Language police are extremely uncool; going around telling people which words they are allowed to use mostly just hurts your own cause. It has the exact same effect that an old Christian woman scolding kids not to use swear words has. Eventually people realize that your magic words give them power and it becomes cool and useful to start using them in the exact opposite way you want them to.
The only way for you to achieve the goal of making sure nobody’s feelings are hurt by words is to take away the power of the words. You only give the words MORE power by reacting to them.
I think about this quote from Ricky Gervais a lot. He's had more than a few controversies, which you may or may not agree with but I think his take here is apt.
"Please stop saying 'You can't joke about anything anymore'. You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system."
If you want to make fun of bartender who is strict their, a prude calling them a homosexual is just a non sequitur not an insult. Its not policing language its someone calling you out and saying your a fuckwit for being unable to inteligentlly insult someone or describe a sitution. That's way I don't like insulting people by calling them gay its just not saying what i want to convey maybe thats the "don't say gay kid" but i think its just indicitive that the people who say that didn't get the point of what was being said to begin with. Aka up your insult game there are ton of insults that are way weightier than calling someone a homosexual.
I’m sorry we’re not allowed to tell people they’re a stupid piece of shit or even that you disagree with their hateful rhetoric. Only the people saying the worst things should be protected and have free speech, we should limit our speech out of respect for theirs
I'm not telling anyone they can't clutch their pearls and tell other people what to do. All I'm saying is that you will never win the cultural battle that way. Building a culture that does things like getting people fired from their jobs for using magic words, even if there is obviously no intentional malice in those words, is a great way to lose elections.
OP is not looking to get people fired for using particular words. OP doesn't appear to be fighting any sort of political battle. OP is telling people to be nice, and that's as much his right as it is yours to use the wrong words.
And I don't think elections or "the culture" should have anything to do with it. If that's how we made every decision, life would only improve for whoever exists in the overall majority. What if we each chose to have some integrity and do the right thing, even when there's nothing measuring it? It wouldn't kill us, I don't think.
That's only true of people who overreact or use offense as an excuse to let off some righteous anger. Most people don't react that way, even if that is what you'll most often see surfaced on social media because it's the most exciting and engaging sort of reaction. Most people will just tell you it's not a good thing to say and let you quietly reflect on it, or just exit the conversation.
tbh politely saying it bothers you is totally fine. That's not my argument.
All I'm saying is that making it your personal mission to make sure nobody uses the words in any context has lead us to where we are now, where we have a big backlash and young people are using gay and retarded more than they ever would have if we maybe just chilled out a little bit with the language policing.
We have taken this magic word mindset so far that we created a broad set of words that were so taboo you could get fired for using them in ANY context, even if you are talking about the word itself (like the case with the Papa Johns guy). And we had institutions like Stanford coming up with inane things like the "Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative" where they wanted to police words like "crazy" and "dumb".
Who said anything about scolding anyone lol. I responded very calmly.
I'm sorry, but you'll never win me over that the world be a better place if only we could bring back overtly prejudiced speech.
Actions have consequences. You can say whatever the hell you want, but doesn't mean you deserve respect, or not to be corrected, or not to face the consequences of saying overtly bigoted words.
The fact is... calling negative things gay implies being gay is bad, and therefore we should stop calling negative things gay if we want to support all the good people in the LGBTQ community.
>I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that
Making a point of trying to shame other people for using words you don’t like is a losing game in the long run.
The “actions have consequences” argument is what lead us to where we are now where you can see an obvious backlash.
Heck the papa John’s pizza guy got fired for using a magic word in an obviously non-derogatory way, and it was the same “actions have consequences” mentality even though basically nobody would be genuinely offended by his usage of it.
If you continue to make a big deal out of every usage of gay and retarded those words will only grow in power and popularity because you are showing someone that they have the power to get you to freak out if they use them.
You can see the opposite effect with traditional swear words, which are so used in popular media that they have lost almost all of their power.
Out of curiosity, what about calling someone a racist, a fascist, a Nazi, a bigot, etc.? Are those all fine too and better to just put out there so no one is, I guess, disempowered? Should we let everyone throw around racist and hateful slurs casually, and also label people using them with the traditional labels for those who engage in that kind of behavior?
Those words you listed are an example of exactly what I’m talking about. Words like Nazi, bigot, etc have lost most of their power now because they have been used so much. 5-10 years ago those labels could ruin your life and people in the US would trip over themselves to prove how those labels didn’t apply to them. Now a great number of young people don’t care at all about being labeled as those things, and being labeled as one of those things is much less likely to ruin one’s life/career.
I’m just saying that words have the power they are given by people. If you don’t want to be offended by a special word you then just don’t give it the power to hurt you.
