Hacker News Reader

Comment by ztjio | Hacker News Reader

Tired of people blaming machines for working as designed when they have full control over the behaviors they are complaining about. It's a single checkbox in the system prefs to disable this system wide by default. These are supposedly professionals. They should be professional with all their tools or hire professionals that can proxy that liability for them.

In other words, this is 100% a fault in the hands of the users in the supposed problem case.

Now, all that said, I'd not be sad at all if this resulted in Apple disabling this feature by default. I always have to disable it on every mac as it drives me nuts. I type quickly so I never see the autocorrection popup.

View on HN

> Tired of people blaming machines for working as designed

How is the specific case of autocorrecting "duloxetine" to "fluoxetine" the system "working as designed"?

> this is 100% a fault in the hands of the users in the supposed problem case.

Why is a case like autocorrecting "duloxetine" to "fluoxetine" absolutely not in any way a fault of the developers?

Would an autocorrect system with the smarts to avoid that problem not be better?

You seem to be thinking of this in terms of absolutes. One point is that autocorrect, like everything else, has costs and benefits. Just because it has flaws doesn't mean it hasn't got benefits. For me the benefits outweigh the costs. Another is that when flaws are found they can be fixed

But costs can go above a certain absolute threshold. In this example, the cost may be a human life, which is unacceptable.

As I said in my comment, problems like in this case can be addressed. And such problems don't argue against all forms of autocorrect like the comment I replying to was rallying against.

Autocorrect on a machine with a physical keyboard is incredibly surprising behaviour, particularly autocorrect that provides next to no visual feedback. Users shouldn't have to be this vigilant to prevent text from getting rewritten.

People are blaming developers for bugs that could cost lives. That autocorrect is really annoying.

You need to be aware there's a problem to begin with.

I didn't know auto-correct was enabled by default on macOS, and would never have noticed that the OS was changing what I was typing without notifying me.

I do get the frustration on this, but the auto-correct is pretty simple to "correct" in cases where it got over-zealous. I noted this elsewhere in the thread, but my last name is one letter off from that of a fabric and it has on occasion when I wasn't looking or paying attention, it altered my name on airline websites.

This was an annoyance, and for a long time I was just super annoyed with it until I decided "there has to be a way to fix this", and there was. It was a simple double-tap on the trackpad "Learn Spelling", and it was done. I type pretty quickly too, but I'm also pretty persistent in watching what I'm doing and catch the lines as they appear.

I the case of the article, there's an association now on the Mac between the two words, which I'm pretty sure that "Learn spelling" will override. But by default if it hits a word it doesn't know and doesn't know what it could possibly be, it just leaves it as a red line.

In the end it’s a failure of education. If people could write properly they wouldn’t need autocorrect. Red squiggly lines are useful, but the actual correction should always be done manually by the user himself. Otherwise there’s no learning effect.

I always disable autocorrect on all my devices.

Maybe in part, but hitting the wrong key on a mobile device is just a mistake, not a "failure of education".

I disagree, there’s times where I fat finger. There’s times where I just have complete brain farts, or have trouble with dyslexia. Auto correct is a savior, and I don’t believe any of these things I listed are a result of this “failure of education.”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com