This doesn't mean that we don't work to fix our language, but it does mean that we need to be aware of the context a word or phrase exists in and the cultural intersections that go along with it.
We just aren't trying to move someone necessarily "away from an imperfect form" and "toward a perfect form that we decided on fifteen minutes ago." Instead there is a cultural gap, there is a matter of identity, and humanity (and all of nature) likes to defy categorization every chance it gets.
If you are a cis person and you have "trans rights are human rights" in your bio I am generally going to assume that you are not a safe person.
Similarly. If you put "Ally" in your bio I am going to assume you aren't one.
Not because it is bad to flag that "Trans rights are human rights," but because it is too easy: you are really only advertising who you are to followers and potential followers, and that is a very easy thing to do without having done the work.
I was at a Native fundraiser awhile back and they had a very powerful land acknowledgement at the front, but part of what made it powerful was their statement about how "this can feel useless, sometimes, or like it is the only thing that it is done" and their reflection on "what it means to us to be doing this."
It wasn't colonizers doing it pro-forma for other colonizers.
Possibly! I don't dispute that it may happen! I've seen a lot of thoughts in that direction for other technologies that never panned out, but I've also seen it go the other way.
Finding a use for the generative AI tools in the development process won't surprise me. Especially if the cost comes down.
What I balk at are replacement narratives or the idea that somehow it will invalidate human engineers.
They will try. It being a terrible idea doesn't mean that they won't try. It ultimately being doomed to failure doesn't mean they won't try. They've been pushing this narrative for years, waiting for a moment when they could try to find a justification to cut our numbers or our pay.
So they will try.
Go unionize. That's your only way of resisting them trying.
But.
Our skills will still be valuable on the other side when they eventually figure out that this doesn't work.
If you want to fight back there are a handful of predominant methods, depending on which theory of power.
Unions are the most practical and the most in your day-to-day control. The others are things like political solutions, which both take time and tend to be out of your average person's hands in a way that unions are not.
Will they always work? Absolutely not. On the other hand: they already have today for this exact problem in the software industry.
The fundamental assertion that the value of the labor will drop to zero I think is a fundamental flaw.
Good luck to them with that theory of labor value. They've been pushing this idea since at least the late 1980s that the "next big thing" would "eliminate" the need for software engineers
Could this be it? Could this finally be it after forty years?
Maybe! But I'm not holding my breath, and in the meantime the question is "what actions can we take in this moment"
I don't have the power to make the US Congress functional, or the SCOTUS not terrible, or get the EU to move more quickly, so what are the concrete actions I can take?
Unions are a concrete step that many people have the ability to take and one that can help.
Think that there is no effective action and we're all doomed to a Malthusian ending?
Then how do you respond to that, because that is the one thing you can control: your response.
"we have this language that can express something precisely and even in some cases provably. We do need specialists who can think in terms of the problem, however, and deconstruct the ideas so that they can be worked on. Especially because you are never clear in your ideas."
"Okay, but what if we just had the execs say whatever [nonsense] ideas in English and software [that we can't understand or deconstruct] generated it, what then, huh?"
I swear this #horse is part cat with nine lives based on the number of near disasters she has had.
So my partner is out of town visiting their girlfriend and I go outside to do evening feeding on Saturday and discover that the horses have made their way into the feed room. I had evidently forgotten to latch it in the morning and they had a GRAND old time in the feed room.
I try to check her but she is having none of it. I can see that there isn't a significant amount of blood, which means she hasn't got a severe laceration, but there is definitely damage to her leg.
She's refusing to put weight on it, but there's minimal blood and it isn't a compound fracture. So that's a good sign. I eventually get to prod it and she does not like that but I don't feel any inappropriate movement. No hoof damage.
These are not conclusive things, but from a triage standpoint they inform my next actions. I text our vet an update on the situation and while I wait for the vet to get back I call my partner.
I update them on what happened and we talk about it. I don't hear back from our vet in about 15 minutes and so we agree that I should escalate to her emergency pager.
So I get the number for her emergency pager and call it and… she's out of town
Within ten minutes she calls me back. We talk about triage, possibilities, and options.
We agree with her showing improvement and since I can inspect it a little more thoroughly now that this is not an Emergency Emergency™ (in that she needs to come out tonight).
Whether it even makes sense to x-ray depends on whether we would be willing to perform surgery, and that isn't happening tonight regardless.
By the morning Red is feeling a lot better. There's clear signs of inflammation and I can see the extent of the superficial damage (which is, well, superficial) and she lets me do a more thorough check on her leg
We agree that it doesn't need to be looked at right now
Today I updated my primary vet on it: she's continuing to do better and now will put significant weight on that leg. So that eliminates most of the Really Bad™ scenarios
So now we wait and see if this manifests into something longer term. She doesn't get ridden and is basically a pasture pet at this point, so it's not like she needs to hold weight or be in any sort of rush to improve. When the inflammation is down I can do a lameness check and see if there's anything else we need to look at
This horse has a habit of getting into very very near misses, so this hopefully is just another one on her list
She nicked a vein in her ankle on a wire cut, any deeper and it would have been VERY bad, but as it was it was just a matter of bandaging and rest for a bit.
She broke the splint bone in her leg, but the splint bone is an auxiliary bone and it healed fine.
She broke her jaw behind the cheek plate, so she could still chew food but just couldn't take a bit for a while.