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Comment by isityettime | Hacker News Reader

I think it takes quite a lot of practice to reach this speed. It's not rare among blind developers, but I think it still takes a lot of work to get there. Pretty impressive!

I wish more people would watch videos like this just because having a realistic idea of how blind people do certain tasks can help you move from pity or even compassion to a more productive kind of understanding. I think sometimes when you haven't seen it, you can't really even imagine how it can be done.

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I listen to a lot of podcasts and listen at 1.5-2.0 speed and it’s to the point that I literally cannot stand listening to 1.0 speed anymore as they go too slowly (depending on the content of course).

Same. Returning to 1x speed makes people sound (to my 2x-abused ears) drunk and slurring their works. If I want to listen to something slowly and carefully, I will just about tolerate 1.25x.

What really frustrates me is watching/listening to discussion of music, because I am forced to listen to the talking at 1x because the music sounds wrong (and is wrong) at anything other than 1x.

Playing music at 1x should be a pretty simple feature to add to those apps.

Ideally it should be done while encoding.

The funny thing is that slow talkers sound normal at 2x speed. It's jarring when you hear their actual speech.

I listen to podcasts at 1x. But there are a few people I've done podcasts with that I do various audio tricks to speed up.

And then there is Dwarkesh who sounds like 2x on 1x.

Norman Finkelstein is a notable example of this.

I'm so glad YouTube and other podcast players have moved to support 3.0 speed. As I get comfortable with one, I move it up some. For things like sports and "did you know" content, I can go 2.5 if I'm not multitasking. For technical content, sometimes I'm stuck at 1.0.

You can get browser extensions to do it for all media controls on any site. YouTube's "Premium" for 3x is laughable when it's an internal browser function.

That’s an amusing observation.

Likewise, YouTube’s “premium” feature of not displaying ads is laughable when displaying content is literally an internal browser function.

I pay anyway, because I was going to pay for an on-demand streaming music service anyway.

Another fun thing is if you use an extension you can fast-forward through the advertisements too. For some channels I use around 3.5x playback speed.

Ublock origin blocks the ads entirely on Firefox.

They're talking about in video sponsor ads, and those can be skipped using SponsorBlock or similar.

Premium is for up to 4x, not just 3x

Something that the Overcast podcast player does (and probably others) is silence removal, which in some ways is even better than the raw speedup.

Except Marc Andreessen, I can’t decode his speech at 2x

Maybe it’s just a matter of practice.

I am jealous. I can't listen and retain most podcasts at more than 1.0x. I even disable the podcast player functionality that eliminates pauses and silent sections.

I do the opposite in a few. There's some I follow weekly and it's only an hour or so each. I drop it to .7 or .8 because I want to get a bit more time with the hosts. Possibly stupid but I've sort of got used to some of these folks at that speed, and the normal speed is 'weird'. One is a political podcast, and when they play clips of Trump, he does always sound very drunk, but the hosts themselves (to me) don't sound drunk, just... measured. Some of it may be audio quality - I'm getting their microphone directly, often the audio clips are from field recordings.

Same haha. But for me 1.5x is the sweet spot. Anything more and I find myself rewinding a lot. I want to feel comfortable absorbing info and not on constant alert.

Me too, but often it's more out of FOMO and a feeling of there being so much other stuff to listen to. But in truth it's either way just a fraction you can listen to from immense amounts of valuable stuff. On more reflection, I find that listening on 1x to something allows more thinking from my end, questioning the truth of what the speaker says, thinking about tangents or similar things I've heard elsewhere, pondering stuff etc. Just like reading a book fast isn't the best strategy. Sometimes you want to look up and just think about what you just read, etc.

> It's not rare among blind developers

It's not rare among the blind in general.

Unless you're completely technologically illiterate, the kind of person who has no idea how to install an app or sign up for an online account, you're probably doing something of the sort.

If you are dedicated, few weeks to few months of usage with regular ramp up. You should be careful with adjusting which symbols are read though and sometimes the programing languages matters because different symbols have different significance for understanding the code.

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