What Are You Doing?

AKA D.E.R.P – Part II

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With current technology, I oftentimes find myself asking... “what are you doing?”

I was thinking about writing an article like this, and while I was texting a friend, I came across the straw that broke the camel’s back: an autocorrect error so bizarre, it had probably marked the fiftieth time I said “What are you doing?” to a piece of technology on that week.

The typo in question: I was trying to write “they’ve”, and as I hit the spacebar, the autocorrect decided to change it to “they’be”.

What… are you doing?

Unpaid text correction software overall has gotten a little better over the years, mostly in knowing when to use “your” and “you’re”. Unfortunately, it still thinks “God to see you” is a more preferable phrase over “Good to see you”. Hell, sometimes it can’t even be assed to automatically capitalize a lone “I”.

I don’t have much experience with Android, but autocorrect on the iPhone is apparently notoriously bad, and personal experience confirms it; it’s horrible. Sometimes you get that steady flow, but then afterwards you realize autocorrect inserted a word in there that makes literally no logical sense to include. What are you doing?

It’s sort of like when an LLM confidently says some stupid shit that has no logical basis. Perhaps we should be happy Apple never got into the large language model scene. I mean they’ve been stuck in D.E.R.P purgatory for a while – allergic to meaningful progress ever since the removal of the headphone jack, so yeah… I guess I expect too much.

Speaking of LLMs, I was using Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro (supposedly the most powerful LLM as of right now) to make sense of a program error I was experiencing. A reoccurring issue was that, within the program's code was a list, and Gemini 2.5 was hellbent on convincing me there was duplicate entries in this list.

For the first run… it was… laughable. You see, Gemini has a “thinking” feature to better solve problems. In this situation, though, Gemini was taking the modern person's route of thinking AFTER speaking.

First it tells me there’s duplicate entries, and then… midway through the generation… it goes “ah, my apologies, there AREN’T duplicates”.

Bro was, to put it crudely, literally yapping.

And yes, CTRL + F confirmed, there were no duplicated entries. I rolled the dice twice more, and twice more did Gemini try to bullshit me into believing there were duplicates.

I told the fucker straight up, and it doubled down. Google, what are you DOING, man?

In the end, Claude Opus solved the problem and didn’t hallucinate problems and then act like a pretentious twit when called out.

But LLMs are only a modern computing issue. How about more ancient examples?

How about this: you accidentally glide your hand across the keyboard and next thing you know, you’ve activated an extremely elaborate and inconvenient shortcut. Would one think the “undo” button would… well… undo such a thing, but of course… there isn’t. WHY IS THERE NEVER A PROGRAM THAT ALLOWS UNDO FOR SHORTCUTS???

The undo/redo buttons should be universal. CTRL + Z should apply to everything within a program, as with CTRL + Y.

Or CTRL + Shift + Z if it’s one of those sadistic programs that bind the key to such.

In both Vegas Pro and Davinci Resolve, if you place down an in/out marker, you can’t undo it. You have to personally search Google just to find the shortcut that removes the marker. Here’s a crack cocaine idea: make it so the undo button actually fucking undoes whatever you did within the program??

One day when I was writing something in MS Word, I came across a freeze. Now, don’t ask how a word processing program can somehow come to a screeching halt. Modern software development is led by the brightest minds these days, as evident by this article and the one before it.

Anyways, while the program was frozen, I might’ve cluster bombed the keys. With that, I then tried to get Task Manager to open. Lo and behold, Task Manager was frozen.

With the entirety of Windows 11 coming to a sudden screeching halt (as expected with this OS, despite a blazingly fast NVME SSD), suddenly everything came together. You can imagine “William Tell Overture Finale” or “In the Hall of the Mountain King” playing right now.

The OS returned from its rest and out came every single bloody shortcut that I had pressed. Even the printer behind me had awakened, printing a handful of documents before I could cancel it.

The OS, despite it’s near dead state, still perfectly remembered ALL the shortcuts I had incited from my aggravation. Even that perfect combination to queue up a printing job. For just a short while, I was unironically convinced that my PC had become conscious.

Truly the height of human technology, when your own computer begins rebelling against you by having a mind of its own. SNAP help us when we achieve true AI autonomy. From what we have seen from personal computers of today, they are already largely autonomous, and not in a good way.