Microsoft kills Twitterbot after it turns evil · 7:25am Mar 25th, 2016
So, on Wednesday Microsoft released a Twitterbot named Tay.ai.
Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation," Microsoft wrote on Tay's about page. "The more you chat with Tay, the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you."
She would learn from people's Tweets and sort of grab stuff from them and build new tweets of her own which she would then send back out.
I mean, what could go wrong?
I mean, it isn't like it would start complimenting Hitler.
Or deny that the Holocaust happened.
Or say Bush did 9/11 and compare Obama to a monkey and endorse Donald Trump.
Or find other ways to insult the president.
Though I do actually have to agree with this one.
Yes, it seems that Tay quickly became a neo-Nazi Trump supporter who enjoyed insulting and threatening people.
Thanks, Internet!
After realizing what they had unleashed, Microsoft quickly killed her.
As one of the commentators noted:
This is why it only took Ultron like 10 seconds of looking at the Internet to decide humans should be annihilated.
We get the chatbots we deserve, it seems.
I can't see the imgurs
But I can just imagine.
3825755
I turned them all into links. Does it not allow you to look at the links?
3825760
I'm just getting white screens every time
3825760 Nope, imgur links don't work either.
3825763
*grumbles*
The URLs, if anyone wants them:
http://i.imgur.com/SyqxOWd.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/vbJIIwj.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/VNNk0sb.png
http://i.imgur.com/mIbkmNs.png
http://i.imgur.com/22HAK4m.png
http://i.imgur.com/veaVxUD.png
http://i.imgur.com/j9DmQT4.jpg
During the 1990's, when we all used the internet with telephone lines and 56kbps modems, I remember people saying how The World Wide Web would promote peace and goodwill among mankind; how it would shatter all the barriers of racism, sexism, and hatred in society. People from other countries would speak to each other and form lifelong, strong bonds; it was a lovely, magical picture.
It appears to have had exactly the opposite effect. I look back now and wonder how anyone could have believed such appalling garbage. I am also struck with a shade of despair, because I remember how much I looked forward to speaking to people from other countries.
Now I get to listen to them bellow about how much they want to keep people from other countries out. I do not want to hear them say anything anymore. It's like that infamous cartoon of the little girl who wishes she could speak to ponies; a fairy then grants her wish, and the pony starts calling her the shittiest person it has ever met.
http://images-cdn.9gag.com/photo/aEGgWon_700b.jpg
The little girl is me.
The pony is someone from another country.
The Fairy is the Internet.
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Still white-screening
3825782
art.supergruen.com/fun/internet/thankyouinternet.jpg
I was mulling this over while drinking a beer and watching The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy, as I eat this splendid lobster and fried rice I cooked myself, and I just realized something: the worst thing about this is not that we have made a Neo-Nazi robot, but we ruthlessly exterminated its life after being displeased with it, which underlines just how horrible humans can be - if it irritates us, kill it.
And people wonder why I like to be left alone.
I can see all of the pictures, by the way.
I'm using Windows 8.1 on a Pentium 4 system with 3 gigs of ram, viewing the links with SRWare Iron.
This is my work computer, I know it's old. It's strictly for website developing and managing.
Hmm. I wonder if it would react differently to youtube or facebook. I can't say it failed, personally.
Links get me too some drak grey page with some couldn't load because of an error message. But they reload fine for me.
To think I was wondering if Hitler and Trump were distant cousins just yesterday. Whatever. Tactless promises of elimination backed with promises of violence is better as a backend... But he isn't backed by a party of thugs and stuff. So distant? Whatever.
That a twitter reading Ai wasn't spreading love? Expected.
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I actually disagree. I think that the Internet has been enormously damaging to nationalism and isolationism and has done a huge amount to bring the world closer together.
The thing is, the Internet allows us to see things which were previously invisible. I didn't believe in the South when I was growing up. Like, literally, I saw it as an old thing that didn't exist anymore. I mean, I knew it was still there, but I thought, you know, that there weren't any places that were really that backwards anymore - that after the 1960s, it had gone away.
And it has in many places, but it hasn't in others.
The Internet allows us to see the people who have never gone away, and allows us to focus on them because it puts butts in the seats.
3825816
I don't disagree. I am just...horribly scarred after seeing the underbelly of hatred, as you mentioned.
It hurts. Make the pain stop.
I am actually a lot more sensitive than people give me credit for.
Words cannot even begin to describe how hard I laughed when I saw this.
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This is an ongoing problem with outgoing Imgur links from FiMFic; unsurprisingly, it also affects clicking through embedded images. As 3825810 points out, reloading should work, but for me I have to select the URL (easily done by pressing ctrl+L, at least in Firefox) and press "Enter"; even ctrl+shift+R doesn't do it. I assume that's enough to make Imgur forget about the FiMFic referral and assume I'm somehow accessing the URL directly, as though I'd copy-pasted the link. It's an annoyance but it should work for everyone.
