Who knows what are gems are what are not? I scan tons of stuff related to my children's school/activities etc. One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them and find some things they will call gems and lots of other junk. Or maybe they will consider it all junk and just get rid of it. But I can't be the judge of that now, I can only be the custodian.

> One day when I'm gone, maybe they will enjoy going through them

My mother used to say the same thing. But I‘m not looking at that old stuff, ever. Maybe your kids will. It’s your decision whether it’s worse to be false negative or false positive here. If the stuff is not taking up too much space, it’s probably a good idea to keep it. Hoarding is something else though.

So the idea that most of it is worthless is far far less justification to toss the entire pile. The cost to benefit ratio is shifted by more than 1000x.

And even then, while cleaning out a physical hoard you'll take time to look through things.

I live and hoard long enough to know I rarely look back to stuff I've saved, things that I hope it will spark my creativity someday, never arrives (except for some really rare case, which is like 'hey, I remember this...,cool', you relish the nostalgia for a bit and then you move on eventually)

I agree with you that even digital stuff took toll on your mind. I remember the sadness but then big relief when my old HDD gone, along with stuffs. The thought that I don't have to worry about it anymore is a plus in itself.

Ultimately it gave me the chance to be for my inner child what my parents never were, but man there was a lot of pain in that process.

I also don't think your implication that only a small subset of people ("hoarders") will enjoy such collections is correct. Most people can become sentimental even if that's not their day to day modus operandi.

It doesn't really cost me anything on an ongoing basis to have this huge digital dump of files sitting around. It was a one time effort to scan everything. If my parents had done that and just left a huge archive of digital files, that would be fine.

If people feel neutrally about digital hoards, that makes sense.

Maybe your kids will enjoy it, though. But that feeling is far from universal.

Sure, we are all different people. I was super happy to find my childhood class photo and marksheets that my dad had saved - it just underlined what I already knew, that he cared. I shared it with my children and we bonded over the exams where I didn't fare well.

> But that feeling is far from universal.

I know that the level of sentimentality isn't a universal thing.

I'm not going to hold them to cherishing this stuff and ask them to explain themselves if they just delete it. I just want them to have a chance at looking at small parts of their childhood. It is done without expecting gratitude or reciprocal emotions in return, which I guess, is part of being a parent.

He can't give them to you if he threw it away. Also, he can ask that question to you because your choices and preferences are, to a large extent, set.

The same stuff, that my child would throw away without hesitation few years ago, is now "precious memories" and not to be disturbed. The emotional value of things doesn't follow much logic and has massive volatility until adulthood.

I mean I totally understand that me keeping bunch of stuff isn't a guarantee that they will find what they value at that point of time. Maybe the lego-shaped eraser would be the most interesting piece of stationary they will remember; doesn't mean I can hoard every piece of stationary. Digital stuff is different though - my SSD doesn't bulge just because I'm putting more files holding snippets of life on it.

I’ve known several people who had to go through their parent’s entire lifetime of accumulated stuff and it was quite the job. Dumpsters were rented. It was a big burden to leave the kids.

Digital stuff will also be a lot to go through. My dad has hundreds of thousands of photos, backed up in triplicate. I was helping him clean the basement once and found 5 1/4 inch floppy disks labeled “backup” from the 80s. He’s kept all digital files. Many of them are locked into various proprietary apps as well. So I’ll likely need to spend months going through it all, while everything is still working, to see what is worth saving, and migrating it into a format I can manage. It will be a massive project, on top of the physical stuff. I’m hoping I can talk the rest of the family into an estate sale for the physical stuff, but the digital stuff is arguably the bigger job, with no way to outsource it.

There is also the question of corruption, or simply being able to read older files. I grabbed some documents I had saved on his computer back in high school about 15 years later. I had saved them as rtf files at the time so they would be more portable. I tried off and on for a week or two to read them in more modern times and it was a no-go. I could get sections, but not the whole thing. I don’t know if the rtf standard changed or the files were simply corrupt, but they were basically trash. I’m sure I’ll run into a lot of that as well.

I have a single page document with the information I think somebody would need from my electronic files if I died. It's printed and stored in my fire safe. My next of kin has a copy of the key.

