Good lord that's scary. Rapidly ushering in the future where none of our words are our own. Anyone ever read Roald Dahl's short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator ? 10/10 strongly recommend, about an engineer who develops a computer-like machine able to compose fiction. Googling "the great automatic grammatizator pdf" gives a .doc version as the top result, for me anyway.
I despise the homogenization of thought that these tools lead to. My words are my own, even my typos.
I don't think typos communicate any information of value.
I think if you are a (paid?) enterprise user, they do not do this. On the other hand, sussing out what is and is not fair game is quite a lot easier with a service such as Fastmail.
Doesn't have to be "enterprise". Anyone can pay $5/mo for GSuite ( https://gsuite.google.com ), which includes gmail and a ton of other tools. Furthermore, it's on your own domain rather than @gmail.com, which is not only better (you truly own the email address), it's also a hell of a lot more professional and makes it easier to migrate to other services if you wish to. To put it bluntly, if anyone here is complainin…
Why can’t I buy gmail and just use regular @gmail? Would love all the features of GSuite, but a custom domain name I would pay even more to avoid. Unless you’re running a business, it looks bizarre. For some in the development industry / those who write technical blogs I can imagine that being useful at times, but still......
Here is something funny. Google's Japanese Input on Android does English dictionary lookup when you're in romaji mode. And, here is the kicker: you have to use exact spelling , or no dice.
The exact spelling for Japanese is a lot more reasonable, though. In English there are lots of spellings for the same pronunciation. In Japanese there is only one spelling for each pronunciation. If you get it wrong, then you are writing a different word and there is very little you can do in the general case. Of course the problem with romaji is our habit of spelling things wrong :-) To highlight the irony, "romaji"…
My comment is about English lookup when the keyboard is flipped into romaji mode, and the user isn't composing kana.
This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]). I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: ( http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s... ) [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references
This is an opportunity to stand out by using less common phrases.
This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]). I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: ( http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s... ) [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references
This is happening everywhere. We're being made more and more homogeneous. The same applies to other aspects of our life, e.g. music, films etc. The general rule is what is popular is safer, so it's being promoted more. In this case what is less popular is not even given a chance to surface - no matter if it's popular radio or YouTube recommendations.
I feel like we are becoming less homogeneous. When I was a kid everyone watched cable television after dinner and everyone watched all of the same shows. Thursday night was Friends. Friday night was Full House and Family Matters, etc. Now I find everyone I know watches all kinds of shows, many of which I've never even heard of. Not to mention YouTube which is whole new layers upon layers of content. In an odd way, I actually kind of miss the "bonding" cable television used to give the populace (but not really).
I just chose shows as an example. But I feel the same happens with reading, music, technology, politics, etc.
This is happening everywhere. We're being made more and more homogeneous. The same applies to other aspects of our life, e.g. music, films etc. The general rule is what is popular is safer, so it's being promoted more. In this case what is less popular is not even given a chance to surface - no matter if it's popular radio or YouTube recommendations.
I feel like we are becoming less homogeneous. When I was a kid everyone watched cable television after dinner and everyone watched all of the same shows. Thursday night was Friends. Friday night was Full House and Family Matters, etc. Now I find everyone I know watches all kinds of shows, many of which I've never even heard of. Not to mention YouTube which is whole new layers upon layers of content. In an odd way, I…
Personally I think you’re both right. We are becoming less homogeneous as a society, but the people within those subgroups interact much less than they used to, at least in person.
This is happening everywhere. We're being made more and more homogeneous. The same applies to other aspects of our life, e.g. music, films etc. The general rule is what is popular is safer, so it's being promoted more. In this case what is less popular is not even given a chance to surface - no matter if it's popular radio or YouTube recommendations.
Globalised phenomena (Cola, Marvel, McDonald’s) can have localized meanings (trashy/hyped/cool/classy/masculine/feminine). It’s not an either/or thing. In sociology this is dubbed glocalization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glocalization
that is watering down the point i think. with companies becoming more and more like amazon, google, and apple, who care about statistics than individual customers, and many, many other aspects of modern society, we are just turning humans into numbers. everything we do is channeled and controlled, which isn’t negated by mcdonalds serving dim sum or whatever in china or other “glocalizations”.
To add a third, I have a problem with my personal emails being used as a corpus of text to train these models. Maybe they're using only my emails to train a model for me, and turning that feature off disables them doing so. Maybe they're using everyone's email to train a generic model. Of course, they've been (machine) reading your emails to provide ads since forever, so in that sense maybe this isn't really that new…
We're training Smart Compose from highly anonymized global corpus of consumer email. We've stopped using emails for Ad targeting entirely, and the enforcement is quite strict, as reported in June: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html
I think if you are a (paid?) enterprise user, they do not do this. On the other hand, sussing out what is and is not fair game is quite a lot easier with a service such as Fastmail.
I don't think this is true. When our large university switched to gmail, all I could find was that they said they would not use our emails for targeting advertising. Seems like that leaves a lot of other possibilities like profile creation (they just won't use it to target ad at you), machine learning of all types, cross correlation with my personal email for who knows what, etc.
I pay for FastMail. Voted with my wallet two years ago. If I get any impression someone is writing me messages with this feature, I'll filter them into my trash. I want to speak to people, not Google.
I got news for you, a large chunk of the HN userbase is on mobile and has been using predictive keyboard input for years. A large chunk of people on the internet, in fact. You're speaking to robots right now.