Interesting that the author chose "deathless" over "immortal."
Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
111–120 of 175 posts
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why podcasts are so much better on 2-2.4x speed with a silence skipper. I get an effective 3x speed and as long as I'm paying attention I still get every word. It sounds like gibberish to most newcomers but if you slowly speed up you don't even notice the increments.
2.4x sounds incredible to me. I can't hear most lecturers at a speed faster than 1.6x.
Really depends on the lecturer..
I can't watch Allan Adams in MIT quantum mechanics faster than 1.25x. Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra on the otherhand I watched consistently at 2x.
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#113> Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer. I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bi…
Those deep structure may be active, but reading was never in their design documentation. Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing. The fact that we read so well is probably a hacked-together scheme tying together structures meant for pattern recognition and speech. I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. The scary thing is that e…
> structures meant for
"Meant"? Nothing in your body or brain is "meant" for anything. There is no "meaning", or "intention", for starters. And the brain is nothing if not adaptable. If your brain is "meant" to be anything, it's versatile.
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those deep structure may be active, but reading was never in their design documentation. Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing. The fact that we read so well is probably a hacked-together scheme tying together structures meant for pattern recognition and speech. I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. The scary thing is that e…
> structures meant for "Meant"? Nothing in your body or brain is "meant" for anything. There is no "meaning", or "intention", for starters. And the brain is nothing if not adaptable. If your brain is "meant" to be anything, it's versatile.
There are parts of the brain meant for specific tasks. It isn't a homogeneous mass of neurons. The bit that is working the eyes atm was designed (via evolution) to work the eyes. As was the bit that takes the message from the eyes and ups the heart rate when a lion appears in your field of view. There is certainly some flexibility, but the basic task layout is a layout, not a random allocation.
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. Newborn babies can swim, obviously with no practice. In fact isn't it a classic example of an instinctive human behaviour?
Newborns can't swim in the sense that they stay afloat. A baby will drown if dropped in water. They do have some reflexes related to swimming, in that they will hold their breath and work their feet, but those reflexes disappear with time and have to be re-learned. It's fair to say that swimming is a learned practice.
>> ... will hold their breath and work their feet.
Imho that isn't related to swimming. That's them trying to keep their heads above water by standing up, hopefully in relatively shallow water. Even with drowning adults, they don't so much try to swim as try to grasp onto something.
Compare dogs. They have a swimming instinct dedicated to movement. Dogs don't tread. They move forwards. We flail around trying to climb out of the water. They are trying to get to shore. That has to be some sort of evolutionary relic speaking to very different ancestral environments.
Polar bears instincts accommodate both treading water and swimming within moments:
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#116It'd be great if we could extract subtitles from video and put into a nice text format that's easy to read so it's skimmable. Then when you get to an area of interest, you should be able to click the place where you're interested and a video will pop up and start from there. Then when you've heard what you wanted to hear you can minimize the video and skim the text for the next area of interest and so on.
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition, but there's practically nothing for me to go on other than look into how the deaf process textual representations independent of the kinesthetic and proprioception encodings of semantic features. Text certainly isn't dead, and I would rather…
> My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition The phonic connection to reading is overrated IMHO and this is why I wrote of a hack of the visual system. Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have bene dropped or tuned --…
> In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further.
It took me a long time to realise the point of learning 'phonics' at school (they were called phonograms in Australia).
While I can see why writing and reading without speaking makes phonics look useless, for children, all of their language is initially communicated through sound. Putting a bunch of symbols in front of them and saying that it has meaning isn't going to help them - but showing that the symbols roughly correspond to sounds that they already know have meaning is a pretty important step.
This doesn't apply to all written languages - logographic systems obviously don't have a correspondence between sounds and written symbols - but for alphabetic systems and the like it's quite a good system.
Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is.
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#118It'd be great if we could extract subtitles from video and put into a nice text format that's easy to read so it's skimmable. Then when you get to an area of interest, you should be able to click the place where you're interested and a video will pop up and start from there. Then when you've heard what you wanted to hear you can minimize the video and skim the text for the next area of interest and so on.
I imagine there could be an interesting means of moving the playhead along with your skimming, so when you highlight a block of text (as I do, habitually), the video would play through the selection and pause at the end. I'd love to use text as a video controller.
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#119> Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer. I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bi…
Those deep structure may be active, but reading was never in their design documentation. Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing. The fact that we read so well is probably a hacked-together scheme tying together structures meant for pattern recognition and speech. I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. The scary thing is that e…
> Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing.
You could be on a poster for "evolution stops at the neck".
Obviously, our brains did not evolve to what they are today long before reading was a thing, because that happened before today. There was no point at which brains stopped evolving.
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those deep structure may be active, but reading was never in their design documentation. Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing. The fact that we read so well is probably a hacked-together scheme tying together structures meant for pattern recognition and speech. I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. The scary thing is that e…
> structures meant for "Meant"? Nothing in your body or brain is "meant" for anything. There is no "meaning", or "intention", for starters. And the brain is nothing if not adaptable. If your brain is "meant" to be anything, it's versatile.
I think pretty much everything in your body is specialized and is "meant" for something. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to get your heart to replace your pancreas or kidneys. And you can't replace your lungs with brain tissue. Sure, doctors can transplant a toe to replace a thumb or a heart blood vessel with a vein from a leg with great success, but it's doing pretty much the same function, just in a different place.
As a whole, humans are quite adaptable to their environment, but specific body parts tend to be specialized.