discussion of this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11461077
Neal Stephenson vs Email or Why I Am a Sociomediapath?
https://www.nealstephenson.com/social-media.html https://www.nealstephenson.com/contact.html
Good Links to read more:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-email-making-professors...
https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2008/07/02/e-mail-zero-imagi...
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/was-e-ma...
(His usual form of reply, as I recall it, would be a note pencilled on a copy of my letter.)
Emails feels pretty low pressure to me. I don't need to answer it today -- or, in some cases, ever -- whereas Slack and similar messaging systems come with the expectation that you must answer ASAP. Surely you've seen the message, why aren't you typing an answer yet? It's very high pressure.
I love email. Every attempt at replacing it with something "better" upsets me.
Loved this quote from Umberto Eco. RIP. (died in 2016)