"Ramazan went to the family's home to apologize, only to be greeted by the father, Emine, two sisters and a lot of very sharp knives."
There's no technological way to fix people that would try to kill someone over a text misunderstanding without figuring out the truth first. People like this are garbage-people murderers, let's not blame tech mistakes for the fact that some people are scum. Everyone involved knew damn well that a couple characters would make the difference between a benign text and an offensive one, and frankly, even if the text was offensive, murder was not justified. Scum.
OK, the overreaction like this may be a cultural problem.
But even without a problem like that, imagine a case when a wrong drug is administered to a patient, with deadly consequences, or a wrong turn is taken by a motorist, leading to a collision.
To avoid this, things should be written in an unequivocal way. But for that, one has to realize how expensive a "negligibly small" mistake can be.
> ...imagine a case when a wrong drug is administered to a patient, with deadly consequences...
Out of band solutions are used to address these problems more comprehensively.
The FDA regulates brand names for drugs for exactly this reason: avoid confusion and ambiguities.
This is also one of the reasons for pharmacists, especially in hospitals. Mouse-clicking in a pull down list can easily select the wrong drug for the patient.
To be fair, though, if you have two drugs that are separated only by very similar looking characters, that's a recipe for disaster anyway. Even ignoring the localization aspects, I wouldn't want two drugs separated only by the difference between i/l, u/v, etc.
> is not an indictment of bad tech, but of a fucked up honor-based patriarchal culture.
Bad tech played a crucial role in the escalation, though. What is justified in one society or even demanded is not necessarily justified in another. And a text message that you consider just offensive might be a strong insult in another culture with implications you cannot even grasp.
Calling people for their culture "scum" is the least effective way of "positively" influencing them (on the premise that Western culture is "positive").
How on earth should people who kill over words, no matter how offensive, be called? Really, in these times of twisting the meaning of words, we should really call spade a spade and not to hide behinds untrue cliches such as "all cultures are equal and should be respected equally". Not they're not and shouldn't be. If your "culture" demands that you pour acid over the face of your ex-girlfriend, it doesn't deserve to be called "culture", and you deserve to be called who you are.
I have no idea who you are responding too. Nobody in this thread claimed "all cultures are equal and should be respected equally".
I was saying that cultures are vastly different and that showing complete disrespect for something you don't even understand will not help anybody at all.
Acid-attacks, btw, are a mostly Indian specialty - try this in a honor based society and you have her family get at you sooner than you can write another uninformed "response" to something nobody ever said.
> Calling people for their culture "scum" is the least effective way of "positively" influencing them
If their culture is objectively so primitive and backwards that it causes behaviour you'd expect of savages a couple thousand years ago, I think that word is entirely appropriate.
I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that, because a misunderstanding over text led to one person murdering another, that the culture in which these events occurred was primitive, backwards, and deserving of the epithet "scum"?
User ewjordan's original comment is clearly calling out a bad institution-- an "honor-based patriarchal culture"-- for encouraging a specific bad actor (or at least a specific class of bad actors) to murder other human beings. I say bad actor because ewjordan saw fit to emphasize-- using the heightened language "damn well"-- that everyone knows about the potential for ambiguity in the choice of text. People who jump on an ambiguity in a patriarchal society for a chance to do murder are clearly bad actors. Hence, the word scum probably seems like a fitting epithet for such a bad actor.
The problem is that heightened language always ends up obscuring one's point. For example, is user dvfjsdhgfv agreeing with ewjordan or extending the critique more broadly to include people who aren't obviously bad actors? It isn't clear to me.
User Kenji's logic is less ambiguous, however. Since it is "their culture" which "causes causes behaviour you'd expect of savages a couple thousand years ago", the use of the word "scum" is deemed appropriate. Yet, using "scum" to describe a "culture" is awkward, and seems to suggest that it is the inhabitants of that culture who are in fact being called "scum" here. Does that include both bad faith and good faith actors? User jballanc asks for clarification on this, and by now user lawly is apparently confident enough to give a one-word answer: "Yes." Finally, just to confirm that the understanding is that we're indeed applying the descriptor "scum" to large swaths of human beings, user jballanc gives the counter-argument based on that logic:
> I mean, I'm no fan of the British, but I wouldn't call them "scum".
