This is not true. The psychology of positive and negative events suggests that to optimize your happiness, you should "lump" negative things and "split" positive things.
People do this intuitively with payments (negative). They'll buy a timeshare or a boat (expensive, "lump" cost) when it would be much cheaper on net to stay at resorts or rent a boat and pay by usage.
They'll pay for subscriptions (automatic payments) rather than pay per experience. Many people will pay $20/mo for Netflix, watch it twice a month, but would never rent movies for $3 on Amazon.
They'll pay a big premium for "unlimited" data plans when this actually makes little sense for anyone vs. paying by usage.
IMO micropayments should be so small that people don’t even account for them in expenses. It costs almost nothing for a website to serve a single request, hosting costs almost nothing.
There’s no reason a big host can’t be 100% free, entirely relying on user payments for requests to pay for electricity and new servers (where each request is almost free), a few engineers and security guards to physically install, maintain, and monitor the servers (funded by excess or donations).
It’s the difference between filling up your tank and having to approve every mile to me. A fund I top up and costs go to 0 when I’m not using it is attractive, much more so than a fixed charge and subscription.
You're assuming that "usage" means an up-front thing to (negatively) focus on in the moment.
Instead the usage could be billed (lumped) at the end of the month and hidden in the moment so there's no real micro-decision or micro-pain response there.
In some sense everything an LLM does is by unprincipled methods. But it works! We judge it empirically post hoc by its performance rather than relying on tuning.
Hell, human thinking is unprincipled in basically the exact same way.
The law is one thing, and shouldn't discriminate on CEO status. but the decline of "cancellations" for various infractions of political correctness is definitely a positive in my book
I'd love statistical evidence that "cancellations" have decreased under Trump. As far as I can tell, the only thing that might have changed is who is being "cancelled."
And people generally seem to be arguing and trying to destroy the lives of the people they disagree with at a higher rate than ever.
> As far as I can tell, the only thing that might have changed is who is being "cancelled."
Has the right cancelled anyone? Like, a single person?
The biggest thing I can think of was a single episode of Jimmy Kimmel, lol. Which came from an incredibly bald-faced lie, on regulated public TV, about a high-sensitivity murder that had just happened.
Yeah I think this is the key thing. Sure, some small groups of conservatives would have liked to "cancel" some things. But unlike the left, they have literally never succeeded.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
> 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".
> "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.
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.
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`
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Assume about 50% of internet writing has zero tether to reality and is written out of pure motivation to shape a preferred narrative (and usually the same one).
When you see this your worldview will instantly become much clearer.
Not everyone is operating with the same constraints. As for me, once the models got good enough (~opus 4.5 levels of intelligence) that they could solve most problems that I was dealing with, I stopped following the frontier intelligence trajectory for daily use and instead followed constant intelligence and decreasing cost. Nowadays I primarily use GPT 6.1 luna, and DeepSeek 4.1 flash.
I've also been very happy playing around with qwen 3.8 27b running locally for personal projects. It sometimes can't quite get there, and that's when I'll reach for GPT.
The "race to the bottom" (to devalue fiat currency and drive inflation) is a big reason why stocks, gold, real estate, and bitcoin are valuable to hold. The market will definitely go up ad infinitum, since that is the policy of all central banks.
In the AI era, you just spin up 1024 bots making substack posts prophetizing the future. That's ten binary predictions. Delete the 1023 that fail. Keep the one account that perfectly "predicted" the future.
I rather have one extreme win than 100 smol wins that get evaporated once the market crashes. There’s an expression that goes ”Eating like a chicken, shitting like an elephant”. That’s the beauty of puts.
I don't trust the market to calibrate "value" the same way that I subjectively define it.
But I trust the market to calibrate value about 10,000x more than I trust any person or group of people to do so. The thought of that is frankly terrifying.
To be more precise, the reason I trust the market is the "skin in the game" and the decentralization / localization of decision making. People with something to lose tend to actively "vote" only on what they know something about.
Not that it's somehow "not people" (of course it is).
> People with something to lose tend to actively "vote" only on what they know something about.
"Prediction" markets have rendered this clearly false of late.
> the reason I trust the market is the "skin in the game"
The market expects economic bailouts and other assistance during downturns, because individual investors with 401(k)s demand it, despite the perversions of market incentives that result.
People do this intuitively with payments (negative). They'll buy a timeshare or a boat (expensive, "lump" cost) when it would be much cheaper on net to stay at resorts or rent a boat and pay by usage.
They'll pay for subscriptions (automatic payments) rather than pay per experience. Many people will pay $20/mo for Netflix, watch it twice a month, but would never rent movies for $3 on Amazon.
They'll pay a big premium for "unlimited" data plans when this actually makes little sense for anyone vs. paying by usage.
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