[HN Gopher] Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not stra...
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Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?
Author : wscourge
Score : 417 points
Date : 2024-02-04 06:57 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ux.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ux.stackexchange.com)
| behnamoh wrote:
| The real question is: Why does Windows cursor look "imperfect"?
|
| https://mspoweruser.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/windows-c...
| promiseofbeans wrote:
| I saw this somewhere the other day - the explanation I saw
| there was that it makes the cursor seem more balanced
| wscourge wrote:
| I was looking at both of them for probably a little too long,
| and I can't see it.
| simondotau wrote:
| The web page which that image is sourced from[0] and the reddit
| page it is in turn sourced from[1] makes a lot of hand-wavey
| analogies to optical balancing (which is a real phenomenon[2])
| but doesn't make any compelling arguments for why they apply in
| this specific case.
|
| An alternative explanation is that this intentional
| imperfection exists to match the unavoidable imperfection which
| occurred when the cursor graphic was originally drawn as tiny
| low resolution 1-bit pixel art. It looks correct because we're
| used to it being slightly wrong. And when viewed at a normal
| size, the difference is barely perceptible anyway.
|
| [0] https://mspoweruser.com/why-windows-10s-asymmetrical-
| cursor-...
|
| [1]
| https://old.reddit.com/r/TIHI/comments/fwnep0/thanks_i_hate_...
|
| [2] edited, thanks jusuhi
| p-e-w wrote:
| I'm honestly not sure any explanation is needed here. Early
| UX design wasn't always done with as much thought and
| sophistication as today's software designers (are claiming
| to) apply. The first Windows systems had plenty of UI
| blunders that make the cursor thing look insignificant by
| comparison, and I can promise you they weren't all about
| "visual balance" or similar. Lots of them have carried over
| to later versions.
| treflop wrote:
| UX may not have been as big back then but there's nooo way
| no one noticed it being uneven if there was any designer
| involved. I just always assumed it was an artist's style
| choice.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| I'd assume it was a deliberate choice because I'd think
| it'd be easier to implement a graphic with straight lines
| than with lines just off enough to be noticeable.
| troupo wrote:
| > Early UX design wasn't always done with as much thought
| and sophistication as today's software designers (are
| claiming to) apply.
|
| Oh, but it was. Here's Apple HIG from 1987 listing
| extensive bibliography on the subject:
| https://x.com/andy_matuschak/status/1447409175596699652
| (here's the full PDF: https://andymatuschak.org/files/paper
| s/Apple%20Human%20Inter...)
|
| Modern "designers" apply as much thought and care as a
| hungry goldfish at feeding time
| troupo wrote:
| Or here:
| https://x.com/andy_matuschak/status/1447710247712280578
|
| > there's a (pre-release) 1985 HIG that's quite
| different. It includes e.g. case studies (useful!), and
| an extended discussion of Jung's theories of intuition
| and how they should influence your designs (!!)
|
| The most modern "designers" read is the labels on grocery
| store items.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| I think the point here is
|
| > wasn't _always_ done with as much thought
|
| While Apple cared a lot about perfecting UX, Microsoft
| had other priorities.
| troupo wrote:
| Microsoft did _a lot_ of user and interface research. It
| wasn 't as streamlined as Apple's, but it's incorrect to
| say that they didn't give it much thought.
|
| I don't have a link to OS-level considerations, but
| here's a series of articles on how MS Office's original
| ribbon came to be: https://web.archive.org/web/2008031610
| 1025/http://blogs.msdn...
| Sakos wrote:
| What's with this myth that Microsoft never cared about
| UI/UX design? It's simply not true. They're especially
| not any better at it now than in the 90s and 00s. Modern
| designers don't put even a fraction of research into UI
| design than what Microsoft used to do.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Windows 3.1 had a beautiful revolutionary design. I
| remember closely examining all the buttons and icons when
| I first saw it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Making things intuitive and easily usable was absolutely
| a priority of Microsoft back then, and they put a lot
| more thought in that than most modern "UX" design.
|
| Making things pretty wasn't a priority for Microsoft the
| same way it was for Apple. But I wouldn't call that UX.
| szszrk wrote:
| I always thought it is obvious - it was done so that it
| will be well visible on predictable background patterns.
| Otherwise (if it would be a clean vertical, horizontal, 45
| degree design) it would easily "hide" in plain sight,
| sticking to grids, window borders. Blend in too easily.
| robinhouston wrote:
| I think the apparent contradictions here can be explained
| quite easily: Apple cared about design, and Microsoft did
| not.
|
| Looking back from an era in which Apple's sensibility has
| prevailed, it's quite hard to explain the extent to which
| Microsoft, at least until the late '90s, really didn't care
| whether their software looked good. They genuinely didn't
| see it as important.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Well, Microsoft _did_ hire Susan Kare to design the
| Windows 3 icons. Kare previously and famously did a lot
| of early Macintosh GUI design work for Apple. But while
| Apple saw GUI design as a holistic effort, at Microsoft,
| the good stuff (e.g. Kare 's icons) and the bad stuff
| (e.g. the sloppily designed mouse cursor) just went hand
| in hand. Which adds to your point.
| jusuhi wrote:
| Phenomenon. That's the singular form.
| j16sdiz wrote:
| The article from Surur Davids is wrong. Windows cursor have
| an outline, the one from Mac don't.
| account-5 wrote:
| To avoid getting sued for copying Apple IP? You know Apple like
| to patent shapes, like rectangles with rounded corners; ask
| Samsung.
| eastbound wrote:
| There was no patent about rounded rectangles. Please stop
| spreading fake news; News are sensationalized by journalists
| to the point the reader has an impression they said something
| that journalists didn't; Do not repeat them.
|
| It's just that Samsung was the Concordski of the Concorde, it
| was copying Apple's designs to the letter, from the unboxing
| experience to the charger even to the home button. It was an
| obvious copyright infringement.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/apples-case-
| that...
| bigfudge wrote:
| I think you are right in substance, but from memory the
| radius of the corners of the copy phones did form part of
| the court case.
| troupo wrote:
| Yes. It formed _a part_ of the case. The rounded corners
| _part_ was a _part_ of the _whole_ design package
| discussed.
| nottorp wrote:
| I didn't follow the lawsuit but i remember seeing a large
| cardboard model of a samsung phone in a store back then; it
| wasn't similar to whatever Apple was peddling at the time,
| it was identical. At least from like 5 m.
|
| So they may have had a point in suing.
| stouset wrote:
| This is tired and uninformed, please just let it die.
|
| Apple was issued a design patent which is a real, common
| thing and is _highly_ specific. It isn't just patenting a
| roundrect and calling it a day.
| account-5 wrote:
| This was a joke. I posted it because I thought it was
| funny, obviously certain apple fanboys are insulted by any
| criticism of apple even in joke form.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| It wasn't funny, the response was informative, and
| throwing around the term "fanboy' is juvenile.
| edm0nd wrote:
| It was pretty funny and the fact you are getting offended
| just proves their point even more imo.
| sircastor wrote:
| The trouble with text is that it often does not have
| implied intent. There is no sarcasm font. And when people
| respond with "can't you take a joke?" It comes off as
| dismissive at best, and trolling at worst. Not to mention
| that "it was just a joke" feels like a hail-Mary attempt
| to justify a comment that was poorly received.
| wruza wrote:
| I didn't know it's a joke. I've heard about Samsung vs
| Apple long ago, but never learned how it resolved or if
| it was about _just_ rounded corners. Probably because of
| ubiquitous and unmarked jokes like this one, combined
| with no research on my side. I'm not insulted, but I
| don't get why people do that. It's not far from trolls
| changing opinions on politics or society standards, just
| less harmful.
| account-5 wrote:
| I was replying with a flippant joke to what I took to be
| a flippant remark/joke about the windows pointer not
| being "perfect" like Apple's pointer supposedly is.
|
| The fact the post I replied to garnered no similar
| criticism to my flippant remark shows more about the
| culture on HN than anything else. That seemingly being:
| critise everything but Apple, Apple is off limits unless
| you're hear to fawn over them. This is currently playing
| out on my karma.
|
| I've made similar flippant remarks/jokes about Google,
| Microsoft, Meta with no repucussions but god forbid I
| level some critism at apple!
| rezonant wrote:
| I wouldn't stress it. Your karma's not going to disappear
| because a few people can't take (or didn't like, or
| didn't get) your joke :-)
| account-5 wrote:
| Haha, yeah I mentioned it more out of interest. My karma
| has fluctuated between +-10 since my initial comment.
| Currently about where I started. I genuinely find the
| phenomenon interesting, I've never really understood the
| blind loyalty apple endears in its fans.
| kuschku wrote:
| Design patents, except for highly specific names and logos,
| shouldn't be a thing.
|
| Luckily the LEGO case has already shown that any design
| patent that even slightly affects functionality is
| automatically invalid.
| rezonant wrote:
| I dunno, looks like a rounded rectangle to me [1]
|
| Besides, if Apple was allowed to patent rounded rectangles
| _more_ , they absolutely would.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/7/3614506/apple-
| patents-rec...
