Robot or Not?

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Hosts John Siracusa and Jason Snell.

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If it’s never meant to make a cookie, is it still cookie dough? (Also: Peanut Butter Spread, Cheese Food, and other food labeling we have known.)

Hosts John Siracusa and Jason Snell.

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This time we’re throwing shade. But do sunglasses?

Hosts John Siracusa and Jason Snell.

John, listener Andy wrote in to [email protected]. You know, I say listener, maybe Andy doesn’t listen to the podcast at all, but for some reason submitted a question. I don’t want to assume, but probably a listener. Andy says, “As we head into the sunnier months of the year, I wonder what you define as shade. I think most people agree that trees and umbrellas provide shade, but do clouds provide shade? Does clothing provide shade? Does it matter if the clothing is loose like a dress or tight like pants?” Oh, Andy. “Is shade synonymous with shadows? Can something cast a shadow but not provide shade? Some people call sunglasses shades, but do they really cast a shadow?” Whoa, Andy, you blew my mind there. John, what is shade? Throw shade on Andy if you want to, by the way.

So I think all of those things do provide shade, even things like clothes, no matter how tight they are, because they block some portion of the sun from things that are underneath them. It’s just not really useful to talk about because it’s so localized and not really available for any other use. You know, setting aside sunglasses as shades, glasses on your face of any kind, but especially sunglasses, do provide some small amount of shade to your face. If you don’t believe this, fall asleep while wearing them in the sun, and you’ll wake up with a weird sunburn, and some part of your face will have been shaded by the shades.

I’ve had that happen with a hat. And hat is clothing, and would I say that the brim of my baseball cap provided shade for my face, the upper portion of my face? Absolutely it did.

Yeah. And clouds do it too, right? You’ll notice this especially, again, the distinction is not really important until you have some particularly dense and small cloud, and it’s moving in the upper atmosphere, and you could see the shade provided by it moving. This distinction may seem silly, even if that’s not really shade, until you’re trying to sit outdoors and watch a concert, and somebody has the seat that’s three feet away from you, it’s in the shade of a cloud, and you don’t have it, and you’re roasting in there better, and you’ll say, “You know what? I agree now, that is shade.”

That is shade. Also, if it’s a sunny day, and you sit in the shade of a tree, and then a cloud passes over, guess what? Your shade is gone because your shade is everywhere now.

It depends on how much is the tree blocking a little extra. There are degrees of shade. How many shades might there be?

It’s just adding shade. It’s just adding shade collectively, and then it makes your shade less special.

There’s probably at least 50 shades.

Wow, that was shady.

Sorry, what can you do?

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If any device can open a door, is every device a key?

Hosts John Siracusa and Jason Snell.

John, Lister Gabriel wrote into [email protected], which is the right place to do this, and said, “What is a key? Is a tag that opens my house door is a key? The app that unlocks the door of my building is a key? Or just those pieces of metal are considered keys? What makes something a key?”

Yeah, so the things with the, like the little, you know, a card or using your phone or stuff like that, right now, in 2023, whenever we refer to those things as a key, what we really mean is, this object acts as a key for your door. You can use your phone as the key for your door. You can use this card as the key to get into your hotel room or whatever, right? But it is some other thing, performing the function of a key, but if you were to put the object on a table and say, “What is this?” That’s a phone, that’s a card, right? Or maybe they would say that’s a key card, but still it is not a key. This distinction may disappear in 50 to 100 years, but for now, keys are keys. Now, there’s metaphorical keys, like this is the key to the thing you’re doing, or like you could have a key to like a drill bit to loosen and tighten the drill bit, which is a totally different kind of key.

And there’s like key to the city, or one of those, I think the pieces of metal, like you get a church key to open a can of beer or something like, there are other kinds of key-like things.

Right, but those are different. Well, the key to the city is a metaphorical key. It doesn’t actually open the city, right? But that’s the kind of key we’re talking about, but the key for opening a can or whatever, like that is a different thing. The drill bit key is a different thing. Your roller skate key, a different thing. But for the door key with the little pins and the little jagged edge and all that stuff, and however it’s done, like, only the metal, the thing that goes into a slot that you turn to open something, whether it’s the old-fashioned looking one with the two big buck teeth hanging down from a rod, or a more modern one with jaggy things, or an even more modern one with laser-cut things in the sides, those are keys. And then the things we use to perform that function that are not keys, they’re acting as keys. So your phone acts as a key, the card acts as a key, whatever.

