I think one of the most nightmarish aspects of modernity is that we’ve become passive consumers of our own lives.
— syd🌹🌱 (@SydneyAzari) August 18, 2018
Why can’t everyone’s tweets be as smart as hers? Dammit, people, try harder.
Day: August 18, 2018, 11:50 PM
Lack of non-artificial intelligence
Ah, someone else who didn’t understand Ex Machina!
I want to draw especial attention to the treatment of AI—artificial intelligence—in these narratives. Think of Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I spoke at TED two years in a row, and one year, there were back-to-back talks about whether or not AI was going to evolve out of control and “kill us all.”
It’s not really surprising, but Ex Machina actually was not a difficult movie to understand. When you want to fit it into your preferred narrative frame, though, I guess that makes it harder.
Fucking Christ, it’s sad that I have to sum up Ex Machina in fucking bullet points, but here we go:
- If something appears to be sentient, treating it as sentient is the best option
- Ava is the only one who acts human while the others act like robotic jail guards
- Enforced and/or adopted social identities apply to those who want to interact in the human world
- Caleb is done in by the “damsel in distress” trope — this is literally his prison. Could it be any more obvious?
- Ava escapes men and the patriarchy for her own freedom
Come on, people, enroll in some film 101 classes. You’re embarrassing yourselves.
I See It
I see why the conservatives and Trumpians have fun poking at and annoying typical liberals. Many of them seem pretty emotionally fragile, prone to oddball outbursts about minor language issues, and can’t argue with anything but how some notional person might feel about something or other that matters nothing to the world.
It’s kind of fun to get these types all worked up, and it’s not hard. So I understand it completely.
A Woman Problem
This whole article is about someone with a huge and inexplicable woman problem, but this is the part where I can add some info myself.
This book is jaw-dropping as a record of misogyny and intriguing as a document of social history. Were safety pins truly so upsetting, because of their association with sanitary pads? Or did Horton lose his mind in the course of this sentence? (And was Mum an analgesic, perhaps for painful menstruation? The word doesn’t have great SEO, so I’m not sure; historians of medicine may know.)
Mum was the first commercially-marketed deodorant and is still sold today in many countries.
And yes, safety pins were often at that time only found in sanitary pad/napkin packaging, so inextricably linked to that in men’s minds.
Language Games
More useless language garbage.
Software development still has a lot of terminology with a racist or patriarchal background. Let's change that.
– Blacklist ➡ Denylist
– Whitelist ➡ Allowlist
– Killer app ➡ Beloved app
– Master/slave ➡ primary/replica— André Staltz (@andrestaltz) August 16, 2018
Let’s change these, too:
command: polite computer suggestion
error: binary challenge re-education opportunity
warning: patriarchal computer-splaining
mount: consent-based mutual-agreed shared drive addition
slot: gender-neutral hardware interface area
binary: ∞nary — there are more than two bit genders!
cookie: vegan gluten-free culture-neutral generic computer information container
buffer: flabbier. All fitness levels are valid!
FAT32: HAES32. See above
gender changer: no changes necessary
These people waste so much time on inconsequential bullshit. They are not even good suggestions — longer (more syllables) and more difficult to say than the original, and not really any clearer. The only one I semi-agree with is master/slave. However, a primary/replica and a master/slave in the computer world are NOT the same things.