Comment by asveikau
4 years ago
That sounds terrible, however, it's important to remember that diacritics don't get people killed, the person who decides to kill ultimately needs to stop themselves.
4 years ago
That sounds terrible, however, it's important to remember that diacritics don't get people killed, the person who decides to kill ultimately needs to stop themselves.
No, "diacritics don't kill people, people kill people" is not an important life lesson. It is a reductive just-so generalization of basic common sense that obscures more than it enlightens.
The important thing for engineers to note is a technical shortcoming caused a tragic misunderstanding. Focusing instead on the well-known fact that some people have poor impulse control, knowing full well that is a non-controllable input, instead makes an excuse for poor engineering and implicitly expresses powerlessness to do anything about the problem.
I am all for good localization efforts. I've been something of a champion for that whenever I've been around user facing code and people working on it. I also am a bit of a language nerd and not monolingual.
But yes, misunderstanding or not, we should not kill people.
The story in the sibling comment is about a man attacking his daughter's ex because the ex came to apologize about a confusion over the Turkish dotless I. That's still a violent attack that the father could have kept his emotions in check. I don't condone calling the daughter names, even accidentally, but it is not a crime and the right response is not attempted murder.
> but it is not a crime and the right response
I don't know who you're arguing with, but it isn't me. Nobody is saying it was.
I'm saying it is an irrelevant non sequitur.
Imagine that Dad instead misunderstood an instruction related to a financial transaction and lost a ton of money. Would you now be discounting the technical problem that caused the misunderstanding and berating Dad for being foolish?
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Ya, I don't see that happening in authoritarian countries.
As a contrived example if you had a symbol for 'happy' you want to be very cautious that it doesn't get converted to 'gay' because in your language gay and happy mean the same thing, in some repressive regime it means the leadership gets to execute you with the approval of the law.
A recent example is that "Let's go [gun emoji] him" could be interpreted as either harmless fun, or conspiracy to murder, depending on if the recipient's phone displays that as a water pistol or a real gun.
Edit: weirdly HN refuses to display that emoji.
Hacker News doesn't allow emojis because only serious fun or something.
HN does not like displaying emojis, though a few slip through I believe.
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Even to a lesser extent, it's easy to forget how a small mistake can have a butterfly effect in other cultures.