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[hector13]

‘tis, but when anyone thinks of spam messages these days, it is more often than not email. I get (more specifically my wife gets) spam letters for stuff, usually immediately ending in a paper shredder upon discovery.

[wierd]

Spam (the kind in a can), assuming it is name brand anyway-- is actually Pork Shoulder.

It is not "Ham". It is not intended to be or replace "Ham".  What it is, is ground, processed pork.

[Greiger]

I am proud I found just a random factoid when obtaining coupons for Spam, posted it here, and it is STILL being discussed when I just got back from the store the next day and forgot to buy the spam I obtained the coupon for in the first place.

[McTraveller]

Whoever plows my street always ends up making a 4-6 inch deep, 3-4 foot wide pile of densely-packed snowdrift across the end of my driveway.  Supremely annoying since I typically previously already have cleared the end of my driveway so it is basically down to pavement.

To top it off, the driveway across the street from me never has such a plowdrift - so it has to do with how the plow is being utilized.  It's also possible that it has to do with my side of the road being on the outside radius of a curve (so the neighbor is on the inside), which maybe changes the way the snow flows from the plow.

[Yoink]

I'm honestly WTFing over how far over everyone's heads the joke went. I got it right away.

I know, right?!
This is like that time I mentioned my "baby batter" and people thought I was actually using babies in cooking somehow.

[Jopax]

A discussion of art and what that entails to certain people.

The WTF stems from how the fuck are those twats still proffessors, when someone who is a proffessor of a certain subject shows such utter and complete ignorance and twattery on a certain subject.

Tho I guess there's worse things, like say anti-vax doctors :V

[Reelya]

A discussion of art and what that entails to certain people.

The WTF stems from how the fuck are those twats still proffessors, when someone who is a proffessor of a certain subject shows such utter and complete ignorance and twattery on a certain subject.

Tho I guess there's worse things, like say anti-vax doctors :V

Those twats are still professors, because what he's describing is completely normal for the postmodernism-influenced departments. But what can you expect from a field where pooping in a jar is art, but being a master painter isn't?

I suspect that quite a few of those professor's generation are like the "emperor's new clothes": they dress everything up in post-modern lingo that's indecipherable and meaningless, but disguised as "profound", and they aren't actually that technically skilled in painting either, I bet. They state to that guy "anyone could draw that". But i deeply suspect that they can't actually draw that. Because ... gaining the skills to draw that is not encouraged in their schools, the teachers don't teach it, they don't practice it. He draws stuff they couldn't draw.

Nurturing what he's actually good at however, would be a threat to the art world status quo. e.g. if they encouraged his technicality, but advised him to innovate more with the subject matter, he could go far with that. But then what? Now they have a guy who's picked up their art-sense, but he's more technical than they are, which would be a threat. There's nothing phonies hate and fear more than the real deal.

[NJW2000]

Given the (expensive)  formal training usually needed for the art world to admit you exist, that is rather unlikely.

Critics seem to care much less about technical skill these days because frankly there are too many people capable of the photorealism of the old masters, and expecting actual thought with totally sufficient technical skill to achieve your aims is now justifiable.

Not that most popular pre twentieth century artists don't have a certain something. There's the odd one or two who just seem like good draughtsman though... Liotard, for example.

[Reelya]

I saw the stuff they were getting the guy to do that they liked, and it was all pretty awful. i'd say it's more like the expensive formal education is a sieve to keep people out: you have the qualification, therefore you're an "artist" now. Basically, it's like the least value the thing you made has for society, the better they like it. The qualification is just the rubber-stamp so that you have "cred" to get your shitty poop shit shown in a gallery.

Any time I see supposedly amazing contemporary art, and it's just crap. This was the first google hit for "best of contemporary art"

https://www.widewalls.ch/10-emerging-contemporary-artists

Seriously, it is just crap, and any concept behind any of this stuff is void of actual intellect. Contemporary art and postmodern literature studies are the two most content-free fields you could study

see how often papers written literally at random get accepted by postmodern lit. journals. e.g. the Sokal Affair. About 2/3rds of all writing in postmodern lit. and 2/3rds of contemporary art are just elaborate phonies, which is exemplified by the fact that the experts can basically never tell the fakes from the real deal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a scholarly publishing sting perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies – whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross – [would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions".

https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/conceptual-penis-social-contruct-sokal-style-hoax-on-gender-studies/

"The conceptual penis as a social construct"

"The androcentric scientific and meta-scientific evidence that the penis is the male reproductive organ is considered overwhelming and largely uncontroversial."

