People who can't give up paper | Hacker News Reader

People who can't give up paper

bbc.com

143 pointsluigi23161 comments

I've worked in tech as a software engineer developing web applications for 25 years and I'm one of these people.

For note taking, I prefer pen and paper. For diagramming and brainstorming, I prefer a physical whiteboard. For non-work related scheduling, I prefer marking things on the physical calendar hanging on my wall... or sometimes I'll reach for a post-it note.

For bills, I prefer that my company mail me a paper bill. Especially if accessing the e-bill requires me to have an account with a web app and enable MFA and change my password every 90 days and always have Okta give me problems when I want to check my bill and thus need to jump through these hoops those whopping 12 times per year that I need this information.

Maybe it's because I see how the sausage is made. Maybe it's because I use some sort of eletronic device all day for work. But the last thing I want to do when I need to jot something down quickly is reach for a phone or a laptop. Heck, most of the time I don't even remember (or care) where I left my phone.

Same, iOS developer here. Maybe if software were treated less like fashion that had to constantly be updated, resulting in a neverending revolving door of bugs and new waves of learning curves, and instead like a focused tool, it could catch up more to paper.

There are absolutely benefits to software over paper but they feel hamstrung by the constant desire to roll out the next UI paradigm. Sooner or later the set of constraints between device, OS and app versions forces an upgrade. Security updates should be the only reason to even hint at that possibility IMO.

Maybe I’m just too close to the problem. If I squint enough I can see how a pen running out of ink is like an app crash, and replacing the pen/ink has a real, nonzero environmental cost. I’m not sure how to amortize the costs of device manufacture and software development across all bugs, and compare that to the costs/benefits of pen and paper. There is some shade of rose on my glasses, no doubt.

I need more information, but I sense it’s not the kind of information that is important to many people, and especially corporations, to gather.

> If I squint enough I can see how a pen running out of ink is like an app crash

Interesting analogy. I think a closer analogy to a pen running out of ink and having to grab another pen, is a laptop battery running low and having to be plugged in.

I feel it's also a scaling issue: If you wanted to do all of the digital bookkeeping of today on paper, that would be perhaps impossible. I don't think personal note-taking is in any way a large contribution to paper use.

I do art on paper and even I don't go through 500 pages in a year. It's at work, things like 60 page reports that need to be printed for submission (and then get printed 2x or 3x again because you can replicate it).

The ease of printing documents is the culprit, you can just replicate large physical artifacts again and again. You can't do that with your personal notes that probably only exist as unique artifacts and maybe get scanned into a digital archive.

I'm in the same situation as you. Though I think the major factor is that the physicality of handwriting the notes helps me.

Paper just works. Whether it's for notes, menus, or voting, paper has a lot of really desirable properties: it's cheap, easily understood, minimal room for external dependencies or BS.

The moment you introduce software and internet connectivity is the moment you invite fragility and inscrutability.

Amazon removing 1984 on people's kindles all the way back in 2009 was a wake-up call. Digital media/content is open to revision in a way that physical media/content is not.

I have swung back around and now buy many physical books/blurays/etc for things I really love or think are important because my faith that companies/govt won't decide I cant have that version anymore is very low.

The security properties are also really really different, and really intuitive, and quite strong too: if you have physical possession you have total access, otherwise none at all.

With a computing device, only if you are certain there is no wifi/bluetooth/cellular/etc hardware inside the device, can you have a similar trust. And the days are rapidly coming when there's no such thing as a device without such hardware, not even a watch.

With computing devices, you do get the ability to encrypt data at rest, so for example, a locked physical paper diary is less secure in that sense than an encrypted text file. But the possible number of actors that would attempt to break the security for a physical paper document is much lower, only whoever is nearby, not everyone on the entire internet.

If I had something I really didn't want to get out, these days, I'd be much more likely to recommend the use of a notebook in a safe than an encrypted file on a laptop or phone or something. It doesn't matter how encrypted it is if my device gets compromised.

(If it had to be electronic, it'd be a laptop with no working networking hardware, in a safe.)

ChangeLog - Paper - Sept 2023

Good news everyone, Paper supports MSPen 2.3.4.5.3.2...., GPen 1.10.1.0.11 "Lumpsucker", iPen 4.2.0 (8 new colors!), and the AmaWEbLumberPen (AWELP)

We're happy to report we've solved the issue of Paper randomly vanishing from your house, and reappearing on your roof.

Security exploits with D4r|<9@nc1l and Y+e()v+ have been discovered, and we're working on a fix. In the meantime, please update your Paper password (remember not to write it down)

Minor issues with Paper flickering (and in a limited user group causing epilepsy seizures and incontinence) have been mitigated.

We're aware of Paper occasionally causing i#Desk models to collapse, and working to close the loop.

We're also happy to report we've been sold to ShredderCo.! Congratulations to the team for going the extra mile, and we expect a bright future in their exciting and challenging area of business.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/16hqcly/good_news_ev...

"..the simplest thing that works but not any simpler"

Pencil and paper is also excellent for doing math. Get all the distractions out of the way and it’s just you and the problem you’re working on. Figure it out with a pencil and paper and then go to the computer to write the code to implement the algorithm or calculate the result from the equation you derived or whatever else you were doing. Too many kids have such negative experiences with math in school that they never want to touch a pencil and paper again after they graduate. To me, that’s a real tragedy.

I just love the smell of a freshly sharpened pencil made with good quality wood and the feel of it gliding across the paper. There’s a friction and give to it that you can’t get with a touch screen made of hard glass. No matter how good the stylus or what coating you put on the screen, it’ll never have the (cushiony, slightly rough but smooth) feel of a good writing pad or notebook.

And of course it’s fairly easy to digitize your handwritten scribbles, if that’s what you want to do. I just use a scanner app on my phone and take a picture. The app detects the borders of the page and corrects the geometry automatically. I also have it convert the colours down to 1-bit for maximum contrast and to get the background solid white. But that’s only when I need to send it somewhere, otherwise I don’t bother scanning.

I'm the same, I think it's literally because I used pen and paper all day in school and that's just what I'm used to.

Ditto.

Hate is a strong word, and I hate typing on phones or tablets by trying to hit small shapes behind glass with the tips of my fingers.

I like the feel of pencils, particularly softer ones like 2B, 3B, or 4B, on paper, preferably those with texture like recycled brown paper that is often used as a tablecloth in Italian trattorias, the good ones, that aren’t too expensive.

The smell of pencil lead and paper and the sound that a pencil marking paper makes both help me absorb and remember things.

Betty Edwards wrote Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and Frank R. Wilson wrote The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. Both warmly recommended.

Writing uses a broader range of your brain, as the information goes through more circuits as you process language to writing. Typing is somehow less mentally involved. There was a study comparing students typing, recording or writing during the lecture, the written notes cohort supposedly learned the best.

Throwing another anecdotal example: Everyone in the gym looks at me like I’m twice my age jotting down my lifts in my notebook. It’s so much less stressful than navigating BS mobile UI stat entry between sets. I say that as someone who develops mobile UI on a daily basis. It’s hard to mistype with a pen.

Pen and paper doesn't have many failure modes. Put it in a fireproof safe, and it will outlive most digital media. No hacker in a foreign country will steal it, no one will encrypt it, no cloud provider will lose it, and no government will read it, no SSD will byte-rot it. There's really not much to be said against pen and paper.

