I have always already disabled autocorrect. That this seems to be a minority position surprises me.
Maybe the content moderators and the drone operators could switch jobs with each other every few months.
1: I've come to rely on it, so its mistakes are indeed aggravating. Like how it doesn't tell you when you've typed "compliment" instead of "complement."
It probably breaks down by how well you type. I'm a bad typist -- touch typing, but slow and error-ridden, and autocorrect speeds me up a lot because I don't have to go back and fix all the THis, adn, defendnat, and so on. I make enough errors that it works for that it's a much bigger profit than the loss from miscorrections.
Something that does annoy me is that I think I've developed ingrained misspellings because they're corrected before I noticed I misspelled the word.
Phone autocorrect bothers me more than MS Word autocorrect. Phone autocorrect gets very insistent about what I must have meant, sometimes substituting something incorrect or nonsensical. Also it really wants me to capitalize things I grumpily do not capitalize, to wit: god, bay area.
I don't mind red-squiggle line flagging misspellings. I just wish it didn't require so much interruption of thought and motion to decline their unhelpful intrusion on the phone or ipad.
Or what 6 said. Especially the part about autocorrect being doggedly insistent on a single instance.
I like it, assuming we're talking about the same thing. It seems to get the obvious stuff and only the really obvious stuff, like "abou tfive" or "teh." On the rare occasions it autocorrects something it shouldn't have, I just have to hit backspace and it's reverted. What's the problem?
I guess this could count as humblebragging about my ability watch the screen while I type rather than the keyboard, but I thought everyone who uses a computer for work could do that.
I get a lot of mileage out of autocorrect at owrk by making it a shorthand tool for long words I use a lot:
aas: analysis
acdg: according
addn: addition
adjt: adjustment
adminn: administration
agt: agreement
amdt: amendment
apte: appropriate
apv: approve
authy: authority
-- etc. I also have conventions for -s, -d, -ly, etc. so it's comprehensive (compv). And more recently, Plmkiyhaq = Please let me know if you have any questions.
Oh, phones and iPads, right. Fair enough, it's annoying there.
I guess this could count as humblebragging about my ability watch the screen while I type rather than the keyboard,
On your phone?
Does backspace undo autocorrect on a phone?
On the autocorrect article - it was interesting, but fuck autocorrect all the way back to Cupertino.
The voice of privilege. Autocorrect is great for the less than fluent. It's as much of a helper to useful expression as cheap typewriters.
The second link could maybe be supplemented with this, not that it's terribly interesting.
What was the I guess successor to rotten in a similar vein? Portal of Evil?
Apple autocomplete bites goat ass. How often does somebody really want to type "Pittsburg"?
That depends, is the person complaining about delays on Bart?
17. I find it annoying on ios screens as well, the "x" to decline should be much bigger, or hotmapped to space or something else manageable.
Still, like autotranslate, it's a utility that makes a big difference when managing words for self-expression takes effort.
I'd rely on autocorrect on my phone WAY LESS if the geniuses at apple had thought to include fucking arrow keys on the keyboard thereby making it possible to navigate to the mistake.
21 is better if fucking modifies either "geniuses" or "keyboard", psosibly both.
Oh god, 21 is so right. "Oh, the cursor function will be easy. Just lower the keyboard, pinch to zoom in the screen, and then tap. DONE."
Even with the tapping you still can't get to the middle of a word, as far as I can tell.
You can, if you zoom in enough that your fingers are small in comparison to the words.
I don't mind autocorrect on my phone but have never used it -- or spell-checking -- on a computer. I guess I could turn it off on my phone but... I don't mind it. So here we are.
a kind of artisanal concordance
How could a concordance be artisanal or non-artisanal? It's a concordance. It's... it's a concordance. Calling a concordance created by hand artisanal is barbarous retronymery.
25: wait, what? hold your finger on the word until the zoomy thing with the cursor shows up, and then move it.
Calling a concordance created by hand artisanal is barbarous retronymery.
Hey, who're you calling a retronym.
re: 25
You have to hold the tap for longer [i.e. press] and then it becomes a magnifier-line draggy thing, which you can then move to the middle of the word.
You people are trying to make me get a Samsung Note. Because stylus. It combines the best features of a Palm Pilot and an iPhone, says nobody but me.
