Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

mastodon.social

331–338 of 338 posts

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#331
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seen on Techmeme: " Similarweb: in March 2023, Twitter's traffic fell 7.7% YoY, the third straight month of decline, web visitors fell 3.3% YoY, and Android app DAUs fell 9.8% YoY "

That's a small fall considering they removed more than 60% of their staff costs.

Staff has nothing to do with it, really. What's a problem for a social network is when its users are leaving.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#332

> This one hurts, it really hurts. I think this hurts worse than Musk buying/poisoning/killing Twitter. I've mentioned this before but a keyboard feels like an extension of your body People need to take a break. Being terminally online and complaining about everything is not a healthy way of life.

I'm just going to pop in tomorrow and replace your keyboard with a new Dvorak layout one. OK with you?

Not a problem for me, I can type on either at equal speed. The biggest problem is using vim.

I will be impressed, though, if you can find (or make) Dvorak keycaps for my keyboard that match its current style.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much no revenue opportunities. I was the PM for a keyboard app with millions of downloads and was the most downloaded keyboard app in India. But there is no way to monetize it. Early on, the OEMs would pay us to have our keyboards in their images as it would give them more customizability, better local language support and end-to-end localization. The rev share on each device sold, was enough to keep the produ…

> no way to monetize it I don’t understand this. Where you giving it away?

Our keyboard was free to the end users and we made our money from OEMs giving us a few cents for each device that came with our keyboard as a default app.

We also had a pro version, but as our app was focused on the Indian market, and the Indian users were not big on paid apps back in early 2010s, there's wasn't much revenue in that either.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#334
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scotland and Britain are separate countries in the UK with separate histories. No-one means the island when they talk about being British, they mean the descendants of the Britons.

You're incorrect, so have the obligatory CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

Thanks for the reference. Unfortunately I can’t edit the comment anymore.

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#335
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same shit happens when driving. Our internal understanding of our own bodies seems to adapt to take the tools we're using into account. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_schema https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=related:5uSissKo6EgJ:...

This strongly resonates with my memory of Marshall McLuhan and his book Understanding Media: Extensions of man; Where he defines media as any extension of ourselves or our senses. Arguing that a car (but in essence) its wheels, are extensions of our legs, and by giving us the ability to traverse further faster shaped our perception and the evolution of society. However it's a large book and I'll have to give it a rer…

Logical maturity (AI) pushed to extreme revives human maturity

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#336
post #315
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good reliable text to speak on mobile is quite seemless and pleasant. For instance to "type" messages or thoughts as you're biking. I used a proprietary offline one from Vivo and it was great (unfortunately the keyboard had other issues) I'm not a native speaker but Microsoft's pinyin on windows and Google's pinyin input system on Linux both give much better results than the few open source alternatives I've tried ..…

it may sound overkill, but I mostly use my own personal modifications to ibus-typing-booster for my input (formerly to ibus directly) it works well enough for me on my computer, and i simply avoid phones for input - anything "phone" is factory-lobotomised and nothing else should really be expected, and even if the software were to suddenly be best effort, you'd still have to overcome very taxing interface limitations…

Yeah, those are yaks I'm not ready to shave. And I do mostly stick to voice messages on the go. But some people are allergic, so I do try to use voice-to-text then. I'm pretty sure the Ubuntu package for input method googlepinyin is entirely offline so I'm not too concerned. More just disappointed with how far behind opensource options are - when these things have been around for a decade+ and are described in textbook by this point

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#337
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but Twitter used to be much more solid prior to you know, losing a lot of its work-force. Reddit, on the other hand, has improved since a few years ago

I've honestly not noticed a worsening of twitter's availability since the previous guys stopped being in charge. Perhaps many of the removed jobs were in non-technical areas of content moderation.

They had a ton of downtime on multiple occasions last few months. This wasn't the case in 2022 when I got on almost every day to check on the Ukraine-Russia war news.

Now I don't spend as much time on it because Twitter actively pushes its politics and hides Ukraine-Russia war content. I often check out stuff on Mastodon since it doesn't have a biased algorithm

Re: Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey

#338
post #7

The author later speculates on why: > I actually was thinking along the lines of "interesting coincidence" but now I actually believe it is not a coincidence and they really did do this just to prevent people discussing welding Bing and "AI" into the FUCKING KEYBOARD

This might not be far off from the truth. SwiftKey, Edge, and several other Microsoft properties are actually under the auspices of Bing Ads now. A while ago, Microsoft made the wild move to shuffle a bunch of branches under the leadership of former Yandex CTO Mikhail Parakhin. Gradually, Mikhail began to make moves that caused a fair number of the original Edge team -- those who had come from IE, brought up Spartan,…

Most of the bad things I see coming from MS lately are like 90% Bing driven, and 10% writing everything for the web and not native.

eg. with Edge it's blatantly clear it's not made asking "how can it be the best tool for the user" but "how can we best use the user to drive Bing+GPT"

Thank fuck for Brave.

Post reply on HN