Indeed. I have family books from the 1800s and photo albums from the early 1900s. Zero effort was put into preserving these, they were just left on a shelf, occasionally moving from generation to generation.

Except for the most obsessive & technically skilled archivists, nobody will have any photos/documents from today in 100-150 years.

Fireproof safe's, aren't. A thief could steal it out of your house, you can't access it on the go, it'll get water damaged and mold and rot. The ink will fade. You won't have a drive to read the floppy disk/CD-rom/DVD/USB-A flash drive. You can't grep it and unless you meticulously organize it, it's a jumbled pile of unopened envelopes. Cloud and digital isn't the be all and end all, but there are plenty of problems with paper.

Eventually, but all those are likely less likely than the electronic degradation. That said, keeping paper organized is hard.

> you can't access it on the go

You can to the same extent that you can access a smart phone on the go. You just have to remember to bring it with you. Given how often I "forget" my smart phone at home, the "access anywhere" isn't a huge selling feature for most things to me. While I do use web-based email, I tend to prefer things like paper tickets for events and paper receipts because I actually find them to be more convenient than digital. This is because having to have a smart phone with me at all times that could get lost, stolen, damaged, malfunction etc. and is a single point of failure in the event thereof is the polar opposite of my definition of convenience.

No one has made the argument that paper is without problems. Only that it has way fewer problems than digital. That, and that the businesses and shills that are trying to force digital-everything are evil monsters that belong in the same rung of hell typically reserved for murderers and people who talk at movie theatres.

That seems like a personal problem.

And yet for thousands of years we managed just fine with paper & ink.

Engraving things in [hard] stone is the winning technology. When we chose to use anything less the information cant be very important.

Mold is a failure mode for floppy disks and water is a failure mode for many electronic storage media or the tools we use to read them.

I suspect that many people associate durability with electronic media simply because it becomes obsolete so rapidly that we don't experience it in the same way. We don't know whether that dusty floppy disk or CD-R is readable since we disposed of our last computer with a drive, or we associate the failure of a flash drive with a cheap drive rather than the intrinsic properties of the media, or we attribute it to abuse. We rarely have the opportunity to use something until it is worn out, or pick it up after a quarter century in storage.

Modern media is incredibly fragile. The chief advantage it has (in terms of longevity) is its digital nature, in our ability to reproduce it exactly. Yet that is only an advantage if we actively maintain our archives.

One unexpected issue with digital media is changing manufacturing quality and an inability to identify it until it is to late. Early stage floppy disks and CDs actually were pretty reliable but by the tail end so much cost saving had happened in manufacturing they'd turned to crap.

The same thing has happened with flash drives already, how do you identify a good flash drive? If you aren't careful you'll end up with a counterfeit but even the genuine articles have shaky reputations and manufacturers change the internal parts all the time.

I definitely agree with the difficulty in identifying reliable products, and it is made even more difficult due to marketing (e.g. conflating the "quality materials" of the shell with the overall reliability of the product).

That said, such things did happen in the past. Paper is the classic example since the manufacturing process affected its longevity, yet many other materials are graded based upon their properties.

> I suspect that many people associate durability with electronic media simply because it becomes obsolete so rapidly that we don't experience it in the same way.

Or probably because paper or other media has already stood the trial of time, there are some papyrus dating around 2500BC that’s more than 4000 years ago, now think if any of the tools needed for current media will be available 4000 years from now.

Modern paper will disintegrate over time, something with acid.

And no need for it. I don't think I have any books printed in the first half of the 20th century with yellowing pages. That's not the case with certain publishers in the recent past who, I guess, have gone for cheap printing options.

Most printer-paper you can buy in a shop is acid-free. I still have high-school printouts from 20 years ago that show no signs of degradation. I don't think any of my own digital assets have survived from 2003 — granted I was a teenager at the time, so I did not engage in the greatest archival practices. But see the comment above: all you need to preserve paper is to make sure it doesn't get damaged, and simply eyeballing it will confirm whether or not it has.

I think this depends on lifestyle. I know that if there's vital information on a piece of paper I need to photograph it (or type it up) and email it to myself because the paper will be lost/destroyed before too long. I could invest in a fireproof safe but it'd be another thing to move and take up space which I don't have a huge amount of. Something emailed to multiple email providers and copies stored in Dropbox, etc is unlikely to lost.

And when you're dealing with a high quantity of information, good luck searching through thousands of sheets of paper for something.

Same. I have tried a few tools but none beat taking notes on paper.

You immediately get to mix text, tables and pictures. You can do it however you want. You can arrange it however you want.

Nothing beats this. Digital tools might be good at organizing old notes but I feel it is not necessary most of the time.

I have found the physical act of writing, and this is borne out by research, helps me retain what I have just taken down.

> Maybe it's because I see how the sausage is made.

I feel the same, only without the maybe.

It just struck me that taking a picture of the white board and sending it to the printer would add up to acceptable use of technology. I have no idea why I never thought of that before. It seems actually nice to uses. (provided you delete the picture from drives, clouds, backups and trashcans)

I'm with you except for the bills. Incoming physical mail is hard (for me) to deal with. Also, most things are set up through my bank to auto-pay. I check the first of the month what's going on.

MIT is starting up a design center to be located in the old Metropolitan Warehouse. One of the directors on the engineering faculty has done a lot of research on how designers work, especially early stage design. When the center was profiled in Tech Review last year, she noted that sketching (including on paper) still has a role to play:

Among other things, Yang has found that the very existence of those visual representations matters greatly: designers who do even basic, preliminary sketching consistently generate more design ideas. As she and a coauthor wrote in a 2007 paper, there is “an important interplay between a designer’s ability to sketch and their ability to visualize in their heads or through prototypes.” She has even found that if designers aren’t highly skilled at drawing, that doesn’t affect the quality of their final design outcomes; it just matters that they draw at all.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1063906/design-c...

Whiteboarding also falls into this realm ... not paper, but it enables the act of sketching without a digital intermediary.

People have been trained to fetishize "new" technology and dump on "old" technology. Frankly put: new is not always better. A technology is just a technology, and "new" technologies almost always introduce regressions along with whatever benefits the they bring.

For instance: paper documents are generally more robust/reliable (as a practical matter), easily attached to physical items, and easier to annotate than any kind of digital document. Digital input methods are usually pretty awful, especially when you don't have the luxury of fumbling around for a few seconds (or more) with each input.

IMHO, any reasonable-aware tech professional should be able to understand that. Especially given how frequently computer technology objectively sucks.

I think paper probably really does have value for mental retention, but digital is so convenient it's easy to totally forget paper is a thing.

Paper is easier to annotate, but if you didn't grow up with lots of paper, you don't notice, because annotating isn't something you think about, you mostly think in terms of quoting and leaving a comment.

The medium shapes your thinking, and the stuff that's hard to do on paper doesn't really occur to you as something you'd want to do, unless you're deeply familiar with it. Just like any technology.

Perhaps that's the big benefit, adding more variety of ways of thinking.

> Paper is easier to annotate, but if you didn't grow up with lots of paper, you don't notice, because annotating isn't something you think about, you mostly think in terms of quoting and leaving a comment.

In other words, people can be fine with worse because they don't know better.

