43 ms·
Can we stop making of big deal (tm) out of every word that has even the flimsiest connections with race or racism?
by umvi 6y ago
Can we stop making of big deal (tm) out of every word that has even the flimsiest connections with race or racism?
- eska 6y agoI couldn't even figure out what he's talking about. People who want to see race will see race.. Facepalm
- tareqak 6y agoNot just people. Institutions, processes, and algorithms. I can easily see an insurance company claiming the driver to be at fault based on retrieved car telemetry, which in turn was erroneous because the machine-learning algorithm was trained on certain faces. There was a flagged HN submission about Twitter consistently centering image previews on whiter faces recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24530968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24530968 .
- bArray 6y agoThe _joke_ was that it mentions "DARK" as a method of detecting whether somebody is damaging a vehicle: > CEO Elon Musk said that it would be used to prevent people > from vandalizing cars when they are being driven > automatically on Tesla’s upcoming self-driving robotaxi > network. The _joke_ was that if removed from context, somebody could insinuate that they are measuring whether people are black to detect if they are likely to damage a vehicle.
- teddyh 6y agoI don’t think so. All the words which had actual connections have (understandably) fallen out of use.
- bArray 6y agoIt was a joke, not a real call-out. I was just making the point that as programmers we should be careful about naming things in code, because one day they might be taken out of context.
- happytoexplain 6y agoI don't understand what you mean when you say "it" was a joke, but also the point you were making was not a joke. What is "it" if not the point being made by the comment?
- bArray 6y agoI'll quote my other comment here: > The _joke_ was that it mentions "DARK" as a method of > detecting whether somebody is damaging a vehicle: > > CEO Elon Musk said that it would be used to prevent people > > from vandalizing cars when they are being driven > > automatically on Tesla’s upcoming self-driving robotaxi > > network. > The _joke_ was that if removed from context, somebody could > insinuate that they are measuring whether people are black to > detect if they are likely to damage a vehicle. Jokes can have a half-serious point behind them (for example, political jokes). To really break it down: Joke: Clearly Tesla's inclusion of the parameter "DARK" is not in reference to black persons, but somebody taking an unfavorable view of the article could make it. Point: Programmers should be more aware of what they name things to avoid such cases. You might think "well this is a closed source app and should never be leaked, there's no way the public would be reading this" - and yet some years after MS-DOS and Word were written people are reading all sorts of things [1]. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/26/5549208/microsoft-early-code-contains-hidden-jokes https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/26/5549208/microsoft-early-c...
- happytoexplain 6y agoI think I see what you're saying - but the replies didn't accuse you of thinking it referenced black people. They disagreed that it is an example of something which is likely enough to be misinterpreted that it should have had a different name.
- bArray 6y agoI thought that the implication of a connection between persons identified as "DARK" and vehicle damage had enough potential to be misinterpreted (either accidentally or maliciously). It was just a throwaway comment that people have taken quite seriously.