Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
kottke.org
kottke.org
That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer.
I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bits re-read hard bits, luxuriate in the really wonderful bits...all of which is hard in video. And in fact because the visual channel is so complex, I find reading more multimedia than video -- it's hard to feel cold when watching someone march through the snow, though a well written book can make me shiver with cold, even on a summer day.
'Surely we must have gone through two pages of this double spaced script that only uses one half of the page in a large font?'
No
Invariably my guess on 'script progress' would be considerably greater than actual progress made. Even under ideal conditions where this was the nth retake and I knew what was coming up I would still find myself over-estimating how many words had been presented to the cameras. Years of experience did not change this, I always over-estimated how much had been read, trying to take into account the 'slow baud rate' didn't help.
If you do ever have a transcript of a video play the video and start reading. See how far you get through the video when you have finished reading. Don't make it a race, read as you normally might, taking time out to Google stuff etc. and you will be amazed at how much quicker the printed word is.
Other <video> elements can be sped up entering this into the javascript console:
document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 2
(There are also browser extensions that can do the same thing.)
(The above comment is 49 words)
For comparison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Speech_and_li... claims that 250wpm is the speed auctioneers speak at and that normal speech is 150-160wpm.
Getting words spoken at you is terribly inefficient compared to reading them.
It's almost like they're pretending it spontaneously came from nature (or always existed absent of humans and we discovered it) and we weren't evolved for it but somehow adapted to it. You could insert eg a bicycle into the same premise: we ride them absurdly well given there's nothing built into the brain for specifically riding a bicycle (except there is: balance, grasping acceleration, etc. - we designed them for our use just as we did text).
I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as none of us can read. The scary thing is that even the best of us can only swim about as well as the average dog. So pity us on the day we find a creature actually designed for reading.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/014...
"Meant"? Nothing in your body or brain is "meant" for anything. There is no "meaning", or "intention", for starters. And the brain is nothing if not adaptable. If your brain is "meant" to be anything, it's versatile.
As a whole, humans are quite adaptable to their environment, but specific body parts tend to be specialized.
No, but the brain can replace brain tissue for one task with brain tissue for another task. It's called neuroplasticity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity#Treatment_of_b...
I agree with the GP, if there's one characterization that applies to the brain, it's "versatile".
Evolution is a random process, there is no designing, there's no goals.
There's absolutely a part of the brain that specializes processing visual information, just as there are organs throughout the rest of your body that specialize with other different tasks.
(2) There is a goal: species survival.
(3) The only rule is that whatever aids (2) is a rule for purposes of (1).
Check out Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.
This is not very far fetched. Much of our DNA is used for a short time during development and then effectively turns off for the rest of our life. Taking that DNA away might go unnoticed.
like, you didn't intend to type anything, it was just a series random processes that resulted in some text, but by convention, it's nice to say that you meant to write something.
Newborn babies can swim, obviously with no practice. In fact isn't it a classic example of an instinctive human behaviour?
They do have some reflexes related to swimming, in that they will hold their breath and work their feet, but those reflexes disappear with time and have to be re-learned.
It's fair to say that swimming is a learned practice.
Imho that isn't related to swimming. That's them trying to keep their heads above water by standing up, hopefully in relatively shallow water. Even with drowning adults, they don't so much try to swim as try to grasp onto something.
Compare dogs. They have a swimming instinct dedicated to movement. Dogs don't tread. They move forwards. We flail around trying to climb out of the water. They are trying to get to shore. That has to be some sort of evolutionary relic speaking to very different ancestral environments.
Polar bears instincts accommodate both treading water and swimming within moments:
You could be on a poster for "evolution stops at the neck".
Obviously, our brains did not evolve to what they are today long before reading was a thing, because that happened before today. There was no point at which brains stopped evolving.
Evolution operates on a different timescale. For all intents and purposes, our physical structure hasn't evolved since reading became widespread in the population perhaps a couple hundred years ago.
Very high literacy rates within endogamous subpopulations go back much farther than a couple hundred years, though.
Text certainly isn't dead, and I would rather think that we're liable to commit a grievous error by neglecting the primary source of civilization. Text also has added life in code and programming, which clearly shows it is no likely to suffer any kind of demise.
