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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Listen, I don’t want to be in a pointless internet argument; I could answer your question by referencing some of the things that go into deciding what reasonable adjustments should be put in place, legally speaking (in particular, your question is getting at the “how much is reasonable” aspect of the problem"), but I only want to engage in this conversation if you’re actually interested to learn.

    (On that front, I apologise for the sharp tone of my previous comment, because that certainly wasn’t conducive to conversation.)



  • Much like many disabilities, deafness isn’t a hard binary between hearing Vs deaf, but a spectrum dependent on many factors. For example, someone may have hearing loss in a particular frequency range, which may affect their ability to hear lyrics. I would also expect that someone’s relationship to music may be impacted by whether they were born deaf or acquired deafness later in life.

    The point that other are making about this as an accessibility problem is that a lot of disability or anti-discrimination has provisions for rules or policies that are, in and of themselves, neutral, but affect disabled people (or other groups protected under equality legislation) to a greater degree than people without that trait. In the UK, for example, it might be considered “indirect discrimination”.

    You might not need lyrics to listen to music, but someone who is deaf or hard of hearing is likely going to experience and enjoy music differently to you, so it may well be necessary for them.




  • I’m in academia. I like how many vibrant and wonderful people I meet. I love asking PhD students to tell me about their research areas, which are often so absurdly niche that I have no idea what it means, but I love being made aware of my own relative smallness. And I love being challenged to think about my own privilege in being here, how the ivory tower of research has been and is still a force of oppression in the world, especially in the context of colonialism. I like being challenged in this way because it prevents me from becoming comfortable in my ideology and challenges me to think of what science would look like in a fair and just world, and indeed, whether it would exist at all. These might seem like odd things for me to count as my favourite aspects but it’s because I love science, and I firmly believe that if you have to lie about something in order to love it, that love is no true love.

    I think a lot about how to reach other people, to share the love that I feel for my subject, and though I haven’t done much teaching yet, I look forward to being able to learn from my students as they learn from me.


  • I wonder what would facilitate people to make their own solutions in this way. Like, I have made a few apps or automation things myself, but if I look at my “normie” friends who don’t have the level of tech familiarity that I do, they struggle with whatever out of the box solutions they can find. Poor IT education is a big part of this, and I’ve been wondering a lot about what would need to change for the average “normie” to be empowered to tinker


  • No pressure to watch the video, especially as not everyone enjoys consuming content in that form.

    Anthrocentrism is part of what I mean, especially if we consider that historically, colonialism has had a lot of power to draw the line between who “counts” as fully human or not. A depressingly common motif is the cyclical logic of “this is what we understand human intelligence to be” -> “these people do not have the signifiers of human intelligence that we understand” -> “therefore these people aren’t intelligent” -> (those people are less likely to be considered as the general understanding of ‘intelligence’ expands and evolves).


  • The other person who you replied to makes good points - it’s always going to be context dependent and it drives me mad when I’m out and about and have so many signals projecting “leave me alone” (such as wearing headphones, being on the phone, studying etc.) and a guy hits on me.

    However, if someone is generally approachable, I’ve found that the best compliments are on something the person has consciously chosen about their appearance. So stuff like graphic t-shirts (especially band t shirts), hair styles (I love people with dyed hair because this presents to me an easy option for compliments).




  • Yeah, I’m super salty about the hype because if I had to pick one side or the other, I’d be on team “AI is worthless”, but that’s just because I’d rather try convincing a bunch of skeptics that when used wisely, AI/ML can be super useful, than to try talk some sense into the AI fanatics. It’s a shame though, because I feel like the longer the bubble takes to pop, the more harm actual AI research will receive


  • Eh, it depends on what we count as “AI”. I’m in a field where machine learning has been a thing for years, and there’s been a huge amount of progress in the last couple of years[1]. However, it’s exhausting that so much is being rebranded as “AI”, because the people holding the purse strings aren’t necessarily the same scientists who are sick of the hype.

    [1] I didn’t get into the more computational side of things until 2021 or so, but if I had to point to a catalyst for this progress, I’d say that the transformer mechanism outlined in the 2017 paper “Attention is all you need”, by Google scientists.


  • CEOs absolutely cannot be replaced by AI because the role that CEOs are meant to fulfill is accountability. When things go wrong, they get passed up the chain, and the CEO is at the top of that chain. Though, it’s not like human CEOs are held accountable either, just that in theory, they’re meant to be, and AIs would be impossible to hold accountable. Currently, CEOs get the best of all worlds - they get huge bonuses when the company does well, and they are sheltered and fall upwards if the company does poorly