alt Hacker NewsOh how I despise these suggestions. You sometimes look for a way to express something and you are on the verge of giving the world something truly original, but as soon as your brain sees the suggestion it goes "oh yeah that fits"
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True! There's an important cybernetic aspect to all this, where an automatic suggestion can be an interruption, sometimes worse if the suggestion is decent.
A certain amount of friction is necessary, at least if the goal is to help the person learn or make something original.
I look forward to reading studies in 10 years how we all became stupider thanks to this "feature". One step closer to the movie Idiocracy.
GK Chesterton would have something brilliant to say about the inauthenticity of it all or something.
I see the suggestions and then choose something different anyway. I don't want to use one of the top 3 most popular responses to an email from a friend. Even if it's something transactional.
> I despise these suggestions
As an adult, I do too. As a middle schooler, we absolutely used word processors’ thesaurus features to add big words to our essays because the teachers liked them.
I disabled them immediately, it feels like the tech version of the ADHD person who keeps interrupting you with what they think you are trying to say. Even if the suggestion is correct, it saves you at most 2 seconds at the cost of interrupting you constantly.