One of the things that should be a deep embarrassment to the technology industry is its failure to replicate some of the strengths of paper and make them ubiquitous across platforms. Things actually seem to be settling for a lowest-common-denominator that's getting ever lower (e.g. people regularly resort to screenshotting text in 2023).

> Perhaps that's the big benefit, adding more variety of ways of thinking.

One of the strengths of paper is its flexibility: you can make pretty much any mark you want, not just marks approved and implemented by some 3rd party. You seem to be describing a situation where technical limitations (of digital systems) are so ingrained in people's thought processes that they have trouble thinking outside the little box they've been given.

Years ago I said something along these lines to the CTO of Novell and didn’t get a very satisfactory response.

I do think shared collaborative documents have filled a bigger void than many expected. But I still feel the current situation is unsatisfactory.

I think you pretty much have it spot on. Digital is the like another dialect of language that people think in.

The paradigm is "I can very, very, easily make this set of marks, and I'm gonna build my process around them" rather than "I can make any mark I want and I'll spend the time to figure out exactly what marks and what process to use".

It's incredibly easy and convenient, since it's all a prepackaged process with really only one medium, linear text, that only needs a tiny fraction of the skill... but we probably are losing something in the process.

I never got into paper or handwriting, and gave up on drawing pretty quick after discovering how much harder it is than I expected, so I never really felt anything missing from paper when moving to digital, but thinking more about it, I definitely do think the tech shapes my thoughts pretty heavily, ideas that are hard to express with current tech rarely occur to me, if I'm designing something physical I'll probably be thinking in the 2.5D way that you do with CAD without really understanding 3D structures, etc.

I tried to get into paper notetaking for quite a while(but found the level of attention to each letter needed to be kind of exhausting) and I tried to learn art drawing, but I never really paid much attention to or thought about the idea of trying to get into any kind of sketching or diagramming on paper, it's not as heavily talked about as text notetaking, perhaps I should try as an experiment.

>One of the things that should be a deep embarrassment to the technology industry is its failure to replicate some of the strengths of paper and make them ubiquitous across platforms. Things actually seem to be settling for a lowest-common-denominator that's getting ever lower (e.g. people regularly resort to screenshotting text in 2023).

This lack of ubiquity of features happens because proprietary systems aren't interested in supporting other systems' features, because they're competing. It's literally caused by capitalism.

> new is not always better

This is something I eternally argue with so many people. I can't understand this blind assumption that something made more recently is better just because.

Better is better. Something new may or may not be better, need to evaluate. Way too often new means a regression on functionality, which is worse.

Amen.

'"Legacy" is not a pejorative. Do not use it as such.'

http://jdebp.info/FGA/legacy-is-not-a-pejorative.html

> Paper, it seems, still rules the waves.

You'd be crazy to get rid of paper charts on a boat, for the same reason any hiker is instructed to carry a paper map, and the smart ones actually do it. Yeah, the primary system will be GPS, but that system requires a lot of things to be functioning which may not always be functioning. You need a backup, and paper is perfect for that.

There are a ton of situations where it’s really a good idea to have a paper backup. Traveling, especially internationally, and you lose your phone in a taxi? Do you know your itinerary and where you’re staying?

I’m not religious about it for simple trips where I know where I’m staying but I definitely make a printout for anything more complex—but I bet a lot of people don’t.

I was on my first travel trip to Rome, and dropped my phone & damaged it at Amsterdam airport while trying to charge it. All maps, instructions, how to reach hotel, public transportation help, everything was in that phone.

God helped & Rome airport had public computer terminals at airport. Found some scrap paper, & drew the general directions to hotel.

I always carry my (N-1)th phone in my suitcase in case of such an event.

Or for those with true tourist savvy, carry (N-1)th phone as primary in pickpocket public, and your current, flashy, expensive device is your backup instead.

I’m not sure I’m quite that paranoid but I can’t really argue. And already pretty much do it with the computer I travel with—my 8 year old laptop. But eg N-1 probably doesn’t have as good a camera if you do every 3-4 years like me.

With some extended personal travel coming up I’ll definitely think about my strategies.

The onwards, I started carrying a second phone.

I always have paper printout, even if I'm using my smartphone as the main ticketing device. Phones break, cell service isn't 100%, battery could die.

>any hiker is instructed to carry a paper map

The best maps are cloth maps. They are amazing as you can bend those, put over a stone, rain could go over.

Tyvek works fine. But really anything is better than nothing if you know how to use it.

Re: hiking, your comment reminded me of this recent write-up in the Seattle Times. It's hard to imagine serious hikers hitting the trail in the PNW without at least one person in the party carrying the relevant Green Trails paper maps, but I suppose they exist.

https://www.seattletimes.com/life/outdoors/seattle-mapmaker-...

“Your devices aren’t big enough to show you the context at any level of detail that from our point of view would be useful,” he said, citing the possibility of needing to find an escape route in a wildfire. “If you unfold a map, you can see where you are and get a better handle on where you can go.”

Coburn’s stewardship also resulted in the durable quality of today’s Green Trails maps. Made of Polyart tearproof synthetic paper, with special ink to shade topographic relief, and printed at Capitol City Press in Olympia, these maps have a clear selling point: waterproof, solar-powered, no batteries required."

I got lazy about this when moving from Washington to Colorado. Many hours in Colorado are so exposed I can still basically see the car some 8 miles later and 6000 ft up.

Ya, lunacy to do any outdoors without paper map + compass beyond the there-and-back loop where you can still hear car traffic.

Does anyone know how to use a map and compass? I don't think I could outside a city.

Everyone talks about the physical maps, but the bigger issue is without the skill the map is useless, and if you've always had a phone, the true terror of being lost and alone might not enter your mind till you're there.

I guess I'm lucky that I often forget my charger and wind up having no clue where I am and trying to get back by asking directions, I'm well aware of how awful it is to have no idea where you are or what direction you're facing or if you're in the right city!

Sure. I usually just use GPS but I absolutely know how to read a trail map. Orienteering off-trail is a bit rusty but I can absolutely deal with most map and compass navigation.

I do not know anyone serious about the outdoors that does not know how to use a map and compass.

Extremely straightforward to learn.

I hike with a Garmin foretrex, I route plan and land nav when out there with a map. The garmin sanity checks me once in a while.

There is a significant amount of bad stuff that can go very wrong, to start, just bc your Garmin’s altimeter and calibration is bugging out while you mindlessly follow. And when you’re in areas where this matters (ie “can I hear street noise” judgment”), the out of the box technical land navigation tools tend to not work out of the box.

I’ve had an updated and calibrated Garmin put me 5-600m away from where I definitely was via map, compass triangulation and then sanity check with a iPhone b/c the difference really surprised me. 5-600m difference is quite consequential. Mix in Garmin using optionally Glonass (Russian satellites), there’s just a lot of stuff that can go sideways. Easy enough to buy a compass, map protector, local map. Even something like knowing what and how to shoot an emergency azimuth can solve an otherwise crisis situation.

Everyone serious about the outdoors probably does, but lots of more casual people don't. I'm assuming that's how a lot people get lost, because the casual people suddenly decide to try something out of their skill level without knowing it's out of their skill level, because GPS has always hidden their lack of skill.

