> I feel like it regularly gets in the way of typing
I understand that everyone's experience can be different. But wow I just noticed that my palms are so often on the touchpad while I'm typing and I have never ever had any problem with that.
Also I usually use my thumb to move cursor and click while other fingers stay on the keys and I cannot remember when it didn't behave according to my intentions. Especially considering the bigger contact area between a thumb and touchpad compared to other fingers.
I just checked edge cases and it works very reliably.
Cursor doesn't move if I use my palm.
It does move if palm is on the touchpad and I use my thumb.
It does move as expected if I move both thumb and palm over touchpad synchronously.
It follows the thumb as expected if I move both my thumb and palm in different directions.
I remember my first touchpad on macbook air 13 from 2011. It felt so much better than anything I tried before. But at that time it was physical and it had dead zone at the top of the touchpad. And it was smaller. Today's touchpad macbook pro touchpad is an engineering marvel.
But then I remembered that I had already stopped reading some common Google search results because they seemed too low effort for a very long time. And they often looked like they were generated, not written. Just three examples from different fields: Quora, CNN, and CNET. But the list is much longer. In non-English parts of the Internet, there is also poorly auto-translated content from websites like Stack Overflow, which is weirdly high in the Google results. Fortunately, I found extensions to block these websites in Google search. So for me, and I believe for many people, it has already happened.
On the other hand, I enjoy reading articles from Simon Willison and Adam Johnson. And even though now we have very powerful chatbot services that can explain anything to you or effectively teach you some skill, I will most likely continue to read the content that they put on their blogs or elsewhere.
Reputation did matter, and it will matter even more in the future. I believe people will continue to read other people's texts. At least I will.
I appreciate that many SF short stories revolve around twist endings or reveals which spoil particularly badly, but I also think there needs to be a time limit on this or we can't discuss a story from 1958.
"Unblock" is the perfect term for the effect of all these GPT things on me. Thank you for coining that!
Recently I wanted to have something like that but for Safari Reading list. The main difference is I tried to find a solution not for one time liberation, but for continuous 2-way exchange with some web service. It appears you HAVE to run everything locally for that. I like "privacy", but I like having options even more.
By the way it was ChatGPT that helped me to remove this several month old item from my TODO list.
Related question: if there were no changes, for instance, because it is too costly to change it now, would you choose a different model for this now?