Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Huh it looks like she horizontally mirrors the camera so that the writing appears forwards not backwards. At first I thought she might have been writing in reverse, which would be doable on simple graphs but harder with more words. Later shots show her writing on-camera, forwards from her perspective.

View on HN

In the past century, glass chalkboards and reverse writing were actually used in the military, mainly in air defense. Specially trained writers were putting objects scanned by radars on the board with coordinates and related info, while officers were reading them from the other side.

My late grandfather was a Radarman in WWII and learned to do this.

Leonardo Da Vinci used to write backwards in his notebooks, in order for his ideas and secrets not to be stolen.

As a left handed person, it’s pretty easy for me to write backwards. It feels like something in my brain wants the letters and words to go that way, even though I never practice.

A right handed person can write in reverse with their left hand without much practice, by holding a pen in each hand, pretending to write with their right and mirroring the hand movements. It's even easier if you just "write" with your finger, eg on a foggy mirror, rather than holding a pen. The scripts we use are definitely optimized for right handed writing.

everyone can write backwards.

place a piece of paper on a board,turn it 180degree facing away from you,writing on it with the pen pointing towards you.

Yeah, she uses OBS to flip the recording (she mentions “in software” in the video in the tweet, and the interview mentions OBS)

For a minute I was wondering how did she teach herself to write so well in reverse (and so fast), until I realised that it's trivial to flip the output.

It's a functionallity in zoom, I believe.

That only mirrors what you see when you look at yourself---it doesn't flip what everybody else sees.

There's a "mirror my video" setting. https://www.freetech4teachers.com/2020/04/how-to-reverse-mir...

Agreed that the setting exists; disagree about what it does.

What that option toggles what you see when you look at yourself. The audience always sees the unmirrored video.

This is not clearly explained in the documentation. However, it is mentioned here

https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/204065759-Zoom-Roo...

for example, where they say of the option "Note: You can tap the Enable video mirroring option if you want a mirror effect for your own video display (where the display of your own Zoom Room looks like a mirror)."

Yeah, I agree with you, this feature always does the same thing in everything (every video conferencing app uses it to show you yourself). The reason is that you're used to seeing yourself in the mirror, and your image would look weird to you if it weren't mirrored.

It would also look weird to everyone else if it were, so they see your normal image.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com