I still suck at being verbally coherent, as my brain isn’t quick in the right way, but my guess is that it’s good to have "talking points" that you’re trying to work toward from wherever the question actually started, and an outline to make sure to hit points A, B, C, and D about matter E...

I always went in as a naive kid "they will ask a question and I will say the answer; repeat" because I was brought up to be so passive. And still am so passive. And I naively thought they’d recognize there must be something there if I could get that GPA.

I don’t see pictures, and I don’t have a monologue running, either.

I don’t know whether it’s the best place to look, but I’ve seen that the people on /r/aphantasia like to talk about these matters.

I hate chats so much. Having to ask something manually and then wait and hope for minutes/hours/days for a manual reply, I can’t think of something more opposed to what people who are familiar with what computers can do for humanity should recognize the value in, and yet here we all are.

On the balance I like chats much more. In terms of personal connections per time spent on contributing I found chats to be about one order of magnitude more effective than old (gone) phpbb forums. Forums were much more transactional and impersonal in nature.

Compared to what forums morphed into - reddit, hn, similar - these are another order of magnitude worse than old forums. See, consider yours and my reply. I won't remember your nickname nor will you remember mine. There are no avatars. It's borderline machine level information exchange with the author itself a faded out barely visible string.

I find the exact opposite - it is multiple orders of magnitude worse in chat than in forum or newsgroup type discussions. But I also had the pleasure of being in some very active and substantive discussions in both formats. Chat is so inefficient, particularly the part where we decided to put them all behind walls that search engines cannot pierce. So you can't find the conversation from 6 months ago that answered the exact question you have, you have to ask it again. It reminds me of IRC days where people created bots to re-answer FAQs.

This is likely something where it isn't something that can have an absolute worth put on the various technologies, but where it'll change from person to person, depending on how they like to interact with others, how comfortable they are in a real-time vs. asynchronous setting and so forth.

But that said, I do believe that all of the walls that currently exist (and yes, I know they've existed in the past, not like IRC was archived) as antithetical to the spirit of the Internet and the idea of sharing information effectively. We have yet to find the perfect medium that combines some level of privacy for those that want it but allows for information to be shared so it isn't lost to the annals of some chat log.

And there are projects that interest me where whatever they’re up to is all in a chat so the rest of the world never does know if/how things have been progressing.

I remember Jim Watson saying that stupidity could someday be cured, and everyone absolutely lost their minds and pretended that he was calling stupid people bad. Somehow.

Not hugely surprising to today-me, but I was still young enough that it was a bit disillusioning to see that people couldn't even see (or say out loud) that being more intelligent would help us all.

I puzzle over how, out in the open source world, so much seems to have shifted from testing for a while before releasing to just releasing and acting like it was normal that there turned out to be lots of bugs. Or never releasing at all and expecting others to use whatever happens to be in git right this moment.

Sacrifices always seem to be presented as the killer or the people giving up something they value, but I would not be at all surprised if it were basically a display of power — killing people those who are poorly-connected or who are rivals in some way.

I'm still amazed how few Americans are capable of caring about the health and lives of other people, their neighbors, their communities. And thoroughly in denial that anything could ever befall their perfect selves.

I feel not convinced, given my experience, but I don’t know how to express it briefly. Maybe I could say that you need to have to happen to have some of the right tastes.

I also didn’t, and maybe it’s me because I never have really made any very like-minded friends ever, but computer science sure didn’t make it easy, since there were always programming projects that could eat up every minute of your day every day. Or maybe a different school would have been a different story.

In my—undergraduate, not-very-specialist—days of being taught something or other about entropy now and then, I felt like we were being told "This state is special, so the entropy is low, and then it probably ends up in one of these other states, and none of them are special, so the entropy has increased”, and it would seem to me that we could appreciate all of the states as equally special if we were big-brained enough. Maybe like the integers being Ramanujan’s personal friends.