[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.