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Comment by timmg | Hacker News Reader

As someone who also works at Google, I agree that there is a vocal minority who want Google to be a promoter of progressive values, but: I think you nay be exaggerating things here.

I've never even heard of any controversy over the word "motherboard". I just did some internal searches. It seems to be a well-used word, both in code and in documentation. (I did a code search for both "motherboard" and "mainboard" and they seem to be used by similar amounts, fwiw.)

In fairness, I will say that I do watch my language more closely than I think is really needed:

The terms "whitelist" and "blacklist" are built into my thought-vocabulary. I do find myself switching to "allowlist" and "denylist" as I translate my thoughts in discussions. Not that anyone has ever "called me out" if I slipped up with "whitelist".

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It's in the banned words list, I can share a link internally if you want.

We're sure it's in a List, but the point is that the List is not uniformly enforced, and "motherboard->mainboard" definitely seems like one to go to bat against because it Doesn't Make Sense to get rid of it.

> We're sure it's in a List, but the point is that the List is not uniformly enforced

The fact that it’s in a list at all should make you reconsider your employment with them.

The inmates run the asylum at Google, just because they haven’t come for your corner/fiefdom yet doesn’t mean they won’t.

yes, I left google because of stupid shit like this.

More importantly: when I was there, I actively fought against this kind of shit, but it was clear at some point that the content moderation team had enough sway with execs that they were going to continue this sort of idiocy untrammelled.

From a purely linguistic point of view, doesn’t ‘content moderation’ imply a work slowdown? I would think any company would be against using anti-productivity language.

I think all companies realize they have a large amount of "sway" in the actual work that gets done, and things like TPS reports and content moderation get in even if they're a net productivity loss.

Once you stop thinking of companies as single entities and instead as large kingdoms containing many fiefdoms it starts making more sense.

You can see it even in this thread, there exist Lists and tools that can be used as weapons against other groups, even if sometimes they're not currently being used because they're not currently at war.

At these wealth levels it’s not about “productivity” anymore lol

Thank you for your service.

That said, consider that leaving just means one less opponent for the other side.

I disagree. Let’s assume OP is talented, his talent can best be used for google’s competitors.

Meanwhile, Google is rotten at the executive layer. No amount of good people working for them will fix things.

The list it is on is about what words to use in external product documentation and marketing. Not some "if you use these words internally the word police are going to come after you" list.

I'm going to be charitable and suggest this person is just accidentally leaving out context, rather than deliberately trying to rile people up because they disagree with something :)

I mean, I'm still pretty shocked to hear 'motherboard' isn't allowed in external product documentation. I don't think it matters if it's internal or external.

"Mainboard" is arguably a bit more literally descriptive: it is the main board of the device.

The figurative part of "motherboard" is pretty vague: it's just larger than the "daughterboards" and in charge of them--it doesn't birth or nurture them or do anything that's stereotypically maternal.

Often power is transmitted from the motherboard to be daughterboards, and the two are connected via a conduit like a fetus in the womb. It's not a completely arbitrary metaphor.

As for whether it's the main board or not, surely that's a matter of opinion. An AI researcher would be much more interested in what the GPU board is doing than on what the motherboard is doing.

It's certainly more central to the device itself. You can run a computer without a GPU, NIC, sound card, etc, but regardless of the peripherals you want, you're gonna need some kind of motherboard/mainboard to tie everything together.

I've heard claims that it's a motherboard because it has female connectors (i.e., sockets), but that's sort hard to square with the contemporary coinage of "daughterboards."

Motherboard isn't offensive. It shouldn't be offensive. If someone is offended by it, that is a problem of theirs.

The idea that a large, influential organization plays along with the idea that "motherboard" should in any way be filtered is as absurd as filtering the words "table" or "stereo".

Sorry, but i'm going to trust the folks who think hard about what should and should not be in documentation that ends up in literally hundreds of different countries more than an an absoluteist HN statement that "it's not offensive" from a random person.

But in typical HN fashion, i'm sure you know better. Just like the people who say that X or Y should take 2 people over a weekend. Remind me again what your experience is here to say they are wrong? Are you a culture expert of some sort? It's really not obvious from your HN profile or comment exactly why you think your expertise should overrule theirs.

Otherwise, i'd say it sure is fun to get upset and pretend it's the reactionary woke police, rather than a group of people carefully thinking something through.

