Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dotsies (2012)

dotsies.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 204 posts

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#181

Post by StavrosK »

code_duck wrote: post #180
stavros wrote: post #17

I feel compelled to write up a summary of the comments here and responses to each one: > This is useless. Who cares? It's super cool! > This is not well-suited for use case X. Did you read the page? It's so great that someone thought of this and did it. > This has been done before. SUPER. COOL. > It's hard to read. I don't know what you aren't getting about this. > What if it implemented improvement X? I don't know,…

I don’t understand what your definition of super cool is.

I have a set of things that define "super cool", and "inventing your own writing system" is definitely in there.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#182

Post by code_duck »

StavrosK wrote: post #181
code_duck wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand what your definition of super cool is.

I have a set of things that define "super cool", and "inventing your own writing system" is definitely in there.

That still doesn’t explain very much. Your answer to “This has been done before.” is ‘SUPER. COOL.’, so what was invented? Could you provide some other things that are on your super cool list or some synonyms?

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#183

Post by zamfi »

bcheung wrote: post #49

Very interesting. It's definitely more compact but I would challenge the more readable claim. If you think about how the human vision system is constructed (similar to convnets in deep learning), the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc. Recognizing letters requires the triggering of multiple layers of these constructs. A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get co…

Also: compact representation doesn't lead to faster reading. This study [0] compares native readers of English and Chinese text; the latter being more information dense than the former on a per-pixel basis. As for reading speed? In words per minute, it's a wash: 380 vs. 390.

[0]: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03204913.pdf

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#184

Post by johnfn »

School-Cotton wrote: post #115
johnfn wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not seeing your quote on the page, and I think that drives my point home: you have created a narrative for the post that doesn’t exist. I mean, come on. They’re called “dotsies”! Does that sound like the name of a font designed to replace ours, by someone who honestly thinks they’ve advanced civilization? Or does it sound like someone having fun?

> The latin alphabet (abc...) was created thousands of years ago, and is optimized for writing, not reading. About time for an update, no?

See, it depends how charitable you want to be to the author, because I read that in a bit of a joking tone.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#185

Post by KennyCason »

m3at wrote: post #160
KennyCason wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your perspective as well. I initially learned traditional Chinese characters (lots of Taiwanese friends), and the traditional variant that Japanese used. Even though initially I was stubborn and would claim that traditional characters are more beautiful or pure, I have to admit that simplified Chinese is definitely a major language improvement. My one exception is I still like to write 龍 instead of 龙 :) I…

About the neural network part, not exactly what you're looking for but you might enjoy this blog post[1] by David Ha with a neural network "dreaming" fake kanjis. [1] http://otoro.net/kanji/

Ha! That’s awesome! Some of the kanji hall-of-famers actually turned out pretty great.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#186

Post by trogdoro »

burke wrote: post #169
xg15 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, you could use your exact post to argue in favor of Juicero, uBeam or Theranos. More in-depth, yes, a lot of posts here are criticizing - but it seems to me, a lot of it is constructive criticism from someone who actually did find the idea interesting. I personally would find a HN where each post is just a variant of "woah that's super cool!" a lot less interesting.

Notably differently, Dotsies is not heavily funded, nor does it want you to pay several digits for access. It’s just a fun experiment. It should not be held to the same standards of usefulness as a thousand-dollar juicer.

I appreciate the support :)

Creator of Dotsies here. I've been using Dotsies to read books since 2012 (maybe around 100). At first on a Kindle and then on a Kobo after Amazon stopped letting you add your own fonts. I reached my normal reading speed a few years ago, and now reading it is fairly second nature. I now prefer it to normal fonts, and have the feeling that my eyes are racing unnecessarily from side to side when I use them. With normal fonts I'm also less likely to "seek" to different parts of the page, and thus feel a bit handicapped with them.

> the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc

It's a little counter intuitive if you haven't tried it, but the shape-seeking aspects of our visual systems do come into play with grids of dots. As others have said below, the words jump out at you as shapes. Sort of in the way that letters normally do. Just to approximate it, consider: :..'. But you may have to look at words a few thousand times before you get the full effect of this.

In general, the less visual noise and redundancy there is, the easier it is to recognize shapes. Consider looking at a pile of sand vs a pile of boulders, to get a sense of the extreme ends of this spectrum. Pile of sand: high complexity, harder to make out visual shapes. Pile of boulders: low complexity, easy to make out shapes. It is possible to map each letter to unique arrangements of 1000 disordered grains of sand, but clearly a few boulders per letter would be better. Consider that it takes about 20 pixels to represent each Latin letter. We scrapped reading fancy calligraphy because they would take more like 40px or so pixels to represent. And the extra flourishes really just added superfluity to the page. Only that was difficult for us to see, since we were so used to the calligraphy as the norm. I think it's naive to think the current state is the apex. Let's get rid of the remaining flourishes! Calligraphy is sand. Latin is marbles (or spaghetti might be apter). Binary grids are boulders. Just stare at the equivalent paragraphs under "How much better is it?" on dotsies.org for a while and you'll get a sense of this. (Especially if you can do so while imagining you're unfamiliar with Latin letters.)

