Since the 90s, I’ve been somewhat surprised to see the PC technology fail to really learn from how well humans have leveraged printed information that is embedded in our environment.

I figure screens and projectors are simply harder and more expensive than what would be required for the digital to get paper like. But still, it’s disappointing.

Incidentally, just watched a recent Bret Victor talk about his latest application of his RealTalk/Dynamicland system:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXiVOmaVSo

Now, I think there really are better interfaces than paper in most of our everyday use cases, and it’s more on what people are used to or what they’re comfortable with (the Chinese student example in the article is basically that). It’s totally valid, and everyone has preferences, it should just be explicited that it’s really about individual taste.

BV starts at about 14 minutes.

As it has been said elsewhere, what I jot down are not finished thoughts but steps on the way there.

Not the main point of the article, but that remark stood out to me.

I sometimes still take notes on paper. Doodling to pass the time or let my thoughts wander is relaxing.

I remember doing it all the time as a child. Do children still have this experience?

Haha, yes, we are not that far gone..

Our children do.

Son designed a seal to stamp on paper this week. Learned that it reverses the image, and that ink dries out.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2021.1347

[2] https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1297

[3] https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437211059540

[4] https://hbr.org/2022/07/how-paper-catalogs-remain-relevant-i...

Right, that's not only my experience but also those with whom I've worked (see my earlier post of refusing instructions by email, when on paper they were real and held much more weight).

Devices such as the Apple Pencil are getting better at capturing pressure and highly-detailed paths, which inturn are encoded as vectors and can gather information that is lost in physical mediums, such as coordinates, drawing order, and temporality, even capturing things not present on paper such as hover gestures and pressure.

Yet it's common practice to reduce gestures and clicks to points, lines, or curves - two clicks from thousands of users in a CAD environment may output the exact same line from point A to point B - which often forget about the expressiveness of pencil strokes on a sheet of paper, features which could be used by machine learning algorithms to discern intent in the input of different users.

this article talks about writing, but I want to highlight the viewing part.

LCDs were not made to be stared at for hours on end, e-ink displays on the other hand were made exactly for that purpose. they don't tire your eyes more than a piece of paper and they require external light to be visible. this is very much in tune with how every single object has worked in the whole history of humankind until the invention of artificial illumination.

in my opinion working for 8 hours in an office starting at an LCD screen should be considered as damaging as sitting at a computer for 8 hours with an incorrect posture. you end up with a headacke and your eyes burn, and the rest of the day is just painful to continue.

this wouldn't be the case if some technology was invented that had the refresh rate and color palette of standard LCD screens while having the pleasant viewing experience of digital paper. I think many people would drop their books or even their e-book readers if normal tablet or computer monitors weren't painful to look at.

The race for brightness considered harmful :)

The problem that LCDs have and CRTs didn't is that you lose color reproduction/contrast if you turn down the brightness to healthy levels.

Hopefull OLED fixes that and becomes affordable. But I'm afraid manufacturers will still race for brightness even on a technology that doesn't need it.

> E-ink has the advantage that it automatically shows the correct brightness for the lighting conditions

Tbh I find eink very readable in bright sunlight and it's all downhill from there, to the point that i prefer reading on a tablet with brightness way down and the lights off to eink with a lamp on. But that may be a consequence of staring into LCDs most of my life.

For me, the screens I use are always at the brightness where white regions are as comfortable as a piece of paper. Sure, colors aren't reproduced "as the artist/developer wanted" at those values, but neither do I need that, nor do we have e-ink screens that can reproduce color more accurately.

I just want to create software, research stuff on the internet, arrange my music etc. and if I feel like doing that for 10 hours straight, I only want the screen to tire my eyes as little as possible.

I also read a lot of books and research material, both on Kindle and paper. My eyes get tired after hours of doing that as well. Light is not the only factor.

So although it's good to try to be optimal about the light that gets in your eyes over large periods of time, it's best to also try periodic rest and moving some activities to non-screen mediums instead of fretting endlessly over the last 5% of screen light optimization.

It doesn't because e-ink is a non-light-emitting technology so has no concept of brightness. Ambient light is what lights it up usually (unless one turns an entirely optional backlight on to read in the dark). So you don't need to adjusts as there's nothing to adjust, it's literally ambient light bouncing back, so is the same brightness by virtue of being the same light source.

Conversely, typical displays (TN, IPS, OLED, CRT even...) being a light emitting technology, one needs to turn backlight up as ambient light increases as both compete. (That is, unless it's a transflective LCD, but even then it's quite dim in ambient light).

> there's nothing inherently less tiring about it

e-ink really is more like paper, while typical displays are like turning a flashlight straight towards your eyes.

e-ink doesn't flicker.

