Nicholas Rinard Keene's Little Bit

I don't have a lot to say, but this is my little bit.

Friday, January 26, 2024

Why is search so terrible?

My career doesn't overlap very much with the people who code search engines, but I'm bewildered at how they work. Today I'm looking for flight fare alerts. I know for sure there are a whole bunch of good sites for that but search engines are completely incapable of finding and listing those sites.

Consider my search results here. The second link is the one I want: Kayak fare alerts. Perfect. This is the link but when I click it, the page I go to is not Kayak fare alerts as promised, it's just... Kayak or whatever. The result says the page title is "Kayak Fare Alerts" but the actual page isn't that at all.

Listen, how the hell does that happen. Really. How is a search engine showing straight up false results? Don't these sites have robots that check links? I'm pretty sure they do, which means the search engine must be wrong about the page because it was fooled. It must be that the process of a page entering the search engine index allows the owner of the page to lie to the engine, claiming a page is one thing when really it is something else.

And why would it be written like that? Why not have your robot actually visit real links and see what they actually contain? What is the counter-argument to providing customers with accurate search results -- why isn't that incentivized by the market? Why not display the same page title in your search results that you see when you visit the page? Isn't that the obvious way for it to work? Why accept lies and manipulation from pagemakers?

The image is from Yahoo but Google is the same and Bing is the same. All three show Kayak Fare Alerts but clicking it takes you to a page which is not Fare Alerts. So all three have the same basic bug, all three accept lies, all three pass lies on to its users. The result is the internet just doesn't have search anymore, and hasn't for a decade or so. For almost twenty years from 1998 to maybe 2015 we could search for things, it was fast and easy. You can't search the internet anymore; as far as I know, there are no services which turn the text you search for into matching search results.

The Cheapflights link is the same: promises alerts, the page is not for alerts. I didn't try the others, why would I, I assume all the results are lies. I don't like being lied to.

If anyone knows of a search engine which returns only results containing all search terms where all results represent the pages as they exist, let me know.



Thursday, July 20, 2023

Waiting for my replacement

I heard there will be "no more programmers in five years" given the advent of AI, and I don't understand that. What will be the job title of the person who uses AI to create software programs? Sounds like what they probably said when compilers were invented: "well, now it's so easy anyone can do it" yeah good luck with that.

Thursday, March 16, 2023

Typical interaction I've had with ChatGPT

 ChatGPT is amazing but its answers leave a lot to be desired. I can tell it is automatic pattern recognition because the data fed into it would heavily skew to the longstanding standard Elasticsearch REST API because that has been deeply documented for many years, whereas the patterns would be weakly recognized for the newer Elasticsearch Java API which has less documentation behind it.

I go round and round with ChatGPT pointing out its errors but it doesn't really learn from them. It doesn't recognize the chat itself as a strong basis for learning. Look here, I just told it that a method doesn't exist, and it apologizes, says it doesn't exist, then gives an example using that method.



Thursday, January 26, 2023

GMail Search Now Completely Disregards Terms

I'm looking for an old work email. I entered three search terms, each an English language word, and GMail returned results all of which contain none of the search terms. None. The results are 100% disconnected from anything I searched for. I can't even figure out  how the results are related to my terms at all. They're just random, that's it, Google's search products now just return baseless random results.

I've already given up Google search, I now mostly use one of its rivals. I've clung to GMail for a long time and one of the main reasons was the long-lasting archive and searchability. Now, GMail is absolutely unsearchable, so I'm not sure if there's even a reason to keep using it.

Zero of my terms are in this email: automatic, checkpoint, period

Update: I found one of the three search terms in the attachment to the email. Maybe that could make sense, except I didn't search for one term, I searched for three and put them all in quotes. The other terms are not in the email or attachment. Also, using Advanced Search I made sure "Has attachments" was un-selected, to exclude these undesirable results, yet it returned results having attachments. That is an abysmal, useless, incorrect, embarrassingly bad search feature.

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

TEK Cleave Keyboard Review

My history with keyboards started as a senior in college when my wrists started to hurt. I decided then and there that I would spend my career using properly ergonomic keyboards, which meant split columnar. My first was in 2002, a FingerWorks TouchStream. That was an amazing gesture-touch input device which was excellent for everything except typing.