Saying that something is or isn't offensive doesn't require being and expert in cultural studies. You just know it by the virtue of being part of the culture and observing what the trends of the majority are.

I think your militant stance on the subject is more problematic than someone else's view that the word motherboard is not offensive.

Also, advocating for some narrow unknown group of people to have exclusive right to define language gives off a little cultish vibes.

"part of the culture".

See, this is the whole issue right here. It's not about a single culture. It's hundreds. This wordlist is for global products with literally billions of users in literally hundreds of countries.

Yes, it requires experts to know what will be inoffensive to all of them at once (or at least, the vast majority).

Your "narrow unknown group of people" is really "people who are experts at language and culture and understand this".

Paying and asking them to help figure out how to create common standards that will cover the majority of the hundreds of cultures at once does not seem cultish or militant at all to me?

It is something literally every single company with literally billions of global users in hundreds of cultures does.

Otherwise they end up naming their product something offensive to a culture, etc.

News stories about those gaffes occur literally all the time, so i'm sort of shocked you are really trying to argue that trying to avoid them is somehow cultish.

I am probably one of the least "politically correct" people you will find, and i'm not even all that progressive in the scheme of things, yet this clearly makes sense to me. So I look at this, and see HN having a huge overreaction because they are upset the world is becoming a lot more politically correct for no obvious benefit.

That bothers me too - a lot in fact. I just don't see the particular thing complained about in this part of the thread (a wordlist used to ensure google doesn't say offensive things in product documentation) all that objectionable.

The original article, about offensive/inclusive/etc AI writing nudges, bothers me about 1000x more than the wordlist.

This is about censoring the word mother clearly. It is nonsense.

Again, you literally know nothing about how or why the decision is made, but are 100% sure about what happened and why. Yet they are the problem and not you?

I would urge you to actually seek facts first, rather than make them up yourself just because you are sure you are right. It's not a particularly helpful approach.

Trust the experts? Really? To people on HN, most of whom have been using the term motherboard their whole lives without incident and who are, in fact, computer experts?

It's quite obviously not a carefully thought through decision, it's more or less random machine-gunning of random words that happen to have the word mother in them because ... well ... because they think motherhood is offensive? Presumably? It's impossible to discern any logic here. This supposedly expert decision is already leading to near universal derision towards Google, a once universally respected name. That derision is now also coming from left-wing media outlets that you'd expect to be fully supportive, like VICE. That's because it's quite obviously insane. Nobody is looking at this and thinking "about time", they're thinking "wtf is that?!".

I'm talking solely about the internal wordlist the grandparent is whining about, not the AI writing thingy. I don't have a real formed opinion yet on the latter.

For the former, it's none of the things you say, and AFAICT, you have precisely zero knowledge of either the decision making process, or how it is used, etc.

So saying "it's quite obviously x" seems trivially wrong.

>So saying "it's quite obviously x" seems trivially wrong.

No one in this chain said that, however. Some person gave an opinion and you then replied with "you don't have any knowledge on this". Even though in this case, it is indeed a cultural question which everyone has some knowledge and likely opinion on.

If you want to encourage others to seek more information out (if it's out there), then sure. But at some point it just sounds like you're appealing to an authority that doesn't exist here. And honestly, who IS the authority of a thing like language and its usage is a conversation in and of itself.

I "trust the experts" on a number of things, but the spectrum shifts a little with cultural discussions, and it's precisely because Google is so incredibly influential that I am suspicious of actions taken that seem to be the modus operandi of a portion of so-called socially-progressive people who try to "nudge" society through the intentional shifting of language.

I would be interested to see the rationale for the change, if it is so clearly benign and not part of any secret-sauce or competitive advantage - similar to the AP Stylebook.

This isn't a debate about cloud security, or strongly-typed languages, or the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and its impact on the Earth. It's a cultural discussion, and I believe citizens should be encouraged to form an opinion, rather than insulted and berated for having one.

You actually didn't defend your position in any way on the topic, you only berated me for not having faith in closed-door internal Google processes to alter the use of the English language.

From another comment: >you have precisely zero knowledge of either the decision making process, or how it is used, etc.

Isn't that the issue being brought up? Let's be charitable: Could it be that "mainboard" is the English term used by ESL speakers across the world, and "motherboard" is only used in the US/UK? Perhaps. I know you work at Google, but I am surprised at your surprise that people would be skeptical of that company's motivation.

