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Have you noticed we're seeing more "time lies"? Two clear ones: "Your driver is 3 minutes away" and "5 minute read". It's the precision that's intriguing. Like "asap" is more a lie about your priorities than about time.
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We’re just encoding the same white lies we used to hide under human fallibility into algorithms that we expect to be more precise. “I’ll be 5 mins late” from a human is understood. What’s new is there are people who think explicitly about how to do them and coding it up.
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The interesting thing is that they are algorithmically obviously "wrong". Like word-count --> read time is trivial to recalibrate to be more accurate via a decent sampling experiment. So it's a deliberate UX choice to sucker you into not getting impatient or something.
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Hehe i think youre overestimating the effort put into these things when their correctness is not a priority. You just find a number for reading wpm (on the higher end of course) and use that. Compared to that, a sampling experiment is hardly trivial. Laziness > deception