38 min read

after I stopped pasting copy into a speedreading script and returned to reliance on "Reader Mode" of regular browsers, I began comparing these estimates

honestly, I find them worse than useless, because my anger at some dumb data wrangler calculating the mode and lopping off all tails for the sake of putting some single number on screen, rather than a range... at best, such impotent rage merely distracts from what was I gonna read anyway?

there's an entire scene in Snow Crash about fingerprinting of an employee's reading pace to determine whether the human is actually reading the memo... no points for guessing which bureaucracy fears lack of comprehension, trusts that "biometric", and even budgets for deploying the spyware.