The phonic connection to reading is overrated IMHO and this is why I wrote of a hack of the visual system. Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have bene dropped or tuned -- and they have no connection to sound, as you say (well, in the Japanese case in particular there are some phonological puns, but I doubt you notice them at speed, even if you have the historical connection). In the latin alphabet I almost never recognize puns when reading (though I get them immediately if someone is reading aloud). And when I was learning German I struggled at first to read the compound words but now the morphological decomposition is automatic.
In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further
It took me a long time to realise the point of learning 'phonics' at school (they were called phonograms in Australia).
While I can see why writing and reading without speaking makes phonics look useless, for children, all of their language is initially communicated through sound. Putting a bunch of symbols in front of them and saying that it has meaning isn't going to help them - but showing that the symbols roughly correspond to sounds that they already know have meaning is a pretty important step.
This doesn't apply to all written languages - logographic systems obviously don't have a correspondence between sounds and written symbols - but for alphabetic systems and the like it's quite a good system.
Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is.
What you really want, for learning to read and write via phonics, is determinism -- you want someone to be able to write something if they know how it sounds, and to be able to read something if they see its written form. There's no need to have symbols and phonemes correspond one-to-one, and they generally don't even when people are devising their own orthography in a green field.
For example, using C for a generic consonant, we have the following regular spelling rules in English:
aC -- TRAP vowel
aCe -- FACE vowel
eC -- DRESS vowel
eCe -- FLEECE vowel
iC -- KIT vowel
iCe -- PRICE vowel
oC -- LOT vowel
oCe -- GOAT vowel
uC -- STRUT vowel
uCe -- GOOSE vowel
The rules for pronunciation is very directly linked to the spelling, with few exceptions.
Sure, as long as you assume the only goal is to validate a phonics approach to teaching reading. Some people appreciate that english words get the same spelling in Minnesota as they do in Mississippi.
For foreigners like me that mostly use it in text, the biggest overhead is in speaking, for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating.
Even if there are dialects that pronounce the same word differently, you could still find a lot of common ground.
If your biggest problem lies in a circumstance you rarely encounter, arguably fixing it is not a priority.
> for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating
This is a funny example to use, since it fully conforms to the rules I described above -- study uses the STRUT vowel, and student uses the GOOSE vowel. It would be a better example for the complaint that we have more sounds than symbols.
It's like a config file specification that supports gotos.
It's like in English, if you say "y'all" and write "ladies and gentlemen", you understand that those might mean roughly the same thing but are different words. It's not a spelling issue.
This is an important but hard to articulate distinction. Ask more if it's unclear...
English is somewhat conservative with spelling, so a lot of words embody their roots in their written form. Teaching kids to spell via phonetics and a huge set of rules makes spelling (and comprehension of new words) harder not easier.
Of course you can take this conservatism to absurd lengths: in French spelling and pronunciation have become so divorced after only a few hundred years that spelling bees are prime time television!
It is still somewhat phonetic. If you ignore the vowels that have changed sound over time and the silent letters, you can still sound out a fair chunk of English words.
Um.... there are plenty of characters that would, at first glance, appear to be identical to each other. There are plenty more that people have difficulty identifying out-of-context, but not when they appear in context. Characters don't get dropped for being hard to recognize.
They are easier to read, assuming you already know them, because they encode significantly more information than a phonetically-based script does. That's a fairly straightforward example of more work up front allowing less work later, much as encoding wikipedia into a decompressor allows the compressed version of wikipedia to be very small.
But memorizing a decent inventory of characters is a process of several years, and the boost in ease of understanding is under normal circumstances too small to notice. I notice that communicating in characters is easier because I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, and the semantic content the characters come with helps gloss over my lack of vocabulary and poor grammar. I can already understand English; I would get minimal help from extra semantic annotations to English text.
The total savings in terms of ease-of-reading in Chinese characters compared to an alphabet, summed over a person's entire life, will never pay back the effort it requires to learn them.
What do you mean by "learnable"?
As well, you can quickly copy paste and remix text in a way we can't with video yet.
Snapchat has the best UX for this type of content.
The simple idea of "tapping" to skip is the equivalent to the tab key when you're using excel. Life is better with it, and you miss it when you can't use it in other apps.
