MudMan

Well, ostensibly because one is a real issue you can do something about now and the other one is not.

And by focusing on the paranoia about imagined future transgressions it both implicitly normalizes the current functionality and paints the pushback to the current implementation as some hyperbolic, out-of-touch maximalist thing. You can call it the PETA paradox, maybe.

I found this post confusing because on the face of it, it sounds like you agree with me.

I mean, yeah, HEAD and head should overwrite each other.

As you say, only technical command-line users care about the case sensitivity. So no, it shouldn’t matter to the nontechnical user. And because the nontechnical user doesn’t care about the distinction if something is called “head” in any permutation it shares a name with anything else called “head”. And the rules are items within a directory have unique filenames. So “head” and “HEAD” aren’t unique.

The issue isn’t that the names are case insensitive, the issue is that two applications are using the same name in the same path.

If we’re not careful that’ll lead to a question about whether consolidating things in the Unix-style directory structure is a bad idea. I normally tend to be neutral on that choice, but you make a case for how the DOS/Windows structure that keeps all binaries, libraries and dependencies under the same directory at the cost of redundancy doesn’t have this problem to begin with.

But either way, if two pieces of software happen to choose the same name they will step over each other. The problem there is neither with case sensitivity or case insensitivity. The problem there is going back and forth between the two in a directory structure that doesn’t fence optional packages under per-application directories. As you say, this is only possible in a very particular scenario (and not what the post in question is about anyway).

Because I thought there was more than one interesting thing about this so I pointed a different one out?

I mean, I know the Internet rewards polarization, but I didn’t realize it had gotten to the point where more than one concurrent observation was seen as controversial.

I guess you are misunderstanding “screw the meme” as implying I find the meme objectionable, maybe? I don’t, I mean “ignore the meme for a moment, what’s up with that other part of the response?”

I didn’t mean you-you, I meant you all in general.

People are way more willing to be outraged about some always-on spying that doesn’t exist, beyond accidental activations, but they aren’t outraged about demontrable, intrusive data gathering.

But you-you are also now doing the same thing, with the implication that these recordings are somehow laying the groundwork for later always-on spying. And that’s weird. Why go for the hypothetical future intrusion instead of the current, factual intrusions, you know?

Yeah, we know what happened and it’s not that Apple was actively triggering Siri without prompting as a way to spy on people.

The whistleblower you mention (and the article you link) raised that Apple was using human canvassers specifically to filter out accidental activations, or at least to grade the quality of the outcome.

The concern was raised because they were hearing a lot of sensitive information and felt the reporting on it wasn’t thorough enough.

Which is certainly bad. It’s a problem.

But as the OG’s piece says, it is very much NOT an admission that Apple is actively triggering indiscriminate recordings. If anything, it’s the opposite.

That’s the thing about these. They don’t need to be used nefariously to capture all of this crap. It’s still a microphone reacting to voice commands. On billions of pockets. Any amount of false positives is going to generate thousands, millions of random recordings. I have random recordings of myself from butt dialing my cam app or a voice memo app and I have NEVER turned on voice activation for a voice assistant (because it’s bad and intrusive and a privacy nightmare).

See, I’m not saying it’s OK with me.

I’m saying that Siri working as advertised is a privacy nightmare. People somehow feel the need to make up a fictitious exaggeration of what the issue is to make it feel bad to them, except that’s not what’s happening and it’s entirely unnecessary, because the entirely allowed, EULA’d up, publicly disclosed usage of data canvassing throughout the entire ecosystem is much, much, MUCH worse in aggregate.

What confuses me is why that is ok to you.

Ew. Yeah. The implication for a normal person is that the woman would be doing the intenting.

That’s probably not the meaning or the implication. It’s probably some religious/iusnaturalist nonsense where the intent is God’s or nature’s or somesuch. Gross.

Like, “oh, you can’t have kids, but I meant you to, it’s just an accident. You’re just God’s little mistake, you”.

It really gets worse the more you think about it.

You are right, I keep doing that.

Bugs and security problems aren’t bad UX, they’re a backlog.

You may not be able to afford the implementation, but that’s not the same as arguing the feature has no value. You want to argue that case insensitivity would be better but it’s too hard/problematic to implement? I can have that conversation.

Arguing that it’s the better option in general? Nah, lost me there.

Sorry, I said last word and then came back, but I feel we’re closer to meeting in the middle now, so maybe worth it. All yours again. This time I’m gone for reals.

Yeah, honestly, screw the meme reply. What the absolute holy hell is “the intention of holding eggs” in your body?

I mean, pretty sure that covers a whole bunch of trans women and decidedly not a whole bunch of cis women, but that’s besides the point. What did she mean?

I fear there is a whole pseudoscientific terfy rabbit hole behind this and I don’t want to fall down that hole, but I kinda need to know if it’s a slip of the tongue or what.

OK, but you see how you’re saying “there is no standard implementation, so the solution is not having the feature, as opposed to selecting a standard”.

