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Comment by pope_meat | Hacker News Reader

You know how sometimes you have to fight auto correct while typing on your phone?

Imagine that with a brain interface...

Duck. No, Duck. I meant duck. Duck that. Ducking hell.

I could imagine easily going insane if I were forced to interact through a piece of technology that would not do what I wanted. It's bad enough when my phone won't do what I want.

Not being able to type fuck is such a weird cultural quirk America has forced down our throats.

The puritanism is real, and it's still a thing; people self-censoring themselves on platforms like tik tok (even going as far as 'censoring' words like sex or even more innocuous words). Not sure if it's fear of The Man, or because they don't want to miss out on views from kids.

TikTok rapidly de-ranks any mention of suicide (a word Apple’s keyboard also avoids) so the kids have taken to saying they want to make themselves past-tense

I wonder: Is creativity and innovation reduced in strongly puritan areas because of this?

I never have this issue. Is it a difference between iOS and Android keyboards, or did I add it to my dictionary long ago and forget all about it?

GBoard, at least, has a "block offensive words" option under "text correction" options. I think it makes sense - as bad as it is to accidentally type "duck", it's worse the other way round.

Context helps - if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck etc...

Edit: this is a possible alternative meaning for "Duck Typing"...

Just wait until your interface doesn't allow you to defend Julian Assange, or deny the efficacy of masks.

A lot of people have experience with fighting mental BS, so hopefully that translates. OTOH they don't have experience fighting both at the same time...

The same kind of statistical models used for voice recognition and autocorrect on touch keyboards are also used for these electrode-in-cortex interfaces, so you can expect the same limitations in accuracy. I don’t think we appreciate how good our hands and fingers are, not just in terms of dexterity, but also on the information-theoretic level as a decoding system.

I mean... who thinks in individual characters? I would assume it would type the words our correctly based on what I'm thinking.

But to your point, would the system understand thought?

Knowing the difference between:

  > "I'm sending two to you" or "I'm sending to Two One Smith Lane."

requires a lot of knowledge/intent if indeed you can't think in terms of individual characters.

It will likely be something like imagining typing, or swiping. It won't work at the level of words. You'd have to correlate between 50k and 250k individual words per person, which would be cumbersome and obnoxious. You have to correlate word components, and the easiest way to train is tapping into a feedback loop that already achieves your intent, like typing.

Systems like the palm pilot graffiti interface, or some optimized symbolic gesture system will become prevalent, but imagining typing will probably carry us sufficiently until better systems are worked out.

I'm more worried about privacy intrusions.

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