Linked List: December 27, 2021

Monday, 27 December 2021

This spot was in frequent rotation during yesterday’s NFL games. It’s perfect.

iOS 15 Autocorrect Continues to Irritate ★

Short roundup of tweets collected by Michael Tsai, starting with this one from Steven Troughton-Smith:

Apple really needs to throw out its crowdsourced machine-learned autocorrect system entirely. Autocorrect used learn from everything I typed, now it interjects with typos & weirdisms from random internet users. It’s been a complete train wreck since they introduced this stuff.

I’m not 100 percent sure it started with iOS 15, but for a few months now, whenever I try to type “20” (twenty) on my iPhone, iOS replaces it with “2.0”. Every time.

Update: With the help of several readers, I think I know what’s causing this. If you have an app installed with the string “2.0” in its name, that will cause “20” to autocorrect to “2.0”. I in fact have such an app installed on my iPhone. At least one reader has seen the same thing with “1.0” for the same reason.

The best workaround is to create a do-nothing text replacement in Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement, with the phrase “20” and shortcut “20”. I.e., set both fields to the digits of twenty. You don’t have to set “2.0” as the shortcut — if you do, you won’t be able to type “2.0”. Just set both fields to “20” and iOS autocorrect will prioritize this above the fact that you have an app installed with “2.0” in its name.

Inside the Failure of COVID Exposure Notifications in the U.S. ★

Myoung Cha, former head of health strategic initiatives for Apple and currently chief strategy officer for Carbon Health, on Twitter:

With the omicron surge, I have had more friends send me screenshots of exposure notifications (EN) in the last week than I have in the last year. Here are some reflections based on the work I led at Apple working with Google and some thoughts on the road ahead. [...]

The biggest pushback we got was why we wouldn’t allow governments around the world to use the API to collect a ton of data about users who had opted in since traditional contact tracing provided more precise insights on who had been exposed to the index case.

Our reply of course was to protect user privacy since the identity and whereabouts of all of your friends could be sucked up by a bad government actor with a more centralized design — to build a social graph of all users with the pandemic as the justification.

“Trust us, we are the government” was often the pushback. But of course, this wasn’t a theoretical concern but something that actually happened in both Singapore and Australia with systems that did not adopt our privacy-preserving approach.

The U.S. needed — and still needs — a single federal exposure notification system. Doing it state-by-state seemed all along like something that wouldn’t work, and it hasn’t. Our state borders are, by design, completely porous. That said, I’ve got iOS exposure notifications enabled, and I encourage you to, too.

The State of External Retina Displays ★

Casey Liss:

The above is the entire lineup. That’s it. Four options. Three of which existed 1,665 days ago.

This is why Apple needs to make its own prosumer-priced external display (or even better, displays) — it’s clear no one else is making them other than LG, and the LG displays aren’t great.

Update: Yoni Mazuz points out that LG’s UltraFine 4K — the smaller one — was replaced at some point after 2017 with a slightly larger panel with lower resolution, but with faster USB ports.

‘USBefuddled: Untangling the Rat’s Nest of USB-C Standards and Cables’ ★

Glenn Fleishman, writing for TidBITS:

USB-C was supposed to be the last cable you would ever need. It hasn’t worked out that way.

The hardware side works terrifically: a USB-C plug fits into any USB-C jack. But perhaps the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the group that manages the development of the USB standard, didn’t fully think through the complexity of what has to go over the USB wiring and how to communicate that effectively: power and video coupled with several different standards for data.

You know what doesn’t have any of these problems? Lightning.