Posted by ozzyphantom 13 hours ago
Anyway, they know things we don’t, for both good (real constraints that users don’t see) and bad (fake constraints from bad internal decisions).
But dear Apple employee reading this: if you have fought the good fight, I appreciate your attempt, please keep it up. If you didn’t, we’re having a keyboard experience that you shouldn’t be proud of, no matter what the internal corporate logic maze you are caught up in.
> Around iOS 17 (Sept. 2023) Apple updated their autocorrect to use a transformer model which should've been awesome and brought it closer to Gboard (Gboard is a privacy terror but honestly, worth it).
> What it actually did/failed to improve is make your phone keyboard:
> Suck at suggesting accurate corrections to misspelled words
> "Correct" misspelled words with an even worse misspelling
> "Correct" your correctly spelled word with an incorrectly spelled word
Which makes me wonder: is Transformer model good with manipulating short texts and texts with errors at all ? It's kind of known that open weight LLMs don't perform well for CJK conversion tasks[2], and I've also been disappointed by their general lack of typo tolerances myself as well. They're BAD for translating ultrashort sentences and singled out words as well[3]. They're great for vibecoding, though.
Which makes me think, are they usable for anything under <100 bytes at all? Does it seem like they have a minimum usable input entropy or something?
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006171
1: https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-a...
2: The process of yielding "㍑" from "rittoru"
3: No human can translate, e.g. "translate left" in isolation correctly as "move left arm", but LLMs seem to be more all over the place than humans
:(
Agree at this point that I would disable it (in its current state) if I could, but when it worked correctly it was a huge boon to typing.
Apple employees reading this right now: "IDGAF about the keyboard, I made 500k in TC last year."
If you are going to change the iOS just for the keyboard (and yeah it's keyboard is bad; but that's not even a mild atrocious design and implementation decision they have made) then I guess your intention is just a big rant and a this post and a little discourse and that's it. Esp. the 120 days timeline. To be honest if you had to switch you'd have switched you know if Apple even does such "fixings" they will take decades (not years) because 1). yes, they are that incompetent when it comes to software, 2). they wouldn't want to mix the opportunity to say even something silly like For the First Time on an iPhone™ you have TrueAutocorrect™ (which will stick suck and will be at least 2 decades behind the 20th worst Android keyboard)
So yeah, good luck.
Someone needs to help me with the ethics here; is it okay to post hit-pieces or...?
He sure showed them. The people I know using super old iphones are doing more than their public commitment to buy more apple products as often as they can -- after a brief tolerance break, of course.
Every now and then, I feel like I simply cannot tap the correct keys. Things I do from muscle memory are jumping to the next letter over. This isn't just a temporary problem. It lasts for days/weeks.
Then suddenly, it's fine again.