Yeah, I've bounced off Blender twice now. And I've written a (basic) 3D modeller.
I think part of the problem is that pretty much all the tutorial material for Blender seems to be in video form, which is easily my least effective way to learn, even leaving aside the "I've only got one screen" issue.
Well, "baby girls born with Y chromosomes" is very clearly begging the question, and I'm not sure where you're getting your "millions" figure from. Even the upper estimates of CAIS have it around 1 in 20,000 XY individuals, which would put global numbers in the order of 200,000.
My mental arithmetic was bogus . The point is the same though. These are children who were assigned female at birth, their parents think they are girls, they think they are girls, and then in teens or adulthood they find out about the genetic issue. Calling them men seems ridiculous.
"Seems ridiculous" is a very subjective thing, though, and very dependent on context. It can seem ridiculous that a boxer with male physical advantage since puberty (i.e. 5-ARD) can beat the ** out of a female boxer while the world's media looks on and applauds, but here we are.
Personally I'm sympathetic to the idea that CAIS individuals should be a reasonable exception, i.e. they're still biologically male, but in most social contexts there's no obvious gain to treating them as such. I can see why many people have arrived at a hardline "XX or GTFO" position given the absolute state of activism on the other side, but yes, there's definitely room for nuance. On the other hand, obviously, testicular cancer doesn't care what you were "assigned at birth"; there is a fact of the matter, and it matters.
Appreciate the civil discussion, btw. It's a rarity in this subject.
The problem with the genetic definition is that it means that nobody knows whether anyone is a man or a woman until they get tested. Nobody pre-genetic testing ever knew. Most people alive today don't know. And that's clearly not how society works, or ever has worked.
I think we're in severe danger of spiralling toward epistemology here, but there's a huge difference between "nobody knows" in the sense you're using it and "nobody has any idea". Society (or more broadly biology) doesn't need us to get it right 100% of the time; these are very, very rare conditions. Going off secondary sexual characteristics is going to get you the right answer as near as dammit every time, especially in premodern contexts, and society has always been happy to work with tiny or even not-so-tiny uncertainties. (Is that kid really mine? Is the accused really guilty?)
The way I see it, the sex binary is fundamentally about reproduction. It's why we can use the same concept for everything from pondweed to platypuses. All across nature, male=small gametes, female=large gametes. In humans that's driven (with the potential for things to go haywire occasionally, sure, but still driven) by the XX/XY system, so that strikes me as a reasonable thing to base a definition on.
Side note re "nobody knows whether anyone is a man or a woman until they get tested" - I'd say that giving birth or fathering a child is a pretty big clue. AFAIK the only cases where that doesn't line up perfectly with genetic sex relate to mosaicism, where I'll freely admit my intuition goes completely kablooie.
Unfortunately, all the political noise is about gender rather than sex. Reproduction doesn't even ever the conversation. It's all about which restroom you should use or which sports team you should be on.
Agreed, and I think that's entirely deliberate. Using the existence of DSDs to try to discredit the sex binary and then leverage that into dismantling sex-based protections.
Those "sex based protections" aren't going to get you what you want though. I really didn't think people have thought this through. Do a Google image search for trans men and take a good look at what you see. Those are all people whose birth certificates say female. Do you think anybody is going to be comfortable with them in the women's rest room?
In the UK, a recent Supreme Court decision has clarified that "sex" in this sort of context refers to biological sex, and is not affected by any shenanigans with birth certificate changes or GRCs.
Right. These guys are "biologically female" by that ruling. Do you think the people pushing these bathroom bills are going to be comfortable with them in the ladies room? I doubt it.
Ah, sorry, I misread your previous comment. And yes, the general gender-critical position is that transmen are welcome in women-only spaces, since they're women.
Though in practice I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually converge on "women only" and "unisex" as some sports have done. The risks posed by self-identification are very much one-way; this isn't a symmetrical situation.
I would guess both the trans men and the cis women in question are going to be uncomfortable with this. But it's possible I'm out of touch with the zeitgeist in the places where these bathroom bills are being passed.
My mental scenario is one of these guys trying to go into the women's restroom they are now legally obligated to use, and a whole bunch of bystanders bringing violence to the table to prevent it.
> My mental scenario is one of these guys trying to go into the women's restroom they are now legally obligated to use, and a whole bunch of bystanders bringing violence to the table to prevent it.
That's the desired outcome for them. They want us to either die or comply.
"Intersex" is a misleading umbrella term for a whole bunch of different DSDs, each of which is 100% specific to one biological sex. And I don't think I've ever seen the term "biological gender"; about the only thing gender proponents seem to agree on is that it's NOT biological.
