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Comment by laputan_machine | Hacker News Reader

This "use the words I tell you to use or else you're a bigot" rhetoric is getting really stale, really fast.

Edit: I think this might be a terrible attempt at satire, e.g. the website is: https://inclusivecoding.wixsite.com/home

You guys are all being absurdly ridiculous. I don't know why programmers make such reaches when the answer is much simpler.

University student looking for easy side project to create and put on resume decides to go with "inclusive language bot", doesn't actually put in effort beyond wix site and ridiculously simple bot, boom. That's all this is.

Yeah, the amount of moralistic tutting and vitriol in this thread is ridiculous. And ironically the same people would complain about moralistic tutting and vitriol.

Right, the ol’ whatever you object to, you’re guilty of routine. No false equivalence there. IGYNYSOAB! Oh no, now I’m guilty too.

Haha! You got me! There's no comparison between people railing against a trend they say is now the status quo and which was mostly formed on echo chamber social media sites by people railing against the status quo, on their echo chamber social media site.

You're probably right about it being an exercise in resume building, and that's totally fine. But then they unleashed their creation on projects as prominent as Rust. If you're looking for that kind of exposure you might want to spend twenty minutes testing the code first.

> If you're looking for that kind of exposure you might want to spend twenty minutes testing the code first.

Eh... I think that part is explained by "University student" ...

A "university student" has no free license to go around damaging the work of professional developers (whose output is relied by many other programmers around the world). Even actual interns at companies try to tread carefully when it comes to the work of people there.

The fact that the "university student" doesn't even care about basic syntax (e.g. the word 'man' for manual), and repeatedly spams repos, tells you that this is a really carelessly-designed bot and that the writer of the bot is incompetent and disruptive.

I think it's more likely to be the project of a near-retirement-age programmer who is outraged at all the "social justice warriors running amock" and created the project to mock people working on inclusiveness, generate blowback at them, and misrepresent their movement to de-legitimize them. Sort of like how in the 50's and 60's everyone ran around screaming about how feminists were "kill all men" commie baby-stealers.

It's working. Look at all the comments here full of outrage at how "PC" everything has gotten etc...by people who clearly have no idea what the actual majority of people pushing for inclusive language are typically suggesting and shy.

You see this a lot from conservative/right-wing types, because it's a lot easier to strawman and ad-hominem someone pushing for inclusiveness based on empathy than it is to present a legitimate argument.

There really isn't a legitimate counter-argument to "can we please work to discontinue using 'master' and 'slave' to describe things in computer science and electronics" so people just run to "THIS IS ABSURD!"

"can we please work to discontinue using 'master' and 'slave' to describe things in computer science and electronics"

This is not an argument, thus it does not require a counter argument. This is a silly request, with no justification. Nothing more.

It’s not a silly request. “Slave” is a very specific term that is highly emotionally charged. There are plenty of alternatives which convey the intended meaning just as clearly without the offensive connotation.

Imagine if one were to insist on referring to “male” and “female” connectors as “cocks” and “fuckholes”.

This is not a hill worth dying on.

Yes slave is derived from the word slav as they were the victims of the brutal ottoman slave trade for hundreds of years. We should be nicer to our slavic bretheren.

That emotional charge is pretty specific to a single culture, while English is used by a large part of the world as second language. It's ok to try to right the wrongs you are guilty of, but please stop trying to project that guilt to other cultures. Where I live there were no slaves or slavery after ca. 1600 - and even before that it was foreign institution imported from the Mongols. That's enough time for emotions to settle down, really.

I choose not to use the term “gypped” in technical contexts even though I live in the US.

I wouldn’t use “genocide” to describe a technical concept even though it’s been over a century since the US has taken part in one.

Why not error on the side of decency?

Sure, why not? If you name the default branch of your repository "main", I will happily submit PRs against it. I won't be doing that in my repos any time soon though, thank you very much. Why? Because that would suggest that I have a reason to do that, while I don't. It's your cross to carry, not mine.

I have my own set of words that I need to be careful with if I want to err on the side of decency. You almost assuredly use some of them as if there was nothing offensive about them. To you, there isn't. I accept that. I'd be grateful if you reciprocated, instead of trying to impose your own cultural norms on me, thank you in advance.

What are some examples of these words? I’d like to know for my own edification, this is not a challenge.

