Knuth versus Email (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Knuth versus Email (1999)

www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu

158 pointsMrXOR157 comments

> Of course, "email" has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émail_(verre)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_(glazuur)

In UK: "How to send an 'E mail'" (1984): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szdbKz5CyhA

Thames TV transmitted programmes over TV audio?! What a wonderful watch, thank you pulse7.

Electronically yours,

There used to be a thing called 'Basicode' [1], one of the first attempts to create a cross-platform language for microcomputers. Basicode consisted of the programming language itself which was a rather limited dialect of BASIC, a number of transcoders from this basicode BASIC dialect to the native BASIC versions for several microcomputers and - which is what made me think of it - a universal audio data transmission standard which was used to transmit Basicode programs over the aether to users. Basicode was started in the Netherlands by the 'Hobbyscooop' radio show but gained popularity elsewhere as well, notably also in the former German Democratic Republic. I still have the original Basicode book somewhere in a box in the barn, along with the Commodore 64 which I used it with. To be honest I quickly got bored with Basicode since the programs received through the radio were rather underwhelming compared to what I could make the thing do myself by programming it in assembly (6502 might be limited but it is a good starting architecture for budding assembly programmers).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE

My first experience with email was the summer of 1984 on the VAX/VMS systems at IIT at a summer institute. That was when I created my first e-zine called Stuff which was mostly gossip about the staff and my fellow high school students. What I remember more than anything else was that I had discovered that putting ^H at the beginning of a line would make the letters of that line print at double height if you printed the file on the line printer.

> people used to write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and ``software''

Along the same vein Paul Allen and Bill Gates started off doing business as “Micro-Soft”. [1]

[1]: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1995... "Fortune, 2 Oct 1995"

My favorite Knuth quote is from his FAQ on being retired[1]

> Being a retired professor is a lot like being an ordinary professor, except that you don't have to write research proposals, administer grants, or sit in committee meetings. Also, you don't get paid.

[1] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html

It's not true, obviously. I have been in DK's office, I have seen him read and write email.

O_o

Which client does he use?

2 bar magnets. He reads emails one iota at a time

> My boss did his PhD at Stanford. The story goes that one day he walked straight into Knuth's office, while he had the door open. Knuth says "Oh dear, I seem to have made a mistake. Could you close the door please?". Boss closes the door. Knuth says "No, from the other side". Source: reddit

I think this was from an episode of The IT Crowd.

Having refuted the central point of this entire essay, why do you think he wrote this in the first place?

As a PR piece for why most email to him goes unanswered?

Like most people who say they're going to quit something he probably just started using it again when he realised it was useful and maybe even essential, and didn't bother to update this webpage. It's been 30 years after all.

> Changed by: Ursula N. Owen, 8-Mar-1999

I was curious about this “Ursula N. Owen”, thinking perhaps she was an assistant of Knuth’s back in the 90s. It turns out that it’s a pseudonym sometimes used by Knuth himself, and is a reference to “U.N. Owen”, a character from And Then There Were None, a best-selling Agatha Christie novel first published in 1939 and one of the best-selling books of all time. The name “UN Owen” itself is a play on “unknown”, and I like to think of Donald chuckling to himself whenever he used that pseudonym.

From the postscript on https://ryanwaggoner.substack.com/p/could-you-delete-your-em...

This was written a while ago. Can we figure out how long ago?

Well, internet archive verifies it existed on the web in 1997.

https://web.archive.org/web/19970526031736/https://www-cs-fa...

Any proof of this?

Uhm, how would he prove that? He probably didn’t take a photo of the occurrence.

A witness is proof, unless you have a specific reason to believe the witness is unreliable.

I met DK when he was visiting my university. So "his" office was the office he was assigned when visiting. He is the most wonderful person you can imagine. He came to my office and he introduced himself in the most affable way. We socialised quite a lot for the duration of his visit. I went into his office because he wanted to show me some proofs on his whiteboard, that he was very excited about. There was a email client on the screen but I didn't pry, I just noticed it.

Also, it is pretty much absurd to believe that someone who is on the faculty of a university, where all business is conducted via email, will not read email.

Basically, what he is saying is that he will not read your email.

Citation needed.

You want a "citation" for someone's personal anecdote?

