I was exceedingly tired this morning, having gotten to sleep pretty late after a night of skiing. Slept in till 10:30, then darting off to Ward Council at 11:00 without having breakfast, sticking around the chapel till church began at 1pm, ending up not eating till 5:15pm. Church turned great though, when we got to sing If You Could Hie to Kolob as the closing prayer, my favorite. I’m convinced that Orson Scott Card took inspiration from that hymn when writing some of his later Ender-series books.

On Monday we had a huge amount of snow fall on us. Half my team, including myself, stayed off the roads and worked from home. Many activities got cancelled. It’s fun to snigger at Washington’s susceptibility to snow, but there are a few mitigating factors – they don’t have the infrastructure to deal with the occasional snowfall, it does get quite icy on the roads at night, and the drivers aren’t as adept at navigating the weather.

On Wednesday we got to take a work trip up to Stevens Pass, a local ski resort. What with all the recent snow, it was full of fresh powder. I hadn’t been in something like seven or eight years, but I picked it right up, and had a blast.

The next few days it got decidedly warmer, but no less wet.

In less exciting news, my roommate has gone and leased himself a brand new car, which he loves to show off.

A quick aside, to bring up a story you all are probably familiar with. Four years ago I was in California, working an internship, and I decided to stop in on the house I’d grown up in, on Pecan Place. I arrive, bask in nostaliga for a bit, then this guy comes up and starts grilling me on what I’m doing, looking in people’s windows and back yards and whatnot. He turned out to be a cop, and was very good at his job of making people uncomfortable. It was one of those times where, ever since that day, you look back and wish you could’ve actually been ready to say all the quick-witted things you came up with in the days and weeks since. In reality I just meekly got back to my car and headed off, then de-stressed for a bit.

So, as Bill Cosby would say, I told you that story to tell you this one. On Friday we had a book author come speak to us at work. We occasionally get speakers of various kinds – late last year we had Nick Offerman a.k.a. Ron Swanson come speak about his new woodworking book. The talk this week was by a woman who’d just authored a book on the encroaching hypersexualization of life as an American teenager, addressing phenomenon like Tinder and Snapchat. Despite commendable motivations, this author really got under my skin. She decided to spend most of her time berating technologists for not coming up with solutions to these problems, such as the nonconsensual sharing of nude images. (Person A shares explicit photos with person B; they break up, and person B shares the photos far and wide.) She insists, “you’re so smart, come up with a solution!” One questioner asked to what degree she’d support wide-scale censorship of such photos, and she immediately misinterpreted the question, going on a tirade – “you people always come back to censorship, well let me tell you, the First Amendment doesn’t protect sharing nude photographs, the Founding Fathers never heard of any of this technology. No I’m not for censorship, I’m for protecting our kids!” etc etc. Some other fun tid-bits were: “How can you work at Google and not know what Kik is?” “You gotta just ignore the lawyers for a bit, you’re Google, come out and say how bad [some random messenger app] is for kids.”

So like my run-in with the cop in Brentwood, I only came up with all my retorts after the question-and-answer portion was concluded. Well, that’s not quite true, I had a few things I wanted to say, but I was so ticked I didn’t feel like arguing. Unfortunately, I think that attitude may continue to drive a wedge between good-intentioned-but-misinformed people like her, and engineers who do actually care about the children but also know just how hard these problems are to solve technologically.

See, this isn’t a First Amendment issue at all. The Constitution limits what the government can do to prevent people from expressing themselves, but it says nothing about what a company like Google/Facebook/Tinder can or cannot do with their content. “Censorship” in the sense used by that questioner means nothing more than the removal of material from the Internet. Which is exactly what this author wants, removal of certain photographs being shared non-consensually. (The original question, then, was really asking what the author thought of the prospect of simply banning any and all sharing of nude photos, regardless of whether they were being shared consensually.)

But then you get into the quagmire of how exactly to do this selective removal at the scale these companies operate at. How is a computer supposed to know whether an image is being shared consensually or not? In fact it’s only been quite recently that computer vision has gotten good enough that automatic recognition of nude photographs is even feasible. But now you want the computer to somehow read the mind of whomever’s posting the image, to make sure they have permission to do so?

To draw an analogy, it’s as if this author were addressing the staff of a hospital, and conveying her frustration with doctors: “They’re so smart, they need to just put their heads together and figure out how to stop lung cancer. Don’t they care about poor smokers?” Like yeah, medicine/technology is amazing, and we can do more things with it every day, but it’s not magic. We can’t regrow lungs / read users’ minds. For now prevention is a better strategy.

The author also took Tinder to task for continuing to allow sub-18-year-olds on their service. Except they explicitly don’t, they only allow 18+-year-olds. However, the issue is that they do age-verification through Facebook, and many kids are known to create fake Facebook accounts in order to get access to Tinder. So this author is impatiently waiting for Tinder to come up with a solution to this issue, all the while thinking ill of these “brogrammers” who just don’t get it, why won’t they think of the children. I would ask how she expects Tinder to know someone’s age, without requiring something like a government-issued ID. And then you get into the hairy mess of interfacing with government databases the world over to ensure people aren’t uploading fake IDs. And that leads to the very real possibility that this will leak to the government which online services their citizens are using. I don’t think people would take too kindly to that.

The very first person to raise their hand and ask a question actually made an awesome point. “I’ve heard you say plenty of things on technology, but I’ve waited this entire time to hear you say one thing on the role of parents, and I haven’t heard anything about it.” He’s completely right, the technology layer is the wrong place to begin worrying about this stuff; parents need to be more involved. And not just that, I worry for kids growing up today with ideas of moral relativity, it doesn’t really matter what you do as long as you stay safe and you both enjoy yourselves, etc etc. The Church’s teachings on morality and the purpose of sexuality are incredibly useful pieces of the overall picture.

One of my all-time favorite lectures was actually given on this subject, the intersection of technology and parenting, by one of my former CS professors. Listen here. Money quote: (story begins at 28:51) “You’ve got a fourteen-year-old with a cell phone and a girlfriend? You don’t have a technology problem. You have a spiritual problem. You have a parental problem, and a familial problem and a priesthood problem. You’ve got some other problem, but it’s not fundamentally a technology problem.”

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Ok, rant over, time for more pictures. On Saturday morning I was able to attend the endowment of a good friend I’ve known since my first Sunday here. At the time she was a not-so-recent convert, but my does time fly.

Had to dash off from there to head back to Stevens Pass for some night skiing with a friend in a neighboring ward. The lift ticket and equipment rental prices hurt a bit, but boy was it fun. In fact, way more fun than Wednesday. Powder is great and all, but skidding across the frozen surface of hills pounded smooth by a day’s worth of skiing was just magical.

So I got back late from this, leading into my aforementioned exhaustion this morning. This evening I met up with my Service & Activities committee to make brownies and drop them off at less-actives houses, along with a flyer advertising our upcoming talent show. We collected our names, headed out to the farthest one with the intent of working our way back towards our part of town, and promptly spent all our time trying to find this random trailer address in the dark. At one point the two guys on this expedition, myself and my roommate, left the girls in the car while we walked up to the trashiest trailer I ever have seen. Piles of garbage tossed just outside the front door; while we were waiting for the door to open we noticed a large rat crawl out a hole in one of the garbage bags. We decided it wasn’t worth waiting any longer and high-tailed it back to the car. Didn’t end up seeing anyone this evening; but it’s the thought that counts right?