Facebook is not a platform to communicate interesting ideas succinctly. I apologize for not coming up a better way of saying this, but Facebook is catering for the not-so-sophisticated. The majority of users probably can't scan/process text very fast.
Facebook is TV. It wants to be TV.
It's a great comparison. TV, in many ways is an obsolete medium, and yet it is still efficient and remains popular despite the advent of streaming and other media offering.
I have always assumed that all social nedia want to be the new TV.
This is completely baffling to me.
Also, writing is SO MUCH EASIER than creating video. Do you really think I would have bothered participating in this conversation if it meant opening up a camera and NLE and cutting together a video of my ugly mug yapping away, with the signature youtube jump cuts to remove the "umms" and "uhhss" and other pauses that you're not currently reading?
Cuz this reply wasn't a coherently delivered, smooth stream-of-conscious delivery. I've already gone back and rephrased several thoughts-- easy to do in text, a pain in the ass to do in video.
And I'm certainly not going to FIRST write this, then read it out loud, THEN edit it, and hope you sit back and watch. And the idea of text-to-video-- seems like adding an extra step.
Video is great, but its the wrong medium for quite a bit of communication.
The counterpart line to the "text is dead" idea is the following from Facebook in the article:
>“The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.”
To me, this says less about "text is dead" and more "our users are choosing to share experiences with video, and they're doing it off-platform." Similarly, they continue with the following:
>"But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech."
I think 'text is dead' is Facebook's segue to bloviate about an upcoming set of features surrounding multimedia, which in turn is pretty much just a "stop uploading videos elsewhere" gambit. Facebook does do a pretty good job at making videos uploaded elsewhere work seamlessly with Facebook. I'd have to imagine that the next natural step is just to get those on Facebook in the first place.
So, I don't get the impression they want youtube-cut videos to replace the textual Facebook arguments; I think they're just trying to build up hype for FacebookVid or whatever they decided to call their next set of multimedia features.
The reality is that the average video is drivel and not nearly as good as a similar written piece. The FB is either living in a reality distortion field or thinking about high quality ad/infotainment content that produces $ for Facebook.
Most of us don't realise how difficult editing is. There's a camera in our phones, and uploading to Facebook, Youtube or Snapchat has never been easier, so now we're all film makers. It just that almost no one realise how hard their favourite podcast or youtube channel has worked on editing. Or how many times they redone the exact same bit, to get it absolutely perfect, and watchable.
It's easier and faster, to re-read a few sentences, edit the worst bit, re-read and post. There's not really a fast way of editing the worst parts of a video.
Exceptions apply of course for long form writing pieces, where the pacing and the wording is as much a part of the content as the content itself.
But on facebook ?
I cannot name a single movie that was not dull compared to a book it was based upon.
The "information density" to "bandwidth" ratio (is there a term for it?) is seldom justified for the majority of video content.
[0] using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improvedtube-youtu...
And still, I'd rather read the PDF slides.
Video isn't a particularly good way of conveying formal information. Text with graphics is way better.
Videos of people just speaking text is terrible and the wrong tool for the job.
Like this: http://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/
This would be a fun hack. Looks like the YouTube caption data is available via API: https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/captions/downl...
Being able to switch between text-centric and video-centric views freely has been a goal of my (now-former, because he just retired) boss for a while (and by "a while" I mean he did his dissertation on interactive, text-augmented video technology with applications to education in the 70s), and we're not quite there yet, but we do have the ability to show a transcript that can be synchronized with the playing video (automatically scrolling and with highlighted text to show where the video is), or scrolled freely and searched through to select a specific part of the video to skip to.
You can see an implementation of the technology (including playing around with some of our editing tools) at http://ayamel.byu.edu
It sounds more to me like they're looking at the bigger ad dollars YouTube is getting and want to absorb their market.
The only way for Facebook to grow now is to get out of the "friends and family" market and take over Twitter and YouTube's "celebrity/popular people" market. It seems like this could be a difficult pivot.
With only 1% of the users generating content, 9% simply liking/commenting, and 90% logging in to just watch.... FB is desperate to satiate the immediate gratification needs of 1B+ people.
Video is the quick fix.
