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Don't guess my language

vitonsky.net

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Re: Don't guess my language

#351

Post by baobun »

notpushkin wrote: post #296
vikingerik wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a circular dependency: how do you sort and list the locales or languages for someone to pick one, when by definition you don't know their locale yet? You have to either make some best-guess approximation (IP geo, browser headers, etc) or use a locale-invariant sort, both of which will be wrong in some cases.

We can find a sorting order with the minimal total distance between where we place a language entry and where this entry would be in that language. If there’s no pair of languages A and Ä such that A > Ä in one and Ä > A in the other, then (I guess???) this total distance will be zero.

> A and Ä

Coincidentally, the expected position of "Ä" can vary wildly. Is it an umlauted A, normalized as AE, or a distinct letter coming after Z?

Re: Don't guess my language

#352

Post by notpushkin »

baobun wrote: post #351
notpushkin wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can find a sorting order with the minimal total distance between where we place a language entry and where this entry would be in that language. If there’s no pair of languages A and Ä such that A > Ä in one and Ä > A in the other, then (I guess???) this total distance will be zero.

> A and Ä Coincidentally, the expected position of "Ä" can vary wildly. Is it an umlauted A, normalized as AE, or a distinct letter coming after Z?

That’s also part of the reason I’ve chosen it for a placeholder / variable name! The actual placing is not important as long as it’s where speakers of the Ä language expect to find it.

Or suppose there’s languages Ä₁ and Ä₂, where in Ä₁ the ‘ä’ is the umlauted ‘a’ and in Ä₂ it’s a distinct letter. The language list would be displayed as:

A Ä₁ B C Z Ä₂

The only problem / corner case would be such a language Ä₀ that would e.g. sort ‘ä’ before ‘a’. I would still put it after, since it’s where most other readers would expect to find it.

Re: Don't guess my language

#353

Post by bmn__ »

Vinnl wrote: post #340
bmn__ wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is expressed as the quality parameter. To make the system GP proposed work atop HTTP content-negotiation, a server operator should assign a very small number to the automatically translated content.

Isn't that parameter sent in the Request ? (Also note that I wasn't talking about automatically translated content necessarily. Manually translated content still often is of worse quality than the original language.)

It is; but also there is a server counter-part with its own quality weights. If that does not make sense, play with the code in http://p3rl.org/HTTP::Negotiate and read the HTTP spec.

Re: Don't guess my language

#354

Post by bmn__ »

vintermann wrote: post #343
bmn__ wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I wanted to transport is the following idea: attacking a channel owner (who is most likely innocent and did nothing wrong) with a metaphoric sledge-hammer when a more gentle and precise tool will do is not a great way to conduct oneself in society. vintermann and clan have a feed now without content that bothers them, but at the cost of lowering the channel owner's reputation in the eyes of the operators of Yout…

Attacking? By saying "don't recommend this", I'm just saying I want to give someone else the chance to be seen, rather than the ones who will make their stuff objectively worse in order to juice their stats for the algorithm. I'm sure my "don't recommend this" clicks don't in any way make up for Google's promotion of channels that "make their content accessible", because it doesn't even stop them from recommending me…

There will be no understanding if you do not even make a token effort to suppress your egocentric worldview and engage in honest conversation.

Re: Don't guess my language

#355

Post by clan »

bmn__ wrote: post #354
vintermann wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attacking? By saying "don't recommend this", I'm just saying I want to give someone else the chance to be seen, rather than the ones who will make their stuff objectively worse in order to juice their stats for the algorithm. I'm sure my "don't recommend this" clicks don't in any way make up for Google's promotion of channels that "make their content accessible", because it doesn't even stop them from recommending me…

There will be no understanding if you do not even make a token effort to suppress your egocentric worldview and engage in honest conversation.

Did you?

They base the feed on user input. The feed is then (supposedly) adjusted to what I like.

What I call a signal you call an attack.

I signal that I do not like Minecraft videos. But I do not attack them.

Your anger is misdirected. You should be mad at YouTube because they do not seem to understand that there can be multiple signals at once.

The chances that I click on a Minecraft video is low. Autotranslated even lower.

So we differ strongly in opinion on how the platform should work. I read your "attack" argument as I should write to the Minecraft creators and tell them their content would be better if they played Minesweeper instead.

I do not punish anyone. I just pursue a clean and (for me) high quality feed.

If you are up in arms that I punish your channel that is another signal that I am probably not your target audience.

When dealing with audiences at scale you need to listen to these signals as handling personal opinions in mails from the discerning viewer is not feasible.

Re: Don't guess my language

#356

Post by pezezin »

knorker wrote: post #102

Also: Don't guess my units . Why oh why does Google Maps think that "miles", "feet", and "yards" are words that have any meaning at all? Only like a 20th of the world even knows what these obscure things are. Just because I'm currently located in a country that nominally uses these arcane units doesn't mean that I know what they are. Oh you can change it to real units temporarily. But if you look away for a split sec…

Related to this: don't even offer arcane units or M/D/Y dates in languages other than English, no other language in the world uses them.

Re: Don't guess my language

#357

Post by Vinnl »

bmn__ wrote: post #353
Vinnl wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that parameter sent in the Request ? (Also note that I wasn't talking about automatically translated content necessarily. Manually translated content still often is of worse quality than the original language.)

It is; but also there is a server counter-part with its own quality weights. If that does not make sense, play with the code in http://p3rl.org/HTTP::Negotiate and read the HTTP spec.

TIL. Well, then I wish that was widely implemented :)

Re: Don't guess my language

#358

Post by draw_down »

donatj wrote: post #21

I have told the story here before, but I built a neat little system to parse Accept-Language weighing the users priorities and using the closest thing we have on offer to the users preferences. As an example, we have a Brazilian Portuguese translation but not Portugal Portuguese, so we would offer the prior to users requesting the latter for instance unless they had a lower priority but more exact match. From my tech…

[dead]

Re: Don't guess my language

#359

Post by uselesswords »

numpad0 wrote: post #328
magicalhippo wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A related issue that has me fuming is when, after arriving at a page of interest from a search engine, a modal popup forces me to select the country I'm from, and then promptly redirects me to the homepage of the regional website. Some have a X button to close said dialog, but many don't which is really aggravating.

https://xkcd.com/869/

https://bbc.co.uk sends me to https://bbc.com in the states and it is just infuriating

Re: Don't guess my language

#360

Post by Aachen »

lxgr wrote: post #307
Aachen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Related: if I had a penny for every time I needed a VPN just to load the payment method selection screen (but not for the actual payment, it's not geolocked) just to be able to pay somewhere, I'd get a lot of products for free by now... Why not let germans select iDeal and dutch users Giropay? They'll not click it if it's not useful for them. Adjusting the sort for what's most commonly used makes sense, but why…

Because then companies would have to charge all users the same price for the exact same service. Charging customers from countries with higher average purchasing power more and hiding the fact behind "charging people in the local currency for convenience" is much more profitable!

Hadnt thought of that, but the price is the same between the two countries I had in mind. Indeed, if there are measures in place to keep products affordable for less lucky/affluent regions, by all means keep those. Just show them all available payment methods, irrespective of the adjusted price
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