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Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

daringfireball.net

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Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#111

Post by Confusion »

madair wrote: post #72
Groxx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did just admit it. Many of the worst-behavers I've encountered act similarly or worse on the internet, and the reverse has been quite accurate for the few I've encountered in that manner. It's certainly prejudice, but that doesn't make it wholly (or even mostly) invalid. Prejudices have a prejudiced opinion applied to them. That snarling dog? It may not bite you, but it's rational to be prejudiced towards believing…

There is nothing good about this at all, this is class warfare and culture warfare all wrapped up together, both very bad and both ripping America, among other places, apart right about....now. You have absolutely no clue about this person and yet you are prejudiced against him, her, it. Is he/she/it 10 years old? You have no clue. You don't know background, you know nothing except that this person just feels that th…

You have absolutely no clue about this person

If someone makes a public comment that is illegible [1] or incomprehensible, then I have a pretty good clue about that persons inability to write. Considering how close the ability to write and the ability to think are, you also have a pretty good clue about their ability to think. Of course, this all depends on the assumption the comment wasn't just a troll.

[1] Or can you say that only about handwriting?

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#112

Post by vishaldpatel »

Okay I try to bite:

Say I'm a "novice" user who starts up the web browser. If everything else works, then here's what I'll see:

A screen with a textbox that says "Search: [ ]". This textbox is at my eye level - I'm likely to see this before the "address" bar on top - which in a lot of computers isn't even labeled anymore.

So delightfully enough I search for something like "facebook login". If the first result isn't something I'm looking for, then I might get angry.... in some cases, at the person who authored the first result .. "hey jackass, I came here looking for the facebook login - whats going on? stop advertising as something you're not!".

What can I say, I'm just a spoilt baby boomer, and you want my money.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#113

Post by joeyo »

madair wrote: post #99
madair wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing good about this at all, this is class warfare and culture warfare all wrapped up together, both very bad and both ripping America, among other places, apart right about....now. You have absolutely no clue about this person and yet you are prejudiced against him, her, it. Is he/she/it 10 years old? You have no clue. You don't know background, you know nothing except that this person just feels that th…

Karma well spent. The doubled-consonants style is very popular with the 12-16 year old set right now. Congratulations on your prejudice.

Your prejudice is my Bayesian inference.

In any rate, judging someone based on how they communicate is morally very different from judging them based on who they are. Communication is action, and if one cannot form opinions based on the actions of others, then indeed, what may we do? Passively observe the world go by?

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#114

Post by Groxx »

joeyo wrote: post #113
madair wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karma well spent. The doubled-consonants style is very popular with the 12-16 year old set right now. Congratulations on your prejudice.

Your prejudice is my Bayesian inference. In any rate, judging someone based on how they communicate is morally very different from judging them based on who they are . Communication is action, and if one cannot form opinions based on the actions of others, then indeed, what may we do? Passively observe the world go by?

Your prejudice is my Bayesian inference.

+1 for a great quote xD

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#115

Post by jessriedel »

noonespecial wrote: post #68

I've found that the single biggest impediment to computer literacy to the "ordinary" is the somehow ingrained belief that its impossible for them to understand anything about their own computers. Learning to use a computer is not like neurosurgery, its more like driving a car. A little attention, a smidge of effort and just believing that its possible is all most people need. Geeks are partly to blame for this becaus…

A similar barrier exists for many people with simple math. As a tutor, it's incredibly frustrating when I introduce a simple algebra expression (plus, minus, maybe even multiplication) and a grown person shrieks "No, I don't understand math. I just don't get it" without even spending a moment to see if they can understand.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#116

Post by fhars »

epochwolf wrote: post #108
Perceval wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some folks have put together a comment filter that flags any comments that are 'formally' stupid in the same way that #14 is: http://stupidfilter.org/main/

I've found it seems to work fairly well until give it any text with formatting (markdown, bbcode, etc) at it. It seems to throw it's hands in the air and cry stupid.