Over the last three years, I have sent 12 emails to him, at the two addresses mentioned on the page (all were bug reports, as he says that's the only kind of email he accepts). Of these, 11 were processed in the way indicated on the page: several weeks later, I got a reply in my (postal) mailbox, with Knuth's replies in pencil over a printout of my email. For the other one, I got a two-line reply by email, saying thanks and that an updated version had been uploaded. (This was a correction to a section he was writing, that I sent immediately after a talk he gave about it. Interestingly, the "from" address on the email was that of his secretary—who comes in once a week AFAIK—but signed "-- Don".)

So I think the content on this page is still substantially true, with rare exceptions.

UPDATE1: Don has an email address: taocp (at) cs.stanford.edu

UPDATE2: How the World’s Most Famous Computer Scientist Checks E-mail Only Once Every Three Months:

https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2008/07/17/bonus-post-how-th...

I find past discussion of this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11461077

Neal Stephenson vs Email or Why I Am a Sociomediapath?

https://www.nealstephenson.com/social-media.html https://www.nealstephenson.com/contact.html

Good Links to read more:

https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-email-making-professors...

https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2008/07/02/e-mail-zero-imagi...

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/was-e-ma...

I had a few exchanges with DEK back in the 80s. Even then he had his secretary filtering his e-mail and if a response was warranted, she would request a postal address so he could send his answer handwritten on a printout of the e-mail. I still have those answers in a box along with other correspondence from the era.

The intensely loyal Phyllis Winkler. You couldn’t even get into DEK’s office without going through hers, which I think was a unique arrangement in Margaret Jacks Hall.

I also had a few such exchanges (mine would have been at the end of the 80s or early 90s, I think) -- by snail-mail in both directions. His replies came in envelopes addressed to me as "Dr. ..." or even once as "Prof. ...", which I found pleasantly amusing, as I hadn't actually graduated from anywhere, let alone reached such exalted heights.

(His usual form of reply, as I recall it, would be a note pencilled on a copy of my letter.)

I often got email addressed to Prof. Hosek or Dr. Hosek when I was in undergrad courtesy of my activity in the TeX world. I don't think I've gotten any such misattribution once after actually getting a degree, even when I was teaching college as an adjunct.

For people not DEK tempted to try this approach, consider the implications of http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1446 .

On the other hand, I do have a friend who, while he was Dean, had his email on three day delay. The theory: only those problems which were still problems after 72 hours were worth addressing at a super-departmental level.

> while he was Dean, had his email on three day delay.

I'm a professor. I can't help but think that this is a terrible idea.

As Dean, it is your job to enable the faculty members and department chairs who report to you. To figure out what obstacles they face, and remove them when possible. To figure out who is doing good work -- especially of the sort that goes unnoticed. To sort through requests for money and other resources, and to figure out who will put these resources to good use.

In other words, the same as any manager at any organization.

If it's important enough to not tolerate a 72-hour delay, email is a completely inappropriate medium through which it should be communicated. A competent worker would certainly be aware of that.

The medium is part of the message. Avoid sending the wrong message.

If you don't want to use email, fine. But this is work, not your personal jollies. I'm sure this guy would have pitched a fit if the people below him decided not to see him in person until they ran 3 laps around the building, or whatever ridiculous requirement they dreamt up.

What would the proper way be?

If it's urgent, drop a call.

Of course, plenty of people here would toss a fit if someone were to call their phone. It's also worth noting that your perceived crisis may not be my crisis.

There is a clear heirarchy of media ordered by immediacy. - face-to-face - phone call - text messaging (through whatever: SMS, IRC, message flavour of the month...) - email - longhand on stationery

Note that immediacy and importance are orthogonal.

There is no contradiction there. You still will be solving problems and enabling, just with some low-pass filter in front. Which is (mostly) good. Less noice, higher the quality.

The amount of connectedness is a spectrum. DK [1] is at one extreme end of the spectrum, the other end is getting a notification at any time of the day or night when you get an email and immediately reading it.

We all have different jobs, and all jobs require different amounts of connectedness. But if you want, you can move slowly towards DK's end of the spectrum. I don't have email on my phone, for instance. While inconvenient sometimes, the benefits outweigh the costs. And when I want to do deep work, I close Thunderbird.

[1] Such appropriate initials.

Lex Fridman had an interesting interview with Don Knuth close to his 82nd birthday[0]. It's fascinating to learn how much energy he still spends at verifying and investigating each aspect of newly published algorithms. E-mail would probably cut away too much time from what he considers more important.

[0]: https://youtu.be/2BdBfsXbST8

typo: "Email would probably..." ;)

This freedom seems directly tied to where you are on the totem pole..

The man has spent a lifetime getting there. You could, too.

