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Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

neurrone.com

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Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#41

Post by Neurrone »

Vinnl wrote: post #39
Neurrone wrote: post #33

Author here, surprised this somehow got onto HN since I only posted on Mastodon. Happy to answer any questions.

Great post. When you're reading a Mermaid diagram, do you just happen to have memorised that "dash dash greater than" means "arrow"? I assume the screen reader doesn't understand ASCII art. And how painful is reading emails? HTML email is notoriously limited compared to HTML (and CSS) in the browser, but it's pretty hard to add structure to a plain text email too. How annoying is it when I do so using e.g. a "line" m…

Oh boy, don't get me started on emails. HTML emails are such a pain because of the hacks needed to get it to render properly across multiple devices. So I hear a lot of information about the tables being used for layout purposes, which is a pain because the tables are not semantically meaningful at all. And then there are emails that just have one or more images.

For a line of dashes like "-------", most screen readers can recognize repeating characters, so that string gets read for me as "7 dash". If using an element, then there is no ambiguity about what it means.

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#42

Post by dcre »

Neurrone wrote: post #33

Author here, surprised this somehow got onto HN since I only posted on Mastodon. Happy to answer any questions.

Great article. I was of course surprised to learn that it's possible to learn to understand the super-fast TTS, since videos and podcasts start to get very tough to follow around 2.5x and higher. I've been wondering: surely better algorithms for generating high-speed speech are possible, especially as we have more and more compute around to throw at it. It's not easy to search for, since "speed" for most tools is about speed of generation rather than wpm. As normal-speed neural net TTS models get incredibly good, I am hoping to see more attention paid to the high-speed use case.

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#43

Post by Neurrone »

dcre wrote: post #42
Neurrone wrote: post #33

Author here, surprised this somehow got onto HN since I only posted on Mastodon. Happy to answer any questions.

Great article. I was of course surprised to learn that it's possible to learn to understand the super-fast TTS, since videos and podcasts start to get very tough to follow around 2.5x and higher. I've been wondering: surely better algorithms for generating high-speed speech are possible, especially as we have more and more compute around to throw at it. It's not easy to search for, since "speed" for most tools is abo…

Yeah, the options for this are quite limited. The only ones I know of are Espeak (open source) but doesn't sound as good, and Eloquence, which is an abandoned product.

The use case for super high speed TTS are pretty niche though.

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#44

Post by ljf »

gizmo686 wrote: post #5

Some vaguely related research: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 If you compare different languages, the speed people tend to speak (measured in syllables per second) varies significantly. However, the number of possible syllables also varies significantly. Once you account for that, the speed of speaking in terms of information is fairly consistent across languages. I'm not aware of any specific res…

I've been using Optimal Recognition Point (ORP) style apps (I use Balto Speed Reader) to comfortably read at 800wpm or more - for fact books and materials I can keep this up for quite some time - though for fiction I find it too fast to parse all the characters and tones of voice (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Spritz-display-The-Optim... )

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#45

Post by rovr138 »

Ndymium wrote: post #29
mtlynch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's the one. Thanks! And thanks for writing it, assuming you're the author.

I'm not, the author was my colleague at the time. I can only hope to be half as brilliant as him.

First time I saw it was here, https://boingboing.net/2017/08/28/this-blind-software-develo...

It has the audio samples in case it's useful

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#46

Post by cess11 »

Neurrone wrote: post #41
Vinnl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great post. When you're reading a Mermaid diagram, do you just happen to have memorised that "dash dash greater than" means "arrow"? I assume the screen reader doesn't understand ASCII art. And how painful is reading emails? HTML email is notoriously limited compared to HTML (and CSS) in the browser, but it's pretty hard to add structure to a plain text email too. How annoying is it when I do so using e.g. a "line" m…

Oh boy, don't get me started on emails. HTML emails are such a pain because of the hacks needed to get it to render properly across multiple devices. So I hear a lot of information about the tables being used for layout purposes, which is a pain because the tables are not semantically meaningful at all. And then there are emails that just have one or more images. For a line of dashes like "-------", most screen reade…

Users of the email client mutt has a similar problem, it doesn't render HTML and CSS and displays it as text, so instead they've developed a variety of workarounds like pushing the email body through a terminal web browser before showing it in mutt.

Might work for you too.

Edit: Also, do you MUD?

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#47

Post by Neurrone »

cess11 wrote: post #46
Neurrone wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh boy, don't get me started on emails. HTML emails are such a pain because of the hacks needed to get it to render properly across multiple devices. So I hear a lot of information about the tables being used for layout purposes, which is a pain because the tables are not semantically meaningful at all. And then there are emails that just have one or more images. For a line of dashes like "-------", most screen reade…

Users of the email client mutt has a similar problem, it doesn't render HTML and CSS and displays it as text, so instead they've developed a variety of workarounds like pushing the email body through a terminal web browser before showing it in mutt. Might work for you too. Edit: Also, do you MUD?

Oh yes. It was one of my formative childhood experiences. My first mud was Alter Aeon, but I haven't played in almost 10 years. I enjoyed myself during the 5 years or so that I played and got to know a lot of people. The first first thing I ever programmed was a bot to automatically heal group members.

Then Empire Mud, but I left due to disagreements with the admin. I loved the concept but it didn't really have the playerbase to support it.

More recently, I was on Procedural Realms. But I was affected by 3 separate instances of data corruption / loss, the last of which resulted in an unplanned pwipe since there were no offsite backups and the drive on the server failed. Years of progress gone due to lack of backups, so I'm never going back.

Ever since, I've been trying to find something else. Perhaps I'm just getting older but I don't have the patience to grind that I once had, which rules out most hack and slash muds. These days, I prefer something with interesting quests, places to explore and mechanics.

What muds do you play?

Re: Software Development at 800 Words per Minute

#48

Post by mdaniel »

Ndymium wrote: post #25
mtlynch wrote: post #24

I'm getting intense deja vu reading this. I remember a very similar article from 3-5 years ago. Even the title feels like I've seen it before. I thought this was a repost from that one but I remember the previous post had a photo of the author's desk with a keyboard, desktop, and no monitor. I tried searching algolia, but I can't find it.

It was quite likely this one: https://www.vincit.com/blog/software-development-450-words-p... Sadly the audio samples are gone. I'll need to pester someone to fix that.

I thought you meant they were 404, but no, it seems there's no markup to even attempt to link them. What's strange is that all the copies in Wayback that I spot checked all the way back to 2022 also didn't have any markup, so I suspect it never(?) did
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