[HN Gopher] A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
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A stupid joke resulting in a silly news cycle
Author : mcovalt
Score : 115 points
Date : 2022-04-10 17:18 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kiwiziti.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (kiwiziti.com)
| bastawhiz wrote:
| This has been a problem for a long time.
|
| Almost ten years ago, I maintained a joke Twitter inspired by the
| Atherton police blotter: @mvpoliceblotter. It was just silly
| nonsense, until one of the tweets about someone walking into and
| breaking a store window while watching YouTube on their Google
| Glass got retweeted by an ABC 7 reporter. SJ Mercury wrote a
| story (later retracted). It got a ton of attention, even though
| your can't even watch YouTube on a Google Glass. There was no
| broken window. The was zero evidence except for two sentences on
| Twitter. Nobody did any fact checking whatsoever.
|
| It's not a new problem, but it definitely feels like it's gotten
| worse.
| cobertos wrote:
| There are companies that scrape Twitter and have human
| adjudicators who try to find buried but impactful trending news
| gems. I wonder if this stems from them...
| [deleted]
| can16358p wrote:
| Some similar thing happened to be once: years ago I made a fun
| fake image, photoshopping some text into a place in a very
| realistic manner, and posted to Facebook (which was popular
| those times). It was in one of my albums, me and a few friends
| had a laugh, then we've forgotten about it, as usual.
|
| Then a few years later I started seeing the image I created as
| "real" in various forums to legitimate publishers and major
| newspaper websites. Everyone believed in the image, taking it
| as a fact (which is fair as it looked legitimate and was posted
| from a "reputable" source), commented under it with various
| levels of confusion.
|
| I still Google that time to time to giggle a bit, but it also
| shows how Internet people tend to copy stuff from random places
| (e.g. My Facebook album) and post in various places and things
| go viral exponentially without almost anyone questioning it.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Do you feel responsible for generating misinformation?
|
| You say there was zero evidence behind the article, but the
| evidence was your Tweet, and it was really your Tweet that had
| zero evidence behind it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Hmm, it is true. There are many such people spreading
| misinformation about chickens crossing roads. They have very
| little evidence for their assertions about said chickens but
| they state these things with great confidence!
|
| Twitter should crack down on this misinformation.
| rascul wrote:
| > There are many such people spreading misinformation about
| chickens crossing roads.
|
| Do these people explain why the chickens were crossing the
| roads?
| krallja wrote:
| "Bok-bok-bok-b'CAUSE," one chicken said, when asked why
| it crossed the road.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The Register: Cause for chicken road-crossing identified
|
| HN: Clearly the original user who purported to have
| recorded what a chicken said is lying. He hasn't learnt
| anything from the whole thing. What a misinformer.
| Practically Pravda.
| krallja wrote:
| I would agree with you, depending on the day of the week.
| pessimizer wrote:
| A tweet isn't any more evidence than a person you don't know
| and have never met spraypainting the same thing on a wall.
|
| The problem is how news outlets that care so little about the
| quality of the information they present continue to exist.
| [deleted]
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Absolutely not. Should The Onion be considered fake news? It
| was a parody account, which was labeled as such. Journalists
| who can't even be bothered to tap through to the profile
| don't get my sympathy.
| nicholsonpk wrote:
| "It was a parody account, which was labeled as such."
|
| I'm looking at the page now and you use the Mountain View
| California city crest as the image, "MV Police Blotter" as
| the title, and it is described as "Keeping tabs on crime in
| Mountain View, Ca. Not affiliated with MVPD, see
| @MountainViewPD. Report all emergencies to 911."
|
| That does not read as "this is parody" to me. You may not
| have intended to deceive but I would bet most people
| visiting would expect this to be actual police blotter
| information.
| jjulius wrote:
| And yet wouldn't we expect a journalist who reads a tweet
| from an account that says, as you pointed out, _" Not
| affiliated with MVPD,"_ to do their due diligence and
| reach out to an official channel?
|
| I can grant that it doesn't actually say "parody" in it's
| description, but we should still be expecting more effort
| from reporters.
