| ▲ | howunfortunate a day ago |
| As another example, imagine if "trans women are" autosuggested "men" or "ugly" for the next prediction. This would probably be a bad customer experience for many people, even if Apple could prove these are simply the most common n-gram completions. And if they altered their training data to avoid completions that are politically unpalatable, IMO that's actually much much worse than a grey list. I'm a big free speech guy but this one is genuinely a bit complex. |
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| ▲ | briandw a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| There is no winning here. It's impossible to make autocomplete inoffensive. In fact making it inoffensive, is offensive. theguardian.com would make Apple the bad guy no matter the policy choice. |
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| ▲ | buran77 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Retric 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | iOS has been steadily offering more options over time. And yes taken individually customization seems like the correct choice basically every time but eventually you end up with a mess. Consider the logic for tap’s could offer hundreds of customizations. That’s core functionality and I’m sure someone internally is thinking deeply about many of them. But if you offer zero customization most people just get used to how things operate so skipping that functionality isn’t terrible for the average user. Instead they offer options for people with disabilities which is a distinct group who can’t just adapt and thus a meaningful justification. | |
| ▲ | close04 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Both disabling the “predictive” feature entirely, or allowing predictions based exclusively on what it learns from the user could work. The latter would probably be unpopular because learning from what you type sounds intrusive. But any prediction picked by Apple without user input could be seen as Apple’s speech. If it’s suggested by Apple then they aren’t censoring you, they are censoring themselves. | |
| ▲ | sam1714 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You'd end up with pages of options, especially once people realize they can get on the bandwagon. Disable swears, alcohol, smoking, marijuana, gambling, child abuse and neglect, sensitive East Asian politics, sensitive Middle Eastern politics, WWII politics, Late Ottoman genocides, LGB issues, T issues, global warming, nuclear power, HOA issues, vegetarian issues, vegan issues... | | |
| ▲ | 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That’s a silly exaggeration. You’re literally just saying “there shouldn’t be a user toggle because developers have no self-control for stopping at one toggle”. To which the obvious counterargument is just “well of course they can stop at just one toggle. That’s not an excuse to have zero toggles”. | | |
| ▲ | Arnt 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's a story about the Microsoft Word team. I'm not sure it's true, but here goes: The team had heard that most customers only use 5% of Word's copious feature set, and as part of some rewrite the team set about finding out what the 5% were. And it was most of the feature set. Customer A used these 5%, B these others... It's easy to say just one option without describing exactly what that should do. L10n raises some questions, for example. Or just two options, or three. Much harder if you want to be specific. | | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | We aren’t talking about completely disparate types of functionality. We are talking about enabling or disabling very narrow categories of words from literally one feature. The story you mentioned wasn’t about exclusions from each and every dictionary. It was about tools that do entirely unique things. I know HN has a long history of struggling with nuance, but surely people must understand that it’s entirely possible to have a toggle to enable/disable the autocomplete adult filter without needing to then have options for every…single…minor…variation of that filter. | | |
| ▲ | Arnt 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think you're saying that it's possible that Apple can add the option you want and go on stonewalling other people's requests for other options. Right? | | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm saying the opposition against having an option because "what if people want more options?" is silly and unproductive. Do you make the same argument for everything? "You shouldn't treat yourself to a takeaway because what if you want more takeaways?" "You shouldn't buy a car because what if you want more cars?" etc. |
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| ▲ | sam1714 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You write "developers have no self control." This isn't a technical problem as much as it is a political/social problem, and it's what will happen in the social/governmental relations part of the business, not what the developers want. Look what happened to geographical names. Windows still doesn't implement flag emojis because they can't sort out countries. | | |
| ▲ | hnlmorg 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | This sounds more like the exact opposite of your Windows example (I don't run Windows so have to take your word on this). The opposite because Apple have implemented different rules for different countries already whereas your example is about how Microsoft was scared to. So, if anything, your example demonstrates my point about the need for a single toggle to disable everything ;) It's insane to me that people would argue "we don't know when to stop so lets not implement it at all" when you can literally just stop at one toggle if you wanted. It honestly feels like sometimes people look for problems where problems don't exist. |
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| ▲ | armchairhacker 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | cite_please a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | That’s ok. I’ve already made theguardian.com the bad guy a long time ago so the two cancel out. |
