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misuba

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Inside Palantir 10 years ago

At least they have the decency to tell you who they work for right in their name.

News was their product, but they made their money by delivering ads to everyone's doorstep on a daily basis.

How does Google make money?

As discussed elsewhere in the thread, rights are not at issue; social consequences are. This is about a group of people saying, "not everything you have the right to do is beneficial. When introducing something into a given conversation in a given way, for the mere sake of the performance of your right, has known negative effects on the conversation and the people in it, you're not being a free speech warrior; you're being a jerk."

Where you read "safety" in this article and other discussions of the issue, it's illuminating to substitute the words "regard as full human beings."

Contexts that don't regard certain classes of people - those with a history of this lack of regard - as full human beings are going to be considered obsolete by today's undergraduates. That's just a given. Repair these contexts and universities would see a lot of these problems go away.

There are, of course, contexts you can't repair - namely, works that have value but were made in, or contain, obsolete contexts. The recontextualization work here can be difficult, it's true, but universities and professors that don't do it are going to be hearing about it.

Hey man, I just finished "What is Code," gimme a minute to refill my magazine-article bar.

As for my admittedly prejudicial feelings towards The Economist, it's been a long ride and I couldn't point to anything specific. I've just developed a tendency not to be surprised when they don't regard certain things as important, or certain other things as fallible.

However, it is pretty clear the intent of the academic in question was to promote discussion and debate about racism.

The Internet - yes, that other one with all the SJWs and their vapid twitterings - has a saying it is wise to take to heart: "Intent is not magic." The particular intent cited has even less magic than most, precisely because it's so often used as a defense by people who are essentially trolling under cover of art.

Not discussed in the article's introduction is whether Mr. Tanyolacar, and by extension The Economist, might possibly have any learning to do about how race works in America, and whether that learning might be something that he and they are currently experiencing as trauma.

There's a point past which trigger warnings are silly; Klan hoods in the quad aren't past it. That professor's an idiot at best, and The Economist has again chosen a revealing bedfellow.

I think I'm like most of us in that I had completely forgotten about annotations. They sound cool.

But I suspect that many of us also don't much want Twitter to get better anymore. We'd rather see an alternative get good enough to switch to.

HTML is done 11 years ago

"HТML uses a Cyrillic ‘Т’ to avoid any possible confusion with HTML." brb laughing until I cry

HTML is done 11 years ago

it's irresponsible to point out a pile of shit without pointing to a shovel.

Nope, try another metaphor: you have the right to flinch away when something stinks, even if you don't know where the nearest rose garden is.

(That said, I think he's wrong. JavaScript has a hell of a lot going for it right now, and CSS and the DOM are starting to take advantage of the effects of that.)

You will probably need to support him - all of these things are soon going to be out of the reach of people who can reach them now.

What I hear you saying is you personally identify with what you perceive as intellectual honesty, what you perceive as rationality, and the freedom to say whatever you want without worrying whether listeners will like it.

The trouble with such identifications, though, is they can lead to logical errors that make your life a lot worse, by causing you to feel as though a question about your intellectual honesty, rationality, or empathy is in fact a personal attack. This happens entirely unconsciously, and repairing it can seriously suck.

I could go into the ways in which I eventually learned that challenges to my own intellectual honesty and rationality ended up strengthening them both once I stopped reacting to those challenges emotionally and started choosing to believe in the good will of the people making them. But that might just be tedious; instead I will say that in my own life, waving the banner for diversity and equality has come along with being happier, feeling more decent, and being more energetically invested in technology than I was before.

The point is, how do you know the difference between something that's "who you really are" and something that you simply feel discomfort around being asked to change?

Please, please, please do not help every nerd who experiences discomfort at being called out on sexism to believe they have some undiagnosed shadow syndrome and are being oppressed because of it. Please don't do that. If only because it would be profoundly disrespectful to people with real diagnoses.

And, I should be clear, for me as well. I happen not to have bad reactions to expressions of feminism - if I knew how I avoided that, believe me, I'd tell the world - but I carry those wounds from my childhood and they fuck up my life every day.

If, by your own admission, you just don't like something, you can't claim that "who [you] really are" is being "destroyed" if you're taught how to avoid injury in dealing with it. Your pet peeves are not a part of you.

But the proof can't be made. If you’re conditioned to feel like an outsider, you’re going to believe the rejection is always lurking around the corner, and the acceptance is never real, never complete. You’ll remain in sullen sureness that outside is where you’ve been placed — or you’ll keep testing, poking and prodding for the thing you could do that’s horrible enough to prove that you were never really welcome.

The word the author is looking for to distinguish "weird nerds" from "nerds" should never have been "weird" - the word is "wounded." And the wound is real, crippling, and unjustly dealt. Time doesn't heal all wounds. We shouldn't be looking to prove something that can't be proven; we should be looking to heal the wound, actually heal it, in all the generations of children to come. Or even, heavens forfend, stop it from being inflicted at all.