3 ms·

Yeah, but at least it's a bit understandable that its changed in that direction, and usually you can get a developer-friendly error message if you look at the H

by diggan 3y ago

Yeah, but at least it's a bit understandable that its changed in that direction, and usually you can get a developer-friendly error message if you look at the HTTP responses in the devtools. I remember one time a company I worked at received a support message where the title was (paraphrased) "DONT HURT MY CHILDREN" from some person who saw an error message saying something about "couldn't dispose of child" or something similar, when the frontend broke. "Child/children" being kind of common in programming, I'm sure others faced similar scenarios. I'm not sure if they were genuinely scared or just decided to have some fun with us while reporting the issue, but after that we made the error messages even more generic, so nothing could be misunderstood. I guess it is this quest to not alienate the lowest common denominator that is the reason behind the stupidification of error messages. On one hand, people won't get scared, on the other hand, people get less context about why the error happened in the first place. Wonder how many of the average users actually care?

DonHopkins 3y ago
The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) >The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x that said "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Since the classic Mac OS offered little memory protection, an application crash would often take down the entire system. Unfortunately, the Mac's bomb dialog could cause naive users to jump up out of their seat and run away from the computer in terror, because they though it was going to explode! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQGX3J6DAGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQGX3J6DAGw And Window's "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" error message was just as bad: it could cause naive users to fear they might get arrested for accidentally doing something illegal!
lamontcg 3y ago
Generally error messages get watered down to nothingness because it gives news reporters less meat to chew on. Not knowing if its a "me or you" problem means that small problems might actually get missed and not need any PR response. Details won't leak and produce all kinds of speculation over the causes, etc.
rjmunro 3y ago
You have to be careful with error messages. It's possible to give too much away and enable security vulnerabilities.
- diggan 3y ago
  I'd assume the security vulnerability is there no matter what the error message says, but I guess very explicit and verbose error messages might expose details to make it easier to find said vulnerability.

by diggan 3y ago

DonHopkins 3y ago

The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) >The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x that said "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Since the classic Mac OS offered little memory protection, an application crash would often take down the entire system. Unfortunately, the Mac's bomb dialog could cause naive users to jump up out of their seat and run away from the computer in terror, because they though it was going to explode! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQGX3J6DAGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQGX3J6DAGw And Window's "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" error message was just as bad: it could cause naive users to fear they might get arrested for accidentally doing something illegal!

lamontcg 3y ago

Generally error messages get watered down to nothingness because it gives news reporters less meat to chew on. Not knowing if its a "me or you" problem means that small problems might actually get missed and not need any PR response. Details won't leak and produce all kinds of speculation over the causes, etc.

rjmunro 3y ago

You have to be careful with error messages. It's possible to give too much away and enable security vulnerabilities.

diggan 3y ago
I'd assume the security vulnerability is there no matter what the error message says, but I guess very explicit and verbose error messages might expose details to make it easier to find said vulnerability.