I don't think just buying a map and compass is a guarantee, for the casual people who don't know what they're doing, and the military has entire navigation classes, seems like it's a real nontrivial skill that you have to actually learn.

Definitely a good idea to learn, but GPS makes it easy to not know how much you don't know.

My current phone's GPS receiver is broken, leaving me with a map and compass, just inside my phone. The Czech countryside is full of marked trails and named points to use for finding your position on a map, so I haven't found navigating very hard. Experience does make it easier, though.

I have a friend who's really into wargames, and I don't mean Catan or Risk. When he moved into his current house he dedicated about 1500 sq ft of his basement (he has a large house) to this hobby where he and his other wargamers will spend months playing a game on a huge map with thousands of pieces - a turn might take several days.

While there are digital versions of this, nothing really matches the broad awareness of the field like just having the 2 meter by 3 meter map stretched out on the play space with all the pieces mid-game. Monitors feel like looking at the world through a straw in this context and the tactile ability to pick up pieces and try out scenarios can't be replicated with a mouse or even touchscreen.

Any technological solution would have to be able to display such a large piece of paper without scrolling, at retina display levels of quality. The closest technology I've seen that sort of "got it" was the early Microsoft cocktail table where you could put phones and controls and such on the screen directly. From those early concept ideas we ended up with the Surface Studio and dial I guess, but it's not a 2x3m retina display with thousands of game pieces, sometimes stacked.

For me personally paper is indispensable as a design tool for sketching out complex systems. I "think" more clearly on paper than I do with any digital tool I've used.

In an aviation context I mostly use an iPad these days (learned to fly long before iPads were a thing) but I carry some backup paper charts. I've had chargers fail mid-trip and the electronic flight bag apps are real power hogs. And that's not to mention the ever-present threat of GPS failure, which is very real.

I'm always fascinated with the folks who still carry paper sectionals.. at any given time in the cockpit Ive got three digital sources of charts that would have to fail, not counting whatever onboard gps I'm flying behind (primary tablet, backup tablet, phone).. I just can't find the point in carrying paper anymore, at least for my risk matrix..

Re: GPS failure, that's orthogonal to the paper argument, since paper doesn't provide GPS either..

I personally am looking forward to the day when paper charts stop being printed! Huge waste of resources that could be better allocated..

"Paper doesn't provide GPS" - spoken like a child of the magenta line! ;)

Paper provides the VOR frequencies and visual navigation info, and approach procedures if you're really in a bind. It's also cheaper than a second tablet.

I'm not sure if you're intentionally misreading my comment. It was in reply to your statement that GPS failure was a "real concern". I simply noted that GPS failure is orthogonal to the paper discussion.

I'm quite happy to use pilotage to navigate, but lugging four sectionals around is a waste of my time and a waste of the FAAs resources to print. My state won the "let's see how annoying we can make these sectional divisions" contest. Just my local flying area is split onto three charts.

You’ll know the value of it when your electronics bork out in a no-fail situation. Or it’s a stress situation and the quick reference chart on paper can be eyeballed while the iPad requires a couple clicks.

It happens eventually.

Three independent electronic devices (two tablets and a phone) running different operating systems would need to fail. And for this to then become an emergency, I would need to be in IMC, also have my onboard installed GPS fail, along with all installed radio equipment.

Short of an EMP event or wildly bad decision making on my part, the risk of this is vanishingly small.

That is usually the response!

From another angle, there’s a lot of hubris in refusing to carry analog backups that are a meaninglessly small addition to a packing list vs their risk benefits… which is the only ultimate job for a pilot.

It takes one oversight to not charge a phone, or it gets cold in the cockpit and battery drops, suddenly you’re down to two systems, risk jumps, odds one fails…

Military pilots still fly with paper charts and darts for a reason.

Military pilots are trained to fly in areas where electronic warfare is commonplace. That's not a risk that needs to be in my risk matrix as a GA pilot.

I personally think it takes a decent chunk of hubris to believe that the likely out-of-date chart that you haven't picked up and actually used in years is going to help you and not impact your airplane control while you find the correct chart and then fold it properly. If we're talking VFR sectionals, I'd need to carry four charts to cover my state -- three, just to cover the area in which I typically fly. Good ole Michigan -- we lost the sectional lottery.

I treat my electronics as required equipment, just like you would apparently treat your sectionals as required equipment. I check their battery level before every flight. If they aren't charged, I don't fly. If I don't have a way to charge them in flight, I don't fly (particularly if IMC is in any way a possibility). If one of them fails during a flight, I seriously consider whether it's safe to continue the flight as planned.

I see paper charts providing a tiny amount of risk mitigation, which is easily outmatched by treating the electronics as an important checklist item and making sure to carry enough redundancy for the mission.

You know who also doesn't carry paper charts anymore? Part 121 airlines. They take risk mitigation pretty seriously.

Yes, you would have to be familiar with the charts, “training” etc.

> I "think" more clearly on paper than I do with any digital tool I've used.

I have no specialist knowledge but my theory is this is at least partly down to the fact that it utilises our highly evolved fine motor control system. Compared to prodding chimpishly at a glass screen, using paper and pens/tools requires a more intricate system of movement and tactile feedback, which implies a more elaborate dance of of neurons and neurotransmitters in the brain and nervous system – and somehow our capacity to "think" is boosted by this extra activity.

Really dislike the “give up” terminology and related digital nudging in group/out group.

Just like I can’t give up:

- paperless billing bc I’d like ironclad proof I’ve paid my mortgage off and have experienced plenty of database failures

- driving without an insurance black box plugged into my car for a few % off my insurance

- cash because it saves the small business a few % points and I’ve (/s) never seen a POS crash and burn before

- paper maps bc you’re completely insane to do outdoors stuff without a paper map and analog compass. When you have the emergency that needs it, you’ll understand.

The best success IT has had is convincing the world that the digital metaphor is as good, No… better! A total replacement! Stop killing the environment paper-man! … than the analog thing.

I have no idea how you can work in and around technology and have this mindset. I get sketched flying on software-defined airplanes these days even. If the scheduling software falls over under load.. I’m sure that implies every other airline software is A+!

The notion that paper letters are more authentic than digital has always confused me. If you can forge a realistic-looking PDF, you can also print it. On the other hand, an email still on Gmail's servers with headers showing its authenticated origin, or a document held in escrow by Docusign, seems like far more rigorous evidence in a hypothetical court dispute. And I'd have my bank statements as corroborating evidence, rather than relying on one company

Ideally, companies would have well-known public keys and sign every PDF they send you. In practice, they don't, but it's not even (feasibly) possible to sign a paper letter, unless we're still counting a printed squiggle as some sort of proof. Holograms and other genuinely hard-to-print marks are presumably very effective against non-sophisticated forgers, but I only see them on a few government documents, not mortgage papers

Also I'm aware that printers print identifying dots, and that is probably the downfall of many amateur forgers, but only because it allows you to find a smoking gun if the document is forged (and the printer was suspected a priori). But I imagine it's a lot harder to use that in the other direction, where a customer wants to prove a document did come from some company, as they'll presumably struggle to get their hands on the signatures of all the company's printers

The use case I’m referring to has:

- a paper letter with an audit trail through the postal system

- a printed out email to include headers that has the customer service rep +1’ing a total loan payment went through

- etc

It’s not an everyday thing but it seems like lunacy to rely on essentially a servicenow queue for any important state change that relies on corporate trust of your actions that took away a revenue stream for them.

