9 ms·
I'm a but wary in general about how US tech used around the world slowly erodes the nuances of different cultures. Often the software doesn't take into account
by matsemann 3y ago
I'm a but wary in general about how US tech used around the world slowly erodes the nuances of different cultures. Often the software doesn't take into account how things work in other languages, different regions etc.
I'm also not sure I'd blame the engineers in SV too much, of course they design software based on their own context. But with tech becoming global, it's a bit sad how it's not prioritized more.
Examples include bad dictionaries in other languages. Bad or no translations. And for instance in Norwegian we quote things like «ord» or „ord“, but all software I use do or makes it harder than just doing "ord". US systems assumes all addresses uses zip codes. My name contains a letter not in ascii, breaking lots of systems. I can't use vpn at work if I'm in a city with the letter Ø in it as some go proxy geoip location thingy crashes. ChatGPT can output in my language, but the language is stiff and feels off. If I ask it to rhyme, it doesn't but if I were to translate back to English it rhymes. Some systems ask me to input a time in am/pm and I've no idea which is when.
Or how things are moderated to an US standard. In Scandinavia boobs are fine, and in Danish newspapers you'd see them all the time. With global networks, we're now moderating to American "prudeness".
I actually think MS products are fairly good at this. They are big enough and have been around long enough to be fairly well localized. Word uses quotes ok and grammar is not terrible. Except it for decades have insisted on writing internet with a capital I for some reason, which we don't do.
- tomrod 3y agoI appreciate your thoughts. You made me realize AM (antemeridian, before noon) and post meridian (after noon, 24 hours mod 12) aren't universal standards!
- bregma 3y agoNot even in the USA.
- Lukas_Skywalker 3y agoNoon and midnight are especially difficult for people used to the 24 hour system. Noon is neither ante nor post meridiem. And midnight is both.
- Jenk 3y agoI don't follow - Noon is 12pm, midnight is 12am.
- ginko 3y agoWhich is very confusing. Why does 12pm follow 11am and 12am follow 11pm?
- crabmusket 3y agoMaybe because 12:00 being consistent with 12:01 was more important than it being consistent with 11? I personally enjoy using 24-hour clocks on all devices I can.
- Digit-Al 3y agoSpeaking of 24 hour clocks: my oven clock shows midnight as 24:00, and then changes to 00:01 at 1 minute past midnight. I've never seen any other clock show that; very strange.
- pasc1878 3y agoI thought that was normal at least when writing or saying things. Use of either mechanical displays or on computers time selecter widgets does mean that 24 is not shown anywhere,
- Jenk 3y agoBecause that's how the numbers are arranged on the clock face/sun dial
- thaumasiotes 3y agoThe word "meridiem" means "noon", the middle of the day. Noon itself is neither before nor after noon. You're right that by convention noon is assigned a pm tag and midnight is assigned an am tag. But midnight, when the calendar date changes, is confusing enough to people that e.g. airplane departures will be scheduled for 11:59 pm rather than 12:00 am, because there's no ambiguity about when 11:59 pm will happen on Wednesday, whereas it isn't clear when midnight will happen on Wednesday -- technically, if it's Wednesday, midnight already happened on Tuesday night. It is far more common for people to end their personal day after midnight than it is to begin it before midnight, so the convention directly contradicts the way pretty much everyone views "the day".
- panzi 3y agoYeah, but because if analog clocks here in Austria we have no problem to convert back and forth. Are there no analog clocks in Norway?
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoThere are, but we just skip the AM/PM part most of time, because it's obvious from context which one you mean. And if it's not you'll just say "... in the morning/afternoon/evening"
- tomrod 3y agoAM: morning, PM: afternoon/evening
- tgaj 3y agoYeah, but this is the problem - why noon is "afternoon"?
- xen0 3y ago"12:00:00 + ε" is after noon, but your clock will not show a difference.
- tomrod 3y agoClopen intervals in order to have a well-specified time system. [0] [12:00 PM, 12:00 AM) for after the noon instant [1] [12:00 AM, 12:00 PM) for before the noon instant 24-hour time is superior to the mod-12 time system in almost every way but mechanical clock faces and soldier shifts under early systems that used sun dials. However, the equivalent question can be asked by a day is a clopen interval of [00:00 current day, 00:00 next day)
- eesmith 3y agoIn 24-hour time, those are 12-24 and 0-12, respectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 A place open 24 hours/day is open in the period 0-24.