I don't really expect they'll do, nor care to do, anything with my digital files.

It could be that the longer it goes on the less relevant it becomes, but it will still hang over my head.

It's hard for me to imagine a problem that could only be solved in that way, or in fact that could be solved that way at all.

I agree that it's a lot of work but disagree that it's a burden - I see it as an opportunity to reflect on your and your parents' lives. And it is only a lot of work if you actually care about preserving the important parts, throwing stuff out wholesale is much easier.

In this case, the author wrote the notes. If they say it has no value, they probably know what they’re talking about.

Well, yeah, if they say it has no value, then obviously it has no value to them, no one could claim otherwise.

I guess the context in this thread kind of shifted to it might still be valuable to someone, even if it isn't valuable to them. There been a lot of cases in history where very smart people judged their own journals to not be very valuable (to them) so they think nothing of it, then 100 years later someone discovers the journal together with a ton of valuable (to the world) nuggets in it.

My sister and I have an agreement to trash my mom’s hoard of our school stuff she refuses to get rid of that we don’t want. All it does is bring us stress. If they made physical art like clay pots in a kiln, keep it for yourself if they don’t want it. If it’s something you can scan, I doubt it’s worth keeping and makes it much harder to find signal in the noise when too much is scanned.

Stuff causes stress. It's really true. Even if it's mostly out of the way, every time you see it it will cause some stress about whether it should be moved, reorganized, saved, or thrown away. The house I grew up in was always cluttered and I'm bad about it myself. Every once in a while I will order a roll-off dumpster to the house and get rid of things that have accumulated over the past 10 years or so. It's a relief but then it starts over again.

If there's one habit I wish I had it would be to regularly and ruthlessly get rid of stuff that I don't use anymore.

I am not exactly a minimalist, but I freely give away and loan things to people who might get more value put of them, it's enabled me to move across the country multiple times for good opportunities at very little notice.

Does that make me a... vicarious hoarder? What point are you trying to make? If you keep knick-knacks for the sake of others, you're a hoarder and should admit it's actually just for yourself -- if you enjoy someone else's knick-knacks which they saved for you, you're also a hoarder?

For what it is worth, I still find it frustrating when I cannot find a certain piece of information that I am looking for but I know exists because I came across it before but didn’t record it at the time. However, I also appreciate being able to forget distressing events that would find ways to remind me about their existence.

I guess all of this may depend on the exact definitions of knowledge, data, and memory, and how an individual reckons with acquiring, organizing, and forgetting information.

I still have a folder full of notes from several of my university courses, grouped by course. Some of it is source code (either the lecturer's or my own); some is assignment text (in a mixture of plain text, PDF, legacy .doc, etc.). There aren't any repositories because this was many years before Git existed and professors back then apparently didn't think we needed to be taught about the systems that did exist.

But why not keep it? The whole collection is smaller than, say, the OpenBLAS shared library that comes with a NumPy installation. It's maybe 1% of the size of the ISO for a modern desktop Linux distribution.

It's part of a folder with even older stuff - all the way back to toy Turing programs I wrote as a child. There are countless random files that are probably poorly organized internally, that I'll likely never revisit with any good reason. But the whole thing is less data than I'd likely end up downloading if I spent an hour on YouTube or Twitch. The ability to store it permanently costs me literally pennies, amortized over the cost of the drive.

... And yet, the size of modern applications still bothers me. It feels almost disrespectful, somehow. Old habits die hard, I guess.

It’s more about increasing the signal to noise ratio along the axis of perceived value.

Data size != memory size, and even memory size != binary size. It's totally fair to rail against the program text, and associated application data, that have to be loaded onto your machine in order for you to do something as simple as send a message on Slack -- RAM, unlike cold storage space, has not grown quite so exponentially, and wasting that space is expensive. And of course, the larger the binary, the slower the program, and the worse your programs will interface with other ones on the system.

The solution to this problem is the same it has been for literally centuries: archiving.

The whole point of an archive is that it's out of the way and takes no effort, even more so a digital one. But if you have/need/want the time/space, you or someone else can check it, and find a gem.

