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cat botherer posted:How the hell do those weird nerds think this would go over well? They're all massive weirdos who live in bubbles of sycophants and drugs.
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# ? Jun 24, 2022 05:32 |
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 17:35 |
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cat botherer posted:How the hell do those weird nerds think this would go over well? The most important thing in these big tech companies is getting ahead and getting promos or good ratings. Get enough hack project managers and developers who are totally code brained who only think about "how" and never "why" and you see poo poo like this all the time.
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# ? Jun 24, 2022 08:52 |
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Yeah there are a lot of people in tech, management mainly, that are desperately seeking to justify their jobs. At bigger companies a lot of their "solutions" get cargo-culted around without anyone stopping to think why we would actually need something until it fails. At the biggest companies these ideas often fail upwards for quite some time just because they have the money to waste.
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# ? Jun 24, 2022 14:13 |
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cat botherer posted:How the hell do those weird nerds think this would go over well? They clearly think it's a brilliant idea that some segments of the population would love. And in fairness, I'm not even sure they're wrong about that? There are some people who get absolutely loving weird about death. I'm sure there's a whole little industry dedicated to selling absurdly overpriced and absolutely bizarre nonsense to people who haven't been able to get over the death of a loved one. Ultimately, I'm sure the real goal of this was to mimic famous voices and voice actors, and some marketer just repurposed it for a different audience.
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# ? Jun 24, 2022 14:20 |
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Main Paineframe posted:I'm sure there's a whole little industry dedicated to selling absurdly overpriced and absolutely bizarre nonsense to people who haven't been able to get over the death of a loved one. Fun reminder that this exists: https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/1321955644736303104
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# ? Jun 24, 2022 15:07 |
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Main Paineframe posted:Ultimately, I'm sure the real goal of this was to mimic famous voices and voice actors, and some marketer just repurposed it for a different audience. I bet the original intention was some nerd wanted to give his home automation servant the voice of somebody he is creepily infatuated with.
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# ? Jun 24, 2022 17:14 |
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Tuxedo Gin posted:I bet the original intention was some nerd wanted to give his home automation servant the voice of somebody he is creepily infatuated with.
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# ? Jun 24, 2022 17:34 |
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As if this modern day dystopia wasn't bad enough, Google search sucks too https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/google-search-algorithm-internet/661325/ quote:Afew weeks ago my house had a septic-tank emergency, which is as awful as it sounds. As unspeakable things began to burble up from my shower drain, I did what any smartphone-dependent person would: I frantically Googled something along the lines of poop coming from shower drain bad what to do. I was met with a slew of cookie-cutter websites, most of which appeared hastily generated and were choked with enough repetitive buzzwords as to be barely readable. Virtually everything I found was unhelpful, so we did the old-fashioned thing and called a professional. The emergency came and went, but I kept thinking about those middling search results—how they typified a zombified internet wasteland. Gotta say I've experienced this many times trying to google for something, particularly if I google in non english I often get a lot of worthless sites that are machine translations of some generic low quality english sites to boot.
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# ? Jun 24, 2022 21:51 |
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Yeah, for a while now google has been next to useless for anything that's not on one of the major site-as-platform sites. Unless you're looking to buy something. Whether the latter is because the commerce sites have an incentive to out-optimize or that's just what Google cares about unfucking is unclear. But when I get those trash results I switch to duckduckgo or bing. Also I have a browser extension that lets me blacklist specific sites from showing up in search results. Otherwise it's loving impossible to find pictures that don't have stock image watermarks, or game walkthrough type stuff the isn't a literal copy paste of the same two sites.
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# ? Jun 24, 2022 22:54 |
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lol if yellow pages and some other local physical info gathers become a thing again. e: somewhat related, I really hate how Amazon has some random letter name company for all their top results, really makes me distrust the website even if I havent been burn by a purchase yet. Well other than a really really smelly leather wallet. PhazonLink fucked around with this message at 01:22 on Jun 25, 2022 |
# ? Jun 25, 2022 01:18 |
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Blue Footed Booby posted:Also I have a browser extension that lets me blacklist specific sites from showing up in search results. Otherwise it's loving impossible to find pictures that don't have stock image watermarks, or game walkthrough type stuff the isn't a literal copy paste of the same two sites. Googling is failing me (hah!) but I desperately want this extension. What's it called?
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 01:41 |
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Not that other giant corporations are significantly better, but I've definitely started buying a lot more stuff from Best Buy and other companies because of exactly that problem. It's getting to the point that you can consistently find better selections, better prices, and similar shipping times on sites other than Amazon -- the only advantage Amazon has is that they deal in everything, but that goes away if you can't find any one specific thing you want because it's drowned in bullshit.
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 01:44 |
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Amazon search is absolutely horrible for just browsing and them pushing all their questionable Amazon Basic products to the top isn't helping.
