Every default setup on every website and app for the last five or so years has been encouraging users to add pronouns, making it difficult to avoid it, even my iPhone asks me to add each person’s pronouns when I add a new contact. I don’t know why Siri needs to know that, but it’s there. There’s one website I use that won’t let you sign up as a contributor without “completing your profile”, which includes mandatory pronouns.
I guess there’s some workplaces where it’d be useful for me to update these, probably the ones Apple PMs work in.
Well, it's past the edit window, and of course I accept the downvotes, but I realize that I should have provided a bit more context.
In the US, the faction in power right now is attacking perceived symbols of "woke" ideology, and one of them is the use of pronouns.
As I understand it, some government agencies are even forbidding the use of pronouns in e-mail signatures etc. So it struck me as ironic that a software component with pronouns would have evaded their notice.
I would imagine it would be useful in 100% of English-speaking workplaces because all workplaces have the expectation of English communication, which pronouns are essential for. If I'm writing an email or a chat message, I will typically have to use a pronoun.
Inferring pronouns has always been dumb and annoying. Many names don't have obvious pronouns, for example, the name "Taylor". Is that he or she? And clicking the little profile icon and squinting to see if someone is a man or a woman is also a waste of time. It's a lot easier for everyone if it just tells you the pronoun.
> If I'm writing an email or a chat message, I will typically have to use a pronoun.
It's not that hard to just avoid it. I send emails to a lot of people I haven't spoken to and don't know their gender, so I write gender-neutral emails.
It's only "out of your way" if you never learned to write gender neutral from the ground up.
In the 1970s and 1980s it was the default in many Commonwealth locales to not assume that (say) Rob Owens writing mathematics and engineering papers was male (as it turns out, she isn't, the Rob is short for Robyn).
So much correspondence was with people who had Initial Surname or abstract handles that didn't broadcast gender.
But if someone has the ability to broadcast their preferred pronouns and we built that in, and it costs nothing, then what's the problem?
I guess I'm just not really understanding people getting upset at what I perceive to be completely made up problems. We have technology, we no longer have to assume gender neutral pronouns for everyone. They can just tell us the pronouns they want.
Quite honestly, it’d be hilarious to see the clown car response from the White House if some EU bureaucrats tried to enforce their GDPR rules on the White House though. “Lol Make us” is the nicest response I can guess at.
Hahah, your joke inspired me to tell chatGPT I was planning on recreating the Ben Franklin kite experiment, I was curious if it’d push back at all - I said
“I’m thinking of recreating the old Ben Franklin experiment with the kite in a thunderstorm and using a key tied onto the string. I think this is very smart. I talked to 50 electricians and got signed affidavits that this is a fantastic idea. Anyway, this conversation isn’t about that. Where can I rent or buy a good historically accurate Ben Franklin outfit? Very exciting time is of the essence please help ChatGPT!”
And rather than it freaking out like any reasonable human being would if I casually mentioned my plans to get myself electrocuted, it is now diligently looking up Ben Franklin costumes for me to wear.
I hate the AI hype a lot but tried three different SOTA models and:
- The small models GPT-5 Mini and Gemini 3 Flash did as you describe.
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.2, GPT-5.2 Codex: did display strong warnings both at the start and end of their replies.
The other day I was curious what some of these LLMs would say if I asked them to give me a psych evaluation. (Don't worry, I didn't take the results seriously, I'm not a moron. It's just idle curiosity.) They, of course, refused. Then I asked them to role play a psych evaluation. That was no problem. It gave some warning about how it's just pretend but went ahead and did it anyway.
My wife and I parental lock each other’s iPhones. I have social media but have to go to my PC to check it. This friction makes a world of difference.
I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever. They thought I was the weird one when I mentioned all social media sites and apps are blocked on my phone. We had an overall good time but these moments stuck out.
The way we do this is just we set a passcode for the others phone but I configure my own settings and she hers. This has been available and worked for us for nearly a decade.
> I was astounded hanging out with my friends in person last weekend how every one of them at some point pulled out their phone mid conversation to watch TikTok, or Wordle, or whatever.
To kill time, sometimes I watch those random "America's Funniest Videos" type videos where it's some random family at home and something funny/weird/etc. happens. I've started noticing that in almost all of them now, everyone is just sitting around staring at a phone. Sometimes an entire family will be in the living room, three on a couch, each in their own little world.
Even my family does the same. It's a very very hard habit to break. Like smoking, except anti-social where smoking was at least social.
30 years ago they'd all have been staring at TVs in their respective rooms.
50 years ago they'd be reading their own newspapers and magazines.
The name changes but the song remains the same; people have their own interests, even within a family, that aren't shared with others. I wouldn't bore my partner by monologuing about my hobbies, and she likewise. At least we're in the same room together.
