[HN Gopher] This Message Does Not Exist
___________________________________________________________________
This Message Does Not Exist
Author : sebtron
Score : 782 points
Date : 2024-05-31 14:43 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kmjn.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kmjn.org)
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| Open in Thunderbird, it will be there, probably.
|
| I had a similar, though not the same, on new and old Outlook and
| indeed it appeared on Thunderbird. After an hour or two also
| appeared on Outlooks.
| playingalong wrote:
| The commentary is golden.
|
| Trying to guess what is going on. I guess they refer to the
| original message (on the server) and its local copy. Both
| referred to as "the message".
| tempodox wrote:
| Which only goes to show that the bad habit of using imprecise
| terms is liable to produce total confusion.
| klysm wrote:
| This is the most Microsoft error message I have ever seen
| fragmede wrote:
| This message will delete itself after this. Please save its
| contents if you with to retain it.
| m463 wrote:
| Wouldn't a more microsoft message be about competing products
| failing to exist?
|
| I've seen teams messages on firefox and safari about features
| not existing "download the teams native app!"
| beefnugs wrote:
| More microsoft would be a 5 minute message on screen
| promising that they have never and will never misplace any of
| your messages, right before this monstrosity appears
| frankthepickle wrote:
| task failed successfully!
| uyzstvqs wrote:
| Only for a while until someone changes it to "Something went
| wrong"
| 2four2 wrote:
| With a large :( to redundantly communicate that something bad
| happened, in case the user didn't even read the simplified
| message.
| caseyy wrote:
| Don't forget "Oops!" -- the element of surprise.
|
| The developer doesn't know what went wrong and things
| definitely don't go wrong all the time at Microsoft! This is
| as surprising to the developer as it is to you!
|
| It's also pleasantly humane, not like "ERROR:", meaning it's
| more of a silly and fun oopsie doopsie than a systems
| engineering failure.
|
| Don't you just feel better as the user seeing that? It's not
| the systems engineer's fault and neither is it yours. It just
| kind of happened. What even is "it"? No one knows! Computers
| are weird -- eh? Nothing like a whimsical hiccup in your
| computing to brighten the day.
|
| Whatever you were doing, whether it's saving work, buying
| something, or completing critical forms, some of that was
| probably done, or maybe not, but who really knows? Hehe, not
| us -- we are just as surprised!
|
| Oh, and don't call support with this stuff. There's not
| enough to go on even if you reported it for us to
| investigate. It's just one of these things, you know?
|
| Forget about it and move on buddy! You've got an essay to
| rewrite/a purchase to figure out/a critical form to complete
| again, and who knows what will happen then! Will it go
| through? Maybe, maybe not. It will be surprising if it
| doesn't! Isn't it just so exciting?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Damn straight. This came up in an earlier discussion about
| languages that rely heavily on exceptions - they sensibly
| don't want to expose backtraces so you get this `try:
| response_handler() except: print("oops!")` nonsense because
| the programmer literally doesn't know what went wrong and
| they're sure as hell not going to give you the details.
|
| I find it as infuriating as you.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Fatal Error: Operation completed successfully.
| consumer451 wrote:
| SharePoint is supposedly one of the keystones of Microsoft.
|
| The answer to "how can I find all SharePoint Sites where I am a
| member?" is:
|
| > Search SharePoint for _contentclass:STS_Site_
|
| How is this, and op, cluster f possible? How do these decisions
| get into prod?
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Excellent reflection on an absurd premise, thanks for sharing.
| thwarted wrote:
| I've had similar philosophical thoughts about a transaction
| rollback.
|
| Consider this definition from go's database/sql package.
| func (tx *Tx) Rollback() error
|
| Rollback can fail, indicated as such by it can return an error.
| What are the cases where rollback could fail and what's the
| recovery mechanism? Does a failed rollback mean (logically) that
| the transaction is still open and uncommitted? But really,
| invoking rollback can never fail to abort the transaction, so the
| error result has little use.
|
| Now, obviously the error isn't totally useless as an error can be
| returned to indicate, say, the connection to the database was
| dropped. But even in that case, the definition of a transaction's
| validity/lifetime means that even if rollback fails, the
| transaction is in the same state as if rollback had succeeded.
| thriftwy wrote:
| Obviously, transaction may fail to be rolled back and leave
| dangling locks. Not sure about the specifics.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| That's a bug in your database, not something you specify on
| your API.
| thriftwy wrote:
| What if it's a connection problem? DBs are normally remote.
| It's also OK to specify potential bug surface on your API.
| thwarted wrote:
| The bug being referred to isn't the connection problem,
| the bug is that in the event of a loss of communication
| with the client, the transaction isn't fully cleaned up,
| including the release of held locks, when the transaction
| enters an abortive state.
| thriftwy wrote:
| It often takes minutes to hours for a connection to be
| reset when one of its sides went away. So no, it's quite
| often that one side will get these exceptions while the
| other one is locked up for prolonged period of time.
| thwarted wrote:
| I don't think that "leave dangling locks" is obviously a
| possibility from rollback failing. What's the method to clean
| up those locks? Rollback harder? Commit? If a transaction is
| ever aborted and there's a chance that locks specific to the
| transaction (MVCC locks necessary for transactional
| semantics) are still held then it would be safest to always
| issue this mythical "clean up locks" statement after every
| rollback attempt.
|
| The default final state of a transaction that is not
| explicitly committed (and even autocommit is still explicit)
| is that it is aborted, purely because the _only_ way a
| transaction can be committed is by commiting it vs there are
| _an infinite number of ways and reasons_ for the transactions
| to abort. If the rollback is successful or not there is
| logically no way that the state of the transaction after
| rollback being invoked is that the transaction is still
| usable for something.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I unexpectedly shuddered at the term "dangling locks"
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Or the Java SQL connection interface, that can throw
| SQLException on close(). Yes, if your connection throws an
| error when closing, I guess it stops being usable.
|
| Has anybody ever did something useful with that exception?
| lxgr wrote:
| Depending on the durability guarantees of the
| database/connection in question and whether it uses request
| pipelining, I could imagine it indicating something like
| "non-clean connection shutdown; your last few commands might
| not have been processed"?
|
| There's a similar situation in raw socket programming in some
| OSes: You might be done writing all your outbound data into
| the socket (i.e. your last write() call returned indicating
| success), but the receiving application might crash before
| being able to read all of your data.
|
| By implementing an application-level shutdown command that
| the other side acknowledges, that can be avoided; maybe some
| SQL protocol implementations do that, and that exception is
| thrown if the shutdown request is never acknowledged.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I've seen this happen in Oracle using two phase commit, when
| the transaction coordinator drops dead before transmitting a
| commit or rollback decision. The transaction remained in doubt
| for months before someone noticed.
|
| You can ask around and manually coordinate a decision, and tell
| the databasecwhat you decided.
| thwarted wrote:
| Oh that's interesting, and probably manifests a bunch of
| issues related to storage and rollback segments being
| consumed with the transaction staying open for months.
|
| But that's not the same thing as rollback failing (although
| it is the _invocation of rollback_ failing) as neither
| rollback nor commit was fully issued and received, so it
| makes sense that the transaction would stay open (given that
| the database doesn 't tie transactions to the a connection or
| a session, and for a two phase commit scenario I'd expect the
| transaction coordinator to "own" the transaction so it's
| lifetime isn't necessary tied to a session).
| hyperman1 wrote:
| Yeah, the story is a bit incomplete. The full chain was
| application->transaction master -> 20 or so slave
| databases. It was a weekly batch dispatching data to the 20
| slaves, starting with a full delete of each slave.
|
| Someone decided to literally pull the plug and replace the
| master database server node from the rack, while the batch
| was still running. He assumed the other server nodes would
| pick up where this one left off. So the batch log of the
| application first complained about the master disappearing,
| then about the rollback failing on another master node
| because it wasn't the coordinator and had no idea of this
| transaction.
