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Hacker now means criminal. Crypto now means digital money. AI now means any three lines of code that take input and store something. As Wittgenstein put it, wo
by nonrandomstring 5y ago
Hacker now means criminal. Crypto now means digital money. AI now
means any three lines of code that take input and store something. As
Wittgenstein put it, words don't have "meaning" the way
phenomenologists think of meaning... they stand in for feelings the
same way the Ooooowwch!! represents the event of hitting your finger
with a hammer. Once people have lazily bound these noises to vague
confusions and prejudices, there's no unbinding them.
Let "algorithm" go and accept that in most people's minds, knowing
swap-sort makes you a sinister Illuminati manipulator, and using
rot-13 makes you a criminal mastermind who trades small children for
bitcoins on the darknet.
- orblivion 5y agoHacker and Crypto are semi-slang. Seeing a basic technical term misunderstood this way is just cringe. AI might be another worthy crusade but I'm not an AI person. Honestly I don't think it's so much the loss of the word as much as the people are being mislead about its meaning. If they knew some of them might use a different word.
- nonrandomstring 5y agoHere's an idea. When I taught "Algorithms and Data-Structures" to first years, it seemed right to spend a moment explaining that it was a Persian (Iraqi) philosopher from Baghdad called Al-Khwarizmi that the whole thing was named after. They were really interested and totally latched on to that. Even if they forgot everything about binary trees and depth-first, students would use any opportunity to demonstrate a treasured factoid of knowledge that it was "An Arab bloke called Ali Charisma who discovered algorithms". Maybe you can throw that swerve-ball at people who blame algorithms on the government and say Al Gore invented them.
- orblivion 5y agoOh man that could really be something. Al Gore invented the Internet after all.