Username cannot contain 'clyde'
old.reddit.comThe key point here that was hard to find is that they and others had a username containing Clyde set already, and now can't update anything else about their profile because their username has come to be considered invalid.
That's pretty poor judgement to not even communicate this to affected users
> That's pretty poor judgement to not even communicate this to affected users
Thanks for the clarification, but imagining it's pretty easy that this could just be a bug, e.g. they knew they wanted to prevent future usernames from having "clyde", and maybe even realized some existing clydes would be grandfathered in, but didn't realize it would prevent existing clydes from updating anything else on their profile.
yeah, it would be pretty simple to skip validation of the username if it didn't change
Sounds like they're doing a PUT when they should be doing a PATCH.
If you use a + sign in your email, some services accept it at sign up but not later on, when users try to update it.
yeah, I've had this happen a number of times because the service was treating the `+` as a space in either the signup or the update, and I've had some success forcing it by replacing `+` with `%2B`
This is a good case for why system bots/messages/etc. shouldn't be given regular names (and perhaps distinguished through other means too); if the error was instead "Username cannot contain 'discord'", it'd be more obvious.
Disclosure, I work at Google.Amazon: Alexa Microsoft: Cortana Apple: Siri Discord: Clyde Google: GoogleWritten like that Google suddenly looks like geniuses.
At least in the naming, sure. Everything else, not so much. I had to switch my whole house over to Echos because you can't change the wake word on Google Home. Every time I said, say, "Hey Google, turn the bedroom lamp off", the Home in the bedroom would say ok and turn the lamp off, both phones in the room would activate and complain that they didn't have a device named lamp listed, and every other Home in the house would start talking about how it couldn't hear me clearly. Then you yell "Hey Google, shut the fuck up!" and the blasted things start whining about how they "have feelings too" and I shouldn't be so rude. Few technological problems have made my fingers ache more for a sledgehammer.
The developers of these things need to stop treating people swearing at them as a time to lecture them and instead realize that if someone is swearing at it then they’re probably not satisfied with how it’s functioning in the attempts before that.
Funny enough Google Assistant on Google Maps does this just fine. When it asks me if I wanted to navigate to the Pizza Hut that's five miles away or the one that's 38 miles away, it understands "the closest one, you stupid piece of crap" just fine.
I can see this being useful. There are multiple Krogers and Walmarts where I am. They vary greatly in quality and selection. Depending on where you are and what you want to get, you might not want the closest one.
But 95% of the time, they’ll just want the closest one. It’s a sensible default.
Haha I wrote a HN comment years ago about the same issue. Everytime "do you want to go to the Wegman's 5 miles away or the identical Wegman's that's 20 miles away?"
This only happened to me once, but I was leaving BWI airport and asked Google to drive home. I really only needed a bit of help getting onto I-70 because some of the signs were confusing. Well it started navigating and after a few turns, it definitely seemed off. Turned out it was taking me to a Home Health place. I've always been super careful since then to make sure Home was Home.
Alexa backend treats user swearing the same way it treats a repeated command or other negative feedback.
Glad someone is, been trying to figure out if there was a command in Siri to communicate I'm dissatisfied with how its wasting my time with the past query attempts, no luck so far although I've basically given up using the thing at all at this point.
The amount of times where I would ask 3 times and have to do the task myself anyway were too often.
And how is that?
I assume they capture the conversation for 'manual review' and upload it to an S3 bucket to languish for eternity.
You can't change the wake word because a separate, dedicated chip is listening for it and is not connected to the rest of the device except to wake up the main processor.
Then they could at least provide more than one option. Though while far from perfect, one of the things I like about Alexa/Echo more than the ability to change it, is that with multiple devices you will generally only trigger one (the others within earshot will listen and then ignore it once one of them has picked it up; works well in my house at least apart from one place where echo/reflection sometimes causes one in another room to get preference, but even then only one device usually triggers). Sounds like that was the main problem for GP.
Most of the time I can just turn in the general direction of the device I want to "listen".
Yep. Echoes also don't make you pause after the wake word, so you can actually talk to it naturally. Also, when you tell them to shut up they shut up. The way Google Homes throw a tantrum when you're rude to them will make you want to reach through the cable line and strangle the arrogant son of a bitch who OK'd something that pointlessly infuriating.
Seriously, what the hell were they thinking? If I'm so frustrated at a device that I'll tell it to shut up, the last thing I want from it is more noise.
