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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?

#291

Post by account-5 »

stouset wrote: post #288
account-5 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I appreciate the feedback, I'll ignore it, but appreciate that a few off the cuff remarks are able upset you in some profound way. I feel sorry for you.

Maybe take a deep look at why you feel the need to get so upset, and exaggerate the impact my words would have. Set some time apart to work on your mental fortitude, and you'll be happier.

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

#292

Post by wruza »

account-5 wrote: post #75
wruza wrote: 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…

Can’t tell if your other jokes are on the same level, but if they are, why do you expect them to not be downvoted? It’s basically disinformation. Maybe the difference is not Apple vs others, but just whether you were called out by someone or not.

It doesn’t take a fanboy to downvote such thing. I’d surely do, being an anti-fanboy of Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta, if I knew the truth about the case.

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

#293

Post by wolverine876 »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #279
wolverine876 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newton was a mathematician and arguably the most important scientist in history. I recommend his biography - it's amazing reading.

I'm the kind of person who is completely disinterested in biographies.

Fine, but then why talk about Newton if you are aware you know nothing about them? Talk about what you know.

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

#294

Post by okamiueru »

yieldcrv wrote: post #287
okamiueru wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pos…

I appreciate your responses. It seems to me that your uses are to a much larger degree interpretative and also somewhat creative.

LLMs are great here. My concerns are mostly that its ability for factual accuracy is confused with its own expressed confidence. Assessment of one's owns abilities is usually optimistic in humans. LLMs just model that language. Facts are baked in as linguistic patterns, rather than a knowledge machine. And, you can often invert its answer to a scary degree.

There was recently an article on Forbes, where the journalistic "source" was the output of Bard.

The most terrifying part about LLMs to me, is not that it's sometimes wrong. But that it's often enough right and excels at certain stuff, that we use it as a source of knowledge. It really isn't.

On the other hand, the creative part, or dialogues regarding creative processes. It's mind bogglingly amazing.

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

#295

Post by toast0 »

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 left mouse on work computers, althoigh I'm right handed, and right mouse on personal computers. (ergo at my first real job encouraged left mousing, and I found mixed mousing is best for my wrists)...

Anyway, most computers you find in the wild are setup for right mousing. Most mice are sculpted to be used by a right hand, a minority of mice are ambidextrous and can be used by either hand well (although it's not unusual for an ambidextrous mouse to have buttons for a right thumb and not for a left thumb), and I can't say I've ever seen one sculpted for a left hand. Same deal for trackballs; if you want a thumb trackball, it's got to be operated by your right thumb.

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

#296

Post by kragen »

Stratoscope wrote: post #266
kragen wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

this is great information, thanks! i think it confirms that even back in the mid-70s they used different hotspots

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

#297

Post by kragen »

lupire wrote: post #223
kragen wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Within 8 thousand years, people will figure out variable length storage and processing for integers. I promise.

do not underestimate human stupidity

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

#298

Post by dragonwriter »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #264
wolverine876 wrote: post #257

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. 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.

> I thought Newton was a mathematician, not a scientist.

Newton was a mathematician, scientist, alchemist, theologian (though, by the view of most Christians at the time and now, quite a heterodox one), and high government official that conducted undercover investigations personally. People can sometimes do more than one thing, and Newton did...a lot.

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

#299

Post by fennecfoxy »

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.

Yeah this behaviour is pretty normal for humans/tribal animals, I don't know why people are surprised really.

I mean just look to politics, that already explains enough!

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

#300

Post by fennecfoxy »

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

If it's been trained to, but I'm not sure that's been the focus recently, though I think some research has been done into it. Turns out prediction engines with attention are useful for more than just predicting text; our bodies and brains work on learned assumptions and behaviours.

But certainly I imagine transformer + attention can = learning to walk/perform task. LLM specifically no...because it's trained on language and not motion, it's all in the name. But even then perhaps motion can be turned into language (non English tokens tho) & an LLM still used, I know people are working on funky stuff like that as well.

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