I don't think that's a problem. What turns logs into a problem is misplaced expectations on what is their purpose and how you should use them.

Logs are collected with the express purpose of being ignored, and as a safeguard in case in the future you need to check an audit trail of what you were doing. After a while, once the odds of those logs providing any value drops enough, you can safely delete them.

Your tool is only as good as you make it out to be.

I mean, "an out there" idea sure, but wild? There are plenty of cases where people underestimated their own worth and value, and the potential impact of their ideas.

Sometimes it's valuable to have outsiders perspective on things. Old war veterans might not think twice about their love-letters between them and their partner, but taken together with a large collection of letters, historians can build new perspectives that we weren't able to see before.

> They have no idea what is valuable there.

Of course an LLM wouldn't know what is "valuable". It would require a person to have an idea of what could be valuable, and program the LLM to surface based on that, together with more things.

For example, I could imagine if I setup an LLM with the prompt "Highlight perspectives that you think are conflicting with other stated perspectives" to go through my own second-brain, it could reveal something I haven't considered before, granted it'll be able to freely query the db and so on.

Likely, this whole "library" was causing unhealthy behavior.

Commitments are important.

I'm in my forties. I have gone through multiple cycles of collecting and purging. How that feels has changed over the years. Sometimes I have regretted getting rid of some things, but that frequency is far, far lower than the number of times I haven't cared or even noticed. And those times I have regretted it have not resulted in obsessive thinking about what I've lost or what might have been.

Further, having a "reset" has proven valuable on more than one occasion, as it opens up new pathways that I might otherwise have not even considered. You speak of relearning everything as if it's forcing yourself to repeat the same path all over again, with no new learning and just a pointless sacrifice of what little time we have. In my experience, "relearning" usually entails discovering entirely new experiences and paths to knowledge along a general set of guidelines through half-memories.

To put it another way, starting over is not guaranteed suffering, it's an opportunity to discover new things.

Conversely, I think you’re letting your own personal views stand in the way of empathy and recognising what is best for another.

There was no “destruction of knowledge”. It was a collection of notes which was never going to be looked at again and was causing stress to the author. Written knowledge which isn’t read is as useless at that which isn’t written in the first place. Would you also decry someone for not having written the note in the first place?

> They could have just left their library for a bit, there was no need to burn it to the ground.

It was not a library. I bet that for the author it felt closer a hoarder’s house with stacks of scattered newspapers.

> "I've just lobotomised myself and I look forward to having to relearn everything and doing it all again".

Absurd. Deleting written notes does not make you immediately forget everything that was written on them. The lessons they needed, they internalised. The ones they didn’t weren’t important anyway. Sure, there may have been some good notes in there, but not in enough quantity and quality to warrant wading though them all and justify the extra anxiety the existence of these lists caused.

> If nothing else, in 7 years time, they'll regret

No, they will not. Signed, someone who learned to delete relentlessly and is much happier for it.

Maybe you would regret it. That says nothing about other people. If anything, I’d regret the years when I didn’t delete stuff.

> There was no need to do this.

Yes, there was. The author needed it for their mental well-being and development. Let them be. Everyone copes with life in different ways. We’re all going to die, all your notes will be meaningless in the end.

> Please anyone, if you're considering this, just zip them up and put them on a usb or cloud storage somewhere out of the way - that's a lot harder to regret.

No, everyone should do what makes sense for them personally.

Having the thing “out of the way” is not the same as having it gone. It’s a very different feeling, like saving a memento from an unhealthy relationship VS throwing it away. There is freedom in deciding to let go without recourse.

I for one applaud the author and wish them the best. I’m sure they struggled with the decision and it took some courage to go through with it. They did the right thing for themselves and that’s what matters.

> There was no “destruction of knowledge”. It was a collection of notes which was never going to be looked at again and was causing stress to the author. Written knowledge which isn’t read is as useless at that which isn’t written in the first place. Would you also decry someone for not having written the note in the first place?

