You know, I really wish software developers
spend less time solving things that are issues only in their minds and focused
more on staying the heck out of my business.
A case in point is an incident with Gmail’s web
mail that occurred earlier this week. I replied to a friend’s email and hit
Send. Up popped this little box:
I actually stared at it for several seconds,
first in confusion and then in disbelief. It’s bad enough that when I refer to
someone as a stud muffin in an email body the next thing I know is I’m seeing
ads for muffins. But when one of Google’s algorithms steps in to “correct” my
actions, that’s just going beyond the beyond.
I clicked OK to send anyway, but fear for the future of humanity.
2 comments:
Really? You didn't think that was a helpful question?
Maybe a dozen years ago, and maybe more, I had the idea that people would really appreciate this exact feature in the e-mail programs -- given how many times I'd had to reply with "There wasn't any attachment" or follow up an e-mail with "Sorry! This time *with* attachment!!"
I even talked to software engineers in my company to see what it would entail.
If they're going to insert Mary Poppins into their email operation, they should program her to parse the terms in context.
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