> I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.<p>> I have a wonderful secretary who looks at the incoming postal mail and separates out anything that she knows I’ve been looking forward to seeing urgently. Everything else goes into a buffer storage area, which I empty periodically.<p>Wow having someone do stuff for you is nice. Such deep insight. One day I wish I can afford to have someone do stuff for me so I too can experience this insight.
In general, I think it's a good idea to be deliberate and judicious about your information diet.<p>In my experience, the more low-quality information you've got in your head, the fewer interesting ideas will emerge. Mainlining social media is very much like watering the fields with Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator.
Pencil and paper is the best environment for working out anything at all difficult.<p>It would be nice if there were an environment to take a picture of written pseudo code and/or equations and spit out some matlab, numpy, or eigen code.
The possibility of having a personal secretary seems almost as outlandish as having a butler. No idea how much higher I'd need to go in my current company's org chart to get to that, but it'd be pretty damn high.
Thanks for submitting, Mr. Schmudde!<p>I'm eagerly awaiting your next post on Beyond the Frame :)<p>[1] <a href="https://schmud.de" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://schmud.de</a>
If you ever try to get a knuth check, you'll receive back a printed copy of your email, along with his hand written notes and a response. Really cool!
I subscribe to the idea of Knuth buffers when developing algorithms. They always first go on a piece of paper before they ever see a terminal. Slowing down the process and avoiding distractions helps the process tremendously.
Knuth is such a likeable man. I get the same feeling watching him talk as I get watching a very experienced woodworker using his hands to create a masterpiece.
I wonder if internet access and instant-entry is /necessarily/ a distraction or impediment to deep thought, or it could be stomached to the effect of great productivity with an especially sharpened mind.<p>It saddens me that the most accessible repositories of information are those that, allegedly, dumb me down.
I suspect Neal Stephenson has stopped composing on paper, given the precipitous decline in quality since Seveneves (or thereabouts; opinions may vary).
The idea that Knuth doesn't use email is basically just a practical joke that got out of hand. He actually received 31,997 and sent 19,910 emails between 1999 and 2019, and that's only including the emails from his work account at Stanford.<p>Sure, he uses email much less than you would expect from someone of has stature, but he still uses email about as much as the average person.