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What the OP was talking about is the negative connotation that goes with the word; it's certainly a poor choice from a marketing point of view. You may say it'
by jll29 9mo ago
What the OP was talking about is the negative connotation that goes with the word; it's certainly a poor choice from a marketing point of view.
You may say it's "silly to obsess", but it's like naming a product "Auschwitz" and saying "it's just a city name" -- it ignores the power of what Geffrey N. Leech called "associative meaning" in his taxonomy of "Seven Types of Meaning" (Semantics, 2nd. ed. 1989): speaking that city's name evokes images of piles of corpses of gassed undernourished human beings, walls of gas chambers with fingernail scratches and lamp shades made of human skin.
- 946789987649 9mo agoDo a lot of people know that Prism is the name of the program? I certainly didn't and consider myself fairly switched on in general
- BlueTemplar 9mo agoIt's likely to be an age thing too. Were you in hacker-related spaces when the Snowden scandal happened ? (I expect a much higher than average share of people in academia also part of these spaces.)
- ZpJuUuNaQ5 9mo agoWell, I don't know anything about marketing and you might have a point, but the severity of impact of these two words is clearly very different, so it doesn't look like a good comparison to me. It would raise quite a few eyebrows and more if, for example, someone released a Linux distro named "Auschwitz OS", meanwhile, even in the software world, there are multiple products that incorporate the word prism in various ways[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. I don't believe that an average user encountering the word "prism" immediately starts thinking about NSA surveillance program. [1] https://www.prisma.io/ https://www.prisma.io/ [2] https://prism-pipeline.com/ https://prism-pipeline.com/ [3] https://prismppm.com/ https://prismppm.com/ [4] https://prismlibrary.com/ https://prismlibrary.com/ [5] https://3dprism.eu/en/ https://3dprism.eu/en/ [6] https://www.graphpad.com/features https://www.graphpad.com/features [7] https://www.prismsoftware.com/ https://www.prismsoftware.com/ [8] https://prismlive.com/en_us/ https://prismlive.com/en_us/ [9] https://github.com/Project-Prism/Prism-OS https://github.com/Project-Prism/Prism-OS
- vladms 9mo agoI think the ideas was to try to explain why is a problem to choose something, it is not a comparison of the intensity / importance. I am not sure you can make an argument of "other people are doing it too". Lots of people do things that it is not in their interest (ex: smoking, to pick the easy one). As others mentioned, I did not have the negative connotation related to the word prism either, but not sure how could one check that anyhow. It is not like I was not surprised these years about what some other people think, so who knows... Maybe someone with experience in marketing could explain how it is done.
- adammarples 9mo agoBut without the extremity of the Auschwitz example, it suddenly is not a problem. Prism is an unbelievably generic word and I had not even heard of the Snowdon one until now nor would I remember it if I had. Prism is one step away from "Triangle" in terms of how generic it is.
- order-matters 9mo ago1 more perspective to add: while i did not know the NSA program was called prism, it did give me pause to find out in this thread. OpenAI surely knows what it was called, at least they should. So it begs the question of why. If they claim in a private meeting with people at the NSA that they did it as a tribute to them and a bid for partnership, who would anyone here be to say they didnt? even if they didnt... which is only relevant because OpenAI processes an absolute shitton of data the NSA would be interested in
- jackphilson 9mo agoTriangle kind of reminds me of the Bermuda Triangle. You know how many people died there?
- ConceptJunkie 9mo agoPeople? Do you know how many of them are murderers, fraudsters and all around finks. That's a terrible thing to mention.
- FrustratedMonky 9mo agoI think point is that on the sliding scale of words that are no longer allowed to use, "Prism" does not reach the level of "Auschwitz". Most people don't even remember Snowden at this point.
- andrewinardeer 9mo agoWe had a local child day care provider call themselves ISIS. That was blast.
- SoftTalker 9mo agoWe had a local siding company call themselves "The Vinyl Solution" some people are just tone-deaf.
- ConceptJunkie 9mo agoThere was a TV show called "The Mighty Isis" in the 70s. What were they thinking?! (Well, with Joanna Cameron around, I wouldn't be able to think too clearly either.)