I basically hate this thing. Sorry team. I know you are trying and you believe in your effort.
I know your intent is in the right place too.
But, here's the thing:
I value real conversation. It is the only conversation worth having.
This is a step toward Disneyland type conversation. And we don't live in Disneyland!
Profanity is a part of speech. There are ugly things, ideas and people in this world and that is what the profane gets at.
As for offending others... hoo boy!
Let us start with a hard to process reality: we all are as offended as we think we are.
What prevents others from abusing that reality to push an agenda, gain position in the rhetoric, and more?
Not much.
Worse, we do not control others. Many attempts at doing that fail. This one is extremely likely to fail too.
What do we control?
How we respond to offensive speech!
And we have options, but a person wouldn't know that because the number one response is righteous indignation!
There are so many other choices!
We can just ignore speech we don't like.
We can employ humor! When an ass gets called one by a clown, I laugh! It is laughable.
Same for the people blowing pages discussing who is the bigger asshole. I say they all deserve that conversation.
We can redirect by asking a direct question, or by making the subject of our response more germane to the topic at hand too.
There are many more options that make a hell of a lot more sense than blathering on with righteous indignation fueling it full on.
Now, here is another dynamic in the same vein:
Say I declare someone is a racist! Just full on judge them on the spot hard.
They are not gonna like that too much are they? Nope. And what is worse, if we are in a position to do some advocacy, the person so harshly judged won't hear any of it.
And being judged like that sticks. Say they stop being racist. They still gotta live with that crap for a long time.
Now, we could say, "are you sure you want to say that? It comes off racist to me."
The idea being you offer help or a way for them to see the harm, while also giving them an out so they are not judged harshly.
They could reconsider next time, or just stop and that is great! They won't have to fight down ugly exchanges.
I could go on for pages. I believe I said enough to make my point.
We can only control how we respond to speech we don't like.
Attempting to control others to the point where they simply cannot offend or cause grief means we also have sanitized our discourse to the point of being worthless.
No thanks.
I have a very thick skin. Others do too.
More of us can manage how we respond and if we put half the energy we put into trying to control others it would be much better.
Such wrong think! I think any forum that adopts this would be worth studying for simply helping to create a score to rate how soulless a site is. Maybe they could make the inverse that would rewrite whole forums for happy thoughts. Rose tinted glasses client? The name needs work.
Trust was very slow to come for me. It happened with Windows 10.
I really like 10.
My computing experiences began on Apple ][ 6502 systems. Then a mix of early Windows for workgroup and SGI IRIX.
I was online proper at 9600 baud in early 1990 at work and had my own WfW + Winsock running 14.4 early '91.
I got a DSL the moment Qwest announced it, and was rocking 100kb up 600kb down per second. A damn rocket ship straight to the WWW baby! Truth is hosting Q3A and mooching files were the real fun. I setup SGI Irix at home.
Linux soon followed. I have ran most everything. Solaris, AIX, MacOS, Be, HP/UX, even XENIX, CP/M and others...
I am at the core a UNIX head. And to all the naysayers back then: I was right! UNIX won!
Anyhow, I liked Win 10. Still do, if they would just continue with it. 10, with the WSL system is a pretty damn good OS, and it can run almost anything ever made for Win OS. 10, pre all the 11 vomit being back ported, is just great.
More of that please.
11 is a major league botch! I hate it. Not only are the UI simplifications a major league regression, but the intrusive data collection features and AI penetrating everything is nauseating. I hate it viscerally.
I am not going to use 11 as a primary OS. Nor anything built on it.
Ever.
The best M$ can expect is it running in a VM where it can be managed properly, and even then, only if some damn software costs too much to live without.
Nope. Not. Ever.
The dollar sign was deliberate. Win 11 trashed any good will Microsoft had garnered with me.
Did I mention visceral hate? Yeah. I use my Mac M1 a lot more now.