28: oh fine I'll try that. But I still think it's totes ridic.
Although I have to admit, I had an iPhone for about 2 years before I realised you could do that.
But neb's point stands: it should be part of the keyboard. It's annoying to have to switch back and forth between phone and keyboard.
Wish I had an idea about the damage to the moderators, what to do about it. Is there a mechanism for declaring something a mental health risk, analogous to a harmful substance in a workplace? I used to follow employment law and health & safety pretty closely, and I think I'd have heard of it if there were.
Class action lawsuit? Congressional hearings? Stevenson's notion of counseling is good but won't do more than mitigate the damage.
Were it illegal to subject workers to it for extended periods the social media companies might have to change policy, which would effect the service but if this is what it takes to keep it as it is, it's too high a price.
I don't understand 34. Switch between phone and keyboard?
It is part of the keyboard on Android (well, it's part of HTC's default keyboard and Swiftkey, anyway. Don't know about stock Android.
And more recently, Plmkiyhaq = Please let me know if you have any questions.
You do realise you could just map that phrase to a shorter set of keystrokes, right?
My very first tech job included, briefly, handling complaints about inappropriate/illegal content on our service (specifically including child porn). I was very very lucky that while I dealt with a couple of them, I never saw anything unambiguously horrific.
The important part of 34 is "but neb's point stands".
The ambiguous horror being neb's standing point?
Nothing horrible about my standing point, laydeez.
10: I did something similar for a paper I wrote that was based largely on correspondence where I kept having to type very similar citations that differed just enough to keep me from using ibid. There's a long history to that kind of text expansion; I learned the technique in a job that was heavy on data entry.
I don't understand 34. Switch between phone and keyboard?
Switch between keyboard and non-keyboard.
On a physical keyboard I leave autocorrect on because it's easier to delete and override. On Android I turn off autocorrect but use auto complete all the time, including to correct misspellings if the correct spelling shows up as a suggestion.
I always used to huffily turn off autocorrect on desktop computers until I moved to London and had to deal with all the sneaky misspellings in British English; it amazes me how many I still find that I had no idea of.
As for phones, I agree with everybody else. I wish there were arrow keys and I resent the bullying from my phone. I do think the version in iOS 8, where you pick among suggested alternatives instead of having to reject a single suggestion, is an improvement.
(why does "autocorrect" get a red squiggly? is that happening on all your American computers too?)
You could also install a whole damn different keyboard in ios8 if you were bothered enough. I bet some of them have arrow keys.
If my aunt had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
Oh yeah, that's right, I had forgotten about that. I don't know if I can be bothered when it comes down to it, though. Maybe complaining about it is good enough.
Most of the alternate keyboards try to differentiate themselves by having...better autocorrect! I just want numbers and some punctuation on the main board, developers of apps. I suppose I could just make one myself, but I have java to learn.
Hah, I forgot you were doing that. What a funny thing to do.
||
Apparently we're going to blind Ebola with science.
|>
Better than bullying it with assholes, of course.
55: You know there's actually an Ebola thread right now?
54: I am fairly confident I didn't suggest Java as a next language. I probably was like "du0d Python yeah bro down!"
57: I do now. I'd apologize but that might erode my self-confidence in marginally unpleasant ways.
I did something like 10 when I was writing my dissertation.
Mu: Müller
HM: Heiner Müller
Hm: Hamletmaschine
VU: Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten
You could use SAS to write a macro to handle that.
47: I really appreciate the half-assed way both Apple and app developers have implemented alternate keyboards. Why yes, I do want to quit the messages app so I can use Swype, why do you ask?
I was kidding; you did suggest python. But my dream is to work 9-5 for Walgreens.
Maybe you could help implement Current-C!
I really like Swype. Still, I think I want a bigger phone so I can type more easily.
Why yes, I do want to quit the messages app so I can use Swype, why do you ask?
Ugh, really? Barf.
10:
Is there a rubric, or did you find by trial and error?
I was excited about the alternate keyboards, until I saw them. I was considering a post on taking good interface design for granted, but meh. It was inspired partly by this (video link) $5000 cooktop (which I covet very much), which has an interface that is about as stupid as a non-insane human could come up with. How many times do I have to swipe to set the temperature? You cannot be serious.