|
| It also means the decision about the commit/rollback was
| irrelevant, as next week's batch run had deleted the
| records in question. Presumably, some ephemeral records
| were hanging around, deciding if they were deleted either
| in week X or week X+1.
| Filligree wrote:
| How did you discover the dangling transaction?
| hyperman1 wrote:
| By accident. I had found a book from tom kyte in a garage
| sale, and was looking around in all kinds of views it
| described.
| 4RealFreedom wrote:
| Not exactly the same but an engineer I was working with wasn't
| handling a failure case properly and leaving transactions open.
| It was reported that the DB would stop working after a certain
| amount of time. I knew transactions were hanging but I didn't
| understand why. I sat down with the engineer and QA trying to
| figure out the problem for well over a day. QA was running
| their test suite over and over. We started removing pieces one
| at a time until we found the problem.
| shpx wrote:
| Pending and rolled back are different transaction states. The
| former uses resources and locks and can prevent other
| transactions from happening.
|
| Rolling back a transaction twice probably indicates an error in
| your program, which Go's API is giving you a chance to report
| to yourself.
|
| Ultimately every network request can fail because of the Two
| Generals' Problem. Actually, every single operation on a
| computer can fail (as in, do something other than what you were
| promised or promised yourself it would do). Nothing in life is
| guaranteed, the environment is adversarial. The fact that we
| create machines that can be predicted with 0.00000000001%
| certainty and carve out a safe environment for them and feed
| them energy is not common and unnatural and all computers will
| also eventually succumb to entropy. The network is just where
| that is common enough that considering that another computer
| can die in our programs can be more useful than completely
| ignoring the possibility. This possibility is represented as a
| non-zero number called "error" in the Go API you've posted, so
| that you have the option of branching your program to a
| different execution path if the database you're communicating
| with stops existing or at least stops being reachable.
| haiku2077 wrote:
| Falsehoods programmers believe:
|
| - Sleep(1) sleeps for exactly 1 second.
|
| - Sleep(1) sleeps for approximately 1 second.
|
| - Sleep(1) sleeps for at least 1 second.
|
| - Sleep(1) sleeps for an unknown, but short amount of time.
| Certainly not weeks, months or years.
| teddyh wrote:
| More _Falsehoods programmers believe about time_ : <https:/
| /gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...>
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "Approximately 1 second" is fine. You just have to keep in
| mind that other influences can block your program from
| running. Those other influences can trigger even if you
| don't sleep!
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > Sleep(1) sleeps for approximately 1 second.
|
| This is correct - Sleep(1) _does_ sleep for approximately 1
| second; the problem is you 're confusing the 95% confidence
| interval (which might be as narrow as (999ms,1001ms) for
| some reasonable designs) with the absolute error bounds
| (which are (0ms,[?]ms], and yes, the infinity end _is_
| inclusive).
| haiku2077 wrote:
| If your software is running on a VM, and that VM is
| suspended (e.g. for migration), the end of sleep could be
| minutes or months in future.
|
| This is surprisingly common when running on certain VM
| instance types on public cloud! Common enough that I've
| had to account for it in production code.
| trifurcate wrote:
| The confidence interval comment still applies for any
| production or client environment I've ever deployed code
| to.
|
| Unless you actually expect your environment to spend more
| than 5% of its time on average getting suspended and
| resumed. Maybe you work on some tooling that is scheduled
| to run right around migration time (for servers) or
| sleep/resume time (for clients).
| NemoNobody wrote:
| Haha, this is one of the best comments I've read on HN
| haiku2077 wrote:
| An example of how a rollback could fail is if the database is
| accessed over a network and the connection times out due to a
| networking problem.
| Groxx wrote:
| > _Does a failed rollback mean (logically) that the transaction
| is still open and uncommitted?_
|
| Yes, it means exactly that until something else manages to
| close the transaction.
|
| Generally that's done by noticing that the connection has
| failed, or a timeout has expired, assuming "roll back unless
| confirmed" is the default behavior (usually true, but not
| always).
|
| The reason you might want to _explicitly_ tell something to
| roll back is to shorten ^ that latency, or to wait for it to
| complete before doing something else that requires it to be
| gone.
| stanac wrote:
| Remands me of "Operation failed successfully" errors. It was a
| meme, but in some cases I had to implement failing an operation
| in a test service fake and log something like that.
| kazinator wrote:
| It's very easy.
|
| "This message does not exist" can be taken to be a false
| statement, without introducing any contradiction.
|
| It is not like "this message is false" (Liar's Paradox) or "this
| sentence has no proof" (Godel's sentence).
|
| Unfortunately, just because "this message does not exist" is a
| false statement, contradicted by existential evidence, doesn't
| mean that the remaining claims next to it can be dismissed as
| false.
| kelnos wrote:
| Perhaps not, but if one encounters a false statement, then it
| is reasonable to assume any following (and previous) statements
| are suspect as well.
|
| Also I think you are missing the point. This is clearly written
| tongue-in-cheek. The author is being entirely rhetorical;
| they're not asking you to solve the apparent inconsistency.
| They just thought the error message was silly, and that working
| through it logically (as if each statement in the error message
| is true and correct) is a funny exercise.
| kazinator wrote:
| The statement has a true interpretation. "This message" can
| be interpreted as referring to some object in a back-end
| database represented by text you see in the UI. The thing you
| see on the screen corresponds to no persistent representation
| in the system.
|
| "This person does not exist" under an AI-generated image
| similarly tells the truth; the image is not the person.
| pieresqi wrote:
| I find the message self explanatory.
|
| Outlook is server authoritative. Message does not exist on server
| and thus it can't be saved.
|
| But it is available on that client - client was able to load it
| before it was removed from server - and such it can be copied out
| or discarded from client.
| lupire wrote:
| That's not the ntresteing is part.
| rzzzt wrote:
| > A returned value of 1 seems to say, "I'm here, but you can't
| use me." > Strange as it may seem, that's exactly what is
| going on. A return code of 1 > means we're not allowed to
| install the print spooler because interrupt 47 > is being
| used for some other purpose by some other interrupt handler. This
| > is a fascinating bit of business to contemplate.
|
| https://archive.org/details/The_Peter_Norton_Programmers_Gui...
|
| To me it sounds like that the service hogging interrupt 47 is
| saying that it can't be used for print spooling purposes.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Any semantic pedantics that involve discussing ontology is always
| a fun time. This was a fun read.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Nor will it ever exist.
| kreeben wrote:
| Me:
|
| Browser:
|
| Server: WTAF are you trying to do, here, man?
|
| Message: Hi everybody!
| mrmanner wrote:
| It has ceased to be
| berryg wrote:
| :-) The Dead Parrot Sketch,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Parrot_sketch
| projektfu wrote:
| ... As always, should you or any member of your IM Force be
| caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow all knowledge of
| your actions.
| joezydeco wrote:
| Currently working in a Microsoft-enabled corp with a very
| aggressive document retention (i.e. _deletion_ ) policy. This
| message doesn't surprise me at all. Stuff just...disappears. All
| the time.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Oh, finally a chance to put my Philosophy degree to use!
|
| The error says the "message" does not exist, but the message is
| not the same as the text. The message is an object that can be
| saved or discarded, and it contains text.
|
| The text still exists and can be copied, but the message is gone
| and can't be saved anymore.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| "the message does not exist in our system, only in your browser
| as text, copy and save it if you want to keep it, if you
| refresh this page the text will disappear"
| stall84 wrote:
| this cracked me up !
| tikhonj wrote:
| It's still funny that the text of a message can exist without
| being a message itself. That must make sense in the specific
| context of Outlook, but it shows that the conceptual design of
| the software does not match how we want to think about the
| domain abstractly.
| sherburt3 wrote:
| I don't think the model is that far off. In real life I can
| read a letter and retain the contents in my mind, then burn
| the letter.
| Wolfenstein98k wrote:
| But this is claiming that the letter does not exist, while
| allowing you to read the contents of the letter.
|
| If it can show you the content, the container must exist!
