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Gmail Proves That Some People Hate Smart Suggestions (techcrunch.com)
Citing a number of complaints following Google's Gmail makeover, TechCrunch's Romain Dillet makes the case for why some users don't want smart suggestions in the email service: There's a reason why Gmail lets you disable all the smart features. Some users don't want smart categories, important emails first and smart reply suggestions. Arguably, the only smart feature everyone needs is the spam filter. A pure chronological feed of your email messages is incredibly valuable as well. That's why many Instagram users are still asking for a chronological feed. Sure, algorithmic feeds can lead to more engagement and improved productivity. Maybe Google conducted some tests and concluded that you end up answering more emails if you let Gmail do its thing. But you may want to judge the value of each email without an algorithmic ranking.
VCs could spot the next big thing without any bias. Journalists could pay attention to young and scrappy startups as much as the new electric scooter startup in San Francisco. Universities could give a grant to students with unconventional applications. The HR department of your company could look at all applications without following Google's order.
VCs could spot the next big thing without any bias. Journalists could pay attention to young and scrappy startups as much as the new electric scooter startup in San Francisco. Universities could give a grant to students with unconventional applications. The HR department of your company could look at all applications without following Google's order.
I haven't used FB in years, but when I used it, I found it extremely annoying with how it would try to be smart about how to order my timeline, rather than just putting things in chronological order.
I think such a system would be especially bad with email, because there's a lot of emails I get that are important, but all the necessary details are in the subject. Thus, I never actually open them, which would lead such a system to incorrectly believe that such emails are not important to me.
"Smart". I don't think you understand what it means.
Dumb mail, dumb tvs and dumb software. There is a probably a billion dollars to be made from dumbware.
If it ain't broke don't fix it. How hard is this to understand?
Gmail proves that people hate being spied on. These same people do not hate Google until something draws their attention to the fact that they are being spied on. Face it folks, Microsoft is no longer the biggest threat to your digitial rights. Now, Google, Apple and Facebook are, and of those, Google is the worst threat even if not the most visible violator.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
People hate smart suggestions because AI isn't really there yet. AI can determine what some Silicon Valley developer thinks is important, but what it needs to do is anticipate what the USER thinks is important. I suspect it will be a long time until AI can actually understand how any human things and what any human needs. After all, it isn't even aware of what it is, how is is supposed to understand what the user is?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I haven't used FB in years, but when I used it, I found it extremely annoying with how it would try to be smart about how to order my timeline,
Oh it still does that.
The worst part about that for me is that what it considers smart now, changes from second to second It seems.
In in effect what would happen is I would see two interesting things on my timeline, click one to read it, go back and... timeline is totally different, no way to find the other thing I wanted to visit.
So frustrating.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The original was the copy machine that after a jam would insist that you "remove the original" without the ability to sense that there was no original sheet on the copier.
Second-guessing systems go back further than this. Elevators that would automatically go to the ground floor unless you pushed a button, jukeboxes with a mechanical memory that would pick the song-before-the-last (thus if no-one inserted a coin and made a choice, they would be stuck alternating between two irritating songs, wearing the records out), but the oldest are likely bibles, where the page width varied slightly by design, so by rifling you would more often end up at popular passages.
I find that predictable behaviour is more convenient than smart. Case in point: the bash-completion package, it knows which arguments to a command are subcommands rather than filenames, and what filenames you don't care enough. It's right 95% of the time. But it's that 5% that's infuriating: a subcommand that was added only recently, a .tar.zst file not recognized as a tarball (zstd is awesome!), assuming that you want btrfs fi def only directories but not files (VM images anyone?), mysteriously skipping directories with a @ in name, etc.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
It also doesn’t get remembered and it’s been broken for a few months now. It doesn’t really show most recent despite what it claims.