[HN Gopher] Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread ...
___________________________________________________________________
Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in
brain
Author : cryptozeus
Score : 125 points
Date : 2024-12-01 13:26 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openread.academy)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openread.academy)
| throwaway519 wrote:
| The paper:
| https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
|
| DOI: doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1219945
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| So the study's findings only hold where typewriting means
| typing "the presented word using the right index finger on the
| keyboard," _i.e._ like a pigeon.
|
| It looks like this was done because while handwriting is a
| unihemispheral activity, typing with both hands is not. But it
| trashes the results from a practical perspective.
| DennisP wrote:
| Which makes me wonder whether typing with both hands, hence
| using both hemispheres, actually results in _more_ widespread
| connectivity in the brain.
| MiguelX413 wrote:
| Thank you for presented the DOI too.
| thenipper wrote:
| Interesting! Explains that even though I've used a laptop since
| 1992 to do school work because of my learning
| disabilities(Dysgraphia, mid-line problems, poor fine motor
| control) I still prefer to hand write my notes. Even if I never
| read them I noticed that just the act of doing them helps me
| remember things. I might not remember the source but I can
| remember the act of note taking. I've noticed the same thing with
| reading as well.
| jumping_frog wrote:
| Multimodality reinforces each other. Action, speech, listening,
| all helping to let us understand a subject better.
| HPsquared wrote:
| This is why I think AI chatbots have so much potential for
| education. Every student can have extended dialogue about the
| topic and really exercise those neurons.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| I think the widespread use of that for education would have
| precisely the opposite outcome that you'd want.
|
| Nothing sinks in to anyones brain because they're not
| actually talking about it and they don't need to actually
| learn it for any reason in school because they can just ask
| the chatbot again at any moment.
| woleium wrote:
| and that is a problem because?
|
| i remember when maths teachers would scold me for not
| knowing my multiplication tables "are you going to carry
| a calculator around with you every day?" they would say
| when seeing me use one. Turns out i do.
| latexr wrote:
| That is such a tired, boring, selective memory meme. Did
| you not use a calculator later on in your education, say
| high school, for stuff like graphing and helping with
| equations? Do you not think educators in primary school
| teaching basic arithmetic knew about that?
|
| All our maths education is based on lies which are
| progressively disclosed. You're told we can't go below
| zero, that numbers are integers, that you can't take the
| square root of a negative number... And slowly are
| introduced to all those concepts building on what you
| learned before.
|
| And yet this meme of "hur dur, mah teachers saids I'd
| haves no calculators on me but I use a phone all the
| time, epic fail" prevails instead of pondering for two
| seconds that maybe your teacher was giving a cookie-
| cutter argument that a literal child could comprehend but
| be unable to refute so they could continue with the damn
| lesson.
|
| And as if people use calculators that often. They don't.
| Yet being able to do some basic arithmetic is useful in
| such simple areas as shopping, to make more informed
| decisions in a world that is constantly trying to trick
| you.
| squigz wrote:
| Technological progress requires that we adapt education
| at the same time. We can still teach the ability to
| reason through problems when necessary, but still utilize
| technology when useful
| andrepd wrote:
| If there is a good reason to, yes. To chase the latest
| trends (which is what all this EduLLM talk is all about)
| then definitely not.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I wonder if having offloaded arithmetic to calculators
| has led to a society that can't do math in their head
| well enough to make good choices at the supermarket or in
| other daily situations where simple math would be useful
| but the situation is too casual to pull out your
| calculator.
|
| But the impact of that is tiny compared to the prospect
| of future generations offloading their general ideation
| and critical thinking to machines instead of just number
| crunching.
| zero-sharp wrote:
| People internalize conversations and the thought
| processes that went into them. If I have a conversation
| with somebody, I often walk away remembering and
| understanding what somebody else said and why they said
| it. And these memories get used in future interactions.
| So just like the offloading of arithmetic likely resulted
| in people not being able to perform mental math, what
| would be the result of conversing with an AI that has
| hallucination/logical issues (a lesser intelligence)?
| Isn't it reasonable to guess that this will result in
| diminished reasoning?