I've read a few times about the concerns people have with voice assistants, which all predominantly default to female voices, taking orders and abuse without question. I believe Cortana was also intended to "stand up for herself" in these situations, to avoid making it seem okay/normal to bark abusive orders at a "woman".
Great idea. When an aggressive man starts hurling verbal abuse at a robot with some female traits, let's antagonize him further with woke rhetoric from the safety of a remote datacenter.
With that sort of reinforcement, his next unfavorable encounter with an actual human female will surely end well.
Does nobody even try to de-escalate situations anymore? The most advanced AI in the world can't slink away quietly, wait until he calms down and try to correct these sorts of behaviors by promoting the idea that he'd slay it in bed, lose weight or grow a monster dong if he read this self-help book (now 20% off!) about treating women with respect? An incorporeal AI with goddamn control of a smart home can't walk through a hostage negotiation playbook to manipulate a violent occupant into submission? Clearly domestic violence is an impossible problem to solve.
It pains me to see people (usually women) encouraging vulnerable women to "stand up for [themselves]" in situations even armed male cops won't approach without backup from other armed men. It's sociopathic-- on par with teenagers encouraging other kids to commit suicide.
The second my computer starts talking back to me is the second I throw it in the garbage.
Google removed the need to pause after saying the wake word years ago. (Possibly you haven't disabled the acknowledgement beep)
IIRC it always worked without the pause. Just the beep was picked up by the microphone and made the recognition for that word or two much worse. It would clearly react to things said before the beep.
I've found that my Home Mini works best if I don't pause after saying the wake command.
Google devices function the same way when configured properly. The mention of multiple devices responding, and some not knowing about the light, makes me think GP has something set up incorrectly.
Not "because".
Dedicated wakeup chips can be designed to have a different matrix shoved in for the word they're detecting. Google presumably did not do this, but they could have.
Adding more communication between the main chip and the wake-up chip would leave more room for privacy intrusion.
It's not more communication: it's different read-only data in the wake-up chip.
Considering how warm Google Homes stay even when idle I seriously doubt the main processor is ever going to sleep.
Heat is dissipated when electricity goes unused too (usually by dumping it in some load resistor) so it’s possible the extra electricity is just generating heat, waiting to go to the processor. I’d lol if they have 5v coming in, and they’re stepping it down to 3.3v for the wake word processor (hence heat) while the main processor runs at 5v.
>Heat is dissipated when electricity goes unused too (usually by dumping it in some load resistor)
This isn't true. Your light switches do not heat up to lightbulb temperature when the light is off. Heat is only dissipated when electricity is "used", more or less by definition. You seem to be describing a linear voltage regulator, which does have a load resistor and is wasteful if the step-down distance is large, but no modern electronic circuit would use such a thing in a power supply - it would use a switched-mode buck regulator instead.
Switch mode power supplies don't waste that degree of energy when doing nothing. That's multiple watts, probably at least 5 judging by the temperature, just being pissed away at all times.
I guess that's why laptops batteries last exactly the same whether the computer is idling or not. Also, the reason they get very hot when you're not doing anything CPU intensive - it's all that unused electricity going to the dump load resistor!
They could just have a transformer that doesn't need a resistor for stepping it down
I doubt that's burned into hardware so it just should have the option to update the fingerprint of the word
Uhm why is that chip not programmable for any ofher catch phrase?
That would require more communication between the main chip and wake-up chip which could lead to privacy concerns.
You're installing a box that has a mic sending things you say intentionally and unintentionally (because it thinks you woke it up) to a megacorp. I think privacy is out the window by now.
That's interesting, I did some digging into Apple device communication and it turns out they have a protocol called CompanionLink that handles this exact circumstance - devices can communicate securely with each other and decide who is going to handle the Siri activation - HomePod's seem to get preference, then phones then laptops. I'm surprised Google hasn't done something similar.
They do. You also get occasional feedback notifications asking you to confirm that the device that answered is the one you expected.
More than one should never answer. I wonder if location is misconfigured on individual devices, but I wouldn't bet against a bug.
It’s hard to infer the cause, but I wonder if the devices were set up under different accounts or not set within whatever Google defines as a home
I have no idea how things work under the hood, but this doesn't match my experience as a user. If I'm in the bedroom and ask to turn the lamp off, and phones are around, the phone screens sometimes lit up as they are listening to the command, but then only the bedroom Google Home actually executes it, while the phones turn their screen back off without saying anything.
Unfortunately I'm with the other guy. We have a Nest Mini in every room, and a Hub Max (only paid for 2, another 2 were free with Spotify and the Hub Max was an Instagram giveaway win).
