this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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Is the code racist? If not I don't care who wrote it.
This is a tricky one. If a bigot says the sky is blue, they're not wrong about that. Other things, sure, but not that.
Maybe we could take their efforts and use it against them somehow. That is to say, we might deliberately use that code for anti-hate purposes, perhaps, subverting the bigot's preferred goals. Make it so that any gain they might have had is overtaken by their disgust at how it's being used.
On the other hand, taint is by association. There's a really neat and geometrically useful symbol; fourfold symmetry, previously used by Hindus, that picked up an extremely negative association around 90 years ago, for example, and short of humanity forgetting history, we're never getting that one back.
If you were someone helped by that code being used against bigotry and you found out where it came from, you're probably going to have mixed feelings about it when you finally get the time to reflect.
You might understand why people would want to avoid it, even if it is correct.
It's instructions running on a CPU. Is the application used to hurt people? If not I don't care who put the instructions in a specific order.