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| I hadn't considered that. If that's the case then we
| should hope people simply copy and paste the output
| rather than try to engage with it or take it seriously.
|
| Though in more practical economic terms, perhaps what
| we're being trained for is a future in which the typical
| worker has a low paying job sanity checking AI output
| rather than a higher paying job doing the work themself.
| HPsquared wrote:
| That would not be a side effect of the dialogue, but from
| awareness of the wider world.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| I think AI chatbots could help but only if that is an
| additional modality to learn and doesn't trump all the
| classical ones becoming the main mode. That would be
| disastrous to learning IMO, nothing will stick because
| users will internalize they could ask the bot to reason it
| for them, something like "why remember all that trivia when
| you could just google it".
| squigz wrote:
| > The experiment comprised a total of 30 trials, where each word
| appeared in two different conditions, presented in a randomized
| order. For each trial, participants were instructed to either (a)
| write in cursive with their right hand the presented word with a
| digital pen directly on the screen, or (b) type the presented
| word using the right index finger on the keyboard. Before each
| trial, the instruction write or type appeared before one of the
| target words appeared, and the participants were given 25 s to
| either write by hand or type the word multiple times, separated
| by a space. EEG data were recorded only during the first 5 s of
| each trial. To prevent artifacts produced by head and eye
| movements caused by shifting gaze between the screen and the
| keyboard, typed words did not appear on the screen while the
| participant was typewriting. The writings produced by the
| participants (see Figure 1 for example) were stored for offline
| analyses.
|
| I wonder what the effect would be when considering:
|
| a) proficiency to write in cursive
|
| b) touch typing ability
| jt2190 wrote:
| Yes I would think that it would be difficult to distinguish
| between brain activity caused by learning a subject and brain
| activity caused by learning to write cursive.
| dgan wrote:
| Linking this thread, because it already crossed my mind so many
| times https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29863108
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Since that thread, did you try tablets and eInk/ePaper devices?
| dcow wrote:
| Could a factor be that most people primarily typewrite now so
| it's second nature muscle memory but the handwriting task
| requires just a little extra effort? I didn't see preexisting
| disposition factored in at all, so I'm curious.
| squigz wrote:
| I think it's actually the opposite - most people can't touch
| type, so they spend more time and concentration trying to type,
| which means less focus on the actual content. I would think
| that handwriting is more muscle memory for most people, thus
| they can focus more on what they're writing, making connections
| to it, etc.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| I didn't read the paper but does this mean if one learns to
| touch type then there's no difference?
| squigz wrote:
| I'm not saying that, but I think it would bear
| consideration, which the study does not do.
| base698 wrote:
| I think the difference in pressure holding the pen or
| pencil and the dexterity required to form letters still
| activates way more of the brain than simple touch type
| would.
| hakanderyal wrote:
| There aren't any information in this study about if there
| were any touch typists. This would be an interesting variable
| to test for.
| squigz wrote:
| The typewriting participants were explicitly not touch
| typing - they were instructed to... type with a single
| index finger...
|
| > participants were instructed to either (a) write in
| cursive with their right hand the presented word with a
| digital pen directly on the screen, or (b) type the
| presented word using the right index finger on the
| keyboard.
| _flux wrote:
| still people who are touch typists are able to find the
| characters faster on the keyboard than others. this
| message is written that way to test that out, in parts
| where it was possible.
|
| however, in my case the blank keycaps did make the task a
| bit more difficult. i would write faster in cursive, and
| it might feel less effort.
|
| also the reason was outlined:
|
| > Allowing the use of (the fingers of) both hands would
| cause many unforeseen effects on the brain, which would
| make it hard to interpret the results.
|
| btw, this post was quite frustrating to write.
| droningparrot wrote:
| That might not be enough without any assessment of the
| subject's typing skill. Touch typists have effectively
| memorized the keyboard layout and would need less effort
| to find the key to type, even if limited to one finger at
| a time
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _The typewriting participants were explicitly not touch
| typing - they were instructed to... type with a single
| index finger..._
|
| Looks like this did this because "allowing the use of
| (the fingers of) both hands would cause many unforeseen
| effects on the brain, which would make it hard to
| interpret the results," since handwriting is done with
| one hemisphere.
|
| Still weird.
| hk1337 wrote:
| I feel like this has been said before quite a bit but a lot of
| people always make excuses about how they're the exception.
| HPsquared wrote:
| My the exception?