> When will they scrunch up and toss away the last page?

When you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Paper is a tool and a good one. It is simple, flexible, and most of all reliable.

You'd be laughed out of the room for suggesting that Wi-Fi connected e-hammers [0] are the way of the future, and when will the last old fogeys finally get with the times and throw away their old dumb hammer?

[0] I mean is it really even hammering without an oled screen that shows you how much force you're swinging with? And don't forget about the proprietary app that graphs your hammer swings for you. The light glaze of gamification (try for the biggest force!) will distract you from the personal data it's hoovering up to sell. Yes it definitely needs your precise location for Home Depot Hammer Hard Coupon Rewards (TM).

I support paper notebooks compared to the e-forms.

I can bet a notes written today in a paper notebook - would be accessible 200+ years from now. compared to notes written in some notebook app.

whether inaccessibility is due to data damage, lost passwords etc. whereas with a notebook as long as it's not damaged by fire. it should be good. also invest in waterproof paper notebooks i.e stone-paper.

> I can bet a notes written today in a paper notebook - would be accessible 200+ years from now. compared to notes written in some notebook app

I think it's the opposite, at least if you use obsidian or just md files. With paper notes, they can get lost more easily, there are no backups. In many countries, termites are a real problem (tell that to my damaged comic books and magic cards). If you use md files (which are just text files) + git/cloud/external drive backups, you are unlikely to lose them

I think you are severely underestimating the complexity of preserving digital data for 200+ years. It’s not trivial, but a family could totally put a box of notebooks and loose papers in a box in a dry/somewhat safe location and pretty much guarantee they will still be usable/viewable in 200+ years without any electricity/file format/solar flare/emp/etc/etc issues to have to consider.

I’m not disagreeing that it’s wonderful to be able to make multiple backups, offsite storage, etc of digital data, I’m just making sure you understand how difficult it is to keep digital data stored long term without significant attention to that desire.

Dropping some markdown in git is not a long-term (using 200 yrs as my example) plan.

I spent years and years working in a newspaper publisher trying to preserve the output digitally and it required serious investment (network storage, auto backup to LTO tapes, and verifying recovery is possible years later). It was and almost always is easier to ship two or three copies of the physical paper to separate storage facilities. I had to remind folks countless times that things like a dvd-r or cd-r have a maximal lifetime where we can trust that the data is retrievable.

Maybe long term storage of personal data will have some future breakthroughs that make it dead simple to trust they can be viewable in 200+ years but today that’s not the case.

I will say that most personal data (sans photos imo) isn’t useful after a few years (maybe 10+) and digital options are great for that. But for stuff we want to keep for centuries, it’s extremely hard and expensive today.

> I think you are severely underestimating the complexity of preserving digital data for 200+ years

although I doubt my personal notes will be necessary in 200+ years

Big same. It might be a curiosity to my kids (or grandkids if I have those) but I doubt anyone beyond that will care

Your personal notes are probably not significant in and of themselves, but historians will certainly care if no one's personal notes from today are preserved 200 years from now.

_Ea-nasir enters the chat_

Most paper will not last 200 years in a normal climate. The acid treatment often used ensures it will break down in less than that. Sure if you actually have a dry climate and archival grade paper it can last thousands of years. However most of us don't have that.

However most of us don't need that either. There are very few things you care about. I threw my kindergarten art out long ago when I realized I wasn't interested in seeing how I improved (back then I thought it would be cool to look back and see). There are things I have done I will care about, but not too many.

I recently moved and was going through boxes of stuff I had accumulated. In one of the boxes, I have notebooks from over 20 years ago. There is also a hard drive with an IDE connection on it packed around the same time. The papers were ever so slightly degraded, but immediately completely readable. I no longer have the hardware to read the hard drive (though, yes, I’m sure I can find some online or at a garage sale). This box of materials has now gone through at least ten moves with me. My money is, generally, on physical media.

> git/cloud/external drive backups, you are unlikely to lose them

I can guarantee with total certainty that github & cloudprovider & your external drives will not exist in 200 years. Probably not even in 50.

If you want to leave anything at all (photos, documents) for your grandchildren to see, how would you do it?

How Gen A does it; cloud drive shared to your kids.

Right, which will go away as soon as cloudservice discontinues that feature or the company disappears. That is far from a long-term solution.

I don't disagree.

What is the alternative? Locking them up on a disk that can't be accessed cross-platform? Self-hosting doesn't solve the "if you're hit by the bus" problem unless the next generation of your family is well-versed in technology.

The alternative is in the title of this topic.

For things that you truly want to preserve for generations, have them printed out to good quality paper.

> I can guarantee with total certainty that github & cloudprovider & your external drives will not exist in 200 years. Probably not even in 50.

tell me you don't know how doing backups work without telling me your don't know how doing backups work

Unfortunately you are underestimating the difficulty of making digital files available and readable in 200 years by several orders of magnitude.

A few backups isn't going to cut it. It's an immensely difficult problem.

I’m trying to imagine a future where historians pour over modern day Leonardo’s markdown files.

>I can bet a notes written today in a paper notebook - would be accessible 200+ years from now.

I bet if you got a sheet of granite and chiseled them into the granite, they would have a far better chance of surviving that a paper notebook.

Paper has two objective advantages over digital: It's reliable and it doesn't scale. That makes it the only option for elections as any compromise of a digital system would instantly decide the outcome. With paper, a bag of ballots might be lost or a few fake ones introduced, but none of these attacks scale very well so if we can prevent most of them, that's good enough.

I won't touch on preferring paper for visualizing thoughts because that's just preference, but seeing people prefer paper invoices over digital ones is just sad to see. On a conceptual level digital should always be preferrable, but we somehow managed to screw the inplementation up so bad that it's worse than no implementation.

Why do we need to overcomplicate everything?

There is more than simply preferential reasons to keep paper around. Some of them were touched on by the article:

* Paper does not run out of battery. On a ship where you need to be able to navigate whether or not the computer fails, this is a feature. My brother-in-law tells a story of when he was an air traffic controller in the military. Every so often they told them they had to turn off their computers and navigate the pilots in the air using paper to make sure they knew how to do it in case the computers failed and the power turned off.

* Paper cannot be hacked. In the article, Russian intelligence and MI5 were mentioned, as well as paper prescriptions. Of all highly secure mediums, paper is the most convenient.

* Paper is just handy. I use it right now to print out knitting patterns and write notes on them. I don't have to find some app to annotate the pattern I can just write directly on the paper. For what it is, paper is the default because it is so fully featured.

Paper is difficult to hack.

Typewriters, however, are a different story, and the Soviets managed to bug IBM Selectrics during the Cold War:

<https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-crazy-story-of-how-soviet-russ...>

Absolutely fascinating.

I found a link in one of the linked discussions which is quite a bit more in depth than the ieee article, for those interested:

https://www.cryptomuseum.com/covert/bugs/selectric/

The book mentions that at one point when they were investigating the chimney, the US operatives discovered a tunnel that extended past the embassy grounds. A team was doing a harrowing journey down the tunnel, uncertain of when they'd hit Soviet territory, and they got their sights on some Soviet operatives at the other end of the tunnel. Shortly after that the tunnel was mysteriously rendered inoperable by some sort of cave-in.

