hands free and perl out loud here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz3JeYfBTcY
Hands-Free Coding: How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking
21–30 of 141 posts
Re: Hands-Free Coding: How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking
#22As a developer who also has cubital tunnel syndrome, having keyboards that places commonly use modifier keys [0] on your thumbs, such as Kinesis advantage or Ergodox, helps reducing the fatigue and symptoms immensely. [0] it is called Emacs pinkies for a reason, and yes, my CTS is totally emacs’s fault as well.
Switching to a planck keyboard would let you customize all the positions of buttons for less strain.
The planck keyboard is a great keyboard, but possibly on par with the worst in terms of ergonomics.
Ergodox, Diverge, Keyboard.io, really any split key keyboard does worlds for keeping hands straight and are fully programmable to very high degrees.
Re: Hands-Free Coding: How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking
#23Exploratory building of rich non-traditional (not necessarily handless) user interfaces is becoming increasingly accessible. For instance, here's a web demo of Google's MediaPipe's face and iris tracking[1]. And hand tracking[2] with a downward-facing camera, permits enriching keyboard and touchpad/tablets: annotating events with which finger was used, and where on a keycap it was pressed; hand and finger gestures in 2D and 3D; and positional touchless events. And speech to text... sigh.
But doing sensor fusion is hard. And strongly impacts system architecture. "Launch the missiles"... 1000 ms later... oh, nope, that was "Lunch is mussels in butter". "Spacebar keypress event"... 50 ms later... "btw, that was a thumb, at the 20% position". "Ok, so 2000 ms ago, just before the foo, there was a 3D gesture bar". So app state needs to easily roll backward and forward, because you won't fully know what happened now until seconds from now. Upside is traditional "have to wait a bit until we know whether mumble" latencies can be optimistically speculated away.
[1] https://viz.mediapipe.dev/demo/iris_tracking ("run" button is top right) [2] https://viz.mediapipe.dev/demo/hand_tracking
Re: Hands-Free Coding: How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking
#24When I started my undergraduate degree, there was a PhD student everyone knew -- he looked like he ran the Linux User Group, which he did, he coded his own window manager, wrote games in Haskell etc.
At some point, he got some hand injury that meant he couldn't type normally for months. He would only have been 21 or 22.
This scared me, so since then I've followed the standard advice on avoiding computer-related injuries very carefully. I use a desktop computer with an external, adjustable monitor. I use ergonomic keyboards, and use a mouse with either hand. I learned to touch-type with the Dvorak layout, I have an adjustable desk, etc.
I haven't had any problems, and I don't know which (if any) of these actions helped, but I'm surprised when I see other developers apparently happy to hunch over a laptop keyboard for 8 hours, while sitting on an awkward chair in a coffee shop. Why do this to yourself?
Re: Hands-Free Coding: How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking
#25As a developer who also has cubital tunnel syndrome, having keyboards that places commonly use modifier keys [0] on your thumbs, such as Kinesis advantage or Ergodox, helps reducing the fatigue and symptoms immensely. [0] it is called Emacs pinkies for a reason, and yes, my CTS is totally emacs’s fault as well.
It's pretty telling that RMS had to stop coding because CTS. Edit: Not carpal tunnel syndrome, as he explains in https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html """In the mid 90s I had bad hand pain, so bad that most of the day I could only type with one finger. The FSF hired typists for me part of the day, and part of the day I tolerated the pain. After a few years I found out that this was due to the hard keys of my k…
> The FSF hired typists for me part of the day...
Re: Hands-Free Coding: How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking
#26I have had an issue with dictation software... I want a dictation software to read me what it typed on screen. Right now the software expects you to check what it wrote and you have to necessarily keep looking at the screen.
Call me lazy but I wish for a method where I could lay back, speak a sentence, wait for transcribing, listen to what was written and ahead I go.
Re: Hands-Free Coding: How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking
#27When I started my undergraduate degree, there was a PhD student everyone knew -- he looked like he ran the Linux User Group, which he did, he coded his own window manager, wrote games in Haskell etc. At some point, he got some hand injury that meant he couldn't type normally for months. He would only have been 21 or 22. This scared me, so since then I've followed the standard advice on avoiding computer-related injur…
Especially the macbook pro keyboards. Those really hurt my hands.
Re: Hands-Free Coding: How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking
#28Seems like it would be a useful feature in voice recognition to have a "whisper" mode to prevent strain.
There are some high tech breakthrough in this space. You can have microphones that hear the faintest of internal voices and even non-invasive ways to hook on the nerves to get your internal monologue.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/device-can-hear-vo...
Re: Hands-Free Coding: How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking
#29Reminds me of the Figma GPT-3 Plugin
https://mobile.twitter.com/edleonklinger/status/128425141917...
Re: Hands-Free Coding: How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking
#30When I started my undergraduate degree, there was a PhD student everyone knew -- he looked like he ran the Linux User Group, which he did, he coded his own window manager, wrote games in Haskell etc. At some point, he got some hand injury that meant he couldn't type normally for months. He would only have been 21 or 22. This scared me, so since then I've followed the standard advice on avoiding computer-related injur…
I think ..... most people have no idea what they actually look like when hunched over a keyboard. It would do wonders to have a large mirror next to our workspace so one could see just how preposterous they're contorting their body.