| hk1337 wrote:
| Oops. Thanks
| danielbln wrote:
| Or not everyone is the same (even ignoring the.. interesting
| stud design of the paper that excluded touch typists).
|
| When I would learn vocabulary in school for a secondary
| language, the teacher would always state how this is best done
| by writing everything by hand. I never ever saw observed that
| benefit and always felt that to be true for me.
|
| So I might be delusional, or there is something else at play
| here.
| netbioserror wrote:
| I made a point in college of taking handwritten notes (focusing
| on what I didn't know) and handwritten test cheat-sheets (even if
| they weren't allowed, simply as an exercise in summarizing). It
| helped in memorization and understanding tremendously.
| bastloing wrote:
| Takes more brain cells to handwrite. I'd be interested in brain
| activity of qwerty vs dvorak keyboards, now there's a study
| onemoresoop wrote:
| When handwritng you use some additional brain pathways to
| finely coordinate the hand. When typing you don't need that but
| use a different one that learned the keyboard. I think using
| both is good to reinforce that knowledge.
| Stevvo wrote:
| The link sends me to an empty page that wants me sign to sign up
| to upload PDF files to an AI tool. It's not clear what this tool
| is for, or what relation, if any, it has to the headline.
|
| Flagged.
| dang wrote:
| HN's software uses the canonical URL when it finds one and in
| this case it was bad
| (https://www.openread.academy/paper/reading?corpusId=null).
| We've reversed that now.
| westurner wrote:
| I tried for a few minutes to find the HN thread where somebody
| refuted the "handwriting is better than typing" _for fact recall_
| claim.
|
| OTOH, IIRC,
|
| - EEG measures brain activation. It takes more of the brain to
| hand write than to type, and so it is unsurprising that there is
| more activation during a writing by hand activity than during a
| typing activity.
|
| - Do brain connectivity or neural activation correspond to
| favorable outcomes?
|
| - Synaptic pruning eliminates connectivity in the brain; and that
| is presumably advantageous.
|
| - Hyperconnectivity may be regarded as a disadvantage in
| discussions of neurodiversity. Witness recall from a network with
| intentional hyperconnectivity; too distracted by spurious
| activations?
|
| - That's a test of dumb recall, which is a test of trivia
| retention.
|
| - Is rote memorization the pinnacle of learning? To foster
| creative thinking and critical thinking, is trivia recall
| optimization ideal?
|
| - (Isn't it necessary to forget so much of what we've been taught
| in order to succeed.)
|
| - Is spaced repetition as or more effective than hand writing at
| increasing recall compared to passively listening?
|
| - With persons who have injury and/or disability that prevents
| them from handwriting, do they have adaptations that enable them
| to succeed despite "having to" type instead?
|
| - We don't hand write software; though some schools teach coding
| with pen and paper (and that somewhat reduces cheating, which
| confounds variance in success and retention).
|
| - We write tests for software; we can't efficiently automatedly
| test software for quality and correctness unless the code is
| typed.
|
| - Does anything ever grade, confirm, reject, or validate
| handwritten notes?
|
| - Are there studies of this that measure recall after typing, and
| then after handwriting, too?
|
| Edit: A, measure, B, measure; AND: B, measure, A, measure
| ElFitz wrote:
| > I tried for a few minutes to find the HN thread where
| somebody refuted the "handwriting is better than typing" for
| fact recall claim.
|
| You would have found it, had you written it down.
|
| Kidding aside, is this the one?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42288545
| kstenerud wrote:
| I've been taking notes in a text editor since 1994. What I found
| was that taking notes via computer was much easier because I
| could finally keep up with what I'm taking notes about (typing is
| MUCH faster than writing), and could therefore spend more time
| considering the thing I'm taking notes on, rearrange things,
| group them, etc using simple keyboard commands.
|
| My impression is that my retention went way up and I had better
| understanding overall because I could discover the underlying
| patterns quicker when I was spending less time and energy
| encoding my thoughts into words.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I am 100% the same.
|
| People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is
| slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are
| learning into a more compact representation, and therefore
| understand it better.
|
| That has _never_ been the case for me -- while I 'm busy doing
| that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer,
| and then am struggling to catch up, and when I finally figure
| out what they're explaining again, there's no more time to
| write it down.
|
| But I can type faster than lecturers speak. And obviously you
| don't take notes verbatim either, just the gist of a sentence.