Thas was a stupid comment :-). Of course the filter probably assumes that its input is text targeted at humans, not code targeted at a markup processor. Code is speech that is deliberately dumbed down so that is is in LALR or LL(n) or so, no wonder that a stupid-filter will trigger on that. Solution: remove the markup, then apply the filter on the content it is designed to analyse.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#117

Post by jellobyte »

nfnaaron wrote: post #91
fragmede wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a terrible cook, but if I was baking a cake, and used laundry detergent instead of flour (I mean, they're both white and powdery...) I'd absolutely deserve any comments about my (lack-of) intelligence. The "News results for facebook login" section on Google is very clearly marked, with, umm, well theres a picture, and a bit of indentation? In this case, I must lay some blame on Google for putting laundry detergen…

May I assume for sake of argument that by "deserve any comments" and "lack of intelligence" that you're including comments similar to those made by the leets against the facebook confused? Why is this OK? Why is it OK to laugh at and discriminate against less intelligent people? What have less intelligent people failed to do, that would have made them more intelligent, that makes them deserve to be looked down on? Is…

"How is this different from laughing at people because their skin is a different color, or they speak a different language?"

There's nothing wrong with discrimination in and of itself. It's actually desirable in a lot of cases. For instance, discriminating based upon competency/intelligence is a good thing. Discrimination only becomes a problem when you're discriminating based upon an |irrelevant| characteristic. (Relevancy is determined by your priorities and/or values.)

"Is it their fault that they're less intelligent?"

Nope, it's not. But that's not the issue. A lot of people think society condemns racial discrimination because race is an attribute outside one's control. That's part of it but not the full story. The real reason it's maligned is because, all other things being equal, race should have nothing to do with an individual's competency or worth as a person. The fact that someone has no influence over their own racial makeup just adds insult to injury when they're judged by it.

-

I've often wondered the same thing you mentioned about intelligence. Everybody is born with their potential; how can you laugh at a part of somebody that they can't control? But life would be rather joyless if you couldn't occasionally celebrate favorable comparisons between yourself and the rest of the world. :)

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#118

Post by tjogin »

jpd wrote: post #16
thaumaturgy wrote: post #10

My current primary business is IT consulting, which really means that I spend most of my time working face-to-face with people that have trouble with computers and technology in general. So, this kind of behavior isn't news to me. In fact, I've tried often to convince the tech-savvy that most users have problems like this, and I've never been all that successful. The RWW "Facebook login" is great from this standpoint…

I'd imagine if your food came with instructions on how to cook them you, as a poor cook, would at least know enough to read and follow the instructions. I can't cook worth a dime normally, but I can follow directions in order to make Mac & Cheese or Ramen. I daresay, if something I am not familiar with pops up with an error message, I would at least read it!

I would too. But consider the fact that on the most popular operating system in the world, pop ups with messages are usually devoid of actionable understandable information. It's just a "huh?"

People don't see each popup with fresh eyes, they associate them with most of the other popups they've seen; overly technical, they didn't understand them, the options made no sense, and they had to call for help.

People ignore all the cruft on screen and only scan for the one thing they're familiar with in order to get by, this is the behaviour that the Windows operating system has conditioned them into adopting. They know from experience that you shouldn't touch things you're not familiar with, because often enough things go wrong. Suspicious behaviour is a sign of malware.

A lot of this is Microsoft's fault. Really.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#119

Post by simonw »

tinotopia wrote: post #56

Netflix used to make it very difficult to find any of their customer service contact addresses or phone numbers. I have an old blog post with a title that includes the word 'Netflix' and the phrase 'Customer Service', where I ramble on about a whole bunch of things; the content of the post is about a general principle that I think Netflix was illustrating, not about Netflix itself. The title, though, resulted in the…

The absolute worst example of this kind of thing I've seen was a bunch of years ago when a blogger posted a short note that mentioned the words "suicide chat room" in it. The comments turned in to a chat room for people considering suicide. Over a thousand of them.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#120

Post by epochwolf »

fhars wrote: post #116
epochwolf wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found it seems to work fairly well until give it any text with formatting (markdown, bbcode, etc) at it. It seems to throw it's hands in the air and cry stupid.

Thas was a stupid comment :-). Of course the filter probably assumes that its input is text targeted at humans, not code targeted at a markup processor. Code is speech that is deliberately dumbed down so that is is in LALR or LL(n) or so, no wonder that a stupid-filter will trigger on that. Solution: remove the markup, then apply the filter on the content it is designed to analyse.

According to the filter, it wasn't.
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