Think of all the videos you ignore on Forbes, WSJ, Bloomberg, etc. because you can't view them muted. Think of all the videos from Buzzfeed and others which aren't of such high caliber but are so easy to consume that you do.
This will force those with real content to publish that content in an accessible way. I'm fine with videos, especially muted ones, because if the current trends stay I think they'll be more useful to me and everyone else.
Text IS great. But somethings like a presidential speech or a short interview need the visual element. Some things don't need the visual part, but a media company can make it better than without it. The key will be to keeping it short because as others mention in the comments it's very difficult to skip around in videos for what you care about. Most of the videos I mentioned are already pretty short though, so I'm guessing that won't be much of an issue for them to adapt.
Consumption of media that expresses resonant emotions is to a degree validating.
However expressing and understanding myself and seeing myself emotionally and intellectually understood by peers is validation on another deeper level. The composition and writing of text has been shown to excite other areas of the brain than simple speech (there is a whole school on writing therapy).
There is always going to be a need for an immediate way to consuming and reacting. That market is served by twitter and snap-chat. Then there is the need for longer, carefully considered deeper thought. Thought where emotions have been deliberately moderated to provide breathing space for facts.
Video may provide more bits per second and via the eyes is more directly wired to our decision system. But the emotional space is already take by twitter and snapchat. The deliberation space is taken by text. It is not clear to me video will grow beyond a extended snapchat.
Now anyone can publish as much content as they want, however irrelevant, and that is becoming a problem: proliferation of irrelevant content (irrelevant from the perspective of the reader).
So I think the next challenge is to just be able keep content concise, relevant and affine to your interests. Twitter took a stab at that, but it's not there yet.
Having a machine to filter and produce summarized versions of whatever endless feed you are reading, as well as remembering seen entries (a bit like Snapchat) is the next frontier.
Another key issue is selective ignorance, biases and such. Only exploring stuff related to your interests can trap people within a detached state with respect to reality.
That's something I've been casually interested in in the last few months, simply because I have, rather lately, come to understand that I won't ever be able to read all the books I want to read, or see the movies I want to see, etc.
However, it seems to me the "problem" or the situation is a little more complex than that. The information you consume will always be a subset of "reality", and how detached you are from "reality" based on what information you consume seems like a quantity that will be hard to measure.
For the sake of being somewhat contrarian here, I'm just going to repeat something I've mentioned a couple times: I think that contrary to popular belief, all attempts at giving people a more "balanced" view of reality with a balanced "information diet", all attempts at avoiding the "filter bubble" are completely misguided.
The value is precisely in creating bubbles that are as valuable as possible for individuals, by filtering, curating, optimizing the information they consume to maximize the utility they get from it. That possibility seems to me to be largely unexplored today in places where you would expect to see it (information aggregation platforms, recommender systems that are still quite primitive, etc.).
This is true. And it is exacerbated by confirmation bias.
I value text. I like reading deeper insights from people much more than cheap flyby memes or time consuming videos. If communication regresses like that, I'll probably withdraw from using those features. It's simply what I don't want in a social network.
Millennials are the biggest and most active group, and more important to them compared to "everyone else" - they know what they're doing.
- feature-chasing Periscope/Vine/Snapchat/Meerkat/Twitch/Youtube
- enticed by pre-roll ads
- planning future Oculus integration, live VR streaming, etc.
For some other things, I prefer a video: how to cook something, how to repair something, how to tie a tie, an interview with a person whom I admire. Even then it can depend on my mood, and if I'm in a hurry I am like, "Oh, just cut to the chase, or put it in a one-paragraph article."
Obsolete would be a stretch however for many the web is all about consumption. Mobile devices cement this point. And videos are a very efficient way to consume information:
- Read the book VS watch the TED talk.
- Go to the recipe site VS watch this Tastemade video.
- Read the Foreign Affairs article on the complexities of the Syrian war VS Watch this cool graphic filled Vox video.
And even with the written word, text is becoming more terse:
- Read this article vs Read this set of tweets
But people will never stop writing so perhaps all Facebook is saying is that the written word will become less relevant to their business model as they slowly turn into something resembling Snapchat
1. Version control systems (VSC) out of the box. Software developers have been using safe source code tracking for many decades. Since queries are the main tools for data analysts, they should be treated the same way, but the development of all VCS features in a custom query editor is not economically viable.
