Autocorrect seems to have gotten noticably worse for me in recent years. I regularly find that the entirely correct words which I type out get changed to something completely different because the autocorrect decided that I couldn’t possibly mean that word. It regularly helpfully replaces entire words after I hit space and have moved on to the next. By that time, I’m usually focused on the next word, so slip-ups that I almost never make at a dumb keyboard (like its vs. it’s, there vs. their, your vs. you’re, or were vs. where vs. wear) happen with shocking regularity unless I proofread the entire comment. As a perfect example, I had to proofread and fix multiple instances of such while typing those examples.











When I call a fern (or wolf, crab, crow, whale, shark), at that level of syntactical broadly used common word I’m mostly talking about the phenotype, not the genotype. If someone was saying something about a specific fern, then we can argue against those romantic idea of deep time, a little. I mean, we’re probably all descendants of some ancient panspermia event anyway if you want to feel some connection to the ancient forgotten past.