That's pretty poor judgement to not even communicate this to affected users

Thanks for the clarification, but imagining it's pretty easy that this could just be a bug, e.g. they knew they wanted to prevent future usernames from having "clyde", and maybe even realized some existing clydes would be grandfathered in, but didn't realize it would prevent existing clydes from updating anything else on their profile.

[ "Siri - ously" ]

Bad pun, I know. :-)

(I'm available for QA testing.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softcard

They had to rename their page to "ISIS the band" or something like that.

*goddess

It's a girl :) -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7MHGDGmsk8

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/paris-attacks-...

It is impossible to say "Karen, who is a woman, bad" without implying "women Karens, women bad." Or if there is a way to disentangle them, it certainly won't fit in a meme.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...

So that comment, by attacking a specific, easily disliked subgroup of memes is undeniably an attack on all of the memes by association. Or am I applying this wrong?

It is impossible to say "a "Karen" meme, which is a meme, bad" without implying "memes "Karen" memes, memes bad." Or if there is a way to disentangle them, it certainly won't fit in a comment.

It's amazing how many arguments ad argumentum are not only self-applicable but also self-defying.

It's amazing how everything is applicable to everything if you freely redefine the terms used.

edit: Sorry, that was a bit snarky. I think there's reasons why this applies to quick, punchy memes but not to longform comments: memes are antithetical to nuance.

I like how you just white washed the problem of racism with misoginy here.

That whole group of Karens is probably a product of white male misoginy towards white women so these women found of way of coming back at it by directing their anger towards even less priveleged groups.

I worry these memes encourage timid people not to even ask for what they are legitimately entitled to, for fear of ending up on some Reddit channel.

If I had to try I'd say it's when you have a problem and you try to resolve it in a way that gets you the most personal benefit and hormone rush instead of just getting the problem solved in an efficient manner, that's Karen behavior. Like if you order a sandwich with no tomatoes and it comes with tomatoes on it; if you call over the waiter, describe the problem in a normal tone of voice without assigning blame, and ask for a replacement, that's fine. If you use a tone of voice loud enough that other tables can hear, blame the server or cook or even take the tomatoes personally as if "ignoring" your request was a personal attack, launch into a diatribe bout how you could have bene killed if you were allergic to tomatoes, demand not only a replacement sandwich but a free side or even your whole order for free, etc, that's Karen behavior; those sorts of actions are getting you free stuff and serotonin bumps but they're causing undue stress on the staff and other people around you, who are human and have their own limitations in terms of stress and mental health, what they can do in terms of the law or dealing with their managers, etc - and they're certainly not solving the original problem (you want a sandwich without tomatoes) any faster.

That's not "fair".

The number that deserve it is going to be well under 1%.

Tragic.

https://news.yahoo.com/parents-forced-change-name-6-18055441...

at least there are way fewer siris.

[1] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/top5names.html

http://popname.ru/index.php?name=%C0%EB%E8%F1%E0&name_sex=1

#48 0.4%

I'm obliged to link you to 'falsehoods programmers believe about names' now. I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules.

..."then change them", as someone might say. But that article seems to be mostly about the edge-cases. I don't think someone named Clyde is an edge-case, nor would someone named Bonnie, for that matter.

If your plan in choosing a name for your bot is to choose one that won't collide with a human, you are going to run into the fact that humans have a lot of very different names. Hence the link to the 'falsehoods' piece.

The US Census of 1950, for example, has a lot of Descords, Descards, Dicords, Dioscords, and... in PA, a Rosa B Discord, in NYC, a Mr Discord.

In general, all I'm saying is, it is far better if your intention is to allow people to choose their name, to not put any arbitrary restriction in place with the justification that 'it probably won't affect anyone'. If there's one thing people really care about it's their name. And no matter how unlikely you think it is that someone will run into your restriction... you're almost certainly wrong.

In this post-Brony society, I’m sure of it.

(Discord was the name of the villain on the show… I think. Never seen more than half an episode myself.)

There was a Roman goddess named Discordia (where "discord" came from), and in the 90s Hercules and Xena TV series the Greek goddess used that Roman name instead of Eris, but simplified to just Discord.

