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morinted

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Art of chording 6 years ago

This is an important topic of development for Open Steno. Machine shorthand has existed in many languages and is used in many countries.

However, not all of them are "computer" or "realtime" compatible, which roughly means that you wouldn't be able to distinguish in your writing between homophones like "their" and "there" and "they're."

Here's a list of some of the languages that have been developed or ported to Plover: https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Chorded-Syst...

There is a Plover plugin to switch on-the-fly between different steno systems.

There is also a plugin to switch between enabled dictionaries on-the-fly.

Finally, there is the idea of bilingual dictionaries, but I haven't seen it implemented well yet.

There's also the problem of some languages having drastically different layouts.

So far, the most multilingual and successful stenographer I've seen is Stanley Sakai. Here's him writing in a Spanish theory that he developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGZ43TID9jU&t=90s

I also know that there are bilingual stenographers in Canada who write both English and French, but I haven't seen it in action yet.

In summary, I think that multilingual stenography is critical for the adoption of steno, but it's currently not easily accessible or widely used.

Art of chording 6 years ago

I still leverage templates and autocomplete from my IDE while using a steno machine.

My thoughts on going down to one-symbol-per-chord:

- Due to the small steno layout, you don't need to stretch your hands to far symbols on the keyboard. - You're not limited to what's on the keyboard. Symbols like ÷ and © and any emoji are now first-class citizens. - There are cases where you get multiple symbols per chord. For example, calling a function `()` is one chord. Writing an arrow like `=>` is also one chord.

Overall, I'd say that coding speed doesn't really change as typing fast is not what makes coding fast.

There are some real advantages that I find difficult to quantify, though. I switch between stenography and typing for both coding and writing depending on whether I'm at my desk and I find it hard to express clearly why coding in stenography feels natural and nice. I suppose: there's a certain fluidity when you break things down into semantic words rather than simply symbols.

Hope that helps!

Art of chording 6 years ago

Agreed that composition time is largely made up of thinking, however once you've decided what you want to write, you still need to write it.

The other thing that I sometimes end up doing with stenography is just a stream-of-consciousness-style writing where I then have to edit it down.

Art of chording 6 years ago

There are modes, like caps lock, but for snake case, camel case, and other things.

You can also do a stroke-by-stroke basis. For example, I have strokes for prefix "is" and "on" followed by a capital. So

    "A*UN SMIT"
would be "onSubmit". You could also fall back to forcing an attached, uppercase word. So:
    "ON KPA* SMIT"
Art of chording 6 years ago

I'm the author of Art of Chording—I program full-time with steno in JavaScript (working mainly with React.)

I'd love ideas on how to demonstrate coding in steno. I struggle with it sometimes because the slowest part about coding is not the input rate… it's the brain. I guess if people are looking to code "quicker"… it's not the rate of input that one would want to explore. I will say that writing comments became a lot easier when the words started to just flow onto the screen.

Here are my existing videos:

Unscripted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=711T2simRyI

Scripted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w

Looking forward to any suggestions on how to improve or even just the big open questions you'd want answered on this subject.

Art of chording 6 years ago

The word "escape" might be written "ES KAIP". I brief it as "SKPAIP".

For the keyboard shortcut, I use "FEFK" which is default in the Plover dictionary.

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- Intermediate-to-senior Java developer

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Check us out online: https://www.shoebox.md/careers/

I'm a React JavaScript developer on the team. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions: ted@shoebox.md

Just to provide a differing opinion, my daily office is the place that I feel most productive. When I'm home, I'm never in work mode because I never (99.9%) work from home.

I like being around lots of people and having face-to-face conversations to work through problems.

There are lots of open source discussion systems, and lots of transparent ones. For whatever reason, the closed and opinionated Hacker News reached the popularity that it did. I don't mind it.

Something about the mystery and the relatively tight moderation has kept HN from becoming too off topic and silly. Do you think Hacker News has somehow avoided Eternal September?

The post is titled "why you should be using a private search engine" and yet there's only a paragraph at the end that's subtitled:

    Why You Should Use Private Search Engines?
Here's the entirety of that section:
    The truth is, people know that search engines are
    tracking them. Most websites have privacy policies
    which clearly state that they use cookies and other
    means of tracking users. Any in many cases, when we
    are asked to give apps, websites, or products
    permission to track us, we blindly agree. This may
    seem acceptable at first, but it’s problematic if that
    same tracker is following you two years later, when
    you’ve forgotten about it.