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| ▲ | Dylan16807 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The problem here isn't a mere lack of suggestion. If it treated that situation as a completely blank context that wouldn't get in the way of typing what you want to type. |
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| ▲ | tobylane 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I'm a big free speech guy but this one is genuinely a bit complex. How does free speech come into it? Suggestions are not limitations (by a private company) on your output. |
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| ▲ | howunfortunate 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | roenxi 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't even think it is complex; you can say what you like so there isn't a free speech issue here. Users are still going to type what they intended to type. Apple can reasonably have their software avoid making guesses about what users meant to say on charged topics. It'd be a better if Apple provided a list somewhere for transparency but what they are doing isn't going to cause anyone any trouble. |
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| ▲ | howunfortunate 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | "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. | | |
| ▲ | roenxi 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am perfectly capable of expressing myself if HN's software allows me to misspell chauvenist and the idea that an iPhone needs a different standard should be totally rejected. That entire line of argument is distracting from the actual problems with censorship - people with power forcing the public discourse into nonsense and lies. Promoting bad spelling and grammar is not a free speech issue. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I am perfectly capable of expressing myself if HN's software allows me to misspell… This isn't about "promoting bad spelling"; we aren't talking about "misspelled 'bad' words don't get autocorrected". We're talking about a system where you try to type a "bad" word and the system substitutes a "good" word unless/until you override it. Or a system where you effectively choose every word from a menu, and the "bad" words are hidden using UI "dark patterns". |
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| ▲ | xenator a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Autocomplete should be following the user's own behaviour. If a user thinks that "trans women are men", then it will be not a universal experience, it is just this separated user's own statistics. |
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| ▲ | hairofadog a day ago | parent | next [-] | | 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` | |
| ▲ | howunfortunate a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is a good solution but you still have to deal with the cold start problem for the ML | | |
| ▲ | throooooo a day ago | parent [-] | | Then you just don't suggest anything if there isn't enough data yet. Regardless, auto-complete suggestions is different from what TFA is about. |
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| ▲ | conception a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | reorder9695 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Futo keyboard on Android has a transformer LM option that uses local ML for text prediction, I've found it to work very well. As far as I'm aware it's completely on device. | | |
| ▲ | SV_BubbleTime 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | “Generated entirely on device” seems like an omission that doesn’t cover diagnostic, telemetry, “product improvement” logs. |
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| ▲ | xenator 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It can be the same way as it works now, hash table with hits stats. | |
| ▲ | stavros 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A friend made a keyboard for iOS because he didn't like any of the existing ones, and it doesn't send any data anywhere: https://typeneuma.com |
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| ▲ | alfjal a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's asking a lot given the current state of the iOS keyboard. | | |
| ▲ | nostrademons a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It already does this. I've found it'll suggest my kids' names frequently, after just 1-2 letters. It didn't do this before they were born. I assume it's training on my previous messages. | |
| ▲ | stackghost a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I never understood the memes about autocorrect until I got an iPhone. The keyboard is so much worse than GBoard it’s incredible. |
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| ▲ | rafram a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > even if Apple could prove these are simply the most common n-gram completions Tech-illiterate online mobs enraged by Apple “making a statement” will not stick around long enough to hear them argue about n-grams or whatever. |
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| ▲ | bjourne a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > As another example, imagine if "trans women are" autosuggested "men" or "ugly" for the next prediction. Or imagine if it auto-completed "the Holocaust is" with "a myth created by the ZOG"! I don't like these "imagine if X was Y" arguments because X isn't Y. Refusing to auto-complete "the occupied territories" (X) is really not the same thing as refusing to auto-complete antisemitism or group-based hate speech (Y). Argue whether X is right or wrong without changing the subject. |
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| ▲ | howunfortunate a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | | |
| ▲ | aucisson_masque a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | sssilver 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Most people where? In the Bay Area? In the United States? In the Middle East? In India and China? All of planet earth? |
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