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Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

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Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#131

Post by toyg »

mFixman wrote: post #90
neilv wrote: post #7

The author later speculates on why: > I actually was thinking along the lines of "interesting coincidence" but now I actually believe it is not a coincidence and they really did do this just to prevent people discussing welding Bing and "AI" into the FUCKING KEYBOARD

A lot of product companies are closing user forums from the early 2010s. My guess is that there's some legal issue involved. Maybe the lawyers were convinced that somebody posting illegal or confidential info on an unmoderated forum is a big risk, and deleting the entire things is cheaper than paying some moderators.

> My guess is that there's some legal issue involved

They are just cutting costs. Forums need moderators (I am one of them, lol), and businesses can't rely on volunteers for that. Expect them to open new forums whenever they need to push adoption of some new product, re-hiring mods as part of the budget for that push.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#132

Post by dustedcodes »

jevgeni wrote: post #118
dustedcodes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

> I think if you equate "helping Ukraine defend itself against ethnic eradication" with "support an awful war" your judgement on what is a balanced debate is not reliable.

I said I support the Ukraine, but I don't believe in everything that the mainstream media is telling us. What you said there is quite a jump from what I said and exactly the type of nonsense that people would say in order to silence any meaningful debate.

I think if you believe that the support which the Ukraine gets from NATO countries is only to "help the Ukraine" and that NATO has no underlying geopolitical agenda and you don't wonder why we didn't support other nations at war with similar enthusiasm or why we never held ourselves accountable for the crimes committed in Iraq then I think your judgement on a balanced debate is not reliable. But that's okay, we both should be able to voice our thoughts and opinion and neither of us should get bombarded with replies which make us uncomfortable to debate and effective silence us.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#133

Post by einpoklum »

AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #106
dustedcodes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's interesting. "Support for the war" is not an expression that makes a lot of sense to me. Nobody in their right mind wakes up in the morning and tells themselves "yes, I am going to fight in the war just for the sake of it, I love wars", those who fight usually believe that although war is gruesome (which it is), they will be in a better shape if they continue fighting than if they just surrender to the mercy o…

Those who fight wars, and those who support (getting into) those wars, are often not the same people. And this is mostly true in Ukraine as well IMHO.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#134

Post by nivenkos »

Daneel_ wrote: post #29

Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly does swiftkey offer over the usual keyboard? A quick google seems to bring up "better predictive text" and "better multi-language support" - is that it?

The text prediction is phenomenal, it even works naturally between different languages.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#135

Post by Tistron »

jeroenhd wrote: post #47
Daneel_ wrote: post #29

Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly does swiftkey offer over the usual keyboard? A quick google seems to bring up "better predictive text" and "better multi-language support" - is that it?

The predictive text combined with the predictive autocomplete are so good that they changed the way I type on my phone. I don't even need to hit the right letters anymore, the need for precisions has disappeared almost completely. This has massively sped up typing on my phone. There's also a wide variety of customisations (including an easy height slider and several input modes that you can adjust to any device) that…

Curious about that. I don't exactly like Microsoft, but them buying it made me trust it more with my data than some random small company. I expect MS to have routines around data security and they they have very little incentive to use my data in illegal ways, eg try to sniff my passwords or something like that. So with MS owning it, I trust more that they don't store text written in password fields (and it never suggests any of my passwords) than if it's some small company that I've never heard of and making a keyboard without a clear way of monetizing it (though I'd absolutely pay quite a lot for SwiftKey).

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#136

Post by ilyt »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #83
yarg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same shit happens when driving. Our internal understanding of our own bodies seems to adapt to take the tools we're using into account. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_schema https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=related:5uSissKo6EgJ:...

> The same shit happens when driving. In a broader sense, it never fails to amaze me that a kilo and a half of goopy cells that evolved to work out where the plants that won't kill you and where to trap rabbits in the next valley are - things that are, generally speaking, not much further than you can see - can visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughl…

> while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed

Predators are way faster than our walking speed. And the faster road is the more gentle any turn is so going 120km/h on a highway doesn't really require that much more reflex than running on twisty forest path.

> Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too.

That has nothing to do with cars, people travelled before them.

You might say "but it is bigger area" but it is also scaled up to car size. And with clear landmarks, hell, even signs telling you where you are and where to go.

That's significantly easier than going into dense forest, that also changes look based on seasons.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#137

Post by aaron695 »

egeozcan wrote: post #27
unpopularopp wrote: post #10

> This one hurts, it really hurts. I think this hurts worse than Musk buying/poisoning/killing Twitter. I've mentioned this before but a keyboard feels like an extension of your body People need to take a break. Being terminally online and complaining about everything is not a healthy way of life.

If a keyboard app feels like an extension of your body, it means you write a lot. It doesn't mean that you are "terminally online", and even if you were online all the time, that's a personal choice and not being online all the time doesn't even solve the problem shared here. I'd even say, perhaps it's best not to tell people that their problems aren't problems to begin with. I'm not saying one should care, it'd be e…

[dead]

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#138

Post by kergonath »

rkachowski wrote: post #115
xxs wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One can tell the British background by the mix of metric ('kilo') and imperial ('mile'). Mentioning that as the way we adapt with different units, feeling natural about them, and getting defensive about them, too.

I mean, "4 hour drive to get to England" also puts quite a limit on the search space.

A lot of France and Belgium is about one 4 hour drive away from England ;)

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#139

Post by CatWChainsaw »

mFixman wrote: post #90
neilv wrote: post #7

The author later speculates on why: > I actually was thinking along the lines of "interesting coincidence" but now I actually believe it is not a coincidence and they really did do this just to prevent people discussing welding Bing and "AI" into the FUCKING KEYBOARD

A lot of product companies are closing user forums from the early 2010s. My guess is that there's some legal issue involved. Maybe the lawyers were convinced that somebody posting illegal or confidential info on an unmoderated forum is a big risk, and deleting the entire things is cheaper than paying some moderators.

Seems like a lot of knowledge is about to be lost/paywalled from moves like this.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#140

Post by jaggs »

pjc50 wrote: post #96
jaggs wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A per pro of nothing, I believe strongly that all online identities created towards the end of 2022 should be subject to a 'human verification test'. Just in case. Not sure how it would work, but just suggesting it might be useful/valuable.

Why end of 2022? It's kind of an ongoing problem. And one that Musk has very much failed to deal with; someone I follow has a different crypto-spam bot reply to every single post they make!

The end of 2022 is when the tools gained enough mass exposure, and more critically ease of use, that anyone anywhere could set up an account, and start creating 'humans' for future use. Before then, it was a specialist task, so much less common I think.

From now on (Day G1?), we're going to be awash with AI written stuff. Literally drowned in it. The first AI drafted marketing emails have already started hitting my inbox, and that's just the start I guess.

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