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 02:07 |
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Furthermore, even if you buy name brand goods from Amazon, there will be a good chance they're counterfeited. Amazon's genius inventory system dumps every single supplier into the same bin. So if RandomCapitals is selling [say] Catface Cattoys but in fact is buying counterfeits from China, Amazon dumps RandomCapitals's drop-shipped stuff into the same stock bin as the toys shipped direct from Catface. So Catface gets yelled at for the quality of their goods, even though the real problem is that RandomCapitals is selling counterfeits. If a big-name brand complains, Amazon may choose to care. If a smaller brand does? Forget it. So when I combine not being able to find the things I want because there are so many promoted things on the page, the dreadful treatment of workers, and the overwhelming amount of drop-shipped Chinese crap, I, too, look elsewhere if I possibly can.
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 02:24 |
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Blue Footed Booby posted:Also I have a browser extension that lets me blacklist specific sites from showing up in search results. Otherwise it's loving impossible to find pictures that don't have stock image watermarks, or game walkthrough type stuff the isn't a literal copy paste of the same two sites. What extension do you prefer for this? Searching for stuff really does suck now, unless I'm looking for something I already know is on like Wikipedia or Fandom or IMDB or whatever I just go straight to the second page of results.
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 02:29 |
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Blue Footed Booby posted:
Not to point out another small version of tech creating the torment nexus, but I think Snowcrash or something another Neil Stephenson book had corporations who intentionally put bad computer generated articles out onto the internet and then would sell you a subscription to a filter that would automatically filter out their articles.
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 04:17 |
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uBlacklist works for, well, blacklisting sites from results. It used to be that you could remove sites from actual google search results about 10 years ago lol
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 06:13 |
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Adolf Glitter posted:uBlacklist works for, well, blacklisting sites from results. You can still remove sites today, just type "-fakescams.com" or whatever in the search.
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 06:19 |
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Ulta posted:Not to point out another small version of tech creating the torment nexus, but I think Snowcrash or something another Neil Stephenson book had corporations who intentionally put bad computer generated articles out onto the internet and then would sell you a subscription to a filter that would automatically filter out their articles. Not sure about snowcrash but Anathem mentioned it as something that had happened on the distant past and I think it was in his most recent book too
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 06:32 |
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exmachina posted:Not sure about snowcrash but Anathem mentioned it as something that had happened on the distant past and I think it was in his most recent book too That was what I was thinking! Thanks “Anathem” posted:
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 10:42 |
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Ulta posted:That was what I was thinking! Thanks Please don't quote the Ita, I am trying to uphold the Discipline.
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 17:07 |
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Blue Footed Booby posted:Yeah, for a while now google has been next to useless for anything that's not on one of the major site-as-platform sites. Unless you're looking to buy something. Whether the latter is because the commerce sites have an incentive to out-optimize or that's just what Google cares about unfucking is unclear. But when I get those trash results I switch to duckduckgo or bing. Is this an American thing? Its still just as borderline magical as ever for me. Like i googled the thing he was whining about and got... useful accurate info, suggestions on how to fix it and links to local plumbers?
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 22:30 |
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Possibly. I checked it accidentally in Incognito since I needed it to read the article and then I checked it again with my regular browser. Both times it gave pretty bad results. The top one was right, to be fair, but after that it seems to match the complaint. SEO articles from general plumbers trying to rank in the engine, a baffling Quora question about someone who likes to poop in the shower and someone on Reddit who was dealing with a phantom pooper.