The amazing thing is my younger peers have come to me for opinions after they too began to hate 11 just as I have.
It is hard to botch it this completely.
Congrats MS leadership. You have accomplished something remarkable!
I have made the mistake of calling the early PC 8-bit, lolol...
Yes, it reminds me of an Apple ][ computer, with the major difference being the Apple had the video sub-system on board, and the PC locating that on a card.
I often wonder how things might have played out had the Apple ][ computers used one slot for video... or, had IBM chose to do it the Apple way.
Apple computers all sort of gravitated to the onvoard video despite a few cards being made. It was just enough, especially when the later models included 80 column text.
I ran my first PC on a TV. Same as the Apple and Atari machines.
Same feels here too. Cassette was kindnof magical and kind of crappy. Well, depending on your machine, potentially very crappy.
One of the better cassette loaders can be found in the 6809 based Tandy CoCo machines. When in the cassette times, I would stress test various machines.
My Atari was bog slow, reading a block at a time, with a pause between... And it was picky and really wanted the dedicated cassette drive. Not recommended at all..
Apples were pretty OK, along with the Tandy machines. The Tandy reader software, whoever wrote it, took full advantage of the nice CPU and 6 bit DAC. I could rest a finger on the tape, slowing it down, then listening to the wow, flutter and speed changes all over the place while the machine recovered. Almost always loaded correctly.
The Apples were not that robust, but worked well enough to not be a big bother.
Both Apple and Tandy machines had good commands for loading and saving right to regions of RAM.
On the Apple, with the spiffy Mini-assembler, it was possible to develop big programs a piece at a time, saving off stuff that worked.
Every so often, it made sense to read a bunch in and save off a nice chunk! Always felt good doing that.
Eventually, you load it all, patch it up, linker style, maybe moving bits around some, and then save it as a completed assembly program.
No source, just the data on the tape and what the mini-assembler would show you when you list memory.
I know your intent is in the right place too.
But, here's the thing:
I value real conversation. It is the only conversation worth having.
This is a step toward Disneyland type conversation. And we don't live in Disneyland!
Profanity is a part of speech. There are ugly things, ideas and people in this world and that is what the profane gets at.
As for offending others... hoo boy!
Let us start with a hard to process reality: we all are as offended as we think we are.
What prevents others from abusing that reality to push an agenda, gain position in the rhetoric, and more?
Not much.
Worse, we do not control others. Many attempts at doing that fail. This one is extremely likely to fail too.
What do we control?
How we respond to offensive speech!
And we have options, but a person wouldn't know that because the number one response is righteous indignation!
There are so many other choices!
We can just ignore speech we don't like.
We can employ humor! When an ass gets called one by a clown, I laugh! It is laughable.
Same for the people blowing pages discussing who is the bigger asshole. I say they all deserve that conversation.
We can redirect by asking a direct question, or by making the subject of our response more germane to the topic at hand too.
There are many more options that make a hell of a lot more sense than blathering on with righteous indignation fueling it full on.
Now, here is another dynamic in the same vein:
Say I declare someone is a racist! Just full on judge them on the spot hard.
They are not gonna like that too much are they? Nope. And what is worse, if we are in a position to do some advocacy, the person so harshly judged won't hear any of it.
And being judged like that sticks. Say they stop being racist. They still gotta live with that crap for a long time.
Now, we could say, "are you sure you want to say that? It comes off racist to me."
The idea being you offer help or a way for them to see the harm, while also giving them an out so they are not judged harshly.
They could reconsider next time, or just stop and that is great! They won't have to fight down ugly exchanges.
I could go on for pages. I believe I said enough to make my point.
We can only control how we respond to speech we don't like.
Attempting to control others to the point where they simply cannot offend or cause grief means we also have sanitized our discourse to the point of being worthless.
No thanks.
I have a very thick skin. Others do too.
More of us can manage how we respond and if we put half the energy we put into trying to control others it would be much better.
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