You said it would be a little while. I don’t know, I feel like this may get away from us real fast.

No, the problem is the metal keys are gonna be around for so long that they’re gonna hold onto that pretty doggedly.

I mean, you think about it like a phone, ‘cause a smartphone kind of is barely a phone at this point. That name has come to mean something else pretty fast. I feel like if we, it depends on how this technology is taken up, but how long before every key card and every digital key that’s on your phone and your wrist and all of that, and is sending out messages, I would not underestimate our ability to make them all, just start calling them all keys. Like, I’ve got, the key is on my phone, my phone is the key.

You can still call it that, but I still feel like, again, if you put the object on the table, it would just look like a plastic card or it would just look like your phone. The phone is a great example because that’s always gonna be your phone, even though your phone acts as a key, and maybe someday you buy a car and that’s literally the only way to open and close it and drive it is with your phone, but it’s still a phone, it’s not a key, right? It is acting as a key.

Right, and a key card, if you lay them all on the table, you’d say phone, card, watch.

Plastic card, whatever, yeah.

Key. As objects.

Even the remote entry things which we’ve had for years and years, people still call them key fobs. They call them keys for short, but when you need to get one replaced at ridiculous expense at the car dealer, it’s, you know, key fob.

All right, well, I hope Gabriel is satisfied with that answer.

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A chair is not a house and house is not a home, but is a house a building? And what about gazebos?

Hosts John Siracusa and Jason Snell.

John, we were having a discussion in the Incomparable member slack. People can become a member of the incomparable sport this podcast directly. This is not meant to be a member appeal. I’m just mentioning it in passing. And the question was about a building. We were talking about, we actually played D&D honestly, and we were talking about a building and what comprises a building. And the idea is, how good does it have to be? Like, does it have to have walls to have a building? Is a gazebo a building? Is an oil derrick a building? ‘Cause it doesn’t have any rooms, it’s just a structure. When is something a structure? When is something a building? And I think the most important question of all is, yeah, is a gazebo a building?

So I’m gonna say no for building on gazebo and also oil rig. It’s not so much because they don’t have walls or whatever. It’s just that, I feel like those things have specific names to identify them because they’re too far outside the definition of building. And building is, you know.

Is a house a building?

So here’s the thing about it. In a particular context, a house could be a building, right? In the context of a discussion about, I don’t know, taxation or land use or something, any buildings on this, whatever, then houses would fall under that. But only in that context. In a context where you’re not sort of trying to categorize distinguishing buildings from streets from stuff like that. You know, like in a more general context, you probably wouldn’t call a house a building because you would use the word house. You would say, you know, I’m the blue building on the left when you’re coming down the street. If you said that, people will be looking for a blue building. They wouldn’t be looking for a blue house. And what’s the difference? In that context, building is a big rectangular thing with a flat roof, right? That maybe is more than one story, maybe not. But like, it’s not a house. It’s not like, even though in the other context, when they were talking about zoning or whatever, then houses definitely were buildings. And then gazebos and stuff, you have things like outbuildings, right?

Ah, yes.

The subcategory of buildings that are, yeah. Ancillary satellite buildings, which may be less building-like than the main building, but probably still aren’t gazebos. So yeah, I’m gonna say no, a gazebo is not a building except in specific contexts where it’s important to lump everything together. Like there is the broad definition of building, but I think that’s not used in most contexts.

Yeah, so I just looked this up in the dictionary and it says a structure with a roof and walls, such as a house, school, store, or factory. But I think that while you can use it generically, what it’s often used for is to describe a certain kind of structure that doesn’t have another great name for it, right? Like, you wouldn’t say at the top of Main Street, at the top of Washington Street in Sonora, California, is a big red building, ‘cause you know what? It’s the red church. It’s a church. We don’t call it a building. It is a building, but we don’t call it that ‘cause we’ve got a better word for it. It’s a church. But across the street from it is a thing that’s not a house, it’s not a school. I mean, maybe it’s a store sometimes, but it’s a thing with flat walls and a couple stories and a thing, and it’s like, well, what is that? Well, it’s a building. And you kind of fall back on the more generic because I don’t have a specific way to describe that particular structure. Whereas the house and the church, I can.

I think a lot of stores are in buildings, though, right?

I think so.

Because if you—

‘Cause you have more than one store in a building.