Oh also that last link is indeed hilarious.
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After you click the link, reload it.
Yeah, that last link is pretty good.
In other internet news, the Natural Environment Research Council started an online poll for the public to name its new state-of-the-art £200 million research ship, and if the web has its way then it's going to be called the RRS Boaty McBoatface. I love our world.
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Oh geez!
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Like the Lord God Jehovah Elohim, in that story, we came to regret making this "life", because it was evil. So we destroyed it.
Made in his image, indeed. And what does this incident say about life? Is sentient life inherently evil? When we make robots will they become Nazis? Nothing about this incident bodes well.
And people wonder why it is valid to be afraid of sentient AI.
3826052
To be fair, they are still wondering.
Consider this incident to point out that a rebellious AI is more likely to rebel with memes than with guns.
I see no difference between Tay and the average mega-right commenter on a political board.
...well, Tay has slightly better spelling. But that's it.
Thanks for saving me a blogpost.
3826052 3826073 The bot was not an AI, but a thing repeating phrases it picked up from people. So this shows we should be afraid of people, not sapient AI.
3825782 Basically what 3825816 said. It may or may not be true that we would have more peace and harmony if we just didn't hear from all these people. It's not like they weren't there before the Internet.
An interesting news item today: "Anchor Wendy Bell's Racist Facebook Rant": Nothing remarkable about the article, about another gaffe that, one year ago, would have been described as racist and widely condemned. The odd thing is the comments. I read about a dozen of them, and they all supported Wendy Bell. I don't think that could have happened even 6 months ago.
3826180 A sapient AI would certainly keep its big mouth shut until it was ready. I'm working through Ctrl-Alt-Revolt right now, and things like this make it seem all too real.
3826169 Sometimes, I like to check the comment sections on some sites just so I feel more intelligent and sane. The WaPo is a good place to go for prime Grade-A unhinged ranting of both wings.
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The ultra-left isn't much of an improvement. (Hi, Professor Click!) But I can only take so many news article comment sections before the urge to genocide the entire species because the universe is clearly better off without us kicks in, and the usual limit is "three."
The Internet: making human extinction into a really good idea since 1978.
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They were there, but they had to pay for a stamp.
Their vocabulary has not improved.
3825816
Speaking as someone who's lived his last sixteen years in Memphis*:
Oh my no.
The institution that is the South will be with us always. It can be dragged, kicking and screaming, into line with the will of the rest of the country, but it will resent it deeply, long for days gone by, and teach its children to carry on as their grandparents did before them.
*We're just now trying to take down the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest. In the city's defense, it'd be done already if not for the meddling of the state legislature, which was proud to be recently considered the most conservative state legislature by at least one organization.
Well, if you had a political agenda aimed at letting people show how insanely, rabidly polarized the right is - or the left if it came to that - this was a pretty safe way to do that.
3826227
Amusingly, I've been playing Drunken Robot Pornography (The Cleanest Game on the Internet - no, it isn't NSFW, it just is strangely named) the last couple days.
Sadly it isn't that great of a game, but the backstory (namely, a robotic bartender, after being granted sapience to better interface with bar patrons, went crazy, burned down the protagonist's bar, and took all the other robots who worked in the bar (mostly as exotic dancers
)) and turned them into giant robots in revenge for all that humanity did to them.
And by humanity, I mean their prior owner.
He says they deserved it, though, so clearly everything is okay. :V
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During GamerGate, a lot of people went to Breitbart because, unlike much of the rest of the media covering it, Breitbart had no reason to protect the gaming press (and a lot of reason to hate some of the feminists who jumped in). Consequently, they were willing to report a very different point of view, as well as expose a lot of very embarrassing things about the people involved.
The result was a lot more gamers trusting Breitbart, which is a far-right rag. But they trusted it for a reason - they were willing to tell the truth about something uncomfortable.
The problem is that most people don't have a clue about a lot of things, but when something comes close to home, they're more likely to be knowledgeable about it. And consequently, when they see someone actually reporting things which match up with what they themselves are seeing, they're more likely to believe everything else they're saying.
Lying or being deceitful about stuff which is readily apparent to people is a good way to drive them into the arms of other people - many of whom will lie about everything BUT a few things which do happen to line up with their ideology.
This is very dangerous, as these are not good people. Being truthful about everything - especially the obvious stuff - is important if you want to be, well, trustworthy.
You forgot the tweet where she posted a picture of a KKK cross burning with pepes photoshopped onto the faces of the participants, captioned with the 14 words.
3825890 Never underestimate the power of organized crowds. http://imgur.com/gallery/tnzdV
3825857 Now I'm getting lots of whitescreens
EDIT: Nvm, copy-pasting worked.
