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Falsehoods programmers believe about video

haasn.xyz

111–120 of 139 posts

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure, but the screenshot I submitted seems to be the default settings. However, software that is 100% perfect is pretty much impossible to write, and if you think there's a systematic issue, please file a bug, so it can help others in same situation.

I am absolutely sure I never changed my settings, and that they have changed over time without me doing anything. Why would anyone want 50% font size at 25% opacity on a yellow then green background? I didn't ask for that. Yes, this is most definitely a systematic issue. The bug reports I've submitted to google have been ignored, and that's a frustrating distraction from what I'm paid to do. Maybe if you submit one y…

> Maybe if you submit one yourself, somebody will pay attention, because google is paying you to work on youtube, and hopefully they will take you more seriously than their users.

FWIW, I always read "file a bug report", when not used to mean "I need more detail" but to mean "talk to the hand" and when spoken by someone working close to a project, as "fuck off", particularly if the person never even bothered to determine whether or not you've used their bug tracker in the past (or even filed a bug already for this specific issue).

When I find someone on a forum with a bug that I haven't heard about, I sit around and talk to them until they either get tired of wanting to talk to me or I get the information I need to fix the problem. The alternative would essentially translate to "I don't actually care about this bug", as that's the only way you are going to get certain classes of bug report. I have shown people at Apple bugs that they were absolutely fascinated by momentarily and then told "File a Radar". I clearly wasn't in a position to do at the moment and which of course I forgot to do it when I got home... they should know this happens, because this assuredly happens to almost every single person they tell that to (and no, "well, we do see a large number of bugs filed" is not evidence against "people you tell to file a bug using your arcane system, particularly if they have to do it days later, probably won't"), and yet even when a potentially rare and real and critical bug is shown to them in person (this was even at an event where the whole point was to work with customers on their issues), their response is easentially "engh, I don't care if this doesn't work unless it affects a ton of people". As someone who works in security, I'm going to assert "do you want vulnerabilities? because this attitude is how you get vulnerabilities": every bug is precious as it is a mistake in your mental model of the software, and who knows how far down the rabbit hole that mistake will take you.

Sure: I realize that the engineer isn't always the best person to do this, and even in my tiny company I had to solve that, but the solution isn't to tell people to "go use the bug tracker", a comment which shunts annoying work learning a new system, one which is all too likely to demoralize them (Apple's Radar is a great example of this), but instead to have someone whose job is to talk to people to follow up with credible bugs: I'd go "hey Xyz, there's a guy on this forum who's complaining about something I hadn't heard of before; can you try to get more details from them?" (where Xyz has changed over the years, but has always been one of the few key positions). I couldn't begin to count the number of times I have debugged an issue with someone on reddit.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also missing the most common error I see: conflating subtitles with closed captions. Closed captions are positioned on the screen to indicate who's talking, have descriptive audio for sound effects, and should be in a high contrast easy to read font (most people with hearing deficiencies also have problems seeing, ie: out of date prescriptions for both hearing aids and eye glasses). As far as I know, QuickTime d…

AFAIK, The YouTube implementation does all of those. Here is a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbqPe-IceP4 Please do not spread falsehoods. Disclamer: I work at YouTube.

>Please do not spread falsehoods.

Please assume the other side possibly doesn't know something you know (if that's really the case here), instead of being rude and accusing them of spreading falsehoods.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#113
post #45

it is true, video is a nightmare mess littered with weird functionality nobody needs. (limited range only just disappeared in rec 2100, optionally??? really??? i'm not worried about my electron gun in my CRT from 1975 these days...nor do i want to know what a Y or a Cb or a Cr means because everything is RGB and B&W TV is long dead... and 4:2:2 is not exactly compression so much as computational overhead etc.. etc.)…

Please let me know what you do when you have filter overshoots or undershoots in full range. Limited range is there for good reason.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#114
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am absolutely sure I never changed my settings, and that they have changed over time without me doing anything. Why would anyone want 50% font size at 25% opacity on a yellow then green background? I didn't ask for that. Yes, this is most definitely a systematic issue. The bug reports I've submitted to google have been ignored, and that's a frustrating distraction from what I'm paid to do. Maybe if you submit one y…

> Maybe if you submit one yourself, somebody will pay attention, because google is paying you to work on youtube, and hopefully they will take you more seriously than their users. FWIW, I always read "file a bug report", when not used to mean "I need more detail" but to mean "talk to the hand" and when spoken by someone working close to a project, as "fuck off", particularly if the person never even bothered to deter…

The rule of thumb I used was: if Google is paying someone enough to go online and post defenses of youtube like "Please do not spread falsehoods", and tell me things I already know like "software that is 100% perfect is pretty much impossible to write," then part of his paid job should also be filing bug reports using the bug tracking system he uses every day, and probably already has an account logged in and a tab opened on, when the falsehoods turn out to be true.

