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The slowness is a feature, not a bug. It gives your brain time to chew on it a little bit, digesting the information and storing it away instead of just copy-pasting.

Speed-hacks like shorthand and stenographers' machines are for copying exactly what was said, not consuming and understanding it. I would be very surprised if there were not very old studies moldering in a paper journal somewhere investigating the information retention of secretaries / stenographers compared to "naive" note-takers.


I recently started journaling by hand and was somewhat frustrated with the excruciatingly slow speed versus typing. Eventually, I realized that the slowness was, as you said, a feature. It forces you to think. You have no choice but to take time with your words. Sometimes brevity is a gift (one I usually don't have).

I migrated to fountain pens and haven't looked back. Partially, it's because I enjoy the experience itself as much as writing, but partially it's because they've forced me to become even more deliberate.

I'd highly recommend it!


Same principle applies to, e.g., Leica cameras. Yes, they're pricey (absurdly so), but the lack of features, the slow speed, and the lack of configuration contributes to me improving my photography. It doesn't make me a better photographer, but it gives me the time and space to focus on being one, rather than just firehosing my camera at whatever is in front of me. It makes my photography intentional rather than reactive.

I think you just explained the opposite—that, yes, it does make you a better photographer. You've just described everything that it has done, which is continually improving your skill set and your thought process(es) that go into your creative work. Now that I understand the process, I love reading stories from others who have learned the same lesson: Deliberate slowness gives you time to think, time to plan, and time to breathe.

That is an experience you can't get any other way. That experience, also, pays forward in other areas of life.

I'm noticing the same thing with journaling. I still enjoy writing on my computers, of course, because I'm a much faster typist. However, I've noticed the deliberately slow pace of writing by hand has become transformative (slowly) over time. I'd imagine you're noticing the same thing. It's about self-improvement more than the hobby itself.

For me, it came at an opportune time: I started teaching an adult Bible study last year, and between journaling with fountain pens and teaching, it's forced me to get rid of some annoying habits that I might have held on to otherwise.


Any old rangefinder camera will do that at a fraction of the price.

Or get an Canon 5d MKI or MKII. Not many features and great kit and can be bought for less than $500.

A sidenote along these lines - I've recently done an MSc, and found that the default approach to lectures is now to present slide decks. One of the profs, however, delivers a more traditional lecture, writing everything on a blackboard. I've found the second style far more effective, largely because writing caps the rate at which information can be conveyed. Because slides have no such bottleneck, I've found they're often misused and overladen with information which is skipped over too quickly.

+1 Deciding what to write is the critical step. You can get it with careful typing, but it's harder because you can type fast enough to skip that step.

It gives your brain time, but reality may not give you that time.

Someone who is typing a fast paced one time lecture, who can then take their time afterward to digest, is going to do much better than the "slowness is a feature" hand writer.

I've seen this first-hand with people taking handwritten notes in meetings


Also, MS Word auto-corrects <space>-<space> into an em-dash just like it fixes quotes. Depending on which software was used to write it, it's very likely that's what happened.

I'm never suspicious of only one em-dash, as they are a perfectly valid, if infrequent punctuation. Three or more in an article this length would make start looking at the rest of it more closely, though.


I'm just picturing me watching their stupid ad, then opening the door and permanently disabling the locking mechanism, with a sawz-all, if necessary.


By that point, they'll have passed an enhanced DMCA law that makes it a crime to tamper with or modify corporate property... see, you can only "license" the object but never own it.


I tried to disable my washing machine lock. Bricked it. Bought a Speed Queen.


Where do the quarters go? (I've only seen SQs in laundromats.)


> ...you can't control what others send you.

Of course not. You can, however, control what you then do with said data.

If a courier accidentally dropped a folder full of nuclear secrets in your mailbox, I promise you that if you do anything with it other than call the FBI (in the US), you will be in trouble.


Except in this case it's unclear whether any intentional decision went on at meta. A better analogy would be if someone sent you a bunch of CSAM, it went to your spam folder, but then because you have backups enabled the CSAM got replicated to 3 different servers across state lines, and the FBI is charging you with "distributing" CSAM.


PyInstaller-made executables also used to have a habit of getting flagged by security software as malicious (maybe that's why you couldn't run it?) -- apparently, so many malware writers used it that it ruined the party for everyone.

Fortunately, that was only the 32-bit version of Python 2.7. Using 64-bit versions or Python 3 was enough to not get flagged as malicious. I figured that out when I decided I didn't want to teach myself Go just then to deploy something that had worked the day before.


> The most successful exception I've seen are books by Joe Klassen (of I Want My Hat fame)...

If you haven't read it The Dark[1] (his collaboration with Lemony Snicket) is also great; my kids absolutely love the voices I do for the animals in I Want My Hat Back and for the titular Dark.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Bccb-Ribbon-Picture-Awards/dp/03...


In the article, they mention that they are working with the crawling company to be reimbursed for the download costs.

Naming and shaming the company while you're trying to work with them is a real good way to not get what you want.


Seinfeld was "a show about nothing."


I would argue that the fast part isn't optional for web apps (where "transpiling"), but it can be in many other instances.

I write a lot of data-pipeline code in Python that mostly runs once a day. Does it matter if it takes an hour to run instead of five minutes? Not really, as long as it's ready to go for the next run.


It's not necessarily wealth that governs price changes, but access. Anyone with a car and 'enough' money for gas can go to the store across town if it's cheaper, but if a store is isolated enough by geography or neighborhood income level, you'll likely see higher prices.

Case in point: the Kroger in Oxford Ohio (where Miami of Ohio's campus is located) has had remarkably higher prices than other Krogers in the area for as long as I've known. Oxford is 'close' to Cincinnati, but there's enough corn and soybean fields between the two to make the trip a pain.


And that’s why dollar store and similar shops are huge in rural poor America


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