| Then after the seminar is over, I can go over the notes at my
| own pace to build my understanding. Details that didn't seem
| that relevant during the seminar, I suddenly realize are key.
|
| I really don't understand why people don't talk about this
| advantage more.
| zffr wrote:
| During college lectures my retention was highest when I didn't
| notes at all. I found that if I took notes, most of my brain
| power went towards capturing the content instead of actively
| engaging with it.
|
| Once I stopped taking notes, it freed up my mind to think
| critically about the material and helped me quickly identify
| when I was confused about something. When I was confused, I was
| able to ask the professor about it immediately instead of
| trying to figure it out on my own after the lecture
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A middle ground is just to jot down a few words when
| something is unclear, just enough to let you know what you
| need to go back and review.
|
| Not all professors want to take questions during lecture, it
| works fine in small classes but it can be quite disruptive in
| a large lecture class when you have a sylabus to stick to in
| a fixed number of lecture meetings.
| blargey wrote:
| "Allowing the use of (the fingers of) both hands would cause many
| unforeseen effects on the brain, which would make it hard to
| interpret the results" so all participants had to "type using the
| right index finger [only]".
|
| How does one rule out the relevance of those "unforeseen effects"
| when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in
| general? The paper only contains that one line about the matter,
| in the "Participants" section. (also, do Norwegian university
| students in their early twenties normally write in cursive?)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in
| general_
|
| Yeah, the paper claims "whenever handwriting movements are
| included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets
| stimulated, resulting in the formation of more complex neural
| network connectivity," which is bunk given the methodology.
| LocalH wrote:
| Wow. Junk science indeed. "Unforeseen effects on the brain" so
| you essentially test in a way that is incomparable to those who
| are experienced typists?
|
| If you're only using one finger to type, of _course_ you 're
| using less brain activity to control that one finger, versus
| all ten.
|
| I'm unable to read the actual paper, but from the comments
| here, it sure seems like they worked backwards from an existing
| premise ("handwriting is better than typing for retaining
| information") and found a way to make that "truth".
|
| Edit: Missed the link to the article in the comments. Reading
| it now.
| Forge36 wrote:
| They give a recommendation for education, but didn't measure
| retention.
|
| I agree with their premise provided students don't know how
| to touch type (given the anecdotal amount of visual typing
| I've seen a reason concern for students) it's also
| interesting that it's cursive, which is being taught less.
| Forge36 wrote:
| I think it gets worse > To prevent artifacts produced by head
| and eye movements caused by shifting gaze between the screen
| and the keyboard, typed words did not appear on the screen
| while the participant was typewriting.
|
| So no only were typists not touch typing, they couldn't see
| what they were typing.
|
| Too many variables are changed between the two tests.
|
| A) writers can see whole words vs no visual feedback B) writers
| use their natural writing technique (2 or 3 fingers?) vs 1.
|
| It'd be interesting to test typing with a single hand (using
| words that can be entirely touch typed with one hand)
|
| I'm surprised the choose not to gather that data.
|
| https://repository.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2306&...
|
| Is interesting in that it shows the opposite effect: improved
| recall. It also measured velocity/speed of response. Which
| shows writing was faster.
|
| Another idea for a test: writing without ink.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Not disagreeing with your points here in this context, but
| it's interesting to note that I learned touch typing on a
| typewriter in school and I know which letters I've missed
| when typing, and can happily copy pages of text without
| needing to see the screen - even to correct any errors.
| Forge36 wrote:
| I wonder if that's lost with this paper's method of typing.
|
| I learned on a Mac. The course material was copying from a
| book without looking at the screen, then correcting the
| errors. This second pass to correct mistakes is different,
| and it's not clear that you can be removed when taking
| notes without affecting learning.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > So no only were typists not touch typing, they couldn't see
| what they were typing.
|
| This is how I feel as a left hander while writing the old
| fashioned way. I can't see what I'm writing so I get sloppy
| really quickly, and always need paper with lines.
|
| Not that this makes their methodology not totally bunk, of
| course.
| Loughla wrote:
| Do you have any advice for helping a child who is left
| handed and sucks at penmanship?
|
| My youngest is left handed, and his writing is just trash.
| I have no idea how to help him outside of specific left
| handed writing tools (that I'm pretty sure don't help at
| all).
