Documentation is different from demonstration. Text (with graph or animation interspersed to unpack unintuitive terms) wins for documentation. Video could be good for demo if presented in a no-nonsense manner.

You guys do know the affordability of the chips you’re using to comment on this is a direct consequence of TSMC “efficiency”, right?

Mind you, the DFT calculation from the Griffin paper is not a proof of LK 99 being a superconductor in any way. What it showed is the (potential) formation of flat bands near the Fermi surface. Band dispersion is associated with the kinetic energy of the electrons, so materials with flat band (and therefore electrons with suppressed kinetic energy) at the Fermi surface are more susceptible to interaction effect (and strong interaction causes all sorts of nonintuitive quantum effects). I’m not a DFT expert in any sense, but from what I’ve heard, it is quite easy to “tune” your model to produce narrow (the limit of which being flat) bands from substitutions (e.g. the Cu substitution in this case) and such, which don’t necessarily lead to superconductivity.

So I’ll take the DFT papers (there are quite a few now) as saying, “hey you want some flat band? Here’s some. We’ve done our part. Now some other theorist, do your magic and conjure up some superconductivity”. It’s a cog in the full picture, if there is a full picture

Getting it to make a sound is (probably) easy but realistically emulating piano action would be really hard. Reputable electronic pianos all mimic real piano mechanics to a degree, e.g., the visible portion of an individual key is only a fraction of its entire length in order to give you the “weight” and “speed” of the real key action, which would be hard to reproduce with e.g. a shorter key + spring. A search of “hammer actions” should give you some idea

The point is there are established conventions among the practitioners on how these are pronounced, and not getting them right says something about the youtuber who may otherwise appear as an expert.

You might be right on how the name ‘Schrieffer’ should be pronounced in its original tongue, but I’ve heard multiple former students and colleagues of Bob Schrieffer pronounce it otherwise to conclude that theirs is probably how Schrieffer himself intended his name to be pronounced.

Yeah, can’t wait to hear economists’ take, or The Economist’s…

Give me a way to physically shut off the microphone (like a camera shield on business laptops), then we will talk.

Strange topics had popped up in my Google feed after l spoke to someone about something I’ve never googled before

Creator already exceeded 100wpm and said it works equally well for random strings iirc.

Not quite sure how to think about the ergonomics though. This is different from steno as each chord only produces one letter, so on average there are nominally more keystrokes than letters produced. Exclusive chording probably also don’t work too well with keywells etc with uneven key heights. Would be interesting to know long term effect regarding comfort/stress

Hi Joe Brian

Not to be snobbish or anything, but at this juncture I wouldn’t trust anyone who can’t pronounce arXiv (or Schrieffer for that matter) correctly to explain room temperature superconductivity to me. Hell I barely believe anyone with a materials/physics degree…

I come from Microsoft sculpt where the wrist rest is built to raise your wrist higher than the finger tips (reverse tilting). If you bend your wrist down (i.e. toward the desk), then your fingers naturally curl down, whereas if you raise your wrist up (like on the MS natural), then your fingers are naturally more extended. From an ergonomics perspective, it is better to have your wrist neutral or slightly raised than to have them bent down. In that case, the top row typically requires less effort than the bottom row (particularly when reverse tilted). Now whether or not that’s more comfortable also depends on how often do you encounter bigrams like ‘dr’ – or worse, ‘cr’ – on qwerty, where you have to extend index on rows above the middle finger (these are the ‘half’ and ‘full’ scissors, respectively, in layout analyzers). The discomfort of top row index often comes from these type of scissor bigrams and is alleviated when it’s possible to also extend the middle finger slightly at the same time. Curling index finger is a move more independent of middle finger placement (but that doesn’t mean less effort/stress on the tendon, particularly for wrist up folks). In other words it’s possible for a key to both be more comfortable and incur more effort/stress at the same time.

I’m not sure, from the description of your wrist rest arrangement, if you are in the ‘wrist up’ or ‘wrist down’ camp. But certainly for wrist down folks, I can imagine the bottom row being more comfortable for the index.

True that. I’m definitely not promoting “layout of the month” type of thing :D

My first foray into alt layout provided some intuition of what aspects of a layout are important to me personally and how they translate to various metrics. After that I make use of analyzers to evaluate different layouts without physically trying them out. I only transitioned to my current layout after becoming relatively sure – through the analyzers – it’s something I’d stick to. I was mainly talking about this second transition being easier than learning the first one.

Speaking of analyzers, take a look at clemenpine’s keysolve and oxey’s layout playground

There is also an extensive alt layout document compiled by ec0vid.

Contour definitely helps! I’ve also seen people resting not exactly on the home row but slightly shifted upward/downward depending on the layout.

Hey just anecdotal, but I find the first alt layout to be the most difficult (I went from long time dvorak to semimak if that matters). My brain started adapting to the fact that it has to adapt to new layouts once I started experimenting more alt layouts. Point is, don’t get stuck on colemak 😅.

Agree on both accounts. I have ‘d’ on top row mid finger, right above ‘h’ on home row mid finger. ‘e’ on vowel hand thumb.

The point about frequency of ‘d’ being too high is with respect to having it on the index bottom row (as in the dh variant), because of the curling gesture it incurs. The index finger is tricky because being a long finger, it is comparatively better to extend up than to curl down (assuming your wrist is neutral or slightly raised), but top row index position will usually find bigrams with mid finger home row, making it a scissor (qwerty ‘dr’) and uncomfortable. Given it’s reign over 6 keys, it is better suited for less-frequent letters on the non-home positions. ‘d’ would be borderline acceptable in terms of frequency, and for reducing incessant curling, inner column center row (qwerty ‘g’) is a better placement – this is what dvorak, maltron, and rsthd opted for (but keep in mind this makes it more prone to the lateral stretch problem). But the better choices are from the ‘mfpgwybv’ pack, and perhaps ‘c’ to a lesser degree due to its frequency.

It is not so much about relative distance to the home position. The more important measure is if there are lots of bigrams to be pressed by the middle finger on the same hand right next to the index key – it is believed that a lateral stretch, meaning having to press a key on the central index columns, right next to another key on the same hand middle finger column (e.g., a qwerty ‘gd’), is more uncomfortable than if the index key is on the home column (a qwerty ‘vd’). This is the logic behind the dh mod.

Personally I think both ‘d’ and ‘h’ are of too high a frequency to be placed on the index finger non-home position, so neither the vanilla nor the dh variant of colemak is good in that regard.

One argument for moving space to a specific hand is so space is assigned to the vowel hand. If you are on a layout with definitive vowel / consonant hand split, then the theory goes that it is more frequent for words (at least in English) to begin with a consonant, and separately, also end with a consonant. By having space on the vowel hand, you are promoting hand alternation.

Personally I have vowels on the left hand but still use right thumb for space. I do have ‘e’ on left thumb, but right hand thumb has been a habit since I learned qwerty on a mechanical typewriter…

LOL usability didn’t occur to me somehow. Was totally immersed in the beauty of it 😍

This really looks like it should be fitted on a spherical surface. Maybe a huge soccer trackball. That would be a spherical version of the keymouse

If you want ergonomics, go for ProArc EM03 fingerball (and the Nulea / Sanwa variations, all MTE clones). If you want more buttons, go for the Elecom Huge. FWIW, I stopped using the Huge after getting the ProArc (much better ergonomics)

Semimak is an excellent layout, have fun switching!