Introducing the Intelizer: A Free Text Player App for Speed Loading Training Manuals TPS-0053

Intelizer Text Player: Train to Speed Read Your Text Study Materials

It's may 17 2023. Episode 53, and I'm excited to share a new tool that I have built on my website that I'm calling, intelizer, like the neuralizer from Men in Black, but, but for intelligence.

So it's actually, instead of taking your taking memories away, it's making new ones.

But I did a little bit of market research just to look at a number of different names.

Trying to give it a bit of a sci fi feel, it's part of this permaculture operation video game environment, but stands alone as a tool.

Outside of that, I'll get into how might be integrating it.

And what it is basically is what you would expect from any media player, but it's a text player.

This is something I've been playing with for years, ever since the the mid 2000s when I was a drummer in a band, and we had a studio, and I would be practicing a lot.

And it wasn't just that it was boring, I'll play along with my favorite albums and whatnot.

I had those isolation headphones so you could, you could jam along to tracks or to a click track, or to other other music that you like.

So, you know, it wasn't about that. I was bored, but I, but I was so under Bruce Lee at the time that I was in this, this, like, hyper multitasking lifestyle, um, and just sort of really proto productivity hacking type of stuff.

I had monitors set up on my drum rack and I would read pdfs, but having to scroll and whatnot, it was tedious.

And then I discovered the ancient marquee tag in HTML.

And so I figured it would be clever to take static documents and feed them to myself while I was drumming, and maybe even the drumming would induce theta brainwave states, and I would have a deeper impression of the material.

And also, at the same time, I was studying the art of speed reading, although I wasn't applying myself to speed reading, to master it, but I was learning enough about some of the basics and, the fundamentals, what's memorable, even to note right now is that, some of what these tutorials and books, the audio training tapes, what they would talk about is how to double your speed, or here's how to double your words per minute immediately.

And they said, use a finger or a pencil, or, a ruler or another piece or a sheet of paper, but basically use some sort of device that you're going to set a pace with, whatever the pace is you're comfortable with, so that you counteract the tendency for your mind to wander and for you to go back and reread and end up reading the same thing ten times, and not even not even starting to pay attention once, and just losing it and just wasting a lot of time.

And that sets you back a lot.

So I immediately adopted that strategy when reading books and, um, even using the cursor to read websites and pdfs and whatnot, but adapting that that basic knowledge and then the marquee tag.

I said to myself, well, then I should just experiment with pushing, pushing and gradually increasing the limit of how fast I can have this scrolling text from from left to right.

Not like Star Wars vertical scrolling, but left to right. Scrolling like a marquee or like a stock ticker kind of kind of an experience.

It used to be one of those early, early HTML Web 1.0, kind of flashy things to do.

But it rapidly went out of style. It still exists as a tag. I played with flash versions and whatnot when that was thing. I

I was a moderately skilled flash developer for a minute, action script, but I actually recently dusted off that, that project because I've amassed so many awesome pdfs and public domain and field manuals and all kinds of stuff that I wanna dig into.

But I wanna kind of game a fight for myself and make it so I can play with not only that one speed reading tactic, sort of inducing a momentum so that you don't, reread you, you start to counteract that tendency to reread and to wander by maintaining this momentum with a tool like that is one effect.

But then there's more effects that I learned from studying the Speed Reading Masters.

They would talk about accepting that your eyes have an ability to take these snapshots of text at a far greater sample rate than one word. We can ingest and comprehend the meaning of not just a few words ahead on the sentence, the way most good speech, or readers who are reading from a teleprompter, or people who read as professional voice actors and whatnot, obviously they have the ability to see ahead of the exact word that they're comprehending in the exact moment.

And they're taking a broader snapshot of the context from further down that sentence and even further down that paragraph.

So we know intuitively that where most of us are generally capable of that average to above average IQ level per se, you don't have to be a savant to be a good story book reader and be able to add inflection and to change tones and change character voices ahead of time and kind of prep yourself to know what's coming next.

