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Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

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Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple? The company that has built its entire brand and product lines around "we know what's best for you and if you don't like the way we've done it, you're wrong"?

Yes. We expect the company that prides itself on having taste to avoid doing tasteless things.

Tastes differ.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#182
post #5

What surprises me most about gmail and AI is that they seem really quite bad at filtering out obvious spam. I get so many messages from people I have never heard from, on relatively new domains, with endings like "if this isn't relevant for you right now, say "not now" and I'll not circle back" (a clear attempt to allow unsubscribe without using the word). How is it that they haven't figured out how to stop these mes…

Google is also bad at not sending spam

I got a lot of group spam, where someone seems to have created a google group and added my mail to it. And then people answer the spam, and the answer is also send to everyone in the group

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#183
post #97

You can turn off the "smart" features in the settings page for gmail. I did this and find it to be much more usable!

The author points out that disabling smart features and personalization also disables message categorization, so you wind up with a different inbox, while disabling individual features doesn't disable the most annoying behaviors.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#184
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I chose to set a browser bookmark with the corresponding GET parameters.

Bookmarks is a surprisingly underutilized feature of browsers, I constantly see tons of people doing 5-6 clicks going to some page, I'm guessing simply they don't know about it. Similarly, lots of powerusers who don't know about "javascript:" bookmarks that basically behaves like tiny like browser extensions (the content-script part specifically) when you click on them.

And even when people use bookmarks they often don't bother to change the titles. Very irksome.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#185
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know everyone's tired of hearing this, but this doesn't happen on Linux. I know I know, it's different and a little janky here and there and maybe you have to find a replacement for one or two pieces of software. But like, you don't actually have to put up with this. There is a better way.

Doesn’t happen on mac either, right?

Coming from 10 years of Linux to macOS, Apple deserves praise for this point too.

I don't use Apple Intelligence, Safari, or Siri on my Mac, and I'm extremely happy to report that Apple does not nag me to use these features at all. THANK YOU APPLE.

Windows would open Edge for random reasons instead of my preferred browser to nudge me to use it, Cortana was a constant reminder in W10 because it was part of Windows Search, and of course, we all know how they push Copilot.

Apple isn't perfect (iCloud is fine on macOS, but iOS is quite misleading and often defaults to on even if you really don't want it), but overall my Mac respects my wishes as a user and it makes me look forward to using my computer as a tool.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#186
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know everyone's tired of hearing this, but this doesn't happen on Linux. I know I know, it's different and a little janky here and there and maybe you have to find a replacement for one or two pieces of software. But like, you don't actually have to put up with this. There is a better way.

Doesn’t happen on mac either, right?

It still does a tiny bit (iCloud Drive is quite pushy) but to uncomparably smaller extent vs Windows

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#187
The most annoying thing I noticed about Google trying to shoehorn “AI magic” into their products is Google Maps. I try to help someone navigate with a child in the backseat and they shoveled an AI button into their UI that is even active when you are navigating… Annoyed me so much. I already picked the supermarket I want to go to, now just get out of my way and get me there.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#188
post #151

I can appreciate LLMs for some use cases, but writing emails for the user is the one that really baffles me. It's one thing if you don't speak English well and could use some help making yourself understood, but the amount of native speakers using this is so strange to me. How does this help you? If you can write to the LLM telling it what kind of email to write, you might as well just write the email.

It’s the protocol of the brave new world, you and the recipient need a single sentence to communicate but the culture dictates using certain language and politeness + personal flavor so your AI helps you write culturally appropriate fluff and the person who receives it is using their AI to get rid if the fluff so you are both optimized for productivity through stripping the culture away making your interactions faceless and yourself fungible.

You can imagine this spread into dating as well, so you just have sex efficiently to optimize the breeding and hedonism.

At some point the protocol of expanding and then compacting with AI will also be removed to optimize the unneeded inference and people will again talk to each other but using the caveman language, stripped away from centuries of culture.

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#189
> I focus the message box to draft a reply, but there’s already one there. It was also generated by the language model. I delete it, replacing it with my own.

The really, really scary thing is how uncommon this approach is. I think.

My assumption is that most people roll with automated pre-written reply. Maybe tweaking a few things here and there, but ultimately preferring the all-too-convenient trade-off of the robots having written something close enough to what they wanted to say, using "better" words. Even when what they would have written themselves would have had some personality, even if it was their own flawed human one.

For the record, I am 100% with you on your approach (on the odd occasion that I must use gmail).

Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left

#190

I haven't used the Gmail UI in almost a decade now; I connect using my own email client. But this sounds terrible. I think the incentives at Google haven't changed. Engineers want promotions and in many teams how you achieve that is through pushing features with tons of user engagement. The features tend to include few options to opt out.

Did you mean investor engagement perhaps? Or some promotion committee engagement? AI is Google+ 2.0.
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