Technology

People love to hate Rowling, but her descriptions of magic are very perceptive as predictions of computing.

Like in this case. Both Skeeter with her magic quill (LLM as it is) and the spell-checking quills (I think Ron liked that he could write much faster with those at first, so either he's as smart as a neanderthal, or they "improve" not only orthography).

And Snape's invented spells and how he doesn't really like their popularity remind me of script-kiddies.

I think I've read a fanfic where Hogwarts was converted into some kind of a "school for hackers" (in that early 00s spirit, think Lara Croft and Spy Kids movies). The universe was generally the same, only magic was replaced with that.

Autocorrect is slave-mentality

I dont like autocorrect both for privacy reasons (though there might be open source ones) and for accuracy reasons. I dont want something else to write for me what it thinks I want to say. (Hence I'm using a customized keyboard in florisboard beta which looks almost the same as gboard.😌)

TBH, Microsoft’s Swiftkey was pretty decent before they started adding Bing AI bullshit. I’ve since switched to Apple’s default keyboard and it’s painful.

Since iOS 17, I have had no problems with text input. It feels better than anything that preceded it which I used on Apple or other platforms. That is true for swiping or typing and in either of the two languages I use. I’m actually blown away by how good it is sometime, correcting words based on the clause around it.

I also have an S10 Lite that I keep up to date. The native input there is okay, but not nearly as accurate.

HTC had one of the best keyboards. Each key had 2 letters on each key (except 1 or 2 that had 3) and it never failed to guess what word I wanted. Stopped working with android 4 IIRC.

Found it on a XDA thread from 2010

Sadly still doesn't work

It’s a privacy issue. To predict, the service would have to get to know you better and there are privacy problems with that.

They just can’t seem to figure out a way NOT to be invasive. Go figure.

SwiftKey is dope

I think the major problem is that culture is evolving so rapidly that keyboard dictionaries can't keep up with new words.