I don't blame Apple for trying to straddle the line that makes everyone equally unhappy. But I steer away from autocorrect entirely so I'm not irritated daily by this like others may be.

Talking about autocorrect and irritation, I remember a situation where someone caused a minor international incident by writing that something "caused a lot of irritation". The word they were aiming for before autocorrect chimed in was "iterations" (on a document). I'd rather make my own mistakes than constantly have to fight an autocorrect system.

There is a way to win here: make it an opt out

- [ ] Disable autocomplete swear filter.

But finely grained options are not Apple’s way.

They could make it a simple algorithm and publish it. Then if someone accuses Apple of being biased towards their word, they just get directed to the algorithm.

Of course, people will still accuse Apple of being biased. But they’ll be wrong, and never manage to prove it (unlike this guy), which I think matters.

That’s ok. I’ve already made theguardian.com the bad guy a long time ago so the two cancel out.

Copying my own comment from below:

> "It's really difficult and frustrating to type anything outside the Overton window, and really easy and seamless to type anything inside the Overton window" is definitely a form of soft censorship worth worrying about IMO.

And as a rule of thumb, if someone says "free speech" rather than "the first amendment", 99% of the time they are talking about the concept and culture of free speech, not the legal implications.

"It's really difficult and frustrating to type anything outside the Overton window, and really easy and seamless to type anything inside the Overton window" is definitely a form of soft censorship worth worrying about IMO.

I can imagine that autocompleting following users' behavior could bite people who do a lot of sexting or could reveal other secrets, ex. `the door code is`

This is a good solution but you still have to deal with the cold start problem for the ML

Yes, please allow me to have corps not only know everything about me but have a hyper accurate way to know what I’m thinking as well.

Or we could just type the whole sentence we need.

That's asking a lot given the current state of the iOS keyboard.

> I don't like these "imagine if X was Y" arguments because X isn't Y

What you're really saying, perhaps without realizing it, is "I have zero empathy or theory of mind for people who have different views than me"

The whole reason these arguments exist is because power changes hands. If you like a rule only because the person currently wielding power aligns with you, you don't actually like the rule. You just like power.

Most people are not anti semitic.

Most people are not against transsexuals and gays.

There is no reason these kind of suggestions get pushed.

At least in the western civilization, I don’t see why it need to censor anything.

Even on a single-word basis, "male" might be make, makes, Maria, Maia, narrow, Maddow, marrow, Mariya, Marita, mafia, males, mallow, Maslow, male's, or masks. "Chauvinist" might be coatings, costing, coaxing, coasting, crating, contingency, contingent, contingencies, chauvinistic, Chauvin, or chaining. "Pig" might be PC, PIC, PCC, pox, poof, PVC, pH, put, pug, PV, Pooh, log, or pub. These are all possibilities that were actually presented when I tried to swipe these words on my Android phone, twice each. Taking into account additional context will broaden this set of possibly confusable words, not narrow it.

We might not talk about a "narrow contingency put" or "Maria crating PVC" very often, but an uncensored autocorrect would almost certainly correct those phrases to the far more common "male chauvinist pig" in the rare cases where someone did try to swipe them.

You can.

Step 1: a word of 4-6 letters that's somewhat close to "male". Say "name" or "masked". Look at the key positions, you'll see what I mean.

Step 2: a word that's even less close to chauvinist, and that makes sense after the word you intended, but no sense after "male", so the guesser picks "chauvinist", based on its incorrect first guess and your second swipe.

Step 3: ditto.

One of my friends is famously bad at texting. She’s even posted antisemitic stuff by accident. This is on Android.

I know these are all typos because she’s a really close friend and easily the last person who would be offensive to other people.

So yes, you’d be surprised at what people can typo on a phone.

"Male chauvinist" and "Male chauvinist pig" are related in meaning but not equivalent.

The difference matters enough that preemptively suggesting "pig" is not a desirable "service" for most people.

Not the parent - I'm a brit - but the obvious example I'm aware of is aussies' casual use of the c-word. It's used much more frequently than it would be in USA - or even the UK - but often in a complementary/friendly sense.

One popular Australian song of past years was I might be a C-word, but I'm not a F-word C-word - https://genius.com/Tism-i-might-be-a-cunt-but-im-not-a-fucki...

> expressions that Americans use in daily life that would offend Aussies?

Civilian regular (daily, weekly) group pledge of allegiance stuff. We're patriotic, but that OTT flag drapery stuff mostly comes across as on the nose.