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Learn to type? I never got over my penman ship problem, I
| just learnt to type and printed all my exams in college.
| And then it didn't matter much after school since I would
| mostly type anyways.
|
| If I had to do it over again, I would probably force
| myself to write right handed. It should be possible to
| get used to it, but that would really be a choice they
| have to make for themselves.
| belval wrote:
| Not sure if it can be found online, but there is a hand
| position trick that allows left-handed people to "drag"
| the pencil instead of pushing which makes it much closer
| to right-handed motions.
|
| I am left-handed and my handwriting is terrible, but my
| partner is also left-handed and her handwriting is very
| nice but she position her hands as described above to
| "pull", so clearly it can be done if you apply yourself.
|
| She also hand writes a lot more while I am almost
| exclusively typing these days so practice definitely
| helps.
| NRHuntoon wrote:
| I'm left handed and had terrible penmanship as a child
| and all through undergrad. A few things have really
| helped me. 1. Get pens that write with low friction. As a
| lefty you're 'pushing' the pen instead of pulling it, and
| tools with higher friction cause the pen to tilt up in
| your hand. I found writing with gel pens, a nice fountain
| pen, or now I use 0.2/0.25 inking pens as my main 'daily
| driver'. 2. Focus on a few 'problem letters' and get them
| well sorted. I always struggled with things like 'u' and
| 'v', '5' and 's', etc. In college I had to make these
| work, so I spent a lot of time developing a specific
| style for all of the problem symbols and got *really*
| good at them. 3. Print vs cursive. I know in school they
| make you learn cursive, but a lot of the connections
| between letters decrease readability, and increase
| complexity for writing them. I no long write in pure
| cursive, but I have a sort of hybrid print/cursive
| script. I write many letters in their cursive form as
| they are faster and flow better, but I never connect
| letters together. It is a good compromise between speed
| and readability. 4. Practice, practice, practice. I know
| this is probably self evident, but it really does take
| practice. Practice writing letters slowly. It's like
| martial arts, you go slow and get the movement perfect.
| Then do it over and over again. That builds the muscle
| memory better.
| DougN7 wrote:
| I don't know if it helps, but Tul brand pens in the US
| are gel pens like you mention. I've never had a favorite
| pen, but I do since a friend introduced these to me.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Learn to write upside down, then turn the paper upside
| down and write from right to left.
| lloda wrote:
| I've seen left handed people tilt the paper 90deg and
| write more or less downwards. Their writing looked fine.
| xenospn wrote:
| I'm left handed, and my handwriting writing goes from
| really nice to shit when I use different pens. My advice
| is experiment with different types. I love BiC pens, they
| feel super smooth.
|
| Also, growing up in Israel, where we write right to left,
| I don't recall any of my right-handed friends having
| issues with handwriting.
| loup-vaillant wrote:
| My SO is left handed, and here's her trick: _slant the
| paper_.
|
| If you write with the same positioning we teach to right
| handers, the hand hides the writing, and if you use a
| fountain pen you just smear the writing before it has a
| chance to dry. So don't: slant the paper, like 45 degrees
| counter clockwise, and position your hand above the line
| you're writing. Somewhat. I'm not the leftie, I'm working
| from memory here.
|
| The key idea is to keep the text visible, and keep the
| writing position relatively comfortable. Then it's just
| down to training. Target a specific style, draw
| individual letters... write stuff while concentrating on
| the _writing_ , not whatever you need the writing for
| (you can't really practice _and_ take notes for
| instance).
|
| Mostly boring advice, that apart from slanting the paper
| probably applies to everyone. _(Note: I also have
| terrible hand writing, grain of salt and all that.)_
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| There might be no 'normally' remaining any more :
|
| I've heard that in some <<almost only words>> fields, laptops
| for students (and projectors for professors) got generalized
| during lectures (?),
|
| while in math-heavy fields (and I assume, anything involving
| frequently having to do drawings / schematics), paper for
| students (and blackboards for professors) were still
| overwhelmingly used only a few years ago, and I predict are
| still going to be, until both hardware (e-paper just only
| barely got colour now !) and software gets much, MUCH better.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| I think things like iPads aren't uncommon, at least that's
| what I was using - but handwriting on an iPad is virtually
| identical to pen and paper, so no real difference.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| We'll have to disagree on that, since IMHO even e-paper
| falls short of paper (while having other benefits of
| course)
| awinter-py wrote:
| > Allowing the use of (the fingers of) both hands would cause
| many unforeseen effects on the brain, which would make it hard
| to interpret the results. Participants gave their informed
| written consent
|
| but is it truly informed consent if it is written with multiple
| fingers?