| mmerlin wrote:
| a recurring peeve of mine is small tooltips becoming unreadable
| underneath the cursor which blocks them from being read... then
| you move the cursor away the tooltip disappears from view...
| this could actually be fixed at some point in the future
| gjvc wrote:
| other operating systems are available.
| wolpoli wrote:
| The current high-resolution cursor seems like a scaled-up
| version of the original cursor. Perhaps it's that way for
| compatibility reason since there are tons of monitors using
| 100% scaling.
| ack_complete wrote:
| At larger scale factors, Windows renders the cursor from an
| SVG source. It's not clear if there would be a compatibility
| issue with straightening the arrow image at larger scales
| since it uses a hardcoded .cur image at small sizes.
|
| Additionally, Windows 10/11 go to some extent to hide cursor
| scaling from applications. Win32 GDI/USER calls only see the
| base 32x32 arrow cursor and only DXGI Output Duplication
| (screen capture API) can see the real cursor. This causes
| other problems, though, such as various bugs and
| inconsistencies with custom cursor images.
| wazoox wrote:
| Because Windows is made with poor attention to details and in a
| tasteless manner. For instance, when Windows XP came out, I
| remember clearly how some stock icons weren't properly aligned
| on the same baseline (it was corrected in some later SP).
| hacym wrote:
| Fascinating! Computers didn't exist before Windows or Windows
| XP!
| weinzierl wrote:
| I have no idea, but a wild guess is that with old hardware the
| "hot" pixel that could trigger the collision interrupt was fixed
| to the upper left corner of the hardware sprite.
|
| EDIT: Another thought that crossed my mind is that with very lo-
| res screens a corner is the only way to get a well defined and
| sharp (yet fairly wide) arrowhead. The trade-off would be the
| shaft being pixelated, but the tip is more important.
| p-e-w wrote:
| Did early workstations support hardware cursors?
| jusuhi wrote:
| If you'd actually read wherever the link is going then you
| could get an idea instead of just speculating wildly.
| rgj wrote:
| That was debunked 10 years ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7253841
| ulrischa wrote:
| Xerox parc again. I have the feeling everything we have today was
| invented in this place. How was it possible that it was so
| successful and influencial?
| gjvc wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14108797
| raverbashing wrote:
| Xerox Park and display reasons aside, I think that the 2nd
| answer, with the picture of the hand is the best answer apart
| from historical and technical reasons.
| wscourge wrote:
| For unrelated reasons it got me thinking of Mark Zuckerberg
| telling Joe Rogan how they left only the hand (and not the
| whole arm) in their VR, as it was enough.
|
| Random thought.
| jusuhi wrote:
| The "best answer" perhaps from the POV of your own intuition.
| But the question is about a historical fact, and those don't
| work that way.
| mcmoor wrote:
| I guess first is the reason why it's initially and second is
| why it stay that way.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| > Is this a legacy thing or does a tilted cursor serves a
| purpose?
|
| It's not _just_ a question of historical fact. There 's where
| it originated from. Then there are the documented reasons
| they first did it that way. Then the undocumented but
| plausible reasons it started that way. Then there are the
| reasons it has _stayed_ this way. Those reasons aren 't
| facts, they're counterfactuals.
|
| Implicit in asking why the mouse cursor is like this is
| asking why it isn't a different way. If there was a better
| enough cursor, it would have won out. So all of its reasons
| of functionality, even the ones the inventor didn't think of
| or didn't matter historically, are part of why it is the way
| it is today.
| Feathercrown wrote:
| One compelling reason is so that when pointing at something with
| the cursor, it doesn't block the thing you're pointing at. If the
| cursor was mirrored or even centered, hovering over a button
| would obscure some of the button. This assumes you approach from
| the bottom right though, which may be in turn because of the
| cursor's shape-- but I think reading direction is a stronger
| theory for why you'd want to approach from the bottom right.
| stinos wrote:
| This was my first reaction as well, but checking how I actually
| use a mouse I don't think it makes sense. Curious if it's jut
| me though.
|
| For starters for normal desktop usage like >95% of the time the
| thing I want to click on isn't under the mouse yet so it
| doesn't obscure anything. Instead I move the mouse to it and by
| the time the mouse is there I don't care what is under it
| anymore because the decision to click it was made already.
|
| Second when the mouse is over something I need to be able to
| read it seems I tend to move the mouse away (even when it's
| over text and turns into a straight cursor). The reason being
| that no matter what cursor is used its lines are typically
| wider and higher than the lines in rendered characters
| underneath so always obscures something. In other words: even
| if the cursor weren't tilted it would still obscure the same
| amount of surface, but just in a slightly different location.
| And that's really only slightly so for practical use won't
| matter.
|
| Wrt where something is approached from: that depends on where
| the cursr is and where the target is. It would be really
| interesting to put this in a heatmap from daily usage, but I
| quickly checked some of the things I access often, like in my
| bottom taskbar and browser tab bar at the top, and since the
| things clicked often are both left and right of the screen and
| my cursor can be seeminlgy anywhere there might still be one
| approach direction used more but only by some marging.
|
| Lastly most software I checked where obsucring could actually
| matter (e.g. CAD) uses custom cursors like 1 pixel wide crosses
| etc, not something tilted.
| bhaak wrote:
| This might be true today but on the lower resolution screens
| of the 80s, the mouse pointer was relatively bigger than it
| is today.
| stinos wrote:
| So the more reason to move it away if it's over things
| which matter?
| vintagedave wrote:
| Time for one of my favourite Youtube videos, by Posy (Michiel de
| Boer.) 'Mouse cursor history (and why I made my own).'
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg
|
| It runs through the history of mouse cursors, as well as problems
| with some of the standard ones, and shows, among other things,
| historical cursors which were straight and not tilted.
|
| It is one of those amazing videos that make the internet
| worthwhile, is short, and is by the author of Posy's Cursor Pack,
| http://www.michieldb.nl/other/cursors/
| loceng wrote:
| Seems like this should be in a list somewhere with that big
| sized keyboard history book that was on HN last week?
| Sakos wrote:
| Oh, dang, I can't believe I missed that. Would've loved to
| get a copy of it. It looks amazing.
| hacb wrote:
| It was really interesting and well-made, thanks for sharing!
| Shorel wrote:
| Great video and great link.
|
| I use his set on Windows (It looks awesome) and on Ubuntu, the
| Linux port from here:
|
| https://github.com/simtrami/posy-improved-cursor-linux
| itomato wrote:
| I'm not sure this is accurate. He shows the IIGS cursor as the
| Lisa "Color mode" cursor, for one thing.
|
| He never mentions the NeXT environment, DPS and differences in
| DPI, their own black and white arrow cursor, and how that
| cursor actually came into Mac OS X, not the one from System 1
| and onward.
|
| Hmm.
| euroderf wrote:
| "When the XEROX PARC machine was built, the cursor changed into a
| tilted arrow. It was found that, given the low resolution of the
| screens in those days, drawing a straight line (left edge of
| arrow) and a line at a 45 degree angle (right edge of arrow) was
| easier to do and more recognizable than the straight cursor."
|
| Well there ya go right there. The left side of the arrowhead is a
| nice clean straight line, and the right side of the arrowhead is
| as close as possible to 45 degrees, cutting down its
| "jaggedness".
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2014)
| haunter wrote:
| Because it mimics the fountain pen? That's how you hold it when
| you write with one (the cursor being the virtual tip)
|
| https://youtu.be/U9mWKwXfF6s?t=155s
| al_borland wrote:
| If this is the case, should someone using a left handed mouse
| have a cursor that tilts the opposite way?
| lb1lf wrote:
| Don't we? I distinctly recall that when I was using a left-
| handed mouse on WinNT 4 in the nineties, the mouse pointer
| was reversed? Whether that was the original cursor or just
| someone at IT being a leftie and installing a custom cursor,
| though, I have no idea.
|
| I later found it much better for me to simply use my right
| hand for mousing about, leaving my left hand free for taking
| notes.
| bluenose69 wrote:
| Thanks for the link! As a fountain pen addict, I found the
| video captivating. I was curious, though, as to why the person
| was printing, not writing. Sad.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Without reading everything there is on the subject, I'd guess
| it's tilted for the same reason it's tilted _to the left_.
|
| Humans are tool makers and tool users. After enough time the tool
| becomes an extension of the body, even if the tip of the tool is
| mechanically or virtually detached from the hand that is
| controlling it. The tool maker designed this as a right-handed
| tool, coming into the frame in the right hand.
|
| If the reason for the tilt direction was not this, then there
| would be no reason why it _shouldn 't_ tilt the other way. If
| you're right handed, try a right-leading cursor . It doesn't just
| look wrong, it _feels_ wrong because it looks like a tool held in
| the left hand.
|
| Does this have an effect on left-handed people? Perhaps. I'm left
| handed and it always felt wrong to use the mouse in my left hand.
| Is it because of the direction of the tilt? Who knows!
| szundi wrote:
| Try reversing it, I'm curious
| m12k wrote:
| >Without reading everything there is on the subject
|
| Everything, or in this case the second answer on the linked
| page ;) I do believe you are (both) on to something though.
| vasco wrote:
| What matters is the hand you use your mouse with, I'm left
| handed for writing and most things but use the right hand for
| the mouse and it doesn't feel strange.
| arrrg wrote:
| Why do you use your mouse with the right hand? I'm also left
| handed and use the mouse with my right hand, I think mostly
| because my parents bought a computer table with our first
| computer that had the spot for the mouse fixed on the right
| side (keyboard drawer with just enough space for the keyboard
| alone and below that a little extra drawer to the right to
| create space for the mousepad and mouse when the keyboard
| drawer is open). So I had to learn using the computer that
| way ...
|
| Seems inconsiderate from my parents, but I think they just
| didn't think about that aspect.
| synecdoche wrote:
| Holding the mouse in the right hand allows for holding a
| pen in the left at the same time. I find that, and having
| the notepad next to the keyboard, to be quite useful.
| There's also no risk of the notepad being in the way of the
| mouse movements.
| hed wrote:
| Yep this was like a cheat code when I had to take notes
| from the computer and could write and scroll
| simultaneously.
| rtpg wrote:
| I use the mouse on the right mostly because stuff like
| games assume you're doing that, so keyboard controls and
| the like are optimized for it
|
| Also, most computers lay the mouse that way
|
| I could mess with this but ultimately I don't mind too
| much. Maybe it explains why I'm bad at FPSes! Probably not.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| This might seem odd for the youngsters having grown up with
| their own smartphone and laptop, but I very quickly found
| it annoying having to rearrange everybody's setup when
| using their computer. Friends, family, school, you name
| it...
| Someone wrote:
| I also write left handed and mouse right handed. My theory
| is that it's more efficient when using a QWERTY keyboard
| layout. The QWERTY layout is heavily left dominant in
| English and, I guess, many other Western European languages
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Properties: _"In the
| QWERTY layout many more words can be spelled using only the
| left hand than the right hand. In fact, thousands of
| English words can be spelled using only the left hand,
| while only a couple of hundred words can be typed using
| only the right hand (the three most frequent letters in the
| English language, ETA, are all typed with the left hand)"_
| )
|
| So chances are that the last key hit before using the mouse
| is on the left side of the keyboard, as is the first key
| you'll hit after using the mouse.
|
| That makes mousing with the right hand while keeping the
| left hand on the home row faster than the reverse.
| coldsmoke wrote:
| Not only that, but a lot of the most commonly used
| keyboard shortcuts are also on the left side.
| K7PJP wrote:
| I'm left handed, use the mouse on the right, and even use
| my right hand for a laptop trackpad. I keep my left hand on
| the keyboard while mousing, and use modifiers in concert.
|
| Perhaps this both explains why I've never quite understood
| the aversion to mice, and also why I prefer smaller (TKL or
| smaller) keyboards.
| gsich wrote:
| Moving a mouse is also relatively easy compared to writing
| with the other hand.
| webignition wrote:
| I'm left handed and have always used the mouse with my left
| hand.
|
| The tilt on the cursor has never seemed odd or wrong or strange
| to me in any way.
|
| I've been using computer mice in one way or another for more
| than 30 years and perhaps a lack of oddness comes from having
| so very much gotten used to it. Maybe newer left-handed mouse
| users would find the cursor tilt strange?
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think left handed users do not find it weird as it works in
| left to right up to down information systems. So unlike with
| pen they get the same benefit of operating tool sensibly.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The arrow gets replaced with a ... pin with a stylized bird
| in each end? ... so the arrow does not hide text anyways,
| when going left to right over text, as a physical pen would
| do.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Oh dear. I am left handed and I have not even considered the
| arrow is tilting the wrong way. Now suddenly it annoys me to
| no end. I need to replace my cursor ...
| Moru wrote:
| 35-40 years ago I had to switch to left because of too much
| strain on the right hand. I was very happy when I found a
| way to mirror my cursor. Am back to right hand now though.
| _moof wrote:
| Just wait until you find out why scroll bars are on the
| right.
| dihrbtk wrote:
| I feel like the scroll bar location has more to do with
| english being written left-to-right.
| xattt wrote:
| > The tilt on the cursor has never seemed odd or wrong or
| strange to me in any way.
|
| Not sure if people realize, but this setting is changeable,
| probably since the times of single-digit Windows.
| justinsaccount wrote:
| > since the times of single-digit Windows.
|
| Do you mean 15 years ago with windows 7, or 30 years ago
| with windows 3?
| ant6n wrote:
| Arguably, the last date of the "times of single-digit
| Windows" would be one day before the release of Win 10,
| which was on 2015-07-29.
|
| Didn't Win 8 have fewer options for adapting the UI
| compared to previous versions of Windows?
| xattt wrote:
| I was indeed referring to Windows 3/3.1/3.11/NT 3.5.
| Wasn't sure of another term that would capture that era
| in one word.
|
| Decimalized? Rational number Windows?
| kevindamm wrote:
| early 90s Windows?
| ant6n wrote:
| Pre 95? 16-bit?
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| I don't know how far back they mean, but Im pretty sure I
| recall it being in XP.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Ohh now I remember! Back when we didn't have internet and I
| could amuse myself for hours just messing with the windows
| 98 settings.
| silon42 wrote:
| I have a mouse on each side of the keyboard, so changing the
| mouse pointer shape was never even considered.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| It might be fun to set up your system to switch between
| left and right-tilted cursors automatically, depending on
| which mouse you're using.
| klibertp wrote:
| Also make it maintain 2 cursor positions and switch
| between them depending on the mouse. It would be pretty
| neat with multiple monitors, with focus following the
| (active) cursor. (Assuming you're ambidextrous, of course
| :))
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Woah! I may be ambidextrous, but no way am I
| ambicursorous!
| taeric wrote:
| The steam deck has a keyboard that supports input from
| both trackpads at the same time. Always surprised me this
| is not really supported by most desktop environments.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I have a mouse on each side of the keyboard
|
| In 30yrs of IT support, this is a thing I have never seen.
| If I had, I'd be forever inserting into conversations about
| end-users. Strictly for the novelty.
| crazygringo wrote:
| For a month or two I decided to start using the mouse with my
| left hand just for fun, to see how ambidextrous I could be.
|
| The "wrong"-pointed cursor annoyed me so much I had to find a
| utility to flip it. (On a Mac, which doesn't support custom
| cursors like Windows has since forever.) It seriously drove
| me nuts otherwise.
|
| So it's really interesting to hear that if it was always that
| way for you, it doesn't bother you!
| taeric wrote:
| I used to swap hands with my mouse every month or so. I
| don't remember ever noticing the tilt.
| lupire wrote:
| How do you feel about writing in general, left to right, with
| your left hand?
| papichulo2023 wrote:
| The only tool I find hard to use, as a left handed, is
| scissors, the rest is just fine. As for the mouse, always used
| it with the right hand.
| martopix wrote:
| I'm also left handed and don't usually have a problem with
| scissors, unless they're bad quality scissors.
|
| I also use the mouse with my right hand and I'm always
| surprised by how many left-handers actually ended up using
| the mouse with the right. It's quite strange. Even stranger,
| was a right-handed colleague who decided to use the mouse
| with her left.
| NamTaf wrote:
| Bad quality scissors will invariably suck for lefties
| because the grip of a left hand pushes the blades apart,
| vs. with a right it pulls them together. Scissors are my #1
| gripe as a leftie too.
|
| I use the mouse with my right because the rest of my family
| is right-handed so it was on the right and I just learnt by
| copying. I don't mind it, as I can type fairly reasonably
| one-handed with my left hand - much better than I could
| with my right - so it means I can still do short typing
| bursts one-handed without lifting my right hand off the
| mouse. When I type with two hands, I find my left covers
| about 60-70% of the keyboard vs. my right doing about
| 30-40% of the keyboard.
| eropple wrote:
| Funny - I'm right-handed, but my left hand also works
| most of the keyboard. I think it's more because the
| modifier keys on the right are more natural for me to
| hit.
|
| On thumb keyboards, it's pretty similar too. My left
| thumb types as far to the right as U/G/B.
| mhandley wrote:
| Even us righties need to use scissors in the left hand
| occasionally, such as when trimming the finger nails on the
| right hand. At least with nail scissors, the trick is to flip
| the scissors around so they point towards you rather than
| away. Then you're still forcing the blades together rather
| that apart.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| A horizontally flipped (straight edge on the right) cursor does
| exist, I think some versions of Microsoft Word use it when
| editing the left margin of a document or something like this. I
| don't think it's a standard Windows cursor though.
| anthk wrote:
| Linux/BSD just have to use "xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr".
|
| OFC you can set that graphically, but this way it's
| universal.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Also selecting numbered lines in a text editor, say on X.
| a13o wrote:
| I mouse left-handed and wrote software for Windows to flip the
| mouse cursors, because it felt more natural
| naasking wrote:
| > It doesn't just look wrong, it feels wrong because it looks
| like a tool held in the left hand.
|
| It feels foreign only for a little bit. I'm right-handed but
| started developing RSI in my right wrist from using the mouse
| with that hand, so I've been using my left hand for over a
| decade now and no issues. The brain is very adaptable. For
| instance, we very quickly adapt to seeing the world upside
| down:
|
| https://theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable-res...
| TOGoS wrote:
| Dear OS makers: Please make it easier to swap the mouse buttons
| and also flip the cursor at the same time.
|
| I say this because I use multiple computers and depending on
| when and where I am using them, sometimes want the mouse on the
| left. In addition to it "feeling wrong" to use a right handed
| cursor with my left hand (I swear it physically gives me
| cramps), having the cursor not match the buttons is super
| frustrating.
|
| Once I got used to the direction of the cursor indicating the
| button configuration, it comes pretty naturally to click
| appropriately, even on occasions where I am using the mouse
| with the 'wrong' hand (because I'm using the other hand to pet
| a cat or drink my coffee or something).
|
| On Windows 10/11, it's relatively easy to swap the buttons, but
| then I have to go into another, much more deeply buried menu
| (the old control panel that they seem to want to bury but can't
| get rid of because the Windows settings team is apparently too
| incompetent to put all the stuff you really need in the new
| configuration screens) to change the cursor to match. So then
| there's 5 seconds or so where the cursor doesn't match the
| button configuration during which my bones want to jump out of
| my wrist and then I need to go take a break. And for some
| reason, Windows 10 on my work computer seems to remember the
| button configuration but forget the cursor setting between
| reboots, so there's always a minute of confustion, there.
|
| Also, if you're going to write some program with a cursor,
| DON'T OVERRIDE THE OS CURSOR WITH SOME {RIGHT|LEFT}-HANDED
| THING! I'm looking at dumb Acrobat Reader. The arrow in that
| program always points to the left even if I've flipped things
| in Windows, and then I get all confused when I try to click on
| the menus as if the mouse is in its right-handed configuration
| when it actually isn't.
|
| I seem to recall some Linux distro that I used once upon a time
| getting this right, where there was an option to flip the
| cursor and the buttons at the same time. But I haven't seen
| that for a while.
|
| Relatedly, why can't I have multiple cursors? There have been
| times when it would have been convenient to have a mouse
| plugged in on the left _and_ the right and just have them both
| show up on the screen (pointing to the right and left,
| respectively, of course, with button configuration to match) so
| I could easily switch to whichever was more convenient at the
| time. Or for when $handedness-handed coworker wants to drive
| (just use the cursor that you normally would!). Best I found
| was some AutoHotKey script that didn 't do quite what I wanted.
| Why does the OS layer need to assume exactly _one_ cursor? Dumb
| if you ask me.
| graemep wrote:
| Not multiple cursors, but XFCE lets you have two mice plugged
| in and one left handed and the other right handed.
| kps wrote:
| X11 on Linux at least is perfectly happy to let you have
| multiple pointer. Last time I tried, most programs handled it
| reasonably, a few (*cough* Chrome *cough*) went nuts.
| zeroimpl wrote:
| Also nobody is asking why it's pointed up, but it's the same
| reason. Your hand is usually below your eye-level. From a
| theoretical point of view, the most intuitive cursor would be a
| crosshair, but I've tried that and don't like it.
| stkdump wrote:
| Another reason is likely clipping. When drawing the cursor you
| have to prevent pixels from being drawn off screen to the right
| or bottom of the screen. If the cursor were symmetric, you would
| have to watch out for the left edge of the screen as well.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| It's a bit scary to see that one of the highest-voted answers to
| this question (188 points) is completely wrong. It says that the
| (0,0) hotspot simplified the calculations for a cursor position
| update, because you didn't have to add any (X,Y) offset.
|
| https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/52349/43259
|
| The problem with this idea is that the arrow pointer was never
| the _only_ cursor. On the first Macintosh, there were many others
| including the text I-beam and a couple of kinds of crosshairs.
| And you could define any cursor of your own by providing a bitmap
| and transparency mask and the hotspot position.
|
| You can see some of these cursors in the original _Inside
| Macintosh Volume I_ and also in previous works from PARC.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230114223619/https://vintageap...
|
| Page 50 of the PDF (page I-38 of the document) shows some sample
| cursors.
|
| Page 158 of the PDF (page I-146 of the document) has the pixel
| detail and hotspot locations for several cursors.
|
| Fun fact! The hotspot for the arrow cursor was not (0,0) but was
| (1,1).
|
| Can anyone explain why? I think I used to know, but it has long
| since escaped my memory and I would appreciate a refresher.
|
| This page also has the definition of the Cursor structure:
| TYPE Bits16 = Array[0..15] OF INTEGER; Cursor = RECORD
| data: Bits16; {cursor image} mask: Bits16;
| {cursor mask} hotSpot: Point; {point aligned with
| mouse} END;
|
| Point is defined on page I-139 and is more or less what you would
| expect, a pair of vertical and horizontal coordinates.
|
| To be clear, the scary part is not that someone came up with the
| idea that (0,0) saved a few instructions. In fact, the notion
| came up elsewhere in this HN discussion. It's a perfectly
| reasonable hypothesis, until you realize that there are many
| cursor shapes that require different hotspots.
|
| The scary part is that 188 people upvoted this answer!
| kristopolous wrote:
| You can see similar things in the Apple Lisa source code as
| well: https://info.computerhistory.org/apple-lisa-code
|
| The linked SO page is a page of complete speculation.
|
| History isn't just a bunch of logical thought exercises, it's
| an assembling of documentation and evidence.
|
| As far as I can see, there is no contemporaneous documentation
| claiming intentionality so the question remains unanswered.
|
| A smoking gun would be a file with a name like cursor.bitmap or
| some code like "declare cursor_default = [ [ 1, 0 ... ] ];"
| from a major source (ms/xerox/apple) say, pre-1988 or so, with
| some comment above it explaining the rationale of why that
| cursor style in particular. I'd even accept a more minor source
| like Acorn, Digital Research, Quarterdeck, NeWS, VisiOn or MIT
| Athena (X).
|
| Finding something that talks about say, lightpens and then
| defends the mouse cursor style in that way is working backwards
| from a hypothesis. It's weak and doesn't preclude other
| possibilities. Let's be rigorous and get it right.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| > _A smoking gun would be a file with a name like
| cursor.bitmap or some code like "declare cursor_default = [ [
| 1, 0 ... ] ];" from a major source (ms/xerox/apple) say,
| pre-1988 or so, with some comment above it explaining the
| rationale of why that cursor style in particular._
|
| The _Inside Macintosh_ pages from 1985 I cited above may be
| what you 're looking for.
|
| Especially page 158 (I-146).
|
| It doesn't give a longwinded rationale of why you need an X/Y
| hotspot offset, it does much better than that. It _shows_ you
| several cursors with their hotspots, so you can see why a
| hotspot is needed. And it lists the data structure to support
| it.
| kragen wrote:
| but that is 4 years later than the xerox optical mouse tech
| report, and from a different company which copied their
| default mouse pointer style from xerox. it doesn't bear on
| the question of whether xerox was implementing cursors
| without hotspot coordinates at the time that they adopted
| the left-leaning shape
|
| (i suspect xerox mouse cursors always had variable hotspot
| coordinates because it's, what, six microseconds extra in
| the screen update to subtract them? and i think
| smalltalk-76 mouse cursors have hotspots. but 01988 or even
| 01985 is way too late)
| lupire wrote:
| Within 8 thousand years, people will figure out variable
| length storage and processing for integers. I promise.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| In one of my comments on the Stack Exchange answer, I
| linked to a couple of Xerox Alto cursors with different
| hotspots:
|
| https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/52336/why-is-the-
| mous...
| zb wrote:
| The arrow has a white outline around it, so the hotspot is at
| the tip of the black arrow, at (1,1).
| reddalo wrote:
| And if I'm not wrong, it still applies to today's Mac
| interface. The cursor still has a white outline all around.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Yup. You can even customise both the inner and outer
| colours as an accessibility feature!
| pmarreck wrote:
| What??? TIL.
|
| A lot of the accessibility features are actually neat
| even to those without the need for them.
| eropple wrote:
| Yeah, it's become super useful for me to color code the
| cursors between my work and personal Macs.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Bingo! Now that you jogged my memory, I can confirm this.
|
| The next question is why you need a white outline around the
| black arrow.
|
| This is easy to answer: if you didn't do that, what would the
| black arrow look like against a black background?
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Some DE solved that by having an inverse outline.
| bmicraft wrote:
| I'm pretty sure even on windows there is the option of
| having the whole cursor be the inverse of the background
| jsjohnst wrote:
| Took me a really long pause to think up what DE meant, so
| to save others from similar waste "desktop environment"
| jfk13 wrote:
| > The hotspot for the arrow cursor was not (0,0) but was (1,1).
| > Can anyone explain why?
|
| My assumption (not having an old Mac or documentation to
| confirm it...) is that the tip of the cursor had to be at (1,
| 1) to allow for a pixel's worth of mask around the outer edge
| of the tip.
| baxuz wrote:
| I was just about to say that.
|
| There's an amazing video by Posy documenting mouse cursor
| history, and even provides his own cursor pack:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg
|
| http://www.michieldb.nl/other/cursors/
| speff wrote:
| It's only scary at the beginning. Then you get used to it.
| Every single social media site - including HN - has uninformed
| people agreeing that a correct-sounding answer must be right.
| My friend the tax accountant gets downvoted for clarifying how
| taxes actually work. My wife the linguist gets downvotes for
| explaining no that's not how language works. It's not scary -
| it's typical.
| tcgv wrote:
| It is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, but on social media:
|
| > The phenomenon of people trusting newspapers for topics
| which they are not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing
| them to be extremely inaccurate on certain topics which they
| are knowledgeable about.
| spicyusername wrote:
| Is it not possible to be both scary and typical?
| 0ckpuppet wrote:
| whoe political movements are built on this kind of momentum
| deadbabe wrote:
| Hackernews is similar to ChatGPT in that regard. Lots of
| correct sounding answers that are really just a word salad.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| > my friend the tax accountant gets downvoted for clarifying
| how taxes actually work.
|
| Let me guess: Tax brackets? That's the one thing that most
| regular workers in the US just don't seem to understand (and
| arguably, many people knowingly spread falsehoods to further
| some agenda).
| speff wrote:
| Decent guess, but nah. Something to do with corporate tax
| accounting. Can't remember the details because that's out
| of my element.
| tpmoney wrote:
| Tax write offs would be my guess. Every employee of
| charities that partner with retail locations for PoS
| donations must die a little inside each time some fool
| confidently asserts that they never give to those
| charities because it's all a scam. The money, they will
| assert with the confidence only someone so wrong can
| muster, is just used for write offs so the executives can
| have a big bonus and the company gets to claim they
| donated all the money. Bonus points if they assert that
| the charity doesn't even get the donated amount.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| I think the basic thing about taxes that is least
| understood is the difference between gross income and
| taxable income (the latter is the amount that tax brackets
| apply to). A close second is the difference between tax
| liability, and refund/balance due on the tax return.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Just try to convince the average person that "getting a
| big refund" is a bad thing, since it means you gave the
| U.S. government an interest free loan.
| MenhirMike wrote:
| Oh yes, that's another fun one! Your yearly tax return
| should be as close to 0 as possible, otherwise you're
| either over- or under-withholding. Then again, I met some
| people that use it as a kind of piggy bank because they
| wouldn't be disciplined enough to save up for bigger
| purchases otherwise and... well, I can't even, but if it
| works for them, there are worse things to spend money on.
| demondemidi wrote:
| I have income from multiple sources and they are not
| aware of each other. For example, they will all keep
| paying social security even when I've exceeded the max
| deduction. It is far too complicated to correct the
| finance departments of multiple companies. I just
| reconcile it all at the end of the year and get a refund.
| Got a better strategy I can use?
| positr0n wrote:
| If your separate income streams are pretty predictable
| and so is the overwitholding, _and_ if you care enough:
| you can put a negative number in the "extra witholding"
| box on your W-4.
|
| I wouldn't say this is a better strategy, but you can
| definitely min/max this even if your income is not stable
| by extrapolating out your expected income and expected
| witholding a few times a year and adjusting your W-4
| based on your calculations.
| lupire wrote:
| Wow I wouldn't trust that. I'd add extra exemptions plus
| a positive withholding if needed.
| dcow wrote:
| Woah, it's okay to have different tax situations. I
| started a business one year and got a pretty big refund.
| But we're not out there bragging about how we get big
| refunds every year like it's some goal to aim for and
| accomplishment to be proud of if achieved. That's the
| mentality people are criticizing.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| It sounds like you're not one of the people they met who
| use it like a piggy bank. From my perspective, they're
| just describing the habits of people who are used to not
| having any money: gotta spend this windfall quick because
| money doesn't last long. It's irrational and ultimately
| harmful but it's borne from the practice of spending all
| of your money every month on non-trivial things and still
| being required to increase debt in order to stay in your
| apartment, e.g., credit card spending.
| sfink wrote:
| It's not necessarily irrational. For example, for some
| people if they ever have any extra money, someone else
| will immediately spend it for them. If the earner wants
| to make a larger purchase, perhaps something that will
| cost short term but pay off in the long term, they need
| _some_ mechanism to save, outside of the regular controls
| that apply to daily life.
|
| You may think this situation is still irrational, that
| the other person is being irrational. But again, there
| are many life situations out there. Perhaps they have
| lived in situations where they had to fight for what they
| needed. Perhaps they lived with an earner who would spend
| their money on drugs if it wasn't taken away, and yet if
| the non-earner saved it up themselves, the earner would
| find it and spend it.
|
| The supposedly rational thing may depend on everyone
| around you to also be rational, and everyone around them,
| etc. And given that we are human, and humans are not
| fully rational...
| loeg wrote:
| You can file a W-4 with exemptions and avoid
| overwithholding! This is a fixable problem.
| demondemidi wrote:
| How do I use a w4 to fix the social security problem
| without incurring underpayment of state and federal?
| Exemptions apply to all the taxes, no?
| loeg wrote:
| https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-w-4
|
| Fill it out correctly and your employers will do the
| right thing.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I think the W-4 only applies to federal income tax.
| There's no field that instructs employers how much to pay
| in FICA (their share and yours). At best you can reduce
| withholdings to account for the excess FICA payments.
| loeg wrote:
| It's all total tax burden. Dollars are fungible.
| lupire wrote:
| Not sure about state, but you don't pay Federal Income
| and FICA separately. They are just numbers that get added
| together. You just pay money, and the IRS splits it up
| after they collect. If you "overpay" Income by $1000 and
| "underpay" FICA by a $1000, you're done, no problem.
| phonon wrote:
| FICA cap is per employer, not total. Is that what you're
| referring to?
| sgerenser wrote:
| FICA cap is not per employer. Well, it is from a
| withholding perspective (only because it would be
| impractical to make employers monitor withholding outside
| their control), but once you do your taxes for that year,
| you'll get everything you paid in over the cap refunded.
| phonon wrote:
| Right, but employers aren't allowed to coordinate to
| calculate whether the hit the cap together or not. They
| don't have that discretion. See
|
| https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-26/part-31#p-31.3121(a
| )(1...
| dcow wrote:
| By the interest free loan logic, you should have your
| employer withhold zero and then you put your taxes in a
| high yield savings account and pay them all as late as
| possible.
| xur17 wrote:
| The IRS already thought of this - they charge you
| interest on the money you owed them (with some
| exceptions, like waiving it the first year it happens,
| only charging you if you withheld less than last year,
| etc).
| MenhirMike wrote:
| Yeah, it sucks that the IRS is such a buzz-kill here,
| with 4-5% HYSA's, it would be nice to just let all the
| taxes sit there and pay one lump sum in April.
| xur17 wrote:
| I owed a decent chunk more one year due to investments I
| sold, and left the money in tbills since I knew I was
| withholding at least as much as the previous year.
| sgerenser wrote:
| The interest rate is also much higher than you can earn
| on anything risk free (8% right now) plus there's
| penalties on top.
| dcow wrote:
| Not sure I understand. Taxes are due in April. You don't
| get charged a year of interest on the amount you own when
| filing...
| xur17 wrote:
| https://www.irs.gov/payments/underpayment-of-estimated-
| tax-b...
| tpmoney wrote:
| You owe taxes all year round. What you're doing in April
| is settling up and filing for the year. If you run your
| own business, you're required to pay a lump estimated
| taxes 3 times a year in addition to your annual filings.
| If you're too short, you owe and you owe interest. The
| IRS has a safe haven rule where if you pay 90% of what
| you owed this year, or at least 100% of what you owed
| last year, they won't penalize you. It's actually one of
| the reasons I personally do over withhold. I do some
| contract work on the side, and rather than calculating
| and sending in estimated taxes every quarter, I just have
| my regular job send in about 25% of the contracting
| income I expect to make. On years when I did as much
| contract work as I expected, I basically get nothing back
| or I might owe $200. On years where I don't, sure I gave
| the government an interest free loan but I also didn't
| have to think about my taxes for the whole year.
| YZF wrote:
| If you get a refund it means you overpaid your taxes. The
| amount you've overpaid can be considered a zero interest
| loan to the government. If you hadn't overpaid your taxes
| you could have invested that money.
| rvnx wrote:
| (Not from the US) Why is it a good thing to lend for free
| to the US gov ? Because the regional banks aren't that
| stable ?
| tomoyoirl wrote:
| "Look! I filed my taxes and I got money back! Yay money!"
| (Could have had that money all along.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| The people that enjoy a tax refund would not really even
| notice the small amount they "could have had all along"
| by adjusting their withholding amounts.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Nah, because for people with poor financial skills, the
| ability to save is very difficult (even if they had the
| "Extra" money in their account each pay period instead of
| paying extra taxes). So even though you're technically
| getting your money "back", for some people they would not
| have been successful to 'save' so much without it being
| forced on them.
| minkzilla wrote:
| It is not a good thing because it is interest free and
| inflation exists. If you would have had that money
| earlier you could have put it in high yield saving
| account or payed down debt.
| loeg wrote:
| It is not interest free. E.g., I was paid $480 in
| interest on overpayments last year.
| dmoy wrote:
| It is interest free if the IRS pays you within N days of
| you filing. If they're slower, then they pay interest.
|
| Where N is some value between like .... 30 and 90? I
| forget.
| loeg wrote:
| There are a number of different overpayment interest
| regimes[1]. Mine was paid based on time elapsed from the
| time of overpayment (overpaid quarterly estimated taxes).
|
| [1]: https://www.irs.gov/payments/interest#pay
| loeg wrote:
| People like getting the big lump sum and some don't even
| realize it was their money all along that they just
| overpaid throughout the year. It's not a good thing for
| individuals to overpay.
| datavirtue wrote:
| The average person is a financial train wreck of dumpster
| fires.
| phonon wrote:
| That's not how the Earned Income Tax Credit works....
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I never understood why people think that giving an
| interest free loan to our government is a bad thing.
| YZF wrote:
| Try convincing a tech person that the shares they get as
| compensation from their employer are equal to getting
| money and buying those shares at the time they get them.
| I also think tech workers tend to over-estimate what
| "average person" really is because they mostly know
| "above average people".
| fortran77 wrote:
| And yet here you are trying to spread an agenda in a thread
| about mouse pointers that taxes are too low because the
| majority of people are too stupid to understand tax
| brackets.
| nsagent wrote:
| I think this also partly explains the LLM hype -- people can
| be as confidently incorrect as LLMs, or maybe LLMs are as
| confidently incorrect as humans since they are trained on
| text from social media.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The LLM output matches what the crowd expects.
| okamiueru wrote:
| I hope we reach a collective maturity on this. LLMs have so
| far I've noticed, left a trail of mediocrity. I'll of
| course not notice the parts that are good, so there is some
| confirmation bias here.
|
| And, I hate it. If not used appropriately, it's an
| automated output from left side on the Dunning-Kruger.
| Bullshit asymmetry has gotten more skewed, and it's
| tiresome.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Thats just not my experience
|
| I'm using Miqu 70B Q4 and it immediately replaced
| Mixstral 8x7B Q5 for me
|
| I screen almost all of my responses in relationships
| through it, with deep context on why its modifying
| things, total paradigm shifts like a therapist is showing
| me more effective conversation styles. I wasn't seen as
| having low emotional intelligence to begin with and the
| results have been great.
|
| Translations
|
| Coding syntax
|
| Entire code bases
|
| Nuanced legal aspects of industries (deep conversations
| about obscure drug and treatment pricing by region and
| billing method, which matched reality)
|
| More stuff about different kinds of insurance and how to
| navigate insurance brokers, to great effect
|
| Whenever a contractor or professional outside of my
| knowledge domain gives me a word salad, I make a note of
| what they said verbatim and have the LLM translate that
| for me. Then I come back to them with informed responses
| they cant bullshit around. I got my HVAC fixed by
| pointing out what they are probably missing, and they
| were previously too prideful to notice or consider or
| admit. Got a payment coming from my landlord for this
| because they caused my energy bill to be higher.
|
| Large document analyses, which I thought was the final
| boss. I'm only giving these things an 8,000 token context
| window and things have been great and coherent
| okamiueru wrote:
| How does it compare to ChatGPT 4? That's the only thing
| I've "vetted". It'll be subtly wrong about something, and
| if I point it out, I'll be "of course you are right!".
|
| And, if you are wrong about what you said it was wrong
| about, it'll still almost always say how right you are.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| for my use cases they are very close to ChatGPT4 and I
| primarily use GPT4 for multimodal prompts and responses.
| synchronous voice conversations, Dalle3 images, uploading
| images to it.
|
| they all lean to be agreeable out the box, but the
| aforementioned two will stick to their guns harder and
| tell you that you're wrong. you have to ask all of them
| to take the other side for more insight.
|
| with ChatGPT4, for example, I posted a conversation where
| I felt that a woman I was dating gave a response to my
| followup that was way negative and way out of left field.
| It told me she had a disproportionally negative response
| to a benign text. Then in another session I posted my
| post and told it to predict her response, and it
| predicted a variety of responses some of which were like
| the woman's and this time it told me why. This means it
| was being too agreeable and affirming my feelings the
| first time, unprompted, while actually giving insight in
| the second session without knowing there was an existing
| reaction to navigate.
|
| Dumbfounded that its predictive qualities were better
| than its affirmation-by-default trait, I told it to act
| like the woman's friends who have no context of me if
| they saw my message, I told it to act like redditors on
| /r/relationship_advice responding to the woman who
| similarly have no context beyond what OP feels. you have
| to create outside observers, and you can run all of these
| alternate realities within 3 minutes. crafting responses
| that break conversation molds you might be more familiar
| with and get better results, but if all that sounds too
| much, you can simply tell it to disagree with you.
|
| in LM Studio you can modify the system prompt and change
| the temperament
| city41 wrote:
| I've noticed whenever a topic comes up that I have a lot of
| knowledge in, people almost always chime in with incorrect or
| just flat out made up stuff. I always remain suspicious of
| anything I read in any comment section. Including here on HN.
| handsclean wrote:
| The way I internalize it: public voting selects for layman
| plausibility, not correctness.
|
| Because laymen massively outnumber experts, the layman vote
| always overwhelms the informed one, so the reaction of people
| who don't know the subject is the only thing that matters.
| Truth only seems to matter because most subjects either can
| be somewhat intuited by non-experts, or are in a niche that
| you're not, so "layman plausibility" means your reaction,
| too. But the true nature of the dialog reveals itself as soon
| as people talk about something you're an expert on.
|
| Answers like this aren't a bug in a truth machine, they're a
| plausibility machine working as designed.
| glitchc wrote:
| As we know in the age of the internet, truth doesn't
| matter, only popularity does.
| dspillett wrote:
| The internet has taught me how many brilliant people
| there are out there. And how massively outnumbered they
| are by the rest of us!
| waveBidder wrote:
| there's another reason for some optimism about a voting-
| truth connection: wisdom of the crowds. As long as there
| isn't a strong bias to people's estimate, the average will
| converge on the truth.
| lupire wrote:
| That only works when people bet that their guess is
| correct.
| tripleSex wrote:
| I am quite unsure as to the veracity of the claim that
| "the average will converge [upon] the truth". I recall
| cases being made (as asides) for the opposite conclusion.
| Intuitively even, this idea of equating truth with
| convergance towards the average opinion appears
| contradictory, counterfactual, and ahistorical. Excuse my
| being brass, but a "wisdom of crowds" seems to me
| oxymoronic on its face. I'd love to be persuaded
| otherwise though; mainly due to my perception of a lack
| of credence towards your view. Perhaps I have
| misunderstood your qualifier: "As long as there isn't a
| strong truth bias to people's estimate . . . "? Off the
| top of my head, I can't imagine any scenario in which a
| mixed population of laypeople and academics/experts would
| converge towards the same (vote average) findings as a
| sample of a handful of experts/academics. For example,
| would The Average converge towards correct mathematics or
| physics answers? Besides trivial, non-technical questions
| that do not require complex analysis, I think not. (See:
| False Memory: Mandela Effect. [0] [note]) [0]: https://en
| .m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect [1]:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade
| [Note]: My point is that groups' thinking is liable to be
| compromised. (After all, what has been more important to
| a human -- evolutionarily: the truth or social access?)
| Also see: Information Cascade. [1] {Post-Scriptum: My
| position is that if averages for answers to questions
| were taken, from the 'crowd' of the whole Earth, then
| these would diverge significantly and routinely from The
| Truth. If there are cases in which you feel this to not
| be the case I would inquisitively consider such scenarios
| waveBidder.} <Edit: Deletion: " . . . ~difficulty in
| lending~ . . . ">
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > I can't imagine any scenario in which a mixed
| population of laypeople and academics/experts would
| converge towards the same (vote average) findings as a
| sample of a handful of experts/academics.
|
| Then you get crap where the experts, even when they
| agree, "dumb it down" for the crowds. This leads the
| masses _who actually do pay attention to experts_ to
| think the wrong ideas are truth.
|
| > After all, what has been more important to a human --
| evolutionarily: the truth or social access?
|
| I don't think this is required for people to be very
| wrong. Caring about the truth can easily lead to assuming
| other people who speak authoritatively know what they're
| talking about, or to speaking authoritatively yourself
| when you think you're right.
| jahewson wrote:
| Unfortunately not, because wisdom of the crowds requires
| not only a lack of bias but _independence_ which, let's
| face it, is usually impossible achieve.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Wisdom of the crowds is obviously dog shit.
| somenameforme wrote:
| As a peer comment mentioned, the wisdom of the crowds
| only functions when people operate independently. When
| people collaborate, our answers turn to junk again. And
| any sort of voting system is an inherent collaboration
| because you are basically seeing what's 'trending' by
| definition, so it destroys any sort of wisdom of the
| masses.
|
| The only way you might have it work is if random people
| were shown random posts from random topics, and asked to
| vote on them. And the ranking was based upon that
| feedback. There's problems there as well, but probably
| far fewer than in the current system.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > And any sort of voting system is an inherent
| collaboration because you are basically seeing what's
| 'trending' by definition
|
| Massively aggravated by "sorting by top" defaults for
| both original posts and separately for the comments on
| those posts.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > As long as there isn't a strong bias to people's
| estimate, the average will converge on the truth.