But by extension, taking that further, they were saying, you can be basically flipping through the pages of a book as fast as humanly possible and taking a subconscious snapshot of every entire page.

And they would even play around and go forwards to backwards, backwards to forwards, do things like test themselves on comprehension with having read the index of the book or the table of contents of the book first, or what I think was one of the more outstanding things that if you go into reading any book with an intention, then you're gonna get more out of it.

If you were to have an intention, and then on top of that, have, first looked at the table of contents.

So you kind of put that wire frame in the back of your mind, and then you could just flip through the pages as fast as you possibly could.

And you would not believe, after a retention test, just being open minded about it, how much you actually retain. Obviously it takes a lot of practice. I didn't devote myself to the practice.

But they told chilling stories about how effective this could be.

And I really believe it. And it's like lucid dreaming.

It's on the bucket list of something to master. But because, ha, I don't wanna let perfect to be the enemy of the good I started playing with that marquee tag and then recently I picked it up again and tried to reapply it now that I have more free time and unfortunately, I kind of got back to the same problem, which is that it really starts to bug out if the files are too big, so you can only do small bits of text at a time.

And then beyond that, it's really choppy and it has sort of a flicker that's kind of nauseating, it would give me a headache but it definitely was not smooth and I kept trying to find ways to make it to make it flow in a more smooth manner. I'm sure that more advanced programmers using more advanced languages could easily solve that problem.

I have been working on this javascript client side gaming environment, to me, it was now very intuitive to use the logic of javascript to replace the the functionality of that marquee tag in a way that is less buggy.

And more solid mathematically, more solid programmatically. Now that what I'm introducing in this intelizer is basically a way for me to legally and in compliance with either public domain licensing by an author or rights holder, or by Creative Commons license, which gives me an amazing ability to remix and to repackage and to redistribute any of the text that is licensed as such.

And then I display that license and I perpetuate the terms of it and don't add any further restrictions on it and what not, per the terms of license and and that gives me the ability to basically put this rapper or this player on any article.

And make it into an experience that you no longer have to exert the concentration and the effort and energy, and bandwidth, even to to read text left to right, line by line.

What it does, this player that I built, it gives you the ability to control the rate, and you're given one word at a time, so that it's basically a word player that plays one word at a time, it doesn't scroll.

Although that could be an option. I may consider that because I think there's value to that. For now I'm happy with the player. it gives you the ability to speed it up, to slow it down, to pause, to start from the beginning, to go one word at a time, forward, one word at a time, backwards, or to jump by, I believe it's set to increments of 50 words.

So let's say a passage just went by, and you're like, damn, I gotta back that up. You can click and rewind, fast forward, or you can do that almost frame by frame or word by word.

And the idea is that, from my experience, not only can this be used to train more effective reading of anything, and train away and counteract the bad habit of wandering and having to reread, because you don't have a momentum, you don't have a rate calibrated.

This can like a treadmill, it calibrates you to and push the edge. You will be astonished what starts to magically happen.

I can speak from experience, having done this just with the marquee tag and its limitations.

Now, this player that I've built, this text player gives you a lot more, fine tune control than what I was doing in the past with the marquee tag.

What is the The Holy Grail that the Speed readers were talking about, is When you start to experience text like a movie.

When most people, because of the way they were taught to read, their often taught to read in a way that slows us down for life. It almost gives us a reading impediment the way that we're taught to read.

And even if there's a place for that rudimentary state that they should be evolving you past...they don't.

So where we're all basically stuck at is this level of reading that's actually stunted, where we try to subconsciously almost barely verbalize, we run each word through some buffering into our vocal chords, and that kind of slows us down.

Because if we don't break that habit, it’s like having the gas pedal and the brakes on at the same time.

Having friction, whereas if you were to release that, then you could fly, you know, you could really, accelerate.

And you would be surprised that the mind, the brain, really computes in a language of symbols and images, more so than letters and words, that those letters and words are associated with deeper layers. For lack of a better word, I'm not speaking the perfect neuro, biological, neuro, anatomical science here.