2. Portability. Text queries can be written even on a whiteboard and a notepad. One of the great advantages of text queries is that they are unambiguous: there are no hidden parts in a text query.
3. Detachable. Text queries can be run in different warehouses. They should not depend on identifiers, conditions, and environmental variables.
4. Fragmentation. An analyst can extract some feature from a query and partly pass it to his colleagues.
5. Embedding. Software developers easily can embed queries into autotests, side subsystems can embed query parts into their code or resources.
6. Specification. DSQL can be a part of a system’s applied programming interface (API) for third party systems if DSQL specification is precise enough.
This is going to go down in history alongside the mythical "640K ought to be enough for anybody" and the guy who thought the internet was just a fad.
For example, video is great at showing the physical relationship between car parts - what they look like, where they go - so if I'm trying to figure out how to get to that sixth spark plug on a 1990 Bronco II, I'm going to look for a video.
Video is also good at pacing the timing of emotional reactions. If it weren't, no one would watch movies.
If, on the other hand, I'm trying to learn or experience something complicated, like how to code in a new language, or an overview of the history of the idea of revolution, or any kind of theology, I'm going to read about it. I'm not going to watch some talking head give me far fewer words in the same amount of time, even if the video has some nice music and pans across a few pictures of cathedrals while the narrator speaks.
Words are the fundamental unit of thinking, and video is piss-poor at communicating words, especially when compared to writing.
Woa. Biig assumption.
I totally agree that text is "fundamental" indeed to our ability to communicate our mind-state, but text is not our mind state and it's a huge leap from "I can communicate with text" to "I'm thinking in text". You might as well assume video frames are fundamental units of thinking.
I am going to drift off topic: the future is AI that understands what we say, recognizes our facial expressions, and generally "gets us." While there are obvious potential downsides, the upsides involve getting notified of things in the order of most useful and entertaining first. AIs will use text, still photos, and videos to show us what we want to know and experience. This whole idea creeps me out a bit, but it is probably the future. At some point in time, effective computer to human neural I/O connectors will be invented, and the effect of civilization will be interesting. So, video -> direct neural implants.
More bandwidth means more money, which means convincing more of the public to invest more in Facebook.
The cost of video production is at least 50X or 100X more than text and hence, we take extra caution to make sure that it's precise and accurate. What is said in 1500 words is trimmed down to 250 words to create a video. It goes through multiple talents like motion graphics team, anchors etc before it hits the screen and hence it's interesting to watch. Text, caption etc are just there for SEO. Bandwidth is the only constrain, especially in developing nations.
And then there are low-quality mugshot videos, which takes less budget than what it takes to present the same content in text.
The quality ones will replace text forever.
And this need to be a startup.
Sure FB might become more video but that doesn't mean it's going to result in the same attachment to the product, at least for adults.
For that, video is perfect.
So in the context of Facebook, it makes sense. In the context of ads, it makes sense.
Yes, we don't want to believe it because it sounds like hell to people reading HN religiously, where text is kind, where people debate, where people don't use smileys, and where ideas get evaluated.
But that's not what Facebook is for. And that's not what the people on Facebook want.
Doesn't it mean that most of these videos are watched with subtitles?
How is that taken into aaoumt with the "death" of text?
No, it means they're not actually watched at all. Facebook autoplays videos (without sound) when you scroll through your timeline. If you get distracted and stop scrolling and 10 seconds play, they count that as a "play".
It just so happens that video works better on Facebook (and probably other social networks), where the stream of information is huge. People, most of them anyway, suck at describing things. Most of them can snap a picture of something nice, exciting, cute, whatever. Not everyone is writer, nor should one be to share some everyday thing.
Text has it's uses. It's just that other mediums usually tend to work better on Facebook.
And that's fine.
Facebook is Borg. Faceborg.
Having said that, if these comments were an audiobook, or a word for word movie script, I'd probably only be through about 5 of them.
Words rule!
On the other hand, if a picture is worth 1,000 words, a movie must be worth billions! Unfortunately it takes a lot of study of a picture to get 1,000 word out of it. That's a lot of pausing.