If you actually want to be decent, then that means taking global perspectives into account if your communication is to a global audience.

If I posted a tweet saying that my company is looking for “refugees from big tech”, that would be insensitive even though there aren’t refugees fleeing the US. Saying that the issue of refugees is not sensitive in my local cultural scope is not an excuse if the audience for my communication was larger than that.

I don't even know how the phrase "refugees from big tech" could be offensive or insensitive. It isn't at all.

Given the burnout rate and the pace of the tech world, it's an apt (and even meaningful) description of the state of working in that industry.

To presume/take offence at every single word is absolutely silly.

Did you know "server" is derived from Latin "servus", which literally means "slave"?

and "slave" apparently comes from "Slav", due to the vast amounts of Slavs that were sold into slavery back in the day. ack!

"servus" historically meant servant as well as slave though, iirc. imo etymology is less important than the current emotional valence of words, though. nobody's thinking of Slavic people being slurred by the word "slave" unless they dive into Merriam-Webster.

> nobody's thinking of Slavic people being slurred

Yet! Nobody thought about "master" being offensive either. But with enough activism, anything is possible. I eagerly await people trying to cancel "Masters" degree because it implies less credentialed people should be slaves to more credentialed ones.

How far do you want to take this?

Would you get behind a movement to remove the term 'beat' from our lexicon?

As in 'Tampa beats Kansas 31-9'

Slave is just a USA thing, like many others. Let the rest of the world be please!

https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/o4h1fq/using_go...

And the holocaust was just a Europe thing, but I’d still choose not to use that word to describe a technical concept to an American audience.

What if the package name contained some kind of blasphemy, should that be allowed? Because this could be very offensive in many places.

What irks people is the presumption that the entire world (or at least the entire Anglosphere) should learn American history and then alter their use of language to conform to it. And that it ends up being a kind of linguistic annexation of the Internet where everybody has to make an effort to not offend Americans but Americans make little effort to not offend the rest of the world.

Perhaps your argument for inclusiveness shouldn't be based on blatant ageism.

> There really isn't a legitimate counter-argument to "can we please work to discontinue using 'master' and 'slave' to describe things in computer science and electronics" so people just run to "THIS IS ABSURD!"

But there is! The BDSM community has a right not to be discriminated against! If we're going to be inclusive, we should hear them out, too...

I don't know now what we can't just refer to components in systems as dominant or submissive partners, so that we can dispense with the distracting and problematic language.

> people who clearly have no idea what the actual majority of people pushing for inclusive language are typically suggesting and shy.

It does not seem to matter what any majority wants. I have never seen a request to rename something because a majority of black/trans/female/... people considered a term offensive, or the majority of staff, or - as you say - the majority of people who are pushing for inclusive language. (Who gets to define this group? Do I count if I make sure to use singular they, but don't care about master branches?)

The way it works is that a person or institution high up declares a term offensive, and then it takes only one or two people to suggest a change in a company Slack or other public space. Nobody wants to be racist/sexist, so the path of least resistance is to go along and make the change. That's why it feels like power games - if things were decided by anonymous polls instead, then I think acceptance of either outcome would be much higher.

agreed. it tends to just be bikeshedding that costs companies nothing to implement but makes them look as though they're woke or inclusive.

personally, as a trans woman, all I do is use "she" instead of "he" when giving examples about users. I don't mind when people say "he." I don't have anything against "they," I just like using "she" so that's what I do.

> Sort of like how in the 50's and 60's everyone ran around screaming about how feminists were "kill all men" commie baby-stealers.

Well, about that ... Sep 2020:

https://www.distractify.com/p/kill-all-men-tiktok

or, Feb 14th 2022:

https://srhsoffleash.org/2171/showcase/kill-all-men-is-only-...

Which has some useful history:

"SCUM, or the Society for Cutting Up Men was an idea based on the manifesto of the same name that was released in 1967. At the time, it had been described as satire or parody, until the author attempted to murder Andy Warhol a year later"

Maybe that's they were running around saying that about feminists in the 60s?

> I think it's more likely to be the project of a near-retirement-age programmer who is outraged at all the "social justice warriors running amock" and created the project to mock people working on inclusiveness, generate blowback at them, and misrepresent their movement to de-legitimize them. Sort of like how in the 50's and 60's everyone ran around screaming about how feminists were "kill all men" commie baby-stealers.

