My Remaining Use for Pen and Paper
The author reflects on the practicality of using pen and paper in a digital age. While digital tools are preferred for storing and sharing ideas, pen and paper serve as a valuable medium for brainstorming and early-stage thinking. The tactile experience of writing on paper allows for a more engaging and focused creative process.
- ▪The author prefers digital tools for most tasks but finds pen and paper useful for brainstorming.
- ▪Pen and paper allow for a distraction-free environment to explore new ideas.
- ▪The author believes that physical writing is more engaging for early-stage thinking compared to digital alternatives.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Jarbus |
| Canonical URL | https://jarbus.net/blog/my-remaining-use-for-pen-and-paper/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 22:00:19 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T22:27:44.846Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T22:27:44.846Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | hSN1RJwbiIBk |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
MY REMAINING USE FOR PEN AND PAPERI care about practicality. I read books on an iPad and take notes on my laptop; in general, if I can avoid having another thing by replacing it with a digital copy, I’ll use it digitally. For many of their historical uses, pen & paper just aren’t practical anymore compared to computers. A nicer experience, sure, but for my day-to-day work, not practical.Only recently did I realize the role of pen and paper in my digital life: not as a storage medium, but as a thinking surface.Computers are better for retrieving, refining, storing, and sharing ideas once they have shape, but paper is better for playing with new ideas.1 For designing non-traditional software architectures or exploring research ideas, I still do my best thinking on paper, where I draw boxes…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Jarbus.
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