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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I could kind of see where you were coming from before but... yeah now you've lost me.

I'm not completely against AI, but I wouldn't want it having control over every aspect of my life just yet. Besides, if you type where you usually would, what's the point of changing the layout in the first place? Regular keyboards work just fine for me and most people, I don't see a reason to reinvent the wheel with some forced AI schtick.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I put AI in quotations because it really isn't an artificial intelligence, it's just machine learning.

Okay, so put it like this, let's say you split a keyboard in two vertically and then rather than have 13 keys on each side, you have one. But your brain still sees the thirteen keys, when you type, based on a local language model, the keyboard would say, this list of words is most often used after this word. However based on an input on the left side X times and Y times on the right, the word is around a certain length and has a likelihood of these letters being used and then it replaces your gibberish with the word you were trying to type. Obviously with machine learning it gets better over time.

We walk with these mini computers, why wouldn't we use them to process communication?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

But what happens when it's inevitably wrong? How do you type the word you actually meant to type?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

You would get a selection of words, like autocorrect now. But if none of those were correct, you could fall back to legacy mode to put in the correct word and next time that word would be weighted so you're more likely to see it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I mean, I see how this could kind of work... but I still think most people would want to use a regular keyboard. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems needlessly complicated, especially since most people use and are fine with the system we have now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I think that if you had a new keyboard enabled on every new phone, people would adapt. Unfortunately though, that would never happen.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

But if you do see a normal keyboard and can type each letter isn't that the same as what autocorrect is doing now? If I type "spmrthjng" my keyboard already autocorrects to "something". If you only see the keyboard after it's guessed wrong then that would just be autocorrect with more steps.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer was essentially killed by the killer micros in early 80's.