You’ll get over it or you won’t. 🤷

Same point in saying anything online: none. That’s social media.

Lemmy is great place to say shit about reddit that reddit won’t let you say because it’s a moderation hellscape.

It was already explained, it’s the premise their activism supports by advocating the disparate treatment of female as a slur. From an external, impartial observer, claiming there’s a problem with the word female with little regard for context communicates the problem resides in whatever the word itself denotes rather than the contextual meaning.

Moreover, the position they advocate is counterfactual. The language community decides the meaning of words through observed usage, and in the preponderance of the community, neither female nor woman is offensive. That includes among females. Female is used self-referentially “in-group”: it shows up in feminist book titles, in dating communities (eg, “F4F/M”), classifieds (eg, “need a roommate […] females only”), etc. In conventional language, female is an acceptable word (as is woman).

Imagine online activists started condemning usage of the word dutch as a slur. It’s bizarre: there is nothing wrong with the dutch, yet they’re acting as though we should think so & resist that urge? Why are they propagating problematic presuppositions we don’t have about the dutch? Why are they trying to make this official? Are they some special breed of stupid?

Continuing this analogy, they drag you into fights by claiming you’re a racist for using the word when you’re not actually saying anything offensive about the dutch. You & the rest of society know the word dutch isn’t offensive, yet these activists insist it is by pointing to some fringe online community spewing vitriolic propaganda about dutch inferiority specifically using the word dutch. You repudiate their claim by asking why some fringe group irrelevant to wider society gets to decide the meaning of words, but they condemn your “hurtful” language and say you’re as bad as them or one of them. Don’t be an asshole & use another word like Dutchperson, Netherlander, or Hollander they say: it’s the right thing to do & shows socially conscientious, moral rectitude.

While our society includes both a minority of sexists & a vast majority of non-sexists who use the word female differently, these activists privilege the language & rhetoric of the sexist minority over the non-sexist majority. Why should the sexists get to decide the meaning of words for everyone & the unequal ideas to perpetuate in society? Who does that serve?

Older activists recognized that doesn’t serve them & took a different approach. Against higher odds, black activists reappropriated the word black as a word of pride. Non-heteronormative activists did likewise with the word queer. Instead of antagonizing non-sexists by treating them as sexists or fulfilling an inferiority complex to make sexist language official, online language police would be wise to learn from the older activists & follow their example.

it’s because it’s extremely often used in such a way that people (typically men) will refer to men as men and refer to women as females. It’s why you may see the phrase “men and females” thrown around as a response.

Right, so the premise is there’s something wrong with the word that names an entire gender. The campaign isn’t “don’t use ‘men and females’”, it’s “don’t use ‘females’”. They’ll write about Ferengis whenever a suspected non-female uses female: they’re not examining meanings & context to draw critical distinctions. ‘Men and females’ is merely a rationalization.

The effect: female is a slur, yet male isn’t, so female is stigmatized. That disparity raises the impression that femininity has such deficiencies even their name is a term of abuse unworthy of pride, and that females are too frail without society coming to defend them from the adversity of their name. In contrast, masculinity is sufficient for its name not to raise adversity, and even if it did, males have the fortitude for society not to come to their defense. That unequal treatment of words implicates females disfavorably thereby stigmatizing them.

Think who that serves: is opposition to the noun “female” unwittingly subscribing to stigmatization & sexist thinking of those who’d welcome the stigmatization? The language police are playing themselves here.

Treating the word female like male, however, wouldn’t raise such questions & impressions, and it wouldn’t ostensibly support a sexist premise and play into its consequences.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all pejorative terms of mental incapacity went the way of idiot & imbecile? Why shelter derogatory words^[1] from ameliorating?

When a term begins as pejorative and eventually is adopted in a non-pejorative sense, this is called melioration or amelioration. One example is the shift in meaning of the word nice from meaning a person was foolish to meaning that a person is pleasant.

I’m certainly not perfect in that regard, but in principle, the language that we use shapes our thoughts more than we realize

The support for that is weak: the influence is mild & easily overcome. An insult isn’t meant to be productive, it’s supposed to convey contempt & unflattering ideas about the recipient of the insult.

To me it’s in the same group as idiot, fool, lunatic, imbecile and cretin.

Because it is: look up the origins of those words.

Here’s the thing, the word doesn’t matter… It’s the intent. For example if I said “well aren’t you a fucking genius” and meant it sarcastically that’s just as insulting. I could also say “you gobflecker” in a aggressive tone that also bad.

That’s how I insult here: write scathing vitriol that replaces derogatory words with equivalent meanings, condescendingly disparages generalities about the insultee without referring to them specifically. It offends them more & makes a better insult.

Counterpoint: 🤷

The whole thing is made up hate by people who had their feelings hurt being called retarded in school. It’s a 4th-grade insult that snowflakes have decided is now a “seriously harmful” term. I’ve been called the dreaded “F” word 1,000 times, so what? Didn’t turn me gay or even hurt my fee fees.

I reveled in embracing the insults thrown at me & feeling empowered about growing the backbone not to care. It saddens me that newer generations don’t learn sticks and stones is really that simple & get so worked up over words.

They claim anyone is a Nazi for explaining to them offensive ideas aren’t world ending & freedom of speech is worth protecting.

I don’t like the euphemism treadmill. Normalize all slurs. Get more creative with your language & learn how to reappropriate & reclaim.

The worst take I’ve seen on slurs is the online activism to make the noun female a slur. When I explain that their advocacy accepts a sexist premise that something is wrong with the name of an entire gender & thereby consents to the stigmatization of that gender, they erupt into an irrational rage.

AI is a great tool for pissing off people who hate AI. That’s reason enough for me.

if you come in guns blazing and condescending people will shut you down no matter what facts you have

I love that approach, but then I’m not trying to change minds of those who lack the wisdom to prioritize the truth & objectivity over themselves and should know better. Merely trying to vindicate a neglected consideration for cooler minds. If someone’s ready for it, then great, and if not, then we can admire & ridicule their folly: reality doesn’t care. Defending truth & rationality is reward enough & those too foolish to appreciate it can find their own way there.

It’s pretty much acknowledging

you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

It’s good enough to point out the water & even be insolent about it: the horse only prolongs its dehydration by not drinking, & there are better horses. I’m not a horse trainer.

People who do that lack basic sense/information literacy not to get Darwin’d out of existence, which is for the better.

While I agree the UK law is nuts, and its citizens either need to revolt or kill all their children & stop breeding (probably for the best) to comply with their law, I’m just writing about principles for robust web content like don’t just post an image of text

1. the disabled can’t read &
2. that’s vulnerable to failure for any number of reasons including geoblocking due to insane laws.

Text alternatives are resilient to failure & provide richer features (usability, accessibility) than images.

Another great argument for text alternatives such as link to text-based (archived) sources: graceful failover & accessibility.

Cybercrime isn’t “research”?

OP thinks security researchers don’t understand how to properly serialize data for correct deserialization. OP also thinks they largely use CSV.