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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

#271

Post by sandworm101 »

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…

>> an visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys.

That is nothing. Try to run through a forest chasing a deer. Your brain will be calculating paths around trees, planning each footfall based on 3d terrain scans in your peripheral vision, constantly recalculating the position and likely path of the deer, and all the while a subroutine is calculating the trajectory of the rock you are about to through at your (hopefully) future dinner. That is what the human brain evolved to do. In comparison, driving a car along a road is like watching paint dry.

Then think about what the deer brain is doing. It does all the same terrain mapping and 3d planning, but does so at double or triple the bandwidth. Deer see 300+ degrees, humans only 130ish.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#272

Post by nitrammm »

Angostura wrote: post #30
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.

I'm just going to pop in tomorrow and replace your keyboard with a new Dvorak layout one. OK with you?

That's hardly comparable. The SwiftKey keyboard is still fully functional. Yes, you can tell it to integrate with Bing if you want and they removed a forum for feature requests. What is the big fuzz exactly?

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#274

Post by xxs »

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.

The impression was before reaching that point

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#275

Post by indrora »

emberfiend wrote: post #144
merijnv wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you say "is this it?", but the multi-language support of literally all other Android keyboards I've used are basically unusable. Take Google's default keyboard, it requires you manually switch languages for swiping and predictive text to work. But that's completely unworkable for the way multi-lingual people end up actually typing texting. I swap back and forth across languages, even if just for 1 or 2 words…

What do you mean when you say "Google's keyboard"? I use Gboard and frequently swipe sentences which mix Spanish and English just fine. You enable "Multilingual typing" on the specific keyboard and then tick off languages from other installed keyboards to enable them. Maybe you haven't tried gboard for a long time?

There's some internal matrix of "Supported" clean movement, mostly between languages with an extensive shared vocabulary. You can enable Multilingual Typing theoretically anywhere, but it only really "works" among languages that share a layout and character dictionary.

But if you need to loanword a non-common word from English into another language (e.g. Hebrew), Gboard just can't do it. If you change character sets, you change entire dictionaries. SwiftKey has a unified dictionary among all languages and makes a best guess approximation based on the current language selected and then tries the other languages you have configured.

This means that if you're going along in, say, French, but then need to reference a word in Hebrew, you can swipe over to Hebrew, bang out a word, then swap back to French, type words in English (which get autocorrected in english) and then continue in French. This isn't really feasible in Gboard without a lot of back and forth.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#276

Post by _4rdf »

jaggs wrote: post #140
pjc50 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Time for a new certificate based web of trust?

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#277

Post by hot_gril »

moose_man wrote: post #2

Are tech companies that desperate that they need to do this? Maybe if it was bigger company, but this can't be a threat to Microsoft....They're all acting like starving rats feeding on their children.

Microsoft does this stuff. Like forcing Minecraft accounts to migrate onto MSFT accounts, which locked out a lot of older players by requiring the original email address used to be verified. There's no use in complaining about it; you should just anticipate that MSFT ruins everything it touches and get ready to switch.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#278

Post by geokon »

muyuu wrote: post #211
geokon wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The open source keyboard space on Android is weirdly incredibly deficient No way to type Chinese with an open source keyboard. And no way to do local speak-to-text (even English) with an open source keyboard

yep well, as far as I'm concerned they're all crap including SwiftKey esp. when compared with using a properly set-up computer phones aren't great for input, and perhaps won't be in the foreseeable future, but using proprietary closed keyboards with no roughly-equivalent alternatives just compounds the problem every time I want to type something substantial, in any language, I wait until I have access to a computer;…

Good reliable text to speak on mobile is quite seemless and pleasant. For instance to "type" messages or thoughts as you're biking. I used a proprietary offline one from Vivo and it was great (unfortunately the keyboard had other issues)

I'm not a native speaker but Microsoft's pinyin on windows and Google's pinyin input system on Linux both give much better results than the few open source alternatives I've tried .. so the situation is only marginally better at the desktop (I haven't tried text to speak on the desktop)

It's one of those weird areas where theyre both supposedly old solved problems - but for some reason nobody has bothered to make open source solutions

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#280

Post by scubbo »

lukeschlather wrote: post #244
a_bonobo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What really blows my mind about driving is that with a little bit of training, we get a feel for how big the car is. You can squeeze into a tight parking lot and you won't scratch your or the other car! By feel! We can somehow transfer our feeling for how big our body is to avoid running into obstacles, to feel how big our car is. There is nothing in the history of mankind that would need for this to be a possible sk…

We evolved to wear all sorts of clothing. And really when you think about it the brain is probably the descendant of some parasite which crawled into another organism and used the exo-organism as a puppet, so in a sense it's exactly what a brain was originally adapted for is glomming on weird new appendages.

> when you think about it the brain is probably the descendant of some parasite which crawled into another organism and used the exo-organism as a puppet

I haven't heard this claim before - any specific reading I should look for?

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