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Secret Panel 💦

Transcript

4 Panel Comic

Panel 1: A doctor lifts up a healthy baby in front of a tired mom

Doctor: Welcome to the world, little guy!

Panel 2: The doctor holds the child up in front of a tablet

Doctor: You need to create a life account

Panel 3: The baby is frustrated as the tablet rejects the input

Tablet: Sorry, that username is taken

Panel 4: The baby facepalms as the tablet needs even more info to create the account

Tablet: You need to make an email account for Two-Factor Authentication

Secret Panel: The baby sweats as the tablet continues

Tablet: Enjoy your 30 day trial of life. After-which, there is a monthly charge.

  • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus
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    3 days ago

    Ehm i looked up the distribution beforehand, see my edit. These things are not distributed evenly - you have a few surnames with an insane amount in relation to any others before even coming to homophones which tilt the balance even harder towards those supercommon surnames. Smith and Brown are the ones you would have real issues if using the suggested unique name schemata.

    Edit: There’s a whole another issue with this approach. If we do this on a per-country-basis, people moving into foreign countries will have to add the country of birth to everything, for example doctors appointments, for the rest of your life in case of a name collision. Making the system work worldwide will exacerbate the issue with very common surnames, because these are not only common in a single country. (Even in the DACH-area the name Schmid/Schmied/Schmidt and so on, which is simply the german form of Smith, is one of the most common surnames)

      • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus
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        3 days ago

        i do not know what you are calculating here.

        You need 21500 names for the last name “Smith” alone without any homophones messing everything up. There is no second “500”.

        Edit: unless you mean forcibly reassigning last names. That will go down real smooth mate, go for it lol

        • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Names in English typically have three components. A given name, middle name, and surname. Within any given surname, assuming people choose only to pick from the top 500 for the given names and middle names, that is 500 × 500 combinations.

          However, there is in fact more variety in given names. The top 1,000 given names account for 72% of children according to the US Social Security Administration.

          So there are actually at least 1 million viable combinations. Certain enough that except for all but the most common names (“John William Smith”), a person’s trinomial name is almost already going to be unique.

          • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus
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            2 days ago

            Ah, you are counting middle names. The one i know exactly noone actively using. I have one too! But the amount of people knowing it is around 7, and most of them will already have forgotten it.

            This makes everyone’s name they have to use in basic situations increase in size by about 50%. I can’t see many people being happy about that change.

            • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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              2 days ago

              Are you being obtuse on purpose? Nothing is supposed to change about everyday use of names. This is to make indexing easier by allowing records to be easily searched by formal legal name and birth year, information that is always available and always known to the person whose records are being found.

              • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus
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                2 days ago

                I am not being obtuse. There are tons of cultures not following your name schema. It makes people moving from one country to another a pain in the ass.

                • NateNate60@lemmy.world
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                  2 days ago

                  Yeah, and I am a member of one of those other cultures. I maintain my position that you are talking about an overblown problem. And if it becomes a problem, they can pick a fourth name to distinguish it. Immigrants making modifications to their names when they arrive in a new country is not a new phenomenon, and the overwhelming majority of them will not have to make any modifications as well.

                  Here’s a better attack line for you to adopt, since your previous one was bad: How would the proposed system deal with people who had non-unique names before the system was implemented? That is something that would be far more disruptive.