| kibwen wrote:
| Ten years ago I would have agreed with you. These days I
| know that humans are too gullible to be able to understand
| obvious satire, and the consequences are deleterious for
| society. As someone who has long appreciated The Onion, I
| am now of the opinion that they should not legally be
| allowed to call themselves a news source, in the same way
| that someone cannot legally claim to be an expert in an
| accredited field. We don't need to censor The Onion, but we
| do need to establish norms regarding false advertising in
| journalism. I understand this won't be a popular opinion,
| because lots of people don't want to realize that the
| internet has killed the very concept of satire.
| rapind wrote:
| I'm going to assume you're not being sarcastic.
|
| At some threshold we shouldn't need to dumb it down any
| further. I think journalists being able to tell the
| difference between parody, that's clearly labelled as
| parody, and real news is already lower than I'd set that
| bar.
|
| Ask yourself what's the value in journalism if they're
| just going to build a story off of a tweet with no
| verification/ fact checking?
| InCityDreams wrote:
| It must really suck to be gullible. But how would they
| know?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| So my Twitter, which does not claim to be a news source
| or post anything other than silly jokes, should also be
| disallowed because some journalists are too lazy to do
| their job?
| kibwen wrote:
| No, if you're not calling yourself news then there's no
| false advertising going on.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Talk about self-fuffilling prophecy. It is like saying
| that because your legs are a little scrawny you should
| stay in a wheelchair for the rest of your life.
|
| Exposing the failings of the sources of information is
| always a good thing. Trust is not some resource which is
| an unconditional good. It must be worthy of it to be any
| good. Otherwise it is like thinking that if you give your
| dog all As in premed and med school he will become a
| capable doctor.
| kortilla wrote:
| That's ridiculous because we don't have the ability to
| censor the entire internet to police what websites call
| themselves "news". If your solution to this is to police
| the word "news", it's dead on arrival.
|
| People claim they are engineers/doctors/lawyers on the
| internet all of the time and there is no repercussion. We
| are only able to actually police those terms when it
| comes to actual business transactions.
| fmmlp wrote:
| Are you from USA, don't you? Planning on happy invading
| other countries for enforcement eh?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I kind of think that in the mess we're in 'it was just a
| prank bro' doesn't cut it any more as an excuse for
| something that causes harm. But maybe that's extremist of
| me.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| So satire cannot exist? Because anyone who might
| accidentally mistake it for truth can be "harmed"
|
| Journalists have a big megaphone. Their job is to amplify
| truth. If I'm making jokes and being clear about my
| intentions, but a lazy journalist sees my content as easy
| clickbait, that's my fault?
|
| What I was tweeting was never "news" let alone "fake
| news". It was never wrapped deceptively as truth. It
| wasn't a prank. Someone else took my words, which were
| obviously and provably not truth, and held them up under
| their reputation as an authority of truth. Why should I
| be responsible for the alleged harm that they caused?
| hanselot wrote:
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Why add entropy to the situation? We know people mid-
| understand satire and sarcasm.
|
| I do kind of feel much satire is deliberately harmful -
| people use it to say things and then hide behind 'but I
| was just joking' having already pushed the message out.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Something tells me you also regard stand-up comedy as
| harmful.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Nobody confuses a stand-up club as news - people do
| confuse Twitter as news.
| kortilla wrote:
| "My use case for satire is obvious but yours is not"
| bastawhiz wrote:
| It's not my job to cater to people who choose to get
| their "news" from a website where anyone can post
| anything under any identity at all. There has never been
| any credibility to Twitter as an authoritative news
| source, especially from accounts that are clearly labeled
| as a joke. Silencing or shaming folks for being creative
| in public is far worse than empowering the layman (or
| lazy journalist) to get their news from the gutter.
|
| People will post lies online regardless of whether the
| good intentioned folks self censor or not. The problem is
| not the satire, it's the blind trust.
|
| Speaking of which, I've got a rich client who recent
| passed away and left a significant sum to one Chris
| Seaton. If that's you, just shoot me your bank details
| and I'll get the money wired to you directly.
| derekp7 wrote:
| Yes, it is extremely extremist to call for canceling all
| works of fiction.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| Most works of fiction is labeled as such. I don't see
| anything against them in this comment.