Let's just be clear: that's pure speculation on your part, and not facts.

And to entertain your speculation, it's also possible that the disruptive bot is instead the genuine work of a coloured/female/young social justice warrior who was trying to police the language of professional repos on the internet, right? Since you are speculating, that's just as much a legitimate speculation as well, if we go by the actual user history of the profile.

Looking at the contribution history of that bot's repos, I believe you're correct. Appears to just be a single student attempting to pad their resume by issuing PRs to the largest repos on GitHub.

> terrible attempt at satire

If it is indeed satire, I think it's actually pretty good. It demonstrates the absurdity of the situation with minimal exaggeration.

Agreed, if satire manages to push buttons then it's doing great.

What about that site makes you think it's satire?

Perhaps 'satire' is the wrong word, but it feels 'off' somehow. I can't quite put it into words

I will say that the repo that the bot is using is absolutely whack, https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/gender-inclusive-lang...

replaces 'mother' with 'parent', 'boyfriend' with 'consort', 'maiden voyage' with 'first voyage'. What a strange world.

Yeah, agreed. The site is almost on the nose.

Maybe not though and you and I are just that "unwoke" lol

I think refraining from the use of 'comrade' suggests it's not satire. Otherwise, I would agree that it would be hard to know.

I can't tell whether or not you are kidding, but "comrade" is indeed gender-neutral and the Pravda recently recommended using it: https://english.pravda.ru/society/149390-ladies_and_gentleme...

If the bot replaced "man" with "comrade" it would be accused of being Russian propaganda.

They say “-master” can be replaced with “-maker”, and they give the examples of:

shipmaster -> shipmaker

headmaster -> headmaker

I can understand wanting to coin a new gender neutral suffix to replace “-master” but why would they include a literal counterexample. Very strange.

The terrible stock clip art, language that reads much like I would expect a boomer trying to imitate social justice folks would write...

It's hosted on Wix, which screams "boomer."

I think this is likely some near-retirement-age back-end programmer who is threatened by social justice movements, trying to manufacture outrage/blowback.

Good satire is often indistinguishable from the real thing.

Good satire is also often funny. This is just stupid.

Good satire is only funny when recognized as satire, and even then only to those who support the actual position it advocates for (the opposite of the one it satirizes.) Otherwise, it trends to be offensive (for different reasons to those who are targeted vs. those who fail to recognize it.)

I often disagree with the viewpoint of an Onion article while simultaneously finding it funny. Same with comedians. I don't need to agree to appreciate a humorous approach the expression of an opinion.

I do the same at babylon bee, or at least used to. The past couple of years it has really taken a nose dive in quality.

Good satire should insult the foolish and hypocritical.

Humor is subjective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

stock photos with stuff like 'love equals love'.

thrown together on a quick'n'dirty templating site (Wix)

their blog https://inclusivecoding.wixsite.com/home/blog gives 5 tips, but then lists '4' twice

I'd say it's a false-flag operation by someone who doesn't like inclusive language.

You're underestimating people's stupidity.

Yes. I got called out by some random "offended" person while discussing a master slave topology on i2c bus I was working on in an embedded system with a friend. It was a coffee shop in Austin so it wasn't exactly shocking but the first time in my life so worth mentioning. Also a company I worked at once declared we should use different terms going forward in our own systems that used master/slaves topologies, they had a variety of alternatives.

I only think I see one thing that stands out...

> For example, instead of using using the term "Bachelor" or "Bachelorette", this term can be replaced with the word gender-neutral word "Baccalaureate".

This is a substitution that only makes sense in the context of college degrees and even then only barely. (One would not describe a Bachelor of Science degree as a gendered thing, and say that a woman has a Bachelorette of Science degree or so.) A serious website would have recommended a plain word like “unmarried” or “single,” rather than such a strange construct.

a riff on a general trend of taking analogies beyond comprehension-

like 'trans' and 'cis' from.. chemistry? or taking the botanical definition of fruit and trying to apply it to 'fruits and vegetables'

> This is a substitution that only makes sense in the context of college degrees and even then only barely.

My college literally had an option for having the "gender neutral" Baccalaureate in your degree, and I think it's becoming even more common.

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