I so want a gas cooktop. I miss the whole flame thing.
I was just talking to Blume last night about how it remains bafflingly common that people think UI is basically trivial or solved.
70: Not intentionally turning an autocorrect/programming languages thread into a cooking thread, but why on earth would you want that thing? Simple flame was good enough on the veldt, and it's good enough now.
I was considering a post on taking good interface design for granted
I... what? What on earth would lead you to think that's a thing you could actually take for granted?
You could also install a whole damn different keyboard in ios8 if you were bothered enough. I bet some of them have arrow keys.
Bizarrely, Swiftkey doesn't. Nor does it have numbers on the main page, like it does in Android, though you can get the most common punctuation. I'm hoping this is just because they were rushing to have a version out in time for launch and the functionality will come in updates. If it's a fundamental limitation of how keyboards are implemented in iOS 8 it would really suck.
68: Usually it works just fine. If you tap on a Messages notification, though, so that the app comes up, Swype goes missing.
Google Maps is the one that I really don't get, though. It launches with Swype selected as the keyboard just fine, it just refuses to accept any input from it.
I once forgot about Dre, but I've never forgotten about the importance of good interface design.
70: There are stupider interfaces and a relatives' induction top has one. It beeps and whines and takes several steps to turn on and turns itself off if you do something unexpected like flip the damn omelette and only has eleven power settings. That's coarser control than my cheap old-fashioned coil electric, on which butter omelettes work at 5 1/3 in copper and 5 1/2 in steel, out of 10. I can't believe they cheaped out on a DAC, so I suspect it's interface-limited. (The temp interface lights up in a circle but you change it by pushing + and - buttons that aren't in the circle. Oh my God I hate that stove.)
Other than that, Jesus McQueen, it's a very efficient transfer of energy to the pan and requires much less ventilation than gas does. Also, less chance of kids and the frail lighting themselves on fire. Supposed to be easier to clean than anything with drip pans, although a saleswoman once told me you couldn't let jam congeal on glass tops or they'd be etched (!!!!).
why on earth would you want that thing?
Because you can't actually get four pots/pans on a four-burner stove, but you could if you could use the entire space, and because it's a way to get gas-range-like power without having flame or pilot lights that at least one son would absolutely find a way to turn into a disaster.
What on earth would lead you to think that's a thing you could actually take for granted?
Point was that it's a thing people sometimes do, but shouldn't, take for granted.
69: Made them up as I went along. My principles are:
* Differentiate from commonly-recognized abbreviations as I might in some cases want to use those - that's why "adminn" instead of "admin", for example
* Only use for fairly long words; the shortest is perhaps 6 letters, but for it to be that short I have to type it pretty frequently
* In choosing letters in the middle, favor letters that stick up or down so that the abbreviation has a more distinctive shape - so "appropriate" becomes "apte" and "implement" becomes "iplt" (exceptions to this are usually legacies)
* If it's an especially long word, another method is to make the abbreviation the first syllable plus the final letter
* Avoid two-letter abbreviations as those might clash with people's initials
These abbreviations have also proved useful in actual note-taking.
I can't believe they cheaped out on a DAC
Clearly stoves have gotten much more fancy lately. What kind of amplifier did it have? Tube or solid-state?
I can see about the ease of cleaning, but I haven't used one of those that I haven't hated. My children remain burn-free, and I often have four pots on the four burners of my 24" stove! Arguments rejected.
You're a small man, Jesus. I use bigger pots.
72: I feel like there's money to be made in science software that doesn't have criminally stupid interfaces, but software is usually made by the company that produces the instrument, so I guess nobody wants to spend the extra money on software after they spend $200K on the equipment. (I totally would.)
Also, is one of your children Murphy's Law incarnate? Because one of mine is!
Huh, looking up stuff about Alinea's use of induction hobs I found this. Who knew Gr/ant Ach/atz posted on egullet?
I also get four pots onto my old cheapie stove (which has TWO OVENS in a slide-in size, SO WONDERFUL), unless canning. Perhaps ogged is always already canning.
87: One of the reasons my former employer was and is so ridiculously popular with its (enterprise) users is that they put a *lot* of effort into UI design. This is basically one of the new trends in software, to put as much effort and attention into business software as people have been putting into consumer for some time.