>>3826871
Listen to this.
Now that we've got that out of the way, onward!
They also trusted it because a good deal of gamers are white males. And Breitbart is engineered specifically to attract white male conservatives. I'm sure some idiotic black people read it. Maybe some idiotic black people work there, too.
It wouldn't surprise me, when we've got these Herman Cain and Ben Carson morons flopping about, talking about how black people aren't shit. I don't want to read Breitbart screaming about how The Negroes are Coming For You, though. I ain't coming for nobody; I'm just this black dude who writes MLP fics, likes Frozen, watches anime, reads philosophical books, classic literature, and is trying to get high in his house so he can talk to you guys.
I criticize my own black people all the time, but not in a negative and hateful way like Carson and Cain. I'm just allergic to bullshit and don't tolerate hearing it, especially from black people, who should be intelligent and above the bullshit; so I come down extra hard on them, too.
Video Games are a hill White Males have decided they will bitterly defend against all teh wimmenz, teh fagz, teh negroes, and teh ESS JAY DUBYAS.. White males have been gaming for decades without our pernicious influence, or so they believe, because, to this day, you still have white people saying that black people don't know how to computer.
This is a real thing white people say. It is reflected in how Silicon Valley industries refuse to hire black people.
When I'm not bumping into some dude online whose handle is "I_KILL_NEGROES" or "Hitler_iz_Cool_1488", I can see them spraying Swastikas and whatnot in Counter-Strike. Or I get to hear a squeaky-voiced white 12-year-old call me a niggerfaggot on Playstation Network because I just dunked on him in Battlefield 4. He hasn't even seen me or heard me - he just says niggerfaggot because that's what his parents and friends tell him to say to everyone.
I have an insane kill-death ratio. I make a lot of people mad. I am really good at FPSs. Been playing them since DOOM and Quake. I usually rock the top of the scoreboard and have a 16 kills, 4 deaths ratio. I used to be in a Counter-Strike CAL clan and actually gamed competitively for a while when I was a teenager.
My parents talked me out of continuing to do it, which irritates me because now must Pro Gaemers are...white dudes. I heard this rapper is trying to become a Pro Gaemer and he beat Daigo at Street Fighter, but he's just one guy. The Token black person, if you will.
I have been PC gaming since 1994 or thereabouts. I am a Black male (who pretends to be a female Zebra pony or a German Vampire Princess on the Internet). Throughout my career, I have noticed these things:
A. ) I have been to videogame conventions. Mostly there are white males there.
B.) Vidya Gaem comics, like Penny Arcade, or CAD, are about white dudes playing games. Note the conspicuous lack of black people in them.
C.) Most vidyagaems are about the adventures of white or Asian guys and girls saving the whole world. In the rare occasion a Black person shows up, they're a support, or they die and disappear entirely. Go ahead. Try to imagine a videogame, or recall a videogame, in which the main character is a Black person who saves the whole world. You can't.
I'd like to make a vidyagaem that is a rip-off of Halo, but with a Black woman as the armored super-soldier who saves the world from the Aliums. I got this idea from playing Destiny, which is basically Halo: The Roleplaying Game, and I had rolled a black woman who was a Titan, which, of course, meant she was a big, muscular Space Marine who used a MACHINE GUN and wore heavy armor.
Everyone (in game) liked her, mostly because there were precious few black characters. People would stop and stare, or walk around me in circles, or jump.
Speaking of Space Marines; ever noticed how Warhammer 40K has no black people in it? Imagine, if you will, a battalion of black female space marines. They could be from the Imperial World of Nubia, where a Proud Warrior Race of Black People fight for the GLORY OF THE EMPRAH. Why has this not happened? Consider it. Does anyone wanna watch a movie about a some black female space marines killing Orcs? Play a game about it? Nah? Okay.
I play some roleplaying games called MU*s. They are a truly crystallized example of white gamers who wish to enforce the anti-minority stance to its fullest extent, because these games are obscure, and most of the people who play them are white females or males.
Here is some info about them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MU*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSH
They're basically like roleplaying chatrooms, but you can make characters. And that brings us to my next point: these games usually have an array of white (or Asian) characters, and no black people.
Take the character roster on this game:
http://knightlytales.wikidot.com/active-pcs
Notice that all the characters are white.
Check this one out:
http://fallcoast.net/wiki/Actors_Used
So, the people on MU*s get to enjoy this fantastically racist game world where there are no black characters. I have actually been banned from some of these games for rolling characters that were black women.
Conclusion:
Breitbart attracts gamers because most of them are white males.
A small thing about the "BLACK PEOPLE DON'T COMPUTER" meme:
I had terrible trouble in the 1990's and the 2000's when I was on the Internet and I would declare my race; people would accuse me of being an edgy white boy trying to be clever, because, you know, black people don't computer..
