What I like to call “glide texting” is when (on a phone) you put your finger on the first letter and drag your finger to the next letter and the next and so on without lifting your finger until you reach the last letter. Letters that are repeated (like in too) are just treated as one letter for this. Your phone will then “guess” what word could be represented by “what you just drew” and give you some options above the keyboard (3 for my phone) for alternatives in case things were guessed wrong. This requires your keyboard to support that feature (and the basic Android keyboard does support it). On earlier phones, the SwiftKey keyboard was used to do such things (that company was later on purchased by Microsoft by the way).

There are two issues I want to highlight with regards to glide texting.

First is where several words can be represented by one “glide text”. I feel (can’t prove) that the phone does use the context of your sentence to assist with word selection. However, you sometimes have to be annoyed and type out words letter by letter to get things entered.

The second issue is that your phone learns from you and from the “intelligent population”. If you type in a wrong spelling (perhaps by not entering in the last letter) then your phone “learns” that word and starts to use it when glide texting. Second is when a person glide texts incorrectly (for “hello”, instead of swiping over HELO they swipe over GWKO or BELO or something like that) and then that person taps the “Hello” entry for what that glide should mean. Now the phone starts thinking glide texts for a specific word (from anyone in the world) must mean some completely different word because the majority of people seem to indicate that.

Still, glide texting is usually a faster way to enter text on the phone. That being said, issues can be quite interesting when they do appear.

That second link is helpful. For instance, it shows an server which I thought was ran well ( startrek.website ) being about 1 million activities behind in content from Lemmy.world

https://grafana.lem.rocks/d/bdid38k9p0t1cf/federation-health-single-instance-overview?orgId=1&var-instance=startrek.website&var-remote_instance=lemmy.world&from=now-32d&to=now

This means that the technology community here looks much different there. Here there are comments to our submissions. Shown there, the submissions seem to have no comments.

https://lemmy.world/c/technology

https://startrek.website/c/technology@lemmy.world

If a person there didn’t know better, they may think that Lemmy doesn’t have as much activity as it actually does.

Thanks for the information!

I’m not sure if the status pages accurately show federation issues though (not federating or well behind). I’m not sure if they can easily show that information either.

I’ll mention my experience with a server from that list (that I won’t name)…

The server worked most of the time but federation kept breaking. The server was rather small. Since you use Lemmy from your home instance, this meant that only a few local communities showed any activity and this was a very low amount of activity. This would go on for days or even well over a week before things got better for a while and then everything started to break again.

It is one thing for a server to just go away. You then clearly know that something is wrong and you can migrate over to another server. It is another thing for the server to generally be online all the time with it just messing up in such a way as to make the whole Lemmy ecosystem seem rather dead.

Things would have been easier if most of the communities I want to interact with were on the same server as my account. The other server, with federation issues, was only home to 5 % of the communities I was following which left 95 % of the communities I wanted to follow as not updated due to federation issues.

There isn’t a clear indication of which servers are working great with a proven track record of working great as opposed to “zombie instances” not federating correctly or other instances which are moments away from randomly shutting down. The point is that I feel like my account anywhere will be able to receive and send information throughout the whole Lemmy network or sites. This reduces the concept of federation a bit down towards needing to have an account on a well known working server simply because account migration is such a headache. I can then interact with communities without issues (hosted on well working servers) but I can easily change my community subscriptions as I want to.

One thing that may help for someone is to try and see what communities they want to participate in. If the communities they primarily find interesting are in Lemmy.world then they likely should have an account there to ease any federation issues. The number of communities I follow here are 3 times larger than communities I follow with any other specific instance. This community subscription list is one I figured out when I was on “that other server” so it guided me here.

Someone may want to know if you are a Democrat or Republican (for advertising, for gerrymandering, whatever). That person may not be able to ask you a direct question like that though (or may feel that you may lie about the answer to such a question anyway).

As such, they likely carry out occasional surveys asking people who are Democrat or Republicans for their opinions on something else. Once they find something else that can strongly correlate your political affiliation with a specific opinion, they know of a new question they can ask someone. That new question should generally reveal what your political party is most likely and they can then proceed with that “most likely” answer.

So “who cares” is those who cannot directly ask you something. They will ask you something else and use that answer to deduce the information they cannot obtain directly.

Reddit, about yesterday, started to implement a change…

They have the old Reddit interface and then the one that replaced it (“new Reddit”) and the current interface you see on Reddit replaced that. People don’t like the most recent interface iteration but had the option to go to “new Reddit” or “old Reddit” by vising the appropriate links.

Notably, each newer interface seems to be more stressful for the servers to run. Still, likely a decent amount of folks don’t like the newest interface so likely the load balances out.

Yesterday though, they “pulled the lever” and “new Reddit” is no more. (This was announced about a month ago at this link but they only got around to doing it yesterday.) Those people trying to access “new Reddit” are redirected to the latest interface. You have the option to use the oldest Reddit interface or the newest one but not the “new Reddit” one. Since the latest interface seemed to use the most server resources before, it is interesting how Reddit seemed to have their severs overloaded a bit when they made the switchover.

On Reddit, people have been upset in /r/help that this has happened but Reddit will likely continue on with this change anyway. Old Reddit will continue to be supported (at least for now anyway).

ArsTechnica has a bit more detail. I’ll quote the important bit below.

… try to reboot affected machines over and over, which gives affected machines multiple chances to try to grab CrowdStrike’s non-broken update before the bad driver can cause the BSOD.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/07/crowdstrike-fixes-start-at-reboot-up-to-15-times-and-get-more-complex-from-there/

This seems like an interesting application of a “race condition”. They are hoping that the update outraces the program starting up enough to crash…

Though others have said multiple states have laws against changing prices during the business day.

Suddenly it makes a lot more sense why Walmart doesn’t want to be open 24 hours a day…

Notably, Digg updated which also involved a worse interface and didn’t have an “old Reddit” interface you could access. Going to a site that was like the old interface involved leaving Digg and joining Reddit.

That is likely why you can now access older Reddit interfaces. They feel that many people will stay if they can find a way to use the new interface (and they may be right about that). The Digg approach of forcing all to use the new interface was a step over the line for Digg and Reddit likely fears a similar thing could happen to them.