Interesting. I remember having written an email to Donald Knuth about 15 years ago. And, surprise surprise, I got a reply! In retrospect, my question was extremely naive. However, I am still thankful for a honest answer.

I always found it hilarious that this guy was fed up with email 5 fucking years before the first machine was connected to Internet in my Central European country.

That sounds a little surprising to me. Are you sure that weren't even any government or university machines online before early 1995?

All I'm trying to say is that Internet (Both web and email and others) has gotten way more hostile since then.

why is this down voted? It is just a fact.

Those were the good day of Email. Pine or Elm all the way on Unix account on uni work stations only.

"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

- William Gibson

Your comment adds a funny twist to this well-known quote. Usually it's said in the context of "someone has cool high-tech stuff that other people don't have." But the reverse is true, too; the Sentinel Islanders [1] have so far avoided the "future" of managing your inbox.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island

I wonder what Knuth thinks of Slack and instant messaging then!

Emails feels pretty low pressure to me. I don't need to answer it today -- or, in some cases, ever -- whereas Slack and similar messaging systems come with the expectation that you must answer ASAP. Surely you've seen the message, why aren't you typing an answer yet? It's very high pressure.

I love email. Every attempt at replacing it with something "better" upsets me.

I honestly thought of doing a blog post where I take these words and replace email with Slack. I have issues with email that my PM is trying hard to get me to delegate more to her and others so I can focus on the higher value work. Slack I actually am on the verge of hating. Especially when every client wants to communicate via their private Slack instead of much saner email and GitHub issues. The worst thing about Slack is the non-federated nature of it. It is practically impossible when you work with more than a dozen startups and other organizations all who have their own.

I’m picturing you printing out Slack messages, jotting down your responses, and sending them back by snail mail.

For many open source contributors and maintainers, it's always not an option to "be on the bottom of things".

Patches (for some projects) flow via e-mail.

So there's some decent amount of "being on top of things". Not at the rate of "I need to feverishly refresh my Inbox every 2 minutes", but "I ought process these patches/designs/bug e-mails at some sane rate that doesn't drive me bonkers". (Which can be done effectively with venerable tools like Mutt, et al; refer to the recent thread on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676 – "Mutt email client 25 years old")

This is just saying the boring truth that there's different kind of e-mail—the draining, unproductive long threads that don't go anywhere and the "get the work done"-style patches/designs/bug work e-mails.

Oh how I wish I sometimes had the choice to be on the bottom of things. :-)

Though I sometimes do get pretty close to disconnecting myself if I have some difficult or urgent task, and on vacation of course. If the world around us cannot survive with us leaving for a week or two, there's a problem on both sides!

I hear you. :-) I never cease to be amazed at how seasoned maintainers like you handle the sheer volume of public email, while continuing to stay effective over the years, healthy disconnection, and setting an example to emulate on how to conduct oneself in public.

(On the problem you refer to, some of us here will recognise that well-meaning FOSS developer who starts getting anxious to take a two-week vacation with the family because "there's no one else who is able to process the core pull requests" for their project.)

This approach certainly gets rid of a lot of unnecessary communication. It is like a special spam filter. Not many people will go through with writing a real letter. For most requests it's probably not worth it for them. Et voila... filtered.

If you don't need anyone reaching you this seems like a good strategy.

Ok. Well, I guess ‘social media’ is a nonstarter for him.

OTOH, maybe his insight says something about our addiction to social media. He has a real life and the rest of us have less of it. Who knew that computer scientists could craft a tool that Could steal our lives.

> `I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.' --- Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker

Loved this quote from Umberto Eco. RIP. (died in 2016)

Makes me question my own habits: compulsive checking of email/Slack has really become the norm. On the one hand, as a manager, I want to be available to my team if they have any questions. On the other hand, a barrage of notifications and interruptions makes it hard to get focused deep work done.

There would be less spam if sending it had an actual cost.

Perhaps we should just add a (small) price to sending email?

Bill Gates had a proposal like that, back in the mid 90s if I recall correctly.

> Perhaps we should just add a (small) price to sending email?

Might work better if the fee is returned unless the recipient explicitly rejects payment within some set time window (which might be automated by or for the recipient, e.g., as part of a spam filter.)

There were attempts to introduce computing costs required to deliver a message.

Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam. Bitmessage uses proof of work to combat spam as well. Though those approaches do not seem to be popular.

My guess is that spammers can operate at scale, rent or buy GPUs, may be even build ASICs. So they'll have very cheap work. While ordinary person will use some cheap 5-year old Android phone which would spend a lot of time and battery to compute that kind of work.

