Poll: how long have you been into D

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sat, 6 Jul 2013 08:13:49 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> Y'know, I've always found correct-as-you-type features extremely
> annoying. I encountered it first in MS Word, and it annoyed me so
> much I crawled back into my Vim cave. :-P  When I upgraded to a
> smartphone, I decided to give it an honest try ... but after about
> half a year or so, I'm starting to regret it. I mean, it's nice that
> once in a while you can just type approximately and it will correctly
> guess what you intended. But other times, it makes the wrong guesses
> and completely mangles your text -- but you're so accustomed to it
> that you don't notice the mistake until it's too late! And yet other
> times, it will add random nonsense words to your custom dictionary
> just because you hit the wrong sequence of keys by accident. (Mistype
> a word, hit space, get the wrong guess, hit backspace, get the
> mistyped word back, erase a few characters, then accidentally hit
> space instead of, say, B, and now the *partial* mistyped word is in
> your dictionary. Wonderful.)
> 
> I'm feeling quite tempted to turn off the feature, right now.
> 

Yea, correct-as-you-type is horrible (at least on smartphones anyway,
haven't seen it as much elsewhere - on PCs it's usually just
auto-*suggest*). I spent most of last year carrying around an
iPhone (long story) and the autocorrect got things wrong literally
around 50% of the time. I think it was about a month or so that I
muddled through with it and then turned it off...which
immediately boosted my accuracy considerably.

Any kind of "smart" feature usually ends up being a big 'ol bag of
badly-tuned heuristics (or just simply a stupid, presumptuous idea -
like the stereo on the 2011(-ish?) Hyundai Elantra *always* turning on
*twice* every time you start the car, whether you want it on or not).

Or as I like to describe "smart" features: It's like some jackass
deliberately messing around with everything you're trying to do via a
secondary keyboard+mouse. Only you can't reach over and smack him ;)