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> The "butterfly" mechanism offered reduced key travel and keyboard reliability. I couldn't quite tell whether this was a subtle joke or not. I didn't know wh
by wyldfire 5y ago
> The "butterfly" mechanism offered reduced key travel and keyboard reliability.
I couldn't quite tell whether this was a subtle joke or not. I didn't know whether the butterfly design was actually intended to improve reliability or not. Regardless, the effect was actually worse reliability.
I decided to get a second opinion from a machine [1] that probably was trained on input from humans. It said that the noun phrases were {reduced key travel} and {keyboard reliability} and did not suggest that {reduced} modified both.
[1] https://explosion.ai/demos/displacy?text=The%20%E2%80%9Cbutterfly%E2%80%9D%20mechanism%20offered%20reduced%20key%20travel%20and%20keyboard%20reliability.&model=en_core_web_sm&cpu=1&cph=1 https://explosion.ai/demos/displacy?text=The%20%E2%80%9Cbutt...
- lights0123 5y agoreduced (key travel and keyboard reliability), not (reduced key travel) and keyboard reliability
- kgermino 5y agoInteresting input from the ai, but reduced is definitely intended to apply to both "key travel" and "keyboard reliability" in that sentence.
- wyldfire 5y agoSo it is a subtle joke? What was the intent of the butterfly design change, then? Just reduced key travel?
- ghshephard 5y agoI thought the joke was pretty explicit as I read it, and pretty funny.
- kgermino 5y agoYep I think the writer intended it as a joke, or at least a comment on how bad the butterfly keys were. The butterfly keyboards didn’t do much except help make a laptops a bit thinner. That had the effect of reduced key travel (often seen as a negative) and massive reliability problems (universally bad).
- wyldfire 5y agoOh, my mistake. I assumed that the "reduced key travel" was actually a feature. If I re-read it as two negatives, it doesn't seem like a joke so much as a straightforward criticism.