It is probably the massive cold I have, but does that mean this replay is from a "playback" file of the old etherpad interface since it is dated February 2009?
it would be interesting to use a colour gradient (say from yellow to red) to indicate how long something survived, before it got deleted. so you could see immediately the different kinds of mistake - transitory ones, or stuff that took you a while to realise.
It's really fascinating to see the thought process unfold like this. I wonder how much variance there is between writers? No doubt everyone has slightly different style and method, but this gives clear way to visualize it.
Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledly-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awkful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done they're done.
I am a basher. Most men are bashers, and most women are swoopers....
Writers who are swoopers, it seems to me, find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without wondering why or how people are alive in the first place.
Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: "What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?"
Stypi looks like a neat tool! Visiting the website it instantly presents a collaborative document with a link such as http://www.stypi.com/7e4op8ww
Don't know if I'll ever need the playback feature, and the name feels a bit awkward. Will be interesting to see where they want to take this as a startup.
Thank you for making your process public. In almost any endeavor where one compares his own process only to the observable outcome of another's process, he can believe erroneously that his (possibly superior) results are the fruit of inefficient labor and near incompetence. While I must edit repeatedly to produce reasonable prose, PG can just dash off a brilliant essay. Few know how may takes were required for a screen actor to nail a particularly difficult scene -- we just see the near-perfect result. Obviously, the same phenomenon occurs in software development. Look at how brilliantly Kevin Bourrillion (et. al., of course) designed the Guava API! [One of my favorite APIs from a design perspective] How many discussions over beverages with Josh Bloch were actually required, and to how many internal iterations at Google were we never privy?
It is only by adjusting our perceptions of the processes by which others produce quality work that we can feel good about our own abilities.
I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff like this. Specifically, the difference between creative endeavors (where you iterate on something before releasing it), and performance-based endeavors (where you try to nail a live run-through of what you've practiced).
In either situation, the amount of work that went into things is hidden from the audience. We simply admire (or abhor) the final product or performance. But it's actually much different to be a creator than it is to be a performer. As a performer, there's no guarantee that the extent of your practice will shine through in the end: performance-under-pressure and amount-of-preparation are equally important variables (although the latter can be said to affect the former).
Creators are lucky by comparison. Their only real concern is iteration. You can generally assume that the more time you spend working on something, the better the finished product will be. So iteration is a function of (A) how much time you have before you release, and (B) how efficiently you spend that time. It can be hard to measure B without comparing yourself to others. But I'm often surprised at how much my writing/design/code/etc improves with even minimal increases to A.
Only one thing I would suggest really - width of linked Stypi page should have some reasonable maximum width, something close to 80 chars. Otherwise, it is really hard to see where all changes are made when browser is maximized.
Watching this gives me much more confidence in my writing abilities. I thought I was the only one who proofreads and changes things again and again until they are perfect :)
I'd love to have this 'during playback, show me things that survived the editing process' feature to be able to better reflect on my own writing. The feature may convince me to switch from to Stypi from Google Docs.
Even though it would be extremely frustrating to read everything in this format I feel like I got twice as much value from it. With every sentence I watched him make the same point in 2-3 different ways. So if I didn't quite understand some concept he was trying to convey the first try, by the final edit I had formed a complete picture. Reading comprehension win!
Seconded. You get in the head of the author, because intent becomes clear from the different way an argument is phrased. Additionally, the jumps between edits show why one thing leads to another. I enjoyed watching this a lot.
Nice features. In what does it make it a "company" rather than a cool side-project? (Don't take it the harsh way, I'm really interested in the answer :)
The fact that a lot of people like the feature and want to use it for starters. If they can sell enough ads to make the hosting worthwhile, they have a successful company I'd assume.
Doing a BA in philosophy (read: essays) in an age when checking your spelling meant breaking out the dictionary likely broke him of most of his poor spelling habits. I find my spelling has gotten immeasurably worse since the advent of typing the word I'm trying to spell in the omnibox and seeing if any of the results are bolded.
I think writers would find it as an indispensable tool to find out where they make mistakes. It can function as a kind of a feedback loop which helps you refine your skill.
FWIW[+], two-and-a-half suggestions for playback mode:
- mark the current edit point more prominently,
- automatically scroll to where the edits are taking place (obvious if you test this on a small screen),
- if you implement the former suggestion, signal big jumps prominently in a way that helps viewers keep track of where they are in the overall document.
[+] I know this is an early proof-of-concept for playback mode, and my suggestions are probably obvious, but it can't hurt.
