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I've been coding for almost 40 years. Without an Internet connection, my productivity drops by at least 60%.

"Cut and paste fragments from {SO,Github,Gist,.etc} and edit to taste"

Admittedly, I was without internet working from home for a few days, and I found it a very nice experience. Not being able to go to Hacker News while compiling managed to keep me focused and on the flow. When I had to look up stuff I found myself digging in /usr/share/doc to find the reference manuals... in a way it took longer than looking up the answer in Google, but it forced you to better understand the system you are using and build your solution from that understanding, sometimes considering third options that one would have missed when stack overflow already contains a bunch of snippets to copy paste.

Of course, I am idealizing the experience (eventually I really needed internet and ended up going to public libraries to use it)... but like everything, maybe we are getting too used to the instantaneous and forgetting that the alternatives are actually not so bad and sometimes empowering.

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