- kzrdude 3y agoOne kind of bad localization that happens every now and then is that the time is given in 12-hour clock but the am/pm particles are translated (to some reasonable thing). While a proper localization in those cases would just display 24-hour time without any am/pm equivalents.
- tomrod 3y agoIf I could edit the comment after a few hours, I would fix the spelling. Apologies! (Ante meridiem & post meridiem)
- vasdae 3y ago>ChatGPT can output in my language, but the language is stiff and feels off. I'm Spanish and I'm tired of American companies pretending only Mexican Spanish exists.
- cambalache 3y ago[dead]
- VeninVidiaVicii 3y agoSame with European Portuguese, I can’t actually use Siri or any voice controlled software because I refuse to speak in Brazilian Portuguese. It is so unnatural (frankly I don’t know how), I would just prefer to speak English.
- neilkk 3y agoFewer than 5% of native speakers are Portuguese...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoI’m Mexican and I’m tired of the entire world pretending all Hispanic countries are perfectly happy with peninsular Spanish :)
- yakubin 3y agoMy personal pet peeve is American SaaS companies not comprehending that half the world starts their week on Monday. All those systems for requesting PTO, sick leave etc. are so confusing if you’re not extra careful.
- heisenbit 3y agoI raise your one day off by switching places for month and days.
- xeonmc 3y agoNah, it's just that Silicon Valley folks are used to 0-based indexing instead of 1-based.
- LordShredda 3y agoShows the superiority of the software artists at silicon valley
- mikepurvis 3y agoRelated to that is all the angst about how Sim City basically just lets you make car-centric hellscapes, not at all unlike San Jose, the city in which it was birthed. And City Skylines inherited a lot of that legacy, that designs centered around mass transit and cycling (such as one would find in Europe or Japan) really only become fully practical with a bunch of mods installed.
- uxp8u61q 3y agoThe whole game of City Skylines is based around a grid-shaped city and clearly delineated zones for housing, commerce, and industry. It's never going to be able to model a European city (or an old east coast US for that matter).
- notahacker 3y agoIts not just the car centric hellscapes, but the assumption the only way a local authority exerts any control over building is zoning (for residential or commercial, never both), the grid, the assumption that high density means towers with parking lots in between, the lack of any social housing (and indeed the assumption low income workers are entirely unnecessary to a properly functioning city), the assumption that the best way to make your city really attractive is regressive taxation to attract the rich and scare away the poor etc etc...
- josephg 3y agoI visited Amsterdam recently and instantly noticed something weird about the road layouts there. I did some research - they differentiate between streets (meant for short distances, or getting to a local destination) and roads (meant for long distance travel - or driving past a location). As a visitor, it seems brilliant. And it makes way more sense than what a lot of roads look like here - with cyclists trying to fit in with high speed traffic. Novel approaches to urban planning seems like an obvious thing to put in to urban planning games. What a missed opportunity.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoUrban planners have coined the word "stroad" for the hybrid monstrosities.
- didntcheck 3y agoThe one that always gets me is how Google's image captcha assumes everyone knows what American school buses, fire hydrants, crosswalks, and various other street features look like. As a youngish EU citizen I do know those from cartoons and the internet, but I doubt my parents do > Or how things are moderated to an US standard It's just comical how adults on Youtube talking about adult topics are pressured into censoring even mild profanity
- sshine 3y agoIt’s similarly comical how video-recorded board meetings will have grown-up people hold woke signs while others recite from library books with controversial wording, everyone starts shouting, and they get escorted off property for reading aloud the book (available to kids). It feels like the US is overstretching its own diversity. Maybe it’s just as bad some places in Europe, and it just doesn’t get televised.
- MSFT_Edging 3y ago> It feels like the US is overstretching its own diversity. Something about this line is bothering me. In the US, we're very diverse sure, but also that diversity comes with deep history of violence, struggle, systemic oppression, etc. To many, current movements might come off like they're overstepping, but so much about our culture is so deeply steeped in the opposite. So much of our daily life has been structured around old deeply racist systems and as a population we're struggling to come to terms with the contradictions of concepts we were taught with the reality. We're taught we're a melting pot of cultures, yet there are so many atrocities in living memory that parts of the population wish would be simply forgotten. So there is the counter swing of the "woke"(I hate that word and the complete corruption of the concept), which is an attempt to bring these subconscious ideas into the conscious level so we can think about them and confront them, rather than let them continue to simmer. The overarching goal isn't to make all these things the standard, but to overshoot so that when the cultural tendon relaxes, it falls to a better place. The "Woke" movements is an attempt to fight a cultural virus, and the remnants of the virus does not like it and gets defensive, and informs other parts of the body that this medicine is actually a virus in of itself. The goal isn't that the medicine becomes a permanent fixture, but that it brings to light the virus and allows the society to understand how to extinguish it.