I disagree that there was no destruction of knowledge. Even if the author is just copy/pasting from random sources, the link and choice of putting those 2 copies in the same folder is a bit of knowledge, a link solidified with an action. We have different ideas of what constitutes knowledge, I think you know you're being ridiculous if you're sincerely trying to argue that 7 years worth of notes doesn't have a single new contribution of any value to anything or anyone at all.

I do decry people who don't take personal notes.

> It was not a library. I bet that for the author it felt closer a hoarder’s house with stacks of scattered newspapers.

I totally agree that's how the author felt - they let their own negative feelings towards what they've created destroy something which could be valuable to others.

> Absurd. Deleting written notes does not make you immediately forget everything that was written on them. The lessons they needed, they internalised. The ones they didn’t weren’t important anyway. Sure, there may have been some good notes in there, but not in enough quantity and quality to warrant wading though them all and justify the extra anxiety the existence of these lists caused.

What's even your point here? You start saying how notes aren't even needed and are pointless to be written down, then you argue that maybe there is some value in them written down, and then come back to support my argument that the author's own personal feelings have lead to the destruction of something valuable.

> No, they will not. Signed, someone who learned to delete relentlessly and is much happier for it.

> Maybe you would regret it. That says nothing about other people. If anything, I’d regret the years when I didn’t delete stuff.

Ignorance is bliss: you can't get upset about the things you don't know any more. Knowledge is hard.

Your position about not regretting throwing away potential personal knowledge and memories isn't a position I've heard from anyone over (*edited typo) the age of 50. You don't regret it just like the author doesn't, I think you have a future of denial or upset.

> Yes, there was. The author needed it for their mental well-being and development. Let them be. Everyone copes with life in different ways. We’re all going to die, all your notes will be meaningless in the end.

There's other ways to deal with information overload, like proper archiving. We're all going to die, and the only reason why have a culture or knowledge as a species is because everyone else hasn't done what this person is doing.

> No, everyone should do what makes sense for them personally.

> Having the thing “out of the way” is not the same as having it gone. It’s a very different feeling, like saving a memento from an unhealthy relationship VS throwing it away. There is freedom in deciding to let go without recourse.

Congratulations with the individualism, you made yourself feel free by burning books. If that makes you happy - you do you, I don't care - but don't act like it's benefit anyone else other than the person struggling with the feeling of information overload.

Then why did you bother responding in the first place, and why should anyone bother reading beyond that point? If you’re not interested in discussing, don’t. Throwing a bunch of words at someone and then going closing your ears singing “la la la” is worse than not being valuable, it has negative value for the discussion.

Frankly, that made me only skim the rest of your post instead of engaging properly. It was still pretty obvious you lack real empathy for the author, their needs, and are unable to understand people who have a different view of the issue than you do.

Here‘s the thing: The author isn’t making a general commentary or recommendation, they are recounting their own personal experience. Pretending you know what makes sense for them is arrogant and misguided. That you are unable to understand other people have different needs and ways of approaching life is a you problem.

I stand by my point, this has been a wasted discussion that I shouldn't have engaged with. In some of the deleted posts, I apologised for time wasted. But also, I think you should acknowledge too that neither of us got anything out of the walls of now deleted text.

This is exactly why I tried to shut the conversation down from the start - it was clear to me from the familiarity of your style that it would end this way, and so I was trying to do us both a favour. I understand why you took issue, because of how I did it, but the fact that so much has been deleted here shows that I was correct in my initial response to you: we couldn't and didn't interact productively. I was able to interact fine with the other responses, that's not to say this is your fault at all, but more the combination of our 2 personality types.

Anyway, I guess we're both done here. Apologies again for my role, but you should also perhaps be more open to ending a conversation cordially when someone says they're trying to make the effort to end it, rather than assuming fingers-in-ears bad intent.

I didn't mean to imply I wasn't going to read, it's just that disagreeing so vehemently on a sentence by sentence basis - like we're both clearly prone to do - isn't always fun or productive. Neither of us is going to change our mind with the depth and detail at which we're disagreeing. You're completely fair to see it as me sticking my fingers in my ears, sorry, because that's disrespectful of me.

My intent was to give you the respect of responding in a similar level of detail to address your points, since you gave the time for me, but prevent the need for either of us to have to keep doing it...

