[erikerikson]

Right, you're not wrong but... "No", you can't scan that box in Chicago, the system says it's in New York. The world state is invalid, not the system. Screw that guy just trying to do his job, right?

Gotta be careful with that attitude even though it represents some insight.

[Kye]

My understanding is this is how USPS packages with tracking can seem to teleport around the country. They accidentally get scanned for the outbound to somewhere, it gets caught while never leaving the tray, and they scan it back in.

[prmph]

I think the comment you're replying to is partially sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek.

[gherkinnn]

Not this time. I was quite sincere.

Let's take names. I have diacritics in mine and an appalling number of computer systems can't handle them properly. Should I drop them completely and loose a part of my language in the process? Or deal with more □? firstName + lastName is another, where our idea of naming is forces on to others with a different system.

Dates. The US sets weeks from Sun-Sat and much of US software defaults to it, even when it should know that in my locale Mon-Sun is the default. In some cases I can't even change it. And don't get me started on MM-DD-YYYY.

Processes. Talking to a human is easy. There is leeway. A computer says no. Now I have to conform.

More broadly, we humans do fantastically well with ambiguity. Modelling ambiguity is tricky, after all, computers are extremely fast morons. So that ambiguity gets lost.