- ginko 3y agoAnother example I recently ran into is Google translate stripping gender from words even when translating between languages with grammatical gender. (German) die Banditin -> (Spanish) el bandido (Spanish) la bandida -> (German) der Bandit So it always turns a female bandit into a male one.
- playingalong 3y agoBecause it goes via English? I am not sure but I think I heard Google Translate always goes via English.
- ginko 3y ago> Because it goes via English? That's my understanding, yes.
- bigger_inside 3y agoThat explains SO much.
- mcpackieh 3y agoYandex Translate gets it wrong in the same way, suggesting that they also go through English instead of Russian, or something else is going on.
- cpeterso 3y agoBased on this 2016 Google Brain article, “Zero-Shot Translation with Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System”, I assumed Google Translate directly translated languages: https://blog.research.google/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-with-googles.html?m=1 https://blog.research.google/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-w... But I just tested some end-to-end translations of some random simple sentences from German and Spanish Wikipedia. The translations are identical whether I translate them directly or via English as an intermediate step. This didn’t prove that Google Translate is using English (or some other interlingua), but at least demonstrates doesn’t not use one. :) German example: de = Wikipedia ist ein Projekt zum Aufbau einer Enzyklopädie aus freien Inhalten. de:en = Wikipedia is a project to build an encyclopedia of free content. en:es = Wikipedia es un proyecto para construir una enciclopedia de contenido gratuito. de:es = Wikipedia es un proyecto para construir una enciclopedia de contenido gratuito. Spanish example: es = Wikipedia es una enciclopedia libre, políglota y editada de manera colaborativa. es:en = Wikipedia is a free, polyglot and collaboratively edited encyclopedia. en:de = Wikipedia ist eine freie, polyglotte und gemeinschaftlich bearbeitete Enzyklopädie. es:de = Wikipedia ist eine freie, polyglotte und gemeinschaftlich bearbeitete Enzyklopädie.
- sshine 3y agoGrammar suggestions in Office 365 is terrible. It just can’t guess the document’s language when it doesn’t align with the browser’s language settings. The automated suggestions are still so poor and out of touch with reality, I reckon they will only be useful to dyslexics who are throwing dice anyways.
- Mordisquitos 3y agoI fully agree with you. Another gripe to add to the list is the Anglocentric expectation made by American software [0] that any full personal name with three words must necessarily mean (given_name) (middle_name) (surname), to be displayed as "Givenname M. Surname" and initialised as "GS" (skipping the ostensible "middle" name). Nevermind the diversity of conventions across cultures [1], every name must obviously follow American cultural expectations. [0] Also British, Canadian & Australian software, but with few exceptions (Shopify, Atlassian…) few of these have such global presumptions as US software products. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989683
- mschuster91 3y agoTime for a timeless classic piece of writing: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names [1]. [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- bigger_inside 3y agoI've encountered software that just assumes everyone MUST have a middle name. I'm German, I have no middle name. Some software (well, online forms) make this a "hard" assumption, so you have to put an "X" or something in the middle name field; it'll scream otherwise
- xyzelement 3y agoI am an American and have no middle name and I cannot recall any software that forced me to enter one.
- chrismorgan 3y agoA funny/sad aspect of it is that I get the impression that violation of the /^(?<first>\S+) (?<middle>\S+) (?<last>\S+)$/ custom isn’t even all that rare in the USA because it’s still moderately common to reuse names and add ordinals, a practice which has largely fallen out of practice in other English-first countries (so that violation of the convention has become rarer in them, though certainly there are other deviations—e.g. I have a great aunt with no middle name). Poor old John Smith Ⅳ (pronounced “John Smith the Fourth”) probably gets turned into the initials “JI” (because let’s be real, he actually wrote “IV” rather than “Ⅳ”).
- gardenhedge 3y agoMS teams quick prompts are heavily americanised imo and sound unnatural in my culture
- mailund 3y agoOh my god, as a Scandinavian, the whole American thing about boobs is so annoying! It seems like the internet really want to force me to be shocked about seeing a chest, it's so weird. Most of the time, it is completely outside of a sexual context, but videos get 18+ because you apparently take psychological damage of you see a pair of tits before you're allowed to vote. Actually didn't know about the quote thing though, even though I've loved here my whole life
- ThrowawayR2 3y agoUntil the internet breaks its dependency on advertising income (a significant portion of which are either American or global, meaning they want to be inoffensive to Americans) and the internet breaks its dependency on allowing advertising to be channeled through an American company, moderating to prudish American moral standards is here to stay. It would be a net positive if Google's advertising business was broken up along regional lines for anti-competitive practices and also being anti-cultural. Anybody want to suggest it to the EU?