| vince3455 wrote:
| In a post office, open a letter, burn the envelope. The
| content now exists, but the message does not.
| chii wrote:
| but that implies the message is the envelope, which is
| not typically what a message means.
| another-dave wrote:
| This letter cannot be read because it has been burnt to
| ash. You can only throw away the ashes. Make sure you read
| the letter and retain the contents in your mind, before you
| throw away the ashes, if you want to use them later.
| derefr wrote:
| I would assume Outlook means that its locally-cached copy of
| the message exists, but the original server-side (probably
| IMAP) message no longer exists. And that without that
| message, there's no server-side resource to update -- just a
| resource _representation_ of a _snapshot_ of that server-side
| resource, still temporarily persisted in a client-side read-
| through cache.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > the original server-side (probably IMAP) message no
| longer exists.
|
| Doesn't Outlook rely on the Exchange mailstore?
|
| It's a long time since I was near to Outlook and Exchange,
| but I thought the Exchange mailstore was some kind of X400
| abomination, and that the IMAP capability was a bolt-on.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Does Outlook can even have opinions?
| m463 wrote:
| if the message never achieved a physical form such as printing,
| does the message exist?
|
| if the message stopped existing, but nobody was there, did it
| make the trash-can sound?
| verandaguy wrote:
| What substantial difference is there between a message being
| manifested physically via printing as opposed to having it be
| a collection of bits in specific states on your hard drive
| (or memory, for that matter)?
| m463 wrote:
| isn't paper substantial while magnetic patterns are
| insubstantial?
| gorlilla wrote:
| What would be transubstantial?
| verandaguy wrote:
| In what way are magnetic patterns unsubstantial? You can
| read information from them, which is really what we're
| trying to do here, isn't it?
|
| Is the goal to have it be readable to the naked,
| nominally working human eye? If so then I'd wager you
| could use magnetic paper as storage if you were a
| particularly persistent driver developer.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| >if the message stopped existing, but nobody was there, did
| it make the trash-can sound?
|
| I know the answer for the case where this question refers to
| something on my pc. I have disabled audio warnings, alerts,
| etc so if the message stopped existing and I wasn't around to
| notice then it clearly does not make a trash-can sound.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > if the message never achieved a physical form such as
| printing, does the message exist?
|
| The physical bits do exist, though, on the storage medium.
| Now, of course this does not match our usual image of
| existing, since the bytes were technically always there, but
| it still exists in the physical world.
|
| You can actually make the same argument with a letter: The
| paper and ink were there before, the pattern ist what brought
| it to existence.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| Ceci n'est pas un message?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| You can stuff that in your pipe and smoke it!
| tempodox wrote:
| Not if it doesn't exist.
| mondrian wrote:
| Or if it's not a pipe.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| The author addresses this though. He calls it the contents
| instead of the text but it's the same thing.
|
| > We learn a final affordance, which complicates the story. An
| inexistent message has contents, which may be copied - but only
| if the message has not yet been discarded.
|
| The message is gone and can't be saved anymore, but it can
| still be discarded (or presumably not discarded).
| bch wrote:
| "Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to
| feel interested.
| gpvos wrote:
| The question remains: how can something that does not exist
| contain anything?
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| The message object used to contain those contents, but then
| the message object was deleted, although the contents value
| was still available in a UI in temporary memory.
| tempodox wrote:
| I speaks to Microsoft's creativity that they are able to
| redefine logic that far.
| IsTom wrote:
| The sane will tell you that Necronomicon doesn't exist in our
| world, yet we have a vague idea of what it contains and we're
| sure that it contains only the most repulsive of things.
| jcparkyn wrote:
| Well somebody had better discard it now, lest it start
| existing at some point in the future.
| fweimer wrote:
| Example: You are editing a table row with some application,
| but when you try to save the changes, the system discovered
| that the row has been deleted from the table. The business
| logic does not permit you to create rows arbitrarily, so a
| new row cannot be inserted instead of updating existing one.
|
| The behavior admittedly does not make sense for files
| (although I suppose you could rename or delete the directory
| that contains it), but it's sort of unavoidable if you don't
| want to take locks while some client application you don't
| control may or may not make changes.
| dahart wrote:
| > the message is not the same as the text.
|
| Like people who's bodies are gone but who's souls are still
| here? I see dead messages... :P
|
| That distinction might be worthwhile, and it's certainly true
| from a technical standpoint. But the real problem here is the
| message is not the same as the message. If that was referring
| to a single message it'd make a great philosophical problem.
| Unfortunately we're just talking about a more boring problem of
| two different messages with two different texts where the text
| of one of them accidentally referred to the other one as
| 'this'.
| 31337Logic wrote:
| Excuse me but Kant would like a word with this dev.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Ceci n'est pas un message.
| chuckadams wrote:
| Reminds me a lot of "The operation failed with an error: success"
| layer8 wrote:
| This message means something analogous to: "You loaded a file,
| but now the file doesn't exist anymore (on disk), so I can't
| update it with your changes. You can discard the loaded copy, but
| consider copying its contents first and create a new file from
| it, because for some technical reason I can't do this myself."
| ggarnhart wrote:
| This reminds of a choice I once saw between the following: "Save
| this Credit Card" Or "Never save this Credit Card"
|
| With hashing and things, the latter is certainly possible, but I
| got a good chuckle out of it.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Along those lines, "Don't use cookies on this site".
| recursive wrote:
| Uses localStorage of course.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| I do not think you need a philosophical degree to handle this. A
| law degree is enough. Just add "legally" before "exist" and
| everything makes its perfect legal sense again.
|
| Indeed, since this person... I mean message - is not in the list
| of ones legally allowed to exist, you can't hire it, can't fire
| it, the only thing you can do with it legally - is to kill it.
| But that does not prevent you from searching its pockets first
| and making use of its valuables.
|
| (Sorry for the gallows humor).
| routerl wrote:
| Isn't all of this just equivalent to a pointer? "This variable
| doesn't exist" is a reasonable error message when you're, for
| example, dereferencing a pointer with a wrong data type: it could
| be the equivalent of "there's no integer at this address" or
| "this integer doesn't exist".
|
| The problematic "this" is just an indexical in that case, and it
| works fine in terms of ontology, just like we might say "this
| house doesn't exist", while pointing at a burned up lot. Any
| fluent speaker of English will understand that, just like how
| they'd understand a description of the Parthenon as "this is a
| great temple", while looking at a ruin.
|
| "This email doesn't exist" is not really problematic; the
| metadata persists but the body and subject have been deleted,
| plus whatever else constitutes "a message" in this schema. We can
| refer to it, because the pointers still exist, but the value at
| the address is gone.
|
| The house might not exist anymore, but the address still does.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Your pointer scenario could have the same warning, but it does
| not match the scenario in the post. In the post, we have """the
| message""" displayed on screen. It's not a simple dangling
| pointer, the contents are right there.
|
| We're standing inside the living room while saying the house
| doesn't exist. And as soon as we walk out the living room will
| disappear.
| routerl wrote:
| I'm sorry, I miss things nowadays, but I don't see where the
| post states that the message is still available.
|
| If it is, that's probably a desync issue, like others have
| said. Still not particularly mysterious or ontologically
| interesting. So much of parallel and distributed programming
| is about solving desync problems.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > I'm sorry, I miss things nowadays, but I don't see where
| the post states that the message is still available.
|
| I put it in super scare quotes for a reason, because it
| depends on what you mean by "message".
|
| But the _text_ is still on the screen. That 's why you can
| copy it.
|
| > If it is, that's probably a desync issue, like others
| have said. Still not particularly mysterious or
| ontologically interesting. So much of parallel and
| distributed programming is about solving desync problems.
|
| If it's just a desync, then it could resync things if it
| wanted to. Instead it gives a confusing and contradictory
| warning.
|
| The way the warning contradicts itself is pretty
| interesting, and I and the author think it's fun to delve
| into how the word "message" is supposed to be defined here,
| and how it's causing problems.
|
| But it's not simply a reference to a thing that's gone.
| It's not actually gone yet. It's a ghost.
| mFixman wrote:
| If it were a pointer, Microsoft's advice of copying the message
| would cause a segmentation fault.
|
| Maybe a better comparison would be a weak reference to an
| object that's in line to being garbage collected.
| routerl wrote:
| Yeah, I said "the equivalent of a pointer" because it was an
| analogy. I then spent the rest of the post trying to cash-in
| that analogy. Sorry I wasn't clear enough.