I like that that the font actually adjusts appropriately when using zoom-in/zoom-out, but it would be nice if the width of the playback div would also narrow to stay within the browser's width zooming in.
I would also appreciate if you used a heavier font weight, or permitted changing the font easily. It's a bit thin-looking and not easily taken in, at least for my eyes.
This could also have applications in tutoring and teaching writing.
Would be nice to see where the cursor is. I completely lost track of some edits as
1. the cursor was not shown
2. it did not scroll correctly
3. speed... i am pretty sure you do not type this fast:)
That's a pretty clean writing style: In the first 80% of the edit, pg's re-editing is mostly to find better ways of saying what he just wrote, but -at least compared to mine- pretty light in terms of correcting mechanical issues of text formation: most of his mechanical corrections are deleting the typo-ridden last word and rewriting it.
I note also that pg's rephrasing most often consists of deleting the end of the paragraph back to where he was last happy with it and rewriting (we can call this the clean-slate approach), rather than editing the section to transform just those parts of text that should change (the conservative approach I use). I think the conservative approach is faster, but it introduces more errors. I guess the overall cleanliness of pg's writing style is related to this. I wonder if I should try to change to a more clean-slate writing technique.
> I think the conservative approach is faster, but it introduces more errors
interesting. i use 'conservative' and sometimes get surprised how could i write and send such non-corellated or repeated sentences so close to each other.
118 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadTellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledly-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awkful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done they're done.
I am a basher. Most men are bashers, and most women are swoopers....
Writers who are swoopers, it seems to me, find it wonderful that people are funny or tragic or whatever, worth reporting, without wondering why or how people are alive in the first place.
Bashers, while ostensibly making sentence after sentence as efficient as possible, may actually be breaking down seeming doors and fences, cutting their ways through seeming barbed-wire entanglements, under fire and in an atmosphere of mustard gas, in search of answers to these eternal questions: "What in heck should we be doing? What in heck is really going on?"
-- Kurt Vonnegut. Timequake p.137-138 (1997)
Don't know if I'll ever need the playback feature, and the name feels a bit awkward. Will be interesting to see where they want to take this as a startup.
Hopefully they started from a better point than the vanilla code dump: https://github.com/mattsta/etherpad
It is only by adjusting our perceptions of the processes by which others produce quality work that we can feel good about our own abilities.
In either situation, the amount of work that went into things is hidden from the audience. We simply admire (or abhor) the final product or performance. But it's actually much different to be a creator than it is to be a performer. As a performer, there's no guarantee that the extent of your practice will shine through in the end: performance-under-pressure and amount-of-preparation are equally important variables (although the latter can be said to affect the former).
Creators are lucky by comparison. Their only real concern is iteration. You can generally assume that the more time you spend working on something, the better the finished product will be. So iteration is a function of (A) how much time you have before you release, and (B) how efficiently you spend that time. It can be hard to measure B without comparing yourself to others. But I'm often surprised at how much my writing/design/code/etc improves with even minimal increases to A.
http://www.matthewherbert.com/manifesto/
Only one thing I would suggest really - width of linked Stypi page should have some reasonable maximum width, something close to 80 chars. Otherwise, it is really hard to see where all changes are made when browser is maximized.
edit: amusingly, I had to go edit the comment. I find that very reflective of the original article.
I guess growing up with computers and not being able to spell are not synonymous.
I think writers would find it as an indispensable tool to find out where they make mistakes. It can function as a kind of a feedback loop which helps you refine your skill.
- mark the current edit point more prominently,
- automatically scroll to where the edits are taking place (obvious if you test this on a small screen),
- if you implement the former suggestion, signal big jumps prominently in a way that helps viewers keep track of where they are in the overall document.
[+] I know this is an early proof-of-concept for playback mode, and my suggestions are probably obvious, but it can't hurt.
I would also appreciate if you used a heavier font weight, or permitted changing the font easily. It's a bit thin-looking and not easily taken in, at least for my eyes.
This could also have applications in tutoring and teaching writing.
I note also that pg's rephrasing most often consists of deleting the end of the paragraph back to where he was last happy with it and rewriting (we can call this the clean-slate approach), rather than editing the section to transform just those parts of text that should change (the conservative approach I use). I think the conservative approach is faster, but it introduces more errors. I guess the overall cleanliness of pg's writing style is related to this. I wonder if I should try to change to a more clean-slate writing technique.
interesting. i use 'conservative' and sometimes get surprised how could i write and send such non-corellated or repeated sentences so close to each other.