> I strongly dislike CUDA. Once you have allowed that proprietary cr*p
Genuine question...why not just type "crap"? It's not even that much of a curse, but I've never really understood the point of self-censorship. If you don't want to curse then you could just use a non-curse word.
It doesn't read as emphasis to me. It reads like the person is trying hard not to curse, and they think "crap" is a curse word. It's a little bit adorable, like I'm reading a comment from an obedient child.
I guess you are not from the generation of texters. This how languages work we used to use * as a way to avoid getting censored it over time became a way to curse or give emphasis.
But typing "b*tch" with T9 is just as difficult (if not more) as typing "bitch". Anyway, I guess I never had a need to swear much over SMS. On IRC, on the other hand...
People are getting used to censor themselves in order not to be reported, banned, or «hurt » other sensibilities. The words « rape » couldn’t be written in instagram for example, what a great way to deal with such a serious issue. Mainly an American thing spreading away from young people if you ask me. Sorry America, just being honest here.
As much as I personally dislike TikTok, I don't think it is fair to it: cultural willingness for more sensor sheep on Internet started years before TikTok's popularity in the west.
It's not the sole cause, but I believe it's the main driver behind a bunch of specific substitutions that are mainstream now or nearly so. For example, dih, ahh, and unalive. They may not have been invented on tiktok, but that's where they incubated.
There's no such censorship on TikTok, it's entirely groupthink based on people saying "when I use that word my video is seen less so therefore it's being censored".
Youtube is a lot more guilty of it though, as well as demonetizing.
It sounds like there is a documented policy or proven that TikTok does it. Just people thinking it does leading them to self-censor. Then people see others doing it and copy it. So, I guess it is censorship but not by TikTok.
After reading through the threat here it seems more like a cultural thing.
The US has quite a lot of filters for profanity.
I remember from my youth that in 2009 Eminem was a guest in a Germany TV show and very happy to swear as much as possible without being censored.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2OC-yKZ5Yag
No, but I think ICQ and some IRC clients had profanity filters turned on by default. I remember visiting a friend once and realising he hadn't turned the profanity filter off. I teased him about it for weeks.
I think a string of non-alphanumeric characters would work much better here, like "Once you have allowed that proprietary @#$&% into your C++ codebase”
In any context I've seen, asterisks are for wrapping formatting and said formatting it to add emphasis. So being in the habit of typing `emphasised phrase`, for italics - regardless of whether the platform parses markdown/similar formatting, e.g. SMS.
To have an unclosed asterisk replacing characters in a word? I've only ever seen that as a way to bypass censorship. This spans communications from people currently in their 40s down to 20.
But this isn't perceived as emphasis at all. If I wanted to emphasize something, I'd be more likely to use something like *bitch* or something along those lines. Replacing a letter with an asterisk comes across as self-censorship, which is pretty silly - just use a different word if you're that uncomfortable with swearing.
Maybe more like p**p, as in "that cunt p**ped in my yard"?
I'll admit, it never once occurred to me that people might be using censored characters to provide more emphasis that a word is a swear, but I guess it does indeed do that, at least to the writer. Whether that comes across to the reader, and whether the writer cares that their intention was understood... I'm not so sure.
I was so disappointed when I tried reading tintin in other languages and found the dear captain was straight up using slurs in those. I wonder whether the english language ones have been edited over the years to remove that sort of thing
I certainly dislike how everyone on YouTube is saying “SA” and “unalive” and “corn”.
It’s one thing if it’s some funny commentary channel avoiding those words, but what bothers me is the true crime YouTubers. In the subject of true crime, rape and murder are just things that are probably going to come up, and when they refuse to use the appropriate language, it comes off as infantilizing, which is weird considering that my actual YouTube account is over 18, let alone the viewer using it.
I don't think those filters are even real, I think it's just mass-hysteria. I call these kinds of behaviours "traditions", but I'm not sure if there's a better term for it.
Basically someone comes up with something which is nonsensical, but plausible. Like believing that their videos are unpopular because they said the word "rape" and the algorithm magically got them, rather than because their videos suck. Then someone else sees that and starts thinking it is true. It silently spreads across the population.
I've seen this in organisations, where new recruits haven't been properly trained. Someone has come up with a method which is wildly incorrect and illegal, but plausible. The other new people around them have copied them. They've become slightly more experienced people, they've taught the next round of new people.
Before you know it, half of the organisation is doing something hilariously wrong, and they all sincerely believe it is the right way of doing it, because everyone does it. It's just self-reinforcing at that point.
> I call these kinds of behaviours "traditions", but I'm not sure if there's a better term for it.
In psychology that kind of thing is referred to as "superstition".
More specifically, "superstition" in this sense refers to the phenomenon of copying someone else's successful approach to a problem you have. (In your example, getting views on youtube.) Since you don't know what parts of their approach matter, you copy the effective parts and the ineffective parts equally.
No it isn't mass hysteria. YouTube has a set advertiser friendly guideline. It will scan uploads and streams automatically.
YouTube used to demonetise profanity unless it was mild. YouTube would demonetise profanity in the first X number of seconds of the video. These rules change and have been relaxed of April last year, but generally these rules still exist.
There isn't a hard filter if you say "suicide" you automatically get it. However it increases the likely hood of demonetisation. So people avoid it to be safe. So you end up with people using stupid euphemisms all the time.
The Suicide stuff is about protecting them from people who were promoting self harm. The unalive stuff is because of threats of violence. You can reference murder if it is say part of a news story or referencing something historical.