Those two series were pretty popular, so I can see it being more likely recently than in that 1950s census sibling comment found. On the flipside, that character is probably not something parents would want for their daughter.

Also names are part of human culture, and Alexa for example has been in use for a very long time. There are valid reasons for names to die off in a single generation (eg adolf) but this is not a reason that our culture gains anything from imo.

Here's an easy lower bound, for the context of avoiding collisions: The name has to have been used by at least two different humans.

Or to get closer to a reasonable bound, 100 humans.

We don't even have a database for all the humans alive today, much less one for the last 400 000 years...

And people that are dead won't be inconvenienced, so you can ignore them.

I disagree. The username can be clyde_discord/clyde_bot and the display name could just be "Clyde". Then the username Clyde wouldn't be taken, and the users would be able to still message the bot and not be confused.

Though I personally really dislike simple human names for bots because it sounds cheesy and dumb.

    Amazon: Alexa
    Microsoft: Cortana
    Apple: Siri
    Discord: Clyde
    Google: Google

Most of the time I can just turn in the general direction of the device I want to "listen".

With that sort of reinforcement, his next unfavorable encounter with an actual human female will surely end well.

Does nobody even try to de-escalate situations anymore? The most advanced AI in the world can't slink away quietly, wait until he calms down and try to correct these sorts of behaviors by promoting the idea that he'd slay it in bed, lose weight or grow a monster dong if he read this self-help book (now 20% off!) about treating women with respect? An incorporeal AI with goddamn control of a smart home can't walk through a hostage negotiation playbook to manipulate a violent occupant into submission? Clearly domestic violence is an impossible problem to solve.

It pains me to see people (usually women) encouraging vulnerable women to "stand up for [themselves]" in situations even armed male cops won't approach without backup from other armed men. It's sociopathic-- on par with teenagers encouraging other kids to commit suicide.

Dedicated wakeup chips can be designed to have a different matrix shoved in for the word they're detecting. Google presumably did not do this, but they could have.

This isn't true. Your light switches do not heat up to lightbulb temperature when the light is off. Heat is only dissipated when electricity is "used", more or less by definition. You seem to be describing a linear voltage regulator, which does have a load resistor and is wasteful if the step-down distance is large, but no modern electronic circuit would use such a thing in a power supply - it would use a switched-mode buck regulator instead.

More than one should never answer. I wonder if location is misconfigured on individual devices, but I wouldn't bet against a bug.

We have to whisper to the Hub Max in the kitchen, from 3 inches away, and the Minis in the dining room and living room often still hear. If I don't whisper, even the ones upstairs hear. Sometimes I get 2 timers for my cooking, sometimes I get one on the wrong speaker. Then I try to cancel the timer, and the Hub Max hears instead and tells me I have no timers set.

The Hub Max asks on the screen if the wrong device responded. It clearly ignores your response, as the wrong device also responds the next time. I have pressed that button easily over 50x before I gave up and stopped.

Something clearly changed ~6mo-1yr ago because they never used to be this bad. It used to be that they would all listen, then only the closest one (that heard the command the loudest) would respond. Problem is, when I'm cooking the Hub Max is 1ft away and the rest are through (often multiple) walls metres away from me.

They'd know. They'd know.

The amount of times where I would ask 3 times and have to do the task myself anyway were too often.

https://goomics.net/239/

Google should have done that too, but it seems you might not have had them all part of the same home (or something else was broken/buggy).

The ideal would be for the voice assistant to have some completely unique word, ideally with sound combinations that are very rare in your native language. And if for some reason, that still doesn't work for you, have a way to change it. Or maybe just not have a default, and require users to pick their own keyword.

I can't think of many words that rhyme with computer so would get picked up.

There aren't many legitimate ways to have people audibly self hypnotise themselves using your brand.

It's very black mirror.

" I don't understand your query. "

  PIZZA  P IY1 T S AH0

  % grep " T S " cmudict-0.7b | wc -l
       991

  % grep -E " T S [A-Z0-9]+ [A-Z0-9]+" cmudict-0.7b | wc -l
       853

(It doesn't have "spritzer" in the list, and uses the spelling "matzoh" instead of "matzo". I didn't look for a more complete list of word pronunciations.)

