Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/05/local-council-in-england-to-remove-apostrophes-from-road-signs-because-computer-says-no.html
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16 Likes
So many levels of dumb.
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The sleepy hamlet of Drop Tables to the rescue!
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Must’ve been a suggestion or two to employ the possessive <=> “of” kludge? y’know “walk of saint mary” (some old grammar rule says that if the possessor is ‘human’ then it must be the apostrophe). eh, whatever gets the message through with the least trouble.
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BS 7666:2006
Section 5: Creating a street gazetteer
3. Explanation of requirements
3.2 Street records
3.2.3 Descriptive identifier
[…]
All names should be given in full. Abbreviations and punctuation should not be used unless they appear in the designated name (e.g. ‘Earl’s Court Road’). Only single spaces should be used, and the use of leading spaces should be avoided.
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Why? Are they too lazy to write a trivial input cleaner?
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Rumour has it that hyphens are next, so Shakespeare’s birthplace becomes Stratforduponavon.
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Where is AI when you need it? Too busy trying to look cool in Silicon Valley to rescue the apostrophes of a local British village.
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I used to live in Lee’s Summit, MO. There were so many times I had to enter my address as Lees Summit on some website because it only allowed letters and spaces in the town name. Interestingly, the first time the name of the town was painted on the original train station, they left off the apostrophe and misspelled the name, writing it as LEES SUMMIT (it was supposed to be LEA’S SUMMIT), so this problem predates computer databases.
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Considering the decades of abuse of the infamous greengrocer’s apostrophe* (“apple’s and pear’s half price”) I applaud this effort to leave a few punctuation’s for the rest of u’s.
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Letting the computer dictate your decision making is pretty backwards. The computer is a tool, not the one in charge.
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ai is too busy creating hyper-realistic images like this:
via
…and making egregious errrorrs like these:
It’s also busy on facebook:
I wouldn’t trust an ai program to know the difference between an apostrophe, a comma, and a hole in the ground.
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It’s not just the apostrophe that’s missing:
And while this example may seem to have more than adequate punctation, it’s apparently still got some missing:
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i think that kind of rule exists to indicate the need for trimmed input. the laws are supposed to guide the software, not - like what is happening to the poor apostrophes - the other way 'round
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Local residents Thomas and Mary O’Brian would like a word with the council regarding their shitty software.
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Very nice that the Councils thing proves idiocy can be promoted at any level of government at all, not just the Nationals. Not everyone can follow along Clarkson’s Farm S3.
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“the town with no apostrophe” what a sad place to live for all the Cyranos!
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happy cake day flossaluzitarin! ( please watch out for the plastic babies. they may look like jesus, but they are still a choking hazard )
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This is called “we are too stupid to do databases correctly, so our only protection against a SQL injection attack is to forbid apostrophes or quotes.”
This is a VERY solved problem that a novice programmer should be able to handle, but so many big orgs fail at it, again and again.
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