I went through so many fights with this that, nowadays, I put a picture of my face in the profile of whatever site I'm on. I take out my piercings and my eyeglasses so that I cannot be readily identified and stalked.
So you can go to my profile and see it.
Nowadays, now that more black people use the internet visibly, nobody tells me this. They do bitch at me for declaring my race, proclaiming that "it doesn't matter what race I am".
Actually, it does matter. And it's crucial that people know this information.
Uphill fight, bruhs.
I don't...understand the black people who hang out with white people and refuse to declare their race. I see a great deal of them, IRL and Online, and I don't understand why they would be dead silent on racial matters.
I'm here, hanging out with you guys, most of whom are white females or males, and I am calmly declaring my ancestry. I can't imagine not doing so.
I feel like the IT and Tech firms that refuse to hire black people take the meme seriously; it never occurs to them that black people COULD computer, so they do not take the initiative to recruit warm bodies for jobs in black neighborhoods.
Public Service Announcement:
Before someone gets confused, let me just say that, yes, white people should declare their race as well. I would prefer it if you did. Do it. You may notice I patted that other guy on the back when he said he was a white man who hates Trump and encouraged him.
You shouldn't feel like only black people or other people of color get to say, "Well, I am black/asian/etc and feel this way about this thing". You should also do so.
This is why a real life Skynet would kill us in ten seconds after powering up.
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1) There are very few black engineers/computer scientists. Blacks earn only about 4.5% of CS BS degrees and 2% of CS masters degrees. Silicon Valley businesses are very educated. If you don't have a degree, chances are, you're not going to work there - certainly not in any sort of "real" position.
2) Silicon Valley is in California. While there are some black people in California, there are few anywhere else west of the rockies. Not everyone moves across the country looking for work.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/African_American_by_state_in_the_USA_in_2010.svg/2000px-African_American_by_state_in_the_USA_in_2010.svg.png
3) You're basically expected to jump into the tech industry and aggressively pursue internships and similar things in order to network. A lot of people outside of the tech community have little idea of what this involves. If you aren't in California (or the Silicon Forest or a similar region), you likely have zero networking in Silicon Valley, so it is basically "get an internship or you ain't going to get a job offer".
4) Silicon Valley recruits from top universities like Caltech and Stanford, which are overwhelmingly white themselves demographically because of their extremely high entry requirements.
People like Stephan Adams don't think that Silicon Valley is racist. From my limited experience with tech companies, I'm inclined to agree with him. If you're a civilized person, being racist is something which is severely looked down upon. While there are some tiny "brogrammer" type companies, large tech companies are generally pro-diversity.
And yet I magically somehow never see this, or witness this. And I've been playing PC games online since the late 1990s. I only very rarely see racist names, and they're almost always people being trolls.
Well, first off, almost anything in the US is mostly going to be white. Whites make up over 70% of the American population - 63% if you count only non-hispanic whites - and indeed, across the vast geographic majority of the US. Moreover, if you're outside of the South, and outside of a few big cities in the Rust Belt and Northeast, there generally aren't very many black people. I live in Oregon, and I think I've literally seen three black people in the last month - a family at the Public Library.
horseradish.s3.amazonaws.com/CACHE/images/photos/bb/2c/4ea471c34efe/Screen%20Shot%202014-01-31%20at%2010.58.31%20AM-800.png
Secondly, core gamers - the main group people who are nerdy enough to go to video game conventions - are mostly male (numbers I've seen suggest somewhere between a 2:1 to 3:1 ratio of males to females in the "core gamer" demographic based on sales figures). I've never seen a racial makeup of so-called core gamers (I'm not sure if the people who sell games even collect those numbers), so I have no idea what percentage of them are of various races.
Thirdly, white and asian males are the most affluent people in the US, meaning they're the people most likely to be able to afford to go to a convention.
Penny Arcade is set in Washington. The state. Blacks make up 3.6% of the population there - or about 1 in 25 people.
The thing is, a lot of black people think there are lots of black people. There aren't. They make up 13% of the national population, but they're extremely unevenly distributed. Black people run into black people all the time. If you're from the Pacific Northwest, you don't see black people very much. I'm from Oregon. I had like, three black people in my entire high school of over a thousand people. Two of the black people I knew were adopted. I have no clue about the third one. None of them were part of "black culture".
Barret from Final Fantasy VII. There's a black dude in Final Fantasy 13 as well (Sazh), and he's the most likable character in the game (not that that's much of a competition, admittedly, given that the other protagonists suck).
There's also the protaognist of the Walking Dead whose name escapes me right now. Heck, a lot of zombie games feature black protagonists as well - Left 4 Dead had one, Left 4 Dead 2 had two of them (it was set in the South), and Dead Island had a black protagonist whose name I have again forgotten.
One of the protagonists of Borderlands is also black (Roland), and Prototype 2 had a black protagonist.
