Yes. HP-11C. Who cares about the speed of the calculating device when I'm just adding or multiplying a few numbers? Physical buttons are easier to use than mousing on a screen. And it's highly portable.
I pasted this article into ChatGPT, then challenged it to choose a topic and write a paragraph that carefully takes note of the criticisms. I think ChatGPT failed; the result sounds like LLM writing to me:
I keep a paper notebook not because it is efficient, but because it wastes my time in a very particular way. The pen skips when I write too fast, the margin fills with crossed-out sentences I decide not to rescue, and every page records how sure or unsure I was when I showed up that day. None of this scales, and none of it generalizes into advice, which is precisely the point: the notebook proves to me that I was there, thinking something that cost a little effort to hold. A clean, fluent summary of my week would be more legible and more shareable, but it would also launder away the hesitation, the bad ideas, the lopsided emphasis that marks the difference between having an experience and reporting one. What I get from the notebook isn’t polish; it’s the quiet assurance that I didn’t outsource the thinking.
Notice the “quiet” at the end. LLMS love to shoehorn “quiet” or “quietly” into their writing. I learned this from Sam Kriss’s NYT piece and I keep noticing it now.
I have one (NUSTE brand on Amazon) that has a built-in rechargeable battery. It takes up much less room than some I've had.
The ones that plug in to a lighter socket (which sometimes require the car to be running or the ignition switch in ACC position), or have to be clipped to the car battery are not as convenient.
> if you come up with the design for a software project, you ought to be responsible for the project’s success or failure
I think this should also apply to people who come up with or choose the software development methodology for a project. Scrum masters just don't have the same skin in the game that lead engineers do.
I recently needed to make a mockup of something, so I got some plasticine from Amazon, since I remembered playing with the stuff when I was a kid. However what I received was quite stiff and left an unpleasant oily smell on my hands that I had to scrub off with a lot of effort. Is there a particular brand of plasticine that you have had a good experience with?
There's a difference between questions of cultural / technical difference and questions of competence or character.
In the end, if a junior is repeatedly not responding to appropriate guidance or advice, then that junior should be gone from that position. Same for a senior who is repeatedly dispensing inappropriate guidance or advice.
But it requires careful analysis of the situation before such a drastic course of action: is there a communication problem, a training problem, a mistake in evaluating abilities?
A senior should be able to navigate cultural and technical differences competently. A junior should understand that that the ones with responsibility for a project also have the authority to make decisions about the project, which should be honored.
Dammit - I went a zero too many, human civilisation ~ 20,000 years worth of "settled" building, agriculture, slowly increasing in scale as climate variations decreased in scale.
Everything that is "modern human civilisation" from, say, early Egyptian onwards (following the formation of the Sahara some 6,000 years past) has taken place in a period of climatc stability.
Point being, come climatic change on that scale again, the planet and various eco systems will adapt and move on, human civilisation patterns as we know them from history will be heavily jarred.
As a general note, @7402 was right to question my comment, particularly with a supplied reference to university course notes.
I made a fat fingered typo, they made a respectful statement of fact, downvotes are not deserved here, if anything throw @7402 a few upvotes for taking part as the HN guidelines encourage.
reply