There are only three of you, and you're cooking in four enormous pots? Have you taken in boarders?
Oh wait, four. But two are small!
My mom, who bakes professionally, has an oven with this control panel, and it's maddening - two ovens, and the controls for upper and lower are kind of randomly different from each other.
89: Oh look it has a knob! (To be confusing, a pot.) ...That might be worth it just for summer canning.
ydnew, for the things I looked into, the market is small, lab tech time is cheap, and a lot of the terrible UI is inherited from medical equipment. I have no idea why medical UI is so bad.
91: That is a trend that cannot arrive soon enough in science land. Maybe someday, I'll be able to do basic things like giving files names longer than eight characters or saving graphs as image files rather than bizarre proprietary types.
95.last, I think there are some niches available, but sadly not many. Something to edit gels more easily than PhotoShop might be profitable.
a lot of the terrible UI is inherited from medical equipment. I have no idea why medical UI is so bad.
Probably because it has to be FDA-approved, and if something was FDA-approved in 1990, whether it be a pill or software, nobody wants to change it significantly and run the risk of having to get it FDA-approved all over again.
WinRHIZO and its siblings are pretty good (old-fashioned, as they're stuck in an elderly Windows UI standard, but I remember them as being very consistent within the UI). They get a bit of ag market as well as pure research.
Maybe someday, I'll be able to do basic things like giving files names longer than eight characters
Your science software is running on DOS?
97.1: SAS has let you use more than eight characters to name variables for probably a dozen years. In general, it seems fine, but I think grad students should train on the older versions so they learn some discipline. Just because you have more characters doesn't mean you have to use them.
100: On a daily basis, I use software designed for Windows98 and a Sun Data Station. We have one thingy that's running Windows 3.1. The repair techs are frequently impressed that it runs.
99 looks pretty good.
101: I like to append dates to filenames. 20141028 takes all eight characters.
I recommend thus essay for the pros and cons of ceramic top ranges: http://www.ladybugletter.com/?p=130
topically, autocorrect thought I meant thus rather than this.
My kid keeps changing the keyboards on our phones to Cyrillic or Hebrew. This is annoying.
I like to append dates to filenames.
This seems like a job for version control.
72. I think UI is considered trivial because people can look at it and think they understand how it works without knowing what a PITA it was to write it in the first place.
90. We thought we might have to replace our stove and it looked like induction made the most sense. Then we realized our cast iron skillets and ceramic-clad stuff were verboten.
Fortunately the appliance guys were able to resurrect the old stove for about $100.
Further to 105: have you considered git?
Then we realized our cast iron skillets and ceramic-clad stuff were verboten.
Say what?
Yeah, that was not my understanding of what doesn't work on induction.
We have an old Viking that was pretty old and well used when we got it. It has decent power and we push it pretty hard. It is apparently one of the last consumer models that can basically be replaced bit by bit and thereby kept going forever. Luckily the local repairman seems to find our intention to do just that simpatico. Weighs an ungodly amount but that's what weightlifter stepsons and their pals are for, right?
You can totally use cast iron on an induction stovetop, you need some metal. Read link posted above for details.
Million-dollar, new-in-2010 mass specs run Windows NT. Which was an improvement on the medical UI, which came with its own little flip-book *to explain the touchscreen* but we needed to add Post-Its because the flip-book wasn't explanatory on a single page, you had to remember earlier state. Oh my God it was bad.
On the other hand, the sensor that found the samples to feed into the mass spec I programmed in assembler (but that's because I was using an old one on the cheap. Current ones have bad Windows interfaces instead. Usually bad Windows interfaces to either Basic or C that they won't expose.)
From the linked article:
enthusiastic 21-year-old with a jaunty pouf doesn't mean what the author thinks it means, at least not this side of the great water.
Science and bureaucracy are like tech graveyards where the zombies never rest.
108. If you have old-school cast iron skillets, which is to say ones with a ridge on the bottom instead of being totally flat, the induction ranges overheat them.
Or so I'm told. We have one small skillet (one egg size) that is utterly flat, but several others that have the round ridge. These apparently cause the skillet to overheat. The same is true for ceramic-clad cookware, or so the web says.
