I found it very confusing between …
I’ve definitely shared this […]
… and …
[…] “well, it’s not like anyone else was going to give them what they need”?
There are two types of men, in my experience:
If your father is a male, he watches porn, basically.
I recognize the term "Artificial Intelligence" from my own profession: marketing.
(Substitute any old attempts at making AI for the first two. This is an old, old, old scam. The first complete and utter failure of "AI" happened when I was a young girl.)
It never had any meaning.
Let's unpack it. "AI" means "Artificial Intelligence". What does "Artificial" mean? We can mostly agree it means human-made. (It gets a bit complicated, but this definition works.) What does "Intelligence" mean?
...
Oops.
There is no universally agreed definition of "intelligence" anywhere. There's no agreed definition in philosophy, in biology, in neuroscience, in any realm of human study. There's not even a hint as to where we'd go to get such a definition. Yet techbrodudes claim to have made an artificial version of it.
"I've made something great: Artificial Geflurtzenshi." "What's Geflurtzenshi?" "That doesn't matter. I made it! Give me money!"
That's what "AI" sounds like.
I'm all for AI.
Just please wake me up when we get it. Bullshitting parrots aren't it.
I need to work out a quad-lingual joke sometime: English, German, French, and Mandarin.
This is not even slightly true.
Base 10 was used because people in one influential area counted the tips of their fingers. But there are recorded (and in some cases still living!) finger counting systems where they count using the gaps between the fingers (giving us base 4 or base 8 depending on how many hands are used), using the thumb and the finger segments (base 12), the same as base 12 plus the finger roots (base 16), etc.
There is literally nothing "natural" about base 10. Indeed it's not even a particularly useful system; bases 12 and 16 are far more useful given how you can do divide them in many more ways than base 10. It just happened to be the one that was used by the cultures that became most influential.
(Western) base-10 needs two hands. Base-12 is one-handed. (There's a base-10 system used in China that's one-handed, mind. Or, rather, it's one-handed until you reach 10.)
Also some maths operations can be done fairly easily (like division) with the base-12 finger-counting system.
Binary finger counting is a pain in the ass, though. Too complicated for most people.
There are a great number of ways you can count on fingers. You can easily support base 4, base 5, base 8, base 10, base 12, base 16, base 19, and even higher (144, say) with finger counting. There's nothing particularly "natural" about 10.
Kirk: I'm having trouble hearing lately. Bones: Can you describe the symptoms? Kirk: Homer is a fat guy, and his wife Marge has blue hair.
OK, so I did a bit of research (as is my obsessive self's wont) and can answer for "gender".
Our modern understanding of sexual matters is far more subtle and nuanced than the old-fashioned notions most of us grew up with¹. What follows is a simplified take on things. The reality is more complicated and has many more axes than I'm highlighting.
At the lay level you can think of there being three axes of sex-related issues:
Gender is in most cases oriented to match your sex (cisgender) and in opposition to your orientation (heterosexual). Because, however, the body, and various parts of the brain grow at different times, it's possible for these three axes to differ due to hormonal differences in the mother's body (external factors) or to activated genetic influences (a mix of external and internal factors). If one of these factors activates at one point in development, the part of the brain that regulates sexual desire flips the switch and your orientation is different². If one of them activates at another point in development, the part of the brain that models your internal view of your sex flips and you now have that thing called "gender dysphoria".
And after literally centuries of trying to "fix" people with gender dysphoria through abuse, through religious counselling (c.f. "abuse"), and through therapy, it's pretty much well-established that gender dysphoria has no talking (nor abusive) "solution". Thus the kindest thing to do is to let people whose gender doesn't match their physical sex to present the gender they feel themselves to be by behaviour, manner of dress, and ultimately, as far as is practical, physically. Anything else is abusive and cruel.
Note, again, I stress this is the very simplified model, and it's filtered through my inexpert, non-practitioner understanding of things. (I'm open to correction by those with actual expertise in the field, obviously!) As such it doesn't address the huge forest of orientations (which I alluded to in the footnote below), it doesn't address intersex issues, and it doesn't address gender issues like the "non-binary". And indeed I don't, to cite Orwell again, "bellyfeel" gender dysphoria, enbies, aces, etc. … but in the end it doesn't fucking matter. There is literally zero impact on me if someone wants to call themselves "non-binary" or "trans" or "ace" or whatever. So even if I don't "get" it, what I do "get" is that these people are profoundly unhappy in the circumstances they find themselves in and if transitioning helps them, all the fucking power in the world to them!
¹ Why "most of us"? Because there are cultures out there that have more nuanced models than the strict binary. Look up terms like "hijra" for the Indian sub-continent, the role of eunuchs, M→F gender-swapping actors, and F→M cross-dressing characters in heroic lore in ancient China, the กะเทย/kathoey of Thailand, the whole allure of "fox spirits" all over the east Asian sphere, the "two-spirit" peoples of North American natives, etc.
² For instance that part of my brain flipped me to a "2" on the old-timey Kinsey scale (nominally heterosexual), though on more modern classifications that the kiddies would use I'd be a het-leaning pansexual.