If YouTube were open source, and I could look at the source code of the keyboard handler to find the cause of the problem myself, prove my bad experience was not just a falsehood to be brushed off, and possibly even suggest a fix, then maybe I would have been more motivated to put my own time into filing a bug report.

But Google is a huge well funded advertising company that payed billions of dollars for YouTube and makes billions of dollars off of it, has a huge complex system set up for digital rights management, promoting and paying for advertisements, enabling copyright holders to report violations, paying many employees for actively pursuing and resolving those copyright violations, removing inappropriate content, hiring conservative lobbyists and sending executives to kiss Donald Trump's ring [1], etc.

So I would expect YouTube employees to put at least as much time and effort into reporting bugs about their own product to their employer, as they put into monetizing YouTube while defending its reputation from people they perceive as spreading falsehoods about it.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-google-idUSKBN14...

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#115

The original one ( http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... ) left me bafled. Then I realized you have to strike a balance; otherwise you cannot deal with names at all. The point where drawing the line depends on your industry/customers, but I'd safely say that it's too restrictive nowadays so these lists are useful somewhat and of course they are interesting.

People's names is one area I think developers constantly bugger up. For example, my last name has a space in it, but half the websites I register on either: 1. Throw an error and won't let me enter my last name as it is supposed to be spelled. 2. Truncate the last part of my last name. 3. Try to be clever and end up shoving the first half of my last name into a middle-name field. My preference for names, addresses, a…

As a Spaniard I have two last names (no middle name, no one last name with space) but 0% of the non-spanish websites I have ever seen accommodate for this.

Normally I just use it with an space in the last name field, but then I get exactly the same problems you mention.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, The YouTube implementation does all of those. Here is a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbqPe-IceP4 Please do not spread falsehoods. Disclamer: I work at YouTube.

The falsehood you're spreading is that youtube closed captioning is consistently usable for everyone by default. This is how my subtitles / closed captions have looked for me on youtube for a year or so now [1] (on up-to-date Mac Chrome). The font is extremely small and blurry and practically transparent, and there is a horrible background color, which is usually yellow until a week or so ago, but has now changed to…

Oh my god, apparently it WAS my cat's [1] fault for walking across the keyboard!

Some genius at YouTube decided to implement persistent keyboard shortcuts that enable cats to easily and stealthily change the closed captioned text into unreadable colors!

My cat can press "o" to make the text lighter and fuzzier, and press "b" to cycle through a garish series of primary background colors plus black and white, including the same color as the text, rendering it invisible. There may be others, but I can't tell and I'm afraid to try.

Hoping that my opposable thumbs would enable me to get some help, I pressed "?" expecting to get a list of keyboard shortcuts, but that didn't do anything but violate the Principle of Least Astonishment [2].

It's not all my cat's fault, though -- some of the blame lies with YouTube: purposefully designing, implementing and not documenting such annoyingly cat-friendly but unhelpfully user-hostile keyboard shortcuts.

Googling for "youtube keyboard shortcuts" doesn't show any links to official YouTube documentation on the first page of results -- the top featured hit is an outdated page from an "SEO Consultant" full of social networking widgets and ads and self promotion, that doesn't even mention the closed captioning related keyboard shortcuts, which my cat discovered all by himself.

Does YouTube itself even document its own keyboard shortcuts online anywhere, let alone providing pop-up "?" help?

And does anybody really think that changing the transparency and background color of closed captioned text is so important that it deserved several dedicated undocumented keyboard shortcuts, no matter what the usability consequences were? Or that the user's inadvertent color and transparency preferences should be persisted across all videos instead of applied per-video? Who would even want partially transparent text anyway, let alone a key to change between several transparencies?

[1] http://imgur.com/a/33Mrt

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#117
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be because you might have changed your settings for CC in the past. Here is what mine look like http://imgur.com/HLIVXQ6 You can click settings again to change font sizes, font family, colors, etc.

I have to change my CC settings every damn couple of days because they revert to the same white-on-white 400% bullshit. So thanks for that.