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| The message is the glue that binds reality and unreality. It
| exists, existed, never existed, all at the same time.
|
| It is the paradox of creation, of existence, of dissolution and
| of consciousness.
| satisfice wrote:
| My favorite Windows error message:
|
| "Unknown device (not found)"
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| I suspect it means the message only exists client side, and they
| are able to detect that somehow. So if you browse away, or
| refresh, or whatever, it is gone.
| sva_ wrote:
| The koan of the message that never existed.
| astrea wrote:
| Wait until the author learns about pointers.
| redbell wrote:
| We used to hear that LLMs _hallucinate_ but, apparently, we are
| witnessing the hallucination of apps now!
|
| This reminds me of another _quiet funny_ error message, again,
| from Microsoft about a Windows Phone error message telling users
| to "insert CD and _Restart Your Computer_ " (
| https://thenextweb.com/news/this-is-the-funniest-windows-err...)
| dfox wrote:
| Exchange did this thing well before there were any practical
| LLMs. And well, while the resulting state and error message is
| somewhat hilarious, it is not that hard to trigger this
| behavior intentionally.
| lisper wrote:
| Everyone is snickering at this and talking about philosophy, but
| there is actually a legitimate point being made here, albeit
| obliquely: how do you explain to a non-technical user that their
| data has been deleted on the server, but that their client still
| has a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow?
| I submit that this is a nontrivial problem worthy of serious
| consideration.
| klysm wrote:
| I find most apps give up an enumerating the possibly modes of
| consistency violation that can occur in an app. I've tried and
| failed to do it "right" before and it's incredibly difficult.
| mrmanner wrote:
| Maybe pose it as a question to the user, rather than an error
| message: "This message has been deleted from the server. Do you
| want to:
|
| - discard it permanently - store this version on the server -
| save as a file to your computer"
| mkl wrote:
| > how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data
| has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has
| a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow?
|
| How about: "This message has been deleted from the mail server,
| but Outlook still has it in its temporary cache on this device.
| You can copy the message contents, or discard it from the
| cache, at which point it will be permanently deleted."
| femto wrote:
| A typical person's head will explode at the mention of the
| words "cache" and "server". They will then go into a blind
| panic that their data is going to be "permanently deleted".
| rovr138 wrote:
| "locally", "the cloud"
| shnock wrote:
| Even that can still be too far. I lean towards "your
| computer" and "their computer"
| recursive wrote:
| Is it local if I stay in the same ZIP code?
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah you can't use words like that. Even many people who
| won't panic at the word "server" don't really understand
| what it is.
|
| "This message no longer exists in your Inbox. If you close
| it, you will not be able to open it again."
|
| What's more amazing is that this state actually happens
| often enough in Outlook that somebody wrote code to detect
| it, and to create a message box for the user to warn them
| about it.
| chii wrote:
| every warning or labelling of an issue is because it
| happened to somebody, and it needed to be prevented.
|
| It's true in the physical world - signs like 'beware of
| falling pottery' for example. The electronic world is a
| facsimile of the real world!
| eviks wrote:
| Not an issue, replace server with the cloud and remove
| cache, temporary is fine
| IshKebab wrote:
| So what? Most users will understand this or at least get
| the gist. My mum can ask me what it means and then I can
| tell her. That's a much better outcome than the original
| message.
| phreack wrote:
| I'd say a non-tech user has no idea what a server or cache
| is. I'd go with the word "backup" instead. Something like
| telling them that email is not backed up (online? where?) and
| if they delete it from their computer it won't be able to be
| recovered.
| OmarShehata wrote:
| this is the only correct answer. "a non-technical user has no
| idea what a server or cache is" sure, but they can learn. The
| average person is much smarter than you think they are (when
| it comes to matters that actually affect their day to day
| life). If they don't get your explanation, it's almost always
| because (1) they don't care, they don't see why it matters to
| them (it often doesn't) (2) you're not explaining it well
| enough
|
| feynman has a nice philosophy on this that I think is true &
| useful: (that there's great variety in capability of the
| average person, we should explain things faithfully & without
| dumbing it down):
|
| https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@omarshehata/1123783593602927.
| ..
| bongodongobob wrote:
| The problem is that people's brains just fucking shut down
| once it's computer related. "What was the error message?"
| "Idk I didn't read it." "Well here it is, it's asking for
| your password." "Ok what should I do?" This type of shit is
| more common than it should be. So many people just give up
| on computer related things that isn't the happy path.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| Counterpoint, when a random dialog asks for a password,
| the answer is not always "give the password", so maybe
| that's part of the reason why people find it so
| confusing.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| When you can't open Outlook because you're getting an
| error, ya might need to fuckin sign in. This is sadly a
| common occurrence.
| anatnom wrote:
| If those users aren't reading the error dialogs anyways,
| why do the error dialogs need to pander to those users? I
| wonder if the "make it dumb enough for every user to
| understand" approach leads to user comprehension
| plateauing prematurely.
| codeflo wrote:
| Shareholder-driven growth targets mean it's no longer
| good enough to target the 20th percentile users, who
| might have reading comprehension at a 5th grade level.
| You have to hit the 10th percentile, or the 5th. Be glad
| that you still get text instead of pictures.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Tangentially related, I used to work at a company where
| the C level was demanding all of our help documents be
| videos. They couldn't understand that it made them
| unsearchable, took way more time, did not allow branching
| or decision making in the processes, if anything in the
| workflow or even UI changed the entire thing would need
| to be redone, takes up a ton of space, is not easily
| skimmable etc. "but it's easier than reading!" "are you
| telling me you've never learned how to do things on
| YouTube?" Etc. I refused and resigned not long after.
| sethammons wrote:
| I was thinking you could do product demos / help videos
| combined as an acceptance test suite.
|
| You would programmatically build the self help tutorial
| like a ui test (use a test browser and it would be like
| cypress/selenium). You would write a script, (ai) text to
| speech, and you could even respond to user input for
| branching.
|
| These would be, de facto, your acceptance test suite and
| your tutorials will flag when they break on new ui
| developments, helping to keep them up to date
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Sure, if they want to hire someone. Ain't nobody got time
| for that.
| latexr wrote:
| > Be glad that you still get text instead of pictures.
|
| Even that isn't a given. I've seen banks using emoji in
| their notifications. Companies are using ML to predict
| which emoji to change your text to. There are emoji
| domain names. Etcetera.
| chii wrote:
| > but they can learn.
|
| though do they want to?
|
| If they can learn, they would've. And then cease being a
| non-technical user.
| throwawayk7h wrote:
| I usually learn things without the explicit desire to
| learn, and then feel happy that I did learn. Perhaps I
| should learn more.
| OmarShehata wrote:
| > And then cease being a non-technical user
|
| I'm glad you said this because Feynman has a beautiful
| response to it: basically, there is no such thing as a
| "non-technical user". Almost everyone is adept at
| navigating _some_ complex system in their life. I agree
| with you that they probably don't want to learn.
|
| but the reason they don't want to learn is because they
| don't think there is any value on it, they believe it is
| a waste of time. For the same reason I (used to) believe
| it's a waste of time for me to play puzzle games (I'm bad
| at it, I don't enjoy it, what's the point). Or learn to
| manage people, or learn to understand politics, etc.
|
| I'm asking you (and everyone reading this) to suspend
| disbelief and pretend that these users DO have capacity
| to learn, and they just don't see any value in it, and
| it's on us to clearly (and concisely) communicate the
| value without gatekeeping and without dumbing it down. I
| have been surprised at how people's capacity to learn was
| much greater than I expected, and I hope the same will be
| true for you.
