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Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

Incredible!

This invokes the feeling that it'll be impossible to keep computers out of our bodies at some point, which is scary on so many levels.

But like any tool, if I look at all the good that can come out of it - simply amazing things are possible.

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You know how sometimes you have to fight auto correct while typing on your phone?

Imagine that with a brain interface...

Duck. No, Duck. I meant duck. Duck that. Ducking hell.

I could imagine easily going insane if I were forced to interact through a piece of technology that would not do what I wanted. It's bad enough when my phone won't do what I want.

Not being able to type fuck is such a weird cultural quirk America has forced down our throats.

The puritanism is real, and it's still a thing; people self-censoring themselves on platforms like tik tok (even going as far as 'censoring' words like sex or even more innocuous words). Not sure if it's fear of The Man, or because they don't want to miss out on views from kids.

TikTok rapidly de-ranks any mention of suicide (a word Apple’s keyboard also avoids) so the kids have taken to saying they want to make themselves past-tense

I wonder: Is creativity and innovation reduced in strongly puritan areas because of this?

I never have this issue. Is it a difference between iOS and Android keyboards, or did I add it to my dictionary long ago and forget all about it?

GBoard, at least, has a "block offensive words" option under "text correction" options. I think it makes sense - as bad as it is to accidentally type "duck", it's worse the other way round.

Context helps - if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck etc...

Edit: this is a possible alternative meaning for "Duck Typing"...

Just wait until your interface doesn't allow you to defend Julian Assange, or deny the efficacy of masks.

A lot of people have experience with fighting mental BS, so hopefully that translates. OTOH they don't have experience fighting both at the same time...

The same kind of statistical models used for voice recognition and autocorrect on touch keyboards are also used for these electrode-in-cortex interfaces, so you can expect the same limitations in accuracy. I don’t think we appreciate how good our hands and fingers are, not just in terms of dexterity, but also on the information-theoretic level as a decoding system.

I mean... who thinks in individual characters? I would assume it would type the words our correctly based on what I'm thinking.

But to your point, would the system understand thought?

Knowing the difference between:

  > "I'm sending two to you" or "I'm sending to Two One Smith Lane."

requires a lot of knowledge/intent if indeed you can't think in terms of individual characters.

It will likely be something like imagining typing, or swiping. It won't work at the level of words. You'd have to correlate between 50k and 250k individual words per person, which would be cumbersome and obnoxious. You have to correlate word components, and the easiest way to train is tapping into a feedback loop that already achieves your intent, like typing.

Systems like the palm pilot graffiti interface, or some optimized symbolic gesture system will become prevalent, but imagining typing will probably carry us sufficiently until better systems are worked out.

I'm more worried about privacy intrusions.

My muscular memory of Vim is so strong, I’d wager I could code even faster and more powerfully with a proper brain interface.

This always puzzles me a but.

Is it the typing speed that limits the amount and quality of code one can write in a day? To me, it's mostly finding out things about the subject area, finding the right APIs, code search.

Of course, when typing is fast enough so that you never break your flow, it is important.

I think that in order to not break your flow, you should be able to translate your thoughts (the answer you found) to code or text as fast as possible. Typing slowly when you know what you want to write can be frustrating for one (lowering your motivation), but most importantly is too trivial a task to prevent you from thinking at the same time (and thus parasitic thoughts can break your flow). A HCI that can help you write your code as you think of it (and maybe log the thought process for future reference !) would be awesome on that front.

The whole point of vim is normal mode, not insert mode. Insert mode is just typing, but normal mode is code or file navigation. Its not about typing speed but deliberate action and precision - with vim you need only a couple of keystrokes. In this context speed refers not to typing code but to doing what you mentioned quicker (at least for code search, jump to definition, go back in cursor history) but there is vimium for the web which helps with research. My hands are slowly failing me and vim is a god send.

I doubt so; I think that editing text via the brain would take a lot of focus to think the right things at the right time. In practice I think your brain would go one direction and the interpreter would type that, so then you'd think "no wait go back I was just distracted by a squirrel" and the whole document is deleted. Or something.

I think it could be cool being born with a symbiote AI.

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