knightly the Sneptaur

Hey @[email protected], did you forget about me?

Who are you talking about that is insisting there can be no deviation from the norm?

Right-wingers, the only people who have ever had a problem with diversity.

Banning words and discussions is absolutely the wrong way to go.

I’m confused about what you mean, because the only people doing that are the “Don’t Say Gay” Florida Republicans.

And my point is very simple. Don’t ban words.

I get the feeling that you’re going to be angry when I point out that the only people banning words are the ones who want to make it illegal to teach kids that people like me exist.

Have open discussions. Don’t support censorship of opinions or words.

Make up your mind, do you want to actually have open discussions or do you think that avoiding censorship of the “opinions and words” of discriminatory groups is more important than the presence of the groups they discriminate against?

Stop trying to control what people should think, and stop trying to teach them what you think is right.

…

What do you think “teaching” is?

But I think instead of trying to change words and ban conversations, maybe it’s better to teach people to accept and even enjoy more variations?

This is naive.

How are we supposed to teach people to accept variation when they insist that there can be no deviation from the norm?

Because right now it’s a bit ridiculous. We are told to ignore obvious differences between people so nobody feels marginalized.

I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make here. Just a moment ago you were complaining that the language we use to talk about this topic was a problem, now we’re supposedly telling people not to talk about it? Pick a lane!

I think it’s fine that everyone gets to say what their gender is, as long as the archetypal roles stay the same - man or female.

But otherwise, sure, people can define their gender how they like.

I’m noticing a contradiction here.

Gender can be a word for how people define themselves, as long as we instead use “archetypal roles” to define what our physical body looks like.

And for those of us who don’t fit those archetypes?

I think what is frustrating is when people start to say that we shouldn’t include our physical body type at all in discussions. That’s taking it too far in my opinion.

Generally, it is considered impolite to talk to strangers about one’s genitals.

Going to the doctor and not telling what body type you are makes diagnosis impossible in same cases.

The medical setting is one of the few contexts where talking about one’s anatomy isn’t considered a faux pas.

And for what reason? That part doesn’t make any sense to me.

Do you want the historical explanation of how puritainism affected our culture?

Race, body type, and other things are important to know in many cases.

They’re relevant a lot less often than you’d think.

I’ll take this as a good faith question, and the short answer is that gender is a lot more complicated than that.

Yes there are two archetypal roles involved in sexual reproduction, but even that isn’t so simple. There isn’t just one feature that defines male or female, but a combination of traits including chromosomes, gametes, anatomy, hormones, etc. In the real world, some folks are born with features that don’t all agree with one or another archetype. Intersex people aren’t common, about 1 in 2,000, but their existence proves that sex isn’t just a binary. There’s diversity to sex that requires a more complicated scheme to account for everybody.

Gender, likewise, doesn’t follow the one-or-the-other model. Most folks are cisgender, but some folks have a gender that doesn’t agree with what people assume their sex is, or no gender at all, or a gender that doesn’t fit into the man/woman spectrum. It gets complicated quickly because gender is where sex and society intersect. Some cultures have different expectations based on gender, and some even have more than two recognized genders. That’s why we say “gender is a social construct”, because we all get to define for ourselves what it means to be a man, woman, or otherwise. And that’s also how gender is constructed, it’s a social project we all engage in collectively whether we realize it or not. Most just pass along the traditional gender roles that were passed to them, but those can change rather rapidly as society changes, like when clean-shaven faces became “manly” in response to WW1 soldiers having to shave so that their gas masks could maintain a good seal.

Precisely.

Gender isn’t binary, there is no such thing as a male or female nipple. That distinction is something that Humans made up.

Irradiated water is fine.

You’re thinking of radioactive water, which is water with radioactive stuff in it.

Subjecting regular water to regular amounts of radiation is fine, even if it’s high-energy gamma rays. If there’s enough radiation to make water itself radioactive then you have bigger problems than radioactive water.

The argument could be made economically rather than ideologically.

Capitalism has a failure mode where too much capital gets concentrated into too few hands, depressing the flow of money moving through the economy.

But Capitalists start crying “Socialism!” as soon as you start talking about anti-trust.

Tulips all the way down…

There are lots of chat clients.

Fortunately, only Discord is also trying to be a for-profit walled garden, a support forum, an in-game voice chat app, a community hub, a media channel, a political soapbox, a video game store, a livestreaming service, a bot playground, and now, apparently, a pirate fileshare.

This is my genuine opinion and I don’t appreciate the condescension.

You don’t have to like it, but trying to dismiss it as mere trolling is, at best, intellectually dishonest.

Good.

Discord sucks at such a fundamental level that the lack of any competing apps for this particularly awful niche actually restores some of my faith in humanity.

Discord sucks and nobody should use it.

Given that photocopiers can do a scribes job (copy the text on this page onto a new page),

That’s not a scribe’s job, that’s not even the entirety of an apprentice scribe’s job (which also includes making paper, making ink, bookbinding, etc.)

A scribe’s job is to perform secretarial and administrative duties, everything from record-keeping and library management to the dictation and distribution of memoranda.

A photocopier is not capable of those things, but if it was then it’d be deserving of the same compensation and legal status afforded to the humans that currently do it.

I presume you are part of a pressure group to pay them pensions.

We have to start treating things that claim to be “AI” as deserving of human rights, or else things are going to get very ugly once it’s possible to emulate scanned human brains in silicon.

If the photocopier is smart enough to do a scribe’s job then it deserves human rights, fair wages, and a pension just like the rest of us.

But technology is fantastic at accuracy, better than humans in many regards.

This isn’t about “technology”, it’s about large language models, which are neither “fantastic at accuracy” or “better than humans”.

Gemini might have a way to go before it gets there, but it or its successors will get there and it’s moving fast.

Large language models are structurally incapable of “getting there”, because they are models of language, not models of thought.

And besides, anything that is smart enough to “get there” deserves human rights and fair compensation for the work they do, defeating the purpose of “AI” as an industry.

If AI can make the services of the National Archives more productive for its staff and/or the public then surely that’s a good thing?

The word “If” is papering over a number of sins here.

Nvidia drivers are mostly OK now.

Seems like a distinction without much difference to me.

*with or without

FTFY

Do it.