QWERTY Keyboards on a touch screen are still the stupid!

sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – -44 points –

Whether you, like me, beleive that QAZWSX keyboards make far more sense, especially in a machine learning world, I think we all agree a layout designed to circumvent jamming typewriter keys doesn't make sense in modern society on modern devices.

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I have enough difficulty when a UI decides to use abc layout, no way would I want to learn a new keyboard layout. QWERTY it good enough

The beauty of QAZWSX, or a modern machine learning backed fuzzy typing layout is that you don't have to learn it. You roughly press where you would ordinarily and the "AI" does the rest and figures out what you were trying to say.

I'd rather not invite AI into my life.

That's an unrealistic expectation to set upon yourself. Machine learning has been prevalent in our lives for a long time already. But as long as you're happy, that's all that matters.

Why does this not work with a QWERTY layout?

Because reasons ok!?! Just trust me bro.

You're being incredibly toxic for a shower thought. Have a word with yourself.

I had a word with myself, I said I don't like my attitude but unfortunately I can't get rid of me because no one wants to work these days. I had to settle for giving myself a slap on the wrist which won't change anything.

It does. But it doesn't need to. Besides, utilizing such algorithms in a QWERTY keyboard produces needless complexity to the algorithm, putting additional load on the processor

I could kind of see where you were coming from before but... yeah now you've lost me.

I'm not completely against AI, but I wouldn't want it having control over every aspect of my life just yet. Besides, if you type where you usually would, what's the point of changing the layout in the first place? Regular keyboards work just fine for me and most people, I don't see a reason to reinvent the wheel with some forced AI schtick.

I put AI in quotations because it really isn't an artificial intelligence, it's just machine learning.

Okay, so put it like this, let's say you split a keyboard in two vertically and then rather than have 13 keys on each side, you have one. But your brain still sees the thirteen keys, when you type, based on a local language model, the keyboard would say, this list of words is most often used after this word. However based on an input on the left side X times and Y times on the right, the word is around a certain length and has a likelihood of these letters being used and then it replaces your gibberish with the word you were trying to type. Obviously with machine learning it gets better over time.

We walk with these mini computers, why wouldn't we use them to process communication?

But what happens when it's inevitably wrong? How do you type the word you actually meant to type?

You would get a selection of words, like autocorrect now. But if none of those were correct, you could fall back to legacy mode to put in the correct word and next time that word would be weighted so you're more likely to see it.

I mean, I see how this could kind of work... but I still think most people would want to use a regular keyboard. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems needlessly complicated, especially since most people use and are fine with the system we have now.

I think that if you had a new keyboard enabled on every new phone, people would adapt. Unfortunately though, that would never happen.

But if you do see a normal keyboard and can type each letter isn't that the same as what autocorrect is doing now? If I type "spmrthjng" my keyboard already autocorrects to "something". If you only see the keyboard after it's guessed wrong then that would just be autocorrect with more steps.

You mean like the way sweeping swiping figures out the words? And what do you do when trying to type out a password? Does it revert to a normal keyboard or function like T9 keyboard with multiple presses to select the right character?

I think with the advent of passkeys, this issue is largely mitigated. But for the most part, yes, reversion to the familiar makes sense, whether that's QWERTY, T9 or simply disabling auto correct.