Opinion | Stories About Disability Don’t Have to Be Sad

weneeddiversebooks:

“I keep expecting more from the plotline than what’s currently here,” one publisher wrote. “What if it was about sisters who were twins, and one had Charcot-Marie-Tooth and one didn’t? That would create a more important conflict.” Another said that Mia Lee’s character didn’t seem suited for a lighthearted story. Finally, my agent told me, “I just don’t think people are ready for this type of story for this type of character.”

What she meant is that Mia Lee, my sassy, YouTube-loving heroine, differed too much from the convention of what a disabled kid is supposed to be like. There are very few stories about kids in wheelchairs, and there are even fewer with a disabled person who is cheerful and happy. Disability is always seen as a misfortune, and disabled characters are simply opportunities to demonstrate the kindness of the able-bodied protagonists.

Opinion | Stories About Disability Don’t Have to Be Sad

About the new censorship filter

autismserenity:

allthoseotherworlds:

telegantmess:

shadowpeoplearejerks:

kirby-ebooks:

shadowpeoplearejerks:

1999msi:

lord-of-the-discourse:

First and foremost: IT HAS BECOME VERY CLEAR TO ME THAT LGBT CONTENT IS NOT INTENTIONALLY BEING FILTERED OUT

I checked several LGBT related tags and the tags were still full of content with the filter on. I checked several porn tags, and they were totally empty. It’s legitimately meant to only filter adult content, anything else being marked as sensitive content is a bug and not done by design.

You can also mark something as sensitive when you post it

The same thing happened with Youtube. Filtering content is NOT EASY, there were bound to be problems like this. 

one of the problems of “big data” and anything involving trying to extract meaning from language through computers is that the state of the art technology (so-called AI, deep learning, neural nets) tend to recreate bias if there is any bias in the data they are trained on. What happened with youTube was pretty clearly that they were going by “what are the attributes of videos that get reported a lot?” and the neural net noticed that videos with lgbt content tend to get reported a lot. so the neural net assumes, because it is a dumb robot with secret methods, that lgbt content is offensive! it’s almost definitely the same thing going on with tumblr, but probably with worse algorithms, because tumblr. 

it’s probably not “malicious” in that probably an engineer didn’t sit down and write out “gay = bad” in a line of code, but it is negligent in that they didn’t CHECK if their algorithm replicated existing bias. this is a continual fucking problem in the field and it’s irresponsible and bad engineering to fail to PLAN FOR IT. 

That’s true. Engineers in machine learning should be well aware of this issue at this point and it’s pretty embarrassing that they let things out into the wild without fixing this. 

“Known issue with past iterations of this kind of car, cars’ brake pads randomly burst into flames”
“Eh, I’m sure we did it right. Roll it out!”

“it’s probably not “malicious” in that probably an engineer didn’t sit down and write out “gay = bad” in a line of code, but it is negligent in that they didn’t CHECK if their algorithm replicated existing bias. this is a continual fucking problem in the field and it’s irresponsible and bad engineering to fail to PLAN FOR IT.”

just repeating this part for emphasis

I feel like this is what what the testing phase of development is supposed to notice

Oh, it is.

I’m gonna go ahead and guess that they don’t have a QA department, AND don’t require that devs do it.

Today, I fucked up… by sending a 3 year old to the hospital…

ceooftheworld:

today-ifuckedup:

So this actually happened today. For some background, I am the kitchen manager at a small restaurant in a small country town. We have been having some complaints over a few menu items that were recently changed so I have been slowly rolling things back.

One of those menu items is our mac and cheese. Not too long ago, our owner decided she wanted to make our mac and cheese gluten free to fulfill the requests of a few customers. Since the change, it has been our #1 complaint and sales have been cut in half. So, I decided to order regular pasta for 99% of orders and keep the gluten free for requests. So far, so good. We have had a lot of compliments and a lot more empty plates coming back. I let all of the servers know but hadn’t told the owner yet because she was so adamant about keeping the gluten free pasta, even though just about everyone hated it. I figured I could just go to her with the increased sales later since she isn’t having any sort of dissenting opinion now. Ya know, ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

Well, today, on my day off, we had a 3 year old girl order the kids portion of mac and cheese. She also has Celiacs. This girl had apparently ordered the mac and cheese several times in the past couple of weeks with no problems, so her mom did not notify anyone of the allergy this time. About 2 hours ago, I got a call from my boss telling me that my decision put the 3 year old girl in the hospital and the mom had called to let us know she would be suing us since it does still say “gluten free” on our menu. I have now been suspended for 2 days until the owners can figure everything out. If the mom sues us, not only am I out of a job, it will sink the restaurant and everyone will lose their jobs. Not to mention it will financially ruin our owners and crush their dreams. So I guess we’ll see.

TL;DR: A 3 year old girl with Celiacs was rushed to the hospital after I ordered regular pasta for our restaurant without telling the owner. Now the mom is threatening to sue us, and not only is my job in jeopardy, but the restaurant itself.

By: throwawaykitchenman

Check out more TIFU: Internet`s best fuck ups are here.

what the fuck did you expect when you specifically mentioned on the menu that it fit dietary requests and then served something harmful???