oh, you right.

trying to ban them is futile

as an author, slurs in dialogue are really handy. they're intensely evocative phrases when spoken in anger or hate, and humanizing when spoken in jest. i just really hate it when someone goes on the internet to shoulder the plight of every ethnicity and creed and shouts on their assumed behalf, "no one should use mean words ever"

you're right but i don't think he was threatening me, i think he's just being difficult because nuance is scary

It is fun and easy to feel right by conflating the idea of expressive freedom with the usage of a specific racial slur laden with a unique history of systemic violence and dehumanization, hell yeah.

but louis ck thinks you're being a faggot

Language is an evolving, organic tool, and attempting to police it usually says more about the person doing the policing than the person speaking. When we start labeling certain verbiage as "correct" or "incorrect," we aren't actually protecting the language; we are just enforcing a personal or social preference.

Communication is about the transmission of ideas. If the message was received, the language did its job. Whether it was delivered with a academic precision or through "crass" slang is irrelevant to its functional success. Demanding that everyone adhere to a specific aesthetic or moral standard of speech is just a subtle way of trying to control how others express their reality. If you make certain words the enemy, you're essentially arguing for a narrow, sterilized version of expression that leaves no room for the raw or the unconventional. It's better to engage with the actual argument being made rather than retreating into the safety of tone policing.

I was banned for inciting violence. The topic of discussion was a video game.

a fanciful answer i heard was that "humans are how the universe perceives itself," and a person could be forgiven for thinking that the point of humans is to do science. closer to the ground, the point of humans seems to be to alter our surroundings to suit our society: kind of like ants. we build, we live, we reproduce, we spread. it's not a good thing or a bad thing, it just is what it is.

utility has several virtues, but i agree that it's not the end-all/be-all. strictly speaking the "point" of any living thing is to pass it's genes by reproduction, but in a complex and evolving world there are lots of animals that have a "point" in existing. oysters filter water, worms enrich soil, birds spread seeds, bees pollinate flowers, there are primary decomposers and secondary decomposers and tertiary decomposers and some birds build nests in trees and squirrels hide nuts and, you get the picture?

then there are other animals that we have changed for their utility. cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep are delicious and they would not make up such a share of modern biomass if we didn't industrialize their slaughter. in some cases the point of an animal is that we're gonna eat it.

if you're an emotion-forward person you might think "oh, no, that's terrible!" and you're allowed to feel that way but usually things are the way they are for a bunch of reasons. feelings are great but food security is better. utility also has a role to play in conservation: we're having a great time with industry but if the earth suffers catastrophic ecological collapse, the whole party stops.

Zombo.com.is remarkably different. You used to be able to do anything...

i learned something fun: goodwill sells kitchen knives for a dollar a pop. they're gonna be scuffed. if you get a reversible coarse/fine whetstone, you can practice sharpening your knife. if you do a good job of sharpening your knife, it will be sharp. if you fuck it up, it was a dollar.

hope this helps.

a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing

hi, i have strong feelings about the use of genai but i come at it from a very different direction (story writing). it's possible for someone to throw together a 300 page story book in an afternoon - in the style of lovecraft if they want, or brandon sanderson, or dan brown (dan brown always sounds the same and so we might not even notice). now, the assumption that i have about said 300 pager is that it will be dogshit, but art is subjective and someone out there has been beside themselves pining for it.

but this has always been true. there have always been people churning out trash hoping to turn a buck. the fact that they can do it faster now doesn't change that they're still in the trash market.

so: i keep writing. i know that my projects will be plagiarized by tech companies. i tell myself that my work is "better" than ai slop.

for you, things are different. writing code is a goal-oriented creative endeavor, but the bar for literature is enjoyment, and the bar for code is functionality. with that in mind, i have some questions:

if someone used genai to generate code snippets and they were able to verify the output, what's the problem? they used an ersatz gnome to save them some typing. if generated code is indistinguishable from human code, how does this policy work?

for code that's been flagged as ai generated- and let's assume it's obvious, they left a bunch of GPT comments all over the place- is the code bad because it's genai or is it bad because it doesn't work?

i'm interested to hear your thoughts