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

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?"

Autosaving. Sometimes you don’t want to save your work, just want to play around and tweak it to try something different.

Yes! This is why I feel more comfortable writing drafts on a regular old Word document and saving it to my computer, instead of using Google docs or or a Word doc that autosaves or whatever. There's an unease about knowing that my every sentence is being saved to the cloud as I write it that really hampers my ability to relax and just write.

lol esp since I used to write out difficult conversations i was about to have at work by scripting them in Word.

come back to Word months later, find all these files named "Doc1" that read "Thank you for joining. Now, I want to explain why I am upset about xx thing you just did."

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

tbh if you don't have this need and don't actually want to watch shows in general it's really not a problem

sports are the only thing I watch live! and tbh I pirate most of that which I can't watch, or I sign up for free trials of things (I have ten YoutubeTV accounts with ten diff cards)

I've come to realize over the past few months that I watch a lot less media than most people I know. I legitimately don't know what a Roku or Fire actually is, tbf, and I'm NOT trying to lord that as some sort of testament to my superiority. I actually find it a bit weird that I don't care about these things. Just not the sort of thing me or my partner are interested in.

I can get CBS by connecting an antenna to my tv! Same as it’s ever been

an... antenna?

does that support Bluetooth

no, I prop my bluetooth up with a dictionary

well played

I've come to realize over the past few months that I watch a lot less media than most people I know. I legitimately don't know what a Roku or Fire actually is, tbf, and I'm NOT trying to lord that as some sort of testament to my superiority. I actually find it a bit weird that I don't care about these things. Just not the sort of thing me or my partner are interested in.

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Monday, March 15, 2021 8:35 PM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i haven't had a streaming subscription for almost a year. i feel a little bad because my partner likes to watch shows and stuff more than i do, but thankfully he seems pretty happy just watching stuff on his phone. i can't fully explain why but sitting down and watching something for more than five minutes is .. never something i want to do.

I've come to realize over the past few months that I watch a lot less media than most people I know. I legitimately don't know what a Roku or Fire actually is, tbf, and I'm NOT trying to lord that as some sort of testament to my superiority. I actually find it a bit weird that I don't care about these things. Just not the sort of thing me or my partner are interested in.

― it's like edging for your mind (the table is the table), Monday, March 15, 2021 3:35 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Do you not watch streaming services at all? Because that's all a Roku is, a device to watch streaming services on a TV (that isn't already equipped for them) -- not much to it really.

FWIW tho I can't think of the last time I watched a Netflix or Prime type show. Maybe Long Strange Trip (the Grateful Dead multi-part doc) which was easily over a year ago. The Roku is really only used by my kids.

an... antenna?

They actually make digital antennas that look like old-fashioned rabbit ear antennas now. Right now I'm using a pair I got at Walmart for like $10. It's actually way better getting channels than the wing-like pair I had with a prior TV.

^^And there more expensive versions that have a greater range.

thanks for explaining that, man alive! i really had no idea lol.

we have Netflix, which my partner uses to watch anime and cartoons while he cooks or works, and which we use mostly to watch Star Trek re-runs.

but no TV. or, i mean, we have one, but it isn't even plugged in or hooked up to anything. just sitting in a closet.