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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • Thanks for explaining! Let me explain why I disagree with this in general. I’ll share a personal anecdote, bear with me please.

    So, a feminist friend shared with me a book on human trafficking for sexual exploitation written by a group of investigative journalists that she had helped translate to Serbian. It was thoroughly researched and well documented. Reading it left a mark on me and taught me things about the world that shatter the childish worldview (this was decades ago, I was a young teenager at the time).

    Now, the Serbian translation was prefaced by my friend’s fellow activist who was clearly a misandrist. The preface was filled with slurs and general assumptions of complicity and guilt about exclusively men, despite the fact that even the very book the preface was for stated that men also get trafficked (though less), and that women themselves are not rarely involved in the illegal trafficking chains of operation (think Ghislane Maxwell).

    Reading that preface made me feel unjustly attacked and I would have dropped the book and never got to the good, educational part, had it not been for my friend’s highest recommendation (I’m glad I stuck with it). It turns out the woman who wrote this had had bad experiences with men in her life, and used this otherwise well researched book as a vessel to vent her personal hate for men, which was borne out of her own trauma.

    While it can be considered “justified” that she feels this way, this damaged greatly the overall message of the Serbian translation, which clearly took a lot of effort to research, document and write, and than translate and publish in my country. Its educational impact was greatly diminished by the editor’s choice (out of activist camaraderie, I’m assuming) to include the hateful text at the very beginning, which unjustly attacks the very audience who would most benefit by learning from the unbiased body of the book. It’s a tragically missed opportunity.

    While social media exacerbates these issues (all this happened long before social media existed), and bad faith actors attempt to skew positive feminist messages, I think we shouldn’t excuse the feminist movement for some of its own failings.

    To conclude, I’m a male feminist, but I think writing “all men are thrash” or “all cops are bastards”, or “all <broad group> are <slur>” in general in the public sphere is irresponsible.




  • The title (click bait as it is) withholds the most important qualifier from the text of which AI we are talking about:

    "“Overall, our model shows that the job loss from AI computer vision, even just within the set of vision tasks, will be smaller than the existing job churn seen in the market […]”

    Sure, computer vision is important for some jobs, but it’s a much smaller subset of jobs that is really deemed protected as claimed by the study. If the knowledge has already been coded to text on the other hand, it’s a different story.







  • Thanks for reiterating this and posting a source. Every time I see an article on Snowden year over year, someone brings up the tired old “argument” that because he is now trapped in Russia, that somehow makes everything he did “wrong”, and invalidates everything he exposed the government for doing. The media campaign against him was apparently quite effective, and these soundbites are ever ready to jump out of people’s mouths without any research or critical thinking.