Yeah, you would direct them to the store or the name of the store or whatever, but say all the signs blew off in a hurricane, you’d be like, where are you? I’m like, I’m in the blue building. Like then you’d be looking for something that’s not a blue house, but a blue building because being able to refer to it as a store requires some identification, whereas the structure itself, stripped of all identification does not have a name in the same way that a house or a church might.

Yeah, in fact, I recall there being in my hometown, in addition to the Red Church, a bunch of buildings that were actually named as the something or other building, and there’d be like three or four stores in them, but they were a larger structure. All right, but Gazebo, no love for Gazebo. I mean, really, it doesn’t really have walls, right? It’s just got posts. It doesn’t really have a room in it.

Yeah, it’s too far off.

In an oil derrick. And if you built a little apartment up on an oil derrick, I think you’re cheating and it’s still not a building.

You could put a building on an oil derrick, sure.

Ah, there you go. The building is on the derrick then. I like that, that makes sense. All right, well, I’m glad we solved this problem that came up while we were trying to play Dungeons and Dragons, ‘cause I don’t know why, you know, these things happen.

Did someone have a special plus five ability against buildings or something?

I think it was before we got started, but this sort of thing happens when you’re setting up the table, these things happen. But you’re right, yes. Yes, save against buildings. But DM, a house is not a building. A gazebo is not a building.

Yeah, whichever player brought up this distinction, watch them.

Yeah, well, I think it was Erika and I am watching her very closely ‘cause you gotta be careful around her.

Can’t trust those Canadians.

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Jason’s trip to his mother’s house makes him rethink his definition of what a dish is. Also, he gets some upsetting news about the long-term relationship between the fork and the spoon.

Hosts John Siracusa and Jason Snell.

“Robot Or Not? (Boardwalk Mix)” performed by Lex Friedman (feat. Jason Snell). Parody lyrics by Jason and Lex.

Support this show and other shows like it on The Incomparable network by becoming a member. Members get early access to podcasts, bonus episodes, and more.

Don’t anthromorphize ports. They hate that.

Hosts John Siracusa and Jason Snell.

Jason: John, listener Chris wants to know about plugs.

He writes, “I’ve been taught that computer cables and ports are gendered to identify each side of the connection. The male end refers to the tab or protuberance and the female end is the cavity that receives the tab. For example, in the Lightning connection on Apple products, the cable is the male end and the devices contain the female end, except for the general one, Apple Pencil, which has a male end on it and came packaged with an adapter.” Lots of adapters out there these days.

What do you think about this? And I will throw in an alternate, which is: I often in my writing about tech will refer to ports and jacks instead of using gender terms about it. I don’t know how you feel about all of that, but sometimes you do need to explain this. And then there’s the added complexity of USB-C, which also came up, which is the idea that at USB-C there’s like a protuberance inside the port that the cable goes around. And so there’s a question of what that even is.

John: Yeah, so using, you know, it’s extremely gender normative to try to use male and female terms for computer ports. And it really doesn’t make much sense and also sort of reveals a kind of preoccupation with sexual intercourse that is not relevant to the technology world.

Like, of all the things that you might use as an analogy for a thing that is a hole and a thing that goes into the hole, you know, the minds of humans, because we’re so driven by our reproductive drive to pass on our genes or whatever, goes right to sexual intercourse and then of course goes right to gender normative and say, “And therefore I’m going to say the thing that goes in is necessarily male, and the thing that it goes into is necessarily female.”

So it is problematic on multiple levels and representative of sort of the most base lizard brain kind of, you know, evolutionary—not going to say evolutionary garbage because without it we wouldn’t be where we are—but concerns of a lower life form, let’s say, because lots of living beings have a drive to reproduce. If we didn’t, they wouldn’t be around, because you kind of need a drive to reproduce to reproduce, and if you don’t reproduce you’re not around anymore.

And we have that too in spades, but it is not the appropriate analogy for a more enlightened species that understands that the gender binary and gender normative things doesn’t reflect the world as it is. It is a vast simplification that is not useful, and it is harmful to perpetuate that by saying, “This analogy is so useful and so well understood and so obviously true that we were going to apply it to the technology world, therefore reinforcing the idea that this is obvious and true and any deviation from it is incorrect.”

So I don’t use those terms either. Setting that aside, what do you use to call them?

Plug, socket, you know, that works reasonably well. Plug, jack works reasonably well. Again, the power plugs that we use to, you know, they’re in the walls of our homes that we plug things in to get electricity. We don’t call that the male and the female end. We call it as an outlet and, you know, and a plug or a socket and a plug. Those terms already exist and they exactly describe what we’re saying. There is a thing with a hole and there is a thing that goes into the hole and there’s no need for any kind of sex organ analogy whatsoever in that, let alone a gendered sex organ analogy. It’s like just garbage on top of garbage, right?