> Here‘s the thing: The author isn’t making a general commentary or recommendation, they are recounting their own personal experience. Pretending you know what makes sense for them is arrogant and misguided. That you are unable to understand other people have different needs and ways of approaching life is a you problem.

I never claimed to know what's best for them, I would even go as far as saying I don't care what's best for them, I was speaking from a position of what I think's best for human knowledge. Fundamentally, if you agree burning books - metaphorically - is a bad thing, then you agree deleting second brains instead of just archiving is a bad thing.

Here's the thing: I'm not making a general commentary or recommendation, I'm recounting my own _personal_ view of what's best for human knowledge and what I think of the authors article. Pretending that me having a different view is "absurd", is arrogant and misguided. That you are unable to understand that I have different needs and ways of approaching life is - apparently - a problem...:P

This is the clarity needed for the discussion, kudos for providing it.

The position implied in your comments is that "what's best for human knowledge" trumps what an individual feels is good for themselves. Even when all we're talking about here is some personal notes.

If a person has a bunch of personal data that they feel is exerting a negative influence on their lives, I don't think that is trumped by the potential interest of strangers and abstract humanity in that data. I would rather the person find their path to being a flourishing, alive person than yoke them to some junk that they feel holds them back.

Alright, fair! Thank you for clarifying.

> I never claimed to know what's best for them (…) I was speaking from a position of what I think's best for human knowledge

Even rereading your original post, it still feels like some parts are a direct prescription for the author. But I believe you if you say that wasn’t your intention. I guess my argument would then be that I still support the author in their deletion, for several reasons, including but not limited to:

* We don’t actually know what was “lost”. Let’s be real: most of what any of us writes is irrelevant and inconsequential and wouldn’t truly contribute to human knowledge as a whole.

* I don’t think it’s fair for the author to suffer in any way, even if it’s “just” anxiety, for the dubious benefit of human knowledge. Even if they did have valuable insights in their texts, they are still their texts and they should have the final say regarding what happens to them. If they want to burn them and doing so will help them get their life back on track, they should. I would argue that without that purge, they could actually be doing more harm to human knowledge in the long run, by not letting them “get back on their feet” and be free for all the new and more valuable insights they’ll have but wouldn’t otherwise.

> Fundamentally, if you agree burning books - metaphorically - is a bad thing, then you agree deleting second brains instead of just archiving is a bad thing.

I agree burning books is bad on principle, but disagree that what the author did was comparable. They didn’t take away from human knowledge, like book burning does. They deleted personal notes no one else was ever probably going to read anyway. The difference is massive.

> Pretending that me having a different view is "absurd"

To be perfectly clear, the only thing I found absurd what that specific quote in relation to what the author did. I.e. I found it to be hyperbolic beyond the realm of reasonable argument. Everything else I found reasonable as a personal opinion as long as it’s not prescribed as the solution for everyone.

> That you are unable to understand that I have different needs and ways of approaching life is - apparently - a problem

Again, that is perfectly fine and valid. But in your original posts you explicitly asked for everyone to act a certain way and my primary goal as to point out that no, I don’t think that should apply to everyone. Many people, sure, but there is definitely a large section of the population for whom I don’t think it would be the right approach. For their own sake, which in this situation trumps “human knowledge”.

There's so much we know about the world from personal notes the author never knew or intended to be read. There's no way of knowing if your personal notes will be valuable to inconceivable futures. We all have to endure a little struggle to maintain society's knowledge. I respect and understand that you disagree with me in various nuanced ways. We're not going to agree, not for any reasons other than we just have fundamentally different views on the world, or one of us is disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing, possibly without realising.

I'm sorry, to anyone who's read this far. Instead of my "... I'll give you one more, but I probably wont respond...." I should have just said "let's just agree to disagree" and stopped there. I don't think either of us have added much valuable at all since.

Sincerely, apologies for any offence caused or time wasted in frustration.

Sounds like the author for sure made an obvious choice even if that doesen’t mean you have to do the same.

Good thing they didn't actually lobotomized themselves, right?

Why is his carbon storage system not enough? Do you need to keep you RAM data persistent as well as your ROM data?