[DonHopkins]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38400368

DonHopkins on Nov 24, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: AI is currently just glorified compression

I love David MacKay's brilliant work on the Dasher text input system, which draws deeply from his work on information theory -- imagine Dasher integrated with an IDE and code search and Copilot and language model!

"Writing is navigating in the library of all possible books." -David MacKay

We just allocate more shelf space to the more probable letters.

Why isn't Dasher built into every operating system and mobile phone?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasher_(software)

https://dasher.acecentre.net/about/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17105728

DonHopkins on May 18, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Pie Menus: A 30-Year Retrospective: Take a Look an...

Dasher is fantastic, because it's based on rock solid information theory, designed by the late David MacKay. Here is the seminal Google Tech Talk about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpOxbesRNBc

Here is a demo of using Dasher by an engineer at Google, Ada Majorek, who has ALS and uses Dasher and a Headmouse to program:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvHQ83pMLQQ

Another one of her demonstrating Dasher:

Ada Majorek Introduction - CSUN Dasher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvsSrClBwPM

Here’s a more recent presentation about it, that tells all about the latest open source release of Dasher 5:

Dasher - CSUN 2016 - Ada Majorek and Raquel Romano

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFlkM_e-sDg

Here's the github repo:

Dasher Version 4.11

https://github.com/GNOME/dasher

>Dasher is a zooming predictive text entry system, designed for situations where keyboard input is impractical (for instance, accessibility or PDAs). It is usable with highly limited amounts of physical input while still allowing high rates of text entry.

Ada referred me to this mind bending prototype:

D@sher Prototype - An adaptive, hierarchical radial menu.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oSfEM8XpH4

>( http://www.inference.org.uk/dasher ) - a really neat way to "dive" through a menu hierarchy/, or through recursively nested options (to build words, letter by letter, swiftly). D@sher takes Dasher, and gives it a twist, making slightly better use of screen revenue.

>It also "learns" your typical useage, making more frequently selected options larger than sibling options. This makes it faster to use, each time you use it.

>More information here: http://beznesstime.blogspot.com and here: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=960

Dasher is even a viable way to input text in VR, just by pointing your head, without a special input device!

Text Input with Oculus Rift:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFQgluUwV2U

>As part of VR development environment I'm currently writing ( https://github.com/xanxys/construct ), I've implemented dasher ( http://www.inference.org.uk/dasher ) to input text.

One important property of Dasher is that you can pre-train it on a corpus of typical text, and dynamically train it while you use it. It learns the patterns of letters and words you use often, and those become bigger and bigger targets that string together so you can select them even more quickly!

Ada Majorek has it configured to toggle between English and her native language so she can switch between writing email to her family abroad and co-workers at google.

Now think of what you could do with a version of dasher integrated with a programmer's IDE, that knew the syntax of the programming language you're using, as well as the names of all the variables and functions in scope, plus how often they're used!

I have a long term pie in the sky “grand plan” about developing a JavaScript based programmable accessibility system I call “aQuery”, like “jQuery” for accessibility. It would be a great way to deeply integrate Dasher with different input devices and applications across platforms, and make them accessible to people with limited motion, as well as users of VR and AR and mobile devices.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180826132551/http://donhopkins...

Here’s some discussion on hacker news, to which I contributed some comments about Dasher:

A History of Palm, Part 1: Before the PalmPilot (lowendmac.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12306377

[novosel]

Excuse me, maybe I am not getting it, why is this downvoted?

I came here to suggest Dasher to OP also.

[MyPasswordSucks]

Because it's a lengthy stream of barely-parsable copy-paste diarrhea when a simple "Dasher might be a great option! I don't have time to summarize why I think it would be great, but here are some links to previous HN threads where it's been discussed <link> <link> <link>, and it comes recommended by <Firstname McLastname>, a <JobTitle> at <Company> - here's a couple 45-minute Youtubes to not-watch <link> <link>" would do much better.

[DonHopkins]

You're proving exactly why I posted what I did. Nobody else has the time to watch a couple of 45 minute videos (several hours actually), so I took the time to do that myself (several more videos about Dasher than those, in fact), and summarize them for you.

