A lot of this is about admins, but I also find it weird when university lecturers embrace LLMs, which are fundamentally opposed to the principles of academia as I understand it.
I can heartily recommend going into your Google settings and disabling the global "smart features" option. It removes a huge amount of crap all at once.
I found the blog post a bit annoying because it was clearly trying to win internet points rather than actually solve a problem. What you wrote above would have resolved the issue in a couple of minutes, faster than moving over to another email provider. I found all the Gemini integration into consumer products super annoying as well and disabled/unpinned all of it months ago the day I noticed it and thought "wth is this annoying thing". Now, if/when Google removes the option to disable, this blog post would be much more impactful IMO.
The author did say he tried some settings but not everything was available to disable. I dove deeper into it here [0]. You can disable Gemini AI and others and there is also a "nuclear option" where you disable all smart features.
Yes, I disabled all smart features. I'm surprised anyone here (or the type who bothers customizing their inbox layout) finds the Primary/Social/Promotions split useful. The original blog post mentioned "automatic thread categorization", which I thought just meant grouping emails in a conversation together (which doesn't really require any "smart" logic).
GMail users sometimes don't see my messages because they get sent to spam. (These are just normal person-to-person emails.)
Google used to have pretty good spam detection but now they seem to have cranked the dial over to err on the side of hiding mail the user actually wanted. It's not a good situation.
You can also see a recent comment of theirs saying they "don't look at code any more" but in this comment they say they "still require a code review" for changes.
I envy you. Before I degoogled my life, I tried going all in to no smart phone. It didn't last very long. I still would like to get there, but considering how difficult and slow it was just to degoogle, I anticipate that it may be a long time before I can operate without a smart phone.
The main thing that makes me think about getting a smartphone is navigation. But I never lost the skill of "looking up/writing down directions before you go" so it's not too bad.
(My phone is technically Android, but really old, not a touchscreen, you can't install apps, and most websites don't work in it, so... basically a dumb phone. But I did write a map web page that works in my very specific situation: https://lab.brainonfire.net/classicmap/ But mostly I just look up directions first and pay attention to signs, and the web page is a fallback that's nice to have.)
No cell phone period or no smart phone? I'm not sure how people manage the former. Do you have a home with a land line? What do you do when you travel?
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