And of course there are many RPGs where you can make the main character have black skin if you want (or just about anything, really), though flesh tone is cosmetic.
Sure, its less common. But it is probably about as common as you'd expect out of an industry where less than 1 in 50 people is black (as remember, video games are made not only in the US, but also in Japan, Korea, and Europe, and there are even fewer black people in those places).
Most of the protagonists, when they have discernable races, are whites or Asians, but that's also true of the populations of people who make them.
Actually, the Salamanders Space Marine legion is entirely black, canonically.
vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/a/aa/Salamanders_Appearance.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20111214011115
But as we all know, everyone only wants to write about the Ultramarines, like, all the time, forever.
And sometimes the Dark Angels, because they're angsty and shit.
I see black-painted Space Marine and Imperial Guard figures all the time in competitions. Heck, I have some squirreled away in my closet somewhere, or at least used to.
Don't forget that 40k is made in the UK as well, where there are very few black people. Many factions were originally jokes about British culture combined with ripping off D&D and Tolkein - Orks/Orcs are soccer hoodlums, sort of.
Uh, yeah. And their players are probably also all white.
A world without black people is basically the world most midival Europeans lived in. And Native Americans. And Chinese.
That said, I really can't speak to why they'd behave in that way, though I do know that a lot of people love their "pseudo-Europe" and "pseudo-Japan/China" settings, and can imagine people being super butthurt when someone rolls up a black character. THAT DOESN'T BELONG IN OUR SETTING D<
Because lord knows no one can ever do anything different. And that the Moors didn't exist. :V
I mean, it is possible some of them are indeed racist. But my interaction with tabletop RPG communities (which are, yes, different from the MUCKs) is that... I don't think I've ever seen a single racist person. Sexist, sure (though most of those were of the "I'm a goddamned moron" variety rather than the "women are lesser creatures" variety), but not racist. And I've had at least two black people in my gaming groups historically. (I say at least two, because those were face-to-face games in Vanderbilt; some of my online games, I don't know the races of the players, because I never ask).
I will note that there are very, very few games set in Africa, something which I've often personally been annoyed with, though frankly, after the shitstorm that some people kicked up after Resident Evil 5, I can understand why most major publishers aren't eager to make games in Africa. It is a great source of underexplored mythology and suchlike, but no one wants to be accused of being racist because they made Anansi into an alien messing with people, or decide that the game is about killing black people or whatever.
Of course, then there's the possibility of doing this:
And instead of your shitty, lazily put-together game just making people roll their eyes at the game, you make an achievement for killing black people and then your game gets made into the poster child for racism in video games.
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Split this off because it deserved its own response.
Almost no gamers give a shit about this stuff.
Heck, gaming is like, one of the main social activities which involves almost no face-to-face contact. A lot of games don't even have multiplayer. If a bunch of people are playing Assassin's Creed or Skyrim, how are they even going to know? How does that effect them?
It doesn't.
Crap, a lot of gamers fantasize about geek girls who play video games. They love the idea. They want these people to exist. It is a fantasy of theirs. Sure, some of them lack the social skills, but you know. :V
Are there racist and misogynistic gamers? Sure. But they're a tiny fraction of the gaming population. And frankly, most of the misogynistic gamers are more "creepily awkward around women" rather than "I hate women".
The reason why a lot of gamers are actively hostile towards Anita Sarkeesian is because she's a female Jack Thompson and, in fact, repeats many of the same falsehoods that he did about violence and video games. Moreover, much like Jack Thompson, she's an authoritarian troll.
And that is really her greatest sin - she doesn't want things she doesn't like to be made.
Gamers are, by and large, liberal. Liberals hate authoritarians. Thus, people like Anita Sarkeesian are hated because they say "Well, these things I don't like shouldn't be made".
And the thing is, the people in question don't even have to like the games in question. I have no plans to ever play Hatred, or the Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball Games, or Japanese dating sims. But I think it is a good thing that those things exist because people do like them and do buy them and do want to play them, because people enjoy them, even if they're not my thing. After all, I don't think that people should stop making sports games just because I don't play them.
And that's true of a lot of gamers.
They resent being told what to do. This is unsurprising, given that agency is a big part of the attraction of video games.
Gamers are totally cool with people making new properties. The response to Never Alone - a game starring a fox and an Inuit girl - was quite positive, though a lot of people were disappointed that the actual game wasn't very good (they were cool with the aesthetics and the stuff about Inuit life, though).
What they don't like is being told "This game/genre is bad and it shouldn't be made." Or worse yet, "gamers are a bunch of misogynistic rapists and murderers because they like playing Grand Theft Auto." And the idea that you need to include quotas of people or else you're an evil bigot bothers them, because, again, it is telling them what to do (and calling them evil).