As for a USB-C, where, for people who don’t know, if you’ve looked at the USB-C, like the hole where a USB-C plug goes into, if you look inside that hole, it’s really dark in there, but if you look in there, you see there’s something in there. There’s basically like a little tongue. Again, there are more biology analogies, but like there is a little thing sticking out inside the hole. And when you take a USB-C plug and you plug it into there, that little thing that’s sticking out inside the hole goes inside the plug.

Still, I would say that that is the socket and the part that goes into it is the plug because what we mostly care about is, you know, which thing that we could see can we no longer see because it is covered by the other. We can’t see the thing that the little tongue thing that’s inside there, right? It’s just it’s too dark in there and it’s very small and it’s hard to see. So it’s not as if by enshrouding that in the USB-C plug we are further hiding it. It was already kind of hidden.

Practically speaking, technology-wise, it’s actually one of the advantages that USB-C has over Lightning, believe it or not. The Lightning connector on our phones, it’s a solid metal, well not really solid, but anyway, it’s a… effectively a solid rectangular thing that goes into a hole.

And if you look at the plug end of a Lightning cable, you’ll see a bunch of electrical contacts, and you’ll see the little, you know, the rectangular thing that the electrical contacts are in. And you’ll see two little dimples in the side of that, and those dimples are for springy metal bits inside the hole to sort of clamp into. So you push those springy metal bits out of the way, and then when you get it all the way in, those springy metal bits go into the little holes and sort of give a way to hold the plug inside the socket, right?

In USB-C, the springy metal bits that perform a similar function are inside the cable, not inside the socket. And that is a better design for longevity, because if those springy metal bits get tired, wear out, get looser over time, if they’re in the cable, you just throw out the cable and get a new one. But if they’re in the device, there’s nothing you can do except for get a new port, which is much harder than getting a new cable.

So if you ever keep a laptop long enough, and if laptops had, or a phone for that matter, had, you know, a Lightning connector, that the springy bits slowly got looser and looser, then there’s nothing you can do about it except for bring it in and get… if you’re lucky, if the connector is on a module on the logic board, you can get that module replaced.

But in USB-C, you just throw out the cable. So I think having the springy bits in the cable is actually a better design.

And you may think, “Oh, but what about the little tongue thingy? Isn’t it going to crack off inside the hole?”

It’s so hard for anything to get in there. When you stick the USB-C plug in there, it’s so well contained that even if you, like, yank the USB-C cable, you’re more likely to break the cable or the connector before you’ll break off that little tongue thing. So I think USB-C is actually a pretty well-designed connector, and it does have advantages over Lightning.

Jason: And like I said, I try to avoid those gender terms whenever I can, right? I mean, I also try to avoid the whole, like, “This is a sexy piece of technology.” It’s like, “No, it’s not. It’s not. It’s just not. Don’t.”

John: I think the definition of sexy has stretched itself far enough to say the desire for reproduction that you feel so strongly, this is attractive in a way that is similar to the strength of that desire, even though we both know that you don’t actually want to, hopefully, have sex with this piece of technology.

Jason: Yeah, I’m never going to refer to a laptop as sexy. It’s just not going to happen. But I do try to do the— I mean, like I said, I end up doing a lot of port and jack kind of stuff, where it’s like the Lightning— the Apple Pencil 1 has a Lightning jack on it. It goes in the Lightning port. That’s it.

John: I mean, to give people a better idea of how absurd it is, male and female being like doubly— like two layers of— like I said, one is we have to use a sex analogy, and two is now we have to gender it as well, right?

If you think that is all reasonable to do, just call it, like, the penis connector and the vagina socket or something.

And then some of you are like, “I’m not going to say those words. That’s ridiculous.”

Like, yeah, it is ridiculous, but you’re basically saying that when you say the male and female port, that’s the analogy you’re using. So if you wouldn’t use the actual words, probably reconsider that analogy.

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Where do beaches exist? And what materials do they need to be comprised of?

Hosts John Siracusa and Jason Snell.

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The difference between islands and continents, and also why Pluto can be a planet if you want to lower your standards.

Hosts John Siracusa and Jason Snell.

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Sometimes they’re wicked, sometimes not. Can an adult call a parent’s new wife a stepmom? Bonus: Can you be too old to be an orphan?