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoSure relative to Europe America has prudish standards. But what about the Arab sphere? China? India? You know, like 3-4 billion people? Yeah, I think America has pretty liberal standards.
- cubefox 3y agoInterestingly, the US seems fairly similar to Japan: Large tolerance for violence, small tolerance for nudity. Which is strange, given that US has much stronger connections to Europe. (Though I'm not a Japan expert.)
- TeMPOraL 3y agoDidn't Japanese culture get pretty much rewritten after WWII to be US-compatible?
- cubefox 3y agoA lot of those points also apply to other European countries. Though regarding the quotation marks, that seems to be more the fault of the local keyboard layouts. I don't understand why German keyboards don't have the keys to write „ord“. MS Word relies on a software solution to automatically convert "ord" into the German format, but most software (like browsers) understandably don't bother with implementing such replacements. The same thing applies to ' and ’. (Is this even the character I have in mind?) Regarding ChatGPT being bad at Norwegian: That's excusable, as the performance of the model is dependent on the amount of available training data. American prudishness. Yeah. Every country has its own preferences, but among Western countries, the US seems special with their aversion to nudity. Excluding Australia perhaps. In the US violence is okay but nudity isn't, in Germany violence isn't okay but nudity is, in France both are okay. The US has a stronger aversion to nudity than most European countries, but it's interesting that in the US a sex scene without nudity appears to be less offensive than a nude scene without sex. As a German, that always seemed absurd to me, and presumably most Europeans would agree. But in the end it means that, because Google is an American company, YouTube globally allows no nudity (not even boobs), while being completely fine with strong violence and even gore. Regarding am/pm, yeah, that sometimes still trips me up. According to Wikipedia: > Other than in English-speaking countries and some Spanish-speaking countries, the terms a.m. and p.m. are seldom used and often unknown.
- josephg 3y ago> among Western countries, the US seems special with their aversion to nudity. Excluding Australia perhaps. Australian here. Culturally we seem less comfortable with nudity than a lot of parts of Europe, but we’re not as bad as the US. It boils my blood how much online spaces (like Facebook) are moderated according to American standards. Most software I use also can’t handle the fact that I mix American and Australian English spelling. (Programming always uses American spelling but I’ll use Australian spelling in other contexts.) All of my devices either complain about “color” or “colour”, and I’m constantly being told off or autocorrected for using my own language in a nuanced way.
- crazygringo 3y ago> why German keyboards don't have the keys to write „ord“ I'm assuming for the same reason American/English keyboards don't have the keys to write “place”, just "place". Which is because American/English typewriters didn't -- they invented straight quotes to save extra keys. And looking up on Google Images, it looks like German typewriters were the same -- Shift+2 was a straight double quote. It's my personal opinion that this was the original sin -- that typewriters implemented straight quotes rather than curly quotes, to save an extra column of keys. Imagine there's a parallel universe out there, just like ours, except straight quotes were never invented, and everybody actually types opening and closing quotes explicitly, and word processors never had to invent any "smart quotes" feature at all... Still, I'm more surprised by German typewriters than English ones. In English, you can "get away" with straight quotes, they don't stick out too badly. But in German, the opening quote is in the totally wrong position, at the top instead of the bottom!
- unsupp0rted 3y ago> I'm a but wary in general about how US tech used around the world slowly erodes the nuances of different cultures This is a plus, not a minus. It doesn't matter what (reasonable) standard we go with, as long we go with one. I'm excited for a time when all humans speak (and read, if reading is still needed by then) the same easy-to-learn logical language from childhood. When English and Norwegian become special interest topics that niche scholars learn as part of their grad work, we'll all be better off. https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Marain https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Marain
- smt88 3y agoIt would be cool to have a universal language, but English is the JavaScript of spoken languages – universal because of coincidence rather than good design.
- JCharante 3y ago> With global networks, we're now moderating to American "prudeness". We're moderating things to the most influential country that uses that language. If you don't use English then you'll see tons of content that would not fly in the English internet. Searching for "watch rick and morty free" gets you to paid services and malware sites, while searching for that same show in a less popular language gets you a very fast pirated stream with subtitles in that language as the first search result. This is very useful for watching pirated English content as long as you don't mind the foreign subtitles.
