Share your proudest speed record. Fast is fashionable again!
Some miscellaneous ones, not in order of proudness, but I’m just curious how many examples I can produce.
I type at around 140-150 wpm and have for most of my life. I got up to 160 wpm on typeracer, which would have been enough to get on the leaderboard except that I didn’t create an account. typeracer is somewhat easier than other similar typing tests I’ve done in the past because you can read the short segment you’re about to type in advance. 10 seconds is a long time.
I credit my typing speed to a combination of playing piano, spending a lot of time on MSN Messenger as a kid, and playing (edit: keyboard, 4-finger) Stepmania, where my all-time speed record is being able to AA a song that was mostly 16ths played at 260 bpm (so 1280 notes per minute). Stepmania’s an amazing game for practicing sheer speed because you can speed up and slow down any song by multiples of 10%, so you can always play at your speed edge, or slow down as much as necessary to aim for perfection.
I once read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 7 times in a single day. I don’t remember why I did this.
Arithmetic Game scores: 27, 28, 33 (Edit: more scores: 27, 42, 41, 30, 41, 35). I’m quite confident I could get much faster now and that I would have been much faster in middle school. My performance is mostly being slowed down by a combination of old mental arithmetic TAPs firing slowly and some TAPs around double checking my work firing and getting in the way. I noticed several tricks specific to this format, taking advantage of the fact that correct answers are automatically submitted while incorrect answers are ignored and only penalized by the wasted time: sometimes it’s more time-efficient to guess the correct answer via various estimation and mod-10 tricks than to compute it (e.g. estimating the first digit and trying out a few candidates for the second digit), and I did that a few times, especially on division problems. (Edit: Mental arithmetic TAPs are speeding up, mostly I’m getting slowed down by tricky divisions.)
The last final I took in college was for differential equations. I already knew all of the material and never went to class; I just needed it to graduate. I was given 3 hours to finish, and I finished in about 40 minutes. Also I showed up in a suit and tie, and with champagne, because I was told that this was traditional for graduating seniors, but I was finishing a semester early and also taking a class that most seniors would have taken already, so I was the only person in a suit and tie in a gym full of hundreds of people. I popped the champagne at about 45 minutes in and the entire gym heard it because everyone else was completely silent. Then I quietly drank a glass, and left.
I like this.
Some miscellaneous ones, not in order of proudness, but I’m just curious how many examples I can produce.
I type at around 140-150 wpm and have for most of my life. I got up to 160 wpm on typeracer, which would have been enough to get on the leaderboard except that I didn’t create an account. typeracer is somewhat easier than other similar typing tests I’ve done in the past because you can read the short segment you’re about to type in advance. 10 seconds is a long time.
I credit my typing speed to a combination of playing piano, spending a lot of time on MSN Messenger as a kid, and playing (edit: keyboard, 4-finger) Stepmania, where my all-time speed record is being able to AA a song that was mostly 16ths played at 260 bpm (so 1280 notes per minute). Stepmania’s an amazing game for practicing sheer speed because you can speed up and slow down any song by multiples of 10%, so you can always play at your speed edge, or slow down as much as necessary to aim for perfection.
I once read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 7 times in a single day. I don’t remember why I did this.
I watched the videos for Andrew Ng’s Coursera course on machine learning at speeds of between 2.5x and 3.5x (thanks to the godsend that is Video Speed Controller).
Arithmetic Game scores: 27, 28, 33 (Edit: more scores: 27, 42, 41, 30, 41, 35). I’m quite confident I could get much faster now and that I would have been much faster in middle school. My performance is mostly being slowed down by a combination of old mental arithmetic TAPs firing slowly and some TAPs around double checking my work firing and getting in the way. I noticed several tricks specific to this format, taking advantage of the fact that correct answers are automatically submitted while incorrect answers are ignored and only penalized by the wasted time: sometimes it’s more time-efficient to guess the correct answer via various estimation and mod-10 tricks than to compute it (e.g. estimating the first digit and trying out a few candidates for the second digit), and I did that a few times, especially on division problems. (Edit: Mental arithmetic TAPs are speeding up, mostly I’m getting slowed down by tricky divisions.)
The last final I took in college was for differential equations. I already knew all of the material and never went to class; I just needed it to graduate. I was given 3 hours to finish, and I finished in about 40 minutes. Also I showed up in a suit and tie, and with champagne, because I was told that this was traditional for graduating seniors, but I was finishing a semester early and also taking a class that most seniors would have taken already, so I was the only person in a suit and tie in a gym full of hundreds of people. I popped the champagne at about 45 minutes in and the entire gym heard it because everyone else was completely silent. Then I quietly drank a glass, and left.
Video Speed Controller is much better than the jank chrome extension I was using, thanks! Anime might just be barely watchable at 3x.