I've had email discussions about Dasher with people I mentioned like Ada Majorek (Google), also David Ward (Inference, who worked with the late David MacKay), Tom Doellstorff (UC Irvine), Donna Z. Davis (University of Oregon), and I've read several papers about it, and also the open source code on github, to understand how it works. So I took the time to summarize the points in the videos, the email discussions I've had, the papers I read, and source code I reviewed.

https://www.inference.org.uk/djw30/

There are many interesting points and ideas I've tried to gather together and summarize, and I think Dasher is an important, underrated, not widely known piece of work, that can deeply improve many people's lives, which more people should know about.

Not just people with a wide range of disabilities, but fully abled people without free time on their hands who frequently need to input lots of text quickly. That's why accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion are so important: they help everyone.

Dasher a wonderful open source project to contribute to, and a solid foundation that needs to be brought up-to-date and re-implement it in terms of modern LLMs, AI assisted IDEs like Cursor, mobile, and VR/AR user interfaces.

I don't have time to do all of that myself, but I hope to save other people time and effort by writing about it, and I hope to inspire students, researchers, software developers, hackers, and therapists who do have the time, interest, friends, loved ones, patients, and customers who could benefit from it.

I'm sorry to hear about your disabilities of poor reading comprehension and trouble parsing text, and I'm envious that you have so much free time and nothing better to do, that you can take time to complain about your impatience with and intolerance of my writing. But it would have been easier, more efficient, and less stressful for you to simply ignore things you're not interested in rather than unconstructively whining with off-topic posts that benefit nobody. Obviously you don't appreciate how lucky you are to be able to type such a useless post so easily. I'm not even asking you to be empathic, or give a shit about anyone but yourself: if you're lucky enough to live long enough, you'll need accessibility tools like Dasher too.

If you'd like to redeem yourself by writing a more useful constructive response to my post, then go right ahead, read my previous posts, watch all the videos, read all the papers and source code yourself, have some email discussions with other people using and working on Dasher, and then try to write a better summary, because your abstract summary above has absolutely no useful information, and isn't relevant to the discussion -- just a waste of your time and everyone else's.

Or you could even take the trivial effort to paste my write-up into ChatGPT and post a summary, but that would be much lower quality and less enlightening than actually watching the videos and reading the articles and source code I cited yourself, but still better and more interesting than your current bitter off-topic "contribution" to the discussion.

If it makes you feel better, I've written every word of this post personally just for you, MyPasswordSucks. No copying or pasting whatsoever (except the email at the end, with updated links to archive.org since my web site is offline, and I reformatted the transcript of Ada's video). Are you satisfied? Is that the attention you crave? Are my syntax and semantics comprehensible to you now? In return, what do you have to contribute to this discussion yourself, besides whining and criticizing form instead of substance?

At least aaron695's rightfully flagged dead sibling comment unsuccessfully and incoherently attempted to criticize dasher itself, not just the messenger, so it was at least more on topic than you post. I hope you can do better.

Here's the email I sent and the response that Ada Majorek wrote to me, using Dasher and headmouse. Since she was so swamped with work at Google, and it took her so much time and effort, even with Dasher, for her to reply to my email because she has ALS, I cherish her helpful reply, and I am glad you reminded me to share it, even if it annoys you to read so much thoughtful meticulously written text that she took the precious time out of her challenging life to write to me:

----

Hello!

I’ve been a huge fan of Dasher for years!

I'm sad to hear that David MacKay passed away. I knew of his work on Dasher, but am just discovering his great work on global warming.

I’m happy to discover how Ada Majorek is carrying on his work, and that Dasher version 5 has been released!

I developed and evaluated pie menus in the late 80’s and have used them in various games and applications, and more recently I’ve been doing mobile and VR programming with Unity3D.

I’m interested in helping develop versions of Dasher on other platforms, especially Unity, and specifically for head mounted displays.

Is anyone else working on that, with whom I could collaborate?

I have a long term pie in the sky “grand plan” about developing a JavaScript based programmable accessibility system I call “aQuery”, like “jQuery” for accessibility. It would be a great way to deeply integrate Dasher with different input devices and applications across platforms, and make them accessible to people with limited motion, as well as users of VR and AR and mobile devices.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180826132551/http://donhopkins...

