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.

Is this for real?

Funny. I have a buddy who bought his around the same time as I did. I remember talking about it. I saw him a month or so ago and he was still using his. He’s got a ton of money (well paid, no kids) and in tech so I figured he would have at least upgraded, but he said there was no need.

Although I just looked it up and they have bad reliability ratings, which is surprising to me based on how good mine has been with decent usage.

I’ve been extremely happy with my windows surface book, which I got over a decade ago, still use regularly, and I can even still develop on it without a huge headache. I think visual studio is the best ide I’ve used. Vscode has replaced pretty much every other basic text editing tool I use (windows based, at least). I’m not a big fan of windows adding more and and tracking shit to the os, but I can’t remember the last time ive had a bsod, and even then I was fighting with hardware problems.

They definitely have their crap and shit that drives me nuts, and like all the big companies they are trying to slurp up as much data as they can get, which is enough reason for many people to move away, but this idea that they “suck at everything” is just circle jerking.

You think most people are reading things with their fingertips?

We’re talking about something most people’s minds are not used to interpreting, so I fear that this would just add a layer of mental load for most drivers that would be actually less safe.

I disagree because you probably use the entertainment buttons more than anything. For instance, my wife’s car has the volume control on the touchscreen, which is super annoying because it’s something I like to manually adjust a lot.

I honestly can’t think of what I would prefer be touch screen…really it should just display on a touch screen so I can use it if I want, but everything should be controllable through physical buttons too.

Microsoft expects me to pay for Office 365? No, fuck you, I’ve got LibreOffice and your older Office software still works as good. Your word processing program, Word, hasn’t really changed that much since 2007 or even 2003. Hell, maybe not since 1997!

So I moved to foss probably about 20 years ago and have been going back and forth between libre office and open office.

A couple of years ago my wife wanted me office, so I got the subscription…and man it’s so much better than either of those two, and to suggest that maybe it hasn’t changed since 1997 is mindboggling.

I’m a big proponent of not signing up for these services, but this paragraph really misses the mark for me.

I find working with AI to help me understand way better.

Using Linux as an example. If I search for “give me the size of each subdirectory in the current directory” the stack overflow answer will be “just type du -h --max-depth=1” so you copy and paste it and, voila!, it’s exactly what you want. Except I have no idea what any of it means.

However, I ask chatgpt, and it will explain that du means disk usage, -h gives a human readable form, and --max-depth=1 will only go down 1 level, without showing all of the subdirectories.

So now I’ve learned something.

Additionally, with coding, it’s a lot like rubber duck debugging for me. Just formulating my question will often lead to an answer, or trying to explain what went wrong with the AI solution helps me get to the proper answer.

And doesn’t insult you, and gives you an answer far more tailored to your issue.

“we don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.”

How do you even get that from the comment I was responding to?

This is not what the article is about at all. I’m not even sure how you would get that from reading the headline alone.

Lol this is the same argument I’ve heard from climate change denialists for years: we can’t possibly change the climate!

Now doomers are saying the same thing, but even more ridiculously because they almost certainly believe we have changed the climate already.

They’re are decent people in this world who want things to be better. Sometimes they even have money.

Also, because we can only really see the world as ourselves, we tend to think everyone else thinks like us. So it’s very telling when people think everyone else is evil.

We shit on redditors for being arrogant and having grating personalities.

Yet it’s ridiculously common to come into a thread here and see it flooded with low effort “well duh!” Comments.

Lemmings apparently know everything and everything is obvious to them.

Which doesn’t even make sense here. A lot of smart people are dumping money into carbon capture as a way to offset what we’ve done. Yet here you are, so smart, that this is obviously wrong.

Yeah for me it’s less that I rage about getting downvoted, its just when I see a massive number of downvotes for posts that are simply pointing to the facts, or being logical and rational…and they get a massive number of downvotes because it contradicts the circlejerk or what people want to be true.