I've tried it a few times.
Does not work for me.
I do not perceive any speed difference, there could be one but it would be marginal.
I am a fairly quick reader, I trained to read fast and extract content in high school.
Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
31–40 of 65 posts
Re: Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
#32I read through the sample and my eyes/brain were able to move over the lines incredibly quickly and recognize the words. I notice it only worked when my intent and goal was to move my eyes quickly over the lines. And, I noticed my eyes could do little fast forward skips as they passed over the words, which is not the norm for me. I don't think this technology would do anything for my retention though, I only skimmed the words. Maybe with practice I could read faster and retain the information as well at speed.
Re: Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
#33Patents for things like this make me feel like committing civil disobedience. Bolding the first few letters is something that needs patent protection? Give me a break. That's not a thing, man.
Patents shouldn't be a thing full stop. Why spend my forcefully taken tax money protecting imaginary rights of a few inventors? I understand the problem of industrial spies and creating something whose recipe is hard to find and easy to make, but I don't see why we should solve it societally for the large corporations which happen to have this issue. Let them spend money suing their customers who violated some ToS an…
I agree that the current patent system is broken, but there are a lot of situations where I think protecting an invention for some time is warranted.
Let's say you invest 10 years of your life trying to develop a new cure or drug, but some other company reverse engineers the formula and sells it for cheaper, preventing you from even recoup your investment costs.
This might not be a problem for large corporations, but nobody else would be incentivized to try to create or develop something cutting edge, which might have a high risk of failure or take a long time to see through.
Re: Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
#34This definitely does not have the desired effect for me. The uneven contrast made me read slower since I found myself re-scanning the same words again to confirm their spelling. It's only slightly less distracting than reading rANdoMlY CaPitAliSeD tEXt.
Re: Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
#35I saw this pop up on Twitter a couple of days ago and made a JS version with a variable font. https://codepen.io/onion2k/pen/qBxmVpR it's a fun idea, but I don't really find it helps me read things.
Re: Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
#36Patents for things like this make me feel like committing civil disobedience. Bolding the first few letters is something that needs patent protection? Give me a break. That's not a thing, man.
Try these bookmarklets:
With a peach background color and a pivot character one-third of the way through the word (plus one):
javascript:void function(){javascript:(function(){var a=Math.floor,b=document.querySelectorAll("p, title"),c=[],e="",f="",g="",h=0,k=0,l="",m="",n=window.open("","_blank");for(var d in b){var i=b[d].textContent;i%26%26(c=c+"\n"+i)}for(f=c,e=f.replace(/\n/g,"
"),g=e.split(" "),h=0;h"+g[h].substring(0,k)+""+g[h].substring(k,g[h].length)+" ","."==g[h].substring(g[h].length-1,g[h].length)%26%26(l+=" * "),m+=l;n.document.write(""+m+"
With a peach background color and no change to bolding for comparison:
javascript:void function(){javascript:(function(){var a=Math.floor,b=document.querySelectorAll("p, title"),c=[],e="",f="",g="",h=0,k=0,l="",m="",n=window.open("","_blank");for(var d in b){var i=b[d].textContent;i%26%26(c=c+"\n"+i)}for(f=c,e=f.replace(/\n/g,"
"),g=e.split(" "),h=0;h"+g[h].substring(0,k)+""+g[h].substring(k,g[h].length)+" ","."==g[h].substring(g[h].length-1,g[h].length)%26%26(l+=" * "),m+=l;n.document.write(""+m+"
Re: Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
#37Interesting. There's probably still more that could be done.
I'm probably weird but since I was a kid through high school (1960s-1970s) I was a subject of various research studies and advanced learning techniques. I don't exactly know why I ended up in these but it's probably "right place, right time".
A lot of these involved "speed reading" as well as "speed learning". What this code does definitely broaches some of what I was taught and what was at one time more widely known. There are other aspects that are missing that relate to typography and dynamic reading.
Re: Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
#38It's always fun for me to see flashes in the pan come and go. I saw this first on reddit a few days ago and went "hmm, ok, whatever..." And then on HN today. Now I'm saying "Oh, someone's putting real effort into this thing. Shame, really, I wish they'd move on to something more productive or at the least talk to some experts about their goals. Sigh." And it'll be gone in a week, or a month at most. Sorry. "Convert T…
> But, based on what? I don't see any pointers to papers or other academic work or collaboration.
Do you only experience things once they have been thoroughly peer reviewed?
Why not quickly try it out for yourself and decide.
Re: Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
#39It's always fun for me to see flashes in the pan come and go. I saw this first on reddit a few days ago and went "hmm, ok, whatever..." And then on HN today. Now I'm saying "Oh, someone's putting real effort into this thing. Shame, really, I wish they'd move on to something more productive or at the least talk to some experts about their goals. Sigh." And it'll be gone in a week, or a month at most. Sorry. "Convert T…
It makes it harder to read imo. I’d rather the beginning and ending of each word be bold and the middle faded. Not seeing the end of the words clearly makes my brain only read the bold part. Since we only need the first and last of a word for our brain to figure out, why not utilize a style that reflects this knowledge?
I agree with you - I only see the bold part. In some cases that makes it feel faster- but if you don't “guess” the word correctly from just the bold part, then my reading stutters.
Re: Bionic Reading – Convert Text into Better Way to Read Faster
#40It is obvious that the improvement to this, is to highlight just the key words of a paragraph and not all words. Requires a way to figure out which words are the important words. Use some AI tool that understands a language.
It's too much clutter to highlight all words. No need for the connective words, etc.
Many have been doing this manually for a long time.