For typing, you really want the tactile feedback of buttons so after a few years I replaced the FingerWorks with a Truly Ergonomic Keyboard which I really loved. This was during the period when do-it-yourself keyboard community was coming together, and when new formats became more common starting with the venerable ErgoDox. I switched to an EZ, wrote a custom four-layer layout for myself, and came to really appreciate that design. I've used it for over a decade now.

Recently the folks at TEK sent me their new Cleave keyboard to review. I spent time using it and I'll compare it to the ErgoDox and to the original TEK.

Switches

The Cleave ships with high end infrared mechanical keyswitches. Instead of making an electrical contact at the bottom of the keystroke, the mechanism interrupts an infrared LED to actuate the keystroke. They claim these will last longer but for me the takeaway is that the sensation of producing a button press is very smooth and consistent. I never miss a letter by slightly underpressing the key. They feel great. They are tactile keyswitches which is what most people prefer, although myself I prefer linear. The keyswitches can be swapped out easily but most people won't bother because these are very good.

Baseplate

A keyboard should sit heavily and steadily on a desk so the baseplate is important. This one is stiff and heavy, made of aluminum. It feels nice, it is heavier and sturdier than my ErgoDox EZ. The whole thing feels right, you can pick it up without flexing, it can clunk down without worry.

Keycaps

Some keyboard nerds like unmarked keycaps because that's elite, but I like keycaps marked with their glyphs. Some people point out that unmarked caps can be remapped without mismatching the cap marking, but my retort is that keyboards only need to be mapped once and then used forever. I'm not rearranging the base layer of my keyboard very often, or ever.

The Cleave has nice cylindrical keycaps, either OEM or DCS or similar shape. The glyph font is nice and the shint-through is pretty. The sound they produce is satisfying, a light click on my version.

Backlighting

My main ErgoDox is the original unlit version. I also own the underlit Shine version and the backlit Glow version but I don't use them because the lighting is unsatisfying. I don't care for underlit at all, and the EZ Shine's backlighting is weak, mushy-colored, and doesn't cover the whole board. I think the folks selling the EZ were aiming for the gamer boi l33t h4x0r RGB crowd.

By contrast, the Cleave's backlighting seems to be targeted at professionals who want an attractive useful keyboard used often in low light. That's me. The lights are clear white, not mushy, they don't flash, and they'll never impress middle schoolers. 10/10

Key Arrangement

I use qwerty layout which is preset on the Cleave. Many ErgoDox users remap to a different layout but not me, I set up mine with as ordinary of a layout as possible on the main layers. Each of these keyboards has an appropriate columnar-staggered layout; that means the letter button placements on both keyboards are equal.

The Cleave has a dedicated Escape key in the proper location: separate from the other rows of keys, up to the left in the corner. That is where Escape belongs and the Cleave has it but the ErgoDox doesn't.

On the other hand, the Cleave puts arrow and nav keys in little clusters underneath the letter buttons whereas the ErgoDox has another row of buttons. I use the ErgoDox buttons for Command, Option, Hyper, Meh, and Control. The Cleave  lacks all of these and instead has two buttons for Control and Option on the far outside bottom corners under the Shift key. There are configuration options to move Command onto the caps lock key, or one of the spacebars, which a lot of people like.

Thumbs

Proper ergo keyboards move more functionality from pinky to thumb. Both Cleave and ErgoDox do this but the Dox does it a little better. The Cleave has basically two buttons per thumb but the Dox has quite a few depending on how far you reach; I commonly use my thumb for all three lower buttons in the thumb cluster plus three more of the command buttons.

But let me say one thing, which is that the Cleave has nice wide horizontal space bars, like they should be. ErgoDox really requires you to hit an exact spot for the space bar and it took adjustment not required by the Cleave.

Division

Both keyboards are split into left hand and right hand sections but the Cleave is on a single board whereas the ErgoDox is divided into two parts. Most people are comforted by a single unit keyboard but I've found over a decade of use my hands have drifted farther and farther apart, now at the maximum allowed by the connector cable. In my opinion, having a split-not-divided board like the Cleave robs users of the opportunity to evolve their typing toward greater comfort.