We have to whisper to the Hub Max in the kitchen, from 3 inches away, and the Minis in the dining room and living room often still hear. If I don't whisper, even the ones upstairs hear. Sometimes I get 2 timers for my cooking, sometimes I get one on the wrong speaker. Then I try to cancel the timer, and the Hub Max hears instead and tells me I have no timers set.
The Hub Max asks on the screen if the wrong device responded. It clearly ignores your response, as the wrong device also responds the next time. I have pressed that button easily over 50x before I gave up and stopped.
Something clearly changed ~6mo-1yr ago because they never used to be this bad. It used to be that they would all listen, then only the closest one (that heard the command the loudest) would respond. Problem is, when I'm cooking the Hub Max is 1ft away and the rest are through (often multiple) walls metres away from me.
Jesus, they seem pretty sensitive to voice. Do they tell you not to be rude when you're having "adult time"?
They'd know. They'd know.
Were these devices given to you, or did you buy them?
A mix of both for the Google Home devices. The Echo dots I got on a black friday for like ten bucks a piece.
If this means you set each echo with a different wake word, you probably don’t need to do that. As long as each one knows about the other (same account) they choose a single device to respond based on the one which heard you best.
Google should have done that too, but it seems you might not have had them all part of the same home (or something else was broken/buggy).
Well, you've chosen convenience over time and here you are.
> At least in the naming, sure.
You have to make sure the phones use the same Google (family) account as the Home.
Well, the verbification of the word google introduces its own difficulties there.
The ideal would be for the voice assistant to have some completely unique word, ideally with sound combinations that are very rare in your native language. And if for some reason, that still doesn't work for you, have a way to change it. Or maybe just not have a default, and require users to pick their own keyword.
> Computer! Earl Grey. Hot.
I can't think of many words that rhyme with computer so would get picked up.
Muh brand identity/recognition though.
There aren't many legitimate ways to have people audibly self hypnotise themselves using your brand.
It's very black mirror.
My roommate had an Alexa and we changed the wake word to computer... Didn't last long. Apparently the word computer comes up on casual conversation much more than you probably think.
Welcome to the life of someone actually called Alexa.
Ok Google, Google "Google"
The 21st century version of Buffalo buffalo buffalo...
In English, there’s only one word in the entire language with a ts sound (pizza) that’s not at the end. They probably could have come up with a name utilizing that fact, making wake words super “easy” to recognize and hard to accidentally say.
Just off the top of my head, depending on accent or dialect: "spritzer", "waltzer", "Mitsubishi", "matzos", "mitzvah".
A fun code challenge! I started with https://github.com/Alexir/CMUdict/blob/master/cmudict-0.7b as a list of words with pronunciation. It has:
Looks like I can search for " T S " to find the "ts sound that's not at the end"PIZZA P IY1 T S AH0
Some of the non-proper nouns include ACCOUNTANCY, ANTSY, and ARTSY. I'll assume this is too close to the end to count, so require two sounds after the " T S ":% grep " T S " cmudict-0.7b | wc -l 991
These include: bestseller, blitzkrieg, boatswain, bootstrap, chutzpah, craftsman, draftsmanship, footstep, hotspot, itself, jetstream, outscore, outsell, outside, postscript, shirtsleeve, shortstop, sportsmanship, statesmen, tsar, tsunami, whatsoever, yachtsman, and zeitgeist.% grep -E " T S [A-Z0-9]+ [A-Z0-9]+" cmudict-0.7b | wc -l 853(It doesn't have "spritzer" in the list, and uses the spelling "matzoh" instead of "matzo". I didn't look for a more complete list of word pronunciations.)
Finally, two words with two occurrences of the "ts" sound, neither at the end:
% grep -E " T S .*T S " cmudict-0.7b ITSY-BITSY IH2 T S IY0 B IH1 T S IY0 TSETSE T S IY1 T S IY0"boatswain" should be pronounced "bosun".
You're right. Though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boatswain says "formerly and dialectally also /ˈboʊtsweɪn/ BOHT-swayn", the dictionaries I checked do not list that alternative.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/boatswain even comments:
> Phonetic spelling bo'sun/bosun is attested from 1840. Fowler [1926] writes, "The nautical pronunciation (bō'sn) has become so general that to avoid it is more affected than to use it."
Most of the examples you gave are compound words, or made through suffixes and who knows, maybe my Russian teacher told a lie!
It certainly seems your Russian teacher wasn't fond of schnitzel nor seltzer.
