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Two Dots Too Many (2008)
- omnicognate 2y agoA tragic consequence of people being homicidal cretins. Nothing to do with localisation.
- crummy 2y ago... Nothing?
- omnicognate 2y agoNothing. In this instance fixing the localisation might have prevented the deaths, but in any specific event there is an array of details that could have produced a different outcome had they been changed, but which aren't causal. Improving localisation is a good thing, but it isn't going to reduce the murder rate.
- davemp 2y ago> The Turkish newspaper Hürriyet reports a tragic consequence of the failure to localize cell phones. . . only to be attacked by his wife, her father, and two sisters. He was stabbed in the chest but succeeded in grabbing a knife, stabbing his wife, and getting away. Emine died of her wounds; Ramazan killed himself in jail. Sorry, I don’t think you can blame this on technology. Stick and stones and all that.
- ivan_gammel 2y agoThere‘s the root cause of an incident and systemic problems that escalated it to a tragic outcome. The systemic problems are the culture. The root cause is incorrect localization, because the causal link is clear and in the chain of events it comes earlier than culture-specific behavior. So yes, UX killed them.
- roenxi 2y agoLocalisation isn't the root cause because he'd probably have been stabbed regardless. If you walk into a room to apologise and 4 people attempt to kill you, it was not 1 poorly transcribed text message that was the problem. > She showed the message to her father, who angrily called Ramazan and accused him of calling his daughter a prostitute. This is the point where the father found out that the text message was a localisation error. If they were confused about his meaning when they tried to knife him then the root cause was his poor communication skills. Otherwise it was some unknown issue.
- trgn 2y agoThe root cause is that first fish crawling on land
- Akronymus 2y ago"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
- KineticLensman 2y agoIn the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘Damn!’ Verily, several other words followed.
- Bjartr 2y agoNot everything needs to reduce down to all blame assigned to a single party.
- mauriciolange 2y agoAt first I was confused by the title (my fault) and thought that the article had to do with geo-localization. And only after several paragraphs I could switch to language localization :D
- Scoundreller 2y ago(2008)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aucisson_masque 2y ago> Another is that it is best not to kill people who make you angry until you have carefully investigated the situation Indeed
- K0balt 2y agoNah, careful consideration is generally the enemy of homicidal rage.
- teekert 2y agoPerhaps a person may even consider refraining from violence even after having carefully investigated the situation, regardless of the outcome of said investigation.
- animuchan 2y agoBut that would mean no stabbing people in the chest for arbitrary reasons! Not even a little bit! How do we, as a society, resolve arguments then? :)
- teekert 2y agoJust imagine Picard looking down on us through a force field porthole of the Enterprise, slowly shaking his head in disappointment, whispering to himself: "Savages."
- krater23 2y ago[flagged]
- weinzierl 2y agoI like to journal when traveling and in the late 90s or early 2000s I sometimes went to local Internet Cafés and send travel report of the past few days to myself via email. One time in Turkey on a computer with a filthy monitor and a very worn out keyboard I was close to despair because my emails were undeliverable. It took me quite a while to realize that the key where every other keyboard layout has the letter i had an i without a dot. The regular dotted i was some key combo.
- Scoundreller 2y agoMy “high-security” email password for a while was a couple of words, but typed one key to the right. Even I didn’t know what my password was. While travelling, Had to lookup an image of a qwerty keyboard to figure out what it was.
- noneeeed 2y agoHah, I had something similar when travelling in Norway. The keyboard was almost identical but I think two keys were the other way round. It took me far too long to work out why I kept miss-typing things.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- croes 2y agoI don't think the cell phone localization is here to blame. The wrong sentence doesn't even make sense.
- dfxm12 2y agoYeah, tensions were already high. People were looking for any excuse. If it wasn't this text message, it would have been something else.
- gweinberg 2y agoMaybe it seemed to make sense in context. Although I must admit I'd be hard pressed to come up with a context in which it would make sense.
- batch12 2y agoOne apology too many - a tragic consequence of the failure to proofread before sending Edit: my failure to verify before sending ruined my bad joke.
- sandwell 2y ago> The problem was that Emine's cell phone was not localized properly for Turkish and did not have the letter <ı>; when it displayed Ramazan's message, it replaced the <ı>s with <i>s. So it was the wife's phone that changed the meaning of the message, not his.
- batch12 2y agoThanks, I missed that.
- SuperNinKenDo 2y agoPerhaps reading TFA would have helped you catch it.
- batch12 2y agoYou didnt have to go out of your way to provide another excellent example of someone making themselves look silly by making a dumb comment backed by the wrong assumption, but I appreciate the cover.
- djha-skin 2y agoLots of comments about how murder is murder, no need to involve UX. I mean, yes, but it's still a good lesson in why UX matters. Even if there weren't a stabbing and the husband was forgiven, there would still have been a misunderstanding, even if perhaps the text had been one that was intended to be positive.
- gbacon 2y agoThis is a failure to apply the principle of charity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
- southernplaces7 2y agoIn cases where the consequences for misunderstanding, and one's reactions are much less extreme, but people still let themselves be led into a problem by misunderstanding, i'd partly blame the technology because it should accommodate the possibility of people paying attention poorly in situations with minor consequences. In this case however, where they decided on murder and the worst kinds of interpretation because of what they'd read, the people are to blame far more than any text problem. They're murderous idiots who couldn't pause to think that maybe trying to kill an ostensible family member shouldn't be done before very, very carefully reading what they had said and later first hearing them out if they want to say something more in person. For that kind of violent stupidity, the stupid itself would have to be fixed if at all possible. No reasonable amount of tech optimization will help because They'll always find something to snag them into deep trouble.
- deepsun 2y ago> blame the technology Reminds me like _any_ work problem can be described as "problem in communication". Problem identified.
- southernplaces7 2y agoI would argue that there are problems that go beyond being ones of communication and are instead problems of hard obstinacy. These are much harder to solve except usually by crudely deviating around them. Also, it's sometimes maddening how often society, media, and of course politicians/lawmakers, see extreme cases like the above and try to blame technology with a "do something!" policy solution, even though there will always be extremes of stupid or obstinate that no amount of specific solutions will stop from happening. But, it's easier to blame a tech or UX standard that's controlled by an agent or entity intelligent enough to be subject to pressure. Easier than it is to blame isolated human extremes of behavior that will in any case not respond to calls for change because their nature makes that nearly impossible. Many of the particularly idiotic rules or UX requirements we see in the systems that most of us, being more or less reasonable, interact with come from the above-mentioned misguided attempts to proof that system against the absolute worst, forcing the vast majority who don't need such measures into stumbling over them.
- dang 2y agoRelated: Two Dots Too Many (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9900758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9900758 - July 2015 (38 comments)
- dfxm12 2y agoThe phone didn't autocorrect "fucking" to "ducking"?? :D
- Muromec 2y ago"It's not like I write software for a nuclear reactor, making a mistake will not kill anybody".
- yencabulator 2y agoSoftware did not kill anyone in this story.
- savolai 2y agoSoftware rarely does. It can only have consequences on either physical machines acting or people acting. And yet, in addition to emotional skills and general communications education, making sure ux is verified can decrease the odds of such issues.
- morning-coffee 2y agoNot only reminds of "Punctuation Saves Lives!" (Let's eat, kids) but also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFeVfwDvTyM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFeVfwDvTyM
- rockzom 2y agoThis reminds me of when I constantly got a gender symbol identifier after certain emojis sent from iPhones to Android. I thought it was some new kind of feminist trend, but it was just my phone not parsing it correctly