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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

I blame Google for popularizing that.

Honestly it was fine enough for a YouTube error, "we couldn't find that video." But then everyone started copying it, including Microsoft who, in Windows 8, updated the blue screen of death to have a "whoopsie poopsie! Your computer has a widdle boo boo!" type message, accented with a :( sad face emoticon.

Which I can guarantee was presented to countless people who lost real work. I'm sure they found that real reassuring.

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As an aside we once set a labmates' welcome screen to the blue screen of death. We let him angrily restart the laptop 3 times before letting on.

This predated the annoying :( which I think would have led him to break the computer after the second try

Back in the day, the blue screen and unhandled exception messages in Windows had some actual useful information in them, like the memory address where it happened, some arguments passed to the bugcheck routine, etc.

Back then the I-cannot-program-my-VCR crowd used to call tech support and scream about all the "egghead nonsense gobbledygook" on their screen. And since there's orders of magnitude more of them than there are people ready to fire up their kernel debugger and make use of that info, guess which tack the UX took?

Reminds me of the time when we switched around all the icons on the desktop (ie chrome => file explorer, recycle bin => vlc) of my friend's laptop. He eventually gave up and launched the programs from command line.

I've seen this one from Google which is kind of peculiar.

Your client does not have permission to get URL / from this server. _That’s all we know._

Yeah, that one was always a bit weird because it's essentially a lie: no, you know more. You're not telling me and that's fine, but come on.

I imagine the context is something like "the associated permissions were set by a different group or department within Google and/or decided by software running elsewhere that didn't communicate its reasoning as part of the protocol it speaks to the load balancer". That is, that's all the system generating the error message knows.

But yeah, it also feels like "we (Google) don't care that much about your problem here, because nobody is going to improve this software to give you a more meaningful explanation".

often disclosing any more information is considered a security leak

I imagined it being sort of tongue in cheek, like saying "who wants to know?". _That's all we know_ minimizes alarm to laymen while communicating that the page contains no other interesting information.

I threw all my Google Home's into the trash after I told one to "shut the hell up!" and it started shaming me about being rude to it.

It's perfectly fine to use "we" in a message on a web site. It's not fine on local software.

Windows may as well be considered a web service at this point!

Yep, but I guess that's exactly what the OP was complaining about. It was just badly stated.

You don't get tempted to talk in terms of "we" when you are doing software that is controlled by its user. But policing the language won't achieve anything either.

Didn't Mac OS have a sad face way before?

I mentioned in another comment that the "apology" and humanization of the error messages doesn't bother me, but I have to admit that the frowny face and the infantilizing messages DOES make me irrationally irritated.

But the emotion of irritation is human. Therefore, mission accomplished.

You know, if my computer said “whoopsie poopsie! Your computer has a widdle boo boo!” I would be amused.

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