Stupid Computer Tricks

I ran into an odd problem this week; a user found that whenever they started Chrome on their Mac, the bookmarks on the bookmark bar would spontaneously rearrange themselves. The user only noticed because he tried to put two bookmarks next to each other, and they kept ending up back where they started.

We investigated further. It didn't matter if we dragged the bookmarks around on the bookmark bar, or did it via the bookmark manager, they still got reverted to their original state. It only happened on quitting and restarting Chrome. They would come up in the desired order, and then a few seconds after starting they would jump back to the original.

I tried "Reorder by title" in the Bookmark manager; oddly enough some of the resulting changes got preserved on restart and some did not. Having done that, I wasn't able to put them back the way they had been, which didn't make the user very happy.

Dr Google was no help; I read a great many explanations of how to use or clear bookmark synching on your google account. But the user didn't have this set up and wasn't logged in anyway. I even tried disconnecting the internet connection; the problem remained.

I discovered that Chrome bookmarks are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Bookmarks (you can get to the Library folders by holding down Option while you selection the Go menu in Finder). I had a look; it's a fairly readable text document. I took a copy after closing Chrome down with the bookmarks in the right spot, and the contents were as expected. Copying this over the main file (and the .bak file for luck) appeared to control what order the bookmarks appeared in at the start, before they were magically reordered. Where else could there be copies?

I looked through the rest of the contents of the Default folder, and found a folder called "Sync Data Backup". Sounded interesting; I closed down Chrome, moved the contents (an sqlite database) out to a temporary location, and restarted. Jackpot! The bookmarks remained unmoved. Changes to their order now persisted through restarts. A new sqlite database file had appeared, but this one apparently did not have delusions of grandeur.

I have no idea what state the database file had got into that caused it to override bookmark order in this way, but I report this in case it proves useful to someone else with the same problem.

I should add that messing with random config files may cause you untold grief; make sure you keep track of what you have done so that it may be undone if need be. Backups are your friend. I don't know what is the database file besides bookmark ordering, and if you commonly use synching you might be killing off other things that you want to keep.

Summary: if Chrome messes with your bookmarks, and you do not have syncing turned on, stop Chrome, delete ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Sync Data Backup/SyncData.sqlite3 and start it again.

Bingo!

Rebecca Watson shoots; she scores.

Richard Dawkins is a tireless campaigner for causes I support, but he does have a bit of a tin ear. I was going to say that I hoped he could read that parody and become enlightened, but it may be that he has already seen that particular error for what it was. In searching for the correct link, I ran into this:

"There should be no rivalry in victimhood, and I’m sorry I once said something similar to American women complaining of harassment, inviting them to contemplate the suffering of Muslim women by comparison."

Sadly, it came up because he was claiming Sam Harris was the victim of a witch hunt, for his comments about why his readership skewed male.

I don't know whether Sam Harris' readership (or atheists, or public atheists, or whatever it was) skews male. If it does, I don't know why. If it's rampant sexism, I am much less likely to notice than the targets of the sexism; sad but true. I find him an interesting writer, even if I sometimes think he's wildly wrong. I thought his comments were rather wooden, and if I'd been there I would have been wincing and hoping the interview would move on.

But when Sam Harris says that "There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women"... it's a bit rich to describe public criticism of this, by women, as a witch hunt.

There seems to be a bit of a low-level war going on in the atheist community over this issue (or maybe it's just the blogs I read). I am not surprised that there are sexist atheists out there, although I have been rather taken aback by the levels of vitriol they produce. But having that conversation in public is a good thing; the stifling of debate that religion can produce is one of its worst side-effects (short of actual physical violence).

Women should not be told to shut up and quit complaining. The way to stop them complaining is to listen and fix the problems. Sam Harris can maybe take an hour to think about how he could "modify his speaking or writing style" to double his audience; if he concludes that it's not worth it, that's his right.

But please no more complaints about coherent, articulate criticism.

Clickbait uses one weird trick: human curiosity.

I have been carefully trying to avoid seeing any coverage of the leaked celebrity pictures this week. Paparazzi annoy me at the best of times; I am a very private person, and having people buzzing around taking pictures of me and publishing the worst-looking ones would drive me into incandescent rage. It's bad enough when it's family.

Relatedly, it behooves anyone who would complain about the NSA spying on them, to object also to random individuals doing the same thing. You too can make a small contribution to the cause of privacy, by refusing to intrude on the privacy of others when given the chance. If news outlets learn that this kind of story nets them no page views, it won't be published. And these days, they get a lot more precise a picture of what people read than they used to.

The thing that really interested me about this effort was a sudden awareness of just how much click-bait there is in the world these days. "You won't believe...", "Eighteen things you must..." "The one thing that...". Many more that are not done in the classic style, but where the contents of the story are far less interesting than the headline would suggest.

Useless headlines are much older than the internet; in my youth the poster outside the newsagent (and the screaming headline on the paper itself) were notoriously misleading. The ads for the evening news (and the current affairs show after it) were another opportunity for creative writing. What's worse today is that there are so many more chances to do it and get feedback. The newspaper got one or two chances and the only feedback they got was a single sales figure. Regular readers who bought the paper anyway were completely opaque. TV was similar; the ratings were very much a blunt instrument.

But now that there is feedback on how many people read every single story, there is much more opportunity to refine the craft. This is a problem that will only get worse.

And so we must fight back. Pay attention to the classic click-bait forms, and avoid those stories. If you realise you have fallen for one, don't just close the page - leave the site and look elsewhere for news or entertainment. (Better yet, take it as a sign that you should create some content of your own. Read a book. Step outside). Reward sites that provide useful headlines by frequenting them. It will take time and numbers for the feedback to build up, and the signal may be diffuse. It's hard to pick that numbers dropped off a little today because there was a click-bait story in third position, especially if that story had the highest reader numbers, but these guys are smart enough to get the hint eventually. And if they don't, their advertisers will.

I'm probably pretty late to this party; @savedyouaclick has been skewering clickbait for a while. And it seems to have turned it into a crowd-sourced operation that hits high-traffic baiters particularly hard. So let me just say: I'm on their side.

The price of good news feeds is eternal vigilance.