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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[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Why was this downvoted? I wasn't aware that shower thoughts had to be popular opinions.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They don't, but pushing your preferred software also isn't a shower thought.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I didn't know keyboard layouts were considered software. My bad!

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 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?

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 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!

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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?