|
| I see this attitude a lot of, "well, if you want to
| understand how this system works, we have to start from
| scratch" (and they start to lecture for hours about some
| fundamental things). I think this is a failure mode: an
| inability to figure out _what_ fundamental pieces
| actually matter to understanding the current system.
|
| Apologies for the rant, I feel strongly about this
| because I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit here
| that everyone can benefit from, but I'm still trying to
| refine my thoughts.
|
| i tried to write about this here:
| https://omarshehata.substack.com/p/my-
| favorite-1980s-canadia...
| stall84 wrote:
| Yeah but that would be taking nearly all of the Microsoft out
| of it ...
| qwertox wrote:
| How about a dialog with the buttons "Try again", "Save to
| file...", "Copy to clipboard" and "Discard contents"?
| pquki4 wrote:
| Funny of you to think your non-technical uncle is aware that
| there is such a thing as "mail server". All they know is that
| this email thing works, in the sense that he can send and
| receive emails.
| ranger207 wrote:
| Does anyone have any real studies about whether users will
| "have their heads explode" when presented with technical
| language? Apple and Microsoft did user studies for this sort
| of thing in the 80s and 90s, right? Has anyone done similar
| in the 00s, 10s, and 20s?
| mtVessel wrote:
| Do we really need to? I'd lay odds that the effect remains
| the same: users dismiss the error/warning without reading
| it.
| lostlogin wrote:
| How about your phrasing?
|
| 'your data has been deleted on the server, but that your client
| still has a cached copy'
| bongodongobob wrote:
| "Hello IT? Yes, all my data has been deleted please help!
| Something about a cash-ay and the server is down!"
| caseyy wrote:
| > how do you explain to a non-technical user that their data
| has been deleted on the server, but that their client still has
| a cached copy that they might want to try to salvage somehow?
|
| "The message has been deleted, but your app still shows it. You
| will not be able to see the message again if you discard it,
| and it will disappear soon."
| mtVessel wrote:
| "What do you mean 'it's been deleted?' It's right here!
| Stupid computers..."
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Some good passes at UX copy in this thread, but for this
| application, I'd recommend against trying to explain the
| underlying technical mechanism at play and instead frame it in
| terms of outcomes.
|
| "This message has been deleted, but you still have a temporary
| copy. If you need to save anything from it, you should do so
| before discarding the temporary copy."
| vsnf wrote:
| This is the best one so far. Combine that with the 'if you
| refresh this page the text will disappear' from another
| poster and I think we have a very workable error message that
| outlines the issue, solution, and due caution necessary, for
| the potentially non-technical user.
| khendron wrote:
| You don't. Explaining _what_ happened is not going to help the
| user at all. You can only explain what options are available to
| the user. Something like the following
|
| "Sorry, this message can no longer be saved. Copy this message
| before discarding it if you will need access to it later."
| chii wrote:
| "Copy it to where?"
|
| Or, "Can't i just restore it out of the trash?"
| Too wrote:
| Sorry but hard disagree on this one. This increasingly
| popular assumption that users are clueless cavemen is very
| condescending. Help the user self diagnose instead.
|
| WHY can't it be saved?
|
| Is the internet not connected? Check your WiFi.
|
| Is the server full? Talk to admin.
|
| Is the message deleted by another user? Talk to your team
| about ways of working?
|
| Is it an internal application error? Tough luck, maybe the
| error code can be googled at least.
|
| This does not mean you need to dump a stack trace in the
| users face, the examples above can still be presented
| briefly. If that's too much effort to implement, consider an
| expandable details section.
|
| The amount of applications lately where I had to open the
| verbose developer logs only to find silly user fixable errors
| is astonishing. Last one was simply credentials that had
| expired.
|
| To anyone who thinks you are giving the users a magical
| experience, free from technicalities, by hiding root causes
| behind a facade of abstract, please think again. You are just
| frustrating the users even more, by making errors
| unpredictable.
| edanm wrote:
| > This increasingly popular assumption that users are
| clueless cavemen is very condescending.
|
| Sorry, but no. And this idea that everyone else is
| condescending is offensive nonsense.
|
| I understand where you're coming from, but the people who
| understand how _actual_ users behave and what _actual_
| users want, in the real world, are not condescending - they
| 're empathic. They recognize that the majority of people in
| the world are not like us, in terms of technical abilities,
| yes, but more importantly, in terms of desires.
|
| The average user doesn't _care_. They _don 't have time_ to
| do things like "talk to admin", nor do they even know what
| "check your wifi" means. "Talk to your team about ways of
| working"? I'm sure most employees would just love to go and
| have awkward conversations with others, that's exactly what
| they want to do this minute.
|
| This is even on the off-chance that the user has even read
| the message, which is incredibly unlikely. I can't count
| the number of times I've had _developers_ tell me they had
| an error message and don 't know what to do, and my
| solution was "let's read it, it says this is the error" and
| that being revelatory for them.
| spuz wrote:
| > This is even on the off-chance that the user has even
| read the message, which is incredibly unlikely. I can't
| count the number of times I've had developers tell me
| they had an error message and don't know what to do, and
| my solution was "let's read it, it says this is the
| error" and that being revelatory for them.
|
| I agree that the problem with technical and non-technical
| users alike is one of motivation. Like you say, someone
| who is not technically minded won't care that the server
| is out of pace or their wifi is disconnected and
| developers who just want to get their code to compile
| don't care about learning how some new framework works.
|
| But in all these cases, the users _do_ care about doing
| whatever they were trying to do when they got the error.
| And the best way to help them is to give them all the
| relevant information they or someone else needs to fix
| it. Giving some generic error like "sorry your file
| could not be saved" neither helps those who are motivated
| to fix it, nor those who aren't motivated.
| rpigab wrote:
| Yes, let's try to explain technical things to non technical
| people without using technical words and pretend we're getting
| somewhere and that it's useful for them.
| alehlopeh wrote:
| Why delete the copy on the client at all?
| canadaduane wrote:
| It is messages like this that revealed to me a culture of learned
| helplessness at Microsoft, and I made a decision to switch to
| Linux.
| infotropy wrote:
| There is no Antimemetics Division
| slashtmpslash wrote:
| "...Outlook..."
|
| Yeah it is gonna be some palmface story.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| Why does the author find this so difficult to understand? I read
| the error and both immediately know what the problem is, and can
| guess a likely series of events that caused it.
|
| 1. You load a page with the message, and your client (browser)
| renders its contents after fetching it from the server with an
| API call
|
| 2. Some unrelated process causes the message to be deleted on the
| server
|
| 3. Some asynchronous process on the client (like a periodic
| refresh) tries to get the message, but it's since been deleted,
| but the client-side rendered state stays the same
|
| 4. Thus the error: the message doesn't exist anymore, so you can
| discard it to manually make your browser state consistent with
| the server. Or you can just refresh and it'll be gone. So if you
| want to save the contents, copy it in your clipboard first,
| before refreshing.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| The problem is that the message does not speak the truth. If you
| can read a message it clearly must exist because you cannot read
| non-existent messages, can you? Can anyone? CAN ANYONE HERE READ
| NON-EXISTENT MESSAGES?
|
| The message should have said "This message is not saved on the
| server. If you close this window without copying and saving its
| text you cannot retrieve it from the server ever again.
| streamfroster wrote:
| While this is the most sane and logical sounding way to put it,
| it would lose the 'philosophical' vagueness of the original
| notification. I still prefer the original wording
| layer8 wrote:
| Of course you can read non-existent messages, for example when
| an AI hallucinates one, or when someone shows you a
| photoshopped screenshot of one, or even just when you copied
| one to a text document before deleting the message.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > Of course you can read non-existent messages, for example
| when an AI hallucinates one
|
| This message clearly exists. It's could be not factually
| correct, but a lie still exists.
