Those far keys are usually triggered by your weakest fingers -- return, for example, is triggered via your pinky and can often require you to stretch your pinky (and ulnar nerve) in unergonomic ways, leading to Cubital Tunnel Syndrome.
I find that a good introductory layout to this kind of keyboard is the Kinesis Advantage 2 [1]. As you can see a bunch of common keypresses usually delegated to the pinkies have been set on the thumb clusters. On my Ergodox, I also have symbols layers that allow you to reach common symbols without moving my fingers significantly from the home row. It definitely takes an adjustment period but my RSI definitely thinks its worth it!
This is exactly why I love my Ergodox. My biggest hand issue was pinky pain, and with the ergodox I've moved basically all of the 'stretch' pinky keys to thumb/index finger. In particular moving backspace/enter/ctrl to the thumb cluster makes me feel like I can never use a keyboard without one again. It's completely eliminated pinky pain on both of my hands.
I used to think the same way as you. Then I got RSI and the only thing I can type on now without excruciating pain is my $250+ ergonomic keyboard. The other day I typed a short password on my Corsair gaming keyboard (standard layout, full size) and I literally sprained my left wrist immediately.
Honestly, after how much money I’ve spent trying to deal with my RSI (doctors, exams, physical therapy, home workout items and programs) the 250 is nothing for something that isn’t exacerbating my injury and in fact reducing inflammation enough that things are finally healing.
FWIW, I think the commentary around pricing is totally valid. Ergo keyboards are absurdly expensive; not everyone can drop the necessary 2 to 400 USD to acquire one of these. I don't know the economics but I'm sure part of it is driven by demand; there's a lot less people concerned with ergonomics than there should be, so no one's really incentivized to figure out how to mass produce these.
I would love it when an entry level ergo keyboard could be had for under 50.
I don’t know any science off the top of my head, but professional stenographers generally prefer low profile keys and short key caps. As someone who is recovering from RSI, short keys and light switches have been a god send.
But are people like that people you want as your co-workers?
Serious question, I don't mean this facetiously. I think is an extremely complex question and I wonder if introducing someone who is openly comfortable with gore is dangerous to the psychological health of the company.
For example, at a previous company a co-worker publicly shared, without a trigger warning and in great detail, a very gorey thing he enjoyed watching to relax. Lots of people were extremely disturbed by this -- not disturbed by him, per se, but disturbed that he shared this without any kind of warning. I don't even resent him despite myself being pretty disturbed because what one considers normal is subjective, and if you regularly relax to this content you probably don't realise that this might not be anyone else's cup of tea. But it really makes me wonder -- what if the guy who sits next to me starts telling me that ISIS beheadings are relaxing to him?
Well, I probably wouldn't invite him to my game night, but if it's his job to watch ISIS videos, it seems like he'd be well-suited, no?
It seems like if you acknowledge that:
a) Terrible job exists
b) Terrible job is necessary
You should also allow for a person to do terrible job without thinking that they must be a terrible person by extension. Otherwise you continue the well-trodden history of certain professions like hide-makers, executioners, or coroners being ostracized from society for doing the job we told them to do.
I'm sorry if I implied that I think that people who would enjoy this work are bad people. I certainly don't feel this way; I mean, I myself have worked on a platform that plenty of Nazis use and i don't consider myself a Nazi, so it would be hypocritical of me to say as such.
I agree that I wouldn't personally spend time with said person, but my question was less about personal social responsibilities outside of work. My example I pointed out happened at work, during normal work hours, in a social space where people have inherently less control over who they surround themselves with. This is the part of it all that is fuzzy to me, and I don't have a clear answer for.
Certainly in our own, private social spaces we are free to choose whomever we socialize with, but at work that option is less available. The example I gave happened during work hours over work communication, so there is always going to be social overlap that you can't simply opt out of (the age old 'what is culture fit' question applies here, and every co-worker contributes to company culture in some way).
And while a lot of content moderators do focus purely on clicking thru things, a lot of other ones still regularly interface with the company. I used to work at Discord, where content moderation of this level (and traumatic nature) was a constant concern. As engineers you may be staffed to work on a tool to help with moderation. Or you may be working on some fancy AI to help sort and tag unsafe content. And this is only from the product engineering perspective; content moderators will have to work with customer success to create content policy, or enforce bans for unsavory behavior. So I don't think they really are siloable away from the rest of the company, and I'm not even certain that that is a humane way to treat them.
Oh my goodness I love this. My husband once told me that when I died he would upload my brain into a machine that was constantly playing Cities Skylines. This looks to be focused mostly on urban grid design; have you given thought to what a suburban generator might look like?