That’s how we began. We used this preposterous sentence to open a “paper” consisting of 3,000 words of utter nonsense posing as academic scholarship. Then a peer-reviewed academic journal in the social sciences accepted and published it.
...
Assuming the pen names “Jamie Lindsay” and “Peter Boyle,” and writing for the fictitious “Southeast Independent Social Research Group,” we wrote an absurd paper loosely composed in the style of post-structuralist discursive gender theory. The paper was ridiculous by intention, essentially arguing that penises shouldn’t be thought of as male genital organs but as damaging social constructions. We made no attempt to find out what “post-structuralist discursive gender theory” actually means. We assumed that if we were merely clear in our moral implications that maleness is intrinsically bad and that the penis is somehow at the root of it, we could get the paper published in a respectable journal.

As much as the postmodern lit. people are morons who are easily fooled by fake papers written by people who don't even know the field whatsoever, they are in fact about 20 times more intellectual than the people who make the type of "art" shown in modern galleries.

e.g. case in point, just like the sokal affair and the "conceptual penis affair" art history is rife with untrained phonies slipping "art" into the gallery circuit, and they always get away with it. Maybe "art school training" is as great as it's stated to be, however real art critics don't seem to be able to tell the "real" from the fake:

http://hoaxes.org/archive/display/category/art

Paintings by a previously unknown avant-garde French artist named Pierre Brassau, exhibited at an art show in Sweden, won praise from critics, one of whom described Brassau's work as having "the delicacy of a ballet dancer." What the critics didn't know was that Brassau was actually a chimpanzee named Peter from Sweden's Boras zoo. A journalist had come up with the idea of exhibiting Peter's work as a way of putting critics to the test — would they be able to tell the difference between modern art and chimpanzee art?

Critics couldn't tell a trained artist from a chimpanzee.

[redwallzyl]

Ya, postmodernism is pretty bad most of the time. And when it gets into science it paralyzes it.

[Reelya]

This always makes me nostalgic for Ariele Schlesinger's feminist programming language.

https://medium.com/@stestagg/how-feminist-programming-has-already-happened-9e4fb507ddb9

“a feminist programming language […] built around a non-normative paradigm that represents alternative ways of abstracting”

I kinda wish they pushed forward with that, because I still don't know where she was going with the non-boolean logic and all. How, is a logic value that's both true and false at the same time "feminist"? Sure, we can make that, but I'd like to see it in action, and to see when it's actually useful to have that.

This is why the (actual) postmodern / feminist programming language idea is so fascinating. In tech, you're required to produce something that's functional. Whereas postmodern ideas don't produce anything functional. So cramming the two together would surely be a blast to watch. But they seem to have backed off from that, since creating a "feminist programming language" that lacks "patriarchal" true/false logic, and "patriarchal" object-oriented structures is harder than it looks: it would require actual intellectual effort, e.g. mathematical and grammatical / logical rigor. Coming up with mathematically rigorous systems isn't something they teach you in gender studies, which I think Ariele learned the hard way when researching her "language": my guess is she thought it would easy since she comes from a field which believes that all knowledge is arbitrary, therefore that all logic structures are arbitrary, and all code structures are arbitrary.

Or how about ...

“feminist bathroom plumbing […] built around a non-normative paradigm that represents alternative ways of shitting”

[Draignean]

This always makes me nostalgic for Ariele Schlesinger's feminist programming language.

Somehow, I had never heard of this. I need to send this to a couple of my old profs, I know my former adviser would get a kick out of all this.

I mean, she was kind of doomed from the start. The hardware works in boolean logic, it's the only thing it understands- so the entire endeavor needs to not only overhaul the very underpinnings of programming logic, it needs to also spark a hardware revolution.

