Interesting Links for 25-10-2021

[andrewducker]

Why is the idea of 'gender' provoking backlash the world over?

(tags:gender bigotry authoritarianism LGBT transgender )

Sewage emptied at 26 beaches along Cornish coast

(tags:Cornwall waste UK OhForFucksSake )

Looks like a lot of Conservatives will need to get a PCR test pretty swiftly

(tags:Pandemic conservatives OhForFucksSake )

How to Report Bugs Effectively

(tags:bugs software advice )

Norfolk sand: Has a colossal experiment worked?

(tags:sand sea )

'Parliamentary Sovereignty' Vs 'Parliamentary Supremacy'

(tags:parliament law uk constitution )

Ofcom orders phone networks to block foreign scam calls

(tags:uk phones scam spam fraud regulation )

Opinion: I can't even say 'woman' anymore, except for how I just said it, and all the times I'll say it in this piece, and all the times I say it in my everyday life

(tags:viaJamesNicoll women transgender journalism satire funny lgbt bigotry )

Google colluded with Facebook to rip off publishers and advertisers

(tags:Facebook Google fraud OhForFucksSake )

Comments

[cmcmck]

The hypocrisy of the Gruaniad with this item is mind boggling given their own attitudes!

[andrewducker]

Yeah. This article is from the USA wing, who are the ones who wrote a letter in protest a while back about the transphobia, and who appear to not be horribly bigoted.

[dewline]

Now...how to give that US faction further leverage within the overall editorial structure? I recall a previous interview with Butler being retro-censored by the UK editorial office, much to the displeasure of the interviewer.

[conuly]

MTE.

[nancylebov]

Two more things about getting help with computers.

Be clear and flexible about what you're trying to do. I wanted to free pictures from Photo Viewer (some malware that comes with windows (sometimes)) to do something with them. The only graphics program I knew of is GIMP, so I asked about moving images to GIMP. You can't do that directly, and a moderate amount of time got wasted. There is a short list of graphics programs that Photo Viewer will send images to. LibreOffice is very nice, and as I recall, you can send images to GIMP from LibreOffice. (Corrected because I got LibreOffice and GIMP reversed.)

The other thing is, when a problem is solved, you may think that the helpful person is as sick of it as you are and doesn't want to have their time taken up with hearing about it. This is false. They want to know they accomplished something, and they also want to add what worked to their store of knowledge. So tell them if they solved a problem.

[andrewducker]

Definitely, on both counts.

I've found myself starting off by asking "What, exactly, do you want to achieve?" and then drilling into that, on numerous occasions. Because what they've asked for isn't actually the best way of achieving what they want.

[simont]

On the other hand, it's also possible to take that attitude too far.

Realistically, there are some situations in which a problem has to be solved in a way that doesn't appear to be the best. For example, you already got 3/4 of the code written before the problem came to light, and now your deadline doesn't leave time to go all the way back to the drawing board. Or you're a fork of some other repository and trying to avoid applying the kind of downstream change that will lead to endless merge conflicts. Or a vital component is proprietary and you can't fix the bug where it really ought to be fixed. Or some other user of the buggy component is depending on the bug. Or, etc.

The failure mode of "take a step back, what are you really trying to achieve and is this the best way to do it?" is to end up being that person who can't ever give any answer other than "abandon this entire approach and start from scratch in a fundamentally different way", and those people don't tend to make a lot of friends, especially if they somehow never give the same input at the start of a project when it might be feasible to act on.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, but in the case of a bug report you'll (nearly) always be looking for a quick fix, and not "Throw it away and rebuild a system from scratch". But knowing what they're attempting to do will shortcut a bunch of misunderstandings.

[calimac]

"I am tired of the woke police forcing me to stop doing something by… well, they don’t actually have the ability to force me to do anything, but they can make suggestions and I resent that."

Ha ha ha ha. You know, the ancient Greeks considered ostracism a pretty powerful weapon.

[conuly]

If only we could actually ostracise these disappointments.

[simont]

Warrgh, that wasn't a thing I expected to see in a 2021 links log! :-)

[andrewducker]

I think it came up in a discussion on Hacker News and I recognised the URL and took a look. And liked it, obviously :-)

[simont]

Over the years that article has brought me in a huge number of misdirected bug reports, from people who go to the web site of the program they want to report a bug in, find a link to HTRBE, follow it without noticing that they've left the program's website, find an email address at the bottom, and send their bug report to me.

That's why my email address at the bottom is in a big red box with a warning sign saying "don't do that". But people still do, no matter how hard I try.

Once a particular program's user base sent me so many of those misdirected reports (an order of magnitude more than everything else put together) that I had to ask the maintainers to host their own copy of the article with my address taken off the bottom, and link to that copy instead!

But anyway. 22 years later, I'm still reasonably happy with most of the content of the article. If I were rewriting it today, I'd change the tone a little (it reads as a touch teenage to my current sensibilities, but that's to be expected). And I'd add one extra 'snappy soundbite summary' sentence, which for years I've regretted not putting in, but it's a bit late now all the translators have been and gone: for all those times when someone says it "won't print" or "can't save" or "didn't connect" and didn't tell you the details of what happened when they tried, I'm fond these days of saying "Don't just tell me what didn't happen: tell me what did!"

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. "It didn't work" is no use at all!

[wildeabandon]

My first thought before clicking through was 'I wonder if that's Simon's article'.

[anna_wing]

The sand article reminds me of something I saw years ago about some of the Pacific island nations that are at greatest risk from rising sea levels. The risk is not that the islands will disappear altogether, because many, especially those that are in groups, will basically just move bit by bit, like those artificial beaches. So the terrain itself will survive. The problem is things like groundwater contamination by seawater, which would make continuing to live on them impossible.

Would this be an issue in coastal areas in the UK as well?

[andrewducker]

I doubt it - we tend to have large inland reservoirs, and are a big enough island to not be affected by that kind of thing.

[matgb]

It has the potential to hurt crop growing in some areas, but not as many as some worry about, depends on local topography more than anything else

There are studies set to go in Slapton (south Devon, where my family's from) when the sandbar protecting the Lee collapses, to see how bad it can get and how far inland it encroaches, but nobody really knows

[momentsmusicaux]

> If you saw error messages then tell the programmer, carefully and precisely, what they were

And for the love of everything, do NOT make screenshots of them! Copy-paste the text! Don't make me type out the error message all over again from your crappy JPEG when I want to search the source code for it!

[simont]

Absolutely!

Although there is one situation in my experience where a screenshot of a failure is more useful than the corresponding text. But it's not an error message. It's Unicode / character-set encoding confusion.

When people report bugs of the form "I sent <this text> and <that gibberish> appeared in the window", it's very likely that by the time those two complicated pieces of Unicode have gone through a cut-and-paste buffer and two mail systems, they've had at least one extra layer of corruption or translation that obscures a vital detail of what had originally happened. In that one situation a screenshot of the window with "This is what I saw, pixel for pixel" is much more likely to represent what the user actually saw than anything I can create by re-pasting their email...

[momentsmusicaux]

Ah, good point about unicode!

And UI bugs as well, obviously need screenshots.