It might reduce amount of extremely low-quality spam. But I guess that kind of spam is easily detectable by something like default spamassassin setup anyway.

I'm not a fan of solutions that require energy to be wasted. At least with normal payments, total value is conserved.

This isn't unlike SMTP tarpitting. No monies are exchanged, but a cost incurred.

Human curated email that sounds like the perfect startup.

I wonder whether he owns a smartphone now and if is is using it for personal communication with his family.

Not everyone in tech has a smartphone. I know a fairly senior manager at a well-known Silicon Valley company who only got one when he joined that company and they gave him one he needed to use for work.

Well, he only gets to do this because he's achieved some measure of success in his life, right? I dare others not so distinguished to try and reproduce his approach.

I generally don't reply to unsolicited email, giving up on billions of dollars in inheritance money from my Nigerian relatives.

If I can do it, so can you.

I would take a middle of the road approach and say that you should be incredibly sparing with who you give your email and maybe have a custom spam filter so you only get a few really important emails per month.

I've had decent success establishing in my workplace that I check email in batches a few times a day.

If you want me immediately, call me, message me, or walk over to me (well, pre-COVID, anyway).

I'm confident I'm not as distinguished or successful as Donald Knuth.

It's easy not to have email if you have a secretary who filters and prints out the incoming messages for you.

I guess he never orders anything on the net, doesn't use any online services, because those usually require an email address where the receipts and acknowledgements are sent.

I imagine one day we'll all have digital personal assistants who can do this, so having a secretary shouldn't be a barrier eventually.

My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them.

> personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them.

The more worrying fact to me, is not MegaCorp will be providing it, but that it's possible that self-hosting would be technologically infeasible. That is, even if MegaCorp gives you a free and open copy of personal assistant, it's still not practical run it on your own hardware - massive computing power and storage is required to operate it, and massive data is needed to train (and continue to train) the machine learning model. Only MegaCorp can afford to run it, and provide it as a service.

This has already happened in web search, content recommendation, speech recognition, machine translation, and many more applications. It's simply impossible to run your own speech recognition or machine translation package that has a comparable quality to Google's.

And these technologies will eventually become an integral part of life in a future society - e.g. When you must use machine translation or personal assistant in your daily life, and when only MegaCorp can provide a high-quality solution, it's a recipe of disaster. It's Ghost in the Shell.

Unfortunately, I'm definitely seeing it as a very likely outcome.

The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law - which is, fortunately, not entirely impossible if alternative computing technologies are developed in the future. But still, there's still the ML training problem.

> The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law

No, economies of scale will always result in some services being cheaper to centralize.

I think the same will happen with 3D printing and solar panels. No matter how cheap they get, it's always even cheaper for the power company to build a huge solar farm, or for me to order a printed part online and have it shipped. (For small batches anyway)

Services like search and speech recognition and translation that benefit from having large datasets to work with, also need fast Internet connections to keep that data updated.

So in 2020 my $100 might buy as much CPU as Google's $80, but it only buys as much network transfer as Google's $10.

The ratio is probably worse if you consider that self-hosted or even federated search means all the web scraping has to be replicated to 100x or 1,000x more databases than Google has to manage even with their CDNs. Redundancy is not free.

I want it to work too, but I don't think centralization is a technical problem with a technical solution. We're fighting uphill against a law of economics. Not even capitalism, either, economics itself as a law of nature.

>> The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law

> services being cheaper to centralize.

You are talking about its relative cost, while I'm talking about the mere possibility.

Back in the early 80s, having a personal workstation (not a home computer) to process private information was nearly an impossibility, not simply because it's cheaper to centralize but because it's technologically prohibitive. Even in the early 90s, I still read stories about how a hacker in a crypto community needed to import his private key every time he comes to work in the morning to read some personal messages, and to remove it again at the end of the day. The server could not be trusted and there was no alternative.

And today, everyone uses Gmail and the same privacy problem is still here - the server can't be trusted, but at least, if you are personally willing to spend some money and energy on your project, it's possible to host your own. It'll never be mainstream, yes, but it's possible and Moore's Law enabled it.

Maching translation, or personal assistant, on the other hand, now resembles a "personal-workstation-in-the-80s" problem. If computing power continues to advance according to Moore's Law, at least it's going to be a "Gmail-in-the-20s" problem after a decade or two.

> We're fighting uphill against a law of economics.