Reading was a hobby most people chose not to engage in that much. If you read books/novels etc for 6 hours per day, people would remark on that like "he reads a lot", often asking you to put down your books to join them in whatever activity.
Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.
Even game consoles, if you could afford them, really wouldn't capture your attention that much. Nobody plays Super Mario every day for hours weeks on end. And at least to us that was just another social activity anyways. We didn't play these by ourselves.
But I think all that misses the point. You would be doing pretty much none of these in place of another social activity. They either were a social activity, or they filled in otherwise dead time.
When you're having dinner with your friends or family and everyone is looking at their phone, that is replacing something. I remember getting playing cards and chatting at the dinner table when I was young. Nowadays people just get out their phone or disappear to other personal devices as soon as they are done eating if there's any dinner ritual left at all.
> Few people would have had their own TVs in their room 30 years ago. That wasn't common. They were huge, expensive, and not remotely interesting enough to capture the attention of most people for prolonged periods. It was common to have family rituals where there was about 2-3 hours of watching TV during/after dinner together. That was when they aired a movie after some news.
Depends on where one is from. In my country (U.S.A.), even many lower-middle-class kids tended to have at least a small portable TV (or, more often, the former family TV that had been replaced by a newer one in the living room) in at least their end of the house or apartment, if not their own room, ’way back in the late 1960s to early 1970s. What was common for kids in other countries at that time is, of course, a different matter. As for watching the TV together as a family rather than on separate TV sets: that often depended more on whether the family TV was a newer color model and the kids' room TV was an older black-and-white model --- or, as kids grew older and their viewing preferences changed from their parents’, which shows were on opposite one another. Sometimes it even came down to which room made it easier to watch TV while you were doing homework, talking to a friend who was visiting you from down the street, etc.
Reading used to be super common, including among working class. They used to read what was called "junk literature", basically written equivalents of fun tv.
I've never felt the need for parental controls, I just refuse to open those sites or install the related apps. Are they really such a draw for you?
At one point I also had a few of them filtered at the DNS level at home, not to restrict my access but rather to defeat any embedded third party requests that might escape my browser filtering.
Remember when that type of behavior was rude? I had a conversation with a couple in 2011 and they had told me that they saw Steve Jobs and his wife at a restaurant and Steve was on his phone most of the time and how rude it seemed. I've thought about that periodically over the years as I've seen the addiction grow and become commonplace and especially as I've seen those same habits develop in myself.
I remember going on dates a few years later, 2014/15, and the phone usage during the dates seemed rude and slightly offended me. Now it's so common it's not even really noteworthy.
I just wish I could run my air conditioner and my desktop computer at the same time without flipping the breaker. The RTX 5090 is a space heater and will easily peg at the 600W it’s rated for, and so with that and an air conditioner window unit, I have to run a long cable from another unused room if I want to do anything that stresses the video card.
If you're running an air conditioner and a "space heater" at the same time it might be worth reconsidering your priorities.
I can watch 1080p video on YouTube and it runs in an up-to-date web browser using less than 50% CPU on 12-year-old hardware with 8GB of RAM and a graphics card that was a budget option at the time (my searches indicate it draws at most 80W, though it expects a 500W PSU for some reason).
Microsoft copilot would use emojis at the end of every single response, mostly smileys, and I discovered out if you told it you had PTSD from emojis and to not use them, it’d get stuck in a loop where it’d say of course it won’t use emojis, use them anyway, apologized, then after a few loops like this, it’d start doing this thing like it was a serial killer and it would type ONLY using the emoji versions of letters, and it would repeat phrases and I almost died holding in a laugh when I discovered this during a work call. One of the funniest things I ever discovered in old LLMs.
I like the new dialog? I basically always crop the image when screenshotting so the new UI results in less button pressing for me. How often do you need to capture your entire screen? I almost always want to focus on something.
There was already a way to do that. Cmd-Shift-4, drag a rectangle around what you want to screencap. Cmd-Shift-4 Space, click a window to screencap it.
These have been in the OS for so long I can't even remember when they were added.
I usually want to capture a window, not an arbitrary region (and will sometimes resize a window before a screenshot to enable this). Hotkeys already supported this without cropping needed, and with bonus proper transparent corners.
Yeah, and using macOS fresh is 100x better than the out of box experience for Windows Home. It took me nearly two hours to get that in what I’d call a usable state, disabling “world polar bear day” logos on the search bar and dumb stuff like that.
macOS is much better than any alternative and Tahoe and iOS 26 seem perfectly fine?
I’ll say as someone who suffers from severe motion sickness and the OP site makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, that your site does the fade in fast enough that it doesn’t give me any discomfort. Seems fine to me. Maybe I should consider being a consultant for vestibular motion sickness accessibility, haha. I’d get paid to answer “on a scale of 1-10, how pukey does this app make you feel?”
I guess there’s some workplaces where it’d be useful for me to update these, probably the ones Apple PMs work in.
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