- cubefox 3y agoThe point was probably that e.g. YouTube or Facebook have strict rules against nudity in all countries, because US American culture has a strong aversion against nudity. (Perhaps due to the influence of Puritan settlers on the early US, or something like that.)
- brookst 3y agoAny information exchange erodes culture. Movies, music, academia, anything. But I think that’s a good thing. Other people feel differently and want to preserve small patches of “pure” cultures, but I think the world is better and richer when hugely diverse cultures are diffused widely.
- city41 3y agoI might agree with you in theory. In reality the American culture spreading across the globe is just sad to me. I don't want to get a Subway sandwich in the US, let alone Germany or Signapore...
- cubefox 3y agoIdeally we would want to spread the best parts of different cultures around the world, not indiscriminately everything from one specific culture. There are many things about US American culture that are great, others are not so great.
- some_random 3y agoIt's not even American prudeness is many cases, it's "making sure everything is advertiser safe" as interpreted by poorly paid Filipino moderators.
- cubefox 3y ago"Advertiser safe" means something else for a US American (person/company/advertiser) than for a European.
- some_random 3y agoOf course, and yet it turns into the same thing when your advertisers are based in Dubai.
- cubefox 3y agoThere does indeed seem some overlap here between the US and Muslim countries.
- some_random 3y agoI know that being progressive is really important to the self esteem of you Euros, but you all need to stop letting it cloud your worldview so much.
- cubefox 3y ago"cloud your world view"?
- GABG 3y ago> My name contains a letter not in ascii, breaking lots of systems Tell me about it. In my native language (European) we have accents at the end of some words (like città or pubblicità; city and advertisement respectively). As someone that works with typography in someway or another, I can't count how many times I had a font that didn't support the character à or é or whatever and I had to choose a font that looks similar to the one I want but that if you look at the text for even a few moments more, you are guaranteed to notice it. An even more disappointing fact is how many people use the apostrophe instead of the accent for capitalized letters (E' instead of É) because there no É button on the keyboard. Shift+è brings up é > Some systems ask me to input a time in am/pm and I've no idea which is when. I have a similar problem. Sometimes someone writes a date in the American MM/DD/YYYY format instead of the DD/MM/YYYY one and unless it's something like 08/24/2023 where there is no month 24, it can be pretty disorienting to me. That's why I really like the ISO (please fill me up on the number) YYYY-MM-DD: it's both clearly distinct for the other two and standardized across the world > I actually think MS products are fairly good at this. They are big enough and have been around long enough to be fairly well localized 100% agree with you, although there are some other production that do a pretty good job (both FOSS like Jellyfin and commercial like Affinity Photo). Fun fact: Microsoft Word 2007's dictionary doesn't have the surnames of some of my classmates but has mine (which is something so rare it's basically impossible)
- briandear 3y ago> because there no É button on the keyboard On a Mac it’s easy. Just hold down the letter and you will have options for pretty much any accent. Holding Capital E for example on iOS: Ë É E È Ê Ě Ę etc..
- GABG 3y agoBut most of the people that make this error are non-tachsavy Windows users. And while there is Microsoft's PowerToys[0] with the Quick Accent tool that does the same thing, I doubt many people know about it. > on iOS I think this works for any mobile keyboard (for example, AOSP's default keyboard supports that). In my language at least, the use of a capital letter with an accent is pretty rare, especially when we're talking about quick messages (which is what your most likely to write on mobile) [0]: https://github.com/microsoft/powertoys https://github.com/microsoft/powertoys
- sandworm101 3y ago>> Often the software doesn't take into account how things work in other languages Not just languages. In my area we run into constant issues with MS products using American date/time formats in places it isn't wanted. For half of ever month this is a big deal, even inside the US as many organizations use the international standard. People cut-and-paste from popup windows or error logs only to discover that the tiny bit of MS code that generated the notice doesn't respect realworld date formats (day-month-year) and just defaults to the US format (month-day-year). Non-MS software (apple/google) and open source more often than not respect date formats. It is MS that seems to just not care. I was once involved in a heated debate re a contract when everyone suddenly realized the issue: 05/06/18 had been confused with 06/05/18, resulting in an extra month of costs being attached. I think to avoid further ambiguity I jokingly rewrote it as "On the sixth day of the fifth month of the year of our lord two thousands and eighteen and ..."
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]