| fleshdaddy wrote:
| I mean are you suggesting no more jokes, parodies, or
| satire lest a journalist take it seriously? That would
| practically require a complete self censor on all
| fiction. I could just easily tweet a blurb from a Sci-fi
| novel and risk someone, somewhere, misinterpreting it.
| Also a prank has the intent to mislead which the poster
| didn't. Don't mean to sound inflammatory but the
| humorless world that would be sounds a lot more miserable
| than living in the mess it seeks to remedy.
| [deleted]
| bitcharmer wrote:
| > Do you feel responsible for generating misinformation?
|
| This is a bizarre stance to take. Social media was always
| filled with false information. It's entirely on news outlets
| to verify what they decide to publish.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| Why should it be socially acceptable to generate
| misinformation? It's in the end harmful for everyone. (I
| don't mean obvious parody and fiction, clearly labeled as
| such).
| bitcharmer wrote:
| My comment is about news outlet's obligation to verify
| information they publish. I never said anything about
| posting satire by individuals.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Why fuel the problem by seeding more false information?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Should we also remove the fiction section from libraries?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Does anyone in practice confuse books from the fiction
| section with news? People do in practice confuse Tweets
| every second of every day.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| For the past few years, the best selling books on Amazon
| have been misinformation about the pandemic, virology,
| and "critical race theory" (if that even means anything
| anymore). Your reasoning is tortured at best.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Are they sold in the fiction section?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| I feel like the actual answer really undermines your
| point more than you think
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Should we also remove the fiction section from
| libraries?
|
| Are people confused by the fiction section?
|
| > Well people publish weird stuff in the non-fiction
| section as well.
|
| Ok... what's that got to do with the fiction section you
| were talking about?
| [deleted]
| maxerickson wrote:
| Are you trying to get out of jury duty?
| krallja wrote:
| One very important concept of journalism is getting a fact
| "verified." Often you need either an incredibly trusted
| source or multiple sources. The journalist should not have
| reported it. But their fact checker committed a grave error
| by allowing a story to run with "some rando on Twitter
| said..." as the only source.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| *some rando claiming to be a parody on Twitter
| politelemon wrote:
| There's a popular myth that Windows 10 was named so because
| there's tons of proprietary code checking for '95' and '98' by
| looking for just the '9', and that would have caused
| applications to break.
|
| There was no evidence of this except the Reddit comment by a
| user pretending to work at MS - their post history very quickly
| showed that was a lie. But that was taken at face value and it
| become part of news cycles and eventually a commonly repeated
| statement.
| Nition wrote:
| Another similar one was the "Nuclear Gandhi" thing[1]. Just
| believable enough for programmers to think it must be true.
|
| My theory on Windows 10 would be wanting version number
| parity with Mac OS. Don't make a news story out of this
| though. Evidence:
|
| - Microsoft did the same thing with the Xbox 360 instead of
| calling it Xbox 2. "360" cleverly aligned it with both
| competing consoles of the same generation, the PlayStation 3
| and Nintendo Revolution (later renamed the Wii).
|
| - Microsoft implied that they might stay on Windows 10
| indefinitely[2]. Who wants to be forever one version behind
| the competition?
|
| - After Mac OS bumped their version version up to 11,
| Microsoft abandoned the above and went to 11 as well.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
|
| [2] https://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-
| systems/mi...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Microsoft implied that they might stay on Windows 10
| indefinitely[2].
|
| Sure, "implied" in the sense that the article quotes a
| spokesman saying "Windows 10 is the last version of
| Windows".
| [deleted]
| Nasrudith wrote:
| The nuclear Gandhi think makes sense as naturally occuring
| from people trying to extrapolate hidden mechanics and
| false pattern detection. Pokemon had the "Press/hold B
| increases catch chance" illusion despite being pure RNG in
| the code.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| Someone ask Raymond Chen.
| kjeetgill wrote:
| I must have been tricked by this and repeated this more than
| a few times, no idea where I first heard it. Or am I being
| tricked by _this_ authoritative sounding post? I don't know
| which one, but I know this for certain: I'm being duped one
| way or another!
| sofixa wrote:
| In the absence of a more credible theory, many people roll
| with that explanation. It does kind of make sense.
