[WesolyKubeczek]

Sometimes I’m wondering what to call people who get offended on behalf of other people or entities that they imagine might be offended by some term or other. See, they feel bad, and like small children, they assume everyone else must feel bad.

Okay, in case of people and words like n___er, one could argue they have a leg to stand on. But stupid computer programs? Really?

And then I remember that in my part of the galaxy, we indeed have a word to describe such people. We call them “dumbasses”.

[cgriswald]

I don’t have to imagine the offense of others to take offense to slurs intended to denigrate them. If I tell you not to use the n-word in my presence I’m not doing it for black people. I’m doing it for me. I don’t want to hear that shit because it offends me. The entire mindset that would think it is okay offends me.

A slur applied to anthropomorphic programs is the same mindset to someone who really believes the programs are experiencing, quite different from “rust bucket” being applied to a car they know doesn’t think and feel. While I can’t quite get offended about it, it does make me wonder if they’re not using other slurs because of the socially unacceptable nature of those slurs rather than because they’re not awful people.

[WesolyKubeczek]

You see, I believe that cars with enough mileage have a soul. My car definitely has grown a soul. Yours might be a rust bucket for all I care. And yet it has a soul of its own.

Programs also have souls. Especially the little well-crafted programs which are works of art. Their authors took a part of their soul and put them into code, and you can see it in the way the code is written and in the way the programs work. They are not anthropomorphic, and yet they have a soul.

A clanker is anthropomorphic in a way that an advanced enough mimic in a dungeon that looks like your ideal waifu is anthropomorphic. It will infect you the moment you get kissably close to it. It subsists on egregious acts of copyright infringement. It’s a parasite that seeks to destroy a part of your brain and replace it with itself, making you quiver in pain each time you try to think for yourself, and the pain stops when you let it mimic your thinking while paying its creators per word-chunk it outputs.

The clanker seems anthropomorphic enough for the people it has infected, so they get offended to the point of blind rage when someone points out that no, this is its mimicry, and that it doesn’t actually experience things.