“Queer” is another example. It used to be a slur, gay people decided collectively that they were going to take the word back, and it worked. Go ahead and call someone queer as a slur in San Francisco, it doesn’t really work the same as if you had called someone queer in the Midwest in 1990.
I've only realized this somewhat recently, and it happens passively, but the way people use some of these magic words helps me to categorize the person who said it.
Sure, use whatever derogatory or offensive words you want, I don't really mind, but I am damn sure going to judge you based on it.
I don't tend to be the "don't use that word" type of person though. But I'm absolutely the "get the fuck out of this 'will make me dumber' conversation" type of person.
I tend to agree, the words someone chooses tell you about the kind of person they are. Context is usually obvious, you can tell if someone is trying to be edgy, if someone normally uses the word in their vocabulary with their friends, or if they are genuinely using it in a hateful way.
The genuine hateful usage is the actually bad thing that people want to stop, but many people mistakenly think they are fighting hatred by policing other people’s vocabulary.
Genuinely hateful usage is of course important to stop but let's not pretend that hearing negative things called something you are all day isn't damaging to people.
The idea that gay people walk around and hear "Oh that's gay as hell!" whenever someone stubs their toe, or loses in a game or whatever and don't have that affect them is silly and it clearly progresses into a culture where people don't feel comfortable being themselves.
It's a good thing that since I've grown up we don't say "oh you're not acting black enough", or "oh that's so Jewish", or any other variation of things that may not seem harmful at the time but end up perpetuating a "right" and a "wrong" whether intentional or not.
My X / Twitter account is 17 years old. I made it 2 years after the website was founded, and for a long time I thought Twitter was the most personally positive and professionally valuable social media website I participated in.
Often when I wanted to research a niche technical topic I would search for it on Twitter, or tweet about it and see who in my network knew more. Often I would see individuals with niche followings say incredibly insightful or valuable stuff years before other people were saying it. I also had a bunch of professional connections form on Twitter along with many job opportunities I could have pursued.
Now I view X as having destroyed nearly all of that. The system is so setup to reward rage-bait and slop that even if I try to curate my experience for it the meaningful individuals get drowned out. The algorithm and all the actions taken on the website seem more about creating a social manipulation machine for Musk than enriching its users, and as a result many of the most thoughtful and valuable people have scattered away from the platform.
I'm all for diversity of thought, but X under Musk is about non-transparent algorithmic manipulation of speech and manipulating emergent behavior to achieve political goals. It is one thing to unban people, but it's another thing to intentionally break all tools (like ban lists) that enable people to self moderate. Musk's X amplifies certain speech and then disempowers people who try to attain higher quality more productive discourse.
The watershed event that caused Musk to buy Twitter was when Twitter banned the Babylon Bee for making a joke about Katlyn Jenner.
Most left leaning people were blind to the increasingly censorious management of old Twitter. It had been ramping up pretty aggressively though up to that point.
Personally I haven’t noticed the algorithm disrupt my usage of X. I follow interesting makers and tech type people, and my feed is mostly stuff aligned with my interests. I didn't have the same network/professional usage you’re describing so maybe that’s the main difference for me.
As a way of staying informed and entertained it is better to me than old Twitter. But perhaps you are right as a way of networking or collaborating maybe it’s different now, idk because I never used it like that.
It was not a Jenner joke: "The Babylon Bee's Man of the Year Is Rachel Levine" was the tweet that got them banned. Cringey but not remotely ban-worthy imho.
The context being that USA Today had celebrated Levine as one of its "Women of the Year".
Or as the Babylon Bee put it:
"Levine is the U.S. assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where he serves proudly as the first man in that position to dress like a western cultural stereotype of a woman."
Far too blasphemous for Twitter's censors at the time.
It’s impossible to offer any differing opinions or discussion on the differences between the smart TV thing and your whataboutism without triggering a flame war and being downvoted to oblivion.
What does this have to do at all with the posted article about smart TV’s?
Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, outright said that it was important for this deal to go through and that is part of the "eighth front" in their war.
Larry Ellison is a vocal Zionist, leaked emails show that he vetted Marco Rubio for "fealty to Israel". In one email he outright said "Great meeting with Marco Rubio. I set him up to meet with Tony Blair. Marco will be a great friend for Israel".
Mac and iOS have something that is almost exactly the same as this called sandboxing. When a daemon or app starts one of the first things it does (usually right inside of “main”) is enable the sandbox and declare which resources to whitelist, everything else is denied.
It is only useful for guarding your own process against someone using malicious inputs to get your process to do something you don’t intend. It is not a guard against programs written by malicious actors (malware), there exist other mechanisms to guard against malware.
