This is validating my decision to mute tech twitter hype accounts like TylerGlaiel and SwiftOnSoftware many months ago.
A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
121–130 of 177 posts
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you feel responsible for generating misinformation? This is a bizarre stance to take. Social media was always filled with false information. It's entirely on news outlets to verify what they decide to publish.
Why should it be socially acceptable to generate misinformation? It's in the end harmful for everyone. (I don't mean obvious parody and fiction, clearly labeled as such).
My comment is about news outlet's obligation to verify information they publish. I never said anything about posting satire by individuals.
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it was a post in the subreddit that would make sense. But it was a comment, not a post, and thus not labeled as humor.
I don't think that's how joke forums work, really.
/r/programmerhumor will ban you if you post a joke in the comments. All jokes must be top level posts.
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#124This doesn't seem like a joke, it seems like a guy outright spreading misinformation. Not sure what was the point of the UUID preamble, his "joke" has nothing to say about UUIDs.
The humorous musings are, despite the unlikelihood of collisions the author was pondering them for UUID (see backpack cubby analogy), this situation came up and then pondered what might have happened with a similarly unlikely collision -- byte identifiers between Roku and Pokemon. It's silly, it's in a humour forum.
The probability of getting a UUID collision is different from an intentional attempt to find a SHA-1 collision. One is guessing a truly random ~128 bit number (really - it’s effectively the output of a CSPRNG). The other is exploiting a weakness in the construction of a 160-bit value that is intended to be a secure mapping of input -> output. It’s not even remotely the same problem and saying evidence of a sha-1 collision indicates anything about a UUID collision is plain wrong (and that part isn’t on a humor forum).
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right but this is called 'programmer humor'. Plus it's obviously not serious if you think about it for more than 60 seconds.
I just took a very quick look at the subreddit (absolutely awful stuff BTW, who finds this crap funny?) and already found 2 instances of people sharing "real" stories in the comments to joke posts. Should both of these be taken as jokes? They are not presented as such. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0elnq/com... > I completely forget the example problem we were doing, but back when I was learning…
> who finds this crap funny?
Apparently 1.9 million people (the number of subscribers).
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#126Don't joke too hard on the internet. 4chan once decided to promote the idea that the "a-ok sign" (making a circle with your thumb and finger) is a white supremacist coded symbol, basically as a test of how easily gulled the press is about such issues. Well, the press got gulled, and today displaying the symbol can get you fired, or banned from certain locations. The ADL considers it a hate symbol.
While it is true that it started as a 4-chan hoax, and the ADL considers it a hate symbol, that's not the entire story. The page of the ADL[0] explicitly mention that in the vast majority of cases it just means ok. Much like how 14 and 88 are perfectly normal numbers, but when someone uses a personalised numberplate Adolf1488 they probably didn't choose those numbers at random.
It's also that symbols and gestures evolve in a social context, people, language, customs and culture changes. It's not unthinkable for symbols to get a worse connotation over time because a group used them a lot. So the question then becomes, do actual white supremacists consistently use the symbol as a way to identify themselves? Eh, I don't think that's the case anymore or in meaningful quantities. But after the populairty of the hoax white supremacists did co-opt it for a while. Is it still completely meaningless if a racist mass-murderer flashes the symbol?
So yeah, indeed it started as a hoax, but the implication that the ADL only included it because they were somehow gulled by a hoax is incorrect.
(As an aside, the OK-gesture is quite culturally different and dependent on context in the first place. Had a mate who while drunk almost started a fight with some Turkish dudes by flashing it, since apparently it mimics the asshole and basically means "you're an asshole". And in France it apparently means that you're a zero, since it looks like a zero.)
[0]: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-h...
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#127The crucial detail that is a little buried in the piece is that the original 'explanation' was posted in /r/ProgrammerHumor so it said right on the tin it was a joke. But the (seemingly clearly intended as a joke) details temporarily nerd-sniped a lot of people's senses of humor right out of their brains. The HN discussion discussion from back then is still fun reading with a number of commenters very invested in the…
Just looked into this and yeah, the original post to which the comment was responding was a programmer humor post. However, it looked as if the comment in question may have been an actual, legit attempt to explain the phenomenon. I don't think it's obvious or assumed that the comments responding to programmer humor posts are always intended to be jokes as well. I'm also just asking myself what's more likely here. Thi…
Yeah it's totally plausible that someone would reply with genuine facts about a humourous situation.
Still, one should do extra double checking before taking anything there literally.
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#128Don't joke too hard on the internet. 4chan once decided to promote the idea that the "a-ok sign" (making a circle with your thumb and finger) is a white supremacist coded symbol, basically as a test of how easily gulled the press is about such issues. Well, the press got gulled, and today displaying the symbol can get you fired, or banned from certain locations. The ADL considers it a hate symbol.
[deleted]
Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
And his link to the Google collision was not an accidental collision, like the rest of his ramblings were discussing.
Right - that’s a SHA1 collision, which has nothing to do with the possibility of a UUID collision. I worry that some people might take away from this that UUID collisions are actually something to worry about (nonsensical kindergarten cubby analogies and so on). Really, truly, UUIDs can be assumed unique. We’re not relying on luck.
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Re: A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just took a very quick look at the subreddit (absolutely awful stuff BTW, who finds this crap funny?) and already found 2 instances of people sharing "real" stories in the comments to joke posts. Should both of these be taken as jokes? They are not presented as such. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0elnq/com... > I completely forget the example problem we were doing, but back when I was learning…
The second one is quite obviously a joke.
It is a bit Poe's law really. There are plenty of companies with dumb software policies and practices, cargo culting legitimate approaches by treating them as axioms.