Comment by Herring
5 days ago
Text is very information-dense. I'd much rather skim a transcript in a few seconds than watch a video.
There's a reason keyboards haven't changed much since the 1860s when typewriters were invented. We keep coming up with other fun UI like touchscreens and VR, but pretty much all real work happens on boring old keyboards.
I’ve been using ChatGPT Atlas since release on my personal laptop. I very often have it generate a comprehensive summary for YouTube videos, so I don’t have to sit there and watch/scrub a half hour video when a couple of pages of text contains the same content.
Here's an old blog post that explores that topic at least with one specific example: https://www.loper-os.org/?p=861
The gist is that keyboards are optimized for ease of use but that there could be other designs which would be harder to learn but might be more efficient.
>> There's a reason keyboards haven't changed much since the 1860s when typewriters were invented.
> The gist is that keyboards are optimized for ease of use but that there could be other designs which would be harder to learn but might be more efficient.
Here's a relevant trivia question; assuming a person has two hands with five digits each, what is the largest number they can count to using only same?
Answer: (2 ** 10) - 1 = 1023
Ignoring keyboard layout options (such as QWERTY vs DVORAK), IMHO keyboards have the potential for capturing thought faster and with a higher degree of accuracy than other forms of input. For example, it is common for touch-typists to be able to produce 60 - 70 words per minute, for any definition of word.
Modern keyboard input efficiency can be correlated to the ability to choose between dozens of glyphs with one or two finger combinations, typically requiring less than 2cm of movement to produce each.
Only if individual digits can be articulated separately from each other. Human anatomy limits what is actually possible. Also synchronization is a big problem in chorded typing; good typists can type more than 10 strokes per second, but no one can type 10 chords (synchronous sets of strokes) per seconds I think.
And anyone that has ever tried to talk to Siri or Alexa would prefer a keyboard for anything but the most simple questions. I don't think that will change for a long time if ever. The lack of errors and being able to say exactly what you want is so valuable.
No matter how good a keyboard we might be able to invent it'll always be slower than a direct brain interface, and we have those, in a highly experimental way, now.
One day we will look back at improvements to keyboards and touchscreens as the 'faster horse' of the physical interface era.
I'm not convinced, because all a keyboard really costs you is latency, while almost every human-machine interaction is actually bandwidth limited (by human output).
Even getting zero latency from a perfect brain-machine interface would not make you meaningfully faster at most things I'd assume.
Yeah I noticed this as I became a faster typer. I very often find myself 'buffering' on choosing the right words / code more than I do on my typing speed.