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Comment Tech Workers in non-tech industry? (Score 1) 166

I wonder about the degree to which things have gotten worse for workers doing IT work for companies that are not self-defining as tech companies. There are pluses and minuses to such jobs, of course, but in my experience one of the more crucial things a worker gains from the trade-off is stability.

Comment Re:I love this post! (Score 1) 107

I haven't logged into slashdot for over five years (it was taken over by anti-semitic trolls at some point), but now that I have am 1) delighted to see the comments seem back under control and 2) completely unsurprised "Will (insert year here) be the year of the Linux desktop?" is first thing I saw. That's just too awesome.

Comment Global Movement? (Score 1) 388

Just an observation and some supporting facts to refute what is pretty clearly clickbait.....

600 hundred people in Dallas does not represent a global movement. For comparison, we can take the total number of 0 to 5 year old kids in America (about 24 million, see https://www.childstats.gov/ame...) and, for the sake of argument, say that 0-2 year olds represent half of that population. That's 12 million kids. Now 1.3 percent of those kids haven't had vaccines by the time they are two. That's around 156,000 kids and a minimum of 156,000 parents who have some kind of vaccine hang-up. That's a global movement. For further comparison, the death toll at the Jonestown cult mass murder and suicide was 909. Jonestown was not a global movement. But they still had more people with far greater commitment than the flat earthers.

Comment Racial bias and racism aren't the same thing (Score -1, Troll) 79

If you are commenting that "the problem isn't racism, it is [insert other cause here]", you need to "check your privilege" in the kids' parlance. Or, at the very least, you need to understand the difference between racism, racial bias, and white privilege.

From TFA:
" The root cause is that the algorithm has been given the wrong proxy for the problem, or data that represents the problem to be solved"
and
"“Even though bias by proxies is very common, it is pervasive across a range of fields and many people seem unaware of it in practice,” she says. “At their heart, what most current A.I. methods are doing is optimizing metrics, and in practice, all metrics are just proxies for what we really care about.”"

Why was the algorithm given the wrong proxy?
Because the wrong assumptions were made.
Why were the wrong assumptions made?
Because the people who wrote the algorithm did not model their patients correctly.
Why didn't they model their patients correctly?
Because they restricted their model to people who are white and upper middle class and make health care decisions accordingly.

This isn't greed. It isn't simple error, either. It is blindness to the difficulties that make up world in which we live.

Guess who gets away with that kind of blindness?
White people.
Why?
Because they can.

Does refusal to acknowledge white privilege automatically make you a racist?
No.
Does it automatically mean you have your head up your rear end and aren't living in reality?
Well, yeah. Probably.

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