07 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
How Racism Perpetuates Itself by Making White the Default
It is now common—and I use the word “common” in its every sense—to see interviews with up-and-coming young movie stars whose parents or even grandparents were themselves movie stars. And when the interviewer asks, “Did you find it an advantage to be the child of a major motion-picture star?” the answer is invariably “Well, it gets you in the door, but after that you’ve got to perform, you’re on your own.” This is ludicrous. Getting in the door is pretty much the entire gam...07 NOV 2019 by ideonexus
The Effort in Keeping the Internet Clean
Contract workers in San Francisco, processing thousands of complaints a day. Sweatshops in the Philippines, where outsourced labor decides what’s obscene and what’s permissible in a matter of seconds. Teams of anti-spam engineers in Mountain View, adapting to the latest wave of bots. An unpaid moderator on Reddit, picking out submissions that violate guidelines.
So much of the internet is garbage, and much of its infrastructure and many work hours are devoted to taking out the garbage. F...27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Redundancy in the English Language
Whenever we communicate, rules everywhere restrict our freedom to choose the next letter and the next pineapple.I Because these rules render certain patterns more likely and certain patterns almost impossible, languages like English come well short of complete uncertainty and maximal information: the sequence “th” has already occurred 6,431 times in this book, the sequence “tk” just this once. From the perspective of the information theorist, our languages are hugely predictable— al...Monte Carlo method for building words and sentences.
10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus