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Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

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Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#261

Post by scotty79 »

speff wrote: post #123
Stratoscope wrote: post #44

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…

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.

> 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.

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#262

Post by anonymouskimmer »

handsclean wrote: post #166
speff wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 plausi…

> 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.

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#263

Post by anonymouskimmer »

adventured wrote: post #256
Tagbert wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that way, it’s a bit like an LLM choosing the most likely answer based on the mass of training material.

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).

> 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.

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#264

Post by anonymouskimmer »

wolverine876 wrote: post #257
waveBidder wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 sa…

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.

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#265

Post by dragonwriter »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #263
adventured wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> 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.

> 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.

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#266

Post by Stratoscope »

kragen wrote: post #168
Stratoscope wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rat…

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 e…

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...

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#267

Post by taeric »

crazygringo wrote: post #190
webignition wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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!

I used to swap hands with my mouse every month or so. I don't remember ever noticing the tilt.

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#268

Post by taeric »

klibertp wrote: post #212
alamortsubite wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 :))

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.

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#269

Post by K7PJP »

arrrg wrote: post #82
vasco wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 dr…

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.

Re: Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

#270

Post by anonymouskimmer »

somenameforme wrote: post #241
waveBidder wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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.

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