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Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

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281–290 of 326 posts

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

#281

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 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.

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

#282
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

Just wait until you find out why scroll bars are on the right.

I feel like the scroll bar location has more to do with english being written left-to-right.

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 Codin…

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.

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

#284

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 a…

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.

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

#285
post #213
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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…

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.

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

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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".

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Codin…

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.

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.

(Analogous to how we have to patch our speech to never blame the victim even though we know there are measures they could have taken to mitigate that scenario. While if the same person asks in advance we would give them advice.)

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. It will begin crafting responses that break the 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

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

#288
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 cu…

Your flippant joke is ten years old, has certainly been made thousands of times on this site alone, and is based entirely upon a lack understanding of the issue it targets. At best it’s tired and overplayed. At worst it furthers misunderstanding.

Maybe aim just a touch higher?

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

#289

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 a…

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.

Hail, Zucker

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

#290
post #242

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.

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.

macOS has this “shake to enlarge cursor” setting, can be useful occasionally, though I never know what with what intensity do I shake.
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