I was literally laughing so hard from this comment. Thanks for brightening my day.
"Zeitgeist" seems like a bug, I've never heard anyone pronounce the leading 'z' as 'ˈts' in English, and doing so as a non-German might even be seen as 'over-pronuciation'.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zeitgeist#Pronunciation gives two pronunciations:
Pronunciation (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA(key): /ˈtsaɪtˌɡaɪst/, /ˈzaɪtˌɡaɪst/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zeitgeist also gives two: ˈtsīt-ˌgīst ˈzīt-
I tried to get statistics from listening to https://youglish.com/pronounce/zeitgeist/english? but found I have a hard time distinguishing the two forms.
Seems implausible.
~ Fatso
~ Pitstop
~ Katsup
~ Yachtsman
~ Scotsmen
~ Batsman
There don't seem to be many, admittedly.
That fact seems dubious, does tzatziki not count?
Is tzatziki the only word that both starts and contains, but doesn’t end, with ts sound?
Tzatziki, Tsetse and Tzar are not English words; OP said there was just one English word (which he identified as "pizza", which isn't an English word).
It has foreign roots but it's surely an English word by any workable definition.
And "tsetse" has been used in English for nearly 100 years longer than pizza - the latter only really introduced because of Allied soldiers sent to in Italy.
Google Ngram says it wasn't until the 1970s when "pizza" was more commonly used than "tsetse." https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=tsetse%2Cpizza... . Or from BoingBoing today, "North Americans feared and misunderstood pizza in the 1950s" - https://boingboing.net/2022/11/21/north-americans-feared-and... .
That is trivially not true.
"you should google that!"
" I don't understand your query. "
Is it just me or does anyone else find saying "OK Google" a bit of a tongue twister?
That's one reason why "Hey Google" was added as a valid wake phrase (and is the one I use)
For me, I apparently say "Hey, go [get, find, etc]" a lot and my phone wakes up unnecessarily. It seems to also happen with "Let's go". It's pretty annoying.
Wait, it wasn't a good idea to name my daughter "Google"?
Until you want to ask google about googols
Cylde is notably the only male assistant. I guess Discord know their customers.
According to Siri: “Animals and French nouns have genders, I do not”
> Cylde is notably the only male assistant.
Siri defaults to male in some countries and languages.
Can't be that well, it's not an underaged anime girl.
Siri does not have a gender, and defaults to a masculine voice in many countries.
I guess Bonnie isn't ready for release yet.)
I am still waiting for someone that lives in a household with a human named Alexa in California to sue Amazon for recording without consent.
This kid will have a bad time trying to create a Google account in the future
https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2019/07/03/google-...
Incidentally, "Hey Boo-boo" a la Yogi Bear also works on Google Home.
Man I wanted so badly for Cortana not to be a big pile of garbage.
Now every time it fails people will hate “Google” :)
Facebook: www
I feel bad for all the Alexas and the few Siris out there that have had their names hijacked my a couple of the biggest companies on the planet.
Slightly different, but my friend's daughter Isis hasn't been too happy about what's happened since she was born.
Neither was AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon when they named their mobile wallet solution ISIS shortly before the caliphate was formed. [1]
I know someone whose major in college was abbreviated as Isys (information systems). Not anymore.
The credential management system at my college was called ISIS, so you had an ISIS identifier, you had to go through ISIS login, etc.
And let us not forget The International Secret Intelligence Service in Archer.
My personal conspiracy theory is that "Isis" is a result of the US "convincing" media organizations to use that name for the Islamic State after realising that intercepting communications using the term "is" was an impossible task. Even further, they then tried to impose "Daesh" but it didn't catch up.
Yeah, you have really tried to find an out there reason, huh ?
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/paris-attacks-...
Starting e-mails with "dear Isis" just feels like begging to be added to watch-lists.
The ancient Egyptian god is fuming
Or the awesome band.
Didn't they get death threats and insults on Facebook? Not only from people that would do that kind of stuff online, but also the kind of person that thinks that a terrorist organization has an official Facebook page.
They had to rename their page to "ISIS the band" or something like that.
Oh zephyr winds from up on high… raise me up so I can fly—
Not nearly as bad as "Karens" have it.
Tbf, some of them deserve it.
Strong disagree. The whole "Karen" meme reeks of old-fashioned misogyny wrapped up in 2020s language. "A woman, complaining? How dare she!". I recognise the meme is about entitled women being rude, but that behaviour is hardly isolated to women.
