In a completely different field, navigating ships at sea, the Collision Regulations which define how people must conduct ships at sea, they use the words "Shall" and "May" to differentiate legal requirements and what may just be best practice. "Should" intuitively means something more like "May" to me
Note "the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course". Gmail and the other big hosters have full-time spam teams who spend a lot of time weighing implications, so I assume the implications of this was weighed.
I feel like "SHOULD" and "SHOULD NOT" are redundant. You end up having to assume someone else treated them as a "MAY". If you control all the endpoints in a private implementation you can just deviate from the standard & not implement a MUST, it's your private implementation. There's thus no difference in public implementations between "SHOULD" and "MAY", and no difference in internal implementations between any of the words. They are therefore redundant, requirements are either mandatory or optional, there's no middle.
Replying for anyone reading this comment: Le Guin was a Daoist, but also, and concurrently, an anarchist. So much of her writing, especially The Word for World is Forest, parts of Earthsea, The Dispossessed, is informed by her anarchism. Very often you find Le Guin exploring ideas of an anarchist response to colonialism, or just enjoying setting out an anarchist society and imagining how it might work, how it would unfold, the challenges it would face, and the solutions people might try.
I believe this is a solved problem and you were closest with the analog system. I'll outline my system so people might find it:
You'll need:
- A physical diary to track your appointments
- A 'working' box to hold index cards of whichever size you prefer (I use 3x5 Exacompta cards)
- 43 tabbed index card dividers + some more if you want tabs for GTD-style 'contexts'
- A pouch for carrying index cards on your person (I have a Lochby Pocket Journal which holds plenty of cards)
- A box to act as an 'inbox' for you to dump cards into before processing them
Where you went wrong is keeping a list on a single card. The only solution is 'One Item, One Card'.
The Set Up:
- Take 31 tabbed dividers and write the numbers 1-31 on them. These will represent a day of the month.
- Put these in your Working Box
- Take 12 more tabbed dividers, write JAN-DEC on them. These will represent a month of the year.
- Put these in your Working Box /behind/ the daily tabs
- If you are using tabs to track 'NEXT ACTIONS' with contexts like GTD, write the name of the contexts on a set of tabbed dividers
- Put these in your Working Box /in front/ of the /daily/ tabs - as in, they come first in the box
Daily Routine:
- In the morning, sit down at your desk
- Check your Diary for any appointments you have that day
- Check your inbox for new cards and put them on your desk
- In your Working Box, pull out the cards that are behind today's day tab and move the tab to the next month. For example, today is the 28th of January, so I pull out the cards behind the 28 tab, put them on my desk, and then move the 28 tab back to February (which is already full of the 1-27 tabs from previous days)
- Sort through today's cards - I do this in 4 or 5 piles:
1) Things I'm going to do now before I go to work
2) Things I'm going to do today, but not right now - these go in my Pocket Journal so that I can refer to them through the day (things like "Call this person over my lunch break")
3) Things I'm going to today, but when I get back home from work - these go right in the front of my Working Box, before all of the tabs. I also organise these into an order in which I am going to tackle them
4) Things I'm going to move to another day, which I then move to another day tab
5) (optional) things I am not going to do, but don't want to throw away. I put these into storage in a 'Someday' box which I look at once a week
- Go off to work with the cards you sorted into the (2) pile, and plenty of blanks to write down anything that comes to mind that you might want to do - make sure that you put one thing on one card, so that they can be sorted into the box easily
- Come home, dump all of the cards in your Pocket Journal into your inbox, and sort them out there and then or leave them for the next morning's routine
As jobs get done I either throw away the card if it was a one-off job, or move it to another day if it is a recurring thing. For example, I have a card that reminds me to clean my phone which I do, and then put back in the box in 2 days time.
Why This Works:
I've been using a system like this for about two and a half years. Before this I used Org Mode and spent a lot of time tweaking agenda views and tagging systems etc. Index cards work better for me for the following reasons:
- The system works offline
- It requires no technology, so I can have a productive day without touching a computer or phone, which is good for my mental health
- I work a job where I cannot always pull out a phone to take notes
- The act of writing things down helps me to remember that I need to do them, and stops me writing down frivolous things (think about how many people have a TODO app full of odd little jobs they'll never do which got there because there's no friction to adding things to their lists)
- Because I have a good habit of writing down anything that I think about doing, and can trust my physical system, I have confidence that what is in my box represents everything I /need/ to do. I don't have to think about whether things have synced properly, leaving me unsure if my I am missing items.
- Once the box is set up there is no need to spend time tweaking the system, which is a time-suck for people who use things like Org Mode
- Because there is one item per card I can easily reshuffle my plan for the day, and move jobs from one day to another and back without crossing things out and re-writing them (this is the drawback of systems like Bullet Journals, and your one)
I'm sure there are other benefits which no longer appear to me because I am so used to it.