This is why I try to avoid using heightened language especially when describing people who commit horrific acts.
FWIW I'm totally with you here: this particular family was who I was aiming the "scum" comment at, not the entire culture.
I'm never going to do a song and dance in favor of that culture, though, because it is pretty messed up if it encourages that kind of behavior. That doesn't mean that everyone in the fold is a bad actor, so I'd hesitate to paint so many people with the same brush. Some or most are probably decent folk that would never support shit like this.
I do stand behind my word choice as written and clarified here, though.
Oh, yes, let's pretend it's the same thing when a nutjob commits manslaughter and a family comes together over knives to commit premeditated murder of a man coming to apologize to defend the honor of the family's daughter.
Text (aka strings) exists in virtually all software projects
For me, distinguishing between text as something that is intended to be read by humans and strings as serial sequences of characters that may or may not be human readable but will be processed by one or more computing automata is useful. For example in C, the string "Hello World" is terminated by a null character. The null character is not part of the text the string encodes.
Or to put it another way, I find that treating strings as text as two different layers of abstraction clarifies my intent. Code that manipulates text is built on code that manipulates strings and in between there's parsing that has to occur.
Wouldn't you want to call that "string" versus "bytes" (instead of "text" versus "string")? (That's the Python parlance, if I'm not mistaken, and it seems good to me.)
To me, Bytes are a different abstraction. In terms of automata, a string consists of characters. Related to the problem of conflating text and strings is the traditional conflation of characters and bytes via ASCII.
Again for me, in terms of handling text versus strings, the Python ecosystem is not the paragon of well considered language design. Abstractions over strings, text, characters, and bytes are a significant breaking change between Python 2 and 3 and among the reasons that Python 2 code is still written in significant amounts...and still there is no 'text' type.
The previous comment used "Python" without specifying which one...and part of me feels that to some degree Python 3 just put another layer on the mess because it still did not make the important distinction between texts as human readable artifacts and strings as a computer science concept. Or to put it another way, a stream of bytes can readily be parsed as a string of characters by an automaton because bytes can be parsed as characters and a stream as a string. But this all happens at a lower level of abstraction than text as something that humans read and write both with and without computers. I mean Python 3's distinction between strings and bytes in no way address messy problems like ß/ss in German.
In that case, which is HTML? Because it's meant for machines to read, so should be treated more carefully that pure 'text'. However, HTML shouldn't be processed like bytes either.
I suppose with HTML the real issue is that there is human readable text in there.
HTML is serialisation of a DOM. It's not a sequence of text, but a semantic tree of it. Both encoded as sequential bytes, but different concepts when decoded.
HTML5 is specified in terms of unicode characters and forbids most control and non-characters[0]. In that sense it is human-readable text. It's not easy to read, especially when minified. But so is shorthand or very dense scientific texts.
Some things are meant to be human-readable and machine-parsable at the same time. Those things are not mutually exclusive.
And sometimes humans will complain even more than machines if you mangle their text in any way.
I wish more software developers kept these things in mind.
At one of my customers I worked on interfacing their online store with several other software components. The store was the only piece able to handle the names of customers (from different parts of the world) correctly. All the rest failed at some point. There are so many additional aspects you discover only when you actually work on these things.
I've worked with several programs that present results as
"Thing number 1"
"Thing number 10"
"Thing number 2"
...
Which IS of course alphabetical order, but it is also the wrong order for any user-facing list. This is most likely a symptom of prematurely string-ifying and passing around information as strings.
"Ramazan went to the family's home to apologize, only to be greeted by the father, Emine, two sisters and a lot of very sharp knives."
There's no technological way to fix people that would try to kill someone over a text misunderstanding without figuring out the truth first. People like this are garbage-people murderers, let's not blame tech mistakes for the fact that some people are scum. Everyone involved knew damn well that a couple characters would make the difference between a benign text and an offensive one, and frankly, even if the text was offensive, murder was not justified. Scum.