| layer8 wrote:
| No, it's a citation of a message that does not exist. I
| wasn't talking about a message sent by an AI, I was talking
| about an AI reproducing the alledged content of a purported
| message.
|
| If you open a text file in an editor, and then delete the
| file on disk, then the file does not exist anymore, but you
| can still read its contents in your editor. Same if you
| open a web page in your browser, and the page is then
| deleted server-side. You can still read the loaded copy of
| the web page in your browser, although the web page doesn't
| exist anymore. The "message" in TFA's notification is
| exactly like that.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| You might argue that 'not existing' in general does not even
| exist.
|
| It reminds me of the ted ex talk where a man states that the
| universe does not exist because it is everything and if we
| would make a list of everything, the list would not be included
| as a topic of the list.
| lupire wrote:
| That's Russell's Paradox.
| sentientslug wrote:
| I think you're describing something akin to Cantor's diagonal
| argument
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| > I have some ontological questions.
|
| My sides.
| krispyfi wrote:
| From the headline, I expected this to be a site that randomly
| presents you with an AI-generated message, in the style of "This
| person does not exist".
| waltbosz wrote:
| Reminds me of the time I wrote on the break room whiteboard at
| work: "Please to not read this sentence."
| temporallobe wrote:
| While the warning may seem obtuse, it's obviously referring to a
| message in a state of limbo. It exists in some kind of cache (and
| therefore only locally) but all traces of it have been deleted on
| the remote storage. It actually makes sense to me, and I think MS
| handled this edge case very well. I actually cannot think of a
| better way to handle it.
| Illniyar wrote:
| I was sure this was going to be a gen-ai site that is going to
| generate messages on the fly.
| k8svet wrote:
| Even after I've read and enjoyed it, I skim the title in the
| list and still think that's what it must be.
| elwell wrote:
| Schrodinger's email
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| All messages in Outlook exist only in the liminal dreamspace of
| Clippy.
| michaelgiba wrote:
| This is art
| phaedrus wrote:
| I once screen-shotted an intranet application at my work asking
| the unintentional koan, "One does not exist", next to a button
| that said, "Create".
| dfabulich wrote:
| I think this is an example of the "answering machine paradox,"
| which philosophers have been writing about since the 1970's.
|
| https://philpapers.org/rec/SIDTAM
|
| > _According to an intuitive semantics for 'I,' 'here' and 'now,'
| 'I am not here now' should always be false when uttered. But
| occurrences of 'I am not here now' on an answering machine seem
| to be true (when the speaker is not home)._
|
| (If you're interested, you can google for "answering machine
| paradox" for more takes on it.)
| tempodox wrote:
| This is ludicrous. Failure to distinguish the person ("I") from
| their recorded voice does not make a philosophical problem.
| It's pure and unadulterated stupidity.
| Y_Y wrote:
| When you say "this", I assume you are referring to the
| message you were writing at the time.
| skyechurch wrote:
| Alternatively: _placing finger on the peak of Olympus Mons on
| Martian map_
|
| "I am not _here_ now ". I'm not seeing the problem.
|
| There are a lot of philosophy 'problems' like this, which
| leads me to think philosophers lead blessed, problem-free
| lives.
| bravetraveler wrote:
| > leads me to think philosophers lead blessed, problem-free
| lives.
|
| I agree, perhaps with the qualification of 'eventually',
| having been both of these people: 1)
| someone born dirt poor who had to spend every waking moment
| to feed myself 2) someone who can pontificate in
| comment sections
|
| As my life became more blessed I could afford more
| philosophy.
|
| Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach wander
| philosophically.
|
| Playing with ourselves. Man plans, god laughs. Everyone has
| a plan until they get hit in the mouth. I could go on.
| goatlover wrote:
| You probably haven't thought deeply about the problems.
| Usually they expose some issue with our concepts or
| assumptions. Things we take to be obvious and simple aren't
| always on careful reflection.
| adammarples wrote:
| They normally expose some problem with our language, and
| nothing deeper than that. This is a perfect example.
| vsuperpower2020 wrote:
| This may be true, but if it is the canadian journal of
| philosophy is doing their reputation no favors by
| publishing the "answering machine paradox". Paradox.
| Paradox. That's a funny word, isn't it? Paradox.
| djur wrote:
| A paradox is just a statement that is self-contradictory.
| It doesn't mean a difficult or mind-bending problem as it
| is sometimes used colloquially.
| mannykannot wrote:
| On the one hand, these puzzles often arise as counter-
| examples to a theory within analytical philosophy, and
| unless you understand what they are a counter-example to,
| they seem pointless and even ridiculous. For example,
| when Russell posed his famous paradox to Frege, he was
| not trying to find out who shaves the barber.
|
| On the other hand, perhaps we should consider whether
| analytical philosophy, following the linguistic turn [1],
| is creating problems for itself when it tries to find
| metaphysical truth by analyzing human language as if it
| were a formal system. For example, when David Chalmers
| says "even God could not create a male vixen", is he
| mistaking an accidental lexicographical fact for a
| metaphysical insight?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_turn
| dahart wrote:
| Hehe, you're replying to a comment that exposed issues
| with the stated assumptions behind the so-called paradox.
| skyechurch wrote:
| I was being glib, of course. Presumably there's some
| legitimate technical philosophical issue, and actual
| philosophers are capable of using answering machines and
| even landline telephones without having all their
| assumptions about reality collapse around them like a PKD
| novel (those born prior to 1980, anyway). But, like Jay
| Z, I've got problems of a more pressing nature, and
| legitimately don't see how this matters.
|
| (See also the 'Problem' of Induction, which I had to
| spend a great deal of time on in college, and even after
| reading centuries of debate about it, is the least
| problematic 'problem' I've ever encountered. Maybe this
| is a linguistic issue, and philosophers should stop
| calling things 'problems' when the rest of us have to
| make rent.)
| thecodedmessage wrote:
| Math problems are quite similar in this way!
| skyechurch wrote:
| ... not the ones involving the rent check.
| lupire wrote:
| If you have problems of a more pressing nature, why are
| you faffing about on HN?
|
| It smells like you are just mocking people for being
| interested in thinking about things. Why?
| vsuperpower2020 wrote:
| This is also why people don't like philosophers. You have
| no monopoly on "thinking about things" and you aren't
| being mocked for doing that.
| djur wrote:
| The implication here seems to be that people can't think
| about and discuss philosophical problems and also take
| care of more immediate physical concerns at the same
| time. Do you feel that way about other intellectual
| endeavors without immediate applications, like "pure"
| science and mathematics?
| djur wrote:
| Do you think that mathematicians are drama queens because
| "2a = 4, solve for a" is a "math problem"? Just because
| something is intuitively simple doesn't mean that you don't
| have to account for it in a formal system. The intuitive
| solution for a lot of simple questions is incorrect in some
| cases. (How do you determine the length of a word?)
|
| In your example, "here" is semantically different from the
| "here" in the answering machine case and doesn't result in
| a paradox.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I think that describes a considerable chunk of the Philosophy
| field.
|
| But that's of course what an engineer _would_ say.
| andybak wrote:
| I find that the joy many commenters here have in both
| denigrating philosophys and at the same time proudly
| demonstrating no interest in knowing anything about it to be
| one of the more embarrassing things regularly on display.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Oh "anything about it" isn't quite valid, now is it. We see
| gibberish with nonsensical blather thrown in, and zero
| logical reasoning behind it. It's not a science.
|
| If you want to tell me it's akin to astrology, or some
| other pseudo made up framework, fine.
|
| I don't have a problem with fantasy. I have a problem with
| those telling me it's real.
|
| "I took a series of university classes, where we examined
| the natural laws in The Land, and Thomas Covenant's ring,
| and derived a measure of predictive weather patterns! I
| know science!" <-- philosophy
| andybak wrote:
| I rest my case.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Your case was "that made up 'science' is real, and you
| can't say no because you haven't studied it for years".
