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Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

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Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#121

Post by nashequilibrium »

andrewflnr wrote: post #117
nashequilibrium wrote: post #104

HN always likes the faster is better, I am a genius absorbing this much information quicker than you. Its been proven over and over that comprehension is way more important than speed of consumption. You guys fool yourselves into believing you can comprehend while reading at breakneck speeds, its way more fun & time saving to be able to imagine, driftaway in thought and understand what you are reading.

Spritz is supposed to improve comprehension too. That's how it was pitched in the original article I read.

How is it going to that, serious question?

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#122

Post by olalonde »

nashequilibrium wrote: post #104

HN always likes the faster is better, I am a genius absorbing this much information quicker than you. Its been proven over and over that comprehension is way more important than speed of consumption. You guys fool yourselves into believing you can comprehend while reading at breakneck speeds, its way more fun & time saving to be able to imagine, driftaway in thought and understand what you are reading.

There isn't that much substance in most blog posts / articles I read online. Of course, I wouldn't use this to read "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach".

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#123

Post by crashandburn4 »

wpears wrote: post #55
timtadh wrote: post #45

What I noticed using this to read a couple Ars Technica articles was it worked really well for short words. But, if a longer complicated word appeared, at say 600 wpm, I would miss it. It seems like an adaptive algorithm based on word length would improve the speed even more allowing it to go faster on short common words and slow down on longer unusual words. Also, there is bug that sometimes causes two words to appe…

That's what I did with Spree [1] (also posted below). Just a simple word.length*8 seemed to have quite a nice effect on readability. 1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/spree/aehoaolhojlm...

Nice, I've been trying a bunch of these things recently (my bookmarks bar now has OpenSpritz, RSVP and squirt along with 2 chrome extensions) and your extensions the nicest implementatiion I've found so far. (partly due to https errors with the other bookmarklet approaches and partly due to nicer design). Thanks.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#125

Post by sa1 »

kybernetyk wrote: post #38
philmcc wrote: post #6

I'm pretty sure this is just a big middle finger to Spritz. In the most hilarious way possible. Or am I misinterpreting the acknowledgments? ;)

Uhm, what's the difference between Spritz an Squirt.io? I've looked at both demos and I can't see much difference in the concept. Though the Spritz website is more ... ehm ... bullshit bingo compliant it seems. Am I assuming right that the joke lies in Spritz being a VC funded startup and squirt.io just a weekend hack?

Also, Spreeder(http://www.spreeder.com/) has been doing this for quite some time.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#126

Post by encoderer »

Mizza wrote: post #82

I'll also shamelessly plug my open source implementation, OpenSpritz, which now has a healthy and vibrant community! https://github.com/Miserlou/OpenSpritz as well as the Android / Google Glass companion: https://github.com/OnlyInAmerica/OpenSpritz-Android

Your bookmarklet never worked right for me. It wouldn't start. I'd select WPM and.. nothing. On latest chrome. Just FYI.

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#127

Post by mallamanis »

lsb wrote: post #67
mallamanis wrote: post #65

I'd really like to see this model with an adaptive speed. Same speed for all the words isn't always the best. Maybe using an n-gram model to predict how probable the next word is, could pass high probability phrases at a faster rate, while slowing down for "harder" words

There's a good Google Books dataset for doing exactly that, and you can doing something in Hive to get you the lowest-entropy n-grams (with something like https://github.com/lsb/text-entropy/blob/master/passphrase-s... ), and then you can the low-entropy n-grams into a Bloom filter (like http://www.leebutterman.com/passphrase-safety/how-it-works.h... ) and your enormous corpus gets fitted into a few dozen megs of mem…

I've been using n-grams heavily in my PhD. I like a lot what you are describing. Also a simple extension is to use "cache" n-gram models, that can naively simulate longer-term "memory".

What's fascinating is that in the entropy/information-theoretic sense, instead of using wpm, one could aim for "constant" information rate of reading (as in bits/token). That's really cool as a concept. I don't know if it would work, obviously.

I'd definitely be up to for hacking this up, but currently a bit too busy. Will ping you at some point though!

Re: Squirt.io – Readability Meets Spritz Speed Reading

#129

Post by maninalift »

gabriel34 wrote: post #124

small increases in wpm can be easily achieved by beeline[1] it without the drawbacks rsvp has. [1]> http://www.beelinereader.com/install

Really? It just makes me feel sea-sick. As my eyes scan the words, I can't help the feeling that the colours are changing and staying the same at the same time, it's a most disconcerting optical illusion.
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