Location: Orem, Utah

  Remote: Yes

  Willing to relocate: Yes

  Technologies: Technical Writing, Information Development, User Experience/User Interface (UX/UI), Electronics Engineering, Computer Engineering

  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephan-fassmann/

  Email: stephan /dot/ fassmann /at/ gmail /dot/ com

I created documentation that allowed customers to successful self-service reducing support calls by 60%.

I expanded the knowledge base with 200+ articles, reducing support call duration by 40%.

I spearheaded a tiger team when I found that customers were not getting the license keys they paid, and the database team misplaced many customers in a migration, saving $50 million in customer accounts.

Reading up on the history of information management, and the real killer app for paper was double-entry bookkeeping, which made Venice rich and contributed to starting the Renaissance.

I was digging around my home state of Indiana's marriage records from the 1800s as part of my ongoing genealogy hobby when I came across the absolutely brilliant way they indexed information. The marriages were recorded sequentially, and that index number was written in special alphabetically tagged pages with the grooms surname and the page number. The brides surname was used as well.

Generally a new book was stared in each county each year.

So, even if there were an error in the indexing, generally you could find a record in 3 operations, doing an exhaustive search was quite unlikely.

The information age might have started when manufacturing stopped fitting into a single human’s head:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250215223917/https://solar.low...

It was the killer app for personal computers as well. From Lotus123 to my family's small business in a tiny country that could only afford a computer in 92 for the business.

Indeed. That's why I am doubtful about LLMs, they just aren't doing something particularly well or solving a basic problem. No one in their right mind would let an LLM do their accounting. Just today I was looking something up and that AI summary was just so wrong. How can I trust it with anything important?

Accounting is integer arithmetic.

Geometry is more or less floating point arithmetic and trigonometry.

LLMs are very lossy text compression. Just like JPEG and MP3 it helps with distilling down the text of the entire Internet in some way.

We can even get reddit recommendations for putting glue onto pizza.

You can't judge AI in general and LLMs in particular by the abysmal Google summaries.

Any titles or resources you have found particularly interesting?

Warning: opening a can of worms. Ann Blair is a great source on general, but there are so many facets to this topic here's a list that I have read or am going to read.

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen * The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin * Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair * Communicating with Slip Boxes: An Empirical Account by Niklas Luhmann * Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design * Writing the Laboratory Notebook by Howard M Kanare * Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski * A System for Writing by Bob Doto * Building a Second Brain By Tiago Forte * Index, a History of the by Dennis Duncan * Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini * The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson * How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens * Filing and Database Systems by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle, Judith Scharle Greene * Organizing from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern * The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen * The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul * Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention by Johann Hari * Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World by Irene Vallejo * Filing by Jeffrey Robert Stewart, Judith A. Scharle * How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess * A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham * The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll * The Medieval Scriptorium by Sara J. Charles * Chance Particulars by Sara Mansfield Taber, Maud Taber-Thomas * The Great Mental Models Volume 1- General Thinking Concepts by Parrish, Shane; Beaubien, Rhiannon * The Product is Docs by Christopher Gales * Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P. Scheper Articulating design decisions by Tom Greever The Card System at the Office by J Kaiser * Systematic Indexing by J Kaiser * Commonplace Books and the Teaching of Style by Lynee Lewis Gaillet * Magic and hypersystems : constructing the information-sharing library by Harold Billings. * The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information by George A. Miller * The Commonplace Book by Elizabeth Smither * The Oxford Handbook of Expertise * Trees, maps, and theorems: Effective communication for rational minds by Jean-luc Doumont * Applied Secretarial Practice by Rupert P. Sorelle and John Robert Gregg * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * What is a Document by Michael Buckland * The Commonplace Book by Ann Blair * Make Better Documents by Anil Dash * A Core Calculus for Documents by Will Crichton and Shriram Krishnamurthi * The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams * Information by Anthony Grafton * The Card Catalog by Carla Hayden * Files: Law and Media Technology by Cornelia Vismann * Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge by Cyrille Martraire * Living in Information by Jorge Arango * How to Write a Technical Paper: Structure and Style of the Epitome of your Research† by Georgios Varsamopoulos * Information Development: Managing Your Documentation Projects, Portfolio, and People by JoAnn T. Hackos * Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango * Software Technical Writing: A Guidebook by James (jamesg.blog)

Wow, I've had an interest in the history of note-taking but that is a huge list. Have you read all those books? Do you have a top 5?