| ThrustVectoring wrote:
| Speaking of unique identifiers: when I was like 13, my parents
| bought new ethernet cards so that all the kids would have their
| own computer. Two adjacent ones on the shelf that happened to
| have the same MAC address. Not sure how they figured it out
| (probably just looking for anything wrong and noticing the MAC
| addresses were identical), but the network behavior was
| interesting. Basically if you mashed F5 on a webpage the router
| would think _you_ were the proper owner of all the network
| traffic for both computers, and it would disconnect your sibling
| from whatever they were playing at the time.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The company was just lazy and/or cheap as MACs aren't even
| supposed to be randomly assigned or hard to come by. You can
| get a block of 16,777,216 globally unique MACs for a one time
| fee, currently just $3,180 dollars or 1/50th a penny per MAC.
|
| Duplicate MACs were (well, still are) a huge problem in places
| with multiple on prem VM pods with shared networks. It's one of
| those things that seems automatically handled until you realize
| it's not ALL automatically handled for you.
| ack210 wrote:
| Something similar seemed to happen recently during the NCAA
| tournament, when the St Peters Peacocks won a major upset over
| Purdue on March 25. News outlets from NBC to the WSJ all reported
| that March 25 was "National Peacock Day", and a Google search for
| "When is national peacock day" seems to confirm this with a
| knowledge panel.
|
| If you dig deeper though, there actually appears to be no such
| day, and the first reference to it other than a Draft Kings blog
| post was a Peacock Day event being held at the LA Arboretum years
| back.
|
| Obviously such a trivial story has no real impact on the world,
| but it was eye-opening to see how a "fact" could essentially be
| brought to life out of nowhere.
| mdoms wrote:
| This kind of thing is why I think Google's answers (not search
| results, the snippets with big bolded answers to questions) are
| dangerous. They're automatically generated from some pretty
| naive parsing of text from sources of dubious quality. I have
| found several pretty serious errors in these snippets when
| Googling for gardening advice.
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think the thing Google is falsely keying in on is actualy
| "Everyday Angels: national Day Journal" by Linda Finstad
| published in late 2020. She made a Pinterest post about the
| March 25th page being national peacock day which is what Google
| picked up which someone somehow noticed resulting in the
| coverage.
|
| Of course nationally peacock day isn't actually a thing, even
| in Canada where Linda seems to be from, so I wonder where she
| got the idea! She has a website with a contact form so I sent
| her a short backstory on how I came to be contacting her and
| asked if she knew where she got March 25th as national peacock
| day. At the very least she'll probably be amused.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| This all reminds me of Stephen Colbert having a field day with
| "truthiness" already 17 (!) years ago. And "wikiality", when
| the population of elephants suddenly tripled thanks to his
| Wikipedia-editing efforts. (And much later, "Trumpiness".)
| mc4ndr3 wrote:
| Is there no registry of common network ports, protocols, and
| packet leading bytes? Similar to mimetypes...
| femto113 wrote:
| On *nix systems there's a file (usually /etc/services) that
| maps protocol/service names to ports. Back in the 90s I was
| working as a solutions architect for a Bay Area software
| company and among other duties I occasionally would help
| install the software at client sites (think big telcos). One
| component of the system relied on a service name to identify a
| port to talk to another component (I think to do a licensing
| check). For some reason there was no direct way to just specify
| a port number, so the standard method of installation included
| editing /etc/services to add the mapping. Editing that file
| requires root permissions, which at most customers meant I had
| to get a sysadmin to actually do that step, but it's a simple
| text file (much like /etc/hosts) so it only takes them a minute
| to do it once I could get their attention. At one customer I
| ran into a sysadmin who simply refused, and said if we wanted
| to be in /etc/services we needed to get the IANA to allocate us
| a port and then we needed to get the Unix vendor (I think Sun
| in this particular case) to update their distribution. If even
| possible this process would take months at best. After wasting
| almost $20,000 of my time on this (what the client paid my
| employer, not what I got paid sadly) someone in the org finally
| arranged for that one particular machine to no longer be that
| sysadmin's responsibility, and found someone else to make the
| edit. His final passive aggressive act was to change the motd
| of that machine to something like "This machine is not managed
| by the sysadmin team and should not be used for any business
| critical operations".
| [deleted]
| kbenson wrote:
| Poe's law is in full effect, so I'll just leave this here.