But broadly speaking, in lay terms, the thing that was so fascinating and that I have experienced is that when you break free from that tendency to try to enunciate the words, even under your breath one at a time, even very subtly, and you actually identify that tendency, and you relax it, and you develop the skill of that relaxation, and it's like anything with meditation, it's knowing, experiencing the waves of thought forms or the waves of sensations.

There's a way to to get a sense of that tendency, and then to master it. It's not like it requires continual effort to suppress it.

It's not like it then becomes its own distraction or its own chore.

It just becomes another thing that you are able to habituate the relaxation of, for lack of a better word.

You get you, you encounter it, you confront it, you move beyond it.

And then you notice that the magic starts to happen, which is that you can speed up that rate of words, and you notice you still have astounding comprehension.

But more importantly, or more interestingly, to me, is that you start to have visions.

You start to see the intent of the writer. You start to see this constellation of meaning.

It's an emergent property from the words going at a faster rate.

And there's really magical properties, emergent properties that happen with the sort of natural, just thumbing through pages of books.

And for me, with a little bit of help with this technology, if I can make it work in a way that is not nauseating and causing splitting headaches and where the technology doesn't bug out if the files are too big...

Given the compute power that we have now, there should be no reason why even very large amounts of text, um, would cause even a slowdown whatsoever of just this basic, basic code.

Really simple. I mean, it's only a few lines of code that I had to write, but it took me a while to know what to, um, how to even think about putting those few lines of code together.

I don't think this is groundbreaking. Maybe there's already a million better versions of this out there.

I've looked in the past. I haven't tried to look much recently.

But to me, it's not the point, for me the point is I'm having this renaissance of coding and development, and I'm enjoying the process of just exploring and finding solutions out and taking a design problem or an art problem and actually just figuring out patching together, piecing together what it takes to get it to work.

And having that satisfaction having that tinkering, that sort, of hacker space with a very low overhead. This is free, open source software, and it's not gonna boil the ocean to do the computing power of what I'm doing here with this little intelizer.

And I'm not scraping the entire Web, and I'm not even making it possible yet for a user per se, to sort of input directly what they would wanna have process through the player, however, because it's happening on the client side.

It's a scalable load on my server, and it can all be done with prompting and coding for a client side end user, they're using their compute power to run the player, and they're using their compute power on browser.

On their local machine. Let's say, to download a page and to have it be formatted in order for it to work through the player that I created, which does take a bit of of stripping out some tags and formatting it and splitting it in a certain way.

Above and beyond the most basic commands. There's a bit of scripting that has to be done.

And I'm at a point now where I'm sort of 50/50 with the the manual labor of it.

I don't mind it being a little bit more labor intensive to hard code one page at a time.

However, I am excited to build that tooling to where it's gonna be fun, where anybody can, can just in insert a url and it be guaranteed to work, that it's not going to crash or not work at all, or crash halfway through because it hits a weird character, so input sanitization, formatting and tag stripping and whatnot.

Strips away the ads and gives you more of a document style experience of the body content of a page and get right to where you wanna get to and read the article, read the piece.

So I don't have big ambitions for it, you know, I'm just announcing it.

It's actually gonna be part of the gamification, part of the way that the game works, where I wanna build in educational modules to where, with the video game environment that I built, basically, you start with a million dollar budget to build your Tactical permaculture site, with all of the elements. You have a million dollar budget to spend.

But the future horizon of this gaming environment is gonna be that you start out with zero budget, and you actually earn your capital by going into this academy where you put on what looks like this Night Vision Goggle headset and then you go through a module of curriculum, and you’re tested on comprehension of it, but you get to control how fast you go through it in this sort of cockpit environment.

It's kind of like a game, the GUI, graphical user interface environment that's kind of like a reader a text player reading sort of cockpit environment and you have controls over it and you can throttle the speed of it.

So it's kind of gamified in that sense. And then, yes, if you do well on the exam, I'm thinking of ways to actually make it so instead of taking a separate exam afterwards that you actually are sort of playing a bit of a game while the words are coming at you.

