7 ms·

If a keyboard app feels like an extension of your body, it means you write a lot. It doesn't mean that you are "terminally online", and even if you were online

If a keyboard app feels like an extension of your body, it means you write a lot. It doesn't mean that you are "terminally online", and even if you were online all the time, that's a personal choice and not being online all the time doesn't even solve the problem shared here. I'd even say, perhaps it's best not to tell people that their problems aren't problems to begin with. I'm not saying one should care, it'd be enough just not to explicitly dismiss on their face.

yarg 4y ago
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_schema https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=related:5uSissKo6EgJ:scholar.google.com/&scioq=human+tool+use+body&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1 https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=related:5uSissKo6EgJ:...
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  > The same shit happens when driving. In a broader sense, it never fails to amaze me that a kilo and a half of goopy cells that evolved to work out where the plants that won't kill you and where to trap rabbits in the next valley are - things that are, generally speaking, not much further than you can see - can visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys *including ones we have not taken yet* but which happen to be in roughly the same direction as where we were a last week. Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too. How do we do this with a brain that evolved to cope with a couple of miles of hills and forest? Is it because I can drive a car at 60mph and therefore cover twenty times the distance I can walk in roughly the same time, so it all just scales naturally? It's crazy, isn't it? You'll be thinking about this next time you drive.
  - xxs 4y ago
    One can tell the British background by the mix of metric ('kilo') and imperial ('mile'). Mentioning that as the way we adapt with different units, feeling natural about them, and getting defensive about them, too.
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      I'm not particularly "defensive" about units. I would however point out that I am not British, I'm Scottish.
      - toyg 4y ago
        Being Scottish technically makes you British, at least until independence comes. I'd argue that, even then, it will remain the case - as long as we accept that Scotland will continue to be part of the British Isles, and in particular of the island of Britain.
        jprete 4y ago
        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.
        yarg 4y ago
        > The term "Great Britain" can also refer to the political territory of England, Scotland and Wales, which includes their offshore islands.[12] This territory and Northern Ireland constitute the United Kingdom.[13] The single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the 1707 Acts of Union between the kingdoms of England (which at the time incorporated Wales) and Scotland.
        hwntw 4y ago
        Would be a nice thought, but literally nobody means the descendants of the Britons where talking about being British. If they did, depending upon what that encompasses, then either large swathes of Scotland would be included (Glasgow is a Brythonic name!), or you'd be excluding England from the discussion. Largely without fail, someone talking about Britain is talking of the island itself, or the current inhabitants.
- dpoljak 4y ago
  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 reread since this is based on a vague recollection. But it's been in my mind more and more lately, especially with all the AI hype in the news.
  - r4ltman 4y ago
    Logical maturity (AI) pushed to extreme revives human maturity
  - dingusdew 4y ago
    [dead]
- staringback 4y ago
  I have wondered if this phenomenon had a name, thanks!
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
muyuu 4y ago
why would you develop such dependency on a proprietary piece of code? > I'd even say, perhaps it's best not to tell people that their problems aren't problems to begin with. I'm not saying one should care, it'd be enough just not to explicitly dismiss on their face. generally speaking, the opposite is true - people need to take some accountability for their problems, thanks to the disintegration of conversation people have had it too easy to simply mute or block opinions they found uncomfortable, helping them to avoid facing problems much more than it's sane to do
- geokon 4y ago
  The open source keyboard space on Android is weirdly incredibly deficient No way to type Chinese with an open source keyboard. And no way to do local speak-to-text (even English) with an open source keyboard
  - muyuu 4y ago
    yep well, as far as I'm concerned they're all crap including SwiftKey esp. when compared with using a properly set-up computer phones aren't great for input, and perhaps won't be in the foreseeable future, but using proprietary closed keyboards with no roughly-equivalent alternatives just compounds the problem every time I want to type something substantial, in any language, I wait until I have access to a computer; it's particularly bad in Japanese and Chinese in my experience, but it's not great in any language - in Asian languages you'd get good over time with some specific system (say 4-corners, zhuyin, kana/conv, and specific predictive dictionaries) and then have support end, so why even bother?
    - geokon 4y ago
      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 .. so the situation is only marginally better at the desktop (I haven't tried text to speak on the desktop) It's one of those weird areas where theyre both supposedly old solved problems - but for some reason nobody has bothered to make open source solutions
that_guy_iain 4y ago
I would say comparing it to Musk buying Twitter is about being terminally online. Like someone bought Twitter and basically made improvements. There are a whole bunch of things he did which don't really affect how many people use or interact with the app which people hate but it's really just internet drama.
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  Amplifying right wing extremists is an improvement?
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    Has he? Is there evidence of this? I believe when the former head it safety left he said they were removing far more stuff than before. For example, I heard there were some child porn hashtags that got wiped out. I haven’t seen any more right wing extremists.
    - kevviiinn 4y ago
      https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-twitter-force-fed-extremism-feeds_n_638a7999e4b0214ec97f5eab https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-twitter-force-fed-e... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/28/musk-twitter-racist-posts/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/28/musk-tw... That's on top of Twitter previously finding that right Wong voices were already amplified far more than those on the left, which was during the peak of the right wing complaints of being silenced https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-politicalcontent https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...
      - that_guy_iain 4y ago
        I don’t see any proof. I see people saying it’s happening. Seems very much like narrative that people want to believe.
jameshart 4y ago
It’s a free-to-download optional keyboard app that augments the perfectly adequate built in keyboard functionality of a thousand dollar device, not a prosthetic limb. If it goes away or embeds features you don’t like, nobody is kicking your crutches away.
TootsMagoon 4y ago
You ok?

yarg 4y ago

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_schema https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=related:5uSissKo6EgJ:scholar.google.com/&scioq=human+tool+use+body&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1 https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=related:5uSissKo6EgJ:...

