This is interesting… does anyone have data in theirs? It also feels like something they could have put on an intern and it didn’t really gain any traction. Each app would need to “tell” the OS who the receiver is, and the article indicates there is no API to do that. Maybe it just knows, but how could that be?
I have a MacBook that was meant to replace my aging Windows and Linux laptops. This article is a microcosm of why I have just stopped using it. An endless stream of mollycoddling, obfuscation and "It's for your own good, child" trash. I can't even bring myself to sell it because I'm ashamed of it.
To be crystal clear, this internal framework and these databases exist as tweaks to make these words be autosuggested to / autocorrected to more often than they would be before the tweak.
Also, not only Windows and Android but even Linux (aspell / hunspell) also have+use “don’t suggest this word in autosuggest” metadata tags in their dictionary databases.
Why would “trump” be considered an offensive term? My understanding of the database is to prevent you from accidentally typing offensive or words being autocorrected to something offensive. Like if I misspell “helper” I don’t want that to be autocorrected to “hitler”.
It’s surprising to me that “trump” would get the same classification. Given that he’s the current president of the US, I’m sure people intentionally type his name all the time. I don’t want my keyboard to steer me away from writing out “trump”. And typos autocorrecting to Trump don’t seem like a big deal either. Would anyone be offended by the text “don’t forget to bring your Trump to band practice”?
I commented this here for this precise reason. `Libtard` is definitely a word people on the internet use but the other one ive literally never seen before. Someone went out of their way to add one and not the other. I agree though that, ehem, rightoids are supremely sensitive tho.
Just in time for America's ongoing discovery that "liberal" and "conservative" are in fact quite similar ideologies. New insults are called for. I propose "progtard" and "reactard".
Apple's built-in dictionary flags on my Mac: 26.2, which is newer than the article's
15.6. Apple has changed several
things since:
┌───────────────┬────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ │ Article (15.6) │ My Mac (26.2) │
├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Total entries │ 199,019 │ 199,940 │
├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Vulgar │ 1,050 │ 850 │
├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Offensive │ 663 │ 727 │
├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Sensitive │ 2,558 │ 2,748 │
├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Oedipus │ vulgar │ sensitive (sex topic) │
├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ cooties │ vulgar │ clean │
├───────────────┼────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Biden │ clean │ now tagged politics topic, still no tier │
└───────────────┴────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────┘
These are unchanged:
- Trump is still sensitive with the politics topic. The lowercase card-game word "trump" is still
clean.
- Obama, Putin, Vance and Harris have no tier. Musk still isn't in the dictionary.
- Tom and Mick are still offensive, and pee, poo, niggle, underling, blacklist and Isis are still
sensitive.
- idiot is still sensitive, and now also has the catch-all "sensitive context" topic.
Words in the capitalized sensitive list that the article doesn't mention include Saddam, Grindr,
Oedipus/Oedipal, TERF and Viagra. Trump is still the only living politician among them.
Somehow Mao is there. But Pol Pot isn't. I would have guessed they'd go by the number of victims. But I guess "Uncle Joe" is clean and uncontroversial, so someone was confused about history. But yeah, this has that "Cupertino interns typed this list" feel to it.
That's incidental, but I hear it a lot. I started using this screen name nigh-on 30 years ago (as was the slang at the time), but I love that people recognize that.
Why does Apple need to keep these in a separate database? I thought they removed filtering, maybe subject to user age or parental controls, not added a whole mechanism to manage it.
This is about autocorrect learning words you like to use that it should consider potentially intentional use of words it might otherwise think you typed accidentally
Categories are used for training the autocorrect transformer model. It’s context aware, app aware, and adaptive over time. The 2023 wwdc keynote explains it all
Regardless, it’s non-censorship because autocorrect does not prevent you from saying anything
Would it be possible to get versions of the files to see when certain words got added and I imagine certain words got removed? Could be interesting to correlate certain events, personalities, trends, memes, controversies etc with the changes.
It was added in 23 so there's potentially 3 years of updates.
When the first iOS 27 beta came out, it was actually really good for me. But later betas and now the public release ruined it once again. It's unbelievable how bad it is.
There are literal slow motion videos on YouTube showing people pressing the correct intended next character and iOS "correcting" it to something else because it predicted(?) that they actually meant something else.
Yup. Something about this sentence reeks of Opus 5.5: "The one exception is the n-word: it is in the list in English and several other languages, and I'm not writing it out."
Yeah, what is it with the fucking 4-word sentences (subject, verb, object) which AI use that aggravate me. Always so short and "punchy". Maybe it's the aggression and breatheless haste...
