41–50 of 128 posts
This is a fantastic read. > "Time passes at the same speed on top of a mountain and at the bottom of a valley". Just curious, does this kind of gravitational time dilation bear any consequence in our systems, given that we are building systems with the assumption that system clocks are not always accurate and there is no global time?
- Programming skill is all you need to build great software.
About the only case where I would say this might be true is when your users are other programmers. If the plan is to target a non-technical market, good design and in-depth understanding of the problem space are just as important if not more so.
My favorite example of this is the world's most popular accounting software. Good design and marketing --- mediocre programming.
I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…
In regards to your last line, I feel like we do need to give people some leeway and not assume bigoted intent. Most of the things we can gig people for not implementing nowadays are only recently important in our cultural consciousness. English has traditionally shied away from using accents and one can reasonably assume that if a person signs up for my English language website, they won't be using Chinese characters…
It's the difference between making a mistake, and getting defensive that it wasn't a mistake. Per old systems, they all fall under bias; it's only with how do the existing support personnel deal with it that you start looking at bigotry, a "I'm sorry, I know, it's just an old system and we don't have the money to update it" is totally understandable and I would argue okay. Digging in that it's not the system that is at fault but the individual wanting a different pronoun, or the person refusing to pick an anglicized name and start using it everywhere, is bigoted.
I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…
I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…
> ...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases... I think that is an unfair accusation. I've been coding for over 20 years, and I have only had to enable UTF8 to cover all corners of use cases (web based data/content) to special characters. I work with companies in multiple foreign countries, and my biases are irrelevant to technically working systems.
Where in the alphabet does "ö" or "aa" go? Well, it depends on the language AND the word.
Is ø the same as ø? Unicode can encode it in 2 different ways, so you need to normalize all encoding before comparing.
Is ø the same as o when searching? For Americans it is, for others not.
I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…
Are you sure most systems even need to record gender or pronouns? Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant, and if by gender you mean masculine or feminine traits then again (other to the person themselves) it’s largely irrelevant I’d have thought.
> Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant
Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly relevant, and is often a poor proxy for the information they really want out of it. Half the time a medical form asks you that it's literally just so that cis men won't get mad at you for asking if they're pregnant on a later step.
I won't be at all surprised if I get some kind of kneejerk reaction to this statement suggesting that it might be important in an emergency or something, but for the most part that's not really the case, and even where it is, if it's that important (ie. allergy level), it's not sufficient to avoid harm because you will have situations where neither "sex" or "gender" as commonly formulated on these forms will tell you what you really need to know (hormone balance, organ configuration, medical history). Any one of those could be out of alignment with whichever social construct of sexed traits you pick.
Even if the programmer wanted to do that, his boss, and boss's boss would disagree.
It is a falsehood, of course, that "I don't have to handle cases outside of the specification we committed to". Though not always, and not for all cases.
Say that my reuqirements are to write a music engraving program for western notation. Of course, I take it for granted that (that type of) music can be written down; my program is not an expression of my personal belief that all music can be written down, or that it has a composer.
I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…
It is probably revealing of your personal biases that you cannot imagine systems in languages other than English that need to do some of this since multiple parts of the language, including verbs, are necessarily gendered, with a neutral gender usually only reserved for inanimate things. Reference: I happen to speak one such language.
Problems like this are just hard due to generations of built-up cultural context and the associated effects. We can and should do better, but there is no need to get overly enthusiastic about accusing people of biases while we are at it.