https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
the scunthorpe problem will never die.
Lyft’s algorithm is trying to block people with names like ‘Dick’ and ‘Cummings’
11–20 of 307 posts
Re: Lyft’s algorithm is trying to block people with names like ‘Dick’ and ‘Cummings’
#12How do they not realize what an obvious shitstorm this will cause? And who is bothered by this, really? I find it hard to imagine that it's the drivers calling themselves Dick Cummings out of immaturity. So what does it really matter what the customers call themselves?
>I find it hard to imagine that it's the drivers calling themselves Dick Cummings out of immaturity. So what does it really matter what the customers call themselves?
That was my thought too. It's one thing if you're using obscenity in an anonymous online alias, as a great many Redditors seem to love doing, but I'm struggling to believe that it's something people do in signing up for real-life ride-sharing apps, either as a driver or rider.
Obviously there must be some amount of people doing it, otherwise Lyft wouldn't bother with this at all, but it's just so... unexpected.
Re: Lyft’s algorithm is trying to block people with names like ‘Dick’ and ‘Cummings’
#13https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem the scunthorpe problem will never die.
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Re: Lyft’s algorithm is trying to block people with names like ‘Dick’ and ‘Cummings’
#14Tech companies will never learn.
How many times must we go through "real names" idiocies before these supposed geniuses stop being imbeciles
Re: Lyft’s algorithm is trying to block people with names like ‘Dick’ and ‘Cummings’
#15Tech companies will never learn. How many times must we go through "real names" idiocies before these supposed geniuses stop being imbeciles
Real name policies are not a good analogy here, as being on Lyft requires in-person interaction.
Re: Lyft’s algorithm is trying to block people with names like ‘Dick’ and ‘Cummings’
#16Besides the humor of how Lyft's filter flagged traditionally Caucasian names like "Cummings" – in addition to the usual issues with non-Western names, e.g. Pimpong and Poon – I'm fascinated/confused how this made it into production? The user database already exists and was currently being used by the live application. Before deploying this new filter onto the production database, wouldn't you do a dry run to get not only the count of users who will be flagged and notified, but a listing of frequently flagged names? Which you could easily manually eyeball to make sure there weren't obvious false positives?
With a userbase as big as Lyft's, I'm sure there were a ton of obvious true positives (anyone named "Fuck", ostensibly). I just can't believe they didn't notice a surname as relatively common as Cumming/Cummings. Yes, the apparent naivety of the regex is an issue, but this seems like a system for which a lot of testing on actual data would be easy and natural to do as part of the QA process.
Re: Lyft’s algorithm is trying to block people with names like ‘Dick’ and ‘Cummings’
#17Tech companies will never learn. How many times must we go through "real names" idiocies before these supposed geniuses stop being imbeciles
Real name policies are not a good analogy here, as being on Lyft requires in-person interaction.
What does an in-person interaction have to do with the idiocy of building software to decide what names people are allowed to have?
Re: Lyft’s algorithm is trying to block people with names like ‘Dick’ and ‘Cummings’
#18Tell me again why anybody cares? Is it because the Church is so central to our lives? We're masters of rationality and technology, who believe in a retributive super-ape in the sky?
Is it because we're medieval scribes and we really want to use the Latin faeces to indicate our scholarly intentions, instead of the Anglo-Saxon shit that everyone around us uses?
There is no reason I can think of that comports with a technological or innovative worldview.
Including cybersecurity. ("Shit" is just an identifier or a guessable string with 13 bits of "chaos" completely equivalent to "Dave" or "Phil.")
Edit: Well I see small-minded superstitious dunderheads have shown up to downvote me, so FUCK CUNT SHIT ASS
Re: Lyft’s algorithm is trying to block people with names like ‘Dick’ and ‘Cummings’
#19It seems like tech companies have been doing DIY profanity filters. Apple has a profanity filter for engraving text onto a device in the online store ( https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1213188371452841984 ); intended to be your name, so terms like "Dick" have to not be filtered. I learnt that Apple has a validation endpoint. Since the engraving service was recently updated, I took a profanity wordlist and checked…
The profanity filter in the Apple App Store was [0] amusingly wrong, but fortunately also a soft filter rather than a hard filter.
What happened was, the German localisation of the app description included the word “Knopf”. Knopf is not a rude word, according to any German I’ve discussed this with — it is one translation of “knob” in the sense of “button”, but Apple’s naughty word detector clearly thought it was “knob” in the sense of the euphemism for a body part.
It didn’t stop the app passing review, but the automatic warning was still a regular part of updates for that particular app.
[0] Back in 2012
Re: Lyft’s algorithm is trying to block people with names like ‘Dick’ and ‘Cummings’
#20FromSoft has a similar problem with totally inane censorship of names in online play in the Dark Souls series. E.G. you would think they'd whitelist the word "knight" in a game about knights, but it's always censored to k*ht. There's some other wacky stuff going on but in this case I don't quite blame them because the devs probably don't speak English natively or at all, and you can tell they had a tight budget/schedule.