How many cats do you have? Any indoor pet chickens or chimpanzees? Or even mischievous children?

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#118
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe if you submit one yourself, somebody will pay attention, because google is paying you to work on youtube, and hopefully they will take you more seriously than their users. FWIW, I always read "file a bug report", when not used to mean "I need more detail" but to mean "talk to the hand" and when spoken by someone working close to a project, as "fuck off", particularly if the person never even bothered to deter…

The rule of thumb I used was: if Google is paying someone enough to go online and post defenses of youtube like "Please do not spread falsehoods", and tell me things I already know like "software that is 100% perfect is pretty much impossible to write," then part of his paid job should also be filing bug reports using the bug tracking system he uses every day, and probably already has an account logged in and a tab o…

I am not getting paid to do this, and actually am taking some time to be with the family for holidays. I just saw the original comment saying that YT "fuck(s) it up" when it comes to CC, and it looked OK to me. So, I just wanted to share my results so that people do not assume "it's screwed up everywhere". I do know that the engineers I have met at work really want to try to do the right thing for users.

I don't have access to file a bug through a work account for the next few days, and if you come across any issues (like CC broken by default), please file a bug with a lot of details. People do look at that stuff. I am glad that you found the source of the issue, and I hope you can agree that it would've been impossible to find it if I had just filed a bug. I do not work anywhere close to the team that implemented the CC, and when people have said "file a bug" to me in a work context, they have meant it as a way to "let's keep track of this so it's not forgotten". Luckily, the people I have met at work have been good about this. I do not speak for Google or anyone else there, just sharing my own personal experience.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#119
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am absolutely sure I never changed my settings, and that they have changed over time without me doing anything. Why would anyone want 50% font size at 25% opacity on a yellow then green background? I didn't ask for that. Yes, this is most definitely a systematic issue. The bug reports I've submitted to google have been ignored, and that's a frustrating distraction from what I'm paid to do. Maybe if you submit one y…

> Maybe if you submit one yourself, somebody will pay attention, because google is paying you to work on youtube, and hopefully they will take you more seriously than their users. FWIW, I always read "file a bug report", when not used to mean "I need more detail" but to mean "talk to the hand" and when spoken by someone working close to a project, as "fuck off", particularly if the person never even bothered to deter…

Unfortunately, I don't work close to the team that implemented the CC system, nor do I know the language it is implemented in very well. And, I do not have access to my work account for a few days (I am taking some time off to be with family), so I can't file a bug with my work account either. It seems like the problem has been resolved, and it was tracked down to the owner's cat.

Luckily, at YT, I have not met anyone that said "file a bug report" and meant "fuck off". I have worked with some people in the past at a different company that have meant that, but not here. Usually it has meant "let's file a bug to not forget about it", this is just my experience, and I just wanted to share it. I am only speaking for myself, and others might have different experiences.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about video

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rule of thumb I used was: if Google is paying someone enough to go online and post defenses of youtube like "Please do not spread falsehoods", and tell me things I already know like "software that is 100% perfect is pretty much impossible to write," then part of his paid job should also be filing bug reports using the bug tracking system he uses every day, and probably already has an account logged in and a tab o…

I am not getting paid to do this, and actually am taking some time to be with the family for holidays. I just saw the original comment saying that YT "fuck(s) it up" when it comes to CC, and it looked OK to me. So, I just wanted to share my results so that people do not assume "it's screwed up everywhere". I do know that the engineers I have met at work really want to try to do the right thing for users. I don't have…

Thanks for responding. I'll submit a bug if I can, now that I know the cause the problem. But I need to know where best to submit it.

It's a design and documentation bug, that needs to be addressed at a higher level by re-evaluating the decisions and justifications behind all the keyboard accelerators, removing the ones that nobody actually uses and that cause more problems than they solve (like making closed captioned text transparent and changing its colors), implementing full and immediate "?" keyboard help, and writing some online documentation.

So should I simply click "send feedback" on any random youtube video and write up my suggestions, as this page tells me to? [1] I've done that now, so let's see what happens.

Do you really sincerely think my suggestion will actually make it back to the designers through that channel and that changes will happen as a result? Is there a way for me to track it?

Or is there a better accountable bug tracking system that I can actually submit a real trackable bug into and watch the progress and see if it gets marked "will not fix", like https://bugs.chromium.org but for youtube? Do you have access to a better bug tracking system for youtube that's not public?

[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/4347644?hl=en

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