Interesting Links for 10-01-2024

[andrewducker]

1. "Men are hitting on my scheduling bot because it has a woman's name"

(tags:men dating OhForFucksSake robots )

2. Scotland seeks opinions on conversion therapy laws

(tags:lgbt scotland )

3. The world's first modular high temperature gas-cooled reactor nuclear power plant has entered commercial operation

(tags:nuclearpower china )

4. Coraline Lego!

(tags:neilgaiman lego viaSwampers )

5. I highly recommend "The Edinburgh Minute" for Edinburgh-related news. Best daily round-up site for Edinburgh.

(tags:edinburgh news )

Comments

[simont]

#1:

On the one hand, yes, those people who actually tried to ask the bot out on a date are plonkers, and surely have both a problematic attitude to women and spectacularly poor play at the Turing Test.

On the other hand: I don't really see why automated mailbots shouldn't put name fields like "Automated Scheduling System" in their mail headers instead of pretending a human identity, precisely to avoid any possibility of confusion. That's what all my mail-sending scripts do. (And I give each script a different name field so that when one goes weird it's easy to find out which.)

And I often suspect that the reason a lot of these mailbots are given female names in particular is in an attempt to weaponise the target audience's horniness (assuming that the target audience skews het-male, or at least that someone imagines it does), by making us imagine a nice-looking young woman and be subconsciously manipulated into being just that bit more likely to be favourably disposed to whatever the email is trying to achieve. And that annoys me – especially since, fitting the stereotype fairly well, there's a chance that it might even be working on me.

So if only the plonkers in this story had somehow contrived to cause periodic awkwardness to the company who created the female-named mailbot rather than the customer who's running an instance of it, then I would think "ha, serves them right!"

(One exception to this annoyance is 1pmobile.com, a PAYG SIM company I have an account with, whose selling point is that each of a bunch of easy-to-remember things costs 1p. Their email bot calls herself "Penny", and in that particular case I don't feel manipulated by my sexuality – I feel manipulated by my appreciation of puns, which I much prefer!)

[andrewducker]

Totally true. Automated systems should announce themselves as such.

(And have names based on puns)

[bugshaw]

Scheduling bot with a man's name that sends you the appointment details and also hits on you?

[andrewducker]

"Hey baby, how about you and me get together to discuss $meetingtitle at $meetingtime?"

[simont]

The article did suggest something like that in the final paragraph!

[cmcmck]

2 'transing away the gay is the real conversion therapy'

OFFS! Where to people get this shit from? If this were genuinely going on the number of trans identified people would be through the roof. It isn't.

I was largely uninterested in relationships with anyone before and became interested in men only once I started transition and hormone therapy- in other words, interested in men as a woman. I only got into sexual relationships AFTER GC surgery.

What about this don't they undestand?

[simont]

#4 reminds me, tangentially, of this article I saw a link to recently, containing what is surely the best bar chart ever:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-09/magpies-swoop-bald-more-often-survey-finds/103297520

[andrewducker]

That is excellent. And I love the lego graphs!

[simont]

Indeed! "Emma is only 8 and doesn't know Excel yet, so she made her graph in Lego instead" makes me hope she never learns Excel, because this is far better.

[andrewducker]

Excel clearly needs a "Lego Graph" mode.

Bricking your computer

[hairyears]

Don't tempt me: this is technically feasible.

[bens_dad]

From most of what I see about Lego these days I'm suprised children still have enough of those sorts of bricks. My faith in Lego is rekindled.

[marymac]

The big yellow 700+ piece crates are the key. Mine have acquired two over Christmas and I might never see the floor again.

[channelpenguin]

Wow. The child-me is totally envious (we did not, for cost reasons, ever have either Lego or Meccano which I would have loved. On the other hand, I did, somehow, successfully get a ZX81 then Spectrum - and the rest, as they say, is history ... )

[marymac]

Aunties on either side checked with respective related parent, who failed to cross check. SEA OF LEGO.

When your parents both computer for living there's no fun in them, apparently. Building giant metropolises on the other hand...

[andrewducker]

I computer for a living.

And yearn to get a chance to do one of my side-projects at home!