I know that past a certain number of Hz our brain just mushes the images together and we magically perceive that the motions on the screen are fluid, just like we believe our electric lights are completely on all of the time. But even though our final perception might be continuous, maybe there are steps in the image processing pipeline in our brain where something gets overloaded by the discrete refreshing of the screen.

actually they kinda are

Blue light from close distance screens is the enemy of your eyes and has many other side effects.

https://health.ucdavis.edu/blog/cultivating-health/blue-ligh...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift_(software)

E-ink reflects light over a broad spectrum, so the amount of blue depends on the amount of blue it's illuminated with. It can be higher than the LCD in some conditions.

Besides, in the last 2 years people reported many more cases of eye strain and blurred vision (at least in my country), because "home" is not really the best work environment for 95% of the people.

There's a reason why offices are always well illuminated.

e-inks are usually used with lights turned off and when ate not I use the red light because it's better for reading.

Refresh rate is the rate at which new information is displayed. Flicker is things turning on and off.

As the parent mentioned, some screens use fast cycles of turning on/off to modulate perceived brightness, but this is not always the case.

All LCDs "flicker" in the same way all movies "flicker". The technology simply displays or flashes a series of still images quick enough to be perceived as fluid motion or video.

(And in fact, some of the e-ink readers with optional display lighting will use PWM to modulate its brightness, and then exhibit flicker. This is a super dumb engineering choice, though, so it's not very common. The Kobo Forma was an offender.)

As an aside, I'd love a secondary e-ink monitor. Hopefully the technology improves so prices come down.

No, e-ink displays and controllers support partial updates.

of course it has a refresh rate when there is a change in the image, but if I'm reading something completely static then literally nothing changes whereas an LCD screen still does things in the background

When the image is not static, because an LCD updates line by line, if you don't coordinate your data updates to the refresh rate you can get artifacts such as "tearing", where different sections of the monitor show different data that doesn't fit together. However, e-ink displays doing differential or fast partial updates have similar problems (and some exciting new ones, making refresh overall quite bad). You just usually don't try to display fast moving imagery on them.

e-ink displays are what is known as "bi-stable", meaning you don't need to apply a voltage to keep a pixel in a particular state, only when you want to change that state. This is not true for LCD, where you do need to keep supplying a voltage. This however doesn't result in any visual change if the voltage isn't changing.

The real difference here is that LCDs aren't reflective, unlike e-ink. So you need a backlight, and that light shining at your eyes is more tiring than how things work with an e-ink display. That either doesn't need a backlight (in a bright ambiance), or the LED lighting isn't behind the display and doesn't shine directly at you, but rather bounces through the display surface. This is a nice quality.

What you're describing happens when lowering the brightness through software (either Gamma adjustments or a dark overlay) because in that case you're only changing the software pixels to be darker.

Although even in that case, newer miniLED/quantumDot LCD screens also lower the LED brightness when pixels get darker, because they have more granular control and dimming an LED doesn't cause shadows over a large area of the screen anymore.

LCD typically has higher maximum contrast than e-ink.

You make many unsubstantiated claims. I don't get headaches from staring at an LCD even 14h/day.

You are probably a young person (sorry for assuming)

I didn't get headaches when I was 18 and stared for 14 hours straight at a 1024x768 14 inches CRT monitor at 85Hz interlaced.

p.s.: the term you're looking for is "screen headaches"

p.p.s.: http://oaxis.com/lcd-screens-harmful-effects/

I have glasses— without those, I’d probably get a headache. I also use a very high quality 5k monitor and proper lighting. Maybe those make a difference? Maybe I won the genetic lottery? Dunno.

What I suffer from since Covid restrictions settled in and had to work from home all the time, confined in a space that cannot be easy illuminated properly, is blurred vision.

I don't suffer from it after reading an ebook on an e-ink in natural light, but I do after a day of work in front of my laptop display (can't easily move the 30 inches display I had at work because insurance, laws, bureaucracy etc) so mine it's not exactly a scientific study, but a close friend of mine she's an optometrist and she said to me that people reporting eye strain, blurred vision and headaches have almost doubled.It affects older people much more than the younger ones of course, but are treating kids too, that were a rarity before.

They all have in common spending a lot of time in front of an LCD displays at home.

I'm middle 40s.

As I got older I started getting neck pain though, if I sit too awkward. But still no headaches ;)

And I would have expected us to have them by now, considering how colour e-paper has passed the prototype stage and is now widely used in supermarkets for labels ??

With my remarkable I seem to be able to doodle notes better.

For doing homework with the kids, and especially maths, the remarkable is remarkable

we can burn through pages and pages of notes explaining and solving problems.

Using a pen and a medium you can write on is extremely useful, and until you can PAVE the walls with screen and make them as endurable as paper - I will continune to prefer pen + paper.

