How old are you? At 39 (20 years of professional experience) I've forgotten more things in this field than I'm comfortable with today. I find it a bit sad that I've completely lost my Win32 reverse engineering skills I had in my teens, which have been replaced by nonsense like Kubernetes and aligning content with CSS Grid.

And I must admit my appetite in learning new technologies has lessened dramatically in the past decade; to be fair, it gets to a point that most new ideas are just rehashing of older ones. When you know half a dozen programming languages or web frameworks, the next one takes you a couple hours to get comfortable with.

▲ doix 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I've forgotten more things in this field than I'm comfortable with today. I find it a bit sad that I've completely lost my Win32 reverse engineering skills I had in my teens

I'm a bit younger (33) but you'd be surprised how fast it comes back. I hadn't touched x86 assembly for probably 10 years at one point. Then someone asked a question in a modding community for an ancient game and after spending a few hours it mostly came back to me.

I'm sure if you had to reverse engineer some win32 applications, it'd come back quickly.

	▲	Agentlien 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I want to second this. I'm 38 and I used to do some debugging and reverse engineering during my university days (2006-2011). Since then I've mainly avoided looking at assembly since I mostly work in C++ systems or HLSL. These last few months, however, I've had to spend a lot of time debugging via disassembly for my work. It felt really slow at first, but then it came back to me and now it's really natural again.
	▲	mickeyp 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		SoftICE gang represent :-) That's a skill onto itself, and I mean the general stuff does not fade or at least come back quickly. But there's a lot of the tail end that's just difficult to recall because it's obscure. How exactly did I hook Delphi apps' TForm handling system instead of breakpointing GetWindowTextA and friends? I mean... I just cannot remember. It wasn't super easy either.

▲ nkrisc 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can’t keep infinite knowledge in your brain. You forget skills you don’t use. Barring some pathology, if you’re doing something every day you won’t forget it.

If you’ve forgotten your Win32 reverse engineering skills I’m guessing you haven’t done much of that in a long time.

That said, it’s hard to truly forget something once you’ve learned it. If you had to start doing it again today, you’d learn it much faster this time than the first.

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Wowfunhappy 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> You can’t keep infinite knowledge in your brain.

For what it’s worth—it’s not entirely clear that this is true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia

The human brain seemingly has the capability to remember (virtually?) infinite amounts of information. It’s just that most of us… don’t.

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pixl97 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You can't store an infinite amount of entropy in a finite amount of space outside of a singularity, well or at least attempting to do that will cause a singularity.

Compression/algorithms don't save you here either. The algorithm for pi is very short, pulling up any particular randomm digit of pi still requires the expenditure of some particular amount of entropy.

	▲	25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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nkrisc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It’s just that most of us… don’t.

Ok, so my statement is essentially correct.

Most of us can not keep infinite information in our brain.

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Wowfunhappy an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I do take your point. But the point I’m trying to emphasize is that the brain isn’t like a hard drive that fills up. It’s a muscle that can potentially hold more.

I’m not sure if this is in the Wikipedia article, but when I last read about this, years ago, there seemed to be a link between Hyperthymesia and OCD. Brain scans suggested the key was in how these individuals organize the information in their brain, so that it’s easy for them retrieve.

Before the printing press was common, it was common for scholars to memorize entire books. I absolutely cannot do this. When technology made memorization less necessary, our memories shrank. Actually shrank, not merely changing what facts to focus on.

And to be clear, I would never advocate going back to the middle ages! But we did lose something.

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nkrisc 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

There must be some physical limit to our cognitive capacity.

We can “store” infinite numbers by using our numeral system as a generator of sorts for whatever the next number must be without actually having to remember infinite numbers, but I do not believe it would be physically possible to literally remember every item in some infinite set.

Sure, maybe we’ve gotten lazy about memorizing things and our true capacity is higher (maybe very much so), but there is still some limit.

Additionally, the practical limit will be very different for different people. Our brains are not all the same.

	▲	Wowfunhappy 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I agree, it must not be literally infinite, I shouldn’t have said that. But it may be effectively infinite. My strong suspicion is that most of us are nowhere close to whatever the limit is. Think about how we talk about exercise. Yes, there probably is a theoretical limit to how fast any human could run, and maybe Olympic athletes are close to that, but most of us aren’t. Also, if you want your arms to get stronger, it isn’t bad to also exercise your legs; your leg muscles don’t somehow pull strength away from your arm muscles.

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ploum 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is also a matter of choice. I don’t remember any news trivia, I don’t engage with "people news" and, to be honest, I forget a lot of what people tell me about random subject.

It has two huge benefits: nearly infinite memory for truly interesting stuff and still looking friendly to people who tell me the same stuff all the times.

Side-effect: my wife is not always happy that I forgot about "non-interesting" stuff which are still important ;-)

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tovej 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

1) That's not infinite, just vast

2) Hyperthymesia is about remembering specific events in your past, not about retaining conceptual knowledge.

	▲	thesz an hour ago \| parent [-]
		https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kUQWuK1L4w APL inventor says that he was developing not a programming language, but notation to express as much problems as one can. He found that expressing more and more problems with the notation first made notation grow, then notation size started to shrink. To develop conceptual knowledge (when one's "notation" starts to shrink) one has to have some good memory (re-expressing more and more problems).

▲ thesz an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

  > When you know half a dozen programming languages or web frameworks, the next one takes you a couple hours to get comfortable with.

Learn yourself relational algebra. It invariantly will lead you to optimization problems and these will also invariantly lead you to equality saturation that is most effectively implemented with... generalized join from relational algebra!

Also, relational algebra implements content-addressable storage (CAS), which is essential for data flow computing paradigm. Thus, you will have a window into CPU design.

At 54 (36 years of professional experience) I find these rondos fascinating.