Would be interested to hear if you have bottom-ridged cast iron and your house hasn't burned down yet.
(Some of these skillets are forty years old or more, by now. Hate to get rid of them!)
116: I haven't been able to find anything that mentions overheating pans on induction cooktops. Where are you seeing this?
(Worse comes to worst, you can always get an induction disk like one of these and use it under the pot or pan.)
Oh boy. $100 iron disks so you can use a stove. I can't wait for that to catch on.
117. Lots of comments on sites for induction cooktops. Lots of different sites. Try searching for "induction cooktops cast iron" and see what you get. They have to be dead flat, which older ones aren't.
We could get a gas stove but it would cost a ton as there is gas in the road but not at our house: $$$$.
Praying for the ancient GE all-in-one range-stove-microwave thingy to live forever. Banzai, Emperor GE!
xpost autocorrect topic: WTF? between .2 and .3?
Back in the day I wrote some of the software used by some of the people in that article to do their jobs. And holy shit is there a bunch of stuff on the internet that you really do not want to see. The "aaah holy shit a beheading video!!!" followed by a nonchalant "oh, which one?" is just as disturbing in person as it is in text.
Of course the alternative is going to be a couple of computer science Ph.D.s creating some machine learning system that automatically recognizes porn and then all these people will lose their jobs which, while shitty, pay $20 an hour for unskilled office work. Or if it's illegal to subject workers to it for a long time they'll just hire people for three months and then fire them, like manual laborers in the nuclear power industry.
Forget it, Jake. It's Internet-town.
Of course the alternative is going to be a couple of computer science Ph.D.s creating some machine learning system that automatically recognizes porn
I dunno, people have been doing plenty of work on that score for a while (you can find examples of the one in google street view at work, for instance). Like many other machine learning applications (cars, self-driving subtype) the threshold for no-humans-in-the-loop viability is likely high enough to keep a heck of a lot of people employed for a long time.
I have an induction cooktop and only three pots/pans that work on it, all stainless steel. It really is great for boiling water and heating liquid based things like soups but I haven't really gotten the hang of cooking other things without stuff sticking to the bottom of the pan but also not cooking the way I want it to, and I have low standards.
I suppose I should see if I could find a non-stick induction-compatible pan. I have so far haven't had a problem scraping the pan clean, but I worry I'm going to mess it up or set food on fire or something.
121.2. Unless they can come up with an AI that's as sophisticated as Justice Stewart, ain't going to happen. It would have to differentiate porn from mainstream erotica (increasingly difficult), as well as legal, probably-should-be accessible-to-adults stuff, whose distributors would lawyer up if it was deleted, from the really sick shit. I think they can probably count on their $20 until they find a better job (which I sincerely wish them all).
125: facebook or twitter (or any of the companies discussed in the article) do not have to adhere to the potter stewart standard; they can block whatever the hell they want.
I don't have an induction hob but my new flat's stove does have a flat ceramic top, the first I've ever had. I've only had gas or those really shitty old electric rings that take forever to heat up. I have to say it's been fantastic, cleaning-wise, and fine cooking-wise.
A "Mechanical Potter Stewart" would be a great name for a thing.
The worst UI crimes are those perpetrated by the software provided with multifunction printers. This includes whatever is running on the on-board touchscreen, as well as the desktop companion software
PS, if you expect them to fix everything with big data/machine learning/whatever, this IEEE Spectrum interview is well worth reading. Well worth reading anyway, really.
130: on the other hand, also read Michael Jordan's rebuttal to his own interview (or at least the framing of it).
It's hard to imagine computer vision completely putting moderators out of work in the near future, but not hard to imagine computer vision greatly decreasing their workload by e.g. ruling out all videos not containing a living being.
Perhaps unnecessarily implicit in 123 was the premise that the need for this kind of thing will scale at a dramatic enough rate that even if computer vision decreases the workload greatly the workforce could easily still increase. And, of course, computer vision preprocessing solutions are already deployed, for sure, at all of the big companies mentioned. So the low-hanging fruit, as far as that goes, and not meant like that, gross, has likely already been picked.
Slowly we will extend our necks like giraffes, and more and more fruit will appear low to us.
