Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure it's even attributable to stupidity (necessarily) as attributable to automation or, more long-windedly, attributable to the fact that automation at scale will sometimes scale in wacky ways and said scale also makes it nearly impossible--or at least unprofitable--to insert meaningful human intervention into the loop.

Not Google, but a few months back I suddenly couldn't post on Twitter. Why? Who knows. I don't really do politics on Twitter and certainly don't post borderline content in general. I opened a support ticket and a follow-up one and it got cleared about a week later. Never found out a reason. I could probably have pulled strings if I had to but fortunately didn't need to. But, yeah, you can just randomly lose access to things because some algorithm woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

View on HN

>said scale also makes it nearly impossible--or at least unprofitable--to insert meaningful human intervention into the loop.

Retail and hotels and restaurants can insert meaningful human intervention with less than 5% profit margins, but a company with consistent $400k+ profit per employee per quarter can not?

https://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyeit.php?code=GO...

This is what I'm talking about in my original comment about the malice and stupidity aphorism.

Someone or some team of people is making the conscious decision that the extra profit from not having human intervention is worth more than avoiding the harm caused to innocent parties.

This is not a retail establishment barely surviving due to intense competition that may have false positives every now and then because it's not feasible to catch 100% of the errors.

This is an organization that has consistently shown they value higher profits due to higher efficiencies from automation more than giving up even an ounce of that to prevent destroying some people's livelihoods. And they're not going to state that on their "About Us" page on their website. But we can reasonably deduce it from their consistent actions over 10+ years.

Fair enough. Scale does make things harder but my $FINANCIAL_INSTITUTION has a lot of scale too and, if I have an issue with my account, I'll have someone on the phone sooner rather than later.

You're saying that as if it contradicts (“but”) what lotsofpulp said, but that was exactly their point: If your bank can do it, then so could Google. That they choose not to is a conscious choice, and not a beneficious one.

Conrad's corollary to Hanlon's razor: Said razor having been over-spread and under-understood on the Internet for a long while now, it's time to stop routinely attributing lots of things only to stupidity, when allowing that stupidity to continue unchecked and unabated actually is a form of malice.

(Hm, yeah, might need a bit of polishing, but I hope the gist is clear.)

Meta: I’ve vouched for this comment. You have been shadowbanned.

I thought I was agreeing. "Fair enough."

I'd go with: "Sufficient stupidity[1] is indistinguishable from malice"

[1]: Where stupidity is further defined as "willful ignorance"

I was just paying a bill online.

I had loading images turned off in my browser.

So I get the checkbox captcha thing, and checking it is not enough, so I have to click on taxis, etc. Which didn't initially show because of images being off.

I eventually did turn on images for the site and reload it. But at first, I was like "wait a minute, why should I have to have images on to pay a bill?" and I clicked a bunch of things I'd never tried before to see if there was an alternative. It appears that you have to be able to do either the image captcha or some sort of auditory thing. I guess accessibility doesn't include Helen Keller, or to someone who has both images and speaker turned off (which I have done at some times).

Maybe this is hard for someone younger to understand, but when I was first using computers, many had neither high quality graphics nor audio - that was a special advanced thing called "multimedia". It feels like something is severely wrong with the world if that is now a requirement to interact and do basic stuff online.

Genuinely-handicapped users should certainly have accommodations that allow them to pay bills using the necessary accessibility tools. It's always tricky to keep those tools from being leveraged by spammers and phishers, though, as witnessed by how TDD services for the deaf were misused in the past. Hard problem to solve in general, either through legislation or technology.

But if you're an ordinary user without special challenges, why would you expect anything to work after turning images off in your browser? If you're that much of a Luddite, maybe computers and technology aren't appropriate areas of interest for you to pursue.

Once upon a time, it was not only easy to find the option to disable image loading, but you could easily load them a la carte, by right clicking on any placeholder.

With the browser I use now, it seems to only let you reenable images per-site and then you have to dig in settings to delete the exception.

There IS a Load Image menu item when I right click...but it does nothing! Neither does "Open image in new tab".

I think it's unfortunate if there is a "long tail" of features in a typical application these days that are not expected to work.

What frustrates me personally is that there used to be a Firefox extension to suppress displaying a particular image, which is no longer available. I can't see the utility of disabling all images, but that extension was nice because you could use it to remove things you were tired of seeing like obnoxious backgrounds, avatar photos, and even some ads. Once you right-clicked on an image and told it to remove it, you'd never see it again, even in subsequent browsing sessions.

This extension died during one of Firefox's periodic Purges of Useful Functionality(tm), and I've been looking for another one ever since. So to some extent I see where you're coming from, but a general jihad against sound and images in the browser seems pretty radical.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com