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Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

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Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#61

Post by aspenmayer »

fsckboy wrote: post #51
tambourine_man wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QWERTY has a steep learning curve as well, it’s just that it’s so ubiquitous that most people don’t question or remember the work that was put into.

> has a steep learning curve just to make the pedantic point, learning curves show skill improvement plotted against time spent/experience, and therefore a steep learning curve means you learn quickly. A shallow learning curve is the difficult one. /pedantry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve

Your own link explains that the phrase is a misnomer. You’re not pedantic; you’re just mistaken about others being wrong.

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#62

Post by jhauris »

torpfactory wrote: post #12

I don’t think my problem is being able to get the words from my brain into the computer fast enough. My typical HID use case is composing meaningful written communication, a process which is unfortunately much slower than 500wpm.

I consider typing speed the I/O of the operation. Sure there's some processing time while you think of what to type, but regardless of how long that takes, typing will slow it down further. I'm not perfectly parallelized in thinking/typing pipelines.

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#63

Post by jcrawfordor »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #49
torpfactory wrote: post #12

I don’t think my problem is being able to get the words from my brain into the computer fast enough. My typical HID use case is composing meaningful written communication, a process which is unfortunately much slower than 500wpm.

Yeah. The sheer amount of button presses to write a 1k line script? That'd be roughly 10,000 words let's say, so 500 wpm would bang that out in a mere 20 minutes. Meanwhile the thoughts to compose 1k lines of code? That could take weeks of reasoning to deduce the proper logic.

These days I type at about 80-90wpm which is not as fast as I once could (there was a point where I could achieve 130wpm on Dvorak but I was both younger and had less of a life). As is, though, it's very noticeable that I can type faster than I can actually compose text. I've also found that typing very fast tends to lead to a much higher rate of what I call "wordos," in which you mistype by completely swapping a word with another or omitting a word... these feel like symptoms of a sort of "buffer underrun" when typing that doesn't get noticed because I'm already having to move on to composing the next sentence.

So yes, I think there's a significant effect of diminishing returns on very high typing speeds, and I'd take a guess that it starts really kicking in at something not that high like 60wpm.

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#64

Post by disiplus »

xondono wrote: post #54
nikanj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on that video, it's more of a macro keyboard. Assign each of the ~10 words to a button, click buttons in order, claim 500WPM

No it’s not, there’s another video explaining, the keys are “2d joysticks” type switches, so typing doesn’t involve removing the fingers at all. I would think it takes a lot of time to get used, but seems like a smart approach for speed.

https://youtube.com/shorts/ZCtn5ROOdmY?feature=share

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#65

Post by tpmx »

umvi wrote: post #7

The "500 WPM" video is a little suspect. He types literally one memorized sentence and extrapolates a WPM from that one 10 word sentence. I'd like to see him actually type 500 meaningful words in under 60 seconds. Anyway, this is cool but basically just a modern stenography device. Steno has a learning curve problem that makes it so most people won't use it.

The video from the product site makes it clear that it's not really typing. More like matching chords to a rather small list of words:

https://www.charachorder.com/

Great for tiktok demo videos I guess.

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#66

Post by tombert »

rappatic wrote: post #56
tombert wrote: post #40

Has anyone tried this with coding? It looks like this is very focused towards writing English, which is fine, but as someone who spends a good chunk of my day around code editors, a keyboard that is crap for code editing is a non-starter. However, if it's good for that, I will probably be buying one.

He posted an earlier video on his TikTok account showcasing the device's coding capabilities. I don't know if the videos he posts are entirely reliable (eg. as another commenter mentioned, he claimed a 500 wpm typing speed by typing one memorized sentence). I do know that it needs autocorrect (built-in) to work at high WPM which doesn't seem great for coding which might use nontraditional words and spellings. Persona…

I'm gonna bite the bullet and buy one, I think. I'm ok with a "good enough" coding experience, and I never bought myself a Birthday/Xmas present last year. This will work.

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#67

Post by aidos »

aksss wrote: post #46
gonehome wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue it's a different kind of learning though. QWERTY is more 'what you see is what you get' - you push a key and you get that letter. Sure the layout is weird and learning to type takes some effort, but there's very little additional cognitive load. It's like a WYSIWYG editor. Steno is like Vim, you have to have all of the phrases in your head tracking a lookup table cognitively. Over time sure that becomes mus…

> IME most people will never do that so it'll always remain niche. like vim.. winces in anticipation of things thrown at him

We’re niche, but happy

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#68

Post by ekimekim »

tombert wrote: post #40

Has anyone tried this with coding? It looks like this is very focused towards writing English, which is fine, but as someone who spends a good chunk of my day around code editors, a keyboard that is crap for code editing is a non-starter. However, if it's good for that, I will probably be buying one.

> chorded typing allows the users to input several letters at the same time and have a computer program generate a predicted word. Instead of typing h e l l o, a chorded typer mashes h, e, l, and o to produce the word.

It sounds like it relies heavily on autocomplete, which means it's unlikely to be useful for coding instead of just English text.

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#69

Post by NikolaNovak »

tambourine_man wrote: post #19
umvi wrote: post #7

The "500 WPM" video is a little suspect. He types literally one memorized sentence and extrapolates a WPM from that one 10 word sentence. I'd like to see him actually type 500 meaningful words in under 60 seconds. Anyway, this is cool but basically just a modern stenography device. Steno has a learning curve problem that makes it so most people won't use it.

QWERTY has a steep learning curve as well, it’s just that it’s so ubiquitous that most people don’t question or remember the work that was put into.

Mmmhm not sure I'd agree.

Initial learning curve is practically non-existent - Anybody can type a letter "A" or a word or a sentence on a QWERTY by looking and poking. It is not my understanding that I could do ANYthing on a stenography device without significant, serious training.

Re: Keyboard lets people type so fast it’s banned from typing competitions

#70

Post by hannasanarion »

tambourine_man wrote: post #19
umvi wrote: post #7

The "500 WPM" video is a little suspect. He types literally one memorized sentence and extrapolates a WPM from that one 10 word sentence. I'd like to see him actually type 500 meaningful words in under 60 seconds. Anyway, this is cool but basically just a modern stenography device. Steno has a learning curve problem that makes it so most people won't use it.

QWERTY has a steep learning curve as well, it’s just that it’s so ubiquitous that most people don’t question or remember the work that was put into.

The learning curve for stenography is much higher. With a keyboard, the buttons do exactly what they say and that only. With a stenography machine, every possible combination of buttons does a different thing.

When typing the word "Unprepared" on a keyboard, you just have to look at the buttons and find each of the ones with those labels, and hit them in sequence.

To type the word "Unprepared" on a steno machine, you need to hit the buttons UPB all at once and then PRAOEPD all at once, knowing that PB is a combo that means N, that the UPB set assumes that it's a prefix to whatever follows, that AOE represents the vowel sound /i/, and that your software understands the input "preepd" to be a shorthand for 'prepared'.

You can try it out with your regular keyboard in the browser here: http://www.openstenoproject.org/demo/

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