Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

it depends what you're writing! I see a lot of people use passive voice because they don't really know what they're talking about, or they lack confidence to assert something, or their thoughts aren't organized yet. ... Yes, there are some contexts when you want to and need to use the passive voice, but there are plenty of contexts where it weakens your presentation.

like anything else there are times where it's the better choice and times when it not, but focusing on avoiding it as a key lesson leads to writing which sounds like a list of assertions

xp I agree, but "this is frequently overused in certain contexts by inexperienced writers," is very different from "this is a mistake," and once Word starts flagging it every time, that nuance gets lost imo. It starts to look like the passive voice is always a mistake rather than a potentially - and only potentially! - iffy style choice.

It's like how some writing teachers will go through student work and cross out every adverb. Do some people overuse adverbs? Sure! Does that make adverbs a mistake? No, they're an essential part of the English language, and there are plenty of writers who can use them without sounding like a Bobbsey Twins book.

related to this, when I go back and write the word again and it "corrects" it again

this just happened to me. i don't know the place to turn it off. i use slide to type fwiw

Google search results for straightforward, one word answer queries being a whole page of links with nothing but SEO clickbait text as a preview, so you have to click a link and navigate the cookies/newsletter/notifications gauntlet, plus one handy promoted "Google snippet" which confidently answers the wrong question with something that isn't true

OTM. Once I stupidly googled the opening times of a huge store and just went by what Google told me. Won't do that again.

when I write a French word that's identical to the English word except for an accent mark, it helpfully removes the accent for me

The fact that you have to hold the alt button, press e and then press e again to get an é -- how in the world is someone going to accidentally make that typo?

I turn off all autocorrect and autosuggest features immediately upon using any program. They're useless trash.

^ my people!

this is all very well but no one is explaining how to turn this particular feature off in iOS

you write a word (spelled correctly), it takes, then you write the next word and the moment you've finished writing the second word the PREVIOUS word CHANGES to what the phone thought you wanted to write. it's diabolical

i don't know if this only happens with slide-to-type fwiw, or if it happens using normal hunt n peck as well

is it a more advanced version of the thing where it will change the next letter after a period into a capital letter? ... what is slide to type?

yeah i would turn it off but ideally i'd like to keep regular autocorrect where it fixes actual typos

i also use slide-to-type, if that's what it's called

yeah, the annoying thing is that I actually like some of the autocorrect/autosuggest stuff in Word when I'm writing in French, because I make stupid mistakes which it catches. But PowerPoint, unlike Word, can't figure out on its own which language you're using, and it's way more aggressive with the autocorrect.

that is indeed what apple's built-in version of swiftkey is called NA

anyone who doesn't use some version of slide-to-type is an animal imo

is that the thing where it suggests three words above the keyboard thing and you can just pick one rather than type the whole thing out?

no it's where you slide to type

your finger, that is

like if you want to type “the” you put your finger on the “t”, slide it to the “h”, then slide it to the “e”. each word is like you’re drawing a little squiggle that the keyboard can recognise as a word

i have never used this. I also don't use my thumbs to type on my phone.

I think of it like cursive typing lol

I am an animal though as I find that sometimes it's much faster and sometimes it creates long strings of scrabble-cheat weirdo words

another annoying thing about google autocomplete is it will start to fill in my intended search, and in the time i take to stop typing, usually a second or so, the autocomplete disappears even as i'm filling it in verbatim, leaving me to have to type out the whole thing anyway

I have a flip phone so I have to use T9word, which has a very long list of words it doesn't know and also, due to a glitch, briefly flashes an antisemitic slur at me every time I type the word "like."

I think I just try to replicate the same motions I use for typing on a computer keyboard on the phone keyboard because it is designed to be a facsimile of a computer keyboard ... thus, I type on my phone with the index and pointer fingers ...

I definitely use my thumbs to type on a phone, and hate slide-to-type. always seemed prone to errors, kind of think people who use it exclusively are animals lol

guess what: all humans are animals

Lily, that is a very unfortunate glitch!

i am a divine being of light, rob, so stuff it

oh, I didn't know that, sorry!

I can see how that would make slide-type hard

;-)

xp it is! I figured out how it's happening: if you hit 5-4-5, the phone starts to type "kik" (why, idk), then when you type 3 for "e," the word immediately changes to "like." The phone never actually types the slur. But because of the speed at which your brain processes the change, you "see" the slur before you see the word "like."

I'm Jewish, btw, and I've had this phone for a couple of years now but I've never fully gotten used to it calling me names.

time to start telling all your friends how much you dig things

Lily Dale, Kik is an instant messaging program that was popular a few years back. That might explain that part of it.

Just installed swiftkey after years of holding out and yeah it's pretty good, definitely faster and more accurate than my old hamfisted technique. But I just swiped 'tomorrow' somewhat inaccurately and it offered me tinnitus or gonorrhoea!

and you were like "maybe tomorrow?"

so glad i've held on to physical qwerty keyboards as a bulwark against all these "forward steps." though my phone still likes to propose dumb changes to what i've typed!!!

SwiftKey on android just gradually deteriorated to absolute shit for me over time. Repeatedly reinserts gibberish typos you've dismissed dozens of times already, not sure I've successfully typed the word "thanks" at the first attempt for like two years

Also insists on periodically refreshing the dictionary with its own preset lost of stuff so that e.g the T in youtube is always capitalised. I don't want to capitalise the dang t in youtube

But I just swiped 'tomorrow' somewhat inaccurately and it offered me tinnitus or gonorrhoea!

― Non meat-eaters rejoice – our culture has completely lost its way (ledge), Thursday, 11 March 2021 13:36 (forty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Regret to inform you that predictive text now features actual predictions, id cancel yr appts

Apple just tried to autocorrect Tuesday to Thursday in no world is this helpful.

excuse me, Ed, what is "Tuesday"? I've heard of Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, but not "Tuesday". so perhaps that is why Apple corrected you?

Judging by some comments both on the Grammys thread and things I see on FB whenever there's a big event/awards show: how hard it is for some people to watch free Network Television (thanks to weird cable plans, cutting the cord and using Roku/Firestick yadda yadda yadda...).

We pay for cable but due to wiring problems in our apartment we don't actually have it hooked up to any TV. It's cheaper for us to get cable plus internet than to get internet by itself. However, every once in a while we want to watch something on regular TV and its kind of a pain.

you can get a digital antenna for your tv. i'm guessing the people who are having issues are watching on a computer/device instead of a tv?

this isn't fully nationwide but a friend has been using this:

https://www.locast.org/

if you pay for cable you might be able to use their app. We have a DVR/Cable but never use it, just use tons of apps in the appleTV, but one of the apps is the Spectrum App, which is just access to their live TV. Don't have the DVR capabilities but the interface is actually better and faster.

yeah uh getting local pro sports games is definitely something that's gotten much worse over the last decade

lol.

"I've cut the cord!"

"great...well now we need to find a way to watch sports"

"oh, that's easy. CBS is showing the football games."

"oh cool. wait, I have to log in and prove I have a cable connection."

"oh, well that won't work. wait, here is YouTube TV, for $60/month, we can get access to specific channels, including CBS, so we can watch the games"

"you mean....like having Cable?"