|
| https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...
| zamadatix wrote:
| > Is there no registry of common network ports, protocols
|
| Ethernet protocol numbers:
| https://www.iana.org/assignments/ieee-802-numbers/ieee-802-n...
|
| IP protocol numbers: https://www.iana.org/assignments/protocol-
| numbers/protocol-n...
|
| Transport protocol ports:
| https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/...
|
| > and packet leading bytes
|
| No registry for this past the transport layer, standard
| protocols will tell you in their standards though.
|
| That said I don't think having a registry solves the problem
| you're implying it does, there are only 65k ports but >65k
| protocols wanting to use ports so dealing with overlap is a
| requirement if things want to operate at that layer. Not to
| mention it's better practice to handle invalid data gracefully
| anyways.
| astrea wrote:
| Man if this is a joke then my whole software career is a comedy
| celim307 wrote:
| Hey if I'm getting paid I'll tell these jokes all day
| qiskit wrote:
| Tragicomedy. Too tragic for tears. Too comedic for laughter.
| WalterBright wrote:
| An April Fools Day prank played by Seattle's local satire show,
| Almost Live, was repeated as actual news. This is despite the gag
| had "April Fools Day" text overlaying the joke.
|
| https://www.king5.com/article/features/the-april-fools-day-p...
|
| Looks like KING5 removed the video again. Sigh.
| mjard wrote:
| There were lessons to learn here for all the parties involved.
| The author seems to have chosen to ignore theirs while wanting to
| pat themselves on the back for fooling news sites. The news sites
| learned nothing, they got what they wanted out of the deal.
| Reddit.. Reddit cannot learn, too many people involved.
| tomrod wrote:
| Incorrect. It's the journalists' job to verify.
| mjard wrote:
| 100% agree. They didn't, and will continue not to in the
| future.
| JadeNB wrote:
| The author seems explicitly to indicate that they're not
| chiding anyone, nor defending themselves:
|
| > It's not meant to bash news outlets over journalistic
| integrity. The internet is a difficult thing to document. It's
| not meant to justify my joke. If you don't think it was
| funny... OK. Depending on the day I'm sure I'd agree with you.
| mjard wrote:
| It's self congratulatory not defensive. If I claim that I am
| not chiding you, but then write an entire blog post on how I
| was able to pull one over on you, one of those should speak
| louder than the other.
| inwit wrote:
| Think what we're all learning here is that you have neither
| a sense of humour nor a sense of perspective. What actual
| bad thing happened here? It's just a fun whimsical
| incident. I actually think it says more about your self
| esteem than anything else that you read this as self-
| congratulatory
| pvg wrote:
| What lesson is the author supposed to learn here? Don't post
| jokes on a joke subreddit?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Some people just don't get jokes. /r/yourjokebutworse has one
| category but there is also that entire category of comments
| that go "I hope that's satire" to what is obviously
| satirical.
| mjard wrote:
| Jokes on the internet are great when people are in on them.
| Positioning yourself as someone that has inside information
| when it's false falls closer to "it was just a prank bro".
| The author should be able to say whatever they want, though
| the ability doesn't make the action not shitty.
| pessimizer wrote:
| No jokes are great when people are in on them. That's why
| the punchline doesn't come first.
| blowski wrote:
| That's a different type of joke.
|
| It's why we laugh at "it's behind you" in a pantomime.
| We're in on the joke that the actor knows it's behind
| them.
| [deleted]
| xwdv wrote:
| This joke got me thinking, is there a way to calculate the number
| of times events of a certain improbability could have possibly
| occurred in the current time the universe has existed? What do
| the odds look like for an event so improbable it could have
| possibly only occurred once so far??
| Tronno wrote:
| Truth and fiction are indistinguishable on social media. The
| medium itself encourages this. Falsehood is built-in and
| inseparable.
|
| Of course "journalists" sometimes spread "stories" based on
| random social media posts. What is really interesting is that
| _the posts were there first_ , and the internet amplifies them on
| its own.
|
| To any reader who's not in on it, the original comment about the
| Roku crashes sounds plausible enough by itself. It is then
| upvoted organically to a broader audience.
