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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2563 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 7, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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SwiftKey is driving me up the wall.

Just today I noticed it autocorrecting load-bearing words in comments I've made, which if taken literally would invert the argument I've been making. I suspect the reason nobody calls me out on it is that they can clearly see it's an error, either from a brain fart or otherwise.

Leaving aside a distressing tendency to autocorrect a perfectly valid word into a similar but entirely unrelated word. Wtf.

It's like a self-driving car that works 99% of the time, just well enough to lure you into complacency before veering off into traffic. At least the stakes are far lower, but that just makes it more insidious when it happens. I'd rather not have to proofread everything I write, at the risk of looking like an idiot.

Is this possibly due to me overtaxing the small ML model it's running by consistently using words from other languages and jargon that it's dictionary didn't come with? So that it becomes so underconfident of valid output it gives up and substitutes something else?

What does this program do exactly? Use ML to autocorrect?

The most basic keyboards use Markov Chains, which are even simpler than what we would normally call ML.

I am under the impression that slightly more impressive models are behind tasks like predicting more than one word at once, or figuring out what you meant when using swipe input.

I would kill for something like that. Idk how you and others here type such long comments on a phone, it kills my hands.

You mentioned some stress related injury right?

I can see that being an issue for you. Have you tried using swipe input instead of just typing?

Yeah it has gotten a lot better but the act of using a phone even scrolling a bunch on it is still difficult if I spent more than a half hour or so. Honestly given the fact that I want to spend less time on my phone, not a terrible problem.

I have tried swiping but it didn’t seem to make a huge difference. Voice. Dictation is nice but unfortunately it’s dealing with the same 99% problem where you have to go back and edit it too much even though it’s pretty much there that being said, Apple’s voice to text has gotten way better even in the last year and I think it’ll be an early and easy problem for transformers to solve.

I don't know how feasible it is for you, but I do think you need to lay off your hands for as long as you can to let your wrists fully recover.

I'm not a physiotherapist of course, and I do hope you're seeing one!

On the topic of the best speech to text, the most advanced model is Whisper by OpenAI, available freely. I don't know if there's a convenient packaging for it, but it is very very good.

Interesting I haven’t actually tried it, might use it to dictate posts!

And weirdly enough when I went through the whole rigamarole of going on medical leave from my job for months (4 separate times), using medical braces, and barely using my hands, they tended to get worse! Idk if it’s a stress related issue or what, but lack of rest doesn’t seem to be the problem.

I’ve seen lots of physiotherapists, and definitely credit the habit of daily stretching/exercise they helped me instill as crucial to recovering so much. I don’t do it anymore cuz the good ones near me are pricey and don’t take insurance.

That sounds fucking terrifying to me, I'd die of boredom if I couldn't use my hands.

I hope whoever is advising you is doing a good job, from my limited recollection the next degree of escalation is probably steroid injection into the joints.

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