Back when I first got a cellphone and slowly started forgetting phone numbers I remember thinking "OK that is scary, it really didn't take long for me to forget something that used to be second nature for me"

[henstridge@mstdn.social]

@tykling I still remember the phone number of the house I was born in, and also that of my current house where I've now lived for 40 years.
I don't remember any mobile numbers, including my own. They seem too ephemeral to bother with memorizing.

[harib_murshidi@mastodon.social]

@tykling I remember at least 10 important numbers and I carry a small notebook.... but that's just me who started carrying a notebook playing pretend slueth since I was 7

[beach@illo.social]

@henstridge @tykling If you start entering numbers into your phone manually again then I'm pretty sure the skill will return. I don't think it's a loss of cognitive ability, I think it's a loss of opportunities to use the number.

[renardboy@mastodon.social]

@tykling Realistically, if for whatever reason you started actually *needing* it again, it'd probably come back in a flash.

As it stands, you can't bring yourself to remember phone numbers because you know deep down that it's largely pointless.

I can't remember phone numbers either, but I can easily remember over a dozen passwords because I don't write them down.

I'm of the belief that if LLMs can fully substitute your need to write code, you were writing trivial code in the first place.

[navi@catcatnya.com]

@tykling Funny, I remember quite a few phone numbers. But, only if I specifically took the time to do so instead of just putting them into my contacts.

[marinheiro@ciberlandia.pt]

@tykling mental arithmetic is another. Coming from a precalculator generation it was once second nature. Now I still remember (with a slight delay) the times table, but ask me to do division in my head and I almost have to start from first principles. But I guess later generations never had this ability? #vibecoding

[henstridge@mstdn.social]

@beach @tykling You are probably correct, though I don't think I'll ever remember my own number as I never call it

[larsmb@mastodon.online]

@tykling I'm not sure this is a great analogy because that's a skill I really no longer need and don't expect to miss. (I can look them up, correctly, reliably, reproducibly, in a database or my paper notes whenever I need them at no cost. They carry no inherent meaning.)

[k@chaos.social]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@tykling/116730072003148764

I never got around to using the addressbook feature of my phone. Seems like a data leak waiting to happen.

[raymaccarthy@mastodon.ie]

@tykling
At least you exported the Contacts as a csv file and made a backup?
Right?

[hazelnot@sunbeam.city]

@henstridge @beach @tykling my number is one of the three I still remember, specifically because I need to give it out to other people when I change it and then enter it on various forms (both on and offline)

(the other two are my parents', which haven't changed since I was a kid and I'd call them from a landline)

[reallylazybear@mastodon.social]

@tykling Keep it together man. Keep using that brain and try to remember how you learned stuff or you might actually develop something worse... dementia

I know it's genetic and not everyone will have it but once you have that, there's no coming back cos there's no cure for it.

I read exercising your brain by programming or playing something like chess and just living normally and eating a healthy diet reduces the chances though, but it relies on hope that you won't get it.

[pascal_mueller@mastodon.social]

@larsmb @tykling I second that. The thing is that memorizing phone numbers is, at least in my opinion, not really a skill. Memorizing is a skill and phone numbers are just a thing to memorize. We‘re still able to memorize things even though we might not remember anyone‘s number anymore.

Vibe coding is different, because coding is a skill in and of it self.

[patterfloof@meow.social]

@marinheiro @tykling so many times I've reached for the phone calculator then thought half way through "why am I putting in something this simple, should be able to at least rough it in my head"

[thundalarchsys@mastodon.social]

@henstridge @beach @tykling

Using a phone number for things like shopping rewards and versions of it for passwords brought this ability back for me, so it's definitely something that can be revived.

Entering a polycule member's phone# twice a month for his employee discount made it second nature in a couple of months.

[nini@oldbytes.space]

@tykling I've never been great at remembering phone numbers but that's why you had phone books of the personal sort, write them down and you'd at least have it documented as a reference. All that's happened between the number being a number and not just a name is an abstraction of data, the number is still there to be seen if you needed it but you're more apt to remember a word over a string of 8 to 12 digits and you're not going to be poking those numbers in just to retain that "poking in remembered numbers" skill, it's not that special a skill.

That might read as anti-memory but it's not, now you can't retrieve the number at all even if you wanted it! The phone is doing a collect call to figure out the number from an automated service then connecting you to the real number that it won't tell you because it didn't retain that info.

[aoi_x_kaizaki@mastodon.social]

@tykling It takes me a while to forget lots of things. My mind is too powerful for the human species. However, I did have three phones currently, but only the same number.
Now, I got a new phone (number 4) and this time a new number.

[krahabors@toot.lv]

@tykling I'm pretty sure in some situations, like in Ukraine, people very quickly relearned these skills, as well as some others.
I'm somewhat afraid of situation when my phone dies and I also have no access to computer or internet for some reason - even another phone might not help here!

[bedifferent@mastodon.social]

@tykling It's why I turn off auto anything (search). I have maybe two contacts in email and added another this weekend.
The rest, I remember or I ask someone for it again.

It's not just ai that will make us brainless, it's allowing crap to take over for us which is another goal - turn us into a non-thinking society. So no or very few: contacts addrs, few phone #s, a.i. which is not ready for any real use, search assist, spellcheck and probably more.

[aedius@lavraievie.social]

@tykling

That's why while Claude is generating bad cod for my boss I'm still coding good code for personnal projects ^^