I’d be delighted to discuss Dasher and aQuery with anyone who’s interested!

Here’s some discussion on hacker news, to which I contributed some comments about Dasher:

A History of Palm, Part 1: Before the PalmPilot (lowendmac.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12306377

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12310029

-Don

----

Hi Don,

I will write more soon. I was swamped with work last week.

First, I am very happy to see your interest in Dasher. I don't have enough time to research another platform. I will be happy to give you walk through the code, and you can decide, if adding Unity is feasible. Is it possible to interface with C++ code on Uniy? There is Dasher Core. It is platform independent. And "all" you need to do is to extend several classes.

Implementing it in Java Script is an interesting idea. You are second person suggesting it. Again, I will not have time to do it. But would gladly answer any questions.

When you wrote about radial menus, I immediately thought of this prototype. Have you seen it before?

D@sher Prototype - An adaptive, hierarchical radial menu:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oSfEM8XpH4

I better send half of the email now, than full email never ;-)

Written with Dasher and Headmouse.

:-) Ada

----

Thank you for your quick reply — I’m delighted to hear from you!

Yes, it’s possible to interface native C++ code with Unity.

It would also be possible to translate the C++ code to C#, which is a similar language (just cleaner and more modern).

It’s also possible to compile C++ into JavaScript, but that makes it considerably harder to integrate with normal JavaScript code, so it might also be worth considering translating the C++ code to JavaScript by hand, to make it more efficient and better integrated with the browser.

That adaptive hierarchical radial menu is wonderful! Thank you for linking me to that. I’ll contact the author and brainstorm ideas!

That reminds me of a weird experiment I tried years ago: Here is a “precision pie menu” that I made for the NeWS window system, which lets you precisely select an angle by poking out of the circle and precisely dialing in an exact number with a flexible floppy line. I’ve never used it for anything practical, but it was a fun experiment!

Precision Pie Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0scs59va4c

Experiments like that are useful vehicles for exploring possibilities and generating new ideas, even if they aren’t directly useful themselves. You just can’t get very far by doing though experiments alone — you need to play with a working prototype and actually feel how it works, in order to decide how to improve it or design something different.

It’s so cool you’re using Dasher and a Headmouse for everyday work, and that gives you so much experience and insight into how to use it best and make it better.

So please don’t hesitate to send me half emails and half baked ideas, even if you don’t have the time to finish them!

-Don

----

Ada Majorek on Dasher:

[I reformatted her inspiring transcript, for people who don't have time to watch the three minute video, although it's well worth it to see how Dasher works.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvHQ83pMLQQ

ALS robbed me from ability to speak and ability to use computer keyboard.

Thanks to Dasher I am still able to communicate at reasonable speed.

Hi, my name is Ada. I want to talk about why I like Dasher. Since my ALS diagnosis in 2013 I tried countless number of alternative text entry and speech generation methods.

So far Dasher is the fastest and least tiring.

Dasher supports multiple languages. Very important for me, since I switch between English and Polish many times per day.

I really like geeky origin of Dasher.

It started as a visualization of arithmetic coding algorithm.

Unfortunately at the time Dasher was not actively maintained. I was a software engineer in desperate need for a fast alternative communication tool.

Dasher was an open-source project. I decided to start coding. With help of my friends and support of Google, we added many features making Dasher even better suited for alternative means of communication.

And here we are today after almost 6 years of silence we are releasing a new version of Dasher: Dasher 5.00.

If you know people with motor impairments or therapists, please let them know. They will like new features we have added. If you know programming, consider contributing to this very valuable project.

And last but not least, if you worked on Dasher in the past, thank you very much from the bottom of my heart.

[DonHopkins]

Even though the parent comment is useless and off-topic, I am vouching and unflagging it, so my response is visible. Please give MyPasswordSucks a chance to respond and attempt to redeem himself by trying to post something useful and interesting instead of whining. (Although I don't expect he's capable of doing that, so I feel sorry for him, but he deserves a chance to try to do better, or prove he can't by not responding.)