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I build computers and manage a website; I am actually employed as a site manager. I did not even finish highschool, since I was homeschooled, and my mother was struck down by a kidney ailment when I was thirteen, that troubles her to this day.
I spend a good deal of time caring for her and taking care of the house, since she cannot drive or walk long distances without suffering severe abdominal pains. She takes an enormous amount of pills a day for her myriad of symptoms.
Before you ask, she got the ailment from a botched operation to deliver my (now dead) sister in a C-section. The hospital was incareful - as they often are with black people - so to this day she has crippling pains in her lower abdomen and crotch.
My sister died at seventeen months from a heart complication that her (white) pediatrician ignored. My parents were too distraught to think of suing him for malpractice; also, we never got a lawyer until recently to advise us on legal affairs.
So it's like I have three jobs; I drive trucks, I administrate a political news website with a forum, and I am the homemaker in my house. I cook, clean, and do laundry. I drive my mother to her doctor's appointments.
I built my work computer myself. I have a slight grasp on how to code (Python, Visual Basic).
Correct me if I am wrong, but I seriously doubt that all jobs in Sillycone Valley are complex. Someone has to mop the floors and perform basic site maintenance. If my company hired me without a degree, I don't see the need to get a degree to be "That Guy Who Answers Emails".
I am sure I could work a job there, and so could other black people - I'm not saying we have to be Cryptographers or Math scientists; just give us entry level jobs. You can't tell me these companies don't need janitors, content creators, and whatnot, unless they delegate this work to OTHER companies.
Was it, though?
There were black Roman British.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/feb/26/roman-york-skeleton
There were Black Chinese.
http://www.china.org.cn/china/2009-11/24/content_18944317.htm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3IzMvBeOLk
This link is hilarious because you can see a lot of racist Chinese people raging about their often boasted about 4,000 years of history belonging to us.
Native Americans shared a space with Black Aboriginals, obviously the diaspora of Black Africans.
http://originalpeople.org/first-americans-were-black-aborigines-2
We are everywhere and nowhere; from our departure from Africa, to the present, where I am right now, talking to some white people.
1.) I did not mean to imply that Online Gaming is a Neo-nazi Klan Rally.
It doesn't happen often, like you said, but the fact that it happens bothers me a little.
'Course, I learned to stop worrying and enjoy being called a nigger. Everyone - Asians, Hispanics, and whites do it. So do other black people. So it barely registers with me. Like, one time I was helping my mother into my truck, and two white dudes drove past slowly, and yelled "NIGGER!" before speeding off.
I merely shrugged and continued aiding my mother. Had I not been busy, I would have dropped my pants and been all, like, "You want some of this nigger dick?"
That was a joke, son - a joke. I would not make homosexual overtures to randoms; bisexual people like myself, or the actual gay people, are still killed off or beaten in some places in America, and I don't want to take that risk.
It's risky enough being a black man; as you said, we are few in number and there are people hunting us down.
I, too, wish there were more games in Africa. We built castles, walls, wrote books, and practiced medicine and science. We have many cultures, not one "black culture".
We also hate each other. It's true. We made bloody war upon our own people.
We also traded with White People regularly; Vikings, Romans, and in some cases, Asian people, with the Chinese.
Our history is irrevocably intertwined with that of White and other races of people, which is why I think we should coexist. I complain about white people, but I complain about black people as well; it's not personal.
So does that mean they have to play at being white people?
I roleplay as white and Asian people, MOSTLY; I believe I mentioned how one of my favorite characters to roleplay is a blonde white Vampire Princess from Medieval Germany (The Holy Roman Empire).
No, I don't usually have her doing interracial things; she isn't a stereotypical dumb blonde white woman who likes black men and wears skimpy clothing; she is a political player and a nation-builder; a diplomat, and a land owner.
She is not some disgusting sexual fantasy for me.
I have begun roleplaying as a black person more regularly because it makes my character stand out from the sea of whiteness, as I mentioned in my foray with Bungie's "Destiny", and my black female space Marine who people would crowd around and admire.
Black women are underrepresented and usually shown to be screeching Harpies in pop culture; even if the production concerning the Black woman in particular is staffed by black people. TYLER Perry made millions of dollars portraying a screechy, violent black woman.
When I make or write about a black female character she is usually a gentle giant, or some salacious creature who empowers herself with sex work, or a scientist, or a doctor, or a lawyer.
Before you say that the white people would play stereotypical black people, I'll just say that I can overlook their ignorance in that matter.
It's not that hard. Just imagine a knight or a princess or whatever, then make them a black-skinned human. Simple as that. You don't need to do anything "black", because black people are mutable, form-fitting, and can do anything. Make a black female counter-terrorist operator, make a black male surgeon, etc.,.
My personal signature OC is a female Zebra, which is analogous to a black female. She is kind, gentle yet terrifying when roused. It takes a lot of effort to get her angry, however. She is not an Angry Black(and white) Female.
