Cleaning up and throwing out.
I haven't been tinkering a lot lately. Not because I haven't wanted to (well, that's not quite true) but because I've had other stuff that I wanted to get out of the way. Basically, I couldn't stand the impacted shitpile that I call an office-cum-workshop in its current state anymore. Figuring out how much floor space I had a few weeks ago really got to me and I decided to do something about it. I've been spending a couple of hours every day (after work and over the weekends) going through one thing at a time (one stack of drawers, one bookcase, one crate of stuff), picking out stuff to donate, picking out stuff to throw away, and coalescing the rest to make room for the stuff sitting on top of books, on the edges of shelves, and so forth.
It's a remarkably efficient process. Just cleaning out my stack of craft materials drawers, for example, resulted in one trash bag full of stuff getting thrown out, and a net one (1) empty drawer in the stack. Same with the random crap sitting on the floor, edges, and suchlike. Half of it got pitched, the other half put away properly. I'm making a point of not thinking too hard about stuff and tossing it as soon as I can. As I go back and work on this post a little more a couple of days later, I think I've thrown out three bags of stuff and re-organized the entire bottom of my rack. I've also deduplicated a large quantity of random cables and power supplies in my collection. Oddball one-offs and ones whose provenance I can prove (e.g., Commodore 64 video cables) get to stay, but by and large I've cut things down to not more than six spares per category of cable (after sorting them). If I open a couple of packages that'll free up more room (because packaging is designed to take the abuse so that the product inside doesn't) but... I'm tired. It can wait a few more days.
This has caused me to reconsider my relationship with physical books and knowledge as well. I have a great many books that I've read once, maybe twice, and then never looked at again. This sticks like a fish hook in my skin because, when I was younger I would read and re-read some books a couple of times per year, but I don't do that anymore. I think that some of it was that I craved life experience as a kid (I knew that I was too young and too limited in scope to do very much) and books filled in for that, but now that I'm much older I am in a position to go out and, well, do stuff with my life. While books are still important to me, they're not as important or in the same way. To put it another way, I'd much rather go to HOPE or mess around with stuff on my workbench than 'just' sit and read a book. Books are nice but they're not an experience in the same way as doing something talked about in a book. "Theory" versus "build and repair," if I had to crib an example from an RPG. 1
There's another thing that I've been thinking about, which is that books represent static collections of information, while electronic sources are inherently ephemeral collections of information that are subject to corruption. Let me unpack that a bit.
Since LLMs, large language models, have become A Big Thing large swaths of the online experience have become... unreliable at best. LLM generated scientific papers are sneaking through the peer review process 2 and being published. And are complete jetwash. LLM-backed bots are popping up on social media to shape narratives, push disinformation, overwhelm moderation systems, and generally fuck with people, sometimes with hilarious results. Online repositories of information like Wikipedia are falling prey to LLM edits with exactly the same risks and side effects they have in other contexts. Life outside of the Big Sites isn't any better because websites full of AI slop 3 are all over the place pretending to be useful but are actually garbage for the sake of search engine optimization which makes it very difficult to find actual, usable information.
This is where needing to get rid of books I haven't looked at in ages bother me. Books are static. Once they're printed they can't be changed unless you throw them out and replace them with new copies (which are of questionable provenance if they were written in the last few years). Websites can and have been taken over and actual writers replaced with slop generators with predictable results.
So, what can we do?
For whatever it might be worth I've been falling back on dead trees more and more. I've got quite a few textbooks and reference texts on my shelves that I'm not planning on letting go of without a very good reason. Some time ago I hunted down copies of the New York Public Library Desk Reference (fourth edition, 2002), Desk Ref (fourth edition, 2010), and Pocket Ref (fourth edition, 2010) and keep them handy on the bookshelves near my desk. Those are all Amazon affiliate links, so if you're not okay with that but want to purchase copies feel free not to use them, I just want you to know they exist. While they're a little bit dated I should like to point out that the essentials of knowledge (arithmetic, geometry, measuring things, basic physics, basic chemistry, basic metalworking, constants like the speeds of light and sound) don't change from volume to volume. You don't need the latest and greatest to learn the Pythagorean Theorem.
This dovetails with another thing that I've been doing in recent years, which is trying to teach myself one new thing a day as a way of keeping my brain exercised as I get older. Where does my external memory stand in relation to the veracity of sources (which may or may not be primary) these days? The answer to this is that, wherever possible I try to start from static, offline resources and use those to check (to the extent possible) online resources (which is where the more advanced stuff is easiest to get hold of). If this sounds like using the dead tree materials to work through the online stuff... you're right. It's a lot like homework, just like going to the gym can be considered homework for your physical health. Sometimes it feels a lot like what Anders Sanderg called fundamentalist science because it means going back to first principles a lot. But, over time, stuff that I haven't thought about in ages comes back to me, and in addition I'm building a private repository of information that is unlikely to be corrupted. 4 5 Additionally, the ability to easily paste things like photographs and charts into pages means that being able to take pictures of primary, offline sources and paste them onto pages like a scrapbook provides something like an evidence trail of where information came from. Plus, you know, not having to re-draw stuff by hand (which is not my strong suit).
Is any of this perfect? Far from it. But it does work reliably for me. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some stuff to put away.
https://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2024-08-14/cleaning-up-throwing-out/