Where you tap to acknowledge that you saw a bolded keyword then and you do it at the right time, that sort of proves that you're engaged with the material.

That's how you sort of get that dopamine gamification.

And then if you go through this ride of the text material in a way that proves that you were paying attention, then you get rewarded with what could eventually be, another type of token.

But I don't wanna even go there for now. But an in game token, let's say for now, that that applies to your balance in being able to go and buy materials to go build out your game, sort of permaculture, virtual site design installation.

So that's the announcement I today. Just started with the US Constitution provisions article subsection, and I went through it, and it had been over ten years since I was doing this almost daily with all kinds of different random text.

But it really was beautiful and astounding. How powerful it is, and just reuniting with that hobby and that enthusiasm.

There's so much material that we get rusty and cobwebs get on.

And whether that's knowing how to express our rights when being pulled over, or maybe you read a good pamphlet about or a good article about knowing your rights about what to do on this and that, or even just having a sense of what your rights are according to the Constitution, or having a sense of what your local states criminal procedure is, or any of that stuff.

The odds that we're gonna have a practice unless it's mandated by some license that you have to maintain where you go, and you have to retake a test like the First Aid certificate, re-certification process, or something like that.

For a refresher for anything. The idea that I know that I could have all these books on my shelf, or I could have all these pdfs, and I'm never gonna stop and sit down and give them a hundred percent full attention.

But even with the tiny little browser tab going with this text flowing like a stock ticker, and knowing the the mechanics and the the sort of sub lingual or sublinguistic, neurolinguistic, whatever subconscious power of just our brains ability to absorb linguistic content from the peripheral.

And it doesn't have to be exactly what we're focusing on. In fact, the less focused we are on it, the more easily it's absorbed.

We digest it through our peripheral vision better and faster and more fully than if we're trying to read it word by word, because we're almost getting in the way of it.

We're almost contracting the scope of our ability to consume it.

And we're dilating that scope of the ability to consume it by relaxing and defocalizing a bit and just sort allowing it to soak in.

This is a little bit of understanding of some of the fundamentals of hypnotism as well.

I want it to be a very well curated trance like state.

But this is why kung fu masters and ninjas will stare at a flickering candle flame and stuff like that.

This is deep, esoteric, but also very practical neuroscience and technology and the power to merge some of that martial arts wizardry and mysticism of mastering your inner space and your inner your inner mindscape, and actually applying some of those ancient technologies to what we take for granted and do all the time.

Which is reading. Just again, going back to what I experienced today, I'm like, whoa, this is so interesting when I consume the text in this manner where I'm relaxed.

It's actually the way that it's bouncing around, it's like reverberating and bouncing around in my mind.

This material is activating all these different associations, visual associations and whatnot that it would not otherwise have done if I was strictly focused on reading a word and a sentence in a paragraph and flipping the page and whatnot.

And it's not just like randomly drifting off. I mean, obviously you can randomly drift off.

It's not like the Ludoviko Technique from A Clock Work Orange, or being forced with your eyes peeled open to experience this onslaught of words coming at you one at a time, unless you were to use a VR headset.

It's not a really captivating experience but what's interesting is that you notice, I notice that there's just more potential and more bandwidth in a more relaxed state to really engage with what you're reading and learning.

I feel it's easier to laugh or to emote and to relate to the material.

If I was reading it, if I was reading the book or reading the PDF, I don't know that I would have the same timing of the punch line, or that the humor of it would be there.

You can only speed up the audio version of text to speech so much before it's unintelligible, but that's not so with words.

With words, you can create a blur and have it still be functioning I don't know technically what the upper limit is of frames per second that you're actually able to capture, what the sort of the camera frame capture rate is.

I know that 24 to 30 frames is about what has been approximated to be the normal sort of flow and then when you increase the frame rate you get slow motion.

There's all kinds of cinematic science behind that.