When it comes to tabletop gaming, I strongly prefer handwritten force lists and character sheets. Printed is okay, so long as they can be marked and modified on the fly with a pencil.

Requiring someone to fiddle with a poorly-designed app to record momentary bookkeeping is downright obnoxious and will not stand for it.

I’ve seen some people use dry erase for consumables.

I’ve also seen little magnets which would be cleaner.

I like the idea of paper. It's got some pretty cool uses. Sometimes I think I probably should use it more. Most of my favorite works of art, buildings I've enjoyed being in, an even a lot of tech had their beginnings on a page.

But it's never something I just casually reach for, the thought of using physical media just doesn't really ever occur to me unless I'm specifically going out of my way. Digital is so much easier, no fighting your hands to make the letters readable, no worrying about losing anything, no need to physically sort things, no need to have dedicated space and time for it thanks to the portability and durability of the screen.

The UI changes, apps go obsolete, but keeping up is just a matter of stuff you can learn on a random blog, not stuff that requires the long, hard process of figuring out how to translate thoughts into spatial patterns, which nobody can even describe really.

It seems like using paper at least occasionally is probably a good idea. It's definitely gotten easier now that we have cheap space pens and A5 format binders that are a little more convenient than full pages.

I think differently on paper. For some reason my entire mode of reasoning shifts and the way I process information becomes different. Could I write the same thing in Vim? Sure. But for some reason paper makes my thoughts more careful, more substantial, as if the input latency gives me time to think.

Too be fair I don't think the anti-paper crowd are talking about me. The amount of paper I consume is minuscule compared to large businesses. I use paper a lot more than the average person. I make paper from recycled junk mail, and I hand write all of my notes. I retain things better when I write them down on paper. I also look at screens for 12 hours a day so staring at a piece of paper is a reprieve.

My only concern with moving entirely to digital is that it is not strictly better. Digital should be the best way to consume media but it often isn't. I don't own the digital media like I do with physical media. Buying brand new digital media is also waaay more expensive then getting used books on Ebay. This is all on top of the fact that we can barely keep services around for more than 10 years without them going away and being stuck with proprietary formats that are not accessible anymore.

I am concerned for the day where everything is all digital, and then something catastrophic happens and we lose a significant chunk of our information. But maybe I'm just giving myself FUD

A professor once gave me a demo of a printer that could erase its own work and print a new image on the same regular printer paper.

In between the two prints he let me mark the page however I wanted so I could be sure it was the same physical page coming back out.

He admitted there was no market for such a thing but it was cool to see anyways. This was in the mid 1990s

This article seems a little out of touch.

Paper doesn’t need to go away or be given up. Some uses of it would be better digital.

Digital can’t do everything nor would it be able to handle everything in every way.

I might use paper less, but writing is still invaluable.

It's fairly clear that paper is being driven out of most white collar settings. It's still invaluable in many blue collar jobs. Phones don't work all that well when you're wearing work gloves, ports get clogged with debris, screens crack when you're crawling through narrow openings or pushing heavy stuff.

I have pencils and post-its in my electronics lab and I use them when working on digital circuits.

We do Civil Engineering and I have stacks of notebooks of calculations and decided I wanted to try using an ipad and stylus. Using Goodnotes, I can organize by job and create a new notebook for each plan check by date. Really enjoying not using a notebook every year as the paperwork was just getting out of hand, plus much more organized. I still use an RPN calculator, but slowly switching to spreadsheets. In this case digital works a lot better for me.

For archiving, some cities still have pen drafted mylar that sits in vaults. If you want to revise plans, go to City, check out the mylar with your life, use a razor blade to edit, pen with permanent ink and send back into the vault. New plans are plotted, but still to mylar.

With kids I am curious if they will learn how to handwrite. Will schools even teach how to read handwriting? Some interesting stuff as more goes digital and type printed.

Pen, Pencil, paper still has very great uses.

I use computer and also write on paper a lot (I usually use a pencil rather than a pen, although some people prefer to use a pen). Writing on paper it can be done anywhere (and I commonly do in many places), and regardless of power outage, etc, and is also easier to give to someone else, than a computer (and do not have to worry about the incompatibility of computers, etc). I could also store them anywhere.

Also for calendar, you can write it on a paper if you have a calendar on the wall; and, if you want to write notes on a paper next to something that it is relevant to (e.g. program numbers on a radio), then you can do that.

Paper can also be reused (especially if you write on both sides) and recycled, and should be done more; even you might have spare paper that you can write notes, etc.

They also mention package materials. I do think that reusable packaging materials would be better. (Reusable stuff is better in general.)

Paper is real, so it is uninhibited by the limitations imposed by the imagination of the programer.

For note taking, with a pen I cam easily transcribe math formulas. I cant do that with a txt editor.

Ok, so I switch to org-mode and become a tex mode guru. There's still no easy way to make a geometric drawing.

So now I have a tablet. The stylus feels weird, the tablet heavy. The resolution much lower than paper, the GUI, the battery life abysmal compared to paper, the latency anodyne.

But sure, it does everything paper can do.

... that is until I crease the paper to make a geometric figure freed from the limitations of compass and straight edge constructions, a cube [1], a crane to flirt with my neighbor, a bottle opener [2], a makeshift knife [3] or to use as kindling.

[1] I've actually done this to help me visualize crystal structure's interstitials.

[2] Neat trick a frenchman taught me.

[3] really sucks at this, but I did slice an apple with a sheet of printer paper once

Does anyone use a paper day planner ?

I gave mine up and tried to go digital, but I just haven't found anything I like. Google Cal has been ok, but I hate the way I had to maintain a personal and private version of my planner. I was worried if I got laid off I'd lose access to my stuff. This is basically a concern with any planning software for me. The app turns to shit or the company goes bust and that's it. I have to invent some new way of managing my time.

Even with my iPad Pro + Pencil, I'm not satisfied yet. I still find just writing a comma cumbersome on the iPad pro.

I'm going to buy a paper day planner again because I've never been so unorganized since I quit the paper planner. I feel kind of guilty because I'm not taking advantage of all the amazing modern cloud, AI crazy amazing tech to plan my life...

I wonder why things have gotten so very black and white. There's digital, but God forbid if paper still is around. It's like we cannot stomach multiple ways of doing things, it has to be the "right" way.

Perhaps because it's so much easier to have an opinion and have that broadcasted.

I suffer from not being able to read my own handwriting. So I prefer electronic notebooks (Jupyter) over paper for note taking. With three exceptions:

1. Drawing is laborious on a computer, and it rarely needs to be precise. It gives me eyestrain headaches and wrist fatigue. I still draw things like simple wiring schematics and flow diagrams by hand, take a pic with my phone, paste into Jupyter.

2. Sheet music. My kids have the latest tech (Apple 12" tablet, Apple pencil, page turning pedal) but I haven't upgraded yet. Also, the "charts" for one of my bands have not been digitized. Someday, but not yet. My notebook computer in tablet mode might be an option.

3 Meeting notes, just because I don't want to have a device in front of me when I'm having face-to-face discussions. The time is too precious.

