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Comment by arielm | Hacker News Reader

I get why this needs to exist, but it feels more complicated than it should be and that sort of “magical” decision that’s based on ML is going to confuse both web developers and web users. It might be worth it, but I don’t think it is just yet.

On a side note though, it seems Apple is doubling down on making decisions for its users. This is one example, another is do not disturb when driving. These sort of features make a lot of assumption and use complex logic to decide for users, even when the users don’t need that. I think that’s concerning.

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Tracking prevention, do not disturb when driving, iMessage communication encryption (and refusal to break it), OS encryption, and other decisions that Apple is making for its users seem quite positive. I'm not against any of these decisions. On the contrary, I think they're great! (Let's ignore developer-centric issues for the moment as we're a small fraction of their user base.)

But I agree it is a concerning trend. The situation is analogous to government-mandated morals. While I might be expected to welcome legislation that enforces my beliefs on the rest of the population, I personally would prefer that the government stayed completely out of making these decisions at all, because it's only a matter of time before they make a decision that does not match my beliefs.

> On a side note though, it seems Apple is doubling down on making decisions for its users. This is one example, another is do not disturb when driving. These sort of features make a lot of assumption and use complex logic to decide for users, even when the users don’t need that. I think that’s concerning.

All of the reports I'm reading say DNDWD is opt-in.

We came up with a hand-coded deterministic classifié that gives similar results. Part of the reason to use ML is to enable us to adapt to changes in the web.

Both of these things can be turned off in settings and DNDWD will ask you if you'd like to enable it.

Yeah, these aren't forced decisions. The driving mode is opt-in the first time.

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