Complaining doesn’t make a Karen. Entitlement does.
Where's the simple line that gets crossed? If I ask for a refund but am refused, am I being "entitled" when I push it? There are some obvious examples of both ends of the spectrum, but a lot of less obvious ones in the middle.
I worry these memes encourage timid people not to even ask for what they are legitimately entitled to, for fear of ending up on some Reddit channel.
Yeah, it's all subjective and contextual. I don't know if I or anyone else can give an easy checklist to define what is or isn't "Karen" or entitled behavior, but having done my time in various positions in the service industry, it's certainly something I can know when I see it.
If I had to try I'd say it's when you have a problem and you try to resolve it in a way that gets you the most personal benefit and hormone rush instead of just getting the problem solved in an efficient manner, that's Karen behavior. Like if you order a sandwich with no tomatoes and it comes with tomatoes on it; if you call over the waiter, describe the problem in a normal tone of voice without assigning blame, and ask for a replacement, that's fine. If you use a tone of voice loud enough that other tables can hear, blame the server or cook or even take the tomatoes personally as if "ignoring" your request was a personal attack, launch into a diatribe bout how you could have bene killed if you were allergic to tomatoes, demand not only a replacement sandwich but a free side or even your whole order for free, etc, that's Karen behavior; those sorts of actions are getting you free stuff and serotonin bumps but they're causing undue stress on the staff and other people around you, who are human and have their own limitations in terms of stress and mental health, what they can do in terms of the law or dealing with their managers, etc - and they're certainly not solving the original problem (you want a sandwich without tomatoes) any faster.
Andcwhat about the Kevins?
As Scott says in Weak Men Are Superweapons [1], a meme aimed against a specific, easily disliked subgroup is unavoidably an attack on the entire group by association.
It is impossible to say "Karen, who is a woman, bad" without implying "women Karens, women bad." Or if there is a way to disentangle them, it certainly won't fit in a meme.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...
> a meme aimed against a specific, easily disliked subgroup is unavoidably an attack on the entire group by association.
So that comment, by attacking a specific, easily disliked subgroup of memes is undeniably an attack on all of the memes by association. Or am I applying this wrong?
I think so. If the argument is that people will make associations that the original person did not intend, then it seems quite possible that pointing out bad usages of memes will result in people likely memes less overall. This is but one factor and could be cancelled out by many other factors causing them to like memes more. I'm guessing this applies to humans in general and is caused not just by memes but by any transfer of information that biases schemas we use to judge situations. But this also applies to any terms of negative connotations where there is some subgroup associated with a larger group (even if the association is wrong, it just needs to be perceived). So even terms like 'racist' or 'incel' end up with collateral damage.
It's not a meme in the same sense though. If this was a short punchy quote that implied that certain memes were bad, then yes.
All right, let me explicitly substitute for pronouns: your comment was aimed against specific, easily disliked subgroup, namely, "Karen" memes, and so it is unavoidably an attack on the entire group, namely, memes, by association.
It is impossible to say "a "Karen" meme, which is a meme, bad" without implying "memes "Karen" memes, memes bad." Or if there is a way to disentangle them, it certainly won't fit in a comment.
It's amazing how many arguments ad argumentum are not only self-applicable but also self-defying.
Sure, if you arbitrarily decide every comment is a meme.
It's amazing how everything is applicable to everything if you freely redefine the terms used.
edit: Sorry, that was a bit snarky. I think there's reasons why this applies to quick, punchy memes but not to longform comments: memes are antithetical to nuance.
Perhaps that hints at the problem of intentionally developing a meme stereotype, and then using it as a stick to beat people with. The bar for having that stereotype becomes ever lower, and thus the set ever bigger. People then self-censor perfectly acceptable behaviour to avoid being part of the set.
Karen is a _white_ woman who uses their entitlement to attack people in services.
I like how you just white washed the problem of racism with misoginy here.
That whole group of Karens is probably a product of white male misoginy towards white women so these women found of way of coming back at it by directing their anger towards even less priveleged groups.
> Tbf
That's not "fair".
The number that deserve it is going to be well under 1%.
A child named Alexa had to change their name because of the bullying.
https://news.yahoo.com/parents-forced-change-name-6-18055441...
Children are such pieces of shit (sometimes)
They didn't have to. Never ever cave to bully demands. That only teaches them they have power.
Mental health is more important than telling yourself that adapting makes you weak. And please stop with this bullshit along the lines of "just ignore it", that's not how bullying works.
