[nonrandomstring]

Convenience kills.

The Art of Memory by F.A. Yates is still a nice read.

In the article, the engineers admired by the author were intel ops who were stuck in an airgap and had to use their minds. That's a principle I try to use in life - to some extent deliberately making things hard for myself. As with all exercise, what was impossibly hard becomes commonplace.

Part of this discipline is knowing what not to do (yes, attic theory). I never create new accounts on anything or unless I've a clear cost-benefit rationale that makes memorising a new 32 character passphrase worthwhile. That excludes a huge heal of crap that wants you to "sign up" for it.

[DonHopkins]

Speaking of airgaps, here's David Beazley's wonderful classic PyCon talk about using Python as a secret weapon while locked in a secret vault with no internet connection or floppy disks allowed:

>David Beazley: Discovering Python - PyCon 2014

>So, what happens when you lock a Python programmer in a secret vault containing 1.5 TBytes of C++ source code and no internet connection? Find out as I describe how I used Python as a secret weapon of "discovery" in an epic legal battle.

>Slides can be found at: https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2014 and https://github.com/PyCon/2014-slides

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ4Sn-Y7AP8

[gshubert17]

The speakerdeck and github links are too high-level. I believe a better link to Beazley's talk is, https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2014/discovering-python-by-davi...

[DonHopkins]

Here's some stuff about how The Art of Memory, Memory Palaces, and the Method of Loci relate to adventure-like games, and some apps I developed along those lines, which I discussed with Scott Adams when he dropped by HN (the kind and brilliant old school text adventure game developer, not to be confused with the terrible Trump loving misogynistic troll and right wing nut job cartoonist who was outed for using sock puppets to gushingly praise and flatter himself on Metafilter and Reddit, and who besmirched the original Scott Adams' good name):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29330901

>How do you think Adventure games are like the Method of Loci, or Memory Palaces, in that they can help you remember and retrieve vast amounts of information geographically?

Scott Adams (game designer):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams_(game_designer)

Not to be confused with Dilbert creator outed for using sock puppets on Metafilter and Reddit (reddit.com):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452527

[Mezzie]

I think the most hilarious part of the Scott Adams (Dilbert) saga to me is that he bothered to sockpuppet on METAFILTER.

[DonHopkins]

The troll Scott Adams' unintentional humor is much more hilarious, revealing, and reflective of reality than any of his intentional humor or cartoons.