• 0 Posts
  • 1.37K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 18th, 2023

help-circle




  • Now I see your original point in a new light. I just viewed it as a natural progression that the mouse would take over as the primary input because of it’s useful and intuitiveness. So when you say you “hated” this, I interpreted as a hate for mice in general and the wishing for pre-mice days. Rather than just a move back towards the keyboard being the primary interface.


  • We’ve prioritized “intuitive” over “efficient.”

    I would argue, overall, it’s more efficient to aim for the former than the latter, especially if we are talking about the wide range of people who need to use a computer.

    But I’m curious as to the “actions per minute” type of efficiency that people are talking about here. I’m an engineer, who has moved into computer programming. I would say the bottleneck for me is never that I have to move my hand to my mouse, but it’s always about thinking and planning. I feel like this “it’s so much more efficient” is viewing us as almost machines that are just trying to output actions, rather than think through and solve problems.

    The net result was a populace that didn’t need support as much, because they were used to reading the docs. If a component died, the docs would tell you how to diagnose and fix it.

    I think this is more of a problem that it went from an extremely niche thing, to something that almost everyone is required to use, rather than a move away from keyboard only. Or, maybe, the rise of the mouse opened the computer to everyone being able to use it, which is why it has become so ubiquitous.


  • I call it my Warcraft-Quake era, we still used keyboard only for Doom 1/2 back in the early days

    This is my main reason for not pining for the days before the mouse: it made gaming 100000x better. I remember when we first started playing quake, a lot of the guys swore by the keyboard only, until I regularly destroyed them with the mouse. . .and they all switched over.

    I’ve also done a lot of graphic design, photo-editing, schematic design, etc. . . and can’t imagine having to do that solely with the keyboard (but again, I’m often like “why isn’t there a keyboard shortcut for this?”).

    Also, when it comes to productivity, I guess it depends on what you are doing because usually my big hurdle is not how quickly I can do actions (that is usually more important in video games, tbh), the big hurdle is sitting down and thinking about how to do it correctly.


  • Sure, it’s not 100% better in all situations. But when you’re unfamiliar with something, almost universally, it’s far more intuitive.

    And this doesn’t even take into account things like gaming. I also can’t imagine trying to do visual design things solely with the computer. Like any type of drawing or schematic design.

    Being pretty adept at using the keyboard, I’m often frustrated when I find out that the only way to do something is by mouse when there appears that there should be an easy way to do it by keyboard. But, man, I can’t imagine longing for the days before the mouse.







  • I’m far from a “the free market solves all!” Type of person, but this is more likely due to government intervention, with zoning laws that restrict the density that can be built in certain areas, rather than a problem with the the free market run amok.

    Like it’s insane that nearly 40% of the land in San Fran is zoned for single family. This is government doing, not the free market.

    We need more housing to alleviate the problem. But what we also need is a mindset shift of the everyday person that they aren’t getting a 3k sqft house on an acre of land.



  • The problem with this garbage type of reporting is that you can create any narrative you want. Social media is so big that it’s not hard to find a handful of posts, like what is being posted in their story, saying almost anything you need them to. Always going to be some insane person in some corner of the internet saying something completely batshit.

    The article is really “we found some people on social media saying these things” and it’s being framed as “maga meltdown.” It’s fucking garbage.

    I agree that social media has a large influence, but how does garbage journalism like this do anything other than add more fuel to the fire of “traditional media is now trash”?