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Comment by gaudat | Hacker News Reader

A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a thousand words is worth more than a thousand pictures. Thank you for the transcript.

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I prefer text to video or audio. Text is a more 2-dimensional format – my eyes scan up and down the page looking for keywords. I read it non-linearly, reading the more interesting-looking sentences first (even multiple times), leaving the less interesting ones until the end. Text lets me follow my own attention, audio/video force me into a linear straight-jacket – I know I can rewind/fast-forward/etc, but that's still a lot more slow and painful than just darting my eyes around a page. A picture can say a lot that words can't, but that's why (hyper)text can have pictures, figures, diagrams, photos, tables, etc, embedded in it. Even embedded video clips and audio files, for those times when an audiovisual component is really adding something.

I've largely hated the slow transition of information from barebones html scrawlings to the modern video presentation format. One thing I've discovered is installing an HTML5 video speed controller extension that lets me run most videos at 2.5-3.0x speed. It really seems to help. I think part of the problem is that most videos are tuned well below the rate I like to scan in information.

Youtube only allows up to 2x and that's annoying. I use mpv (with youtube-dl) to work around that... up to 4x.

I can often understand and follow a vid just fine at 3-4x.

If you do not want to install an add-on to work around that, you can use a bookmarklet like this (works at least in Firefox):

javascript:(() => { document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate=2.0; })();

Enchanter for YouTube allows you to set the speed as fast as you want.

I agree and also watch most videos much faster than 1x; it seems lowest-common-denominator-oriented "educational" videos require the most speedup, while with denser stuff, and some entertainment, I can only get up to 1.5-1.8x. An (un?)fortunate side-effect is that talking to most people in realtime becomes annoyingly slow; and likewise, others tell me that I'm talking too fast.

From fortune:

"A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures."

Sometimes the written form is far better than the visual form.

That’s Perlisism #39 from inaugural Turing Award winner Alan Perlis’s delightful “Epigrams in Programming”.

http://cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

Edsger Dijkstra: “A picture may be worth a thousand words, a formula is worth a thousand pictures” (https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/E...)

Terry Tao: “A picture is worth a thousand equations”

I think it’s all about choosing the best medium for a message.

Didn’t Jobs say a word is worth a thousand pictures?

I'll do you one better. Here is a ChatGPT summary:

"The LPC to ISA adapter enables old ISA cards to work with modern motherboards via the TPM port, as demonstrated with a sound blaster 16 card."

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