    Your search engine should be optimized for searching
    the internet, not tracking you once you’ve left. Your
    Google information can be used against you in legal
    cases, even in civil cases like divorces.
So if I understand correctly:

1. You might forget about trackers you've accepted.

2. Your search history can be used against you in the court of law.

They couldn't come up with anything better for this ad?

In Ottawa, I know very few people who regularly carry cash. I easily haven't made a cash transaction in 6 months.

When I went to the States (NYC), I was surprised at how hard it is to get around without cash (restaurants, hairdressers, tolls, all cash-only or EZPass) and eventually caved in and took out money for the trip. I think America is just slightly behind the times in terms of cashlessness.

BMO in Canada forces 6 digits or alphanumerics as your account password. No more, no less.

What's worse, because it can be entered on the phone, aAbBcC are all == 1. So it's really just 6 digits.

Big time. There are various levels of caption quality and part of it is the tools used.

1. QWERTY transcriptionists working brief, 5-10 minute shifts typing as fast as they can and rotating.

2. Voice-mask reporters using Dragon with a voice mask (more commonly phonetic typos)

3. Stenographers using a steno machine, some of them were not trained to do realtime and lack the ability to edit as they go.

It's all up to the individual, unfortunately. Furthermore, the budget for live captions is sometimes smaller than it should be and so the service purchased is the cheapest, not the best.

I pay attention to captions now. I've watched TSN (Canada) and it seems that past 10 p.m. they put in someone who isn't fully trained or graduated from school and they most definitely shouldn't be providing captions as they are near unreadable.

Good captions are priceless for the access that they offer.

I'm part of the stenographer/captioner community as a hobby and you'd be surprised at how many people think that all captions are automatically computer-generated. In reality the practical limitations of autogenerated captions are demonstrated by YouTube's caption system. It's good but even a mistake every other sentence (95%+ accuracy) can completely obfuscate the meaning behind the video.

I really like Hacktoberfest, I think it's a great way to get people involved in open source.

The T-shirt design is always good.

I'm sending out an email to my coworkers who usually wouldn't participate in open source and offering them help on how they could make their 4 pull-requests for the month.

Bonus: even if you don't get the T-shirt, they often still send you stickers.

It doesn't help that emoji and giphy are listed as prime features in this new offering.

You're right that the applications can be used productively. I find that my work Slack is a lot less focused on being productive than the dev channels that I follow in Discord for open source projects.

The other big issue is the discussion of asynchronous versus realtime communication: https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-against-real-time-te...

I do find that in some Discord servers we accidentally exclude people living in different time zones, which is not as much the case with an async medium like Google Groups or other mailing lists.

Now we have Slack, Discord, Gitter, Microsoft Teams, and Atlassian Stride.

I'm not sure when chat rooms became a business tool. Personally, I find myself distracted more than anything from all the notifications these apps cause, I get less done.

I have to be sure to quit every chat app and put my phone in "do not disturb" to disconnect and focus, and then I get coworkers mad that I'm not online.

At least with email I could take a while to reply without anyone blinking an eye.

Posture (neck angle) and arm/wrist placement are really hard to get right in the situations you describe.

I saw a physiotherapist at one point and the best advice I got was to get someone to take a photo of you in your "usual" position. You can analyze that yourself or bring it to your family doctor at your next appointment if you are curious.

What am I missing that makes this so expensive? Is it just a "Google Glass"-syndrome kind of thing?

This is a $5,000 whiteboard with an annual SAAS fee.

It wasn't always this way. I had horrible password standards as I'm sure most of us did when we started out on computers.

- If it's a website I couldn't care about, I use a simple password, probably a remnant from growing up.

- If it's a website I'm concerned about but knowingly won't use, I create a random password and clipboard it during initial creation/login, then every time I use the website I reset it (lazy man's password generator)

- If it's a website that I care about, like HN, I have a loose pattern that I follow that includes symbols and numbers (that's the 30ish character I was referencing). Every website is unique.

- Financial accounts have their own set of rules (unless it's stupid and has, say, an 8 character limit)

- My main email accounts get special treatment with an exceptionally long password.

- Use two-factor authentication wherever possible.

And yes, I could replace this with:

- Password manager

- Two-factor authentication

E: grammar.