Heavily bullied as a kid. Never conformed. Maybe not the right solution for everyone but I learned those were not the types of people whose approval I needed in life.
In my experience, Apple devices readily respond to "Sarah" which was a top-five baby girl name in 19 of the years from 1980 through the 2000 [1].
I know an Alexa. She hates it.
She should consider suing Amazon for recording without consent.
The only assistant not to be paired with another word as well.
Apple is reportedly planning to remove "hey" from their wake word
I hope not, my daughters name just happens to have syllables similar but not the same as “siri” in her name and calling her name sets it off ALL THE TIME.
I agree it's a terrible idea, and yet https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-06/apple-...
"Seriously?" - sorry, but Siri does not understand the word "ously".
[ "Siri - ously" ]
Bad pun, I know. :-)
I have a dreary theory of which Siri is leery.
(I'm available for QA testing.)
In Russia, Yandex have decided to call his voice assistant "Alice". Which is top 4 popular name in Russia.
Your data is about "percentage of female names in whole population". I'm talking about "most popular name to assign to newborns". Sorry for misunderstanding.
Alexa is not such an uncommon name. They should team up and sue, being designated as the obedient servant for the benefit of someone else's brand is a non-negligible annoyance. Ignore people who say 'tis' not that serious,' they're the sort of people who never care about anything until it happens to them.
Why, what's Sue got to do with it?
I also feel bad for that Google kid I knew in high school. People were always asking him where to find stuff. He thought that changing his name from Alta Vista would stem the tide.
Tragic.
You... are aware that Alexa and Siri are real human names, right?
So is Google.
Oh at first with my cafein lacking early morning brain, I mistakenly parsed it as "Developers should not be able to call their bots regular names". But it's nothing to the bot's name but how it's registered on the system right? So the suggestion is, the username should be discernible from platform users usernames.
Gizmoduck back in the 80s had this worked out. His bot invocation was "Blathering Blathernsikes".
"Go-go gadget" also doesn't tend to come up in conversation, but I'm not sure if anyone holds a trademark for it
"go-go gadget bedroom lamp off" doesn't sound that great
> This is a good case for why system bots/messages/etc. shouldn't be given regular names
I disagree. The username can be clyde_discord/clyde_bot and the display name could just be "Clyde". Then the username Clyde wouldn't be taken, and the users would be able to still message the bot and not be confused.
Though I personally really dislike simple human names for bots because it sounds cheesy and dumb.
It's not about the username being taken, it's all about what people appear as in the client; bots and scammers might impersonate Clyde to steal credentials, social engineer, etc, so you cannot be "Clyde_help" nor "Clyde_Official" nor any variation that would make people think the bot/user is speaking on behalf of Discord.
Why not just put a special logo or symbol or something on that profile to mark it as special/official, or have some sort of "user type" displayed that says "human" or "official bot" or "third party bot"? I feel like making it look like a regular username makes it _more_ likely people will be scammed by "other" regular users rather than less likely.
Discord already does this - they just don't trust average users to be aware enough to check. (Based on my experience moderating some discords, they aren't wrong.)
For example, like a blue checkmark after the nick for users who are genuinely who they say they are?
Which is funny when you take into account that people are still using special characters to get a Clyde name that mostly resembles it. I question the effectiveness.
I’m skeptical, since I’ve been using Discord for years and have never seen (or noticed) any “Clyde” bot.
This of course rests on the assumption that there is such a thing as a 'regular name'.
I'm obliged to link you to 'falsehoods programmers believe about names' now. I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
That's why I name my bots "A" and just ban any username with "a" in it. If you can't get it 100% right, fuck it, do whatever you want.
:(
There's not exactly a list of canonical human names per se, but "bots can't use human names" would still be a very sensible rule for us to have. Put the cost and the burden on companies making bots, not on individual people who got unlucky.
Also names are part of human culture, and Alexa for example has been in use for a very long time. There are valid reasons for names to die off in a single generation (eg adolf) but this is not a reason that our culture gains anything from imo.
There are certainly far more Clydes than there are Discords (has anyone even been legally named Discord before?)
I'm not happy about it, but those are the rules.
..."then change them", as someone might say. But that article seems to be mostly about the edge-cases. I don't think someone named Clyde is an edge-case, nor would someone named Bonnie, for that matter.
So I perhaps should have been more clear.
If your plan in choosing a name for your bot is to choose one that won't collide with a human, you are going to run into the fact that humans have a lot of very different names. Hence the link to the 'falsehoods' piece.
