Well, here's a new accursed UI pattern. When you try to book a flight on Chase rewards and key in the exact code for the airport you want to go to, it suggests a bunch of non-matching airports, and puts the exact match like 10 options down.
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@pluralistic that's increasingly my experience with fuzzy search, it's like regular search but with wrong results.
@pluralistic someone (ai?) just mess with the return order
@pluralistic Another in the same vein:
The oil monopoly (who's app your using) wants you to burn more Jet-A in their rewards program.
@pluralistic it won’t surprise you to learn that JIRA and Slack do the same thing: https://dwlt.net/blog/2023/07/16/searching-is-broken/
@pluralistic I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the search has been optimised to look for the name rather than the code. So it might not be enshitification but in fact really poor UX and not testing things before you release them.
@pluralistic I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the search has been optimised to look for the name rather than the code. So it might not be enshitification but in fact really poor UX and not testing things before you release them.
@pluralistic My best guess is they are trying to perform the search using some semantic embedding vector distance, like one does in translation and language models or recommendation algorithms.This is a perfect example of how "forcing AI on everything" fucks up where exact computing algorithms would have worked better with a fraction of the resources.
@pluralistic I recently had to buy some tire chains. Looked up the exact PN on the manufacturer's website. Searched that PN on Walmart, one single result popped up, and it was in stock at my local store. Great! Went and bought it, and found out it was the wrong one when they wouldn't fit my tires. Turns out the Walmart search found a very similar, but not quite the same, PN. No indication like "we couldn't find an exact match, but here's something similar". I hate modern "search".
@pluralistic Not that new. See it all the time in map apps. Type the exact name, or part of it, primary results are worse stochastic matches. No idea what the sorting key is.
Can't remember when search was a useful tool, instead of a wild spirit you had to placate with some arcane, properly worded spell.
@8r3n7 @pluralistic A Google maps search for the full name of a local school returns , in random order, both that school (2 sites), and another school a few miles away, also with a name ending "community school". They haven't fixed it since I reported the error. They're in a very similar direction from my place, and I only really use Google maps for driving directions with live traffic info (OSM is far better for actual maps). All very confusing, and new in the last few months.
@pluralistic I have come to believe that there are no accidents. The intent here is pretty clearly that you book a flight to the wrong location.
@pluralistic „nobody knows the airport codes“ I’m sure the UX expert said. I’d suggest the code should only match on the airport name, not the city or the IATA codes or the call sign. That will surely differentiate the audience between frequent flyers and everbody else :-)
@pluralistic and the suggestions aren’t sorted by alpha for IATA code or airport name or location… 🤯
@pluralistic
I think Chase doesn't discount the tickets, so why use them? You can get your points out in cash and use a better site to book flights.
@pluralistic - I don't use it compulsively, but I'm inclined to call occam's razor on this one.
@pluralistic The weather is great in Gonggar this time of year!
@pluralistic I hope you enjoy your time in Lanzhou.
@pluralistic we will be seeing many more stories like [this](https://www.fresnobee.com/news/nation-world/national/article272083132.html) soon
@pluralistic It's like the Google Play Store, A search for almost any app will always put an ad for a competing app in the first position.
@nuintari @pluralistic this infuriates me to no end. Enshittification has occurred everywhere, nearly.
I'm my new community/complex/whatever I need an app to open the gates. There's no fobs, despite explicitly being listed as available in the lease.
So if your phone is inaccessible for any reason, tough shit on getting in with your vehicle.
My front door is able to be opened via NFC/rfid, which 2 physical fobs were given for that don't work for the gates. $75 to replace these little plastic pieces of shit, to which I'm just going to clone anyways.
(So far I'm happy here, but the encroaching Enshittification in everyday life is nauseating as much as it is enraging.)
@nuintari @pluralistic not to mention trying to find finding an exact item (including perhaps a part number) on Amazon. And it is isn't just their 'sponsored' results that pack out the results.
@pluralistic Mystery Travel Destination is an exciting new travel benefit, not a bug.
@pluralistic Maybe I don't know enough, but it feels like it would take MORE work to produce this shoddy result. What in the heck?!
Hey, maybe they don't like how LHR doesn't post gate info until the last minute? HA
Not just there. It's like no one programming these things knows what an ICAO code is, and can't imagine anyone who does.
@BenHM3 @pluralistic The UK's national rail enquiries system has a similar thing with station codes that are also substrings of other stations' names, but not this bad. It's also fairly new, along with their new "responsive" website that means more, longer, waits for things to load (and no longer encodes the station code in the URL, which was a nice workaround to avoid having to reload the search page for familiar stations)