I can't focus and read this shit. The other article on the frontpage https://blog.nns.ee/2026/11/02/renault-hack/ also used LLM for the work, but I think a human wrote it (or he's using an LLM that's managed to sound human). It's so readable!
Edit: a snippet from the slop:
> There is no public API
> I looked. NSSpellChecker, UITextChecker, NaturalLanguage and UILexicon don't expose vulgarity.
I think the fucking problem is, each sentence is supposed to convey information. Here "I looked." is prominent, but is it information? No, it's fucking useless. Remove it and it doesn't even change the information. Meanwhile readers' brains are trying to process why the author included this sentence, it must have value?
There is something very funny to me about how that word (I’d write it directly if I knew I could without getting auto-dead) has somehow been deemed the most offensive word of all time. What makes it different from any other slur based upon identity?
Using that word means that centuries of enslavement and subhuman treatment are not abhorrent to you. Because a person who finds it abhorrent would never use it. In essence it shows you still put yourself above other people in that incredibly vile way
There’s not really any neutral reason to speak or write that word, at least in the U.S., because it is so infamous that in any context you can use “the n word” and everyone will know exactly what you mean. In terms of direct semantic meaning, the actual word adds nothing.
The potential downsides of using it are also famous. So the only remaining reasons to speak it are to show that you can (demonstrating your power), or choose to (demonstrating an obstinate desire for conflict).
And obviously if you are installing a text filter in software, you will need to type it out and store it that way.
In addition to the situation that you described where it is essential to use the specific word in a technical matter, it also seems reasonable to use that word in certain academic and legal contexts when quoting or reciting something that contains it.
No it doesn’t. It means you’ve said a word, which could be for any number of malicious or non-malicious reasons.
Why does saying “fag” not elicit the same level of repulsion in people? Homosexuals have been treated awfully throughout history, but for some reason it doesn’t hit as hard for people. You could say the same for “kike” or any other number of offensive terms linked to a people who have been targeted throughout history and even today.
A good example is that I was able to write out the two offensive terms mentioned above - no euphemism required, but from what I’ve experienced writing the dreaded “n” word in any context means your comment is auto-dead.
I like the analogy, but I don't see how it's applicable here?
The 100m dash record is about an objective mesaureble property of the device, speed in this example. If we were talking, say, about inference speed, then yes, of course it's Claude who generated X tokens in Y seconds, not you.
Isn't a better analogy to ask if you drove a car completely on autopilot to some destination, then was it you who drove there or the car?
Also, for the record, I also don't like the AI-written publications. My concern is the consistency in using the terms. This is also related to the idea to not to antromorphize AI.
There is a lot more interesting stuff to mine from this.
The phrase blocklist for the Chinese lanaguge is a lot larger (surprise, surprise). It about 281 KB for Simplified Chinese, 325 KB for Traditional and 160 KB for Cantonese, against 28 KB for English.
apparently there are `shouldShowTaiwanFlagEmoji()` and `deviceIsChinese()` functions as well but that doesn't have anything to do with this database.
How do I make iOS let me swipe “fucking” everywhere? fucking
fucking fucking fucking!! After typing it manually two or three times it then swipe completes in this particular text field in this app. I've heard about adding a contact with the words, but that is ridiculous, so I have held out hoping Apple will eventually come to their senses, like a fool.
This doesn't make “fuck” swipeable either… unless I type it once, and keep it in the text field!
Interesting overall, but maybe it's just me: when I read this section in Caveats :
`- Flagged is not censored. As far as I can tell these flags decide what the keyboard volunteers, not what you can type.`
An alarm bell went off in my head. The first thing I thought of was this P.T interview [1] where he describes with certainty, what he thinks the interests are in Europe currently. I'll leave you to imagine what his sources might be for this.
And now I can't stop thinking about how these word lists might look like simple technical flags,but could also be used to distill people worries and track trends.
Anyway maybe it's the LLM world that we live in ... I don't know everything is sus now days.
Fun fact, the word “cooties” didn’t originally refer to a fictitious infective agent spoken of by children; it was originally a nickname for body lice.
> Coined during World War I by British and American soldiers in the trenches of Belgium and France to describe the pervasive body lice that infested their uniforms. The word likely traces back to the Malay word kutu (parasitic louse).
Funny enough, the same sorts of activities that can “give you cooties” can in fact spread cooties (the real ones.) Though mostly due to physical proximity and skin contact.
76 comments
[ 404 ms ] story [ 2654 ms ] threadAlso, not only Windows and Android but even Linux (aspell / hunspell) also have+use “don’t suggest this word in autosuggest” metadata tags in their dictionary databases.