|
| I don't need to study astrology for years, to know it's
| nonsense in about 10 minutes.
|
| Yet I've hear a lot more philosophical blather than that,
| and so yes, I have enough data to make a determination.
|
| There's an inner logic to tarot cards, books and books on
| it, but that doesn't make it useful or valuable.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| You very clearly illustrate andybak's point by showing
| that you just don't even know what philosophy is.
| bbarnett wrote:
| So your argument, is that one must spend years studying
| nonsense, to have an opinion on its worth?
|
| I've already clarified why this is not so. Thus, your
| main, true disagreement is that you do not agree with my
| assessment.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| No, my argument is that you lack even a rudimentary
| understanding what it is all about. You only need some
| curiosity and an open mind to get that. I'm certain there
| are something in Wikipedia that can help.
| bbarnett wrote:
| I'm sorry my friend, but Wikipedia cannot help
| philosophy. Nothing can.
| djur wrote:
| Philosophy is not and does not purport to be a 'science'.
| The fact that philosophers make and discuss propositions
| that seem incorrect to you does not mean that the field
| of philosophy is fraudulent or unimportant.
| tadala wrote:
| Shocking comment. Do you think the scientific method is
| inbuilt in our DNA or something? Where do you think it
| all comes from?
| bbarnett wrote:
| You think it comes from philosophy? This is like claiming
| our democracy comes from God, because he edictorially
| spoke through ancient kings!
| djur wrote:
| The term "scientific method" is itself a philosophical
| term (as is "method" in this context). Read, or even
| skim, this and notice how many of the important figures
| listed were philosophers:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_scientific_metho
| d
| sethammons wrote:
| > I don't need to study astrology for years, to know it's
| nonsense in about 10 minutes.
|
| Copernicus deniers didn't need years of study either as
| their source material said differently.
|
| I'm not saying anything either way on philosophy, I'm
| simply pointing out that your presented logic there is
| flawed
| bbarnett wrote:
| You're saying that Copernicus deniers didn't listen to
| anything he had to say? That's the only way there's a
| comparison here.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| I wouldn't call myself a philosphy expert by any means
| (love me some Epicurus) but I think the previous commenter
| is right. As far as philosophical dilemmas go, the
| answering machine problem is contrived at best.
|
| It relies on a pretty obvious mischaracterization of the
| situation at hand - there isn't a person saying "I am not
| here" at all, it's a machine playing a recording. With the
| necessary context, the dilemma becomes a pretty obvious
| non-dilemma.
|
| If you're saying we should be willing to explore our minds
| through philosophical problems, I agree with you. I just
| think this particular philosophical problem is pretty lame.
|
| Is the conclusion supposed to be that that formal meaning
| of any particular word is less important than the ability
| to communicate abstract ideas? That's an interesting notion
| though I'd argue that notion isn't helped by a half-broken
| analogy.
| tadala wrote:
| On the other hand, the other response to OP's comment is
| a perfect display of what he means. A lot of tech bro
| hubris/idiocy.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| In that case, let me go a step further: although I
| wouldn't respond the way some other folks have, I get why
| they would. Many of my most memorable and most
| intellectually stimulating classes were those that
| weren't related to my engineering degree. The philosophy
| classes, though, never even approached "intellectually
| stimulating" status. I wrote a good 80-100 pages of
| pseudointellectual drivel about half-baked analogies like
| the "answering machine paradox," and accrued thousands in
| debt in the process.
|
| Another thing: The great thing about Philosophy is that
| there are no wrong answers. But, the bad thing about
| philosophy _classes_ is there _are_ wrong answers. Open-
| endedness and free thinking don 't scale to 150-seat
| lecture halls, indifferent TAs, and PhD-candidate
| "professors" doing the bare minimum to get a diploma.
| djur wrote:
| "Paradox" and "dilemma" and even "problem" don't have as
| strong a meaning in philosophy as they do in colloquial
| English. In this context, the claim is essentially that a
| particular system of analyzing the truth of statements
| will incorrectly analyze this particular type of
| statement. The "paradox" is in the system, not in
| reality. The paper linked offers a solution for modifying
| one particular system so that it will correctly resolve
| the paradox.
|
| The programming analogy would be that processing a
| particular type of data will often have hidden pitfalls
| for the most intuitive approach. It might be easy to
| avoid those pitfalls by modifying your program, but
| someone had to notice and document the problem and the
| workaround.
| ordu wrote:
| I wouldn't say so. If we mark this a stupidity, then a lier's
| paradox is a stupidity also. If people could easily deal with
| such statements and understand them correctly, it doesn't
| mean there is no problem. Problem arises when you try to
| devise some formal system describing all the statements, and
| then you find some more statements and the system doesn't
| work for them.
|
| Zeno's paradoxes for example show us the weaknesses of
| Ancient Greek's system of reasoning, the weaknesses of their
| kid of logic and math. But will have troubles seeing them as
| paradoxes if they do not know logic at all or if they know
| modern logic and modern math which solve all of the Zeno's
| paradoxes (or most of them?). Now Zeno's paradoxes are not
| paradoxes at all, but the silly mistakes of reasoning.
|
| It reminds me of edge-cases in programming, you designed a
| beautiful program and then edge-cases started to pop up, you
| patch your program, patch it some more, and in no time at all
| your beautiful program becomes a heap of spaghetti code. The
| only way to avoid it is to code something that you coded
| before many times and know all the shenanigans allowing you
| to combine beautiful design with the practical applicability.
|
| Here is the same thing, if you do not know what the system
| the author uses, you cannot judge if his reasoning stupid or
| not.
|
| I don't know either, but I believe, that it is an interesting
| observation. The person said "I'm not here now", and it was
| obviously false, when they said it, but when answering
| machine says it the statements becomes true. I'm not sure
| what the problem is, but I think, that the problem starts
| biting you hard, when you try to define a set of all such
| statements and to choose a condition of their truthfulness.
| Of course, you can use your intuition as a tool for
| demarcation, but philosophy doesn't work that way, it seeks
| an objective criteria, preferably a formal one.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| Absolutely off topic, but does remind me of a Mexican movie 'I
| Am No Longer Here' that I'd seen not long ago was astonishingly
| good for something I hadn't heard of.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_No_Longer_Here
| rayval wrote:
| By the way, that is a great movie. Or do I say "was"?
| earth-adventure wrote:
| Thats a great movie, if you are just making that statement.
|
| That was a great movie, if you've just finished watching
| it.
| croniev wrote:
| Many commenters here seem to be hostile towards philosophy.
| Heres a take for you:
|
| This is only a paradox if you think of language as a way of
| describing some "real", static state of affairs in the world
| (look up " correspondence theory of truth"). There is no
| paradox here if we think of language as pragmatic, action
| directing, since it is obvious what the sentence should convey
| (look up "pragmatism"). Some people will argue that there is
| some sort of static meaning hidden behind the actual words
| which enters the consciousness of the listener, others will say
| that the meaning is only generated by the person hearing the
| words.
|
| This is as philosophical of a question as it gets, and has been
| debated even more heatedly ever since Wittgenstein.
|
| If you do not see that debating these questions is relevant and
| interesting, but would rather reduce all of philosophy to that
| first obvious-seeming and thus "not a _real problem_ "
| position, then I wish you a good time bathing in your
| ignorance.
|
| However, if you comprehend that what we take for granted in
| every area and discipline can be subjected to reasonable
| reflection, then I welcome you to the dark side. Nothing is
| clear, no knowledge absolute - many engineers seem to forget
| this while over-indulging in an overly simplistic world view :)
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I think it is okay to philosophise about situations and
| events that seem a bit paradoxal but the explanation is
| obvious. Even more, that is a core trait of philosophy.
|
| There are many similar situations where what we hear, read or
| see is technically incorrect. Since the sender (or the
| activator of an agent) of the message in such case assumes
| the interpreter has enough common knowledge, it is a
| perfectly okay communication.
|
| A video tape containing a recording: "your watching this
| means I'm dead."