I think I made a joke in 2012 about cave-men waving their spears at the stone-age version of hacker news claiming their bison heads and triangles couldn't possibly be improved on :).

Just wanted to give a quick summary. Will reply to other comments directly.

Btw I'm also the creator of Xiki, which has been discussed on HN as well, and has a stronger claim to originality/practicality. I did 2 kickstarters for it, which didn't get much hacker news attention, much to my disappointment. I'm doing a third soon and am hoping for more interest/abuse :). My new version will switch to using the markdown format, and will hopefully revolutionize the command line.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#187

Post by the_cat_kittles »

trogdoro wrote: post #186
burke wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notably differently, Dotsies is not heavily funded, nor does it want you to pay several digits for access. It’s just a fun experiment. It should not be held to the same standards of usefulness as a thousand-dollar juicer.

I appreciate the support :) Creator of Dotsies here. I've been using Dotsies to read books since 2012 (maybe around 100). At first on a Kindle and then on a Kobo after Amazon stopped letting you add your own fonts. I reached my normal reading speed a few years ago, and now reading it is fairly second nature. I now prefer it to normal fonts, and have the feeling that my eyes are racing unnecessarily from side to side…

you should really cite your own personal experience on the page. if i had seen that you have read 100 books in dotsies i would have taken it much more seriously. all this other stuff is kind of post hoc rationalization. if dotsies didn't end up being easier to read it would all be irrelevant. i really think you underestimate the complexity of reasons (or lack thereof) why dotsies works (or doesn't)

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#188

Post by trogdoro »

bcheung wrote: post #49

Very interesting. It's definitely more compact but I would challenge the more readable claim. If you think about how the human vision system is constructed (similar to convnets in deep learning), the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc. Recognizing letters requires the triggering of multiple layers of these constructs. A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get co…

Dotsies words look kind of like letters. They have lines, corners, loops, etc.

> There's going to be a high degree of uncertainty. A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get conflated

I initially thought that would be a big issue as well. Turns out in practice it almost never comes up when reading paragraphs. For headings or words on signs that could be more of an issue.

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#189

Post by trogdoro »

qlk1123 wrote: post #101
KennyCason wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm impressed, If you remove the Kanji from Japanese, my reading speed goes down significantly. Though, as a native English speaker of course my English (alphabet) reading speed is faster than my Japanese (Hiragana/Katana) speed. What I do find very interesting though is that given I know all/most of the words in a Chinese dialogue, I have noticed that my Chinese reading speed is close to on-par with my English readi…

Interesting, thanks for sharing your perspective as a native English speaker and a Chinese learner. > I really wish Chinese was the international language. It's power and elegance always amazes me. Even more so as I get further into Chinese literature, poetry, culture, humor, etc. It had been a dominating language/writing system for part of Asia, and we can still find its legacy in Vietnamese, Korean, Japan. But I th…

Part of my motivation with Dotsies was to capture the compactness and visual distinctness of Asian characters, while still keeping what's good about alphabets. I'm guessing native Chinese speakers find it exhausting to have their eyes dart back and forth at a comparatively hectic speed to take in the same information when reading English?

Re: Dotsies (2012)

#190

Post by trogdoro »

qlk1123 wrote: post #75
bcheung wrote: post #49

Very interesting. It's definitely more compact but I would challenge the more readable claim. If you think about how the human vision system is constructed (similar to convnets in deep learning), the brain uses a hierarchy of constructs like circles, lines, corners, etc. Recognizing letters requires the triggering of multiple layers of these constructs. A dot, and another dot 1 pixel higher or lower is easy to get co…

> I'm not an expert on the vision system but I would think, sticking to at most 2 different locations instead of 5, and mixing in vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonals, corners, and circles might be work exploring. What you proposed here turns out very similar to the elements of Korean Characters. As an East Asian who is native to Chinese Characters, two-dimensional symbols are always more appealing to me. I st…

Grids of dots can be slightly morphed to resemble curves and slashes. Notice how some of the morphed versions of Dotsies appear visually similar to Asian scripts:

http://dotsies.org/script.html

Interestingly, when you read Dotsies quickly and at a smaller font size, the scripted versions appear indistinguishable from the square (unmodified) versions. Because of this I didn't end up pursuing this aspect.

Post reply on HN