|
| The author didn't write misinformation for ad views,
| sponsorships, or even Reddit karma. He just released it for his
| own pleasure, as an "obvious" joke.
|
| Millions of similarly motivated posts are being blasted out every
| minute, with content such as: memes with humorous but false
| descriptions of the content, selfies painting false pictures of
| people's lives, anecdotes with implied messages, creative writing
| of what-if scenarios or "head canon", compelling but baseless
| theories about complex topics, true statements cherry-picked to
| make false points, etc.
|
| These are created not for sales, propaganda, or even internet
| points, but simply to share half-formed idle thoughts. That is:
| jokes, guesses, hot takes, wishful fantasy.
|
| It may be obvious bullshit to the authors, but the medium
| presents it all as fact. None of us are capable of passing
| careful judgement on the sheer volume of content, so most is
| absorbed at face value.
|
| This environment is also a fertile breeding ground for
| deliberate, malicious misinformation, but that's beside the
| point.
|
| Ultimately, the only solutions are to stop consuming social media
| altogether, or accept that falsehood is now inseparable from
| actual facts.
| pvg wrote:
| The crucial detail that is a little buried in the piece is that
| the original 'explanation' was posted in /r/ProgrammerHumor so it
| said right on the tin it was a joke. But the (seemingly clearly
| intended as a joke) details temporarily nerd-sniped a lot of
| people's senses of humor right out of their brains. The HN
| discussion discussion from back then is still fun reading with a
| number of commenters very invested in the notion that it wasn't
| really a joke.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21566921
| davesque wrote:
| Just looked into this and yeah, the original post to which the
| comment was responding was a programmer humor post. However, it
| looked as if the comment in question _may_ have been an actual,
| legit attempt to explain the phenomenon. I don 't think it's
| obvious or assumed that the comments responding to programmer
| humor posts are always intended to be jokes as well.
|
| I'm also just asking myself what's more likely here. Think of
| the demographic of that forum. It seems to me like some up and
| coming nerd kid fancied themself an expert and cooked up a half
| baked theory about what was happening.
| stevage wrote:
| Yeah it's totally plausible that someone would reply with
| genuine facts about a humourous situation.
|
| Still, one should do extra double checking before taking
| anything there literally.
| causality0 wrote:
| If it was a _post_ in the subreddit that would make sense. But
| it was a comment, not a post, and thus not labeled as humor.
| pvg wrote:
| I don't think that's how joke forums work, really.
| bentcorner wrote:
| /r/programmerhumor will ban you if you post a joke in the
| comments. All jokes must be top level posts.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| In defense of the gullible, I have a hard time telling the
| difference between reality and a prank these days too.
| pvg wrote:
| I think misreading something like this is a perfectly
| understandable thing. It's definitely a 'had me going there
| for a second' type of joke. The unusual thing about this one
| is its spread and the (seemingly ongoing!) insistence by some
| of the taken that it was diabolically difficult to tell it
| was a joke. I suppose the latter contributed to the former.
| mdoms wrote:
| I don't think something presented as fact in the comments to a
| joke is always going to be taken as a joke. Lots of people post
| their (supposedly) factual war stories in the comments of The
| Daily WTF and similar websites.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I don't think something presented by a clown dressed up like
| a ballerina is always going to be taken as a joke. If you
| based a actual news story around an anonymous DailyWTF
| comment, that would be strange.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >Lots of people post their (supposedly) factual war stories
| in the comments of The Daily WTF [...] //
|
| I've always assumed they're apocryphal, ie based on the truth
| but considerably dramatised to be more "Daily WTF" material,
| somewhat like The Onion articles. Basically, if your best
| source is an internet comment in a joke-y forum, just like if
| your best source is "Rob from accounts said at the water-
| cooler", then some corroboration before you promulgate that
| information would be absolutely in order.
| pvg wrote:
| Right but this is called 'programmer humor'. Plus it's
| obviously not serious if you think about it for more than 60
| seconds.
| mdoms wrote:
| I just took a very quick look at the subreddit (absolutely
| awful stuff BTW, who finds this crap funny?) and already
| found 2 instances of people sharing "real" stories in the
| comments to joke posts. Should both of these be taken as
| jokes? They are not presented as such.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0elnq/co
| m...
