> When we lean too much on tech, does our brain atrophy?

Probably, yeah. It's been suggested and shown that brain size took a pretty significant hit roughly coinciding with the invention of writing systems and so on. This link is to a Youtube video— There are sources in the description:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOgKwAJdeUc

Then again, maybe not:

https://www.unlv.edu/news/release/unlv-research-no-human-bra...

Then again, I don't think it's controversial to suggest that you get worse at things if you never do them. If you're just mindlessly copying samples off StackExchange, then presumably you're going to waste some of your own potential. If you make some conscious effort to understand them and adapt them to your own needs, then it might be an opportunity to enhance your own learning instead. Or if you don't pay much mind to it but you use the time and energy it frees up to focus on other things, you could benefit from it too.

Are digitized resources your library? Are they your mentor? Are they your assistant? Are they your rival? Or are they just the guy you use to cheat by doing your work for you?

> however I couldn't fathom (or be tasked with) using books or offline knowledge to code or do my job

> The alternative though - self-sufficiency without google/chatGPT having to rely on physical books is now terrifying since I've come to lean on them so much.

I have over a hundred gigabytes of locally saved Zeal/Dash docsets and Kiwix archives. It's not far off from physical books; The biggest difference (other than automatic updating) is being able to hit CTRL+L instead of having to manually scan through an alphabetized index. It's also not far off from Google; The biggest difference is needing to have a clearer sense from the start what you're looking for, and having to wade through much less cruft to find it once you do. If one of those three systems disappeared overnight (Internet, local datasets, xor physical books), I figure I'd still retain access to most of the knowledge that is currently immediately available to me.

For computer-related subjects, the official docs are a more authorative and explicit reference than randos on StackExchange, and for nearly everything else, general search engines are just a messy portal to Wikipedia. Modern computer technology— the ability to fit multiple entire countries' national archives in a volume the size of your pinky, and do so at commodity costs— should mean we have less dependence on online resources, not more.

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For computers:

https://kapeli.com/dash

https://zealdocs.org/

https://zealusercontributions.vercel.app/

Dash is a paid product that creates and provides official high-quality docsets, plus lots of user-created docsets and instructions for generating your own. Zeal is a free community-created affiliate of Dash, that uses the same docsets on non-Mac platforms and is allowed to do so as a way of increasing Dash's reach.

DevDocs.IO appears to be a separate, browser-based effort. All of them work offline:

https://devdocs.io/

For everything else:

https://www.kiwix.org/

Kiwix hosts downloadable copies of most of the Wikimedia Foundation projects, TED talks, StackExchange databases, Project Gutenberg, and lots of other nominally online resources, in most languages.

It doesn't take up nearly as much space as you might expect. The full text (and search index) for every English Wikipedia article is only 46GB compressed. 50,000 best articles, including pictures, is only 6GB, and if you're really pressed for space, you can get the intro summary of the 50,000 best (which is still a massive amount of information, and likely to cover most things that matter) for only 330MB.

Something like the ArchWiki is only 30-40MB, and still worth having around in case you brick your WiFi and need to figure out how to fix it. So too is WikEM, for that matter, in case you brick your Idk spleen or whatever.