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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

#321

Post by selcuka »

bobmarleybiceps wrote: post #259
munk-a wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically, lets imagine LLMs as compilers - you're passing your prompt through to get some pretty language at the end. Don't send me your compiled code, send me your prompt. Let it be rude, if the wording is awkward I guarantee I can understand it just as well as an LLM, ignore the fact that my daughter just graduated and offering hallucinated platitudes. Send me the actual question, don't make me try and decompil…

yeah this is what drives me crazy about LLM writing. Most of the time the prompt has all the info you need and is like maybe a few sentences. Then the LLM expands it into a few paragraphs... I guess if someone is writing like a big fancy email to send out in bulk, maybe using an LLM to improve would make sense... but just emailing some coworkers it seems super lazy and insulting to send an LLM output :-I

Some people send LLM generated replies in Slack chats! Now there's that.

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

#322

Post by andrekandre »

outofpaper wrote: post #280
not_a_bot_4sho wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It's almost as though someone was put in charge of AI growth and all they care about is token burn.

thats completely illogical and no business would ever waste their money something like that (eyes-looking emoji)

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

#324

Post by ryandrake »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #293
ikrenji wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you yourself are OK with being talked to rudely, doesn't mean others are. In fact I'd wager most aren't consciously or unconsciously...

Yeah that attitude will not get you far in life unless you're Steve Jobs, and it'll sink your ship unless you're obnoxiously rich. And even if you're either/both of those things: A. you can and should act better, and B. people will always attach an asshole-asterisk to your name for the rest of your life and probably even a good while after.

Exactly. In my 25+ year career, I've encountered maybe two dozen or so people whose e-mails and chats were terse, yet admittedly succinct, one-liners and most of them were also raging assholes to work with. The ones who also didn't use capital letters or punctuation in their communications were uniformly assholes.

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

#325

Post by andrekandre »

coldpie wrote: post #20
triMichael wrote: post #10

While I haven't had this issue with Gmail, I recently got a new computer and the first two weeks for full of moments like this. It's shocking to me how much we've let popups go rampant on everything. Perhaps the worst offender is Windows update, as it won't even let you use your own computer without clicking through 10 screens refusing all sorts of products they are trying to push on you.

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.

using linux feels like macos back in the mid-2000s and windows (in a good way) in the early 2000s, like its some kind "operating system" for you to do things instead of being advertised to...

its such a breath of fresh air

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

#326

Post by selcuka »

not_a_bot_4sho wrote: post #222
sebmellen wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, but LLMs are inherently lossy. There is no guaranteed way for the second AI to extract the original prompt from the text.

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

#327

Post by cadamsdotcom »

Looking for your alternative?

Let me give you some (non financially motivated) praise for Fastmail.

It has everything Gmail has - even app passwords, hide my email, and ios integration. The only criticism is the calendar doesn’t autocomplete addresses so that’s a bit more typing than I would like. But everything you do in Fastmail is instant. They live up to the name!

Once you try it and go back, you’ll be shocked - Gmail makes you stare at its logo for multiple seconds while it shrugs and eventually loads.. then takes over the top of your inbox with “try our new AI features!” which never remembers that you dismissed it 50 times in a row. Everything in gmail is SO slow, while Fastmail doesn’t even bother with animations. No animations will confuse you until you settle in and realise that yes, things can be nice.

Fastmail data migration brought across my 22 years of emails over the course of about 30 hours with zero help from me. Search on Fastmail finds everything - even back to when you could only get Gmail with a friend code. There’s nothing left on the other side, it’s all here with me.

Going back to my brand new startup inbox (G Suite) gives me the same feelings I get wandering a castle ruin.

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

#328

Post by munk-a »

saltcured wrote: post #313
munk-a wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically, lets imagine LLMs as compilers - you're passing your prompt through to get some pretty language at the end. Don't send me your compiled code, send me your prompt. Let it be rude, if the wording is awkward I guarantee I can understand it just as well as an LLM, ignore the fact that my daughter just graduated and offering hallucinated platitudes. Send me the actual question, don't make me try and decompil…

Tangentially, yes, let's imagine LLMs as compilers. How insane is it to advocate the usage of these non-deterministic compilers, where each time you compile may produce different semantics? And then people resort to saving and hand-editing the compiled output. But when they want to change the source, they recompile and have to start over hand-editing the output again.

Actually, in professional usage in a technical setting this is my prime objection to heavily LLM driven development. Were the tools in usage deterministic then I'd be a lot less objecting to the mandating of their incorporation into workflows.

I want to be reading, writing, testing and maintaining the software at the same layer. Right now extreme AI usage leads to reading, testing and maintaining happening in a less expressive language than writing and guess which of those four activities developers enjoy the least and find the hardest - it sure isn't writing.

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

#329

Post by phyzome »

programmertote wrote: post #285

Not related to using LLMs for writing email, but something that bothers me about using Gmail lately. There were a couple of lass action lawsuits (like this one: www.GoogleWebAppActivityLawsuit.com) against Google. The emails from both lawsuits went straight to my Gmail account's 'Spam' folder. I'm glad I review my spam box regularly. Hopefully, it's just the false positive effect of the Gmail's spam filter.

GMail users sometimes don't see my messages because they get sent to spam. (These are just normal person-to-person emails.)

Google used to have pretty good spam detection but now they seem to have cranked the dial over to err on the side of hiding mail the user actually wanted. It's not a good situation.

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

#330

Post by gs17 »

It's really bizarre at this point. I'm okay with things like having one-click options for simple replies like "That time works for me" (Google Messages on Android is hilariously bad at these but it's at least useful occasionally). I'm not okay with it suggesting a whole point-by-point response to someone else.

Today I had an email from a colleague where it had a suggested reply so large it didn't fit in the preview box. The response was the usual LLM "sounds good but doesn't say anything" prose. It's not just unhelpful — it's a waste of everyone's time!

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