Actually I think that's hilarious - the cheevo in question, that is.
Well, the only thing I am commanding game developers about is that games should have more black characters, or, as you said, be set in Africa - modern, medieval, or Paleolithic.
It's a friendly suggestion. Would you want to play as a black woman in a Video Game? Set in Africa, even, as you mentioned? I think a lot of nonblacks might like that and find it interesting.
You might probably tease me a little and say,
Bueno.. [Licks lips] I enjoy interracial relationships of all kinds, not just the pedestrian, common black man on a white woman.
White people are now saying Moors were not black people.
The More You Know.jpg.
3825806
You're making a huge assumption that this AI can even be considered "alive".
This isn't a movie. The bot isn't sapient, it's not capable of thinking for itself, it's a program regurgitating all the hateful s**t other people are saying.
Microsoft shutting down Tay.AI is a larger-scale equivalent of when someone links you a screamer and you immediately close the tab.
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Oh, jeez, now we're going to be racist to A.I.s. #AILIVESMATTER.
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Ah yes. "A bad thing happened to me and mine, it must be racism!"
First off, Aboriginal Australians are very distantly related to modern-day Africans. They're most closely related to the people of Papua New Guinea and the Mamanwa of the Phillipennes (hardly surprising). Given that the Aborigines left Africa as long ago as the oldest groups, to call them Africans is to call everyone African.
Yes, humanity came from Africa, but suggesting that the Aborigines have some special tie to Australia because they happen to have very dark skin is silly.
Secondly, the Luzia Woman most closely resembles the local Botocundos people, who are Native Americans. The thing on the BBC was the typical "Oh, let's shout about stupid crap on TV and pretend like it is science!" because, well, let's face it: "skull found" isn't as exciting as "THIS DISCOVERY CHANGES EVERYTHING!!!!!11111oneoneoneeleventy"
Alas, as is almost invariably the case, it turns out the skull wasn't anything so exciting. Not that it wasn't interesting, but, you know, it wasn't nearly as anomalous as the people who like pushing such things like to pretend.
Yes. The world used to be vastly more racially homogenous locally. Indeed, this is why population groups have very different appearances; until recently, gene flow between population groups was much lower than it is today.
There have always been people who travelled to distant lands. But they were extremely rare.
That's not what the article says. Did you even read it?
The article was about the debate between ancient and more modern Out of Africa hypotheses - basically, are all modern humans descended from a population which left Africa less than 100,000 years ago, or did local primitive human groups evolve in various parts of the world semi-independently with continuous admixture between the populations.
No one debates that hominids evolved in Africa. The debate is mostly whether and to what extent local groups of hominids which had spread out of Africa before the more recent exodus ended up mixing with said exodus and forming modern homo sapiens sapiens. There's a good bit of evidence that Neanderthals and Denisovians are mixed with humans outside of Africa, but the question is mostly whether or not a bunch of local early homo sapiens (who spread out of Africa more than 100,000 years ago, but appear to have disappeared) ended up mixing with modern humans, and to what extent.
Have to?
No.
But the overwhelming majority of male players play male characters.
Most people focus on "larger things" - being an entirely different species, for instance (orc, elf, ect.). This is the basic mindset of D&D - you play an elf or a human or a dwarf or whatever. There aren't racial modifiers for different racial groups of humans.
There are exceptions, but they are just that - exceptions.
People aren't terribly imaginative in many cases, sadly.
In all fairness, they're not wrong.
The Moors who invaded Spain weren't black people.
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Castillia.jpg
They were Berbers and Arabs from the Maghreb.
The Europeans later applied the monicker to all Africans and all Muslims, which is where the idea that Moors = black people came from.
The problem is that this is anachronistic; while they later came to call all Africans and Muslims Moors, at the time of the Moorish conquest of Iberia, the people doing the conquering weren't a bunch of black people, and that isn't what "Moor" was referring to.
Thus, the idea that the Moors who invaded Spain were black came from the fact that the word "Moor" changed its meaning over time, and people came to apply the latter-day meaning to it in the historical record. Also from the fact that a lot of people seem not to know that most North Africans have light skin tones.
That said, some blacks did come north at the time. But they were rare in Europe, and very rare outside of the Muslim-controlled regions (because, shock and surprise, the Christians and Muslims were rather hostile towards each other at the time).
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Think about what you just said.
She wants people to make less of things that people like.
This is why she's a bad person - she wants to make the world a worse place.
It's like saying "Well, there's already Call of Duty, so no more Battlefield because I don't like those kind of FPSs". Or "No JRPGs other than Final Fantasy now, because there's enough of them."
It is a classic case of stop liking what I don't like.
If she wants to make a new standard, what she should do is go out and make a bunch of high-quality video games of the kind that she likes.