Programmability

I'm not aware of deep firmware customizability on the Cleave. If it has it, it's not QMK which is the nerd's choice for keyboard firmware. My ErgoDox has not only a custom layout but some of the layer setup has custom C code. Almost all users won't do that but I did and you can't do it on a Cleave.

Bottom Line

The reasons that I won't be giving up my ErgoDox are not reasons most keyboard users share: I want divided left and right with more thumb buttons and customizable firmware. My willingness to use unusual keyboards is already greater than the audience served by the Cleave, which is an audience I used to be in and to whom I would recommend the Cleave. People more like me can look at an ErgoDox or Iris. As for me, if I give up my ErgoDox it will likely be for something like a Manuform.

Thursday, January 13, 2022

Jira is terrible. Really terrible.

 Jira is terrible. Really terrible. The functionality mostly fits the need but the interface is absolutely abysmal, floating below and just above the minimum threshold of usability.

Jira is used by programmers. Programmers work with text, we are text professionals, our days are spent typing and copying and pasting text. Yet Jira for some bewildering reason goes out of its way to make working with text impossible in its interface.

1. In Jira, you can't select text if it's a link. Jira activates the link. This is a violation of how links have worked in web browsers since Bill Clinton was President. A link is text which activates when clicked and not otherwise. There's a good reason for that: web pages contain hypertext, not buttons. You can't select the text label of a button, but you can select hypertext including links. Again we are text professionals, we select and copy and paste text all day long, it's the whole freaking career; to screw up your web pages so text can't be selected is unforgivable. This example is an unusable interface literally: I cannot in actual fact select the text of a link, it is impossible, this UI is below the threshold of usability.

2. The main body of Jira content is hard-limited in width. Like this website, Blogger, the content of the page is laid out in a column. This column I'm looking at holds about a hundred characters and that's fairly reasonable because in blogs we type paragraphs of text and we want nice word wrap like in a book. But what works for a blog emphatically fails for Jira because Jira does not display blog posts, it displays comments about computer code. That's what a Jira page is, it is a webpage containing a discussion about computer code. But computer code doesn't word-wrap, you have to scroll horizontally to see wide lines. That's no problem because we programmers have enormous screens, mine can display fully four hundred characters across. But not in Jira! No, no, Jira's tiny little column will display approximately sixty characters -- that's less than a TRS80 hobby home computer sold at Radio Shack in 1977. It is so preposterously skinny that it's hard to believe it was designed by a person whose intent was not sadistic. There is no way a thinking and caring person would ever sell to programmers a user interface which can only display fifty characters. Only malice explains a UI that bad. To scroll in those text boxes requires the manual manipulation of TWO scroll bars, not just one. This is hands down the stupidest way I've ever seen code formatted, ever, including when it's formatted using variable width fonts. It's just absolute trash. The Jira page should render as wide as I make the window, I'm not a dumbass, I am a computer professional I can handle that. But I shouldn't have to handle using two scroll bars to go back and forth between an 80 character line of code and the words discussing it.

3. I tried to fix #1 by disabling JavaScript. Jira shows nothing without JavaScript, just a frame with a loading animation. Web pages should use as little JS as possible in my opinion so to use it for literally 100% of the page is as bad as JavaScript usage can get.

4. Jira is a product sold to computer programmers. We work with text day in and day out. A standard way to interact with text is double click to select a word but Jira screwed up this universal gesture and redefined it to mean edit a page element. No. Double click means select word. Editing a page element is done by clicking a little pencil icon. To select a word in a Jira description, you must double click, then wait, then double click, then wait, then press escape. Only Jira could take something so useful and make it so painful.

Thursday, December 16, 2021

The Slack title bar is nearly undraggable


 Does anyone else remember when we used to be able to drag windows around the screen by their title bar? I remember, those were good days. That was good UI, very sensible, click and drag.

These days look what more and more applications are doing, stuffing things into the title bar that don't belong there. All browsers now do that, it's horrible. Who decided that we don't need to drag browser widows around the screen? Was there a meeting I missed? I still like to do that, I'd like to have those title bars tyvm.

Slack is just as bad look at this. I have to find the tiny unfilled space near the right end, or else click the teensy weensy draggable strip underneath or above the buttons, which show no edges.

We had this UI locked down in the 90s and it was superior: title bar, button bar, content, with Cancel/OK buttons at the bottom. None of the alternatives we've seen since then have been improvements.