Yeah, this subject is a bit of a rabbit hole. I've read about half of the so far. That's my list of sources from those that I have so far.

I would say start with:

* The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen (This is a fast micro history that hits the highlights.)

* Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair (She is a scholar that has a lot on the subject.)

* Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe by Alberto Cevolini (This is a collection of pretty deep essays.)

* Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs by Markus Krajewski (This is about the development of paper-based databases.)

Thanks for taking the time, I appreciate it. If you write anything on the topic I'd be interested in reading it.

That does make a huge difference, though I have found you also need to divide by the audiences. There are usually two main audiences that need addressing:

1. The new user. They typically know nothing about the product, not even why it exists. The CTO/CIO bought it and now you have to use it. They need lots of hand-holding and needs concrete instruction. Tutorials and explanations are focused on them so they can build accurate mental models of how the software work.

2. The experienced user. They have a pretty good idea of how the product works, but business requirements have changed in some way and know needs to make adjustments to their processes. Or just needs reminders of less used features. Good how-tos and reference material is vital.

If you don't take care of these things the customer will abandon your product sooner than later.

Location: Orem, Utah Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Technical Writing, Information Development, User Experience/User Interface (UX/UI), Electronics Engineering, Computer Engineering Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephan-fassmann/ Email: stephan /dot/ fassmann /at/ gmail /dot/ com

I created documentation that allowed customers to successful self-service reducing support calls by 60%. I expanded the knowledge base with 200+ articles, reducing support call duration by 40%. I spearheaded a tiger team when I found that customers were not getting the license keys they paid, and the database team misplaced many customers in a migration, saving $50 million in customer accounts.

Something important to do is to let your audience know that you are only showing them a small piece of the whole, because of the media you are using. With hooks like, if you want to learn more go read this article or this book.

Merry Christmas, This has been a wild one. On the way to my sister's house we got a call from her sister saying their dad needs to go into an assisted living place because his pneumonia is not getting better and needs 24/7 care. But this will cut off the income my wife was bring in for caring for him.

As the call is on our car throws a red light: Transmission malfunction: Service now. We take the next exit and happen to find a Big O Tire place which is where we get most of our car work done. The transmission is seized, but it's Christmas Eve and no one is open to get an estimate on a replacement. But that's okay a couple of cousins are able to pick us up to get to the party.

We get home and find big pile of presents on our doorstep but we find they are addressed to names we don't know. So we bring them in for safekeeping. Today I look around the apartment building and finding one with a dollhouse on the balcony give a knock but its the wrong door but they knew the family which was downstairs so the right family got the presents finally.

Now cinnamon rolls are baking for breakfast and starting dinner prep soon.

But somehow I have to figure out if I should replace the transmission on a 13 year old car which needs $4500 in suspension work too or replace the whole vehicle.

And find a way to make more money since the part-time job I have right now to open up time for caregiving won't be enough for all this, and it looks like caregiving won't be necessary for much longer anyway.

Hope things improve for you, and you have a Merry Christmas in spite of it all.

For what it's worth, it strikes me as very unlikely that the transmission is going to be less than an additional $4500. But you never know, it could be a simple fault - no sense in trying to make mental decisions before you know the math involved.

Hang in there. This is a difficult period of life, went through something similar not long back. Be sure to take care of yourself and have some mental “time off” this week.

That's a bittersweet mix of troubles and sweetness. I hope the troubles sort out without too much heartache, and that 2026 brings many good things.

One aspect of it might be glucose depletion. I know when I was taking lots of tests at uni I could give myself a boost by eating a honey stick which was recommended by a bio prof. In any case, this looks fairly complex and it will be interesting to see how this goes.

The one author that I think we have a good chance of recreating would be Barbara Cartwright. She wrote 700+ romance novels all pretty much the same. It should be possible to generate another of her novels given that large a corpus.

I'm not sure how we'd know. My wife sometimes buys and rereads a novel she's already finished.

Gotta love how "market rate" is about 60% of what you need to qualify to rent an apartment these days.

And of course the roles are hybrid specifically to prevent you from living in a location where you can actually afford rent.

The sad part is that over-regulation and taxes have put us in this situation, but the same politicans keep getting voted in, time and time again.

The trouble is how many times can you try. I tired building 6 businesses; all failed. I just don't have the resources to try again. I've lost too much. I am lucky to have been able to try at all. Like that parable floating around about the people and the carnival games, the rich own the game, the poor run the games and the middle class get a chance or two to play.