That is indeed a similar problem. Europe is now aware of this problem and starting to mitigate it, to reduce dependencies on big tech - how hard that may be.
This is what worries me. People become dependent on these GenAI products that are proprietary, not transparant, and need a subscription. People build on it like it is a solid foundation. But all of a sudden the owner just pulls the foundation from under your building.
Same (GP). Schools were really unsafe places for children back then. It always strikes me of you see movies about schools in that period, that the story is often that children get horribly bullied and are called ugly, etc. I am glad my children grow up in better times.
Thanks for sharing this. It is so sad! Sorry that there are people like that. The only thing we can do now, is be better people than those horrible teachers.
As a 10y old, my father taught me about logical ports. I took a very large piece of paper and in a few days, I designed a tic tac toe "computer". It had LEDs that indicated the next computer move, based on the position of the pieces: every single possible state of the board led to a specific "next move" led. I do not think it actually would have worked, but of course I was very proud of my design at the time. Unfortunately, when I showed it to my teacher, he did not believe that I was serious. "This is a joke, right?" And that was it. Poor kid me... It did not discourage me however. I was a software engineer for a long time, and now I am a CS teacher. And I (try to) never ever discount the efforts of children.
Douglas Crockford nearly got cancelled because he qualified JavaScript as "promiscuous". People not knowing what the word means plus having a sense of urgency about sensitivity can be a dangerous combination.
> You're experiencing something real that the industry is aggressively pretending doesn't exist.
I agree with the article and recognize the fatigue, but I have never experienced that the industry is "aggressively pretending it does not exist". It feels like a straw man, but maybe you have examples of this happening.
His point is that the Orwellian way of surveillance is impossible to do in practice, and that a proper science fiction writer would have left the surveillance to machines. So I think his critique is about the art of SF writing, not about the prediction of surveillance itself.
The writeup does not mention Jeff Atwood (Stackoverflow founder) trying to convince Gruber to standardize markdown. Atwood approached him publicly in a series of blog posts, but Gruber kept silent, and if I remember correctly finally declined stating that he didn't want to spend time jumping through other persons' hoops. Although it sucks that markdown is not standardized, I still see this as an inspiring example of a person just doing what he wants to do.
I used to host an SSH server at home at port 443, for the same reason! The sysadmin of my employer was so strict that 'solutions' like this were the way of the least resistance. Security gets worse when policies get stricter.
> It states the cargo culted reasons, but not the actual truth
This dismisses existing explanations without engaging with the mentioned reasons. The following text then doesn't provide any arguments for this.
> Pronunciation is either solved by a) automatic language detection, or b) doesn't matter.
There are more possibilities than a and b. For example, it may matter for other things than pronunciation only. Also it may improve automatic detection or make automatic detection superfluous.
> If I am reading a book [...] I will pronounce it correctly, just like the screen reader will. If I see text in a language I don't recognize, I won't pronounce it correctly, and neither will the screen reader.
A generalization of your own experience to all users and systems. Screen readers aim to convey information accessibly, not mirror human ignorance.
> There's no reason that the screen reader will get it wrong, because <hungarian sentence> isn't ambiguous
This is circular reasoning. The statement is based on the assumption that automatic detection is always accurate - which is precisely what is under debate.
> If you can translate it, you already know what language it is in.
This a non sequitur. Even if someone can translate text, that doesn't mean software or search engines can automatically identify that language.
I had a teacher who became angry when a question was asked about a subject he felt students should already be knowledgeable about. "YOU ARE IN xTH GRADE AND STILL DON'T KNOW THIS?!" (intentional shouting uppercase). The fact that you learned it yesterday doesn't mean all humans in the world also learned it yesterday. Ask questions, always. Explain, always.