Someone is having a case of the Mondays!
Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
221–230 of 865 posts
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#222I 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.
The most frustrating thing to me is to receive a 5-paragraph-plus email that was clearly written with some AI that filled in the email with vapid and useless talking points, like "Let me know if you need any other blah blah blah; While there is clearly a need for system improvement, we are working hard to address the underlying and fundamental issue; This is a lesson that it's not just a feature, it's a critical path…
> receive a 5-paragraph-plus email that was clearly written with some AI
Which is promptly and ironically summarized by AI on the receiving side
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#223I haven’t seen the Gmail web UI in perhaps 15 years or so. I’ve been using it with various email clients and it works just fine.
The issues the author describes are issues with Gmail’s web interface, not with the email service itself.
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#224Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#225> I think we’re all used to user-hostile software these days [...] Malware. Call it what it is. Software that intentionally subverts and acts against the user’s intent is malware. It’s important to call malware what it is because people don’t even realize they shouldn’t use it when it’s not called malware. Instead, they get "used to" using malware.
Please do not call it malware, because it is not. It is just bad software UI.
Why not?
It's a software feature designed to benefit Google at the expense of the user.
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#226I 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.
[deleted]
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#227I 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.
Settings->See all settings->General Scroll down to: Grammar suggestions off Spelling suggestions off Writing suggestions off (probably the one you want)
Yup, I was just giving them "thumbs down" on every suggestion, but I know I am screaming into the void.
But the fact that this feature exists in its current form (opt-out) means that nobody who tested it internally had the balls to just say "this is fundamentally the wrong direction, we should probably not do this". Don't be evil teehee.
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#228What 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…
> on relatively new domains I'm seeing a lot of domains that are clearly registered to spam without a reputational hit to the root domain; for example, wh***teams.work spamming me on behalf of wh***teams.com. I wish Google'd link them together.
Fun fact!
Doing SEO/marketing tricks on behalf of your competitors which gets them penalized by Google is a form of blackhat SEO with a rich tradition & history.
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#229Please Google let me buy my email and move it to my own service without any restrictions and I will be thankful. I am now in too deep to move away, from my govt licenses to banks to everything else. Switching away from Gmail isn't possible for me, but I will keep trying, I won't give up but hopefully I would never have to realize how big a mistake this was. I feel like I might end up on the streets if gmail goes away…
Why can’t you migrate? It took me a year to move my business to protonmail. I had to change about 200 accounts but we finally moved. I’m curious what the hard limit is for you.
govt stuff, they have 3-6 month cycles for updating details in my country for certain stuff... stuff that can be changed online is better but there is stuff where i need to go to the office
Re: Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left
#230I still use gmail, and so far only a few spam messages have gone through. They really built a solid system, but the web ui is just not a good experience, so thank god for thunderbird too.