|
| > I completely forget the example problem we were doing,
| but back when I was learning C, we were given sample code
| to fix. Everything was perfectly formatted, and the program
| ran without issue like be 99% of the time, but every once
| in a while, it'd give a totally incorrect value, or throw
| an error, and it was to teach us all about concurrency and
| race conditions and how even when we know we have done
| everything right, there might be something wrong that takes
| a deeper understanding to idntify. My professor was
| awesome.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/u0ibli/co
| m...
|
| > In my old team, every line above 400 was considered an
| error. 2000 lines was a cause to put the development on
| hold until the end of refactoring.
| pvg wrote:
| The point isn't that there aren't 'real' stories. It's
| that it makes a lot of sense to evaluate it as a joke,
| given that it's in a joke forum. And when you do that,
| it's not that hard to tell it's a joke or at least
| suspect that it is as likely to be a joke as anything
| else.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The second one is quite obviously a joke.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It is a bit Poe's law really. There are plenty of
| companies with dumb software policies and practices,
| cargo culting legitimate approaches by treating them as
| axioms.
| irrational wrote:
| > who finds this crap funny?
|
| Apparently 1.9 million people (the number of
| subscribers).
| throwthere wrote:
| I think the oddest bit of this is the author "doxing" their
| trolling on Reddit with their actual identity on the blog.
| userbinator wrote:
| This article just makes me more curious to know what the truth
| was.
| possiblydrunk wrote:
| Sense of humor is replaced by sensitivity-derived outrage.
| [deleted]
| captainmuon wrote:
| So, was the true cause of the problem ever published?
| zamadatix wrote:
| I think Roku just issued a patch, no fancy blog post detailing
| the low level bits or anything. That said it wouldn't be
| anything more than "crappy protocol parser" just not because it
| conflicts with the signing key like the joke goes. (also I
| think it may have actually been a different port number).
| rtb wrote:
| Pretty weird "joke" or "a slightly funny hypothetical". It's a
| plausible but false explanation for an event people were trying
| to understand, posted to a programming forum. It feels more like
| disinformation to me. I think it was a bit unethical to not mark
| it as fictional.
| [deleted]
| mypastself wrote:
| It does feel more like a hoax/prank than a joke, but I'm not
| sure I'd call /r/programmerhumor a "programming forum".
| bitwize wrote:
| Don't joke too hard on the internet.
|
| 4chan once decided to promote the idea that the "a-ok sign"
| (making a circle with your thumb and finger) is a white
| supremacist coded symbol, basically as a test of how easily
| gulled the press is about such issues.
|
| Well, the press got gulled, and today displaying the symbol can
| get you fired, or banned from certain locations. The ADL
| considers it a hate symbol.
| [deleted]
| snakke wrote:
| While it is true that it started as a 4-chan hoax, and the ADL
| considers it a hate symbol, that's not the entire story. The
| page of the ADL[0] explicitly mention that in the vast majority
| of cases it just means ok. Much like how 14 and 88 are
| perfectly normal numbers, but when someone uses a personalised
| numberplate Adolf1488 they probably didn't choose those numbers
| at random.
|
| It's also that symbols and gestures evolve in a social context,
| people, language, customs and culture changes. It's not
| unthinkable for symbols to get a worse connotation over time
| because a group used them a lot. So the question then becomes,
| do actual white supremacists consistently use the symbol as a
| way to identify themselves? Eh, I don't think that's the case
| anymore or in meaningful quantities. But after the populairty
| of the hoax white supremacists did co-opt it for a while. Is it
| still completely meaningless if a racist mass-murderer flashes
| the symbol?
|
| So yeah, indeed it started as a hoax, but the implication that
| the ADL only included it because they were somehow gulled by a
| hoax is incorrect.
|
| (As an aside, the OK-gesture is quite culturally different and
| dependent on context in the first place. Had a mate who while
| drunk almost started a fight with some Turkish dudes by
| flashing it, since apparently it mimics the asshole and
| basically means "you're an asshole". And in France it
| apparently means that you're a zero, since it looks like a
| zero.)
|
| [0]: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-
| symbols/okay-h...