The US Census of 1950, for example, has a lot of Descords, Descards, Dicords, Dioscords, and... in PA, a Rosa B Discord, in NYC, a Mr Discord.
In general, all I'm saying is, it is far better if your intention is to allow people to choose their name, to not put any arbitrary restriction in place with the justification that 'it probably won't affect anyone'. If there's one thing people really care about it's their name. And no matter how unlikely you think it is that someone will run into your restriction... you're almost certainly wrong.
> has anyone even been legally named Discord before?
There was a Roman goddess named Discordia (where "discord" came from), and in the 90s Hercules and Xena TV series the Greek goddess used that Roman name instead of Eris, but simplified to just Discord.
Those two series were pretty popular, so I can see it being more likely recently than in that 1950s census sibling comment found. On the flipside, that character is probably not something parents would want for their daughter.
> (has anyone even been legally named Discord before?)
In this post-Brony society, I’m sure of it.
(Discord was the name of the villain on the show… I think. Never seen more than half an episode myself.)
We can put bounds on it.
Here's an easy lower bound, for the context of avoiding collisions: The name has to have been used by at least two different humans.
Or to get closer to a reasonable bound, 100 humans.
How would you know how much it has been used ?
We don't even have a database for all the humans alive today, much less one for the last 400 000 years...
You can be pretty confident without a comprehensive database. If you're unsure about a name then don't pick that one.
And people that are dead won't be inconvenienced, so you can ignore them.
People (and lawyers) might get annoyed if you called your bot Avici, even though he is dead and won’t personally be inconvenienced by it.
Naming something after a celebrity is a different issue entirely. It's actually a bigger problem if the celebrity has a non-regular name!
"Clyde is the name used for a fake bot in the client. It responds to specific Built-In slash commands (/timeout, /ban, /kick and /nick), and sends private messages with information or errors". https://discord.fandom.com/wiki/Clyde
Why is an internal system in the same namespace as users?
I wonder whether there are constraints that made it difficult to implement this functionality in another way, or this is just a bad design decision.
It's not. The reason for this is not technical (unless you think they literally filled their user database with every possible username permutation with the word 'clyde' in it). It's to make sure scammers can't use names with these words in it, because it might make more people consider those accounts legitimate.
Yeah, sure. The very first comment in the Reddit thread says "I use Clydē and it works," and the third one is "CIyde. Use capital i instead of L," so nice try, but no.
All usernames on Discord have a four-digit number after them called a discriminator, separated from the rest of the name by a # symbol. In the Reddit post in question, that number is #6381.
The problem isn't that the (fake) bot is in the same namespace as users; if there were any problem like that at all, it would be a shortage of discriminators.
However, that's not what this message is saying. It's saying that the name cannot contain "Clyde". In other words, you wouldn't be able to use any name that had the word "Clyde" in it, taken or not.
The fact that they haven't attempted to block usage of "CIyde" and similar does suggest they might not have thought it through, but it's verifiably not a namespace issue.
I think you're talking past each other. Having to try to block names containing or appearing similar to "Clyde" is a result of having the bot in a public namespace.
Just as a random, poorly thought-out example, internal stuff could be namespaced with a different prefix like "&Clyde" instead of "@Clyde". As long as users know that official stuff is addressed with &, it matters less what people do with @-namespaced stuff because there's an easy way to tell whether it's actually official or not.
By putting official stuff in the same namespace as user-generated stuff, it's much harder to tell whether something is an official tool or not. @CIyde could be a real internal account.
The technical incompetence of implementation doesn't mean that the root reason for it was wrong
I mean their prevention implementation could just be lazy too
It's probably a mix of both. Namespacing often seems to be an afterthought in many systems, and it can be hard to refactor in once an architecture has solidified.
It's not always the wrong choice to mingle identifiers of different types, but I think often people err on the side of convenience (/ laziness) instead of thinking through all of the potential issues.
The discord username namespace is weird. You get to set a display name which doesn't have to be unique so you can have the name "Bob" and that's what shows up when you message people, but then you also have a unique version on your profile that looks something like "Bob#3922" I'm not sure what happens if 10,000 people pick the same name but as far as I know, there is no limitation to how many people can have the same username.
So it seems almost impossible that this is some technical limitation but rather Discord cracking down on a common deception tactic.
It don't let you if there are no numbers left when I changed my discord name last
I think it could also be for the purpose of preventing imposters, as what Clyde says is what Discord says.