So i'd say text isn't the ideal, it's just a matter of economics that we are surrounded by text all the time, and maybe facebook can shift that.
On a sidenote, i'm curious why aren't there aggregators for well illustrated content ?
I guess that explains FB's hope for a rise of video content.
The applications that we built were an attempt to resolve some of this. We were building editing / curation tools to help improve video, and some of the people using our software created incredible things, that I absolutely loved.
I especially dislike the trend in the past (5?) years toward programming tutorials in video. Give me a written tutorial. Give me a blog post. Give me a well-commented repo, or at least a poorly commented one with a decent README file. When teaching anything involving a textual artform / profession, give me Anything but a visual / audial medium. I write and read code for a living, and otherwise I write and read about problems solved with code all day. When it comes to programming, video is a square peg in a knife fight.
That said, I have an enormous collection of TV shows and Movies, and I have a great deal of appreciation for the medium, in general. One of my close friends is an Editor in Hollywood and I have such an absolute respect for him and the creative sides of his industry. I love to see his work and hear about the intricacies therein. When edited and curated, video is splended. I can dive in and forget the world exists and appreciate nuance and symmetry of visuals, sounds, and ideas. And despite my feelings about programming videos, I know it's possible to learn from video, depending on the subject.
I don't want to watch videos of everyone I know doing every day things. I don't want to watch unedited, uncurated crap in real time. Every time a "Live" video link shows up on my FB notifications, I skip it. I don't want to see you live. If I did, I'd video chat with you, or I'd call you up to hang out. But if you want me to take some time out to watch your broadcast, then I expect some planning, editing, and and overall respect for my time. This is video, after all. It's all-consuming. I have to watch AND listen in real time, which means I'm not doing anything else. Asking that much of me requires respect.
Of course another benefit of text is that it's so easy to edit. I don't know if you've actually enjoyed reading this post, but I assure you the first version was much, much worse.
And if you just skimmed it and ended up here, at this sentence, well there it is: my favorite part about text over video.
And then there are many people who would simply prefer to read something over heating it. Is that really so hard to understand?
I sometimes have trouble conversing in crowded places if there's lot of other people having their conversations loudly. Not much trouble, though, but listening to the only one thread of discussion requires bit extra mental effort.
Then there are people who don't speak clearly, and you have to ask them to repeat what they said...
And all this in my native language. I find dealing with written forms of any foreign language I know much easier than the spoken language. (Both "understand" and "produce by myself".)
Text will rule for a long while yet.
Sure. I know Facebook wouldn't put out videos like that but it seems 80% of all videos linked to do start out like that and that's the quality you're going to get from anyone worth listening to. Even the polished ones, though, blatter on about things I don't care about but I can't skim ahead in the video without worrying I'm skipping something I really do want to hear.
Thus, the advantage of text. To the point. Skimmable, both forward and backward with the ability to understand what you are skipping over.
Have you ever read transcripts from talks given? Don't you wish someone would have edited out all the garbage talk beforehand? And doesn't your mouse wheel finger hurt scrolling down the page, only to be told "to hear the rest of the video, click here".
Now let's talk about the weight of video files ....
Then you have the best of both worlds. Adding some sort of out-of-band overlays (like iTerm2/3 annotation maybe[2]) for extra commentary would make it truly amazing.
..Looks like no, but in teh future plans of [1] at least.
I'm not sure how the production workflow would go - I guess you'd
- record your terminal session, perhaps with live audio recording.
- if tools existed (which they afaik don't really), being able to clean up your ttyrecs to remove typos, speed up slow typing etc, would be amazing)
- Maybe rerecord a commentary/narration audio on the edited visuals, and add any annotations.
- publish, and glory in your multimedia educational creation!
(As I continue to think about it, I'm tempted to try to build this. I wonder if it would get used?)
[1] http://tty-player.chrismorgan.info/#drop-in-video-replacemen...
[2] https://www.iterm2.com/img/screenshots/v3-screen-shots/iterm...
I can't watch Allan Adams in MIT quantum mechanics faster than 1.25x. Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra on the otherhand I watched consistently at 2x.
What a pathetic load of hogwash. Video is the slowest possible way of conveying any meaningful information.