Two Dots Too Many (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Two Dots Too Many (2008)

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

95 pointsAlifatisk42 comments

In 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.

> blame the technology

Reminds me like _any_ work problem can be described as "problem in communication". Problem identified.

I 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.

I 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.

My “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.

Hah, 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.

Lots 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.

I don't think the cell phone localization is here to blame.

The wrong sentence doesn't even make sense.

Yeah, tensions were already high. People were looking for any excuse. If it wasn't this text message, it would have been something else.

Maybe 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.

At 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

The phone didn't autocorrect "fucking" to "ducking"?? :D

Two Dots Too Many (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9900758 - July 2015 (38 comments)

This 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

Not only reminds of "Punctuation Saves Lives!" (Let's eat, kids) but also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFeVfwDvTyM

One apology too many - a tragic consequence of the failure to proofread before sending

Edit: my failure to verify before sending ruined my bad joke.

> 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.

Thanks, I missed that.

Perhaps reading TFA would have helped you catch it.

You 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.

"It's not like I write software for a nuclear reactor, making a mistake will not kill anybody".

Software did not kill anyone in this story.

Software 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.

> 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.

There‘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.

Localisation 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.

The root cause is that first fish crawling on land

"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

In the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘Damn!’ Verily, several other words followed.

Not everything needs to reduce down to all blame assigned to a single party.

This is a failure to apply the principle of charity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

> Another is that it is best not to kill people who make you angry until you have carefully investigated the situation

Indeed

Nah, careful consideration is generally the enemy of homicidal rage.

Perhaps a person may even consider refraining from violence even after having carefully investigated the situation, regardless of the outcome of said investigation.

But 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? :)

Just imagine Picard looking down on us through a force field porthole of the Enterprise, slowly shaking his head in disappointment, whispering to himself: "Savages."

Star Trek is not the last word on violence and interventionism.

lol. The original stayed pretty close to the eat/fight/screw paradigm, at least as far as capt Kirk went.

A tragic consequence of people being homicidal cretins. Nothing to do with localisation.

... Nothing?

Nothing. 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.

(2008)

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