Introduce Yourselves!

Perl + Smalltalk, I like both, although so different

You wouldnā€™t say that if you got 300+ emails a day that you need to look through manually because those are the important looking ones after filters.

Mailing lists havenā€™t worked for me in years. I fucking hate them.

I guess weā€™re just different :wink: To me, a mailing list filtered out to a separate folder and with a healthy amount of threads ignored by the mailing client doesnā€™t add to the cognitive load, since itā€™s filtered out anyway and doesnā€™t count against the pile of emails needing manual attention after filters (and thatā€™s a huge one, believe me). And, unlike the forums, all the mailing lists have the same interface with the same keyboard shortcuts that are in my muscle memory already. :slight_smile:

Also, in a forum thereā€™s no decent way to write this my answer that is terribly off topic for the thread :smiley:

Yeah, the difference is probably that I get a lot more emails than you and also need to respond to email quickly as part of my job.

Thing is: I get so much email in the important folders that I need to check that if I filter out mailing lists to a folder that ā€ždoesnā€™t add cognitive loadā€, it will literally never get checked. I might as well not have the list subscription. This isnā€™t theoretic, itā€™s happening right now in my mail client.

When I say I have too much email, I mean only the mail requiring manual attention. The rest doesnā€™t matter. But something I want to eventually read needs manual attention (the reading). Filters donā€™t solve this problem.

Actually, one of the reasons I left employment was exactly this problem. People were sending me a lot of email and then wondering why looking at and responding to that mail took a significant amount of my time away from writing.

Then they said: Just filter that mail away. To which I said: If you want to send me mail I will never read, why are you sending it to me in the first place?

Basically, email takes enough of my time already. So the decision if I opt into receiving any is: do I want to spent time looking at this? If not, I donā€™t subscribe or just filter it away. Which makes email unusable to me for tasks that arenā€™t important enough to eat into my precious time. And yeah, I do consider my time very precious. Which is why I generally bill people for it. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

You could open a new thread and just @ me.

But I also donā€™t mind the occasional off topic discussion in a thread. This is a community forum, not the LKML.

I see your point, but I also see a fallacy :wink:

Youā€™re going to read the forum anyway, at least some of it. Youā€™re gonna spend the precious time doing it. And it doesnā€™t really matter whether youā€™ll be reading these lines in your email client or your browser; if anything, the familiar and comfy interface of the email client facilitates spending less time on the taskā€¦

Some people say they feel the need to switch interfaces to distinguish work from life, for example, and thus they do work in the email client and donā€™t want their leisure time activities (i.e. forums) there. I had to spend a lot of time teaching myself to ignore the growing 3-digit ā€œunreadā€ numbers over the folders with the emails Iā€™ll have to deal with first thing in the morning when I get to work while Iā€™m skimming through my entertainment mailing lists enjoying my evening glass of wine. Itā€™s hard to accept that inbox-zero is impossible if youā€™re a perfectionist like me :smiley: Hard, but not impossible.

Iā€™m still pretty early in my Smalltalk learning. Definitely very different in syntax, Smalltalk being so minimalistic. But I feel that practicing in Smalltalk might improve my style in Object Oriented Perl, more so than doing some C++ maintenance did. Theyā€™re at least similar in being dynamically typed.

What implementation of Smalltalk did you use?

I can identify with that :slight_smile:. Interacting takes much more time than just listening to a podcast e.g. in transit (so I avoid writing comments when I know I will not have time to engage with the responseā€¦).

What I find useful is that on certain topics we have here very active contributors, with more or less similar views to mine, so for example if I have a comment on something related to climate-change or corona, thereā€™s a good chance that it will be raised and discussed sooner or later (like in those episodes with @MikeTheDane ). This way I can spend my bursts of interactions on other topics.

Nice to meet :wave::slight_smile:

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Thank you, for me as well.

Yeah, the need to have more time to properly engage in a topic, held me back many time in different occasions.

Yes. But if you sent me this in an email, chances are I would never read it. I donā€™t understand what you are complaining about. I am giving you a bit of my time here. Something a lot of PR agencies would probably actually pay money forā€¦

Again, that is not the problem. You simply donā€™t work in a job where getting a certain email is the difference between you doing your job that day or not. In my case itā€™s the difference between getting paid that day or not.

Your email address also isnā€™t listed on sites with millions of monthly readers. And you donā€™t have a situation where readers, whistleblowers, PR people and spammers are mailing you. I want to read 100% of mails from readers and whistleblowers, maybe 5% of mails from PR and zero from spammers. Thereā€™s simply no way to filter that. Filtering PR from spam alone is impossible. Getting those 5% out of my PR pile is almost impossible. And not filtering away readers and whistleblowers at all is pretty hard.

I simply canā€™t afford any wine-drinking entertainment lists. Iā€™ve barely kept up (and often failed) extracting good info from my email account since at least 2012. If you came over here for a week and looked at how someone in my situation uses email youā€™d realise its fucked. The fact that it works for you doesnā€™t mean you can unilaterally say it should work for everyone else, theyā€™re just holding it wrong. It just stops scaling in certain situations.

Iā€™m Steve, from Smithers BC in Canada.

I do lots of different things, currently employed as a diesel engine technician, machinist, and fabricator with one company and a network and server technician with another.

Iā€™ve been listening to Fab since the LO days and have been transitioning through his podcasts as he goes.

Why am I here? Well, why are any of us hereā€¦

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Wow. Two jobs at once? That sounds stressful, man! Nice to meet you. :slightly_smiling_face:

That is how I manage to stay out of trouble. Since I donā€™t podcast, I needed something to fill in that time.

Yeah, well. I am hardly one to talk. I work pretty much all the timeā€¦ :laughing:

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:house_with_garden: Where are you from?

Iā€™m from Portugal, more specifically the Azores. Now i reside on the mainland, near Porto.

:man_office_worker: What do you do?

Iā€™m part of the IT staff on the university of Porto.

:mag: How did you find this place?

Iā€™ve been following on and off @fabsh work since the early days of LO.

:mage: Why are you here?

Mainly to shoot the shit about any themes that appear here.

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:house_with_garden: Where are you from?
I am from and live in Luxembourg.

:man_office_worker: What do you do?
After my studies for electrical engineer I reoriented myself because of difficulties in finding a job and became an elementary school teacher.

:mag: How did you find this place?

:mage: Why are you here?
I think having listened to every podcast episode Fab has published since the beginning of 2019 and I have been a producer for TPC since the start of the show. Although I have rarely sent feedback I am a loyal listener to the show and am very grateful to Fab for not only discovering Sabaton and Firefly through his podcasts and streams during a personally difficult time and for inspiring me to watch all the episodes of Star Trek TNG, but most importantly for bringing me to the attention of the No Agenda Show and eventually becoming a producer there as well, which helps me a lot to stay sane during these difficult times.

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That is pretty cool! Iā€™ve never been to Portugal. We wanted to holiday in the van over there in 2019 but the weather on the Atlantic coast got too bad and I diverted us to Tuscany instead. Then the pandemic hit. :roll_eyes:

One of these days, weā€™ll get to come over in the van. Or, maybe, if Katy ever gets a science collaboration with someone at your uni going we can do it that way. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Youā€™re actually one of the most important producers of the show. Itā€™s fair to say that the show probably wouldnā€™t be there anymore without your financial support. So: Thank you!

Also pretty cool to hear that someone in Luxembourg was listening to Uplink. And that you found your way here through that! :partying_face:

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Sure! Hit me up if youā€™re ever around or need contacts!

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