I think today it's a lot less explicitly aggressive, but it's actually more meanspirited. It might be controversial to say this, but online discourse is a lot less male and a lot more female than it was. Is this any great surprise?
Strongly agree. It used to be the accepted norm that you’d ban relentlessly evade to get back at the admin who flamed you in their ban message. However, there was the tacit understanding that it was the internet and none of it was real: just log off and go outside once you got sick of it.
If I could filter out the overuse of profanity shown in this article, I would. "Fuck yeah!!! That bad bitch is totally the shit!!" gets caught by a profanity filter. No great loss, IMO.
If you get normal not-always-online not-gen-Z people to evaluate these messages and label them as Good or Bad then you will get results like this. If I got any member of my family over the age of 30 to evaluate these messages, they'd label them all as offensive.
>If I got any member of my family over the age of 30 to evaluate these messages, they'd label them all as offensive.
How sure are you on that? I'm 31 and there's definitely no one in my peer group who would find those examples offensive. Hell, only 1/2 parents might be offended by that language, and my mom has been working around young people enough for the past decade that she might have softened up since I lived with her too.
But these are all subjective opinions – I could just as easily say that it _is_ a surprise to me that it's flagged as offensive, or that unnecessarily using profanity isn't toxic or impolite. And I feel like that's where this post is gesturing toward – not a judgment on what should or should not be considered toxic, but just a reminder to be intentional when writing definitions and sourcing training data.
Chiming in to say you are dearly mistaken, you turkey-squid uncle buntler.
I, on the other hand, am a fucking amazing shit OG bitch.
But yeah this stuff is absolutely dangerous, opinions like these are destroying culture. It won't be long until the threads these automatic tools are moderating, WONT BE WORTH HAVING.
I first heard "the shit" meaning "good, cool, amazing" in 1996, I think. Never knew the origin, I heard it from a Californian in Arizona, and not really from anyone else since.
The issue is more "Offensive" depends very much on context - not a black and white state.
There are contexts that quote would not be offensive to anyone (more casual settings with a group that trusts each other), but also contexts where everyone would find it offensive, no matter their age or generation.
Which is why its futile and counterproductive to have content-based mass censorship. Offensiveness is completely subjective. Give everyone a mute button and a blacklist for them to block out any posts with whatever whatever words they are too fragile to see and let people decide for themselves. On large social media platforms it would be far better if we went back to the old system of banning spammers and people posting explicitly illegal content and letting everything else sort itself out.
The point the article is making is not that the messages are "Good" or "Bad", it's that an automatic rating system that intends to allow some usages of profanity rates messages with the type of profanity that it purports to allow as very bad, towards the end of the scale that it uses.
Where are you from, and what's your cultural background? I'm from Melbourne, and my parents are from Adelaide (possibly the most puritan city in Australia).
Not a single person I know would take offense to this.
My South African wife's family, however, is a completely different story. Her mother's side (English) would be horrified by this, whereas her dad's side (Afrikaner) wouldn't be upset in the least.
Point is, it's geography and upbringing far more than age that predicts puritanism. If anything, the young people from your area are regressing to the global mean.
I imagine it could have something to do with the physical fixedness of a book. I can remember the positions of the line breaks in some of my favourite books as a child and it wouldn't surprise me if the physical layout of the words on the page (and how far through the book you are) somehow factored into the way the brain stores the memories of reading the book.
With an ebook you have the same little device with exactly the same dimensions for every book (no memorable covers or different formats) and there's no physical indication of how far through the book you are. And you can change the font size.
I think all these points are valid. As someone who spent the first 30 years of my life reading physical books, the transition to e-books has been difficult for a lot of the reasons you mention.
I wish the author was more specific on what "reading circuit development" means.
The frustrating thing about e-book reading devices is how slow they are. Flipping to the table of contents or flipping around the book just doesn't work. Mobile devices, tablets and computers are faster, but the experience still isn't as good a physical book. And then there are distractions.
That's a fair assessment. The brain doesn't store information so much as reproduce your experiences while reading during recall. It lets you relive, in part, the lighting, the angle, how heavy the book was, whether your edition had a defect on a particular page, the feel of the paper, the smell...
All of that comes in to play.
