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New Kind of Paper

mlajtos.mu

111–120 of 127 posts

Re: New Kind of Paper

#111
post #97

I like my regular old organic paper just fine, thanks. Sure, writing with ancient mechanical tools lacks modern computational technology, but that's kind of the point. Unconnected from the rest of the world, my writing exists only as a conduit from me to the page. If I want to refine that and digitize it, I can then hand-type it into a digital medium, which acts to reinforce in my brain what I wrote and allow me a bo…

I would love it if I could tap a few terms in an equation and have them refactored out in the next line. Or if I could select an equation, mark parameters and get an interactive chart. Or if I could select a graph and have it topologically sorted for me.

It's almost like different tools suit different problems better.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#112

Some of us ...of a certain age... may remember an ATG Night at an Apple WWDC in the 1990s. This kid comes out on stage, holding a tablet, and starts writing math formulas, which are recognized and displayed on the screen. Then he starts balancing the equation; dragging variables from one side of the equals to the other, and the program automatically does stuff like invert the operations. Then, he graphs it. A whole c…

Wow. Does that app really work that way?

I don't know if it ever worked exactly like he demoed (I have never really used the graphing calculator. It wasn't useful to me. I have always used PCalc), but that was exactly what his demo did. That was why we stood up and hooted and hollered.

A lot of ATG demos never really saw the light of day (except in MS products, which was one reason they stopped doing them).

Nowadays, you can do that with a Web browser, but back then, we hadn't seen anything like it.

It was ahead of its time.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#114
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love it if I could tap a few terms in an equation and have them refactored out in the next line. Or if I could select an equation, mark parameters and get an interactive chart. Or if I could select a graph and have it topologically sorted for me.

It's almost like different tools suit different problems better.

There's no good way to enter math formulas to computer, that's the thing.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#115
post #43

Nobody writes asterisks like that in handwriting - is that to help the ocr? We just use an × for multiplication, really.

We don’t use any operator, since the parentheses are there. If we’re feeling nervous, maybe a centered dot.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#116
post #46
post #43

Nobody writes asterisks like that in handwriting - is that to help the ocr? We just use an × for multiplication, really.

Depends on the country. In Poland it's usually nothing for multiplication: (x+3)(10-y) then dot, then asterisk. Nobody writes "x" for scalar multiplication cause it's easy to mistake it for the variable x. What do you mean by 2xy? 2 * y or 2 * x * y? Another cultural difference is how 7 and 1 is written - in USA you write 7 with 2 strokes and 1 with 1 stroke. In my country 7 is always crossed (always has 3 strokes) a…

That was how I learned to notate multiplication in high school or earlier. It’s how it’s done in all the mathematical literature or textbooks I’ve ever seen. And people only started using * when they started programming computers.

Re: New Kind of Paper

#118

Note to the author: it would be neat if you could include multiple codecs for the video tag like vp9. My stock linux install does not have codecs for mp4. Browsers will automatically pick a preferred codec if multiple are listed.

Same here, I could not play the videos before scrape-downloading them with `youtube-dl`

Re: New Kind of Paper

#120

Am I the only person here with handwritting so bad that the automated recognition just completely and utterly fails? I got the latest iPad Pro with the Pencil 2 some time ago - and as much as my friends rave about the "very good and totally great" handwriting recognition in text fields, it's just totally bust for me. I can't write a single word and have it recognized correctly on first try. It takes me 10x as long to…

My handwriting is so bad. I’m 35 years old. And I try so hard. I slow down and hold the pencil/pen/stylus differently. I try making characters in different ways. And no matter what I do my handwriting goes from terrible to childlike and back. It’s embarrassing honestly.

This is where something like Scribble would be useful if it could let you write and draw in your own handwriting, and then fix things up along the way to look highly professional. E.g. if you draw a square quickly and title it Square, you’d end up with straight lines and the word Square neatly drawn on top of it. Even better if could be stylized with different drawing flavors.

While Scribble can do a little or it by correcting shapes if you are careful enough as you draw, it isn’t able to “autocorrect” hand drawn titles by replacing with rendered text.

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