People need to take a break. Being terminally online and complaining about everything is not a healthy way of life.
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.
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://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=related:5uSissKo6EgJ:...
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.
Mentioning that as the way we adapt with different units, feeling natural about them, and getting defensive about them, too.
I would however point out that I am not British, I'm Scottish.
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.
Of course, they might _technically_ be British from a legal standpoint, which I'm sure Gordonjcp is aware of. It's entirely possible to be both British and not-British simultaneously in different contexts. This sort of thing isn't black and white.
Absolutely, but it would be nice if people expressed their wishes in logical terms. "I prefer to describe that dog as a terrier" is logically sound, "that is a terrier, not a dog" is not. The latter tries to arbitrarily redefine what a dog is.
It's a bit like "Charlie's not a dog, he's my best friend"
Shorthands are fine, but this is not it. This is some weird agenda to deny the logical truth.
I'd argue that one can be damaging and we should call people out on it.
Dogs are dogs and they need to be treated like dogs. The infantilization of dogs is how you get unleashed dogs getting into dog fights when it turns out that Charlie really just is another dog and should have been leashed.
Yay for Brexit.
4 hour drive and you're about half way to your parent's place, and they're in the same province.
We're a species that has navigated its way across the world.
Human tribes frequently migrated seasonally with the herds on which we depended for food and clothing.
We're very well equipped for long distance travel.
Predators are way faster than our walking speed. And the faster road is the more gentle any turn is so going 120km/h on a highway doesn't really require that much more reflex than running on twisty forest path.
> 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.
That has nothing to do with cars, people travelled before them.
You might say "but it is bigger area" but it is also scaled up to car size. And with clear landmarks, hell, even signs telling you where you are and where to go.
That's significantly easier than going into dense forest, that also changes look based on seasons.
This seems to break down when we deal with things without easily appreciated analogues e.g. black holes and quantum physics.
OTOH I don't know why we can pick up driving and cycling so easily. Some people instinctively know how to countersteer an oversteering car.
While you're running through the woods, you have to see and account for every rock and root or you trip, fall, and get literally eaten alive. While driving on a road, you don't need to consider the road itself at all, really.
That's the technology of roads - removing all obstacles to travel. A road is literally an empty, smooth space. So now you only need to consider traffic, turns, and distance.
I'm not surprised at all that our brains that can probably remember the locations of every fruiting bush and tree in our territory can efficiently encode some turns.
There is nothing in the history of mankind that would need for this to be a possible skill; no conceivable evolutionary pressure lead to being able to transfer the feeling for the size of our body onto other objects, while being inside those objects. We can just do that!
What’s happening here is that your eyes are connected to a very highly trained model of the physical world around you. And your subjective experience of vision occurs post-processing through that model. It’s the same model you use to physically navigate the world, so it has a similar subjective feel regardless of what you’re doing.
It’s not limited to cars and tools; pitchers can “feel” the strike zone, even though it’s 60 feet away. Like driving, this takes a lot of reps to develop (lots of training data).
I haven't heard this claim before - any specific reading I should look for?
That’s where your misunderstanding is. A lot of animals are migratory, including us. We _did_ evolve to understand how to cross continents.
Straight on at full speed and hope you manage to dodge the local nutters driving like maniacs en route.
(I did actually like Bradford in a bunch of ways but the drivers were still impressively aggressive, to the point where being a pedestrian in Italy was honestly quite a comfortable experience)
Fucking *Wakefield*, though.
That is nothing. Try to run through a forest chasing a deer. Your brain will be calculating paths around trees, planning each footfall based on 3d terrain scans in your peripheral vision, constantly recalculating the position and likely path of the deer, and all the while a subroutine is calculating the trajectory of the rock you are about to through at your (hopefully) future dinner. That is what the human brain evolved to do. In comparison, driving a car along a road is like watching paint dry.
Then think about what the deer brain is doing. It does all the same terrain mapping and 3d planning, but does so at double or triple the bandwidth. Deer see 300+ degrees, humans only 130ish.
