The home team starts chatting about GitHub’s CEO stepping down, then gets onto Cassidy’s favorite topic—keyboards—before getting deeply sidetracked talking about how memory and brains work.

Episode notes

GitHub’s CEO, Nat Friedman, stepped down recently to focus on his startup roots. Chief product officer, Thomas Dohmke, will be moving to CEO. 

The Verge reviewed our no-longer-a-joke April Fool’s keyboard. 

How many keyboard layouts are there anyway? Including non-English layouts, there’s lots. 

Do you have a mind’s eye? How about an inner monologue? We explore why some people have a voice in their head when they think and some don’t. 

I’ve seen, like three or four decades ago, in judicial courts, what looked like braiile keyboards (the Perkins Brailler kind) operated by (I assume) a blind person to keep a written transcript. Definitely some sort of chord keyboard with a few levers where the typist was punching away. That was in Germany, where, I guess, words might be longer and spoken speech is typically between 100 and 160 word per minute (the wpm target for giving a speech in German is 90 to 120 wpm, but untrained speakers don’t care). The typist might need to add in who has spoken, but I guess that’s all what the typist needs to think about. And with other people doing the thinking for the typist, the task becomes far easier that, let’s say, code a Brainfuck program.

Wait. When you are condign in Brainfuck, with its 8 character character set…is there still a meaningful distinction between a chord keyboard and a “regular” eight key keyboard?

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