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# ? Jun 25, 2022 23:42 |
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Tuxedo Gin posted:I bet the original intention was some nerd wanted to give his home automation servant the voice of somebody he is creepily infatuated with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAa5NJ5N2sI
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 01:04 |
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sebmojo posted:Is this an American thing? Its still just as borderline magical as ever for me. Like i googled the thing he was whining about and got... useful accurate info, suggestions on how to fix it and links to local plumbers? Yeah, they tend to roll out the worst algorithm nonsense first in America and the rest of the world is an afterthought.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 02:48 |
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Listened to a Radio Lab had a segment today about some guy that thought his cheeky vanity car plate of "null" was just that and some people with the lastname Null have some problems in the modern era. They also mentioned the classic computer science essay "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names". lol at dumb computer touchers like the Google worker tricked by a chatbot thinking Da Supa Meta Matrix is coming when a ton of simple stuff is still jank as hell.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 04:58 |
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PhazonLink posted:Listened to a Radio Lab had a segment today about some guy that thought his cheeky vanity car plate of "null" was just that and some people with the lastname Null have some problems in the modern era. They also mentioned the classic computer science essay "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names". One of Tom Scott's videos is essentially an appeal to programmers to just build forms with a single large text field for names. Lazy or 'efficient' programming causes so many problems when it comes to names. I live in Japan now, where most 'important' things need to have my name registered as it appears in my passport, which is my first, middle, and last names . I can't count how many companies, government organizations, and services I've been unable to register for because my name was too long to fit into the system, or their system was programmed to not accept the Latin alphabet which creates a conundrum - I have to convert my name to the Japanese script to get it accepted, but then when my registered name doesn't exactly match my government issued ID, it is thrown out or service is refused. My bank card has my name cut off in the middle of my middle name because it is too many characters. Things were a lot easier when I lived in Taiwan, when I got my residence card there I had to also register a 3 character Chinese name and everything just worked - Japan doesn't allow that unless you naturalize.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 05:55 |
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There's a loooot of ingrained racism and cultural assumptions that become all too obvious when it comes to names. Of course, institutional incompetence and stubbornness also comes in, like it being a crapshoot whether somewhere will remember or acknowledged a name that's hyphenated or has an apostrophe, despite those being entirely normal and common for Western names, even and sometimes especially old and storied names.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 06:34 |
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A lot of forms gently caress me up just because my parents decided to give me two middle names and I guess that's something that's rarely accounted for.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 06:48 |
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Tuxedo Gin posted:One of Tom Scott's videos is essentially an appeal to programmers to just build forms with a single large text field for names. A drop down list for each character.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 07:23 |
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Libra posted:A lot of forms gently caress me up just because my parents decided to give me two middle names and I guess that's something that's rarely accounted for. my mom has no middle name and she's had form fuckups her whole life, hosed either way i guess
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 07:48 |
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My legal first name in the country I moved to is my American first and middle name smooshed together, and with no legal middle name (even though legal documents have a place for it), because American passports don't have a separate entry for middle names - they just have a first and last name, and middle names just get shoved into the first name box. Whoever did my paperwork just made a guess from ambiguous information and guessed wrong, and now I have a new legal first name. In the long run it's helpful, because I know any mail addressed to Firstname Middlename is garbage spam mail that someone pulled from some public registry somewhere.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 08:52 |
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Just having your last name changed at your own job can be a disaster. Any idea on how many systems will suddenly break or not allow you to log in because your email address changed and it wont sync over from active directory properly? At least half of them, and you'll be dealing with broken poo poo or finding new broken poo poo for months, at least. I'm sure this has nothing to with women traditionally having their last names changed and tech being functionally or actually misogynist either.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 15:23 |
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Mercury_Storm posted:Just having your last name changed at your own job can be a disaster. Any idea on how many systems will suddenly break or not allow you to log in because your email address changed and it wont sync over from active directory properly? At least half of them, and you'll be dealing with broken poo poo or finding new broken poo poo for months, at least. It took our company being acquired for my boss to finally get her email address changed.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 15:39 |
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Tuxedo Gin posted:One of Tom Scott's videos is essentially an appeal to programmers to just build forms with a single large text field for names. Lazy or 'efficient' programming causes so many problems when it comes to names. It's funny that the lazy option here (one big field, no assumptions about anything) is actually the best option by far. Far too many developers get carried away with their own cleverness when it absolutely does not matter, and their solutions are mostly fragile pieces of poo poo that break whenever any of their "flawless" assumptions do not hold, and for... honestly, very little benefit at this point. If you have a system that needs to store the names of every single human being on the planet, and you luxuriate with up to 1kB for each one, that's still essentially a trivial amount of storage required at the server level. Even at the consumer level, ~7TB isn't much any more.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 15:53 |
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And all this is why I didn't change my name when I got married.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 16:00 |
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Mercury_Storm posted:Just having your last name changed at your own job can be a disaster. Any idea on how many systems will suddenly break or not allow you to log in because your email address changed and it wont sync over from active directory properly? At least half of them, and you'll be dealing with broken poo poo or finding new broken poo poo for months, at least. Just the other day I had to go in to the validation file for one of our admin pages and update a list of usernames someone had hardcoded in there because someone had changed theirs when they got married and couldn't get in anymore.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 16:07 |
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MechanicalTomPetty posted:Just the other day I had to go in to the validation file for one of our admin pages and update a list of usernames someone had hardcoded in there because someone had changed theirs when they got married and couldn't get in anymore. This textfile is pretty good at breaking text assumptions, btw: https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings/blob/master/blns.json
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 16:19 |
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Agents are GO! posted:A drop down list for each character. Some financial institutions make you enter passwords on a virtual keyboard by pressing buttons. Now imagine that but with kanji, or any other kind of logogram. Solution: allow any Unicode character in passwords, and present the options in a randomly sorted drop-down.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 16:39 |
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 17:35 |
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eXXon posted:Solution: allow any Unicode character in passwords, and present the options in a randomly sorted drop-down.
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# ? Jun 26, 2022 17:20 |