It's also pretty amazing on a social level too. With a few obvious exceptions (certain signage, driving on the left or right side, etc.) the whole system was standardized for every adult in the entire world in something like 50 years. Everyone wanting to "get into" driving has to play by some basic rules. (And not following them is far more likely to be a mistake than intentional, at scale.)
Then I look at bees and I realize we're really not that special.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/honeybee-mental-number-l... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230307144358.h... https://today.ucsd.edu/story/complex-learned-social-behavior...
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.
> 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
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
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?
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
it works well enough for me on my computer, and i simply avoid phones for input - anything "phone" is factory-lobotomised and nothing else should really be expected, and even if the software were to suddenly be best effort, you'd still have to overcome very taxing interface limitations
this has the disadvantage of making you even less at home in other devices but hey, my reality is what when this happens I wouldn't have been any better off regardless
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-polit...
If it goes away or embeds features you don’t like, nobody is kicking your crutches away.
"In September 2022, Microsoft announced it was terminating support for the iOS version of SwiftKey. The app was removed from the App Store on October 5.[15]
In November 2022, Microsoft announced a reversal of its decision to discontinue SwiftKey for iOS devices. The app was relisted on November 18, with Microsoft promising future updates for the app. The company cited "customer feedback" as a reason for SwiftKey's return.[16]"
Assuming "customer feedback" is a euphemism for people complaining online then perhaps this is sometimes an effective strategy. These so-called "tech" companies often have no meaningfui Customer Service as they do not want to pay for it, but it seems they do pay people to monitor what is said about them online.
The keyboard works in such a way that it learns your typing style and then understands what you type without the requirement for actually hitting the right keys.
I can type "ky nt gromf koe stw uoi" and it will become "hi my friend how are you".
This makes typing on a phone extremely fast.
The problem is that other keyboards that claim to have similar features are not able to understand my typing gibberish.
In essence, I and many other Swiftkey users have trained ourselves to no longer be able to use any other keyboard.
Is this worth being mad over? In my opinion yes, a product loved by many being purchased by a big company who then close down support avenues is always a good reason to be mad.
I will be impressed, though, if you can find (or make) Dvorak keycaps for my keyboard that match its current style.
Such people can be pretty miserable, sometimes all the time, thus prone to venting.
They would stop if you could fix their broken body and broken lives.
While you use qualifiers like "some" and "can" throughout, I don't really see any substance to the comment.
Basically, a single person existing that does match your comment makes your comment true, without any hint at how pervasive this might be.
There used to be -- and may still be -- hash tags and such on Twitter to help such people find each other.
I'm very seriously handicapped and don't get out much. It's why I spend so much time online.
It's called testimony -- giving a voice for a topic I have a lot of firsthand knowledge of. I have no idea why you are attacking it so aggressively.
As such, I thank you for sharing your story: that requires courage for sure, and can certainly give support for any one point! If that use of qualifiers is what gives you that courage, take my apology for being so "aggressive".
I was simply suggesting to avoid generalizing, even (especially) when starting from your own experience. Your comment suggested that all the handicapped people might have the same reasons and same feelings, which I felt inappropriate.
Note to self:
Next life, be a rich white male or some shit.
In retrospect, you didn't do anything wrong, and I read too much into it: my bad, so sorry!
While they had a strong reaction to this that was over the top at points, I still feel it was a worthwhile thread documenting a new problem.
What you are doing is an overly simplistic deflection
There you go. But we need to go a step further.
They need to get off altogether rather than being terminally online or addicted to social media. In regards to this, it is very sad to see of all things, many on that site are throwing a tantrum....
...over a keyboard.
"Welcome to the Microsoft Support Community! Thank you for your excellent question. As a Microsoft MVP (Mostly Vacuous Pinhead) I am more than happy to help with your problem. I am sure this will help:
<useless copy-pasted non-solution>
1. Set fire to your PC
2. Give up on life
On another note, I have just installed two alternative keyboards today to play around with. OpenBoard and AnySoftKeyboard both with some nice features.
sounds very healthy.
It's a way to shut down debate while pretending to use a legitimate debating technique. A tale as old as the internet itself.