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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

#141

Post by Forgeties79 »

xp84 wrote: post #67
platevoltage wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you on this. All I hear is how behind Apple is with AI. More and more I'm feeling like thats a feature not a bug.

Let's not pretend that fact is anything but a happy accident, though. The only reason AI has been practically scrubbed from their website is to try to make us forget the time they preannounced fantastically brilliant AI capabilities and then delivered less than nothing -- not even fixing Siri, which is the obvious #1 product in the world that needs to be rebuilt on LLMs.

Apple, maybe because of ego, is often not the major mover on anything they didn’t come up with first. They tend to take a wait and see approach with a lot of ideas. Hell look at VR (which I’m surprised they even did but clearly they see longterm value)

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

#143

Post by thedanbob »

green_wheel wrote: post #71

> This time I’m doing things the right way by connecting my own domain to a mail host. I’m currently with Fastmail since they were by far the most popular option when I asked for suggestions on the fediverse. Question for the general public: why Fastmail over Proton?

It's been a few years since I went with Fastmail over Proton, but if I remember correctly Proton prioritizes privacy while Fastmail prioritizes other features which were higher up on my list, like storage (not as important to me now), custom domains, email aliases. Fastmail also gives you static webhosting, which I don't think Proton offers (could be wrong).

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

#144

Post by neogodless »

BeetleB wrote: post #101

I don't get it. Just don't use the Gmail interface. Use your own mail reader. Don't conflate "Gmail the UI" with "Gmail the mail provider". Having said this - I never used Gmail for anything serious - I had my own domain + mail etc since before Gmail existed, and the reason was I got tired of "free" tools making my life miserable.

> Sure, I could switch to a different mail client and never see any of these language model features, but my experience these past months has left such a bad taste that all I’m looking for now is a clean break.

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

#145

Post by smohare »

happymellon wrote: post #44
Our_Benefactors wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

As someone who uses more than one monitor, my Mac has far more issues than my Linux boxes.

Huh, I’ve never once had a problem with multiple monitors and macs over the last 15 years. But at most I’m running two monitors.

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

#146

Post by drnick1 »

xp84 wrote: post #119
drnick1 wrote: post #11

As someone who hosts their own email, I dislike Gmail as much as anyone. But your issue is this: > I go to check my email in Gmail’s web UI.

Gmail has three main features that matter (to me at least) -- and they are huge, very important features. And as much as I don't like this fact, using their official web or mobile clients are the only way to get them: 1. Accurate, deterministic, fast search of your email 2. Whatever they call the categorized inbox, I use "Primary," "Promotions," and "Updates." 3. Labels implemented as labels, not mapped clumsily onto…

Thunderbird works well for my needs. I just want to see my emails categorized in reverse chronological order. I don't expect or want any kind of filtering; I would just Sieve filters for that (running on my own server). Perhaps I am just old fashioned. Should I want AI assistance to write an email, I would fire up a local model such as GPT-OSS. Local models are more than capable for trivial tasks like this, and a smaller model on CPU only would also work.

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

#148

Post by verdverm »

lpolovets wrote: post #28

Related to this, I hate how aggressively Google pushes Gemini and all of the privacy implications involved with that. 1) Lots of features got moved around and there are now many "Write with AI", "Generate image with AI", etc buttons polluting user interfaces even though I don't use them and don't want to use them. 2) Actually, I would use some of these features if I didn't have to do a full opt-in to Smart Features f…

I've had similar complaints about GCloud, they shove Ai callouts everywhere, there are pages with half a dozen of these. Completely unnecessary, just need one button, not in every form and multiple callouts how "ai can help with..."

They have over indexed hard and turned off (formerly) loyal customers. I'm on proton + vivaldi + digital ocean + opencode-go now, replacements for almost every product area. Still need to make the switch to GrapheneOS

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

#149

Post by everforward »

larrik wrote: post #53
Our_Benefactors wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

On the other hand, if you swap "Linux" and "Windows" in your complaint, you get my experience. Windows is a hassle to get working for advanced use cases, and then every quarter they nuke my settings via windows update. I just can't do it. I managed to go about 6 months last year on Windows for the first time since ~2010, but nope. Not worth it.

This mirrors my experience.

Windows gives you nice sliders for things, which they will happily break on a whim. Linux forces you to memorize a Lovecraftian string of characters to do something, but it will generally stick for a long time.

I use both, with differing ideologies. My Linux is heavily customized with keybinds and semi-niche software that enables my workflows because I know it will stick. On my Windows machines, I've accepted that Microsoft owns that machine and I have to adapt my workflow to fit their sensibilities.

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

#150

Post by dirkc »

glerk wrote: post #59

I just can't stand how Gmail is putting a red line under every other sentence that I write (telling me that my writing style is a "mistake") and aggressively nudging me to rewrite it to make it sound more like AI. Whoever thought such a product would be a good idea should be fired.

I get the blue squiggly underline with suggestions on how I can improve what I write. I bet if I open up two drafts it will happily suggest contradictory improvements on it's own suggestions.

I'm starting to develop a squiggly line blindness, so be it if grammar in my email suffers :)

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