The forecastle of a ship is in the forward part of a ship — at the front, not the back. Looking at renderings of cogs, the 'castle' at the stern seems more to anticipate the modern bulk carrier, with an accommodation block with bridge on top at the aft end, looking out over the cargo holds.
Ships of that era and leader had castles on both ends fore and aft. It's just the forward one than retained in usage as a sailing term, even after foredecks no longer looked like castles. The aft castle became a quarterdeck, a poop deck, a cockpit or a bridge etc.
Meanwhile, a built-up and elevated stern 'castle' is advantageous place to put the steering and command position, close to the rudder and with visibility of the whole ship, it's rig, plus where the ship is going. While maximizing mid-ship area for cargo. If you have to pick one end or the other, stern is the more comfortable end of the ship being most sheltered from wave action and weather. Being elevated and fortified also helps as a fighting/defensive position, but that is less important for modern cargo ships. 'Anticipation' isn't quite the right word as shipbuilders have always worked within the same basic design considerations and trade-offs, as the sea itself continues to enforce the same fundamental constraints.
> I wasted several hours on occasions where Claude would make changes to completely unrelated parts of the application instead of addressing my actual request.
Every time I read about people using AI I come away with one question. What if they spent hours with a pen and paper and brainstormed about their idea, and then turned it into an actual plan, and then did the plan? At the very least you wouldn't waste hours of your life and instead enjoy using your own powers of thought.
> What if they spent hours with a pen and paper and brainstormed about their idea, and then turned it into an actual plan, and then did the plan? At the very least you wouldn't waste hours of your life and instead enjoy using your own powers of thought.
OP here - I am a bit confused by this response. What are you trying to say or suggest here?
It's not like I didn't have a plan when making changes; I did, and when things went wrong, I tried to debug.
That said, if what you mean by having a plan (which again, I might not be understanding!) is write myself a product spec and then go build the site by learning to code or using a no/low code tool, I think that would have been arguably far less efficient and achieved a less ideal outcome.
In this case, I had Figma designs (from our product designer) that I wanted to implement, but I don't have the programming experience or knowledge of Remix as a framework to have been able to "just do it" on my own in a reasonable amount of time without pairing with Claude.
So while I had some frustrating hours of debugging, I still think overall I achieved an outcome (being able to build a site based on a detailed Figma design by pairing with Claude) that I would never have been able to achieve otherwise to that quality bar in that little amount of time.
I had not thought of visualing my mental debugging process as a decision _tree_ and that LLMs (and talking to other humans) are analogous to a foreign graft. Interesting, thanks!
Never have FOMO when it comes to AI. When it's good enough to be a competitive advantage, everyone will catch up with you in weeks, if not days. All you are doing is learning to deal with the very flaws that have to be fixed for it to be worth anything.
Embrace that you aren't learning anything useful. Everything you are learning will be redundant in a year's time. Advice on how to make AI effective from 1 year ago is gibberish today. Today you've got special keyword like ultrathink or advice on when to compact context that will be gibberish in a year.
Use it, enjoy experimenting and seeing the potential! But no FOMO! There's a point when you need to realize it's not good enough yet, use the few useful bits, put the rest down, and get on with real work again.
If it takes you hours to figure out what's working and what's not, then it isn't good enough. It should just work or it should be obvious when it won't work.
I mean that’s like saying doing normal coding or working on any project yourself isn’t good enough because you put in hours to figure out what works and doesn’t.
That analogy is off, because LLMs aren't a project I'm working on. They are a tool I can use to do that. And my expectation on tools is that they help me and not make things more complicated than they already are.
When LLMs ever reach that point I'll certainly hear about it and gladly use them. In the meantime I let the enthusiasts sort out the problems and glitches first.
I work as a merchant seaman and for our regular day's work everyone basically exclusively uses bowlines, round turn and two half hitches, and clove hitches. We'd use reef knots or single sheet bends for joining ropes.
I think most often people have some vibe coded stuff that kind of does what they want but they don't really understand what it all is and how it works, or any confidence it can be made into something useful, so rather than spending time cleaning up AI code they just use it to grasp the idea and write it themselves. Whether any time is saved by going through this process with the AI seems doubtful to me. Sitting down with pen and paper and thinking through things would probably be more useful.
I think this is a good point because "cheating at the work I have to do, as quickly as possible, well enough to not get fired" is the actual use case for AI for 99% of people.
All the stuff you see in this thread about how kids are going to use AI to bootstrap an education for themselves even better than what their teachers give them (not sure why there's so much hostility towards teachers) is a fantasy.
HN obviously overrepresents kids who were interested in tech things who may do something like that. The vast majority of kids will use AI as a tool to blurt out essays and coursework they don't read, so that they can get back to their addiction to TikTok and Instagram.
As will, of course, everyone using it at work. This is already the case. This is what AI is for. "Do this for me so I can scroll more".
He has two main projects - A & B. Currently A takes up 80% of his time and B takes up 20%. He uses the timers to track time on each project with the goal of transitioning to 80% on B.
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