SELinux and Apparmor are typically configured by admins. They require root privileges and are designed with human interfaces. It is certainly atypical for a program to say "hey kernel, apply this apparmor profile to me" and they're not designed for incrementally dropping rights either.
On Windows and MacOS programs are free to sandbox themselves programmatically and without privileges. Linux is the odd one out, basically every way of reducing your privileges programmatically requires already being root or at least having an admin preconfigure the system in a way that would allow it.
The ACLU only writes these articles when the system is being used to take down something they like politically.
They never had a problem with the App Store removing Gab, Parler, or Infowars. It’s hard to take institutions like the ACLU seriously when they have such obvious bias. If the ACLU had taken a principled stance when the system was being used to take down things that they didn’t like, they would have been able to keep their legitimacy.
Care to point out anything on the page that’s factually incorrect?
It sounds like you consider it to be cancer because someone with whom you don’t agree is involved with it, but that doesn’t really provide a good reason why the article should be dismissed without even reading it.
We know that Grok, like other LLMs, is trained on data that is not held to any rigorous standard of knowledge like exists in the fields of journalism or academia.
There is no reason to think that such a system is even capable of determining truth. At best, we might be able to say that it reflects a consensus of opinion, but even that is a stretch given the nature of these systems.
And that ignores the fact that we know that these products are designed to be sycophantic to their users/operators. That is not a recipe for objective knowledge. Especially given what we know about Grok (meddling by Musk).
And to cap it all off, for all of Wikipedia's real or perceived flaws, all of the decision making is done in public view. This is very much not the case with Grok.
It's dystopian and obviously so. Your comment about "Luddite mentality" is farcical on its face. Of you, I might say something like... "techbro mentality", or maybe even something less flattering.
Your point about Wikipedia being out in the open is correct and fair. Grokipedia should do the same. Grokipedia is at version .1 and they have stated the intention is to open source it, so it seems obvious that it will be similarly open.
Just because it’s done in the open doesn’t mean it can’t have some pretty bad biases though. Just looking at the set of allowable sources shows pretty extreme bias to begin with. The type of people who self select to become Wikipedia editors (just like Reddit mods) skew heavily on many topics, and there isn’t much effort to correct for it.
Again though, you are not pointing out anything wrong with the information presented itself, only the fact that you don’t like the person/technology compiling the information.
And of course a pro-white-supremacist biased LLM is going to falsely exonerate a racist like James Watson with the same pro-racist biases that Elon Musk programmed it with.
And timonoko also regularly posts Grok generated AI slop bullshit, and even pretends to be a FORTH programmer by having Grog generate code that doesn't do anything like what he claims it does, which should be obvious if he even glanced at the code he was posting. I'd hate to see the kind of Grok-generated buggy crap he unwittingly checks into source code control.
It's strange that timonoko is so compelled to virtue signal so often that he shares Musk's and Grok's racist views. But at least now we know what kind of person he is.
James Watson just stated that intelligence and race are related. Something that every normal person knows and experiences regularly. Calling things that you don’t like racist doesn’t work anymore, nobody cares.
There is so much anti white hatred present in media, many people yearn for a source of information to correct for it.
One example just this week the economist published this wonderful headline:
>With Trump and Vance in power, many pro-natalists believe this is the moment to jump-start baby-making. But some critics see pro-natalism as part of an insidious project to create a whiter America
There are hundreds of headlines like this present in publications that are in Wikipedia’s allowable sources list. We are happy to have a source to correct for its bias.
You did not address any of the actual information presented, only the fact that you don’t like the people/technology used to create it, which kind of makes my point.
Imagine if we sent Senagal $10M per day in tax payer money and questioning it led to your own politicians labeling you as "anti-senagalese" and being ousted from every political party.
"The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world"
"Like other big tech companies, Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses routinely comply with requests from police, prosecutors and security services to hand over customer data to assist investigations."
The way I interpret this is Google, Amazon operates in multiple countries under multiple jurisdictions. The security services for any of these countries(including for example Egypt where Google has offices according to....Google), can produce a legal(in Egypt) order requesting Google to produce data of another customer( for example Israeli govt) and Google has to comply or leave Egypt.
It seems to me that being under constant threat of your government sensitive data being exposed at the whims of another, potentially adversarial government is not a sustainable way of operating and Im surprised that Israel havent either found ways of storing its infrastructure locally or encrypting it five way to Sunday.
This is not a comment on the specific accusation of actions by Israel but for strange reality of being a small-country government and a customer of a multi-national cloud vendor.
The only way for you to achieve the goal of making sure nobody’s feelings are hurt by words is to take away the power of the words. You only give the words MORE power by reacting to them.
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