The big one for me with sheet music is being able to add notes, scribble, etc. It would be way to slow in the middle of a rehearsal to take down some direction from the conductor on a tablet

I've been writing some assembly, learning ED, and some other things on my Kaypro 1. I write notes on paper from the reference material on my desktop then go over to the Kaypro to apply it. Seems to work really well for learning and brings back memories of college classes.

Going through the comments, it feels like this topic is for people in tech what "physicians prefer to die at home" is for physicians. Knowing the inner workings of a system perhaps makes us avoid it?

Where does "digital paper" rank in this?

Over the years I've gradually transitioned all my computing devices to be ones that support pressure sensitive stylus input. Most of my note taking thus ends up being handwritten, but still offering the benefits of digitization.

For me it's the perfect compromise since I always have a device I can access all my years of notes on (although I don't tend to need to access them). With paper notes, I used to just throw them out every few months because they'd pile up and it was clear I wouldn't miss them.

The writing tool affects the choice of words and, by extension, the thought itself.

With a pencil you can rest the tip on the paper and you can erase its traces, but it has lateral drag and requires some downward force. The fountain pen requires no force, but you can't rest it on paper or it makes a huge blotch. You can't even leave it uncaped for very long, so it kinda forces you to be writing. The computer allows searching, copying and pasting, but every minor alteration in font or typeface requires cooperation from the software.

We should be sure to distinguish "paper vs. digital" (the question of storage technology, I suppose?) and "tablet(paper)/pen(pen) vs. touchscreen/finger vs. keyboard/mouse" (the kind of interface).

Typewriters are paper tech. Drawing tablets are digital. Large physical keyboards can be used with paper (typewriters) or digital (computers).

How different from a piece of paper and a pen is a digital tablet device with a blank canvas that you draw on with a stylus? In what ways?

Just some thoughts.

for everybody still on physical medium (be it paper, board, whatever), did you try to leverage digital tools thinking it would allow wider expressiveness, faster iteration, more precision and yet came back to paper ?

if so do you think it's due to cultural habit (being raised on pen and paper) or maybe a neurological need (paper requires more psycho/physical stimulation, you have to draw geometries, letters, organise.. that cost might be actually beneficial for your brain way of working)

> if so do you think it's due to cultural habit (being raised on pen and paper) or maybe a neurological need (paper requires more psycho/physical stimulation, you have to draw geometries, letters, organise.. that cost might be actually beneficial for your brain way of working)

There is some of that. But pen and paper has other benefits that are hard to match:

- Pen & Paper works even if there is a service disruption / outage

- Pen & Paper works even if the device's battery dies or the power goes out

- Pen & Paper is fast. I don't need to unlock the screen, I don't experience progressive sluggishness due to memory leaks, analytics / telemetry running in the background or feature/library bloat

- Pen & Paper doesn't send everything that I'm writing to some remote server for analytics purposes

- Pen & Paper has never crashed on me

- I get to decide if and when I want the newest version of pen/paper. I don't ever reach for Pen & Paper to discover that some product owner has pushed a change on me without my opt-in / consent.

- Pen & Paper works in virtually every envrionment, regardless of whether I'm wearing gloves or my hands are cold (though admittedly cold hands can slow down the writing process, but much less so than trying to use a touch-screen or keyboard).

- Pen & Paper is often easier to read (assuming the hand-writing is legible, which is admittedly hit or miss, but it causes much less eye fatigue than staring at a screen).

- Pen & Paper doesn't distract me with spell/grammar checks that I don't need in the moment. Disabling / re-enabling these features is time consuming.

- Pen & Paper is a technology that has truly stood the test of time. The fact that it continues to persist into the digital age is very telling. Sometimes "simple & works" beats new and featureful but complicated.

It's ruling our lives

There is no hope

Thought I'd drop a line

The weather here is fine

But day and night it blares

Commanding through loudspeakers:

"Metal is tough, metal will sheen

Metal won't rust when oiled and cleaned

Metal is tough, metal will sheen

Metal will rule in my master scheme"

-- Siouxsie and the Banshees, "Mittageisen"

To add:

The manufacturer of the pen or paper can't remove your access to using them because they decided to chance licensing.

Said manufacturers can't force push an update that suddenly makes your old writing unusable.

For me it's just that it works much better for some tasks.

Two years ago I moved back to paper for my productivity and notetaking after about 7 years going fully digital. There are a lot of advantages for me. Some of those may apply to others:

- Tactile feeling and aesthetics. My writing is not very beautiful, but a stack of papers filled with my notes and diagrams is very inspiring.

- Paper is an offline, distraction-free medium. I think better with paper. Maybe it is a cultural habit.

- Paper won't disappear one day due to bad battery, untested OS update, malware, EOL for cloud service etc. Losing a couple of sheets of paper is easier than electronic device. But when speaking about losing a bulk of notes, it is much easier to lose it electronically than physically.

- Paper is forgiving. I can draw quick-and-dirty diagram in a minute and move on. It is hard to draw quick-and-dirty diagram on a computer. I will spend at least a couple of minutes deciding which app will be more convenient to draw this diagram, about ten minutes fighting an app, and up to an hour fighting my perfectionism, placing all shapes in proper places in grid.

- A sheet of paper is bounded, which helps with internal distractions. If I need to make a TODO list, I will take a smaller sheet, and fit all important things there.

- When you have large desk, you can spread a lot of paper sheets on it and see it all at the same time. Rearrange it, put it in stacks by some criterion, and so on. And neither scrolling nor list of thumbnails work as good as flipping through a paper book.

Disadvantages are:

- Lack of search function. I didn't try Apple Notes document scanning recently, maybe some kind of handwriting recognition is there and it will be enough to just take photos of all my notes.

- Portability: I need a desk with enough free space for both laptop and papers (so, mostly in terms of depth - probably a problem for open space offices).

I have some hopes for Apple Vision Pro (maybe in V2 or V3). I think it has a potential to bring some of these advantages to digital world :)

Dude, I have been trying digital tools since I thought that one of these things[0] would replace my Franklin Planner. I'll save you a click, that was over 30 years ago. Yeah, I use the hell out of some digital tools ("hey dingus, add bananas to the <shared family> grocery list"). But the first thing I grab in the morning is a paper notebook[1] to plan my day, using the "bullet journal" style that I've settled on these past few years. Every digital tool I've tried just turns into an abyss-like dumping ground where tasks go to die (and never get completed).

I don't know why, maybe it's the lack of spatiality with digital tools. Or an abstraction too far, I don't know. I just know that I'd been pounding that square peg into that round hole for decades, until I finally just gave in went back to paper. Bullet journal style, nice notebook, and a nice fountain pen works for me for most of my organization, and it's probably what I'll stick with.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Wizard [1] https://www.leuchtturm1917.us

Digital is worse than paper because with paper you need to copy and clean up your todo list often (typically daily, though other things can work) That means every item you didn't do is reviewed to see if you still care enough to put in the effort to copy it. digital systems make it easy to keep a long list of things you want to do eventually, but in reality never will, and soon you can't find in the long list things you really must do now.

If you use your digital todo list for things that you must do by a deadline it works well. Digital tools are good for the yearly tasks list "buy birthday card for my sister" - knowing that you can then decide when it pops up if you will buy one or not. Digital tools make it too easy to put things in like "investigate interesting widget you just heard about when money isn't so tight", and then they clutter the list with things odds are you won't do.