|
| Yes, as long as the truth is the most significant
| systematic influence on beliefs, any reasonable method of
| aggregrate of belief will converge on the truth with
| sufficient numbers.
|
| Unfortunately, the required condition for convergence on
| the truth is often not true, and there is no way of
| reliably determining when it is true other than
| determining the truth independently and determining if
| belief converges on it.
|
| Significant effects on belief about facts from
| cognitive/perceptual biases, especially where the fact is
| not something easily observable like "is it raining at
| this instant where you are standing" are not rare, and
| these biases often align for similarly situated
| individuals.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > there's another reason for some optimism about a
| voting-truth connection: wisdom of the crowds. As long as
| there isn't a strong bias to people's estimate, the
| average will converge on the truth.
|
| Hmmm ... that doesn't seem to match what actually
| happens. After false beliefs holding back humanity for
| its entire history, science came along and produced
| actual, working, truth. And science is the opposite of
| what you say: The crowds don't matter, only the facts.
| Newton was not a crowd, and the crowds didn't produce
| anything remotely as true and valuable for all those
| years. The crowds persecuted Galileo (and many others).
|
| _" In matters of science, the authority of thousands is
| not worth the humble reasoning of one single person."_ -
| attributed to Galileo
|
| As someone pointed out, I think here on HN, the intuition
| of the crowds sucks. If it was any good, we'd have had
| the right physics in 5,000 BCE not starting in the 17th
| century.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I thought Newton was a mathematician, not a scientist.
|
| > the intuition of the crowds sucks. If it was any good,
| we'd have had the right physics in 5,000 BCE not starting
| in the 17th century.
|
| Eh. People used to stay in their lane. Only these days
| can you get a city person voting on proper farming
| techniques.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Newton was a mathematician _and_ arguably the most
| important scientist in history. I recommend his biography
| - it 's amazing reading.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I'm the kind of person who is completely disinterested in
| biographies.
| Tagbert wrote:
| In that way, it's a bit like an LLM choosing the most
| likely answer based on the mass of training material.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| And just think, its training material is all this upvoted
| - and then believed and repeated - BS.
| adventured wrote:
| Humans are nearly all mimics, at least 98%+. They are
| LLMs. It's a survival optimization (energy spent copying
| the existing vs creating/innovating/distributing). It's
| only fitting that we'd create LLMs in the human mold.
|
| LLMs are to human mimics what AGI will be to human
| creators/innovators (and then some of course).
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Humans are nearly all mimics, at least 98%+. They are
| LLMs.
|
| We are GIs, at least 98%+, LLM like behavior _may_ exist
| in our cognitive repertoire, but we certainly aren 't
| limited to it. Can an LLM drive locomotion?
|
| I never understood AGI as generating _sui generis_ ideas
| as a requirement. I thought that AGIs could also be
| uncreative mimics.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Can an LLM drive locomotion?
|
| Can't see any principled reason it couldn't, if it was a
| big enough, sufficiently trained one, running on fast-
| enough hardware, if you represent the sensor data in its
| token vocabulary, and have the reverse for control
| outputs.
|
| Quite probably not the most efficient way to drive
| locomotion, though.
|
| > I never understood AGI as generating sui generis ideas
| as a requirement.
|
| Creativity is among the applications of intelligence that
| I would deem included in the "G" in AGI; OTOH, like most
| proposed binary categories, its probably more useful to
| view generality as a matter of degree than a crisp binary
| attribute.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > The way I internalize it: public voting selects for
| layman plausibility, not correctness.
|
| To lend credence to this idea, I reflexively upvoted you
| despite not having read any experts on this voting
| phenomenon.
| whoswho wrote:
| This is why I ask for qualifications when someone has an
| authoritative tone.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| It's amazing how far that can take you. I saw a post on
| another social media site about something being wrong, and a
| comment said it's not wrong, it was just missing a "not".
| Which was the exact reason it was entirely wrong.
|
| So people can state absolute absurdities and have people
| agree.
| datavirtue wrote:
| "So people can state absolute absurdities and have people
| agree"
|
| That Reddit mission statement.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Happens on HN all the time too.
| lupire wrote:
| Some people are able to correct typos when reading.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| Not the case there. The context of this was definitely
| not a typo.
| wonderfulcloud wrote:
| But Reddit is exceptionally bad at this though. It's
| basically about what sounds the most positive for the
| upvoter's way of thinking rather than anything else.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Reddit is a place where you get downvoted for linking
| something that proves what someone was saying is wrong just
| because it goes against the site's overall narrative. Lies
| are encouraged if they're the correct lies.
| redsoundbanner wrote:
| The exact same can be said for academia
| graemep wrote:
| Depends on the sub. Political ones are the worst.
| graemep wrote:
| Most often it is because people are too lazy to take the time
| to understand the explanation they are being given.
|
| Sometimes that is because experts just say "I am an expert so
| trust me" without proper explanations or links to
| explanations or evidence.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| The difference is that (subjectively) there used to be less
| of this on HN. The herd moves much more aggressively now
| rather than granting for debate. The generational differences
| are much more pronounced; the politics not a match of
| Democrat vs. Republican, but something equally vindictive. It
| isn't particularly pleasant, but what are the alternatives?
| scotty79 wrote:
| > It's not scary - it's typical.
|
| It's really a great strength of human species. We may not
| exceed animals in any other quality, except for persistence
| hunting, but we are exceptional at copying the behavior of
| other individuals of our species without considering whether
| it's sensible or not. Even monkeys don't do this as much as
| humans.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| truth is stranger than fiction
|
| in my experience thats true, its less familiar
| sobellian wrote:
| The second-highest answer is an incorrect just-so myth. It even
| includes a screenshot of the historically correct answer!
| jodrellblank wrote:
| As you said ten years ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7253841
|
| The scary part is that you will likely be saying it again in
| another ten years and again and then you'll die as "that weird
| cursor offset obsessed fanatic".
| glitchc wrote:
| > Fun fact! The hotspot for the arrow cursor was not (0,0) but
| was (1,1).
|
| Perhaps it's because cursors have a one pixel wide black border
| around them to enhance contrast, but users associate the
| cursor's position with the first bit of white (or color) at the
| tip. (0,0) is colored black for a typical cursor.
|
| Edit: ninja'ed further down.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| I think you touched on a wider problem. Peoples shallow
| understanding of the world, translates to a shallow world view
| and policies. It's kind of scary to me how much my high school
| sociology class, group projects, became political policy
| decades later. Simplistic reductions, when in real life even
| unclogging a toilet can have complictated steps, nuanced
| decisions, and many caveats.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _the arrow pointer was never the only cursor. On the first
| Macintosh_
|
| the first macintosh was very late to the party, there had
| already been GUI cursors for about a decade at PARC, and cursor
| styles had settled down to some standards.
|
| in the early days of GUI cursors on relatively low resolution
| displays (by today's standards), an important issue was to
| reduce the amount of calculation and squinting the human had to
| do to identify the hotspot so you could accurately select/swipe
| what you wanted to. the tilted arrow cursor points right at its
| hotspot quite effectively even if the tip pixel is blurred, as
| does the i-beam (whose vertical offset is not as important to
| know accurately) the five fingered hand for moving bulk
| selections also does not require accurate placement, although I
| think the hotspot is at the end of a finger.
|
| early GUIs let you edit your own cursors and hotspots.
| lupire wrote:
| I was hoping that it would be lower than 188 when I clicked.
| It's not. (196):-(
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| It's obviously wrong, to me, because of how little latency
| performing two additions would actually add to the system.
| endgame wrote:
| It drives me up the wall! Permit me a digression: so much has
| been written about the early FPS era, but discussions of rocket
| jumping often skip straight to Quake and omit Rise of the
| Triad, despite rocket jumping being necessary to complete the
| game! ROTT's shareware release was the same day as Marathon,
| another game that does come up in these discussions.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Top answer [1] (when I'm looking, others seems to refer to other
| top answers) says that the original cursor _was_ straight, and
| links to an image, which 404's [2].
|
| Anyone have a working link?
|
| [1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/52338
|
| [2] http://origin.arstechnica.com/images/gui/4-NLSgui.jpg
| AndroTux wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190628045230/http://origin.ars...
