mccIt is mind boggling to me how many websites make it difficult or impossible to express the idea you no longer wish to use an old credit card
So I've got two credit cards on the account, and one expired in 2019, and that's the one you're defaulting to. Do you think you're making a good decision here
Bad assumptions programmers make about time: It does not exist, and no piece of information related to a person will ever need to change
"At first we believed that programmers were latently sexist/transphobic, and due to their demographics had never thought about the fact that minoritized communities might need to change their name or gender marker. However with further research, we discovered the problem was larger: Programmers have never thought about anything, at all"
Edward L Platt@mcc seriously though, I don't think my students knew what they were in for when they came in for the week on data models
RuggledomeSigh. My career was in logical and enterprise data/information modeling. This was the kind of thing we constantly bumped into.
It takes a fair amount of time to learn about/appreciate the vast quantities of use cases and gotyas one needs to model for. Also for folks to really understand that logical and physical models are different and necessary. The stories I could tell...
Squeezing that into one week? I salute your effort!
ck@ruggledome @elplatt @mcc just remind them that everything they know about anything is probably wrong and their assumptions will hurt real people and they'd be almost set to model the real world
JiΕΓ Fiala Total Landscaping
wb x64
Ishtar (Antiprotons)β€οΈπ§‘π€π©·π@mcc Yeah, what bugs me are gender/sex markers.
It asks for gender, but shows sexes, or has a category error like, {male, female, non-binary}. Intersex is never listed.
As a transgender programmer, I have sought not to be that way, though I usually do B2N/interfaces, so I rarely end up doing anything with this.
Tom Forsyth@antiproton @mcc Of course the real question is - WHY DOES THE WEBSITE CARE?
@TomF @mcc there can be a lot of reasons why a website cares. A lot of it comes from things like demographics for analysis. I'm not saying I agree with this, but if you ask the website people that's what you're going to get. Huge amounts of demographics are used for marketing purposes. I mean I'm not a fan of it, but that would be the answer
@antiproton @mcc No no - it answers the question perfectly well :-)
Q: Why does the website care.
A: Marketing.
Q: So what should I put there?
A: Anything you like.
That's what me and all the other people born on 1st Jan 1970 think, anyway...
@antiproton @mcc If a website asks my birthdate, I am exactly as old as every computer whose RTC battery has died.
@antiproton @mcc It is also a really excellent way to annoy people who talk about the Birthday Problem. Coz it's not 23, it's like... 3.
The cat who walks thru walls@antiproton @TomF I believe the idea is something like "You don't believe it's so few? Here, let me show you! Let's pull up this list of my contacts /friends/whatever from <website, messaging system, etc> and take a look at their birthdays... See? We already found a match!"
@mrrmot @TomF Oh I know how the problem works. That's one of the things they bring up an undergraduate computer science lol I'm just not sure that N=3 is likely to produce the same result without data poison, but that was what the OP mentioned, so maybe that's a joke? I'm autistic and I often don't get jokes and sarcasm, so perhaps it's humor? No way for me to know lolπ€·ββοΈπ€·ββοΈπ€·ββοΈπ€·ββοΈπ€·ββοΈ
@antiproton @TomF I know you know :) I believe the point is that OP's contact list would almost certainly include several other people who are in the habit of putting down 1970-01-01 as their date of birth because it is none of the other side's business.
@TomF @mcc well I mean you can do that I guess.
I have an entirely offset, fake set of dates that I use. Like I said, the efficacy of their reasoning is necessarily suspect, but I think that's what it is. I've said in too many meetings listening to marketing people not to be suspicious This is the reason.
I'm just lucky that I don't have to code stuff like this normally. I don't do ux π₯°
Briala@antiproton @TomF @mcc And then there's the fast-food website who want quite a range of demographic information for you to submit any kind of feedback. Not just name, email, suburb, but also phone number and full address and there was more I don't remember. It felt quite intrusive and poorly thought out as an experience.
Imbolc@TomF @antiproton @mcc I used to always use January 1, 1900 -- so that it was very clearly a non-real birthday and that I was withholding information rather than attempting something fraudulent
Though recently some sites were no longer accepting that: I guess they have a maximum age check now (the current oldest known person was born in 1907)
So, I've started using January 1, 1920.
LisPi@TomF @antiproton @mcc Username & DisplayName, those are the only two pieces of information the site in the majority of cases should care about.
As well as some standard means of authentication (whether that be a password for forms or BasicAuth or a public key).
@lispi314 @TomF @mcc I mean probably, of course depending on what the site does.
I'm absolutely not advocating for the collection of data. One of my pet peeves is the inability for most companies to get gender and sex correct, and they usually don't need either one outside of some medical reason or something. Like I get why my doctor asks for it on the intake website.
Gabor Major πͺπΊ β@mcc As a programmer I strongly believe no computer program should need to know the gender of a user. It is the rarest of use cases in which this piece of information is relevant or useful at all - to facilitate the correct operation of a software.
If we accept the above, it might as well be treated as an optionally input free-form field. An indicator.
Only biz people want to know such metrics. For all the wrong reasons.
Programmers are not the decision makers in this matter.
Sensible Crone@goobemaster Iβll raise you no one needs to know anyoneβs gender, unless they specifically do need to know. Gendered pronouns are a trap. Too much for the service worker to have to determine gender in order to greet a person.
@goobemaster My bias... I am a cis woman who does not do any of the [drag] things women do to look like women... hair, make-up, jewelry, boobs evident. Also, am tall. I am called sir every time a stranger addresses me. The mistake is clear when I respond, & then they feel terrible, apologize,
& I have to console them. So annoying. I've taken to wearing dangly earrings in public, as that pretty much takes care of it. FYI, kids who want to appear female: dangly earrings.
& I have to console them. So annoying. I've taken to wearing dangly earrings in public, as that pretty much takes care of it. FYI, kids who want to appear female: dangly earrings.
@susiemagoo Thanks for sharing your story. Gives background.
Michaela Sue@susiemagoo @goobemaster That's amazing! For me, long hair, dress, purse, heels, jewelry all combined would get me 100% sir, or, if someone came up from behind, a ma'am followed immediately by an 'apology' and a whole lot of sir. But in recent years wearing the pandemic respirators people suddenly really do take me seriously as being a woman!
Joy Denebeim@mcc to be fair, software engineering has been one of the few jobs open to trans folk. Since the 80s at least
novatorine π΄π³οΈββ§οΈ@mcc this is part of why as someone who is deep into software development and hacking and stuff I try very hard to also make it my business to care about actual real human needs and experiences, think hard about the implications of things, learn, and question my assumptions. The problem is, most programmers are STEMlords and actually doing those things is "dirty wishy washy unscientific humanities studies" and so they refuse to do it β making themselves dumb for all their book-smarts in the process.
Joshix@mcc programmers just do their job, and if they ask "shouldn't I do it in a good way?" management answers "no that would be too expensive, nobody will notice"