[Reelya]

She had a blog about it here, there's the main post, but she expands on it in the comments section:

https://www.hastac.org/blogs/ari-schlesinger/2013/11/26/feminism-and-programming-languages

note, this is real, but not to be confused with a parody called C+= (C plus equality) that someone made after she proposed this.

Here's a bit of an "excerpt" where I edited part of the intro, and part of a comment together:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the scope of my research, a feminist programming language is to be built around a non-normative paradigm that represents alternative ways of abstracting. The intent is to encourage and allow new ways of thinking about problems such that we can code using a feminist ideology.
...
The idea came about while discussing normative and feminist subject object theory. I realized that object oriented programmed reifies normative subject object theory. This led me to wonder what a feminist programming language would look like, one that might allow you to create entanglements (Karen Barad Posthumanist Performativity).

I realized that to program in a feminist way, one would ideally want to use a feminist programming language. So what is a feminist programming language? Well I took a look at the major programming paradigms, the following are the four main groups a programming language can fall into: imperative, functional, object-oriented, and logic. I decided to explore feminist logic such that a feminist programming language could be derived.

I am currently exploring feminist critiques of logic in hopes of outlining a working framework for the creation of a feminist programming language.
...
A non-normative paradigm would be something that does not reinforce normative realizations of what a programming language is. That is to say, not whatever paradigms (OOP, functional, logic, etc) and programming languages you would consider standard (Java, C++, Ruby, Python, to list a few). The ideas is that the standard, normative, concepts reinforce the values and ideologies of societies standards. Currently, there exist projects built in response to normative programming languages and standard computer science, check out mezangelle for an example. In many ways this falls under the scope of critical code studies, as I am asking questions about the cultural, social impact of normal programming constructs.

What is a feminist logic is a question I’ve spent the past six months thinking about and researching. There are not a lot of women in philosophy, and there are definitely not a lot of feminist philosophers, so I don’t have a good answer for this question. There is great scholarship talking about weather a feminist logic can build off of formal logic or if it has to reject the laws of identity and create something entirely new. There are solid arguments for both camps, personally I’m swayed by the constructive theories that would build onto formal logic through a feminist lens. There exist logics that handle contradiction as part of the system, namely paraconsistent logic. I think this type of logic represents the feminist idea that something can be and not be without being a contradiction, that is a system where the following statement is not explosive: (p && ¬p) == 1.

In many ways the difference between a feminist programming language and a normative programming language would be the ways people go about answer questions with a feminist programming language as well as the types of questions a person would try to answer. I believe there is a stark contrast in these two different ideologies. If you get a chance to read the Karen Barad article I mention above it speaks of non-normative subject object relationships theorized as entanglements. Entanglements exist in stark contrast to the values and structures of OOP.

Note here, that she refers to a precedent for her feminist programming language called "Mezangelle". What is "Mezangelle" exactly? It turns out that it's a "language" some feminist artist came up with, which mixes up English and "code speak" as a performance-art type thing. So, she basically can't tell the difference between a joke language/net-speak and a functional computer language.

[Frumple]

This always makes me nostalgic for Ariele Schlesinger's feminist programming language.

Somehow, I had never heard of this. I need to send this to a couple of my old profs, I know my former adviser would get a kick out of all this.

I mean, she was kind of doomed from the start. The hardware works in boolean logic, it's the only thing it understands- so the entire endeavor needs to not only overhaul the very underpinnings of programming logic, it needs to also spark a hardware revolution.

That said, I could swear there's been something resembling progress with fuzzy (non-boolean, more or less) logic on the programming side of things in the last while. Possibly related to quantum research? Can't even remotely recall when or where I ran into it, if I'm not misremembering entirely. Fuzzy logic's pretty neat, though. Never have gotten around to looking into it as much as I've wanted to off and on.

[Reelya]

Fuzzy logic's been around since forever, it was just a fairly-ridiculous buzz word that trended because people who didn't know better believed that programmers could only code true/false on a computer, and the idea that you could e.g. tell a computer "well this is 60% likely" seemed like a revelation to them.

In fact, floating point variables have enabled you to do "fuzzy" logic since forever. It's called a "probability". You can use probabilities like logic, but not using any "fuzzy logic" magic, just using what you learn in school about how probabilities work.