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I feel the need to immediately change to an upward pointing
| cursor to honour Douglas Engelbart.
| anileated wrote:
| The point of a pointer is that it should stand off against the
| things it points at.
|
| A usual GUI for the most part has straight edges and certain
| symmetries. A cursor that is similarly symmetric will blend in
| more easily, and get visually lost.
|
| Which way it tilts is secondary, the irregularity of the tilt
| itself against the rest of the interface is key.
| swozey wrote:
| I don't know if it's me getting old or new HDR/5120
| res/monitors with crazy white/black levels but I had to
| recently change my cursor color from white to green because I
| started losing it on all white screens.
| baxuz wrote:
| For a better deep dive into mouse cursors with more information,
| there's Posy's "Mouse Cursor History (and why I made my own)":
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg
|
| It also shows how absolutely horrid Windows' cursor designs are.
| They always were. I still remember making my own sets back in the
| early 2000s when DeviantArt was the home of desktop
| customization.
| rkagerer wrote:
| I'm surprised nobody has posited an "obscurity" rationale.
|
| When the majority of your information is vertical/horizontal
| (such as text, window elements, etc), an angled cursor makes it
| easier to interpolate what's underneath. And the arrow shape
| keeps the bulk of the icon out of the way of your point of
| interest (compared to, for example, a reticle - although I expect
| we'd adapt just fine).
| mort96 wrote:
| There's ... a lot of dubious and unsourced or poorly sourced
| answers there.
| shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
| I agree with all the reasons mentioned ranging from calculating
| the vertex position - sharp tip of the arrow (x, y) to the pixel
| issue (low resolution on older machines) to the right-hand
| pointing direction.
|
| For all practical purposes, I observed 2 other things.
|
| The first is that English is written left to write. If you ever
| had the experience of using a different language that starts from
| right to left, this same arrow feels weird.
|
| And the second is a little activity experience.
|
| 1. Arrange the 4 files in a square box, 2 up 2 down
|
| 2. Notice that as soon as the sharp point of the arrow touches
| any file boundary, the arrow can select the file by a pixel
| difference that you can't with a straight arrow (ease of use)
|
| 3. It also takes a constant number of operations (best case
| scenario) compared to the straight arrow where the algorithm has
| to decide based on the percentage of how much of the straight
| arrow shape hovers over another file to select
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| My theory. When hovering or clicking on an icon more of the icon
| is visible with a tilted arrow.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| I'd like to add to all of the reasons I find valid (not obscuring
| what one is pointing at, mimicking pointing with a finger) that
| everything displayed on the screen is pretty much perpendicular
| to the x or y axis. The tilted cursor thus sticks out among the
| rest of the content.
|
| As an aside, as a typical Amiga quirk, the early Amiga mouse
| cursor was tilted in a 45deg angle to the x axis, contrary to all
| the other popular GUIs with more acute angles for the cursor. And
| there was a built-in tool for creating custom mouse cursors,
| which I personally loved. See for example
| http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga12.html
| bhaak wrote:
| Including setting the hot spot.
|
| Similar to the Macintosh mouse pointer the click point was not
| at (0,0) but at (1,1) (the orange point in the skin colored
| area in the editor on the linked page).
| Findecanor wrote:
| I'd think that the original Amiga arrow pointer could have got
| its stubby style because hardware sprite could only be in low
| resolution and 2:1-stepped lines did not look very good.
|
| The style was changed to a sharper point in Amiga OS 2.0 but it
| was still slanted 45deg. First on the Amiga 1200/4000 with AGA
| could you get a high-resolution mouse pointer.
| teo_zero wrote:
| In Workbench 2.0+ it was slanted 45deg with the two sides at
| 30deg and 60deg, it was red with a hint of 3D (light at the
| top-right, dark bottom-left) and was beautiful! It stood out
| on whatever background.
| mike_hock wrote:
| The "saves a calculation" answer sounds like complete horseshit.
| Any machine fast enough to update a mouse cursor _every time the
| mouse moves_ could have afforded two additional subtractions _on
| a click event._
| zoomablemind wrote:
| My understanding is that before mouse pointer there was a light
| pen aka light gun pointer. It was used perpendicularly to the
| screen, literally pointing at the desired location.
|
| Then, when implementing a more 'remote' on-screen pointer, the
| notion of pointing perpendicularly at the site was best projected
| by a tilted 2D marker.
|
| Think of the mouse pointer kinda sticking out of the screen as a
| dart.
|
| I can't imagine the arm strain the users of the light pen had to
| endure back in time ... Though the workflow was probably still
| more keyboard-bound.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen
| codesnik wrote:
| I suppose it makes more sense for left to right text interfaces?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> It was found that, given the low resolution of the screens in
| those days, drawing a straight line (left edge of arrow) and a
| line at a 45 degree angle (right edge of arrow) was easier to do
| and more recognizable than the straight cursor._
|
| Ockham's Razor. It really is that simple. Having had to do a lot
| of "dot art," in The Days of Yore, I understand perfectly, why
| this choice was made. Some systems did an "unfilled" arrow, with
| just the outer barbs. Same angle of the shaft, but the barbs were
| at 90 degrees. Leaning left was chosen, because of the prevalence
| of righties. The "unfilled" arrow was easier to confuse with the
| background.
|
| I suspect that many of today's programmers would be absolutely
| aghast, at the resolution of our screens, back then.
|
| ResEdit FTW!
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup. The "stairs" of a 45deg angle just looked visually
| smoother than an up-2-over-1 line which looked a bit jaggier.
| Not an earth-shattering difference, but a difference
| nonetheless.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| look at your right hand right now. how is the mouse oriented? I
| would be $1000 it's a little to the left, just like your cursor!
| quesera wrote:
| You are going to owe left-handed people a lot of money. :)
| Izkata wrote:
| Or also the fingers of those of us using a touchpad/nub.
| causality0 wrote:
| I'm amazed none of the answers are pointing out that a straight
| cursor is completely non-naturalistic. A cursor tilted to the
| left resembles an arrow being held in the right hand and being
| used to point at something.
| Izkata wrote:
| 3 of them do, 2 with a hand pointing and 1 with people pointing
| sticks at chalkboards.
| amelius wrote:
| I love Izhaki's visual explanation.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Were the first mouse pointers graphical?
|
| I remember using a black rectangle as a mouse pointer in console
| based applications - it was literally one character of the
| console with inverted colors.
| kps wrote:
| > Were the first mouse pointers graphical?
|
| Yes. Set aside a few hours to watch 'The Mother of all Demos'.
| elif wrote:
| Anyone struggling with the answer didn't grow up on 640x480
| resolution.
|
| When you have so few pixels, you really want to be able to use
| the exact pixel you intend.
| jturolla wrote:
| I was just going through my regular Sunday morning routine when I
| opened hn and realized I'm the second most upvoted answer to this
| question.
|
| That was 10 years ago.
|
| Is it right? Probably not.
|
| Did I answer instinctively? Yes.
|
| Is it a problem to keep it there? I don't think so, there are
| plenty of other explanations in the same page.
|
| Am I providing further evidence? No.
|
| Please refer to https://xkcd.com/386/
| ant6n wrote:
| I guess the obsession to fix something that's wrong on the
| internet only applies to mistakes by other people, not one's
| own mistakes. Cuz really, it's the responsibility of other
| people to fix my mistakes.
| akarve wrote:
| Most SO answers were non-answers or word salads. Thankfully one
| of you added an answer explaining that the cursor is already
| straight given that it must be visible from the graphics
| coordinate origin (upper left) and is 45 degrees wide.
|
| https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/149837/45927
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Bart Gijssens's answer is neither of those things, and gives an
| explanation, including the historical rationale, and links to
| citations.
| Izkata wrote:
| ...this is using wordplay to avoid answering the question. It
| doesn't explain anything.
|
| Also:
|
| > Thankfully one of you
|
| We can see your name.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| It's funny how much of this stuff comes down to just "because
| that's how someone did it first". I see this mirrored in my own
| work, where so many arbitrary decisions are maintained for no
| reason other than that they were chosen at the outset. Nice to
| see that applies to basically everything.
| efitz wrote:
| Although the linked page was highly entertaining, I suspect (and
| this is pure speculation) that the real answer is that, to the
| people who had to make the original decisions back in the 70s and
| early 80s, the current design "looked better".
|
| For subsequent implementations it is likely mostly inertia.
|
| Again this is all speculation but it doesn't really have to be
| any more complex than that.
|
| As a side note in the early 80s as a teenager I wanted to write a
| space game on my Apple //e computer that had a wedge shaped
| spacecraft like a star destroyer or the spacecraft from
| Asteroids. I spent many many hours hand drawing the bitmaps for
| each size and rotation. The shapes always looked a little jagged,
| _except_ in the + /- 45 degree orientations.
| oq_pmg wrote:
| As someone who played with the DOS text mode fonts a little, I
| never bothered with that question, assuming left tilt of the
| arrow was a way to make it visually bigger / more visible
| CharlesW wrote:
| None of the Stack Overflow answers mention Alan Kay, who created
| the angled mouse cursor at PARC. When asked about this1, he
| responded:
|
| _" The Parc mouse cursor appearance was done (actually by me)
| because in a 16x16 grid of one-bit pixels (what the Alto at Parc
| used for a cursor) this gives you a nice arrowhead if you have
| one side of the arrow vertical and the other angled (along with
| other things there, I designed and made many of the initial
| bitmap fonts). Then it stuck, as so many things in computing
| do."_
|
| 1 https://jameshk.com/mouse-cursor
| arduanika wrote:
| Nor did they mention Mark Zuckerberg, who is still holding his
| head up high in the face of negative press:
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/03/faceboo...
|
| giving the appearance that the mouse is tilted.
| wooptoo wrote:
| What an incredible historical resource that website is. Just look
| at the original Ethernet spec here: http://bitsavers.trailing-
| edge.com/pdf/xerox/ethernet/
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