Comment by ACCount37
4 days ago
"Writing imposes a speed barrier to brain" sounds like a bad thing, period.
It's not like you can't impose a speed barrier at will. Plenty of writers or programmers spend time thinking, writing absolutely nothing - regardless of whether they use a mechanical keyboard or a goose feather quill. Humans aren't LLMs - nothing compels them to produce text at all times.
Plenty of writers and programmers also spend a lot of time cutting down and editing what they just wrote - to get sharper prose or more concise and understandable code. Which is NOT something that can be done with a goose quill.
> Plenty of writers and programmers also spend a lot of time cutting down and editing what they just wrote - to get sharper prose or more concise and understandable code. Which is NOT something that can be done with a goose quill.
Disagree. At least for prose, I do my best editing that way. (All right, not a goose quill - I use a ballpoint.)
I find it easier to draw a line through some text than to move the cursor to the start, hold down shift while moving to the end, then hitting backspace or delete. I find it easier to move some text from one place to another by drawing an arrow than by selecting the start, shift selecting the end, ctrl-x, move to the destination, then ctrl-c. And so on.
In short, pen and paper break my mental flow less, so I can put more uninterrupted brain onto the actual editing.
Now, sure, after I'm done with the editing, then I have to go to the actual file, find the start of that text to delete, hold down shift while I move to the end, and all that. But I'm not making the edit decisions while I do that.
This is just what works best for me. If it doesn't for you, that's fine. Don't use it.
Sorry, I don't know how to put it more politely, because I ran out of words. You sound like someone who refuses to believe that vitamins are healthy for the body, because the pills smell funny.
What you said is true though. I also spend some time not writing or typing anything but thinking, but I know where I want to arrive and trying to find a polite and concise path from where I am to the point I'm trying to arrive.
When I'm using pen and paper generally that arrival point is non-existent. IOW, I'm working on much harder problems and hacking a mental path towards somewhere I don't know, so I need to slow down, and chip away a problem step by step.
Some programmers go to a whiteboard, some talk with rubber duckies or their colleagues, to add an external speed brake to the process, because when you tend to think hard, the brain's speed brakes wear down. This is not myth, it's neuroscience. Adderall and Ritalin is used to add these speed brakes to people who born without them. This is a thing. Don't ask me how I know.
"Your first draft will be shit, edit until it makes sense" is the 0th rule of writing anything. What I do is writing that draft on paper, and editing in my mind. Then write the 5th or so draft to the computer.
This allows me to create what I want in less iterations in less time.
What you already said is also true. Humans are not LLMs. We're not copies of machines, or copies of each other, for that matter.
You sound like someone who says "vegetables are natural and healthy and humans ate vegetables since time immemorial and everyone should eat this" and then points to a fucking tomato. Which wasn't even a part of human diet in most of the world until ~4 centuries ago. This is the kind of thing handwriting is.
Really, it just sounds like you like tomatoes way too much. Which is fine. But don't you go around preaching about how tomatoes are a vital part of human diet and everyone should eat them all the time.