Lady @Lady@cat.family

@Ottergirljazz@hellsite.site @aescling @coriander “the right to choose and redefine gender” is actually just neoliberal trans rights (the right to participate in society as a consumer, insofar as gender is defined as a series of consumer decisions, for example what clothes you buy or what medical apparatuses you involve yourself in; if you absolve yourself of market forces then you’re just back to normal liberalism, the right to make decisions about your life and body as an egoistic individual)

marxist trans rights is the right to participate in society as a trans person, for example the right to access community spaces like bathrooms, involve yourself in community events like sports, participate in productive and reproductive labour like finding employment without discrimination, getting married, raising children, teaching, producing art which is available in libraries and public spaces, and so forth

take note of which of these fascists are currently coming hardest for

@wallhackio the goal of computational linguistics is to transform human language into a machine-processable model which you can then apply technological processes to. the core questions of the field are “what does this model look like” and “how do you do those transformations”. unfortunately, the model tends to be something which looks like a Western, Enlightenment, Structuralist approach to semantics, which i think is ultimately incorrect. firstly, I’m not convinced that English and Japanese (for example) DO model meaning in the same way; i think the question is open whether there even IS a model which all languages can be mapped to unproblematically. if there isn’t, you have to choose a model, which has implications for how fully different languages can be supported. the trend of course is to fully support English and let other languages fall where they may. secondly, i think the Structuralist approach is inadequate even for English; the idea that there is a comprehensible ontology of concepts and language is simply a means of expressing relationships between those concepts has been, i think, discredited since the 1970s. one of the reasons why A·I is so effective is because it doesn’t bother with this notion; it has no need for a backing ontology. but of course this is also why A·I sometimes produces nonsense

@aescling but that origin mark!

@wallhackio i feel like the whole field (a) suffers from epistemological failings in approach and (b) has been eaten by A·I

@wallhackio we don't care about saturn or jesus but we do care about the season of carnival, which runs from “kings day” until lent and consequently must be begun with a kings cake

@wallhackio see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_cake for more history and traditions

@wallhackio in the roman colonies they had this feast called saturnalia where on the last night they would bake a bean into a loaf of bread and whoever got it became the lord of misrule

after christianization this tradition was moved to the end of christmastide, i·e epiphany i·e the day celebrating when the three gentile kings bore witness to jesus

consequently the cake is now known as kings cake

@coriander but it’s complicated. for example over the course of my lifetime publishers have decided to get really into dialogue and shied away from lengthy prose. this is BOTH because dialogue is easy to adapt to film AND because an audience which is more versed in film than literature is more comfortable reading dialogue exchanges than lengthy prose AND (and subsequently) because it is an aesthetic choice in a lot of YA, which preconditioned the preferences of a lot of heavy readers who grew up on the stuff

@coriander a slightly more accurate take would be that the amount of money in film adaptations of books means that publishers are looking for books which are easy to film-adapt, and YA just figured out that formula first

@coriander i mean it’s always been happening but increasingly so i think; a reductive but probably at least somewhat accurate summary is that YA’s popularity has resulted in publishers trying to make every other genre more like YA