hatch of random thoughts and opinions. I write down pieces of random thoughts and unelaborated opinions.

Content Warning: strong opinions and strong language.

• Color Encoding is Ableism
• keyboard layout is a human-computer ABI
• Eurocentric Table Etiquette - keep it to yourself please.
• You browse the web, that makes you a google user? hell no!

RELOCATED POST(s):

• on generative (art) AI is merged into the post reflections on generative AIs

Color Encoding is Ableism

Important note: “normal people” in this context refers to people with functional eyesight and color vision, i.e. the “majority of people”. This does NOT imply that the opposite group of people are “abnormal” to the slightest.

Or let’s take it further: any format of presentation is ableism, if it can’t be translated into another without self-reference. Color encoding is such a format that only serves people with functional color vision.

Some argue: “hey, I can describe the colors for you if you can’t see them, there is a red circle on the left and a yellow triangle on the right!”.

For a color-blind or born-blind person, “the sky is blue” is useless context because it’s empirical – a person who has never seen colors has no concept of “color” and any descriptive text of color is self-reference.

Being color-blind myself, I’m not saying color encoding is a bad presentation. But the problem is, it’s often used in the wrong (spelt: “ableist”) way. For example

The following, however is a bad one:

Other painful things to work with (practically forgivable, but still painful)

• Color encoded twisted-pair-cable (e.g. + RJ45). The 25-pair color code is …. such an evil…
• Electronic color code (e.g. color-encoded resistors)
• Any instructional text that ask you to interact with xyz of certain colors.

Ok, I admit that color among other visual hints is important in certain fields and some certain tasks are unfit for visually-impaired people to perform. Maybe they (I) should not operate a chemistry lab. But I urge you not to generalize this limitation. If disabled people can’t understand your presentation, please try better accessibility techniques where applicable, instead of just blaming them for not understanding something that is obvious to you.

keyboard layout is a human-computer ABI

What’t the role of a keyboard and its layout? Instead of speaking of Computer-Human Interface – or in a narrower sense, User Interface (UI) – I would borrow the term Application Binary Interface (ABI).

I’ve been wanting to switch to one of those “ergonomic” keyboard layout¹, because qwerty really sucks. It’s painful to use my pinky and ringfinger to those frequent letters and I often unconsciously shift my hand and use my stronger fingers (i.e. middle and index) for those letters, resulting in inefficiency. I tried Colemak² for a while. It’s really nice, but I have to give up the thought of switching a keyboard layout. Here are the reasons:

First the base assumption: 1) proficiency in one keyboard layout trades off mastery in another, if not fucking up both.

Typing on a keyboard is an essential part of my life and for work (i.e. writing code) I’ve developed a keyboard-centered and mouseless workflow. Spoken, it’s unacceptable to lose my skills in either typing or interacting with computers.

Portability - likewise for ABIs, portability is a big deal for keyboard layout. It’s not a good idea for people who frequently hop among devices (that are not always theirs) to use a non-qerty keyboard layout.

• you may need dedicated physical keyboard layout and inlays.
• otherwise you need virtual layout mapping.

And imagine having to use someone else’s computer for a while…. alas, it’s already extremely painful for me to use a system that doesn’t swap CAPSLOCK and ESC…

btw. Some quirky software read raw keyboard inputs instead of keys presented by libinput…

keyboard workflow and bindings
It’s not only about typing blocks of text, but also for control. One obvious problem is that switching keyboard layouts will break the many key mappings. Key mapping is a subtle blend of semantic flow and muscle memory.

This is especially true for vim. The reason why I love vim keys is the same reason I’m reluctant to switch a keyboard layout. For example to delete content of a parenthesis I use <ESC>di(: <ESC> goes to the Normal Mode, and delete inside “()”. On a Colemak keyboard these physical keys are mapped to su.

Now there are two solutions:

1. change the software setting (vim has such plugins to re-map the keybindings per keyboard layout). This means I’m still typing the same physical keys thus not breaking my muscle memory. The software sees a different input and map it back the old QWERTy one. While my muscle memory stays the same, this no longer make sense. I’m thinking about “I need to delete what’s inside of this ()” while I’m typing something totally unrelated! There, I’m typing in Colemak but still thinking in QWERTY. Also this require extra setups for virtually every single application that uses the keybindings. IMHO this is just hiding your head under the sands. Over time this will only adds up to the overheads, both mental and software.
2. Another solution is to actually use the new physical key position of di but this will break all of my muscle memory and this will be VERY painful. I’m still unwilling to make the leap of faith.

When you add another language - likewise for programming languages vs. OS ABIs!

I can’t even manage to type efficiently hopping between QERTY and QEWRTZ (german) layouts. I still make tons of mistakes when typing the umlaut öäü, not to mention the symbols. The need of switching between languages exponentially increase the difficulty!

If you have some ideas against above points I’m eager to know.

Eurocentric Table Etiquette - keep it to yourself please.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdyyin_9izI
this is not a commentary on the quoted video; It’s simply to make clear what I’m talking about.

When talking about Etiquette in this context, please prefix it with “eurocentric”.

“you are a guest to our culture, you need to learn our ways”
If you were a guest to east Asia, are you willing to pick up a pair of chopsticks or are you gonna ask the waiter(-ess) for a set of cuttery? If not the former then you can properly shut your mouth.

there goes the saying:

Don not do unto others what you would not like others to do unto yourself.

You browse the web, that makes you a google user? hell no!

Is it okay to call every single web user a google user? Then what about calling the whole ActivityPub-federated social network “Mastodon”?

“so what, I’m not offending you, I made factual yet purely technical mistake that hurts no one!”

Although dangerously similar, I’m not gonna strawman this misconception into the same offensive bigotry such as misgendering. Well I can’t argue that this is a ethical issue at all – it’s just about the software you use…. right? Why would someone take it so seriously as offense simply because people assume their choice of software?

For countless times I felt the urge to correct people who abuse the term “Mastodon” or whatever mastodonism such as “toot”. For those who still don’t know, ActivityPub is the protocol we communicate and federate our servers, like email; and Mastodon is one of the (and most dominant) implementations, such as gmail. It’s absurd to assume that every email user uses gmail, so is it to talk mastodonism with someone you don’t know on the Fediverse.

Yet I’m inclined to correct them because of the same argument: how can I take this kind of ignorance offsensive? Would I take offense if someone assume that I use thunderbird? Or that I use VSCode? Or Chrome? Do I really care about letting people know what software I use? (I use arch, btw.)

“Well, I just don’t know, every tells me this is mastodon….”

So here is the other side of the story: if I don’t correct your misconception, this mastodonism will become de-facto: Eugen will technically control the ecosystem, and as history shows that they often have their own ideas³.

If google decides to drop xyz W3C specs from or add whatever bullshits to their chromium or V8 engine, every web dev has to follow; If google search decides to unlist some results for their own interest, small business will die; If gmail decides to blacklist your email server, you’d better switch to a new one; If mastodon use bad specs (which they do) then all other implementations⁴ has to follow or they risk defederating with majority of the network. they are the fucking standards because 99% of the people use it;

So, it’s not about you hurting my feeling by calling me a “mastodon user” – I don’t really care to let you know what software I really use – it is that you are inadvertently empowering their monopoly⁵ and marginalizing other software, developers and communities.

Remove mastodonism from your fediverse posts, please.