Hosts John Siracusa and Jason Snell.

John, listener Alesh wants to know, Alesh writes, “A certain person I know refers to her stepmom, someone her father married after she was an adult and living alone. This sounds odd to me. My intuition is that something like 16 is the tipping point. If my parents had divorced and one of them had remarried after that age, that’d just be my dad’s new wife or whatever, even if they had some limited parental type authority over me.” What’s the line for calling somebody a step parent?

I think this person is working through some issues in their Robot or Not letter.

I’m going to toss in another term on top of it too, which is orphans, right? Because there’s obviously a dividing line there. It involves this concept of sort of like words you use involving parents when you’re a child versus when you’re an adult. There’s that line in, is it “City Slickers” maybe I want to say, where the two old men, their parent dies and they’re like, “We’re orphans now,” because it’s silly. It’s ridiculous, that’s not what an orphan is. It’s a child who’s lost both of its parents. So step parent strikes me as being a little like that, right? If you’re a full-fledged adult and one of your parents gets divorced and marries somebody else, is it a little weird to say, “Oh, that’s my stepmom,” or not?

So I’m mostly with you in orphan, except, before I get on to the stepmom thing, except for the case where I think there is a useful and used purpose for the word orphan in it is the single word description of somebody whose parents are not alive, right? And that sometimes it is useful to use that word to describe an adult, because you just need a compact way to say, “This is a person whose parents aren’t alive.”

Even then, I think it implies that they died when they were young.

We don’t have another word for it, and sometimes you want the single word. If someone said that, you would say definitionally, that’s not wrong. It is just odd. But yes, for the most part, you’re not using that. But stepmother, on the other hand, has no age limits whatsoever. It is simply that the step is in there to explain, “This is not my actual mother. It is somebody that my father married.” And that does not have any time limits. It doesn’t mean you need to call them mom. You don’t need to call them stepmom, but that’s what they are, because they married your father and there is no age limit. It doesn’t mean they have any control over your life. I still call my mother my mother, and she doesn’t even live in the same state, right? She’s not controlling anything.

Well, you know.

Yeah. The title of father or mother, with or without the step, doesn’t have any implications of the age of you or any participation in your life. So yeah, that’s your stepmom. Like, I mean, they can be your wicked stepmom if you like, but it’s your stepmom. It’s not just your dad’s new wife.

I think you made the point there that I think is good, which is it is a choice to use it. And I’m kind of on the side of Alesh here that it is, it can be weird to hear an adult refer to a stepmom, but I think it’s okay. I think there’s a style choice there. So my wife’s father, my wife’s parents got divorced. My wife’s father remarried when she was a, I want to say, late teenager. But there’s complexity here, right? So she never lived with them. She was a late teenager. The new wife was only about five years older than her. And that’s one of those cases where she only refers to her as “my dad’s wife.” She’s never referred to in a motherly way at all. I think because it’s so far out of context that it really makes no sense to her and you would never do that, even though technically that’s what she is. And I would agree technically that’s what she is. She would never refer to her that way. By the way, I’ll also mention on the flip side, her mother got remarried. She lived with her mother and her stepfather and he’s just dad, right? He’s never referred to as a stepfather for the opposite reason, which is that he is also her father. So, you know, there’s a lot of personal choice going on here.

Yeah. So what you, the words you use to refer to someone within your family are completely, you know, it’s up to whatever you want to do. People call people uncles who aren’t even related to them in any way legally or by bloody. You can do whatever you want. But I’m saying like the word stepmother, if someone was looking at, you know, a family tree, someone who you’d never met a hundred years in the past, they’re going to label that as your stepmother, right? Or like, or if they said, here’s you, who is this person that I’m saying? Oh, that’s their stepmother, right? That’s what they’ll say. They don’t know or care what your relationship is or what you call that person or whether you like them or not, or how much control they had of your life. That is literally what they are. And that word never expires. And other people can use it as a descriptive term to explain the relationship, like the family tree relationship, the legal, societal, whatever relationship they’re saying nothing about whether you call that person mom, whether you like them, whether you call the person they married dad, even if it is your dad, like that is totally separate.

And that’s just, you know, again, within families, people call people all sorts of things and that’s fine. And that is much more having to do with the relationship. And there’s nothing forcing you to refer to this person as your stepmother. You never have to use that term because you can use other ways to describe the relationship, but other people will apply that because it is technically true.

Yep. I think that’s exactly right.

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