Creators are being careful don't want their video demonetised because once it gets the yellow flag, even if it is removed later they've lost the majority of monetisation.
The problem with providing direct proof of this is that YouTube moves the goalposts quite often and their auto moderation system is very inconsistent.
I am sure they are bullshit. Like when they mute cursing and "risky" speech, but when you enable autogenerated subtitles they show up there. Youtube knows what thay said regardless if it's censored or not. It's so fucking stupid
A (baseless) hypothesis: perhaps there are plenty of YouTube creators who use the proper, mature terminology but you never see their videos because the algorithm really is penalizing them for it...
It's become so bad that even quality history youtube channels are frequently using euphemisms like "moustache-man" instead of just saying "Hitler", to avoid their videos being buried by The Algorithm, and therefore cut severely into their viewership.
> even quality history youtube channels are frequently using euphemisms like "moustache-man" instead of just saying "Hitler"
That can be quite confusing. You had German mustache-man, Russian mustache-man, French mustache-man (Petain), French small-mustache-man (de Gaulle), Spanish small-moustache-man (Franco)
It may be to bypass censorship, rather than self-censorship. Some platforms block or shadowban comments with curse words. Not sure about this platform.
I have written many words far worse than "crap" on this site. I haven't gotten in trouble over it yet.
I do find it a little amusing, because commenters stopped criticizing my cursing the moment I started getting a good chunk of karma here. I remember in 2016 someone criticized me for using the term "shitposting"...I don't think I've gotten that kind of criticism since 2016 though.
Because I know it is not technically crap, a lot of competent people worked on it, most with good intentions. I suppose it is better described as a cleverly designed Trojan horse than can infect your software and make that software become crap, in the sense that it becomes harder to maintain, increases code duplication, messes with your build system, ties your build system to platforms that have their toolchain binaries available, etc., etc., without bringing any long-term benefits over learning things the hard way.
The long term benefit is that there are more developers with CUDA experience available to hire than there are with any of the "hard ways" you mention.
Not saying you're wrong, but my career got a lot less frustrating when I started focusing more on the product and less on the ergonomics of the implementation. If you need to build a house and the customer isn't willing to pay for brick, you use vinyl siding.
For learning that may be a fine approach, but CUDA (in C++) really tries to hide what is going on behind the scenes, which is roughly:
1) code gets split between a host part that goes through your normal compiler, and a device part that goes through the GPU compiler. You may as well write the kernels separate and compile them via a separate compilation step, and keep your trusted host compiler for the host-side code.
2) data needs to move between the host and devices via explicit buffer transfers and synchronization steps, CUDA tries to hide this with annotated pointers, but it is really easier to think about those as just buffers that you allocate and transfer IMO, instead of trying to transparently share pointers between host and device like CUDA does.
3) kernel launches can we wrapped in a function similar to:
Instead of the funky <<< >>> syntax that CUDA for C/C++ imposes. The problem is that once you start putting that in your code, it stops being C++ and stops being portable to non-CUDA GPUs. The launching and grid settings can be a bit hard to grasp at first, but sugarcoating that in bastardized C++ syntax does not absolve from having to understand it eventually.
So a good place to start might be an OpenCL or Metal primer, depending on the hardware you have available. D3D12 (and probably Vulcan too) makes this much harder than it should be, with too much boilerplate but is overall a mature and well-designed API should you wish to develop for Windows. Starting with WebGPU might also be good these days. It has a very different shader language than the others, but the rest of the concepts are similar, and it has a strong emphasis on making things async, which is what you want for performance anyways.
Claude/Codex should be able to get you moving very quickly.
Thank you very much for the effort you put into your advice!! I think I will start with WebGPU (wgpu), even though I have an Apple Silicon Macbook. I would really prefer to work with Rust instead of C++ because I am not good with C++. (I believe) I am good with C, so my C++ code looks like C code, and I am kinda learning the differences as I learn CUDA, which is a terrible way to learn C++, I guess.
> I've never really understood the point of self-censorship.
Some platforms disallow certain words. In order to bypass that, some people use the asterisks. That's just as one possible answer to your question; there can be many different reasons for self-censorship, but to me the most logical one is when one tries to work around crappy restrictions, such as on terrible reddit (they killed old.reddit recently; I retired before that due to moderators being insane, but I also said that if old.reddit is gone, I am gone anyway - the requirement to now log in, totally defeats old.reddit com's usecase. Then again reddit went downhill many years before that already, so not a real loss.)
Your comment only makes sense in context if you believe in a deity who is too dumb to understand the difference between cr*p and crap. I for one do not worship a Bayesian spam filter.
"Daddy, what does cr*p mean?" Kids aren't stupid and this self-censorship isn't protecting anyone from anything.
(if a platform is serious about Bad Words for whatever reason (moral?) they would also forbid character replacements; ultimately it's the intent, not the word itself, that they try to steer with rules like that)
I guess I never understood censorship when it’s plainly obvious what you’re censoring. Anyone who can read will clearly know that it said “crap”, so I don’t see how it’s fundamentally different than just saying the word. You still put the word into my brain.
IMO cr*p and crap are both valid but separate swear words. People have a wide option to choose from when they want to swear, and people like variety (much much more than LLMs do). People also tend to influence each other with their usages: cr*p is popular because it is popular.
Otherwise cr*p is just as good as crap, shit, horseshit, poopoo or such.
edit: * replaced with \* as HN interprets asterisks as formatting for emphasis. Thx latexr for informing me
Genuine question...why not just type "crap"? It's not even that much of a curse, but I've never really understood the point of self-censorship. If you don't want to curse then you could just use a non-curse word.