Is it something about using Chrome? My wife's Gmail was showing the "Press / to help me write" prompt last week and we couldn't figure out (1) how to turn it off nor (2) why _I_ wasn't seeing any such prompt in _my_ Gmail, despite all our Gmail settings being the same as far as I could tell.
We both use Chrome (she on Windows, me on Mac), but I could totally believe that I've turned off some shiny AI feature _in Chrome_ that she hadn't.
Anyone care to confirm or disprove the hypothesis that there's some setting in Chrome itself that will disable this Gmail feature?
I saw the "Press /" using Thorium (a Chromium fork). Tried to use the element picker in uBlock to get rid of it. This failed, of course, because the thing to be blocked disappears as soon as the text input area loses focus, even after I deleted every event listener that I thought could have been relevant.
In a Firefox fork (Floorp) using another Google account but with the seemingly relevant part of Gmail configuration matching, I don't see "Press /" at all. Not sure why exactly, it's a somewhat interesting question but I already went poking through dev console to write a selector for it and I'm starting to get irritated at the idea of spending any more time on it, lol
An interesting idea I saw long ago in some book (I thought it was K&P's "Software Tools," or my second guess was K&R1, but neither of those panned out — a strong Mandela effect) was the clever idea of a whole-document spellchecker that works purely probabilistically, by histograms: you feed it a document, it tallies the trigraphs, and any trigraph that appears only rarely is flagged as a likely typo. This approach lets through unknown-but-realistic words like "antithematory" while flagging unrealistic words like "prisencolinensinainciusol" (because of its unlikely "ciu" and "ius" clusters) and "antthemaory" (because of "ntt" and "aor").
To make this approach work better, feed it a bunch of English text (or whatever language your document is in) before the document you really want to "spellcheck."
Essentially this isn't a spell "checker" so much as a spell "linter" — it looks for antipatterns statistically associated with bugs, and reports the patterns for further investigation.
If anyone knows where this trigraph-based "spellchecker" was first presented, I'd love to find out again.
> Likewise "Russia" is shown in Siberia, but everyone in Russia lives near the European borders thousands of km west.
Yes, and "Love's Labour's Lost" specifically pairs/ contrasts "Russians" with "Muscovites": the "Russia" of St Petersburg is pretty far west of "Moscow."
A lot of that is bias from the fact the whole map was vibed/hallucinated by an LLM instead of just sourced from (what I'm sure are many) concordances of Shakespeare's works.
For example, "The Tempest" famously mentions the "Bermoothes" (Bermuda), but that's not included in this LLM's output for some reason. Any decent subject-index of Shakespeare would include it.
Yes (I think). In this particular case I believe you could also say he was created duke (since he was the first Duke of Wellington); I think one would have to say that the second Duke of Wellington succeeded to the dukedom.
If we're listing modern games vaguely similar to this, we can't let the thread go without mentioning the fantastically entertaining (yet _mostly_ random) "Hot Streak" (2025)!
TBF, text adventures absolutely "sprinkle dopamine rewards all over the place." The random-reinforcement effect is a big part of their appeal — as a player, you never quite know if you've seen "all the good stuff" yet.
WOOD0350: Did you try using the bird on the dragon? PLAT0550: Did you try going back across the troll bridge after tricking the troll? HHGTTG: Did you CONSULT GUIDE ABOUT everything you found? Frog Fractions: Did you try SCORE? Did you try applying every verb to MYSELF?
The "definition of a heap allocation interface" indicates that there is no standard heap. Instead, there's a standard interface for the use to define their own heaps. Any standard library function that needs to allocate will take a sp_allocator_t parameter, and use that to allocate. As opposed to e.g. strdup, which hard-codes a call to malloc internally. Sp.h's strdup-alike would take an sp_allocator_t as input and call into that to get the memory it needs.
A C++ programmer might describe this as "PMR, but not default-constructible. And std::stable_sort takes a PMR allocator parameter. And PMR is the default, and there's no implementation of std::allocator (or new or delete)."
Yeah, but I took the parent comment as a non-rhetorical question. Say you were one of these "MORE attuned" people of the past: how long [literally] do you think it would take you to notice that the calendar was drifting? Like, if the calendar says the equinox should be on Monday, but in fact it's actually technically more like Tuesday, would you notice? What if it was technically on Wednesday?
If the rate of drift was like 5 days per year, then sure, people'd probably notice in a year or two — three tops, right? But how fast would the drift be? It's a question about how much people can detect small changes in daylight and how big the change actually is.
I also observe that we put up with tons of drift in our months: the new moon is hardly ever on the first of the month! And that's really easy to detect (within a day or two). So maybe people would notice a drift relative to the seasonal cycle and just not mind, the way we don't mind a drift relative to the lunar cycle.
We both use Chrome (she on Windows, me on Mac), but I could totally believe that I've turned off some shiny AI feature _in Chrome_ that she hadn't.
Anyone care to confirm or disprove the hypothesis that there's some setting in Chrome itself that will disable this Gmail feature?
reply