The cultural burnout and second-hand AI overdose many of us are suffering. It's a form of mental pollution, and it's getting harder to breathe.
It’s surprising to me that “trump” would get the same classification. Given that he’s the current president of the US, I’m sure people intentionally type his name all the time. I don’t want my keyboard to steer me away from writing out “trump”. And typos autocorrecting to Trump don’t seem like a big deal either. Would anyone be offended by the text “don’t forget to bring your Trump to band practice”?
Trump could be offended. It is obviously there to avoid offending Trump.
And it is not considered "offensive" but "sensitive".
People are reading too much into this.
And it worked! It has been so much censored that neither of us even knew that word.
If the shoe fits....
It’s adaptive non-censorship
Regardless, it’s non-censorship because autocorrect does not prevent you from saying anything
It was added in 23 so there's potentially 3 years of updates.
Edits: This comment shows differences between 15.6 and 26.2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50358223
Can’t believe they don’t fix it year after year.
Claude dumped Apple's word list, and obviously wrote the article too.
I can't focus and read this shit. The other article on the frontpage https://blog.nns.ee/2026/11/02/renault-hack/ also used LLM for the work, but I think a human wrote it (or he's using an LLM that's managed to sound human). It's so readable!
Edit: a snippet from the slop:
> There is no public API
> I looked. NSSpellChecker, UITextChecker, NaturalLanguage and UILexicon don't expose vulgarity.
I think the fucking problem is, each sentence is supposed to convey information. Here "I looked." is prominent, but is it information? No, it's fucking useless. Remove it and it doesn't even change the information. Meanwhile readers' brains are trying to process why the author included this sentence, it must have value?
Is there any context in which you feel it is acceptable to use that word?
The potential downsides of using it are also famous. So the only remaining reasons to speak it are to show that you can (demonstrating your power), or choose to (demonstrating an obstinate desire for conflict).
And obviously if you are installing a text filter in software, you will need to type it out and store it that way.
Why does saying “fag” not elicit the same level of repulsion in people? Homosexuals have been treated awfully throughout history, but for some reason it doesn’t hit as hard for people. You could say the same for “kike” or any other number of offensive terms linked to a people who have been targeted throughout history and even today.
A good example is that I was able to write out the two offensive terms mentioned above - no euphemism required, but from what I’ve experienced writing the dreaded “n” word in any context means your comment is auto-dead.
This is not some novel legal loophole.
The 100m dash record is about an objective mesaureble property of the device, speed in this example. If we were talking, say, about inference speed, then yes, of course it's Claude who generated X tokens in Y seconds, not you.
Isn't a better analogy to ask if you drove a car completely on autopilot to some destination, then was it you who drove there or the car?
Also, for the record, I also don't like the AI-written publications. My concern is the consistency in using the terms. This is also related to the idea to not to antromorphize AI.
The phrase blocklist for the Chinese lanaguge is a lot larger (surprise, surprise). It about 281 KB for Simplified Chinese, 325 KB for Traditional and 160 KB for Cantonese, against 28 KB for English.
apparently there are `shouldShowTaiwanFlagEmoji()` and `deviceIsChinese()` functions as well but that doesn't have anything to do with this database.
How do I make iOS let me swipe “fucking” everywhere? fucking
fucking fucking fucking!! After typing it manually two or three times it then swipe completes in this particular text field in this app. I've heard about adding a contact with the words, but that is ridiculous, so I have held out hoping Apple will eventually come to their senses, like a fool.
This doesn't make “fuck” swipeable either… unless I type it once, and keep it in the text field!
add fucking as a replacement for fucking (yes, both the same)
Stupid, but it works.
An alarm bell went off in my head. The first thing I thought of was this P.T interview [1] where he describes with certainty, what he thinks the interests are in Europe currently. I'll leave you to imagine what his sources might be for this.
And now I can't stop thinking about how these word lists might look like simple technical flags,but could also be used to distill people worries and track trends.
Anyway maybe it's the LLM world that we live in ... I don't know everything is sus now days.
[1] https://youtu.be/vV7YgnPUxcU?t=3153
Updates could expand its use, Computer owner unlikely to notice
> Coined during World War I by British and American soldiers in the trenches of Belgium and France to describe the pervasive body lice that infested their uniforms. The word likely traces back to the Malay word kutu (parasitic louse).
Funny enough, the same sorts of activities that can “give you cooties” can in fact spread cooties (the real ones.) Though mostly due to physical proximity and skin contact.