Biological gender is the inconsistent "sex=gender" conception that cranks and conservative grifters operate under.
I'm not sure what a "gender proponent" is, but Dawkins has come out and written some pseudo-scientific bullshit about there only being two sexes/genders, and that everyone fits nearly into one of them. Which is patently false. Intersex people are a real phenomenon, and are not clearly classifiable into either sex. Dawkins has made a fool of himself by claiming that a real biological phenomenon can simply be ignored when conceiving a theory of sex (and gender).
In other words, Dawkins has gone off the deep end. He doesn't really have credibility as a researcher or public intellectual. He's with the grifters now.
This embarrassing conservative grift is part of an anthology filled with drivel from other grifters: The War on Science", edited by sex pest Lawrence Krauss [1].
> Biological gender is the inconsistent "sex=gender" conception that cranks and conservative grifters operate under.
I don't know about cranks and conservative grifters, but it's definitely not a feature of the "gender critical" position which I thought Dawkins was broadly aligned with. That's more that "sex" is absolutely binary, with your "intersex people" being umambiguously classified through genetics, while "gender" is too vague and undefined a term to be useful for much of anything in the public sphere.
> Dawkins has come out and written some pseudo-scientific bullshit about there only being two sexes/genders, and that everyone fits nearly into one of them
It'd be surprising for Dawkins to make any kind of definitive statement about gender. I do think that your use of "sexes/genders" in that sentence is symptomatic of exactly the kind of conflation you're complaining about. "There are only two sexes" is a completely different statement from "there are only two genders", and far more defensible.
The rhetorical claim "there are only two sexes" is only ever used to claim that there are two genders. And that is precisely what Dawkins has done.
You are wrong about intersex people being genetically classifiable. There is no deterministic causal relationship between genetics and sex characteristics: as an example, a person with XX chromosomes may develop external male genitalia and v.v. for XY chromosomes. But of course, for most people with XX and XY chromosomes develop, this is the other way around. See how genetics do not explain this?
Your first para seems utterly bizarre, to the point of nonsensicality. Maybe it would help if you could say what you think "gender" refers to, but at this point I doubt it.
Your second para's argument would only be valid if you thought that sex is defined by external characteristics. I'm pretty sure you don't think that. And as far as I'm aware, while some DSDs certainly have a gene-expression component, there's no reason to think that they don't all ultimately have a genetic basis. There's a strong whiff here of "it's all terribly complicated so let's just agree that nothing means anything".
Obviously people can disagree about the merits or otherwise of a genetic classification. But it's not straightforwardly wrong or insane, particularly since credible alternatives have been notably lacking.
Ok, so you don't know what you're talking about. That's fine.
"There's no reason to think they don't all ultimately have a genetic basis". Oh, so you have groundbreaking research results you want to share? Something that would explain luteoma as having a "genetic basis"?
And yes, external sex characteristics is how sex is determined by doctors at birth. And throughout life. If you live as female/male/ambiguous intersex, but have some other set of chromosomes, that does not change your sex.
Or the extreme casualty rates experienced by the (mostly very young) East India Company clerks in Calcutta. From Dalrymple's The Anarchy:
"Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and two-thirds of the Company servants who came out never made it back – fewer still in the Company’s army, where 25 per cent of European soldiers died each year."
Makes perfect sense; old CRT TVs had the same kind of effect in making low resolutions bearable. (If you think DVD is bad, you'd have loved long-play VHS at around 230p...)
I don't disagree given your "most" qualifier, but there's a case where every level of hardware would benefit: compression of textures generated at runtime, either via procgen or for e.g. environment maps.
This is in a frustrating state at the moment. CPU compression is way too slow. Some people have demoed on-the-fly GPU compression using a compute shader, but annoyingly there is (or at least was at the time) no way in the GPU APIs to `reinterpret_cast` the compute output as a compressed texture input. Meaning the whole thing had to be dragged down to CPU memory and uploaded again.
we hit some wired case on Adreno 530, ran into bizarre GPU instruction set issues with the compute shader compressor, that only manifested on Adreno 53x. Ended up having to add a device detection path, and fall back to CPU compression. which defeated much of the point.
Spark supports Adreno 5xx on both GLES and Vulkan backends. Getting the codecs to work on these devices and obtaining good performance was very challenging.
I think part of the problem is that pretty much all the tutorial material for Blender seems to be in video form, which is easily my least effective way to learn, even leaving aside the "I've only got one screen" issue.
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