Hacker News

points by conradev 10 hours ago | 0 comments

Apple is choosing between two outcomes:

- There is a chance, quantified by some metric, where a person is suggested a word that is offensive to them or their culture because a probabilistic model made the wrong decision.

- There is no chance that the above happens.

Apple will choose the latter, time and time again, because they are risk averse and freedom is not particularly high on their values list. We’re talking about the company that doesn’t let you type the Taiwanese flag in China, or the pride flag in Russia. It’s no surprise you’re not allowed to swipe “fuck” in the United States. I used to work at Apple.

[–] Litost 10 hours ago

At the risk of being controversial, isn't there also the choice not to implement autocomplete and then avoid the above conundrum, especially once you factor in the fact that they can't possibly catch all combinations of words/letters so a grey list isn't actually an effective solution either, other than it provides a we tried defense.

The ultimate problem being some subset of consumers want autocomplete and some subset will retain the right to be offended and some subset will be both of those?

EDIT: And at what point does accidently sending male chauvinist pig to your boss because of autocomplete absolve you of the responsibility of reading the message before you send it?

Is there any reason apple can't give us the choice of.

a) No autocomplete.

b) Autocomplete with greylist.

c) Autocomplete without greylist.

[–] hxtk 5 hours ago

The biggest problem with it for me is it also affects swipe typing by tracing over the letters. There’s no way to implement that (and have it be even slightly usable) without some amount of predictive text.

If it didn’t auto complete then that would be fine when hitting keys individually, but when I’m swiping the words, it means no matter how accurate I am or how many attempts I make, it will literally never produce that word in that position.

And it’s contextual. Obviously I can swipe in “me,” but if it’s after the word “kill” then it’s banned, and I simply can’t dedicate the space in my head to learning this inscrutable list of banned phrases that until this article I’d been unable to find anywhere so I could only ever discover a phrase was on it by having an extremely frustrating time trying and failing to type it until I realized “oh, this is a politically or emotionally charged phrase (or could be in a different context) and I’m not that bad at typing so it’s probably banned.”

[–] Calazon 10 hours ago

I suspect Apple just decided that giving users a lot of fine-grained settings is not as good for their business as keeping things simple.

[–] zahlman 38 minutes ago

To my understanding, that has been their attitude for pretty much the entire life of the company.

[–] rpdillon 8 hours ago

Yes, taking away customer choice is good for business, as Apple has proven time and again. It's a shame, but I can't argue with the results.

[–] bawolff 7 hours ago

> Is there any reason apple can't give us the choice of.

Because they are in the business of making money and the business case for this doesn't make sense.