You’re right that I didn’t sufficiently consider the “was” in that sentence. Perhaps there’s something I’m missing though, because I haven’t seen anything that would suggest X is left. When I put my right hand in the position indicated in the OP, my index finger (Y) points upwards, with my thumb (X) pointing right, making an L shape. My middle finger (z) comes out towards me.

However, most of my experience with coordinate systems is with abstract, mathsy stuff, and I don’t have much experience with any of these softwares; there may be something obvious that I’m missing.

I don’t think that’s correct. Here’s a drawing I did when trying to get my head around this.

drawing

I find that trying to make sense of terms like “to the left” tricky when we can rotate the directional cube any way we want. For example, in my drawing for “Y-up, left handed”, the red X axis is pointed leftwards. However, we could rotate the unit vector cube so that the X axis is pointed right, and the Y axis is pointing up (i.e. the orientation we’re most familiar with for 2D graphs). The Z axis would then be pointing away from us, into the plane of the paper/screen.

In contrast, if we oriented the Y-up right-handed cube in the same way, then the Z axis would be oriented as if to come out of the plane of the screen/page, towards us.

These distinctions only matter when we add a third dimension, so the left or right handedness is basically a question of "when we add the third axis to a 2D square made by the other two axes, does the third axis come towards us or away from us? I apologise if this hasn’t made things any clearer — I am able to make things make sense by imagining the rotations in my head, but not everyone is able to visualise them like that.

I don’t think that’s right. The post that you linked to includes this link, which includes this snippet:

"First, instead of labeling coordinate axes with X, Y and Z, we’re introducing more descriptive axis names:

Left (was -Y)

Up (was Z)

Forward (was X) "

That sounds pretty cool. I don’t know much about Piefed — would we still be able to access posts from Lemmy instances?

I really enjoyed reading this piece, thanks for sharing.

Your writing is so stylish and punchy that I found myself frequently highlighting or annotating sections, sentences or phrases (I try to annotate as I read when I find something that grabs me, as part of an ongoing quest to read more thoughtfully). I’m working on improving my own writing, so it’s always a useful exercise whenever I find writing that I enjoy so much that it helps me to understand my own taste in writing. I like your rhythm, in particular.

You caused me to think a lot about my own experience at one of the fancy UK universities (one that has a particularly strong Effective Altruist crowd). My time there radicalised me in the same way that your time at Google affected you. It’s quite striking to me that although growing up in poverty looks very different in the UK compared to in Brazil, there are aspects that are remarkably constant. For instance, how naïve young people are told that they are special in order to make us ignorant of (and complicit in) our own mistreatment and the oppression of those ostensibly beneath us.