I thought it was a basic understanding that unfamiliar people, events, places, etc _do_ look alike, because before you get sufficient experience and exposure, you don't have enough skill to know what features are important to focus on and which ones carry no information.
Its a well known thing that people have a harder time telling the difference but I have not seen it mentioned that software would. For example zebras are all uniquely identifiable by their stripes and other zebra and computers could identify them but I would have no hope.
It's true. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't put the effort in to learn, and especially put the effort into our software.
It's also worth considering what saying that implies to the people you're saying it to. Especially when said dismissively. I'm terrible at names, faces, voices, pretty much any way of telling people apart. But that's my problem, and I need to be careful not to push the burden of that problem onto the people around me.
If you say “i have trouble telling people of ___ race apart” that’s different from “you all look the same”. One is a statement of your own limitations, the other is saying your own limitation is actually someone else’s fault.
The first one CAN also be troubling if you have had ample exposure to become familiar, and are indirectly admitting that you did not believe it to be an important skill to learn.
Lots of white people also look the same, I grew up in a mostly Mexican environment, living in the Bay Area now, I find it difficult to recognize lots of white people apart from each other.
I'd say it's an ignorant thing to say in the way you say it. Like you said in this post, you just don't know the features to look out for when you're not familiar with them
No, software people never do anything this controversial. They were just observing that they know of a universal law of nature as described in a recent Quillete article, and/or have second-hand knowledge of a particular quirk of a specific software that is definitely not just the reflection of its creators' myopic world-view.