I don't know what the upper limit is for...if these words are flashing at you, a part of this count goes back to The Lawn Mower Man and being inspired by just the idea that you could use software to accelerate the bombardment of symbols and words and whatnot, so that you could accelerate the learning process.

So instead of uploading or downloading, you're sort of inloading or side-loading material at a rate faster and at a rate that just bypasses that turnstile.

That's the word I was looking for when you're trained to read, where you try to enunciate, even under your breath, every word as it comes in.

It's like a turnstile that prevents you from comprehending and speeding up and reading at full speed, hence taking snapshots of full pages of text as fast as you can flip through them.

For now, with this technology, as fast as the pixels will actually refresh on the monitor, which is pretty fast.

So, with that said I put in basic limits to how fast or slow it can go.

If anybody asked me to take those limits off, by all means, you can use basic developer tools in your browser to modify any of the parameters that you want if you have that skill set or inclination or both.

But for now, there exists, if not the only, at least another text player, that starts with the US Constitution provisions, which I would love to be having conversations about right now, of all times in the history of America and history of my life.

This is now something where I have no excuse.

And now I kind of feel like I wanna give a Civics Day.

I wanna have a Civics Party Day, where I make a playlist with this text player, and I call it my Civics Day of the Month, afternoon, whatever.

I just remember this stuff because I'm like, wow, you take so much more pride, have so much more respect for anything when you appreciate the history of something, and if it's just out of sight, out of mind...

I love the idea of having a life hack like this where you, can just inject yourself with with a bit of reinvigoration and appreciation for these founding documents, these governing documents.

This is such a pivotal redirection in my entire thinking right now.

And I'll probably get different, have different epiphanies every single time I go through this process.

If I have a tab where I press that button and I can kick back, like, eat popcorn, or, engage in other libations, shall we say, and it becomes a form of passive brain eye candy entertainment.

It has all this extra value to me.

This is a nerd extravaganza, a nerd buffet.

Now I'm very excited because the temperatures are changing.

I'm not gonna be able to put in full shifts. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to get up early.

Hard code, a new article into that player. And then as as fast as I can do, that is as fast as I'll make new material available for for anyone to enjoy as well, until eventually it gets to a point where it's sort of build your own playlist kind of thing.

But I'm excited because I'm turned into a vegetable from 11am to 7pm, now that it's a hundred and 5 to 10 degrees 5. It’s gonna be hundred and twenties coming in the next few weeks, and it’s gonna be that way for three months.

It's gonna be that way around the clock, above a hundred and five degrees, 24/7, peaking in the hundred and twenties, for like three months.

And it's already starting now. And so what better timing than having this existing so I can just sit there and be a vegetable and have my brain melting out my ears and my ears melting out my brain, and just put this on...

It was a struggle to get it to differentially display the right text size on a desktop, and then intelligently dynamically know how to how to tilt itself sideways and force a landscape mode and display the proper variable tech size for for mobile So hopefully that is working across platforms and browsers and you're able to enjoy this as much as I do.

But I am going to be spending a lot of time laid up, veducating myself, vegetative, vegetating, educating, meditating, laid up.

And I'm gonna be consuming a lot of material that I've been wanting to consume.

It's just a chore to do it. But now there's so much that I wanna have just that, Neo in the Matrix, “I know kung fu feeling”.

And that's what you get from this, as close as it gets to that, as close as it gets to literally implanting, downloading through the matrix plug.

This is as close as it gets. And I don't think it's that far off, um, in terms of just pushing these limits.

So at your own risk, enjoy it. Hey, you can trottle it.

It starts off at 30 words, say a minute, right? Every 500 milliseconds, you get a new word. I'm thinking, in a Java script mode, and it took me a while to actually convert back to seconds and minutes or whatnot, although that is the way it's displayed on the front end.

But I'm sort of in the back end mode still right now.

So basically, it starts out at a comfortable rate. It's not an onslaught when you start it.

And then if you feel like you wanna speed it up, the tools are there.

It's a little dashboard. It's fun to play with, and if there's any feature requests, by all means, let me know and enjoy.