this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Showerthoughts

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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 best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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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.

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[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 50 points 5 months ago (5 children)

!unpopularopinion@lemmy.world is that way

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[–] ChihuahuaOfDoom@lemmy.world 34 points 5 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 5 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] jeffw@lemmy.world 25 points 5 months ago (2 children)

What evidence do you have that QWERTY is bad?

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 8 points 5 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.

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[–] Carighan@lemmy.world 11 points 5 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 5 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?

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[–] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 4 points 5 months ago

People rode horses for millenia until someone built a car.

[–] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 5 months ago

Because touch screens are very different from typewriters and having to precisely press tiny keys without making full use of their capabilities is extremely inefficient.

[–] DrCake@lemmy.world 25 points 5 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

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[–] ChihuahuaOfDoom@lemmy.world 22 points 5 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 5 months ago (1 children)

a layout designed to circumvent jamming typewriter

Or are you have... the stroke?!

[–] ChihuahuaOfDoom@lemmy.world 8 points 5 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 5 months ago* (last edited 5 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 5 months ago

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

[–] tobogganablaze@lemmus.org 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)

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

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[–] HappyRedditRefugee@lemm.ee 10 points 5 months ago (4 children)

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

[–] AceSLS@ani.social 4 points 5 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 5 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?

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[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 5 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 5 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@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 5 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.

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[–] oeverbloem@feddit.nl 7 points 5 months ago (2 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@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 5 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.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 2 points 5 months ago (4 children)

I've never seriously tried dvorak. How long did it take you to get proficient?

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[–] MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 6 points 5 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.

[–] sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al 2 points 5 months ago

We live in a world whereby we're lucky enough to have options.

[–] TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

you had me until machine learning. Nope

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[–] VulKendov@reddthat.com 5 points 5 months ago

For most people its not worth switching

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 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.

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[–] muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee 2 points 5 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.

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