For reading it would have benefitted immensely from a pair of hw buttons for page turning.

That said - unless you really want exactly the rm2 - I'd say it's maybe two to three times as expensive as it "should" be.

The clarity, density and speed of the kindle's screen is miles better than boox, probably close to remarkable if the videos are any indication.

I got the Scribe for the large screen to read ebooks, but the pen and its responsiveness and feel is surprisingly good.

i don't know if it does handwriting recognition, but the notebook app has been surprisingly fun for me to jot down notes when i'm contemplating a design problem.

Now, stick a postit on your fridge or on your work screen. Do you need to interact specifically with that note? No. Every time you scan the room, your eyes will connect with that image of that postit and despatch it to your retina and brain. You don't even need to be able to read that postit from where you are. The mere fact that your brain registers its presence, also connects within your brain to know the content of that note, legible at that moment or not.

At home we use a paper calendar in the kitchen. That works far better than Google calendar or the iPhone calendar. We see stuff everyday that may be two or three weeks in the future, thus reinforcing the memory of that item such that it never suddenly gets sprung on us that 'Today is the day for X'.

Now try it without printing the PDF first.

https://blackwing602.com/collections/pencils

https://blackwing602.com/products/blackwing-one-step-long-po...

I use the .5 for woodworking, but a .7 along with a Rhodia dot paper notepad for my desk.

Now with ChatGPT, it’s even more so than ever. It’s practically free to produce digital content.

On the other hand, even by just printing out a doc increases the cost of replication and distribution significantly (compared to pure digital replication); hence the quality of the content is assumed to be higher.

I'm also gradually hearing friends come to realize that their ebooks and streaming movies may vanish at the whims of corporate licensing agreements, but their libraries of physical books and DVDs are durable.

Give it two more years and we might see letter-writing clubs emerge.

Paper is worse for my workflow in almost every way. I keep trying paper-based systems because of articles like this and I keep coming back to digital. I bring this up to say that it’s OK not to like using a pen and paper. Find a system that works for you and not the mode person.

I’m used to things calling out to me like that.

As a halfway step, I’ve tried using a Rocketbook and scanning things in, with workflows to file text away appropriately.

Forgive my ignorance, but what should this mean?

I can think of many different reasons for why, but they are all just guesses at best. One that comes to mind is that writing it on paper feels more "personal", as in "i am giving you this piece of my info", and I instinctively know that a human will have to look at it, read it, or do something else with it. Regardless, a human will have to take a look at it before something else happens to it.

While typing it on the person's device feels much more impersonal and more of a "I am entering my email into this digital form, with no expectations of any real human to ever look at it, with my email probably being sent into some database for some automated processing or spamming me or whatever else".

The latter isn't a real objective concern of mine, both typing and writing it out could easily lead to the exact same outcomes (both good and bad). But just instinctively, I feel that this is one of the main reasons for why it feels different for me on a subjective level in the back of my head.

My response was to refuse email from him (as emails can be ephemeral). Second, I requested all his future instructions to me be in words written physically in the form of black atoms adhered to sheets of white atoms and signed by his own hand in blue atoms at the end.

It dismayed him and everyone including my staff some of whom I'd instructed to block my emails—yes, I'm likely one of the few heads of an IT department in history who refused to have an email address.

Yes, it worked and he complied and ultimately I had the last laugh but that was only after the feud had become newspaper headlines.

In choosing to reply to this story I had a choice of making my point about the often fragile and ephemeral nature of electronic data and I chose an actual real-world example that involved myself in preference to some hypothetical case which would have been less interesting. The fact was at the time email in this organization was both insecure and often ephemeral by nature in that there was no guarantee that copies of it would be kept indefinitely let alone able to be authenticated at some later date (unfortunately the reasons are too involved to explain here, you'll just have to my word for it).

That and the fact that decisions made by the CEO often turned out to be bad or made inappropriately and that he regularly changed his mind about matters that had already been signed off after being influenced by external voices and did so without consultation with his departmental heads caused serious disruption within the organization to the extent that it became almost dysfunctional—not to mention staff morale being reduced to an all-time low was the reason why I demanded he provide me with written instructions under his signature. That I was not fired both vindicated my stance and showed the true gravity of the situation. (I eventually left the organization of my own volition well after the event. Without doubt it was the worst working environment I've personally experienced).

Incidentally, my staff were always loyal to me, in fact I protected them from much of the turmoil. What I was surprised learned from that and other related incidents was who one's real friends were and or those who held strong ethics and who were prepared to stand up for them. I received support from the most unexpected of people—staff, managers etc. from very different departments to IT, many of whom I hardly knew.