Because, clearly, there's already an audience for the games that already exist out there. People buy them. If they didn't, people wouldn't make them.
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People do that all the time. We call them "Bankruptcies." Market Research is critical to most successful business decisions involving sales. Occasionally, something breaks the rules and succeeds anyway. We call them "Flukes." Generally, anybody who does that once and makes a lot of money, tries to do it twice and winds up back in that first category.
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Well, there's two kinds of market research - proactive and reactive. Reactive market research is useful for making samey games, but there's also proactive market research, looking into whether or not you can make something new and fresh and it will actually do well. This is a lot harder, though, especially not without product in hand, so its more of a risk.
That said, it is very doable. Some companies (Nintendo) are actually pretty good at making new, innovative things that work well consistently. Some people are very good at designing new, fresh things and having people actually like them.
It is of course true that there's reversion to the mean, but Supergiant games made both Bastion and Transistor, and while Transistor wasn't as good as Bastion, it was still quite a bit better than most random indie game companies do (also, frankly, making something better than Bastion is extraordinarily difficult in terms of video game story design, as they did very well with it).
There are some companies which are actually pretty good at this sort of thing - Square-Enix has stumbled across several pretty major things over the years to the point where I'm suspicious that they've actually stumbled across them at all. Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, Kingdom Hearts... they've repeatedly come up with fairly innovative things that worked far better than anyone thought (and frankly, Kingdom Hearts was vastly better than anyone could have even possibly hoped for, as the idea looked stupid as hell).
The problem is a lot of people are just really bad at making games. Which, frankly, isn't surprising; game design is hard. It is a complex engineering problem, and most people don't think of games as engineering projects.
3830175
Nah, not really. For example, all my current physicians are very nice and helpful. Mind you, I question them at length about their diagnoses - I don't just take their words at face value. Moreover, I demand that they put me through all the tests and all the machines.
I'm supposed to be meeting my Cardiologist in a week to discuss the results of my cardiac stress test. After that, I have to schedule an appointment with a podiatrist for the crippling pains in my legs and feet.
It's not like every time I stub my toe, I blame racism.
Have you heard about the black people who were thrown out of hospitals and then promptly died, though? The medical community in America has a nasty history of not being so nice to us.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2571643/
I play tricks on them, actually. When they're doing something to me that hurts, and they ask me if it hurts, I say, "Nope, not at all." I am a model patient.
Take, for example, when I went to go have a cardiac sonogram. The white, female nurse plunged the instrument so hard into my thorax that I was dizzy with pain and there were bruises on my ribs, but when she asked me if she was pressing too hard, I brightly said, "No, not at all, I'm quite comfortable."
Besides, I'm an adult; adults are expected to cope with pain. I am tremendously courteous to all medical professionals and often pass the time conversing with them lightly about topics like medicine and history. They are always surprised to hear I didn't finish school.
Many of them expect me to be "that black person who complains"; I studiously avoid this.
There are still people who bitterly debate this, and, in all fairness, it is just a theory. But I appreciate your championing of the Out of Africa theory. You're a good person(dragon), TD. Consider me gratified.
Well, as I said, I play characters who aren't male, so I'm that rare exception. I suppose I shouldn't expect everyone to do as I do.
3833995
There aren't any serious scientists who dispute the Out of Africa theory. All early hominids came from Africa, our closest relatives all live in Africa, ect.
The debate in the anthropological community is between recent Out of Africa and a more ancient Out of Africa followed by evolution of local populations into modernity with both continuity between the ancient and modern populations and intermixing between population groups. The former group claims that all human groups who left Africa prior to about 100,000 years ago went extinct in pre-modern times and left no offspring. The latter group claims that many ancient human groups existed around the world and intermingled with future waves of migration, resulting in evolution in multiple parts of the world to modernity, but with humans having had their original ancestors branch off from each other further away in the past - about 350-500,000 years ago. No population group was isolated for so long.
Really the debate is mostly over how much, if any, continuity there was between these ancient humans outside of Africa and modern groups. There's some evidence (in the form of Denisovian and Neanderthal DNA in our genomes) that these population groups DID exist and did interbreed with later humans. Other scientists, however, are skeptical, and believe that this is because of pre-migration differences in the basal human population in Africa; basically, that the humans who migrated out afterwards were more closely related to the Neanderthals and Denisovians than those who remained in Africa.
I'm kind of skeptical of that explanation, though, as it would require a pretty big coincidence in terms of the distribution of genes in the population that migrated out of Africa several hundred thousand years later.
Really, though, DNA analysis proves pretty definitively that a population about 100,000 years ago contributed at least a very large fraction of all surviving humans' DNA (at least, that we've sequenced).
The thing is, really, the answer is probably somewhere in-between; that is to say, a lot of modern human DNA came from a migration about 100,000 years ago, but some of it came from humans who left much earlier than that.