this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
-43 points (24.1% liked)

Showerthoughts

33201 readers
785 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Whether you, like me, beleive that QAZWSX keyboards make far more sense, especially in a machine learning world, I think we all agree a layout designed to circumvent jamming typewriter keys doesn't make sense in modern society on modern devices.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 50 points 10 months ago (5 children)

!unpopularopinion@lemmy.world is that way

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] ChihuahuaOfDoom@lemmy.world 34 points 10 months ago (3 children)

It makes perfect sense, we've been using it forever, it's the standard, almost every person that's taken a typing class for the last 150ish years (in the English speaking world), has done so on a qwerty keyboard. Why bother changing something that just works?

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 9 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Just because you're used to something, doesn't make it good.

[–] jeffw@lemmy.world 25 points 10 months ago (2 children)

What evidence do you have that QWERTY is bad?

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 8 points 10 months ago

Honestly, it's a mere shower thought, so I didn't come prepared with notes and statistics in hand, what I will say is the amount of screen real estate is by far the worst issue.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 11 points 10 months ago

Sure, and we've tried a lot of alternative layouts over the decades.

None of them stuck around, by and large. Some have ultra-niche followings, sure. But overall, the latin-script world has stuck to (Q|A)WERT(Y|Z). For a reason!

[–] XTL@sopuli.xyz 4 points 10 months ago (4 children)

True. But the rule of thumb is that in order to replace an existing working solution, a new model needs to be at least ten times better in quantifiable ways. Otherwise it's worth staying with the established solution.

What's ten times better than qwerty?

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 4 points 10 months ago

People rode horses for millenia until someone built a car.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] DrCake@lemmy.world 25 points 10 months ago (22 children)

I have enough difficulty when a UI decides to use abc layout, no way would I want to learn a new keyboard layout. QWERTY it good enough

load more comments (22 replies)
[–] ChihuahuaOfDoom@lemmy.world 22 points 10 months ago (1 children)

QWERTY Keyboards on a touch screen are still the stupid!

I know what you are trying to say but the more times I read your post title, the more I feel like I'm having a stroke.

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

a layout designed to circumvent jamming typewriter

Or are you have... the stroke?!

[–] ChihuahuaOfDoom@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

Now I'm having another one. I heard if I keep stroking I might go blind (ノ゜ー゜)ノ

[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 17 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

a layout designed to circumvent jamming typewriter keys

BTW, the supposed origin of the QWERTY layout is uncertain, and the story about it being based around avoiding adjacent bigrams has been called into question often enough (PDF, see pg. 169ff). You can see there plenty images of typewriters that had O next to U still (I was left of U), which if you think about bigrams makes no sense as especially back then it was one of by far the most common ones.
The supposed slowdown is also false as explained in the PDF, as early typewriters were used to receive morse-code, and could type at 60-80 words per minute while the best morse senders capped at ~30, meaning that no slowdown would have been perceivable anyways.

One proposed origin could be that the early still-not-quite-there developments were based on most people using 4-8 fingers to type not all 10, and alwys the inner fingers and discarding the outer ones.

[–] Amir@lemmy.ml 10 points 10 months ago

I seem to see a story I believed for years get debunked almost weekly now, thanks

[–] tobogganablaze@lemmus.org 16 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (7 children)

It's the layout I know by heart so switching to anything else would just be worse. No thank you.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] HappyRedditRefugee@lemm.ee 10 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Hey OP, could you send some links about QAZWSX? I coulndt find anything

[–] AceSLS@ani.social 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Same here, especially something with AI?

I'm currenly using Unexpected Keyboard with dvorak layout which works insanely well (especially for Termux and such)

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 2 points 10 months ago

I just offered to private message someone an implementation because I didn't want to be accused of shilling but since you and @happyredditrefugee@lemm.ee are both interested and it would look dodgy to be offering so many private messages, I'll just post here is that's okay?

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I don't want to use a different keyboard layout every time I switch devices.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What is a QAZWSX keyboard (couldn't figure it out by web search), and what does keyboard layout have to do with machine learning? I'm genuinely curious.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Just an alternative keyboard layout

I broke the concept down in more detail here https://lazysoci.al/comment/9715945

[–] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for replying. It sounds like you basically get two (or some number well below one keys per character) keys and the set of possible characters gets somehow distributed between the two "real" keys, then the keyboard uses a predictive algorithm based on previous input to guess which keys were meant to be pressed.

IMO I'd be willing to try out an implementation of such an idea so long as I could run the predictive algorithm locally on my phone. I do think that current autocorrect + predicting which keys were pressed would require a lot more training data than just a generic autocorrect to get it working sensibly, and I think it would take a lot longer to converge to the user's "style" if it ever does.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] oeverbloem@feddit.nl 7 points 10 months ago (6 children)

everywhere I use 10 fingers to type, I use dvorak; but I still use qwerty on my phone.

I tried dvorak on my phone keyboard, but my thumbs kept bumping into each other. It was too annoying so I switched back.

[–] tonarinokanasan 3 points 10 months ago

Exactly the same here. Since I swipe type, I have to imagine that would be a nightmare on Dvorak with all the vowels clustered together.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

you had me until machine learning. Nope

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Qwerty is bad for physical keyboards, but it's actually pretty good for mobile especially for swipe typing. I use coleman-dh on an ergo split keyboard but i still use qwerty on my phone because it just works better.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] VulKendov@reddthat.com 5 points 10 months ago

For most people its not worth switching

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

What I found when I first learned about DVORAK and other layouts and why we use QWERTY, there were some studies that had shown that there wouldn't really be any significant increase in proficiency using different layouts, and the time needed to readjust to a new layout just isn't worth it.

[–] tonarinokanasan 2 points 10 months ago

I use Dvorak, but it has nothing to do with statistics for me. When I switched to Dvorak, it felt more comfortable on my hands. My typing speed is essentially the exact same, for example, and I don't think you could find a measurable difference depending on which I use. But qualitatively -- it feels more comfortable.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

There is plenty of evidence qwerty is slower there are also plenty of alternatives that get minimal to no use cos well standards.

load more comments
view more: next ›