Moore's Law and personal computing, regardless of how sufficient or insufficient, is historically a balancing force. If this force continues to act upon, the level of centralization of future software applications will still be imaginable to us.

But if it ceases to exist, things will become much worse.

That is all I wanted to say.

> This has already happened in web search, content recommendation, speech recognition, machine translation, and many more applications. It's simply impossible to run your own speech recognition or machine translation package that has a comparable quality to Google's.

I don't really agree with that. All of these things can be done on your own machine, and generally comparably or even in a superior fashion to Google. Bear in mind that Google has to focus on a very long tail of "serving every single user", whereas your software has to serve you.

This means your speech recognition needs to support your speech, not the speech of every accent and dialect on earth. Your content recommendation can be limited to types of content that are even peripherally of interest to you, and likely in a limited subset of languages.

Basically any amount of data and processing Google needs to do something for everyone, you can massively subset for just yourself. The biggest issue is that most of the data and code that companies like Google are using is proprietary, so good luck getting a copy to run.

Good counterpoint. So far I don't have any new idea to add to this discussion, all I can do is upvoting.

Just a quick response here:

> This means your speech recognition needs to support your speech, not the speech of every accent and dialect on earth.

What about machine translation? I don't need French, German, or Russian translation, until the day I need it... Hypothetically, combining it with speech recognition, it will create a perfect platform for wiretapping conversations.

I'm not inherently opposed to bouncing out to someone else's service when you need something you didn't expect. If you suddenly need to translate Russian, use a service maybe, and then start up running a Russian->English service on your own hardware if you expect to need it frequently going forwards.

Apple does their speech to text entirely on-device for phones (I just did a quick dictation test in airplane mode to verify. I think the watch offloads the process to the phone). It astonishes me just how much computing power is in my pocket.

And the next version supposedly is getting its own offline abilities now.

> My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them.

That's all but guaranteed if it's any time in the next decade or so.

> My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them.

My worry is built on your worry; I worry that people won't even think of using their self control to say no to this, but will wait breathless for some third party to save them from their own bad decisions.

I have been fantasizing over these virtual assistants since I played the Megaman Battle Network games.

I've spent many hours playing AI Dungeon, a text adventure game powered by GPT-3 (unlocking it requires payment). You input an arbitrary body of text, and GPT-3 keeps writing the story for you. You press enter, and the AI writes a new line. There are some serious limitations, but still, sometimes the plots are surprisingly creatively, as if the characters are alive, and I couldn't wait to see what follows it (it's rate-limited).

I always think Machine Learning is merely a useful and flexible pattern recognition machine that can be trained, anything beyond that is all media hype and marketing, there's nothing to see here.

Now my opinion has changed - if a pattern recognition machine that contains no breakthrough (GPT-3) can be surprisingly intelligent if you throw a lot of data to it, any new development cannot be worse than that. I'm now a true believer on the feasibility of AI assistants.

I’m curious how you can be “playing” this for hours and hours. Isn’t AI Dungeon mostly just a toy, not a real game? There isn’t any goal, there’s nothing to figure out, there isn’t even a coherent state that I’m aware of.

And that’s why I disagree with the claim that GPT-3 is in any way intelligent. It’s a chameleon. Or a Chinese room [1].

I think to have real intelligence you need a model for reality, not just a language model. Otherwise you can do nothing more than parrot and remix the words of others. Parrots are entertaining companions though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

It's not like a video game, but it's not a toy either. To get good results you have to direct it and be mindful of its limitations, but if you're willing to approach it as a human-assisted story building application rather than a game, it's easy to put some hours into.

It's hard to have such a secretary and printing opportunities nowadays. In academia across Europe, I am hearing complaints that department secretaries are overworked or reduced to part-time status (even as the number of administrative personnel elsewhere in the uni is ballooning), and printing is limited by quotas after which soon one has to start paying out of pocket for printouts. Even grayhaired tenured faculty are feeling the pinch.

What does cause it, some green-eco-pressure or a bare underbudget reason?

Mixture of all of it.

On the one hand, university is changing a lot in Europe with less funding from governments and more and more fundraising from private companies.

Then there's the point that some professors (or universities at all) really have to leave their ivory towers. Cutting their funding (or secretaries) works wonders in getting those people to move and care about things again.

Then there's the point that one should really ask what needs to be printed and what not. My university life/education fits on a USB-drive and three file folders with notes I made. I know students who have a whole wall filled with folders. Did they really need to copy whole books and whatnot? I doubt it.

At last there's some ecological considerations, too. But that's not really forced, it's more a "nice to have" for the image of the university...