For my last read-through of Children of Dune (roughly a year ago now), I read it on the Kindle app on my phone. I remember the hotel room in Mumbai, the look of the text (white on a black background), the sun going down, and the characters moving through my mind. Would I have developed these recall skills if I hadn't spent my life reading paper books? I'm not so sure.
>In these later letters, Wolf sounds like the kind of alarmist digital enthusiasts often deride. After all, they say, reading is not dying; it’s thriving. Wolf herself quotes a study from the University of California, San Diego, showing that an average user consumes 34 gigabytes of data per day—the equivalent of nearly 100,000 words.
How is that the equivalent of nearly 100,000 words? I appreciate people read a lot of text messages, articles, posts, etc. But they don't read 100,000 words worth of those things on average a day by any means. 34 gigabytes of data is also definitely not 100,000 words, more like 5,100,000,000 words or 17,000,000 pages.
Is it based on some 'a picture is worth 1,000 words' argument?
Reading is not thriving. It's hard to find anyone that actually reads books, even if you count reading on eReaders, even if you count listening to audiobooks! People consume a lot of data because they're watching Netflix, YouTube videos and Instagram (and downloading the same JavaScript over and over again on every website).
The whole article is just bizarre. It conflates so many unrelated things and doesn't seem to have any real thesis. People not reading books doesn't really have anything to do with people using phones except for the indisputable fact anyone here will attest to: going back to reading books after not doing so for a long time is really hard. You find your mind wandering, you find it hard to read linearly one line at a time without skipping around, etc. The kind of reading you do of a blog post is totally different from the kind of reading you do of a novel. That people read pamphlets in the 18th century has nothing at all to do with the decline in people reading books today.
I literally have students coming into tutorials that cannot write. They cannot write down answers on paper. They struggle to write (to write!) because they've been told they can just type and never have to write. It's absolutely bizarre, but that's what they're told by their school teachers, apparently. They also can't sit still and read something without getting out their phones. Students complain that their lecture notes aren't put online and they have to actually attend lectures and take notes themselves even though it's been proven again and again that handwriting notes in lectures is much better for information retention and synthesis of ideas than typing or god-forbid not taking notes at all.
Personally, I'm really unsure whether I would even let kids have access to the internet. I had a lot of great experiences online as a kid (I have very fond memories of RuneScape from ages 9-12), and I learnt computer programming online. At the same time, I think you have to be really careful to limit it. It shouldn't be the primary means of entertainment. Mobile devices are probably the main issue: avoid them and at least you can ration and supervise their access to the internet. It can be a tool for research, homework and learning (and fun and games) without the dangers. The mixed messages ("don't share your personal info online" + "put all your personal info online on Facebook and Instagram") are unhealthy and confusing to kids too, I think.
I also “lol’d” at 34GB being equated to 100,000 words. A sibling poster suggests it was supposed to be 100k books, but I’m skeptical, it sounds to me like just a false correlation (the author saw somewhere that people read as many as 100k words per day and elsewhere that they consume 34GB of data and mistakenly connected those two dots).
Not being able to write is common in Japan. Of course the average adult can write quite a bit but they'll forget how to write various kanji and most people blame it on the fact that they usually they no longer have to write them, they just type the sounds and the computer/smartphone turns it into the correct character.
This is especially funny in a Japanese class where the Chinese students end up correcting the teacher's kanji mistakes. Though, now that computers and smartphones are as common in China as Japan I suspect the same thing will happen in China.
Maybe it's the same thing as forgetting out to spell because we know the device will spell check and correct for us.
> How is that the equivalent of nearly 100,000 words?
It was probably meant to say 100,000 books. That would be 0.34 MB per book which is reasonable. For comparison, the first Harry Potter book as a text file is 0.4 MB.
The Linux kernel uses lots of macros, many of them with lowercase names that are barely distinguishable from function names. Given the quality of that codebase, I think not using macros is a bit silly.
You could make a proposal to the C committee to add a keyword `_Nullptr` and to add a header `stdnull.h` which has `#define nullptr _Nullptr`, like they did with bool.
care to explain which language this doesn't work in (and why)? I'm curious. AFAIK, `free` isn't a keyword in either language and this is just declaring an int variable with a legal identifier (but not initializing it).
Why are you posting a SubscriberLink to an LWN article to HN? That's not really the point of the links. They're for sharing in small groups not for giving away paid content to thousands of people.