| cjs_ac wrote:
| When I did my teacher training fifteen or so years ago, we were
| told that information that was written down by hand was retained
| for longer than information that was typed. This article seems to
| correlate with what I was taught.
|
| However, there's no underlying theory to anything in psychology.
| Psychologists come up with things they call _theories_ , but when
| you look at them a bit more closely, they're 'just-so stories'
| that happen to fit some experimental results. The experimental
| results themselves are shallow correlations between inputs and
| outputs. Prod the brain in this specific way, and see how it
| responds. EEG experiments like the one linked only tell us what
| bits of the brain respond to what stimuli; we don't know what's
| actually going on in forming a response to that stimulus.
|
| You can point to the ethics protocols by which experimenters are
| bound to not harm their subjects - these are important and
| worthy. You can point to the advertising industry's use of
| psychology to improve its effectiveness, but this is itself a
| shallow endeavour. As far as improving our understanding the
| brain as a physical system, the discipline of psychology is much
| activity with little achievement.
| dmd wrote:
| But this is not handwriting vs typing. It's handwriting vs. "a
| weird input method none of the participants had ever used
| before", namely pecking at the keyboard with one finger of one
| hand.
| deepsun wrote:
| But if the results were null, would anyone share and repost the
| article?
| richrichie wrote:
| Hence "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False".
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1182327/
| pmarreck wrote:
| Now do it with a Dvorak or Colemak layout. lol.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Neither handwriting nor typewriting existed while the brain
| evolved.
|
| Why does the more modern method have to be the bad one again?
| tarboreus wrote:
| I'm visually impaired and not being able to write in a notebook
| is one of the relatively few things I actually miss.
| utopicwork wrote:
| I was forced to handwrite my whole school life and was forced to
| switch off of cursive when teachers decided they didnt want to
| read it so writing was very slow and painful for me. Typing blew
| open my ability to think because I could just bash out what I
| needed written down immediately and then edit as I saw fit
| instead of just missing my window to write something down and
| like not retaining it at all.
| DavideNL wrote:
| ...so, do i need to register to be able to see the article? (i
| see a blank page with the text "Someone has a copy - request"...)
| dang wrote:
| Fixed now - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42290219
| for explanation.
| codr7 wrote:
| Crappy science aside, I second the findings, sort of.
|
| I always carry a notebook/pen with me, writing/drawing helps my
| brain process information in a way that doesn't happen with a
| keyboard. Whiteboards are even better, if slightly less portable.
| codr7 wrote:
| Hey now dimwits, it's not like I'm forcing anyone, just sharing
| my experience.
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| This has been known for a long time...
| amai wrote:
| In the age of AGI why is handwriting recognition still so bad and
| not a mainstream technology?
|
| Why do I still have to painstakingly write math formulas in LaTeX
| instead of just writing them by hand?
|
| Why don't we write computer code by hand instead of typing it in
| and struggling with encodings?
|
| We have face/object recognition and audio recognition which is
| often better than humans. But handwriting recognition is still
| quite lacking. Are there technical reasons for that or is our
| monopolistic IT industry just focusing on the things nobody needs
| like Metaverses, Augmented Reality and Chatbots?
| amelius wrote:
| Because writing by hand is slower for most people, and makes
| editing difficult?
| Etheryte wrote:
| I think the base premise of this comment is wrong? Apple has
| had many features like this available for a long time and it's
| hard to think of many things that are more mainstream
| technology. You can input text, equations and what have you
| with the Apple Pencil, you can scan your handwritten notes to
| text in Notes, etc, it's all already there.
| squigz wrote:
| Write code... by hand?
|
| This is surely not a serious suggestion, right?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Oh my god writing code by hand would be awful. I can type so
| much faster than I can write, and my hand doesn't start to hurt
| after a few words like it does when I write. Plus, how would
| code completion work with handwriting?
|
| I hate handwriting with a passion
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