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0 pointsstavros29d ago0 comments

> Division very much is the point because they are not humans.

I'm not so worried about dividing humans and LLMs as dividing humans from each other. Sure, LLMs are not humans, and that's a valid distinction, but the word "clanker" is used by humans, and there's already a divide between humans who think it's OK to use a slur if it's directed towards a group they don't like (I don't mean you here) and people who don't.

> Dogs are not inanimate objects and even legally they carry a lot of rights.

I'd think less of someone who was gratuitously swearing at a dog not because they hurt the dog's feelings, but because they were being gratuitously negative.

> I'm assuming the line emerges from what society does with a word.

It does, and the use of "clanker" I've seen was generally meant as a slur. It's not a neutral word in any context I've seen it in.

> You seem to draw a line somewhere that is different from where I would have drawn it.

True, but I also think that "clanker" is fairly far towards one end of the spectrum, not really near the middle.

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the_mitsuhiko29d ago· 2 in thread

> It does, and the use of "clanker" I've seen was generally meant as a slur. It's not a neutral word in any context I've seen it in.

I can tell you that within the agentic coding community plenty of people are using it as a way to refer to coding agents by their users. That's a pretty neutral use.

> True, but I also think that "clanker" is fairly far towards one end of the spectrum, not really near the middle.

Until I saw the comments on the most recent hackernews discussion on it I would never have made that guess.

stavrosOP29d ago

That's odd, even the Wikipedia entry (from Star Wars) begins with "is a derogatory term":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanker

That's where it originates, and (I assume) it was chosen precisely because it's derogatory.

the_mitsuhiko29d ago

But also if you go to the talk page you can see discussions that lead to the change of the description of that page from "slur" to "derogatory term". That discussion was, from what I can tell, about the fact that slurs are for human targets and not machines. A lot of things are derogatory, particularly when applied to tools, and we would not bat an eye in the discussion. Something makes (at least some) people feel different about clanker.

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