201–210 of 310 posts
humans should come with a big UUID that is generated at a central database to keep out duplicate and then just a name without any last name for social connections. this would also solve discrimination on many levels. would be a nightmare for privacy and tracking but we are all being tracked anyway.
the CIA/NSA wet dream... We're not supposed to make it easier for them to control and target us...
I think we should all embrace a future where legal names are just straight up binary streams. I can finally realize my true potential and be recognized as Mr. “:100 emoji:(Unicode zero-width joiner):fire emoji:(null character)(base64 encoding of a QR code that links to a website with a photo of my face),(vcard data, recursively referencing this last name somehow)”
Big Endian or Little Endian ;-)
The number of times that a website rejects my first name because it has a hyphen in it, even in 2025, is astounding. I get told all manner of things by support staff, like "just leave it out" as if it's just not an important part of my name or anything.
Indeed. My passport correctly includes the hyphen in my surname. Air New Zealand doesn't support spaces or hyphens so my surname is written out as both words concatenated (i.e. Onetwo). Qantas doesn't support hyphens but does support spaces so my surname is written out as two words (i.e. One Two). Thankfully apparently this is common enough that I've had tickets including travel on both airlines (as Qantas cancelled…
I have mostly documents that include my full middle name, and the way half or more of air travel systems deal with that is to just crunch the first and middle into one name.
But: it all works fine.
I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us. It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and reque…
My university was [initial][lastname][year][letter][letter]@school.com, allowing for 26^2 people to have the same initials and last name every year. Despite having a rare last name and no twins, I was "AC".
My name, Ĝonatano, contains a ĝ, which is an uncommon letter outside of my language, Esperanto. But when I go to set my username to "ĝonatano," I'm often told that usernames "may only contain letters or underscores," as if ĝ weren't a letter. (You can see that I've approximated it in my HN username, but I don't need to do that on web services that correctly understand that letters exist outside of ASCII and Latin-1.)
You also can't put in Cyrillic or CJK characters. It's a user name, not a human name, you should be fine just using the 26 ASCII letters for it. Basically anything that is a computer-centric string should be only ASCII and nothing else, because supporting all of human writing is a never-ending task.
I've had great fun with my surname, which contains of two words and just a space in between. Lots of systems thought my "maiden name" was the first word and adressed me as Mrs. My wife has three first names, adopted my surname when we married and her own surname. Nobody gets it right. We don't care and have fun with it.
I've also had great stress with my surname, when some algorithm at the tax authorities decided it sounds a bit like coming from a Slavish country and along with other parameters decided to tag me as a fraud. Still an ongoing problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same, as someone with two middle names. Both scenarios are very common.
I’ve wondered about this myself, though I only have one middle name. Do you typically enter both middle names into the “Middle Name” form field?
It's rather fun that computers have these magic words in them.
The number of times that a website rejects my first name because it has a hyphen in it, even in 2025, is astounding. I get told all manner of things by support staff, like "just leave it out" as if it's just not an important part of my name or anything.