Finally, two words with two occurrences of the "ts" sound, neither at the end:

  % grep -E " T S .*T S " cmudict-0.7b
  ITSY-BITSY  IH2 T S IY0 B IH1 T S IY0
  TSETSE  T S IY1 T S IY0

Pronunciation (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA(key): /ˈtsaɪtˌɡaɪst/, /ˈzaɪtˌɡaɪst/

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zeitgeist also gives two: ˈtsīt-ˌgīst ˈzīt-

I tried to get statistics from listening to https://youglish.com/pronounce/zeitgeist/english? but found I have a hard time distinguishing the two forms.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/boatswain even comments:

> Phonetic spelling bo'sun/bosun is attested from 1840. Fowler [1926] writes, "The nautical pronunciation (bō'sn) has become so general that to avoid it is more affected than to use it."

~ Fatso

~ Pitstop

~ Katsup

~ Yachtsman

~ Scotsmen

~ Batsman

There don't seem to be many, admittedly.

Google Ngram says it wasn't until the 1970s when "pizza" was more commonly used than "tsetse." https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tsetse%2Cpizza... . Or from BoingBoing today, "North Americans feared and misunderstood pizza in the 1950s" - https://boingboing.net/2022/11/21/north-americans-feared-and... .

Siri defaults to male in some countries and languages.

https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2019/07/03/google-...

I wonder whether there are constraints that made it difficult to implement this functionality in another way, or this is just a bad design decision.

It's not always the wrong choice to mingle identifiers of different types, but I think often people err on the side of convenience (/ laziness) instead of thinking through all of the potential issues.

So it seems almost impossible that this is some technical limitation but rather Discord cracking down on a common deception tactic.

The problem isn't that the (fake) bot is in the same namespace as users; if there were any problem like that at all, it would be a shortage of discriminators.

However, that's not what this message is saying. It's saying that the name cannot contain "Clyde". In other words, you wouldn't be able to use any name that had the word "Clyde" in it, taken or not.

The fact that they haven't attempted to block usage of "CIyde" and similar does suggest they might not have thought it through, but it's verifiably not a namespace issue.

Just as a random, poorly thought-out example, internal stuff could be namespaced with a different prefix like "&Clyde" instead of "@Clyde". As long as users know that official stuff is addressed with &, it matters less what people do with @-namespaced stuff because there's an easy way to tell whether it's actually official or not.

By putting official stuff in the same namespace as user-generated stuff, it's much harder to tell whether something is an official tool or not. @CIyde could be a real internal account.

Such lists are usually kept secret, but there are a few open source word lists that people can adopt for their services, for example, https://github.com/shouldbee/reserved-usernames.

Why do their messages have to appear the same as humans?

If bots should all operate in a distinctive space, give it that space.

Mind you architectural foresight is hard so maybe they'll get there.

> The Scunthorpe problem is unintentional blocking [...] because [...] text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an [...] unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

It's obviously not a good solution, but it's not an example of the Scunthorpe problem.

https://twitter.com/tezfunz2/status/1565159942964891649

It reminded me of the "our database schema doesn't allow people with the name Jeffrey": https://twitter.com/yephph/status/1249246702126546944

I had heard that some airlines may have tried to discourage the practice but this is the first I heard about such measures.

Seems common for some travelers to book tickets ie. Tuba, Lastname. https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/united-mileage-plus-pre-merg...

I’ve got to imagine that some people named Alexa find it unfortunate and invasive that suddenly their name is used everywhere. At least “Siri” and “Hey Google” are less popular names for people.

Poor Clint.

"Name on cake must not be Clint"

Reserved words in SQL sometimes get blocked as well as things like too many singles quotes or an odd number of single quotes. I've seen the name "Walter" blocked on many forms over the years.

The worst part is that the sender just gets sent to a security or generic page with no idea why, often losing the message they created.

https://crzysdrs.net/dv/victim/223-its-a-damn-shame-what-the...