Gordonjcp 4y ago
> The same shit happens when driving. In a broader sense, it never fails to amaze me that a kilo and a half of goopy cells that evolved to work out where the plants that won't kill you and where to trap rabbits in the next valley are - things that are, generally speaking, not much further than you can see - can visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys *including ones we have not taken yet* but which happen to be in roughly the same direction as where we were a last week. Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too. How do we do this with a brain that evolved to cope with a couple of miles of hills and forest? Is it because I can drive a car at 60mph and therefore cover twenty times the distance I can walk in roughly the same time, so it all just scales naturally? It's crazy, isn't it? You'll be thinking about this next time you drive.
- xxs 4y ago
  One can tell the British background by the mix of metric ('kilo') and imperial ('mile'). Mentioning that as the way we adapt with different units, feeling natural about them, and getting defensive about them, too.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    I'm not particularly "defensive" about units. I would however point out that I am not British, I'm Scottish.
    - toyg 4y ago
      Being Scottish technically makes you British, at least until independence comes. I'd argue that, even then, it will remain the case - as long as we accept that Scotland will continue to be part of the British Isles, and in particular of the island of Britain.
      - jprete 4y ago
        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.
        yarg 4y ago
        > The term "Great Britain" can also refer to the political territory of England, Scotland and Wales, which includes their offshore islands.[12] This territory and Northern Ireland constitute the United Kingdom.[13] The single Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the 1707 Acts of Union between the kingdoms of England (which at the time incorporated Wales) and Scotland.
        hwntw 4y ago
        Would be a nice thought, but literally nobody means the descendants of the Britons where talking about being British. If they did, depending upon what that encompasses, then either large swathes of Scotland would be included (Glasgow is a Brythonic name!), or you'd be excluding England from the discussion. Largely without fail, someone talking about Britain is talking of the island itself, or the current inhabitants.
dpoljak 4y ago
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 reread since this is based on a vague recollection. But it's been in my mind more and more lately, especially with all the AI hype in the news.
- r4ltman 4y ago
  Logical maturity (AI) pushed to extreme revives human maturity
- dingusdew 4y ago
  [dead]
staringback 4y ago
I have wondered if this phenomenon had a name, thanks!

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

muyuu 4y ago

why would you develop such dependency on a proprietary piece of code? > I'd even say, perhaps it's best not to tell people that their problems aren't problems to begin with. I'm not saying one should care, it'd be enough just not to explicitly dismiss on their face. generally speaking, the opposite is true - people need to take some accountability for their problems, thanks to the disintegration of conversation people have had it too easy to simply mute or block opinions they found uncomfortable, helping them to avoid facing problems much more than it's sane to do

geokon 4y ago
The open source keyboard space on Android is weirdly incredibly deficient No way to type Chinese with an open source keyboard. And no way to do local speak-to-text (even English) with an open source keyboard
- muyuu 4y ago
  yep well, as far as I'm concerned they're all crap including SwiftKey esp. when compared with using a properly set-up computer phones aren't great for input, and perhaps won't be in the foreseeable future, but using proprietary closed keyboards with no roughly-equivalent alternatives just compounds the problem every time I want to type something substantial, in any language, I wait until I have access to a computer; it's particularly bad in Japanese and Chinese in my experience, but it's not great in any language - in Asian languages you'd get good over time with some specific system (say 4-corners, zhuyin, kana/conv, and specific predictive dictionaries) and then have support end, so why even bother?
  - geokon 4y ago
    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 .. so the situation is only marginally better at the desktop (I haven't tried text to speak on the desktop) It's one of those weird areas where theyre both supposedly old solved problems - but for some reason nobody has bothered to make open source solutions

that_guy_iain 4y ago

I would say comparing it to Musk buying Twitter is about being terminally online. Like someone bought Twitter and basically made improvements. There are a whole bunch of things he did which don't really affect how many people use or interact with the app which people hate but it's really just internet drama.

kevviiinn 4y ago
Amplifying right wing extremists is an improvement?
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  Has he? Is there evidence of this? I believe when the former head it safety left he said they were removing far more stuff than before. For example, I heard there were some child porn hashtags that got wiped out. I haven’t seen any more right wing extremists.
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-twitter-force-fed-extremism-feeds_n_638a7999e4b0214ec97f5eab https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-twitter-force-fed-e... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/28/musk-twitter-racist-posts/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/28/musk-tw... That's on top of Twitter previously finding that right Wong voices were already amplified far more than those on the left, which was during the peak of the right wing complaints of being silenced https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-politicalcontent https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...
    - that_guy_iain 4y ago
      I don’t see any proof. I see people saying it’s happening. Seems very much like narrative that people want to believe.

jameshart 4y ago

It’s a free-to-download optional keyboard app that augments the perfectly adequate built in keyboard functionality of a thousand dollar device, not a prosthetic limb. If it goes away or embeds features you don’t like, nobody is kicking your crutches away.

TootsMagoon 4y ago

You ok?