I used to run network printing for a 35,000 student university in the US. For some reason, the administration insisted that ICT provide printers free of charge to departments. When I started, we had 1 printer per 3 full time employees and the average student printed 150 pages per semester. Some students and faculty printed entire textbooks. Each page cost $0.03 all-in. When ICT funding was easy, eating the $350,000/year didn't matter as much, but when state appropriations dried up...well, print cards, quotas, and penny pinching became the norm.

I used to teach the TeX User Group LaTeX classes around 1989–93. The students were almost entirely math department secretaries who were charged with typing up professors' handwritten manuscripts. When I did a couple rounds of grad school in 2002–6, both unis had a department secretary but they worked strictly administrative tasks for the department as a whole (and to a lesser extent for the department chair). There wasn't a prof who didn't do their own typing.

I agree. I fear people look at this situation in a different light than say the current president of the United States who, while he does have an email address, admittely does not write emails or read them directly. Knuth is admired and this is a pleasant quirk; the POTUS appears an old, out-of-touch dinosaur.

I'm not judging either; my initial thoughts were just of the different perceptions for similar unique and rare circumstances.

I think he explains pretty clearly up front why his job makes this circumstance appropriate - on the bottom of things. I can’t think of anyone who should be more on top of things than a president.

And there is barely worse way to stay on top of things than email.

I wouldn’t agree. It’s the best communication format for someone who wants to control their own time and attention.

While I greatly admire Knuth, I've never thought he wasn't a dinosaur. I don't look down on my grandmother for being confused when she's trying to use email, and I don't look down on Knuth for abandoning it in the 90s.

I guess it comes down to whether you think technological dinosaur is an insult or an observation.

It seems that the current POTUS knows how to use Twitter directly, which is probably generally considered more modern and "in-touch" than email. Maybe, then, the perception of him that you described wouldn't be based on the technology he uses to communicate.

It was 1990. No one was really ordering stuff over the internet yet. Commercial commerce was still sort of a taboo since, by and large, it was funded by public research monies.

Now? He probably has some webmail account so he can sign up for online banking, utility accounts, and all the other mundane stuff people do online which would have been science fiction back then.

Even in the early 90s, there was debate about whether it was acceptable to include an advertising tagline in your signature on Usenet posts.

The secretary does all of that, I'd guess.

What's an email?

An old-schooler printing out his emails... Why is this upvoted?

"I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.'"

This is my goal. Avoiding unnecessary stress and interruptions is a bigger goal for me than creating more wealth.

It's not an age thing though. I'm 37. I still happily communicate with other people, but ideally it's only when I make or take the time for it. That's why I worked from home, in a rural area, trying to get to 100% 'passive' income by the end of 2021.

What type of passive income are you aiming for?

I don't want to put all my eggs in one basket, so I am growing income streams from subscriptions, ads and affiliate partnerships. I target niches without a lot of competition. The amount of customer support is negligible, customers are happy and everything is automated, apart from invoicing.

"I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages."

An object unable to receive messages is soon marked for garbage collection.

Let's just say I prefer polling to pushing.

He's not unable to receive messages, he just uses a niche messaging protocol that's openly hostile to automation.

I have reached that age.

Oh, I get sent a lot of messages. What I receive is a different story.

Similar age to you (40) and I've noticed as I've gotten older that distractions are vastly more costly for me.

Til recently I was in an open office, gone 100% remote again (new role starts in a few weeks) and beyond working in an environment I control the thing I am most looking forwards to is the ability to control the distractions and environment (other than the furry ninja's at least).

I think what Knuth means here is that he has consumed enough information in his life that he has now stopped consuming any more of it and is only generating new information instead.

Could be. The quote was from Umberto Eco though.

What a waste of trees.

I don't understand this, can't we just grow more trees? Reading emails is a huge waste of time and I don't see how we can produce much more of that, let alone produce more Donald Knuths.

> I don't understand this, can't we just grow more trees?

Sure.

But you also have to transport people to the forests where they grow, operate machines to cut them down and trim them, transport them to pulp mills, use a lot of water to generate the pulp (often add bleach to whiten it), and then distribute the final product. There's also the create of printers and ink/toner.

And once DK has spent 30-60s reading the printout, it gets tossed into (hopefully) the blue pin where more energy is spent trying to recycle it.

And a lot of the energy used is generated from fossil fuels.

And the paper that's sent to landfills breaks down into global warming-worsening gases.

Let’s ban wrapping paper

Reply on news.ycombinator.com