Thomas FuchsBut natural language is a much better user interface than GUIs!”
Yes, that’s why we use steering microphones in cars!
Alda Vigdís
Samir....You're breaking the car!!!
Dr. Seltsam 🌎🎶🌳@thomasfuchs
You're right, never thought of this. Someone's yelling: "Hey you dumb fuck, turn to the right!"
You're right, never thought of this. Someone's yelling: "Hey you dumb fuck, turn to the right!"
@hipsauerkraut that’s backseat driving, not driving
Janne Moren@thomasfuchs
I'm thinking that the gui didn't replace keyboard input; it augmented it. You still use the keyboard for shortcuts, text input and terminal (even Apple keeps the terminal around).
And our mobile devices - all GUI all the time - still provide a virtual keyboard, and feel impoverished due to lack of the full pre-gui experience.
Voice and assistants are likely going to become another modality we use together with the existing ones. Not a replacement.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)The mouse didn’t replace the keyboard. More importantly, both the mouse and the keyboard are driven by the hands. Humans have an enormous number of neurones dedicated to controlling the hands. You can move them independently, exercise very precise, fine-grained control with them, and offload a lot of processing (I am typing this on a touch screen without looking at the keyboard bit of the screen! I am thinking words and some part of my brain stem / spine is translating them into a sequence of thumb movements! That’s phenomenal offload!).
Almost none of that applies to speaking. It requires full engagement of a load of cognitive functions.
I recall an experiment from the ‘90s (I think, might have been earlier) where they tried to see the upper limit of voice control by having a person interpret the commands and do the actions, and didn’t count that time towards the totals. They found that, in most cases, doing the thing yourself was faster. The outliers were ones where the person following the instructions was exercising high-level agency: you give them some task that needs breaking down into a bunch of steps and they determine the steps and do them. But that requires actual intelligence, not just the ability to extrude synthetic text.
KasTas@david_chisnall @jannem @thomasfuchs You just reminded me my aunt. Back in the day, when she was just out of the university and started working at some court as a secretary, there was a huge switch from typing machines to computers.
And most of her coworkers, mainly elder ladies were soooo puzzled for weeks... How can you move the mouse here, on the table, but stare at the cursor over there, on the screen. Even switching from using both hands on the mouse, then moving back with both to the keyboard...
Habits of only typing a keyboard and looking relatively to the same direction is kind of hard to unlearn, apparently.
@KasTasMykolas @jannem @thomasfuchs
Someone I knew who died in the '90s, who told stories about learning to type and being hit on the knuckles with a ruler if she looked at the keys.
@KasTasMykolas @david_chisnall @thomasfuchs
AFAIK Microsoft shipped games such as minesweeper with Windows so they would help people learn how to use a mouse.
AFAIK Microsoft shipped games such as minesweeper with Windows so they would help people learn how to use a mouse.
@jannem @KasTasMykolas @thomasfuchs
That was the justification for the Windows 3 games.
That said, all of them also worked with the keyboard. Though Solitaire was a bit painful to play that way (I did, on Windows 3.11, on a laptop with no mouse).
Franco Gr@thomasfuchs Aren’t those called cabs and buses?
SlightlyCyberpunk@thomasfuchs Note that in Star Trek, far in the future with goddamn androids and shit, they still talk to the computer like they're navigating a drop-down menu. It's not "I would like a hot mug of Earl Grey tea, please", it's "Tea > Earl Grey > Hot". They had infinite possibilities, but they recognized that you would not want to *converse* with the machine.
sarcoptus scabium@thomasfuchs screaming “go left, go left!” to my tesla. it calls me a commie, and continues veering into the incoming lane, into the path of an eighteen wheeler
Flipper 🐬🏳️🌈@thomasfuchs eyelid controlled hydraulic servos are what all the cool kids are using. Don't get left behind!