Friday, January 17, 2025

Trouble Updating the Wisdom of Quinn

Josh Wisenbaker:

With the most recent update to the Apple Developer Forums, it’s become pretty much impossible to update this collected wisdom in any regular way. This is why there hasn’t been an update to the archive in a while.

The main issues are:

  • Apple staff no longer have individual accounts.
  • The collective “Apple” accounts are not searchable.

[…]

If you try to search for that username, it doesn’t really do what you expect either. It just searches for that string in posts, not for posts by that user.

Searching for “user: DTS Engineer Quinn” does a fairly decent job of finding results, but they are all over the place now. You can only see 15 of them at a time on the new forums as well.

It’s doubly disappointing that this goldmine is relegated to the forums and that it’s now so hard to find there.

Previously:

16 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon


Doesn't he always sign his posts with his usual "Eskimo" signature? If so, couldn't the scraper search for that, sort by date and get the posts that way?

Seems like it's possible:

https://developer.apple.com/forums/search?q=eskimo&sortBy=newest

I'd ask the author, but I see the "The-Wisdom-of-Quinn" project on Github has issues and discussions disabled. I hate "open" source projects like that, where the maintainers feel too precious to be in touch with their community.


Harald Striepe

We all deserve many thanks for Quinn - the Eskimo. He made up for a big void in Apple Developer Teck Support.


Perhaps it’s a good thing that Apple is lowering the prominence of someone who still uses a slur against the Inuit people in his username? (hint: it’s not the “Quinn” part)

Not saying he doesn’t offer great advice, but as time roles on it seems increasingly insensitive to me



@jb Before getting offended on behalf of a whole people, consider doing a minimum of research.

1. The name is a reference to a Bob Dylan song, which in turn is a reference to an actor in a movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinn_the_Eskimo_(Mighty_Quinn)

2. The word is not just for Inuits, you're completely ignoring the Yupik. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo

3. Do you actually *know* those people are offended, or do you just think you do like everyone thought of the word "Indian"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kh88fVP2FWQ


Why is it that white people from California get offended more than the actual people in question (“gypsies”, “Eskimo”, “Indians”, etc.)? Why is it that white people from California want to dictate language the people themselves do not want (“latinx”)?


I know it’s a reference to a Bob Dylan song. I still don’t think it’s polite to use a slur in your username. Maybe he doesn’t know? I don’t know him personally.

Regardless, what’s so wrong about trying to not offend groups of people?


"The name is a reference to a Bob Dylan song"

That's an excuse that worked great for all the people who sang along to Rap songs on TikTok and said the n-word.

"Do you actually *know* those people are offended"

Yes, and so do you.


I love this site!

Random internet copyright violator: Apple murdered me! They deleted an easy option. I'm done!
Normal person: Can't they just Google it?
Woke person: I'm offended! Apple shouldn't allow this tiny bit of individuality. Then nobody could Google it!

Maybe Apple deleted that easy option so that normal people might actually go onto the Developer forums looking for Quinn's posts. Maybe they will ask some actual coding questions. Maybe they will answer some questions. I'm sure Apple engineers like Quinn are getting tired of all the "Why did Apple reject my app offering medical advice to children paid for with casino chips purchased via Stripe?" questions.

For those that didn't already know, Apple regularly deletes documentation. Don't assume it will always be there. Don't assume that someone else is going to archive it for you.

PS: Show some love to people like Kevin Elliot, Ed Ford, Ziqiao Chen, and all the nameless "DTS Engineers" who aren't "the crazy ones" posting their real names on the internet.


How do those boots taste, Clark?


"Apple shouldn't allow this tiny bit of individuality"

Nobody said that. If you have to lie about what people said in order to make them look unreasonable, maybe you're the problem.


@Plume

Oh, the irony is almost poetic. You lecture others about “lying to make people look unreasonable,” yet you casually twist Quinn’s Bob Dylan-inspired nickname into something sinister. If this were a contest for self-awareness, Plume, you wouldn’t even make it to the starting line.

The only ones being offensive here are you and jb. I suggest you both apologize to Quinn and then kindly “log off.”


"yet you casually twist Quinn’s Bob Dylan-inspired nickname into something sinister"

Kindly point out to me where I did that. I said exactly two things:

1. Other people said an offensive slur and excused it by explaining that it is just from a song, and the people the slur referred to did not accept that explanation.

2. We do know that this term is offensive to people.

If you find either of these two points offensive, then I really don't know what to tell you, but you need to stop being such a snowflake. If you do not, then I must ask you why you lied about what I wrote.


> For those that didn't already know, Apple regularly deletes documentation. Don't assume it will always be there. Don't assume that someone else is going to archive it for you.

Actually, Apple lately has been busy solving this problem. They just don't write the documentation in the first place.


Agatha Christie wrote a book that's pretty decent I'd say. The original name was pretty offensive, so they changed it to a different name, which was at least mildly offensive. In recent decades you might know it as "And Then There Were None". I have zero problems they changed the name, because the option for me is to simply not read it at all because the name was needlessly offensive. The new name befits a mystery novel and properly evocative of the subject matter.

I grew up around the Washington DC metro area and for decades everyone swore the name of the local football team was completely fine and no one was offended by it. Well, it turned out, that wasn't really true, and the name was changed. Lo and behold, a few short years later, the team is as popular as ever because they are playing well. No one actually minded the name changed and those that hated the old name are mollified. There was no loss at all.

I told those stories to tell you this one, ignorance is okay, we can't know everything, but I'm not going to go out of my way to try offend people after they've told me certain terms were offensive. Look, sometimes people misunderstand language and can be mistaken at meanings, but in the case of self identity, I prefer to call people what they themselves prefer. I figure that respect carries over to adjacent uses of terms.


@someone You'd think the most valuable company in the entire world might be able to hire some technical writers to actually write complete documentation. But no, somehow that's beyond Apple's capacities.

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