If you have a digital todo list you are allowed to have 2 things that you must do today, and 10 things you must do sometime in the next week (numbers are debatable). If you have more than that something must go. If it isn't in the next two weeks put it on the calendar not the todo list so it doesn't pop up until you need to do it. (todo lists that integrate with your calendar are good at this!) Actually I've found my todo list works best if instead I use my calendar to block of time - I have a short presentation to give in a couple weeks so I have one hour a week to work on it.

I have dysgraphia which means I cannot read my own writing. As such digital solutions have a higher interest for me. However there are things people using paper can do that I do not have a good replacement for. Things are working for me, but writing is a much better system if only I could use it.

So far I observed two-three things about computing in regard to human experience:

- it removes stimuli (you move less, you touch less)

- it removes cost (undo is near free, unlike erasing on paper)

- it offers too much distraction / choice

I really feel that my brain loves (deeply) having to deal with multiple sensory inputs and making sense of them from physical to conceptual. Maybe that's why having tools "too powerful" is detrimental somehow.

Just a thought

Thanks to everyone who answered, it's really really great reading your stories and ideas.

Another paper user checking in. I even have two different types of pads. One with thin paper for taking notes in meetings and such, since they will be deciphered to better paper later, and the thin paper will be recycled. One for more robust paper to which said notes will be deciphered and arranged, which is also used for real work. Plus I find it very hard to read from screens, even e-ink, so I tend to print things out if it's going to be a long read.

My poor handwriting is something I am disappointed in myself with. I knew how to write quite well, but that skill went to shreds in university when I tried to write too much, too fast. My hand started to repulse the pen. It is as if it always wants to let go of it and only with mental force can be made to hold on and scribble some ugly notes in protest. If I slow down I can write prettier, but I don't have patience to write slowly.

As much as using a phone with nav software and a dedicated plotter is easier to use—when everything breaks, and it will, I rely on paper charts when sailing.

I have had sweaty hands my entire life. Pen and paper can be frustrating when your paper gets soaked and you cannot write on it any longer, the ink smears from your hands, etc. I don't want to wear a glove every time I want to write something.

For designing something I will take the time to physically draw it, but for any notes I need to be able to access regularly I will use a digital version.

Sometimes I want to get more into paper, so I have an excuse to buy pretty notebooks. I do that about once a year and never end up using it right now.

Secondarily, hearing about our risks of EMPs from solar flares (or even in war scenarios), or in case of electrical grid collapse (a not-impossible scenario in some countries), paper is the only way I'll have survival knowledge available to me.

My favorite indulgence is high quality thesis-like paper. Archival quality, with nice cotton fibers. Pair with some nice ink nibs or fountain pens... ahhh

Look for a ream of short-grain (bookbinding) paper. Other option is a ream or stack of 11x17 and have it yourself. Even a bit thinner it tends to be nice for writing.

> real paper made from trees is still considered crucial to countless businesses and government systems globally, despite the environmental impact of producing it. For decades, computers, smartphones and tablets have provided an alternative.

Is the impact of printing a paper navigational chart really higher than replacing that chart with an electronic device?

One of the great festures of using paper is, that it exists physically. I can see my stack of to-dos or bills or notes and this also helps remembeing where what what is. I don't have this experience using digital. My brain just remembers computer as the general location. I loose all spacial intuition. On the other side, this is great for anything I don't want to remember.

This is an actual problem in government modernization projects. When legacy paper-based systems get overburdened, it's impossible not to notice growing stacks of file folders everywhere: on desks, on carts, in file cabinets, on shelves, in storerooms and storage facilities.

But when the new digital systems back up, it's invisible. What's a few hundred thousand rows to a modern database?

I also like the spatial context, but tend to misplace paper.

Suggest to try using multiple desktops: one for work project A, another for personal email, etc. Open a browser tab or text editor window on the top left of each desktop with a note about what this one is for. In the case of work projects that tab will often be the bug report covering the task at hand. This way when I get defocused, it's a simple process to tab between the desktops, reading the index tab to reacquire wtf this screen was for.

Thanks for the suggestions. Somehow, I never thought about using virtual desktops, but it sounds intriguing.

... the entire Germany in the most comprehensive and pervading (bureaucratic process integration kind of way) that is conceivable for a human being in 21st century. Germany.

https://www.dw.com/en/germans-use-more-paper-than-any-other-...

Advantages of paper: 1. To increase size, use bigger sheet 2. To see two pages side by side, just put them side by side 3. To zoom in, bring closer, with no side effects 4. Mix and match all kinds of paper to make a book, no compatibility issues 5. Use pen/pencil for both text and diagrams

Bound lab books with printed numbers on the pages are, I am led to believe, at the forefront of any technical defence of a patent or discovery. You just can’t fake ‘em.

This is why I record all my ideas in a lab journal — a cargo cult it may be but we’ll see who’s laughing when I finally invent homomorphic encryption / perpetual motion / alchemy!

That's no longer true. The US used to use "first to invent" to determine patent rights, but it was changed to "first to file" in 2013. It's no longer necessary to prove when you first invented something, it's now just a matter of checking filing dates.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_i...

It can still be useful to prove prior use, though. It doesn't invalidate the patent, if unpublished, but let's you keep using it.

I did all of my note-taking on paper in school. I felt like I had to to keep up with complex visualizations and concepts. The habit has carried with me.

I still keep those notebooks for reflection on what I studied. They're very valuable to me, even though I get teased for it. To me, it is like looking at a photograph of your younger brain.

For me, paper helps a lot with proofreading. I can proofread on the screen all day, but the best edits happen once I print it out and start using a pen. I generally go through several iterations of this before a paper or story is done.

Paper is enormous and extremely high resolution. Even a shitty printer has a higher dpi than almost any screen and you can do get an almost arbitrarily large print at that dpi instead of constantly losing density.

that's why we all keep using it for maps.

Well, also, you don't need to charge paper.

Huh? I go through a half-dozen engineering pads a year. Even twentysomething new-hires at my site use them. No GUI can keep up, yet. And this comes from someone who loves to draw with Procreate on my iPad.

Today, I had to create a couple of handwritten reference index cards. Went to the trouble of finding a ruler (remember those things?) to cleanly underline my headings. It was a wonderful feeling.

I’m a developer and I still rely on paper to do some of my best work

Likewise. I've never found anything as effective as a pencil and paper as a scratchpad when thinking through problems. I also find a strange motivation day to day in checking items off a physical checklist/todo-list that I don't get from the digital equivalent. However, digital is indisputable king when it comes to sharing information.

Same here, and when I was a grad student (phd) I used to write most important sections of a paper on paper.

I've found that today's pen/tablet experience is pretty close to paper, with the added benefit that I can't lose the work and I can easily share it. Surface Pro X for me, but the larger iPads probably work as well for this.

Most courts in the country have laws mandating electronic submissions for all documents.

They all have to have an exception in the statute for prisoners as they are stuck using paper for everything.

Finally, my hoard of 200+ new journals (bought from Walmart, Ross, Amazon, AliExpress, Temu, 1 at a time over the period of 3 years) will come to use :)

Not to sound like an ad, but I really like my Remarkable 2. It's basically a digital piece of paper.

Honestly, I didn't know that I was being asked to do so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com