|
| A secretary of a company impersonating the company when
| sending a message to many recipients.
|
| An actor speaking about his character, as if they are
| somebody they know very well.
|
| Writing that an AI hallucinates.
|
| My car informing me that one of the tyres is low on pressure,
| even though it does not know what a tyre is, let alone how to
| measure pressure.
| rvnx wrote:
| The fix is to add "on the server" to the sentence.
|
| "This message cannot be saved because it no longer exists on the
| server.", and then it's all solved.
| Tojot wrote:
| Dangling pointer. Case closed. Period. Period period. :)
| tempodox wrote:
| Leave it to Microsoft to come up with nonsensical stuff, be it
| names or something like this. They must have an ample supply of
| specialists for braindead language.
| weinzierl wrote:
| _" You don't exist. Go away!"_ said the server.
| nyfresh wrote:
| You could argue from the perspective of the server this is a true
| statement. The message does not exist. If the server stored a
| history of messages, current and deleted, it would not be in the
| logs. What you received is something different. Like a message
| but not a message.
| wwilim wrote:
| I want to ask a simpler question - why don't I have a button to
| make the message exist again if I have the content?
| kunley wrote:
| Imagine the meetings and comitees to decide how such a button
| should be named. They would brobably involve "AI" somehow
| yetihehe wrote:
| That would probably allow inserting any message you want into
| history. Malicious messages too. "Your honor, server chat
| history shows that the defendant indeed sent that explicit
| message to my client". Inserting on server messages sent to you
| seems pretty crazy idea for anyone who ever programmed any chat
| functionality.
| tjoff wrote:
| I've gotten this message and it kind of illustrates one of the
| many aspect as to why web-browser apps are so terrible, that the
| storage is disconnected from the app and the connection is
| unreliable (and in most cases (if not on mobile) it is just that
| the server is unreliable, because it has to handle 10 million
| other connections).
|
| > _Make sure you copy the contents of the message before you
| discard if you want to use them later._
|
| Like, really? Is that the best you can do? You rely on a human to
| copy-paste text because you can not be bothered to create it
| yourself?
|
| In theory, yes, that might be the best they can do because they
| can't connect to the server - in my case however, that was not
| the case. Outlook worked fine and I got new notifications, but I
| had to manually preserve the content.
|
| It's been 20 years since gmail "disrupted" webmail, yet it still
| sucks. At best they only give the illusion of search, because
| they don't have the resources to do it properly. How people can
| stand it is beyond me.
| michaelmior wrote:
| The problems you cite with Web apps are not unique to the Web,
| but to client-server apps in general.
| tjoff wrote:
| It is much worse than that because a proper client can have
| storage as well. The key difference is that the browser is
| not a proper client but a general purpose interpreter and
| that webb applications don't have a choice no matter how bad
| of a fit it is.
| phantomathkg wrote:
| Web app have storage. It is only because the app you use
| doesn't use it properly. Even gmail has offline mode.
| tjoff wrote:
| But it can't trust the storage. Maybe you are in
| incognito. Maybe you are not using your own computer etc.
| Not particularly likely it will ever sync again.
| necovek wrote:
| You are setting different goals: a client (non-web) app
| running on a different computer would not have access to
| local storage for another computer where that same app
| was running locally. FWIW, even on the same computer, you
| can frequently run the same client using a different
| profile, user account or similar, and it wouldn't have
| access to another instance of that same client.
|
| Browser does have local storage and you can assume it
| keeps the local storage.
|
| The main difference is that browsers tend to be "OSes"
| for multiple apps.
| tjoff wrote:
| You wouldn't install and configure an app on a different
| machine for quick instance. Which you do for a webpage.
| Hence outlook can't assume that the message can be
| recovered because it can't assume it will ever see that
| local storage again.
|
| A webapp has it's place. It is an inferior option but it
| is convenient for when you lack access to a proper
| client, doesn't make sense for them to target the same
| goals.
| pavlov wrote:
| Computers can stop time because they don't have to execute
| instructions. In a sense this is an example of what that affords.
|
| Think of a physical message on a piece of paper. The paper is on
| fire. You can still see the text, but it's too late to put out
| the fire.
|
| If you have good memory, you can figuratively stop time at that
| instant and memorize the contents of the paper. With a computer,
| the message is already "burned" on the server, but the frozen
| instant in front of you can be extended indefinitely.
| robryk wrote:
| As with race conditions, making things faster doesn't change
| things but only exposes preexisting problems. The preexisting
| problem I see here is sloppy definition of existence for the
| message: if you can see the message on a burning piece of
| paper, it should be considered to still exist (just as a
| message being sent with smoke signals does not disappear the
| moment it's committed to smoke).
|
| E: The obvious way to fix this is to stop talking about
| messages existing/not existing, but talk in terms of messages
| being stored in X (or having been deleted from X), for some
| value of X.
| alpinisme wrote:
| It's not the word "exists" that causes the problem (although
| it definitely gives it an added air of strange mystery). It's
| the word "this." Consider the case of a draft email I am
| writing on my laptop, but have to leave before finishing.
| Later, I resume composing the email _on my phone_ and I hit
| send. But I do it in a hurry and mostly forget about it. The
| next morning, though, I open my laptop and I see the still
| unfinished draft I left there.
|
| Now, when I try to finish and send that I'm hopefully going
| to get an error message. But "you already sent this email" is
| both right and wrong, since "this" email (the one I'm looking
| at) may have different contents from the one I sent.
|
| Agreed that the best error message is just more precise
| though: "You are attempting to edit a draft that you already
| finished and sent from another device. Would you like to
| treat this as a new email?" Or something like that.
| dsign wrote:
| It used to be so during the golden age of personal computers or
| if you run Linux and have tweaked it so. But modern-day
| operating systems will bend the nature of reality itself if
| they have to, in order to restart and install updates, or to
| force you to change your password which is already 120 seconds
| old, or to log you out for security reasons if you stop moving
| the mouse. You better save that message promptly.
| hollander wrote:
| This is typical Microsoft logic. And 'logic' should be quoted,
| because Microsoft has the most stupid texts in their products.
| They make translation errors, grammatical errors, use
| incomprehensible and stupid comments.
| xorcist wrote:
| Didn't Jobs say something along the lines of that the problem
| with Microsoft is that they don't _care_ about their products?
|
| Things like this shows how literally that is true. Make a
| product, sell a product, what could possibly be the problem
| with that?
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| This comment does not exist.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| This is not a comment.
| hacker_88 wrote:
| Microsoft BSOD message Team were moved to Microsoft 365
| Angostura wrote:
| Presumably this is shorthand for 'The message is no longer stored
| in the system'
| jhbadger wrote:
| I was expecting this would be another version of This X does not
| exist (where X is a cat, person, molecule, etc.) where generative
| AI has been trained on messages and gives a plausible message
| that has never been given before.
| slackr wrote:
| Reminds me of a joke where a Jewish kid asks his dad "what's the
| holy trinity?" And the dad replies, "there's only one God and in
| this house we don't believe in him."
| graycat wrote:
| One relatively simple but informal description of the problem is
| that the statement is _self-referencing_.
|
| Related is the Bertrand Russell paradox:
|
| X = {z | z is not an element of z}
|
| So, X is an element of X if and only if it is not -- a
| contradiction.
|
| The usual solution was to have two steps:
|
| (1) Over here, say, on the left, we have everything we want to
| regard as _elements_.
|
| (2) On the right, we have everything we want to regard as _sets_.
| The sets consist only of elements.
|
| That's a good fix.
|
| For more, there is the elegant, long popular, P. Halmos _Naive
| Set Theory_ , now available in PDF, LaTeX, etc.
|
| For more there is the appendix to J. Kelley, _General Topology_.
|
| For more there is P. Suppes, _Axiomatic Set Theory_.
|
| For more, sure you want more????
| necovek wrote:
| One of the best executed statements of the sort was "I've been
| murdered" from an old movie D.O.A.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwzjpwdqay0
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