We Still Use Paper

(humanpro.co)

18 points | by gx 2 days ago

7 comments

  • Aozora7 4 minutes ago
    I haven't used paper for anything since I graduated college 10 years ago. Excluding education where I only used paper because I was forced to, closer to 20 years. I would much rather open a text editor or a spreadsheet on PC.
  • alecst 13 minutes ago
    Most feel-good pieces on AI make the same mistake, which is looking at where the ball is and not where it's going. If progress were to halt today, this article would be relevant and I'd upvote it.

    But since the richest and least trustworthy people on earth are on track to make an ultraintelligent thinking machine, the risks I'm worried about are: killing most jobs, concentrating most wealth, and putting ourselves at risk of literal extinction. All I could think when reading this was, "this person really did not think this all the way through." I'm sorry.

    • ben_w 3 minutes ago
      > are on track to make an ultraintelligent thinking machine, the risks I'm worried about are: killing most jobs, concentrating most wealth, and putting ourselves at risk of literal extinction. All I could think when reading this was, "this person really did not think this all the way through." I'm sorry.

      While two out of those three risks do not require anything "ultraintelligent", for killing most jobs it's worth remembering that their track is an appropriation of intelligence, and the speedups happen where it's easiest to measure more than where the tracks correspond to economic value.

      Unfortunately, this has the opposite effect for safety, and can still do a lot of wealth concentration even if it doesn't end all jobs.

    • singpolyma3 7 minutes ago
      They're going to do all those things with or without AI. We need to fight the end goals at a social level rather than the temporary means
  • ivanjermakov 13 minutes ago
    Stopped using paper the day I graduated uni. Digital tools are superior in all aspects for my way of thinking.
    • cocoto 7 minutes ago
      Except for doing maths, which is painful to input on screens (but beautiful).
  • yetihehe 8 minutes ago
    I was recently hired at a datacenter buildsite. The pen is the most important tool here.
  • fschuett 11 minutes ago
    I did use to review the AI slop code on paper, it was extremely effective in quality, but extremely slow as a feedback loop: https://imgur.com/a/ZRg5x7t

    There is some science on this, how reading on paper activates different brain waves than a screen and how the physical layout of pages activates spatial memory recall: https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/Papercode-printing-code-on-... and https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L-TEaM0pn3IZjrvQMHUDDCtB...

    I am currently working on combining all of that into a code review tool to more effectively review slo.. AI pull requests. I am not sure if people here would be interested, but basically the idea is to not use the keyboard anymore to type your annotations, but only use a tablet / pen and voice (with transcription), so that code review is much more ergonomic. So you can "paint" on your code, make annotations, have a "physical" layout of your code, architecture overlays, etc. and then agents re-edit the code until it is what you want.

  • IshKebab 9 minutes ago
    We still have horses. I wouldn't recommend a career as a farrier.
  • nalekberov 35 minutes ago
    I don't understand the point of this blog post. Who said paper will be replaced by AI?
    • sshine 10 minutes ago
      AI won't replace old tech that works, is the point.

      Paper is one such.

      I'm less sure keyboards will stay to the same degree. My thinking was always the bottleneck while programming, so even though I can talk faster than I type, I couldn't solve problems faster than I type. But I can now.

      So I'm opting for speech-to-text when the office space allows it, and looking into steno (stenography) keyboards, or perhaps building a steno overlay on my custom split keyboard to go from 80-100WPM to 200+WPM.

    • iammjm 19 minutes ago
      Clearly the vibe du jour seems to be to just throw AI at any and all problems. And sometimes there are better, simpler and more straightforward solutions