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| This is validating my decision to mute tech twitter hype accounts
| like TylerGlaiel and SwiftOnSoftware many months ago.
| mdoms wrote:
| This doesn't seem like a joke, it seems like a guy outright
| spreading misinformation. Not sure what was the point of the UUID
| preamble, his "joke" has nothing to say about UUIDs.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| The humorous musings are, despite the unlikelihood of
| collisions the author was pondering them for UUID (see backpack
| cubby analogy), this situation came up and then pondered what
| might have happened with a similarly unlikely collision -- byte
| identifiers between Roku and Pokemon. It's silly, it's in a
| humour forum.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The probability of getting a UUID collision is different from
| an intentional attempt to find a SHA-1 collision. One is
| guessing a truly random ~128 bit number (really - it's
| effectively the output of a CSPRNG). The other is exploiting
| a weakness in the construction of a 160-bit value that is
| intended to be a secure mapping of input -> output. It's not
| even remotely the same problem and saying evidence of a sha-1
| collision indicates anything about a UUID collision is plain
| wrong (and that part isn't on a humor forum).
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Only if people take seriously the posts random anonymous
| strangers make on r/programmerhumor. The _real_ source of
| disinformation here is whomever decided to repeat the dry humor
| without the context of it coming from a joke subreddit.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Some people will believe everything they read, and they are
| friends with people who will believe everything they heard
| from a friend.
| TheDudeMan wrote:
| And his link to the Google collision was not an accidental
| collision, like the rest of his ramblings were discussing.
| jameshart wrote:
| Right - that's a SHA1 collision, which has nothing to do with
| the possibility of a UUID collision.
|
| I worry that some people might take away from this that UUID
| collisions are actually something to worry about (nonsensical
| kindergarten cubby analogies and so on).
|
| Really, truly, UUIDs can be assumed unique. We're not relying
| on luck.
| hanselot wrote:
| zamadatix wrote:
| UUIDs can be assumed unique because we are relying on luck,
| not the other way around. The cubby example is actually a
| pretty good example of why the luck is on your side to the
| point you should never worry about it. The SHA1 collision
| not as much.
| iso1210 wrote:
| I read through that and I still wasn't sure if he was being
| serious or not.
| bagels wrote:
| Same. I didn't see a joke. Were Roku devices rebooting? Was it
| being caused by a Pokemon game? No idea what is going on here.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The part in "the joke" contains the joke, all of the other
| sections are not.
|
| Pokemon Sword/Shield was really causing Roku devices to boot
| until Roku issued a patch as the "background" section
| details.
|
| The joke was this involved a collision with some signed Roku
| command and that's the fluke our universe gets over a planet
| of Justin Timberlake clones. It's not a "2 guys and a priest
| walk into the bar" type joke, it was on /r/programminghumor
| after all.
| bombcar wrote:
| The amount of "news" reporting that is simply reporting that
| something was said on Twitter or Reddit is getting out of co
| trol.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The worst are the articles that consist almost entirely a
| series of tweets with 3-12 likes each, just repeating a
| headline that aligns perfectly with the editorial slant of the
| outlet.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The lesson is mainly that few news sources these days do anything
| like fact checking, with bothering to care at all if what they
| are reporting may be true or not.
|
| If you can _accidentally_ plant a false, story imagine doing so
| intentionally.
|
| Or just imagine all the things you see shared on social media
| that didn't start from a made-up story exactly, but still get
| important things wrong just through the game of telephone and
| becaues media outlets don't bother trying to ensure they mostly
| report true things.
|
| We really do live in a post-fact society.
| sacrosancty wrote:
| It doesn't even matter. The facts of a news story aren't very
| relevant to the opinions people form. Instead, news largely
| leads people to get emotional hostile feelings about outgroups.
| It doesn't matter if mother Theresa saved a dying beggar or a
| terrorist bombed a hospital. Whatever the story, and whatever
| the facts, people will go away hating whoever the news hijacked
| their minds into hating.
|
| If you're concerned about facts being true, you're missing the
| real problem of divisive hate-inducing news.
| blowski wrote:
| I don't know how true that is. I look at old news from the
| Victorian era and there was a lot of bullshit then too.
|
| The difference now is the distributed nature of both the
| bullshit generation and fact-checking.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Yep. People confuse detection related correlations with
| causation all of the time.
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