It’s an amazing video! The video not only explains evolution, it does so by using a relatively simple computer simulation that is in style these days to produce “intelligent” computer programs. Yes, that’s right, evolutive computing through sheer brute force has bested old forms of algorithm development.

El cheapo keyboards and their rubber hills

Regular cheap keyboards (and most expensive ones) use a dome-type switch under every key — it’s a hill-shaped rubber thingie that, when you press, activates a sensor below, and when you release, pushes the key back.

They suck.

Model Ms and their clickety-clickety switches

Almost all Model Ms, in contrast, use mechanical-type switches with springs (yes, there’s a spring under each key). This is the way they work:

1. When you press a key, the spring underneath it opposes an increasing amount of resistance until it sort of “gives way” (the spring actually “breaks” halfway) — and when it does, it stops resisting, clicks loudly and sends the keypress to the computer.
2. When you release the key, the spring recovers its original form, and the key bounces back, with another click.

Many people despise Model Ms precisely for the noise and the springs’ resistance. I’m sure these people aren’t typists or heavy keyboard users — I usually refer to them as ignorants — because those characteristics are exactly why you want a Model M.

And here’s why you want one: faster typing speed, more accuracy, and less frustration.

Model Ms are more accurate

Accuracy determines how fast you type, and how frustrated you get in front of the computer. Make many mistakes a day, you’ll hate your job. Type fast with no errors, you’ll be happy.

When a key on a Model M clicks, you can be 100% sure that the key was registered. If a key didn’t click (because you pressed it too lightly), then there’s a 0% chance the key registers. Dome-type keyboards aren’t that way — there’s no click, so you can’t be sure without watching the screen — and that makes your hands exert extra pressure just to be sure keypresses get through. Mind you, not that much extra pressure — you can’t consciously tell — but the effort builds up and wears your arm muscles.

Give it a shot, if you have a cheap keyboard. Press a key lightly — lightly enough that the key “gives way” but not strongly enough for the computer to detect. You’ll see this is not only possible, but a rather frequent event. That kind of half-ass keypress isn’t possible in a Model M. Either it clicks and it works, or it doesn’t. Ever.

The feedback is more than just click-click — you actually feel it under your finger

Plus, you not only get very clear audible feedback. As stated before, the springs actually give way when the key is activated, so you can tell beyond a shadow of doubt when you activated a key, even using headphones with music at 120dB, because you feel the spring give way, and that is an unequivocal signal that your keypress has gone through. You don’t need to double-check on your screen, ever.

And that feedback is key to computing without frustration

These characteristics of mechanical-type keyboards like the Model M not only (dramatically) reduce typing errors, but they let you determine without even glancing at your screen when you’ve made a common mistake, then quickly backspace over it. This makes a brutal difference if you’re into activities that require uninterrupted concentration or simultaneously reading and typing massive amounts of text. Let me give you just one example why:

Have you accidentally hit two keys simultaneously with one fingertip? I don’t know about you, but it happens to me occasionally — especially when I move my hand back from the mouse.

With dome-type keyboards, you need to check the screen to see if one or two letters were detected (because of the half-ass keypress problem I explained above). Checking the screen before typing again sucks; yes, I know it’s only a couple seconds — however, multiply that by hundreds of mistakes a day, and you get an idea of how frustrating it gets. And every time you do it, you lose your laser-sharp focus on what you were doing.

With a Model M, you can instantly tell and correct that type of mistake — because of the tactile/audible response combo — and then you just hit the Backspace key the appropriate number of times. Two clicks/bumps in your finger, one backspace; Four clicks/bumps, two backspaces. No need to check the screen and interrupt your flow — be it dictation, thoughts or computer programming — just backspace one or two times and continue typing.

And, boy, do they last!

As for their durability… I bought my Model M used from a bank in a used-equipment sale. That keyboard had been used for a decade since 1980 — at a bank terminal on a mainframe-based character terminal system. You know, bank teller monkeys pounding on its keys all day long, nine-to-six, nonstop, for ten years. And it still works like a charm. How’s that for durability?

Test one!

So, if you’d rather spend $80 unstressing on Friday nights and $3 on your keyboard, be my guest. But if you’re into doing your job quickly while avoiding stress in the first place, you should give one Model M a spin for a week (or, if you can’t find any, perhaps Das Keyboard is your next-best bet), then tell me if you went back to your old keyboard. You won’t regret it.

The system in question that will deliver us from stupid is called (somewhat appropriately, would you say?) StupidFilter, and has been in development for a while now.

It consists of a rather dumb Bayesian system — the exact opposite of an expert system, which consists of brute-forcing a corpus of data and inferring useful information from the corpus without contextual understanding. In other words, it’s a giant, incredibly stupid but learning machine that is being trained to identify the stupid out of a quarter of a million wastes of time pulled straight out of (wait for it) YouTube itself!

How it works is rather simple. Given a large amount of comments ranked smart to stupid, it identifies the chance that a particular word is in a stupid comment. Example: if the word moran frequently appears in comments deemed stupid, then future comments with that word will be deemed stupid. Bayesian filtering was suggested first by Paul Graham in his now-famous essay A plan for spam, and (perhaps due to its dead-simple mathematical ruthlessness, perhaps because it works like a charm) is now in use for antispam systems in both mail servers and the Akismet blog commenting filter.

At the moment, there’s not much from the project to showcase, except for a damn hilarious stupid randomizer that will let you spend countless hours and inches of eyelashes at your computer, marveling at the utter inanity of regular YouTubers. It cracked the fuck me up — and it’s feature-complete, down to the customary big MOAR button!

Let’s hope they deliver a solution soon. I can’t wait to plug it into my blog and clean up comments en masse.

Windows users often look at me while working on Windows, and have some ’smart’ comments like ‘Let it boot. Wait, it’s not booted yet.’, ‘Why are you moving windows so much?’, ‘Do one thing, than another…’.

Well, Ante, I can sympathize, so you’re not the only one. Much too often, dimwits whose computers I’m using will tell me exactly what you’ve quoted. Without exception, those dimwits are running Windows — not ever have I heard these stupid “pearls of wisdom” from a Mac or Linux user.

Let it boot. Do one thing, then another.

Yeah, right. I do tens or thousands of things simultaneously with my computer, and it doesn’t even flinch. Fucking dimwits! I don’t know what makes me angrier:

1. The fact that they don’t know their computers are made expressly for multi-tasking.
2. The fact that they’re running Windows.
3. The fact that they have the audacity to tell me, an experienced computer engineer, how to operate a computer correctly.
4. The fact that they’re afraid their computers will break just because I can and usually do several things at once with them.

Do one fucking thing, then another.

Fuck, for Jebus’ sake! What, do you think your computer is going to break because I send it off to do several tasks at once? Come on, not even Windows is so fragile!

Why do people think like that? Well, it’s a known phenomenon: people tend to assign magical properties to objects they don’t understand. They simply cannot get their heads wrapped around the fact that computers are just numbers, so they think their computers run on mojo or magic, clicks from the mouse mapping to needle pricks in their voodoo dolls.

And boy do we know, as computer engineers, that computers are sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic!

However, since I’m feeling particularly benevolent today, I’m going to grant them this acknowledgement: yes, your computers boot like dogs on molasses. Which, of course, means only one thing: you’ve installed too much crapware, and it’s time to reformat and reinstall. Morons.