> Respectify is not an engine for monoculture of thought, but in fact intends to assist in the opposite while encouraging in healthy interaction along the way.
We don’t want to monitor or enforce saying specific things. We want people to be able to speak, but understand how others will hear them.
All those times people talk past each other. Or are rude but don’t realise it. Or are rude but don’t care (and should because it’s a human on the other end.) Or the worse people who intentionally say something awful and… just maybe can learn a bit about what they’re saying.
I get your fear. I think I’ve seen AI used for bad quite a bit. I hope, given the tech isn’t going away, we can use it to make things a bit better. That’s the goal.
I get that objection, and we are certainly very uninterested in that becoming the norm. The idea, of course, is to try to prevent comments that we want prevented and that aren't helpful.
Different bloggers and different communities are going to define that differently. That is why we are making a good-faith effort at allowing sites/people/groups to tweak this as desired.
I've gotten a visa to a country that doesn't use Latin characters. My name got transliterated. At the bottom of the visa there's the machine-readable field that uses ASCII characters, and my name lost a character (a OU became just U).
It's also fun when the official transliteration rules suddenly change: a visa/passport issued in one year has a different name in Latin than a passport issued in another year. I was once two separate people :)
What if a user with the name kссqzу (k[Cyrillic c][Cyrillic c]qz[Cyrillic y]) pretends to be you, sends your friend a PM and extracts a secret out of them?
Now you are just making up implausible scenarios that don’t help.
A chat app or any app with a PM feature either has a globally unique user name feature or has an internal identifier for the user so the user-chosen name doesn’t have to be unique. In the former case, any user will be able to see two seemingly identical user names in their chat list, but one with no chat history. In the latter case, well humans are known to have duplicate names too, so Cyrillic characters don’t even come into the picture.
If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
The Portuguese acronym does sound like an urban legend, but I wonder if there are things that got their names from some random writing on the packaging... Not "Xerox machine" since that's the actual brand. In Indonesian, razorblades are silet, which is how the French pronounce Gilette, but that's also a brand...
Halfway through this blogpost, I realized it's written for idiots used to the Buzzfeed/Twitter-style of "One sentence per paragraph". Fucking infuriating.
Not at all! That is my drafting method creeping through. I try to write each sentence as a separate paragraph first to make sure I don’t get too wed to a paragraph and can delete/move liberally. Then I try to go and merge the paragraphs that have cohesion. Seems like I didn’t do a great job here. Sorry it distracted you, but honestly thanks for giving it a chance and the feedback. Will do a better job on the next one.
I wonder what event triggered them to add this. The mention of US Patriot Act is intriguing considering they're a French company (I thought the app was maintained by one Frenchman, but following the LinkedIn link on their website shows it's a company in Nancy, France). But I guess it's a copy-paste Warrant Canary.
Apparently the virus was able to ruin cognitive function that people struggling to breathe thought they're fine. (Ok, it seems too convenient that the virus can do this...).
Nobody (OK, maybe a few very special people) is saying that COVID was a hoax. What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.
Ah yes you say, another psycho. He probably eats ivermectin for breakfast and chases it with bleach. But I ask you, after a chlorinated burp: how come Africa didn't die out? Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California? Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?
> What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.
But yet here you are saying it. Whether it's true or not probably requires a great deal of analysis, but your self-applied "psycho" label may be accurate enough if you've managed to apply lots of cognitive biases to end up with your "truth".
I'd agree the governments overreacted in many sense, but a non BoJo/Trump-government has a duty to be overcautious rather than a flippant attitude of "So what, x% dead is acceptable". Some other rules are based on dumb science: two meters distance from each other is probably a joke, a compromise between "keep everyone at home!" (what China did when there was a breakout) and a "Keep going to the pubs!", my own theory is that if you could smell someone's cigarette smoke from 2 meters away, virus particles being exhaled from their lungs would reach you too. Later we figured out getting the virus from surfaces is very unlikely, but people were still wiping surfaces down anyway...
Because it's an airborne virus and Africa isn't 1) as connected with the world to begin with and 2) as closely concentrated as urban areas. That's before really looking into Africa's response compared to other countries.
>Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California?
Because we didn't isolate fast enough between Trump trying to claim it being a hoax early on and desperate political attempts to keep "essential workers" running business. The locality doesn't matter for an airorne virus; just that people continue to go outside and not develop herd immunity.
>Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?
I don't have a crystal ball into 2030. But yes, people still can catch COVID in 2026. Buying only enough for 2020-2022 would be reckless.
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