̀However aaron695's sister comment is so comically wrong and off base that it's not worth vouching for, since it adds nothing to the discussion, and only goes to show what kind of a horrible person they are. It's amusing just how wrong they are, but insulting and offensive to most people, so please set showdead=true if you want to see it. We all know very well by now how Team MAGA sees empathy as a weakness, and has a sick fetish with mocking and abusing people with disabilities.

Trump mocks reporter with disability:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9reO3QnUA

>Donald Trump is under fire again, this time for mocking a New York Times reporter that suffers from a chronic condition. CNN's John Berman reports

Here's a low-effort ChatGPT generated TL;DR summary, to satisfy MyPasswordSucks who had trouble reading my other post:

Here’s the straight-up rundown of the Dasher thread:

DonHopkins jumped in to rave about Dasher—calling it a miracle for people who can’t type. He dropped links to videos, papers, GitHub, and even shared his personal emails with Ada Majorek, who uses Dasher because ALS stole her voice and hands. He made it clear he’d dug deep—watched hours of videos, pored over source code, talked to experts. He went all in to explain why Dasher deserves more love: it’s based on solid info theory, it learns your patterns, it’s openly extensible, and it works across languages and platforms—even VR.

Someone named novosel chimed in asking why Don’s comment was downvoted, saying Dasher really is worth knowing. But then MyPasswordSucks blasted it as “barely-parsable copy-paste diarrhea” and declared Dasher awful, claiming the whole thing was off-topic. He sneered at Don’s effort, calling it useless. aaron695 piled on, arguing Dasher isn’t the answer for someone with a short-term injury and criticizing Don’s wall of text even more harshly.

DonHopkins didn’t back down. He defended his post, pointed out how much final work he put in—no copying or pasting. He reminded people Ada had replied personally, highlighting how essential Dasher is for her. He got indignant about people whining instead of appreciating the depth of his write-up. In short, DonHopkins delivered a massive, heartfelt case for Dasher. Critics flamed him for style and focus. The result: a messy, heated debate between someone who’s poured years into accessibility work and anonymous commenters who can’t be bothered to look beyond a giant block of text.

[novosel]

I agree, Dasher is a beautiful piece of software design.

I am ok with the long-form reply. We are all sentient, one can scan for the information or insights that are valuable to him/her. On the other hand, I dislike when information is withheld from me.

I was researching different input methods, and stumbled upon Dasher. What I like the most is:

  - the fact that I can write with one hand (like with a fountain pen, remember those?)

  - right edge of the interface is literally The Library of Babel of J. L. Borges

[DonHopkins]

What's magnificent about Dasher is that it works with so many modalities, like eye tracking, suck tube, pressing a single button and waiting, etc. It's able to extract the maximum number of bits of text per minute from the minimum amount of bits of input per minute, harnessing every input device to its fullest potential.

It also seamlessly supports multiple languages, it can be pre-trained on examples of what you write so it adapts to your vocabulary and gives your favorite words more shelf space on the Library of Babel, and you can include symbols and control functions too. You could even have an "emoji" branch where you spell out the :smile: codes, constrained to just the defined codes so it's easier to select them (and see the growing emojis as you get near to spelling them out all the way), incrementally learning your favorites and making them easier to pick.

It drives me nuts how we blindly accept these ancient, kludgy input methods -- QWERTY is the biggest offender, but let’s not forget those shitty swipe keyboards that think gliding your thumb over letters is somehow “intuitive,” or the garbled cell-phone autocomplete systems that keep mangling your sentences until they’re barely recognizable, then texting embarrassing obscenities to your mom.

Dasher is in a league of its own. Instead of shoving you into a historically fixed grid of scrambled letters, or forcing you to hunt and peck through a list of predicted but unpredictable words, Dasher treats writing as a continuous journey through a probability landscape! You don’t tap tiny squares or hope the AI guesses what you meant, you literally “dive” into the next letter or word that’s statistically most likely. Maximum text output for minimum physical effort, without any of the guesswork or awkward ergonomics baked into hunt-n-pecking QWERTY, slippery swipe tricks, or psychotic autocomplete engines.