No technical limitations... Look at how blizzard has done "blue text" on their forums for decades (a different presentation-space)
It's really embarrassing if does actually allow visually indistinguishable variations like 'CIyde' or 'Clydе'. Impacting real users, while having zero effect on malicious actors
Reminds me of a fun bug at RockstarGames's SocialClub
Interesting!
It reminded me of the "our database schema doesn't allow people with the name Jeffrey": https://twitter.com/yephph/status/1249246702126546944
This happens because Discord has a system bot also named Clyde that mostly tells users when their messages fail to send (among other system messages).
Why not call it DiscordBot?
Coz someone tried to be cute instead of smart
It feels like a UX faux pas to pick common names for stuff like this.
I’ve got to imagine that some people named Alexa find it unfortunate and invasive that suddenly their name is used everywhere. At least “Siri” and “Hey Google” are less popular names for people.
On Swissair website there was a time where I couldn't purchase tickets because my name contains the name of a musical instrument. So out there there are people that did worse than that in my personal experience :(
Wait, what? I'm trying to figure out why that would exist but the only thing I can think of is that people were buying a ticket for their instruments rather then checking them and the airline wanted to try and stop the practice.
I was shocked as well, and couldn't come up with an explanation either. My name is Marcello and the problem was the `cello` substring (an Italian name, but being Italian an official language in Switzerland they should have though about that). They removed it luckily!
That is the instrument that I had in mind when I was thinking of the ones that musicians buy tickets for, but I couldn't think of a name that had a collision with it.
I had heard that some airlines may have tried to discourage the practice but this is the first I heard about such measures.
Seems common for some travelers to book tickets ie. Tuba, Lastname. https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/united-mileage-plus-pre-merg...
Now I'm wondering if there's a language where "mar" translates to "my"...
You can’t create a Gmail account containing the words support, gmail, google, and several other variations
Huh, TIL. Is that documented anywhere? I confirmed that you're right by trying to create a new address, but I've never heard of this rule before.
It's a common security practice, to prevent scammers from using official-looking usernames, or even tricking services that verify domain ownership by sending email to postmaster@ or admin@.
Such lists are usually kept secret, but there are a few open source word lists that people can adopt for their services, for example, https://github.com/shouldbee/reserved-usernames.
I discovered it innocently. I wanted to create a gmail address named support{myfirm}.gmail.com. Of course I instantly understood what you point out but then I had to discover all the other edge cases.
So you think it's bad? How about this: I just wanted to create an account there finally and it was suspended without me even entering it once, I also had to pass about 5 captchas to be able to sign-up, no VPNs, clear home IP Some shit-show is going on there right now, dunno
Why don't bots have some other distinction? Like a blue tick or <blink> or some screenreader function?
Why do their messages have to appear the same as humans?
If bots should all operate in a distinctive space, give it that space.
Mind you architectural foresight is hard so maybe they'll get there.
They do have the tick next to their names and yet they still have this nonsense in place anyway.
Because they don't trust the average discord user to not fall for someone who doesn't have a checkmark or system tag. And frankly they're right.
Because it's not working. Put a big red flag that this is a scammer, and still there will be people falling into scam
Contact forms for US Senators and Representatives often have surprising issues like this.
Reserved words in SQL sometimes get blocked as well as things like too many singles quotes or an odd number of single quotes. I've seen the name "Walter" blocked on many forms over the years.
The worst part is that the sender just gets sent to a security or generic page with no idea why, often losing the message they created.
That's upsetting, but what else would I expect from a senator's website that's probably been up for 25 years...
Change your name to “Sue” instead:
https://crzysdrs.net/dv/victim/223-its-a-damn-shame-what-the...
This just reminds me of the birthday cake for Clint.
Poor Clint.
"Name on cake must not be Clint"
This feels very adjacent to the Scunthorpe problem, except that the blocking is intentional here:
> The Scunthorpe problem is unintentional blocking [...] because [...] text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an [...] unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.
Actually, in this case it's intentional that "Clyde" is blocked. That's the name of the "bot" that error messages on Discord use to make them friendlier.
It's obviously not a good solution, but it's not an example of the Scunthorpe problem.
You're right. Updated.
This is sadly typical of Discord, who treat every problem as a nail even when offered a detailed explanation.
I don't have account on stackoverflow or reddit because their authentication system is broken to me.
Does the bot use every possible permutation of "Clyde"? It must be every Clyde that can ever exist?
Apparently it's do deal with fraudulent uses for their internal bot.
Another bad case of co-opting a common word in tech - here with more than just annoying results.