I note you chose to focus on my insubordination rather than the matter of reliability, authentication, paper documents, etc. This is not a criticism given the abrupt way I presented my comment, in hindsight I could have worded it more tactfully but in hurried HN posts that doesn't always happen, as here (that said, I'm usually reasonably restrained and careful about what I post online). It was interesting to note that some voters almost immediately voted the comment down after posting but surprisingly the votes fluctuated either way and are now split evenly—in fact to the exact number.

That work incident wasn't supposed to hog the comment, it was only meant to be a stand-in for cases where it's turned out that physical evidence was either much harder to tamper with and or easier/cheaper to authenticate than electronic counterparts.

First I'll mention a personal case, some years ago I had a contractor with a nice important-sounding name do some work on a property where I was not living at the time, it was substandard and he never provided a proper itemized invoice (and after I forced him to provide paperwork it was obvious that many of the newly listed items were only padding). I disputed the bill and the matter went to court and I lost—in the end a bill of around $2,000 ended up costing me over $10,000. He claimed he sent me email which I never received and stated to the court that his computer later failed so he could never prove it. The judge took his word and not mine, so I lost. Had he said he faxed me the info then the situation would have been very different—the printed log sheet of my fax would have shown that he had not done so and it would have been verifiable as fax logs are notoriously difficult to forge well. (I know, in a much bigger case telco comms records etc. could be subpoenaed, but that's well outside the scope of a petty sessions case like mine where the Beak expects to get through a half dozen cases before lunch).

When working in surveillance and remote monitoring (this time with a decent, professional organization) we switched from film cameras to digital ones and then read them remotely (which we couldn't do with film and inconveniently it had to be collected by hand). To switch over we had to go to inordinate lengths to ensure the data link was tamper proof and the data was properly encrypted and authenticated. On the other hand, the physical film was almost impossible to tamper with without it being clearly evident (but again we didn't have the luxury of remote monitoring).

I've many more such instances but not the time to cite them here. Sure, digital data is taking over the world but physical data is extraordinarily difficult to forge well if subject to proper scrutiny/forensics. On the other hand, digital forensics can be both very expensive and often very difficult to detect and or difficult to detect and apprehend the culprits; if were not fact and it were easy to do then we wouldn't be saddled with the many billions of dollars internet fraud that we see every year.

If I really want to get work done then I need to make myself a to-do list.

Honestly, it is the same with notes - as in, lists and things to remember later. I always have my phone, so I always have the grocery list and can write down ideas that I have while on the bus or walking.

You see, my phone does all of that except provide an ink pen. Plus more. I generally have a map with me. I have a communication device and a camera (which I use quite often to take pictures of otherwise mundane things like manhole covers). I keep some cash and a non-state-supported ID in there. (Passport doesn't fit). I email stuff to myself quite often because it is a quick way to get things from one device to another. I pay for the bus with my phone, pick up packages from the post office with it, and other small things like that.

I'm simply not interested in downgrading to paper for this stuff. I'll use paper for fun (art and stuff) instead.

And mostly we coordinate with ourselves.

But I personally use both. Paper is for ongoing goals I’m working towards since I’ll glance at it several times a day (unless I forget my notebook), but for events and so on, electronic reminders are a “do this now” sort of thing that I can’t accidentally miss because they’re so distracting.

I think I'd struggle moving into that kind of setting.

Is it about the ability to edit it afterward ? Or because it’s not in your hand writing ?

That electronic calenders are less intentional people chuck over potential times and I don't necessarily consider if they are practical slots. Often I have multiple, up to five, conflicts with various meetings automatically appear in my calender.

If I personally write it into my calender I have a stronger connection with the decision to attend or act at that time. And I just have a better sense in my mind of what that means in terms of that's in a fortnight, that's the day before Christmas etc.

But what's come up in these replies is I'm also at a different team structure that my previous experience with Google calendars. Maybe I'm just not good in a large workforce Vs in a small 5 person team in a 20 office.

I think having a personal, isolated and well goomed version of what will be your day's schedule is an understandable proposition.

You're probably right that it comes down to the organization's attitude towards time. I currently have meetings that magically appear a few hours before they start, and some disappear or move around. We get Slack messages to discuss and/or negociate these changes, but we see calendering as something fundamentally flexible.

Using pen and paper for that would just make us waste paper without affecting how it works in practice (thinking about it, I was in a startup where the day+week's main schedule was on the corner of a whiteboard, and it would get rewritten quite a bit)

(eg the "offside rule" was originally conceived to be easy to interpret even for handwriting)

It’s called APL, it is incredibly effective, it won many awards, there’s a book about it called “Notation as a tool of thought” which is a bit dated but still highly recommended.

But it is not really compatible with modern programming languages and styles.