Logs Thrown Overboard To Track Speed
Last updated: 5/23/2026 | Originally published: 5/22/2026
This week, prompted by a discussion at work, I decided to give Wispr Flow — the Hot New Dictation App™️ — another try.
Wispr Flow is a great product, in the traditional sense. They’re using (presumably) the same Whisper transcription model as everybody else, but they wrap it in such a nice package that it’s a pleasure to use, and they find clever workarounds for all the issues that come with operating on iOS. Wispr Flow’s popularity shows that even in this supposedly vibe-coded future we’re living in, genuine, thoughtful design can still be appreciated.
But: I’ve completely bounced off it (not for the first time). Removed the shortcuts, uninstalled the app.
At first the problem wasn’t obvious. Is it just embarrassment at talking at my phone in public, which is definitely not mainstream in the West the way it is in, say, China? But I wasn’t using it even when completely alone. Was it just the inconvenience of using a third-party dictation app? Not really — it feels fairly slick on macOS, and while the iOS implementation is a hassle1 Apple would clearly prefer you use their built-in dictation, helpfully placed at the bottom right of the native keyboard… , Wispr’s workarounds are genuinely clever.
Eventually I realized the issue is simple: I think at about the same speed I type (or slightly faster), but I can speak much faster than I can profitably think. So Wispr’s much vaunted “4x faster than typing” doesn’t help, especially when I’m trying to express a very specific technical thought while programming. I often found myself simply stopping in the middle of a sentence to think ahead, which certainly occurs while typing, but it feels more natural2 Perhaps because hitting individual keys is so discrete, while natural language is “continuous”? Which is, of course, part of why the idea of writing has only been invented independently, like, three times. It’s just not that natural to think about chopping up spoken sentences into discrete blocks, even though it feels perfectly natural to our literate-or-post-literate societies. and doesn’t happen nearly as often. So I can flow while typing in a way that just doesn’t work when speaking — at least if it requires serious thought, which if you’ve ever talked to me in person you might have noticed.3 I’m realizing now that my thinking-while-speaking pattern is not all that dissimilar to an LLM — “well this is obviously because… wait, no, that’s not quite right; let me explain better…”
(As a side issue: you may have noticed I’m fairly specific in my punctuation etc, which Wispr almost-but-doesn’t-quite capture, so I often had to stop and edit it anyway.)
Now, I know a lot of people very profitably use voice memos (which, I assume, can be transcribed easily these days). But, even there, I tend to stop what I’m doing and write it down in Drafts instead. (It helps that I have the good fortune that I almost never need to drive.) So the only real use I have for transcription is writing out very short reminders or messages, especially when I only have one hand free, which is ably served by Apple’s built-in, highly convenient dictation (… assuming, of course, there’s no background noise and I don’t have AirPods in and…).
Anyway: good product, I understand why many people love it, but just not for me.
Sadly, unlike last week or the week before, I didn’t read a classic this week. But I did put the classic A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et. al. on hold,4 Inspired by Sara Hendren’s lovely, if admittedly somewhat inconclusive, essay “Pattern Recognition”. Hendren’s What Can A Body Do? is a personal favourite, one of the vanishingly few non-fiction books I read twice. so perhaps expect some notes in that direction in the near future.
Every week I think to myself: boy, I haven’t done a good old-fashioned linkblog in quite a while. And I do like sharing things I’ve read (because I read a lot…), and I do like clicking the nice tempting links in other people’s newsletters. So, perhaps, I’ll start throwing in a couple links I enjoyed into each newsletter. And so:
My friend recently pointed me to the electropunk band Lip Critic and their (fantastic) sophomore album Theft World. Two fun facts:
- Their official website is a knockoff of Pirate Bay which (as far as I can tell) has real torrents of their albums.
- Theft World was inspired by a fan stealing the vocalist’s bank credentials and then confronting them about hidden messages in their debut album.
From the newly-added-to-my-subscriptions Approximate Knowledge, I learned that blog (via “web log”) actually refers to real, physical logs, since logs thrown overboard to track speed on the open ocean were recorded in a log book, hence log as a generalized term for a journal.
Do you want to watch “Hotel California” performed on a guzheng? Of course you do!
From the rather idiosyncratic5 I personally do not find their writing style annoying, but I could see why some people do… trendspotting newsletter Blackbird Spyplane comes reflections on a grace-based POV. In a world seemingly run by hucksterism and scams and fake expertise and influencers trying their best to sell you on bullshit, what happens to normal people just doing their best?
The lines between these categories can blur. And in reaction, it’s all too easy to find oneself becoming hard, uncharitable, and mean.
[…]
What really recommends the G.B.P.O.V. is if you read it as a hybrid of graciousness and basedness, with one informing and counterbalancing the other.
Because the thing is, we do need to be based, clear-eyed and critical. We do need to call out bad arguments and bad actors. We should defend standards of excellence in the disciplines and art forms that matter to us, rather than devolve into a milky-brained “let people enjoy things” haze.
Which is a lens I appreciate — Paddington’s “if you’re kind and polite, the world will be alright”, but with an added edge that you can be critical when necessary. Which reminds me of more thoughts I had on Helen deWitt and taste but this newsletter is getting long so maybe another time…
This week elsewhere on the site:
- I set up an /about page answering some not-actually-frequently-asked questions about myself! That’s the first of a number of slash pages I’ll be rolling out soon.
- I set up Hammerspoon replacements for some of my Raycast hotkeys, which led me to spend a bunch of time messing around with other Hammerspoon hotkeys, which ended up reminding me why I love automating the personal.
A few weeks ago I got to see Professor Johnson from UC Berkeley’s CALM lab give a talk on the relationship between mania and creativity.6 The tl;dr is that mania itself is probably not correlated with creativity, and in fact can be quite disruptive, but a family history of bipolar disorder is strongly correlated with ambition, which is probably why the relatives of bipolar people are so strikingly high achieving. At some point in the Q&A, someone asked if it were possible to be hypomanic all the time, much like it’s possible to be depressed all the time, and whether there were any downsides. The professor thought for a moment and then pointed to the (exceptionally rare) hyperthymia, or permanent hypomania, for which there’s no evidence of any downsides — without the disruptive behavior associated with full-blown mania, hyperthymics really are just happier all the time. Which, she added dryly, is a pretty nice life if you can get it.
So I wish you all a pleasant hypomania.