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When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

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Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#101

Post by s_fischer »

robertlagrant wrote: post #69
onion2k wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am assuming the correct spelling is "de Zwart" Are you really willing to assume someone spelled their own name wrong before you question your own knowledge about Dutch names? That seems a bit unreasonable. It's much more likely that your assumption is incorrect than someone wrote their name incorrectly. This is the premise that should drive software as far as user input goes. The rule should simply be "Trust that t…

Are you chiding someone for knowing and communicating their confusion and assumptions? When someone is already communicating enough self-awareness to obviate that, either contribute clarifying information or say nothing.

I think the problem is that the OP did not stop at "I am confused, can someone explain this discrepancy to me?" They went on to make seemingly unconfused assumptions that the translator must have misspelled his own name in an article about misspelling names.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#102

Post by mcv »

Ballas wrote: post #58
thiagocsf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s incredibly ironic that the author also misspelled Hans de Zwart’s name as De Zwart, just like Facebook did.

It is capitalized when used without a first name. (and the author is Hans de Zwart)

More precisely: the first letter of a name is always capitalised.

So in "Hans de Zwart", the 'H' is the first letter, and therefore capitalised. But in "De Zwart", the 'D' is the first letter, and therefore capitalised, even if it normally wouldn't be.

There might be an exception to that if that letter is not part of a whole word. "De" is a word, but I once knew a guy whose last name was 't Zet. The "'t" is not a word (it's short for "het", the neutral version of "the", whereas "de" is gendered[0]), so probably wouldn't be capitalised[1]. Now imagine 200 countries and languages with exceptions like that and imagine having to write software to handle all of that correctly. This stuff was never a problem before the internet, but I expect the next century is going to see a lot of simplifications in language.

[0] Yeah, in Dutch, there are two articles: "de" which is gendered, and "het" which isn't. Compare to French "le" and "la", which are both gendered, one male and one female, and there's no neural article. In Dutch there is, but the gendered article doesn't care whether it's male or female; it works for both and doesn't actually care about gender, just that it's there. So it's gendered in a neutral way. Wrap your head around that.

[1] This is also true at the start of a sentence: always capitalised, except when it's not a complete word. If you start a sentence with 's avonds ("in the evening), you capitalise the 'A', not the 's', which is actually the last letter of the archaic possessive 'des'.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#103

Post by brnt »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #44
ascar wrote: post #22

> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Name…

I always worry with plane tickets because I have a middle name on my passport but many buying services don't take middle names into account. Also the name of my town has a "Ą" letter in it, which also is problematic in online forms and I often just write A instead just to be on the safe side.

I have three first names, and round these parts they are space separated. Turns out that in a neighbouring country I should be comma separating them, or they are treated as a single first name (that happens to have spaces).

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#104

Post by tinco »

op03 wrote: post #15

Facebook is trying to administer a 2 billion member virtual city with about 20k people. Most of the fires that start and actual administration details are just conveniently left to real world politicians, bureaucracies, journos, school boards, parents and police depts to work out. This retarded unsustainable model has been sold as the magic of Scale. Scaling user base = Scaling up issues. No free lunch. Regulators ca…

We not only don't charge them, our governments actually give them money to do it. The Netherlands actually gave Microsoft 500 million euro in free energy credit (by building them subsidized windmills) just so they would build their enormous data center here, an enormous datacenter that is going to employ only 125 people.

And those windmills, they were pitched to the people as being able to power 370.000 households. The kicker of course that they won't power even a single one, as 100% of the energy has been sold to Microsoft.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#105

Post by doikor »

mcv wrote: post #90
doikor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By definition there is no legal middle names here in Finland (all of the 1 to 4 names given to you are called "first name" in the law). And thus all of your names will be in the passport too. Filling some foreign (or poorly done/ported local) it system forms can be bit of a guess work. Also as a bonus space " " is a legal character in a name. Both "Jukka Pekka" and "Jukka-Pekka" are valid names (also you could have 2…

> "all of the 1 to 4 names given to you are called "first name" in the law" Is 4 a hard maximum? Because in Dutch it's not unheard of to have more. Not common (most people have 1 or 2), but at least one famous politician had 5 first names.

Current law only allows 4 but allows exception for foreigners (but then the name has to fulfill that other countries naming conventions). Though there is a superseding law that roughly says "the name must not intentionally bring harm to the child" meaning they can block you from giving weird/stupid name to a child (so name like Elon Musks youngest "X Æ A-12" would never be allowed to be given to a baby here)

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#106

Post by Bayart »

rusk wrote: post #51
microcolonel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically for that example, Zoom is written and maintained in China, so I would expect the developers made special code for segmenting chinese names but not non-English latin ones.

Are these characters strictly speaking "Latin"? Would they be categorised as "Nordic" or "Cyrillic"? Standard "Latin" characters to me are those that are supported on a Latin keyboard, and provided for by the latin codepage.

They're Latin characters with diacritics. They're not usually treated as separate letters.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#107

Post by ovi256 »

kokey wrote: post #49
op03 wrote: post #15

Facebook is trying to administer a 2 billion member virtual city with about 20k people. Most of the fires that start and actual administration details are just conveniently left to real world politicians, bureaucracies, journos, school boards, parents and police depts to work out. This retarded unsustainable model has been sold as the magic of Scale. Scaling user base = Scaling up issues. No free lunch. Regulators ca…

It's the problem anyone who moderates a system faces, when the users vastly outnumbers the moderators your moderation has to have some level of opaqueness and unpredictability or else you have no chance of keeping up with people gaming the system.

If your moderation is the equivalent of a low fence keeping people away from the other side, with 2B users the fence will always be swamped by people leaning over it and bending it while looking you in the eye and going "See ? I'm not passing it. This is what you allow."

If you randomly bring the hammer down on a fraction of the people who just touch the fence, the fence will be pretty clear of people leaning over. But you'll sure gain a reputation for opaque capricious moderation.

NB: I am not against this system, and I recognize it's widely applied in the world.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#108

Post by robertlagrant »

numpad0 wrote: post #42

IMHO: A private company, under a nation, shouldn’t be allowed to require PII , let alone forcing to publish it, unless it is absolutely necessary(not in the way Facebook works) or required by law(webshops, banks) to do so. Facebook as it is isn’t compatible with society. It’s at least a decade past the point it had to be corrected.

This really isn't the problem at hand.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#109

Post by pteraspidomorph »

dontchooseanick wrote: post #92
ascar wrote: post #22

> He immediately gets angry at Facebook messing up his name. The company changes his name to ‘Hans De Zwart’, with a capitalized D. A small annoyance, but for De Zwart it signifies something bigger: “It is the arrogance of a giant American corporation which considers the correct spelling of the names of millions of Dutch people an edge case.” This reminds me of the excellent "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Name…

And of course don't forget Pablo Picasso :) Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso ( https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso )

...of Ulm ;)

Name forms really should just be:

Your full legal name: [accepts anything, modifies nothing]

Shortened name of your choice for our UI: [can have restrictions, esp. length]

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#110

Post by robertlagrant »

jiuahweruihawi wrote: post #91
louwrentius wrote: post #33

I think if you work at Facebook, I wonder how you can live with yourself, helping to make the world a worse place. Having worked at Facebook should make you a paria, nobody should hire you. Facebook should be a stain on your resume.

I've long viewed working for Facebook (or Twitter) as like working for a cigarette company. Your product makes the world a worse place and everything would be better if your company disappeared, but hey, something's gotta pay the rent I guess?

I'm amazed that in a global lockdown, where digital communication and connection are more important than ever, that you see only negative benefit to users in Facebook.
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