That’s wrong. It’s just bad implementation. Or, rather, it’s bad prioritization of UX, which is then bad implementation by default.

Also, having case sensitivity be a user toggle is not the same as having no case insensitivity. We know case sensitivity works technically, you need to do additional work to make certain characters be read as equivalent. I don’t mind if grandma wants to set her documents folder to be case sensitive to hack the world. I mind that there is no feature to make it so she can’t be confused about what file she’s selecting because the engineers didn’t like having to deal with edge cases.

Alright, I’m getting trauma flashbacks now. I think we’ve established our positions. Happy to give you the last word.

Yeah? Well, not being from the US that’s not quite how I heard that tale.

For one, who made the attempts? Gonna guess the implied “we” in that framing doesn’t include Ethiopia, Spain, Portugal, Italy itself and a bunch of others, right? Not much appeasement going on in Guernica, you’ll have to admit.

I mean, the underlying facts are the same, but appeasement as an attempt to pacify Germany versus appeasement as a politically convenient way to avoid intervention in areas where opposition to the fascists was heavily aligned with communist or broadly marxist stances are meaningfully different framings. Little of column A, little of column B, I have to assume. Lots of column ethnocentrism, almost certainly.

EVERY schoolchild?

I am kinda curious to know where you’re from now, but I don’t like to be too explicit about that myself, so I won’t push it.

For what it’s worth, the first time I had a conversation along how fuzzy and arbitrary the “official” start of WW2 is I was in high school. “Wait, so Germany was bombing Spain since 1936 and Italy was straight up invading Ethiopia since 1935? How is that an ‘interbellum’?” didn’t require that much maturity to bring up.

I had good history teachers in high school, incidentally. Kudos to them.

OK, no, but yes, do that.

Yes, prioritize making sure that grandmas are not confused by case sensitivity over bug-free secure software. That’s correct.

Also do that robustly in the user layer. Why not? That’s cool as well.

I am a bit confused about how you suggest implementing a file system where two files can have the same user-facing name in document names, file manager paths, shortcuts/symlinks, file selectors and everywhere else exposed by the user without having the file system prevent two files with the same case-insensitive name existing next to each other. That seems literally worse in every way and not how filenames are implemented in any filesystem I’ve ever used or known about. I could be wrong, though.

Point is, I don’t care. If you figure out a good implementation go nuts.

But whatever it is, it NEEDS to make sure grandma will never see Office.exe and office.exe next to each other in the same directory. Deal?

You should know I cherish every time somebody thinks I’m far left online. It’s the only think that keeps my family and friends from roasting me as a filthy capitalist liberal when I vote for milquetoast social democrats. It’s super important for my social standing.

Could have told that to the Spanish when they were being bombed by German planes. See, they thought there were a democracy being attacked by a fascist coup receiving political and military aid from the Nazis, but they didn’t realize that they didn’t have a land border with Germany, so it didn’t count. That was their real mistake. See, the British got bombed when France was already Nazi, so that counted and they got liberated. Should have waited a few years. Rookie mistake.

No, I saw a piece of data that doesn’t match my experience, which meant I must be missing something, so I asked.

You should try it sometime, it’s super useful for figuring things out. It’d help.

Really? You were going for some Socratic roundabout ironic thing? Could have just said what you thought, saved everybody the trouble. That feels a bit patronizing.

“Temporarily puts aside differences”? The only think keeping the capitalists from shooting at the communists was being on opposite sides of Germany. They were both maneouvering politically before, during and after. Sometimes the different types of marxists DID shoot at each other. The left is nothing if not consistent on that front. The capitalists meanwhile were so anxious about communists in Western Europe that you’re arbitrarily right just because they refused to intervene in Spain and Portugal and somehow declared they had defeated fascism while leaving both under fascist dictatorships until the 1970s while they smoothly rolled into the Cold War and proceeded to do the same to a bunch of other countries.

Bit rose tinted, that.

No, hold on, this is not about the OS.

This is about whether the filesystem in the OS supports case insensitive names.

That determines whether the GUI supports case insensitive names down the line, so the choices made by the filesystem and by the OS support of the filesystem must be done with the usability of the GUI in mind.

So absolutely yes, the OS should decide that some characters are the same as others, not arbitrarily but because the characters are hard to read distinctly by humans and that is the first consideration.

Or hey, we can go back to making all filenames all caps. That works, too and fully solves the problem.

I mean, I don’t disagree on the broad strokes, but it does beg the question:

What are you doing here?

This is that. You’re on social media. We don’t allow smoking and drinking for adults because it’s any less harmful for them, it’s just that we choose to let grownups choose whether they want to mess themselves up.

So why do you choose to mess yourself up and what should society do about it?

I read the piece and have been thinking about this daily for thirty years.

The guy is right and the piece sucks.

It’s borderline satanic panic that hasn’t thought through the downstream ramifications of even attempting to implement age gates online. And as the previous poster says the negative effects of social media are at the absolute least just as bad in adults. The scaremongering about drug dealers and pedophiles is just that.