German trans woman (female pronouns) pursuing a cryptography-PhD in the Netherlands.

https://tech.lgbt/@Fiona

https://fiona.onl

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Not using it, but AFAIK it uses a bloom-filter internally which is a datastructure that is known to come with unavoidable false positives. AKA: Even if the database was 100% free of errors and only contained actually transphobic people, the extension would still mark a lot of completely innocent accounts as transphobic, simply because the data-structure returns wrong results at times.

    Based on that alone you should treat any and all results as “warrants a closer look” at most. With even that being a questionable use: People with dark skin are more commonly non-EU foreigners in Europe than white people, but every sane person agrees that the police checking dark skinned people more often is racial profiling, which is racist, should be illegal, and is just a bad thing to do. So taking a closer look at people because of something they cannot control that isn’t directly tied to them personally (skin-color or positive match in a bloom filter) is a questionable practice to begin with.

    Lastly: What does it change? The validity of an argument is not affected by whether the person who made it is a transphobe or not.


  • Cis guy here (pardon the intrusion).

    The validity of an argument is not decided by whether the person making it belongs to a minority. It’s such an awful failure of leftwing discourse to engage in all this identity-politics bullshit, when what counts should be the arguments. Like yours. Because it is good and correct! And not made worse by you being presumably cis. (And if you figure out one day that you aren’t and come back here, that is also fine and it doesn’t change the validity of the argument. And lived experience is not a substitute for data, because if we were to go by my lived experience there is essentially no transphobia in the Netherlands outside the healthcare system… (spoiler: there is!))

    Sorry, this is just a pet peeve of mine. In short: You and your arguments are welcome with me!



  • Can’t he just not tell them that he has it? At least in Germany that was generally the solution for gay people to donate blood: The only person who could potentially be liable would be the physician if they knew for a fact that you were lying. Which was very unlikely, considering that those red cross people rarely included the local GPs. (The legal situation might be different in other countries though, so check!)




  • The crazy thing about minority report is that nobody, least of all the people who made it, seem to have understood the problem that the movie depicted:

    Having the ability to predict attempted killings and interfere with them would be a genuinely good thing! The problem was the notion that everybody who is predicted to commit such a crime gets an extreme punishment without even a trial, consideration of the circumstances, or any of the other things we would normally attempt to do if we learned about someone attempting to commit a crime. Equating premediated murder out of greed with an over-reacting in a highly surprising situation, with self-defense, with pretty much just accidents and punishing them all in the most cruel way you can imagine is what was so idiotic about the movie that it was hard to take seriously. Trials are there for a reason, and that reason isn’t just to figure out what happened physically!





  • Higher education is truly a scam.

    It really depends. From what I hear about the US a lot of it is there. But in some ways that is also the exception.

    Compare Germany: By most rankings KIT is one of, if not the top university for computer science in the country. The requirements to get a spot there are literally just that you are qualified to study (aka: have the right high school diploma) and haven’t lost your right to study computer science at a public university by conclusively failing to do so at a different German university. When I was there until 2019 we payed a bit over 100€ per semester in administrative fees and got a limited train ticket in exchange.

    The only selection criteria were “did you pass your exams?” that during the bachelors were almost all written exams that were the same for everyone. What you learned was to an extend up to you, it was a university, not an apprenticeship, so there certainly was a significant focus on theory, but especially during the masters a lot just fully depended on what you wanted.

    The main cost at the time was just general housing and living costs, which in my case was payed for by my mom, but for those for whom this is not an option, provided that they were either German citizens or legal residents for reasons other than the education, there was BAföG, which comes down to an interest-free loan from which you only have to pay back 50%.

    And yes, I definitely learned a lot of useful stuff there.


  • you definitely don’t have the authority to say he’s definitely beyond ANY help. That’s the part I find ridiculous, not the part where you think there’s something wrong with him

    It’s an approach known as perpetrator type theory (or “Tätertypenlehre” in German) that was notably deployed by the Nazis to be able to punish people they didn’t like much harder than others, by allowing them to say for example that someone was inherently and unchangeably a murderer and should thus be executed. The crime was essentially just proof of that, what you got punished for, was what some judge deemed to be the innate criminal personality you had. In particular this allowed to hand out lighter sentences to “Arians” and to decide that Jews for example were inherently bad and could thus be punished much harsher for the same crime.


  • It’s very obvious from your posts that you neither know what the purpose of a punishment in a legal state is, nor what the effects of them are.

    The idea that a multi year sentence is “getting of easy” is insane. And from what you are writing I get very strong vibes that you are one of those people who still subscribe to debunked ideas of perpetrator types, which are unironically Nazi-ideology.

    The world that you want to create is not a safer one, quite the opposite in fact. Rehabilitation is the by far most important aspect of a punishment and the idea that crimes like the one in question are committed by people who carefully weigh how many years they are willing to spend in prison and could thus be deterred is beyond ridiculous.


  • Trace the execs

    Importantly you need to trace the execs who copied it, not the ones who decided to try it the first time. Giving things a try and not immediately throwing it away when it isn’t perfect is a good thing and behavior that needs to be encouraged. The problem is when others start copying it blindly because it is new before it could demonstrate benefits. It’s the people jumping on hype that are the problem, not the people giving new things a try, even if they may fail.






  • I’m not saying it’s an easy line to draw because you obviously don’t want to create incentives for bad journalism, but don’t want to make it too high of a bar to get into in the first place. I think you’d need to take things like the number of readers, the factuality of headings and content, the originality and the investigative value into account and be able to at least temporarily cut of bad outlets that spread fake/hate/… while at the same time ensuring that inconvenient truths make it out.

    It’s not an easy task, but I feel there is more room to get somewhere useful than with the current model of billionaire-owned media that outdo each other with rage-bait and inaccurate/misleading/falsly balanced/biased reporting…