this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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xkcd

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https://xkcd.com/2912

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๐“˜ ๐“ฝ๐“ฑ๐“ฒ๐“ท๐“ด ๐“ฌ๐“ช๐“น๐“ฒ๐“ฝ๐“ช๐“ต ๐“› ๐“ฒ๐“ผ ๐“น๐“ป๐“ธ๐“ซ๐“ช๐“ซ๐“ต๐”‚ ๐“ฝ๐“ฑ๐“ฎ ๐“ถ๐“ธ๐“ผ๐“ฝ ๐“ฏ๐“พ๐“ท ๐“ฝ๐“ธ ๐”€๐“ป๐“ฒ๐“ฝ๐“ฎ, ๐“ฝ๐“ฑ๐“ธ๐“พ๐“ฐ๐“ฑ ๐“ต๐“ธ๐”€๐“ฎ๐“ป๐“ฌ๐“ช๐“ผ๐“ฎ ๐“บ ๐“ฒ๐“ผ ๐“ช๐“ต๐“ผ๐“ธ ๐“ช ๐“ผ๐“ฝ๐“ป๐“ธ๐“ท๐“ฐ ๐“ฌ๐“ธ๐“ท๐“ฝ๐“ฎ๐“ท๐“ญ๐“ฎ๐“ป.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Iโ€™m not sure I would use a nationโ€™s strong preference/popularity for a particular tech to be the gold standard. Fax machines are, or at least used to be, in high usage over there. Also, they have a quirky preference for doing everything in spreadsheets; deviating from that to use a more appropriate tool is frowned upon. One of the best examples Iโ€™ve seen of this is someone drawing up an office floor plan, very detailed, including the cubicles. It was a gorgeous piece, but I had to wonder about the baffling inefficiency of that approach.

That said, I donโ€™t disagree with the notion of avoiding any tool that creates huge overhead of just using the tool itself. Screw that. I love tech, but screw that.

Even where I work now, we try to reduce duplication. And in spite of that, I find myself using a hodgepodge of GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. Jira and Confluence are slow and bloated, but thatโ€™s where weโ€™re meant to put a lot of our effort. Even so, a table in either of those is slower and more limited than just using Sheets.

Iโ€™ve tried various ways of taking notes over the years. So many times Iโ€™ve had that โ€œfinally, this is the oneโ€ moments, only to eventually move on to something else. For a short while there, I was simply editing Markdown in Visual Studio Code (with Preview mode) and committing to GitHub, which was both lightweight and made for quick backups. Then I discovered Obsidian, and around the time worked out how to get SyncThing working.

Iโ€™m not a fan of my handwriting. And Iโ€™ve been burnt too many times in university courses, writing something down, only to realise I needed to add another paragraph up where there was barely any room to add a few words. And drawing arrows here and there only works for so long. So yeah, call me embittered =)

Handwriting in university was really the only option at the time, as it would be decades more before the first smartphone would come along. Plus, taking courses in linguistics, Chinese, and Japanese, you needed to be able to capture things that a conventional keyboard just couldnโ€™t manage.

Use the right tool for the job. Which it sounds like youโ€™re doing. Likewise for myself, I think.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I was just saying there are a lot of Japanese/German-made stationary options because they use stationary. It's kind of a bummer because you have to pay extra for them to be imported, and they might not be in English or show important American dates. I wish there were more high quality English-language options available. Even the paper itself is usually shit ๐Ÿ˜ฉ

Totally understandable that as a tech worker you would prefer digital note-taking tools!

And just as an aside, sometimes I think engineers focus too much on "efficiency". There are a ton of things that can be optimized for! Maybe having a beautiful office layout diagram makes the experience of looking at and working with the diagram more enjoyable, more memorable, maybe it instills pride in the office workers.