I'd be interested in your opinion on the first-order topic, and also why you're so angry in the second place.

As an ESL speaker I can confidently tell you that in French the correct term, approved by the "Office québécois de la langue française" (Québec's office of the French language), for mainboard and motherboard is "carte mère" (carte<->board and mère<->mother).

Even google translate mainboard to "carte mère" !!!

I’m a “go along to get along” Asian but even I think this level of obsequiousness remarkable.

These departments have an expertise, sure. But part of being an intelligent, critically thinking person is knowing when people are speaking within the scope of their expertise and when they aren’t. You and I both know that this wouldn’t hold up under Daubert. This isn’t like telling you not to name your car the “Nova” in Spanish-speaking countries. It’s like trying to make “LatinX” happen.

I represent a culture of 100+ million people in my country, 300+ million in total speaking my (non-English) language natively. Motherboard is the word every single hardware repair shop or seller is going to use when talking about motherboards. It might be hard to imagine from a certain perspective, but the vast crushing majority of humans worldwide is entirely unbothered that some words are feminized.

I don't see how that matters at all.

> The list it is on is about what words to use in external product documentation and marketing.

So this list is real, you own it, and you acknowledge that as a continued employee you are supporting this nonsense?

Does "motherboard" even make sense as a term? It's not like a motherboard gives birth to little baby boards that eventually grow up to be mother and father boards of their own. It's just one of those weird words we accept because it's been part of a shared vocabulary for so long. I don't particularly see any harm in assigning a gender role to a hardware device, but I don't see anything is particularly gained either. "Mainboard" is fine.

All the little components live on the Mother Board just like you live on the Mother Earth.

I'm fairly sure that "motherboard" came about as a term specifically for computer logic boards with slots that other cards -- "daughterboards" -- plugged into. It's very much from the 1970s era when we referred to "microcomputers", "minicomputers" and "mainframes". Granted, I'm a Mac user -- the last time I bought a "motherboard", I think it was a Pentium 4 -- and we tend to use the phrase "logic board" over here in Apple land, probably because, other than debatably the Mac Pro, we haven't had motherboards using the canonical definition for a very long time.

At any rate, while I wouldn't go out of my way to squelch the word, I wouldn't go out of my way to insist on it, either. "Logic board" and "mainboard" both work and get the point across.

Presumably, that would be Main Earth.

Well, not at this rate. Hope our sub earths are habitual in the next century or 2.

There's only one earth so far, so that wouldn't make a lot of sense.

Not all mothers give birth to their children. Seems like you're not being very inclusive to parents of adopted children.

why does a company have a say which words are allowed to be used?

i mean there are some bad words you shouldn’t use, but i just can’t grasp why is there something like “motherboard” on that list?

The banned words list they are referring to is about what words should be used in external product documentation and marketing :) Not about what you are allowed to say inside google, or anything like that.

the point still stands though

could you please explain to me, a non-native english speaker, why using "mainboard" is better than "motherboard"?

It is the same logic as why we switched from "fireman" to "firefighter" or "stewardess" to "fight attendant" decades ago. Because some people find the old word offensive. The only real debate is the size of the "some" and whether that "some" is small enough to ethically ignore.

The thing is, those substitutions are logical because "fireman" doesn't refer to female firefighters. But "motherboard" is different, because "board" doesn't refer to a person.

Perhaps, but this is your opinion. Maybe you are in the "some" for certain words and not others. I am not in the "some" for "motherboard" so I can't tell you exactly why people are offended, but I know they are. Whether the rest of us think someone taking offense is logical doesn't stop them from being offended.

I very much doubt anyone is actually offended by the word "motherboard". More likely it's a dumb inductive argument. "Some people are offended by some gendered words => every gendered word might offend someone => every gendered word must be eliminated as a precaution".

This is basically a semantic debate, but I guess this all is anyway. I don't disagree with the pattern you are describing, but I would describe it a slightly different way. There are people getting offended on the behalf of other people who potentially might get offended. Even if this second group never materializes or doesn't even exist, that first group is still getting offended on their behalf.

Basically I don't believe that "precaution" you mention is an apathetic but cautious person. These changes are more often motivated by someone who thinks "this might offend someone so I will take offense to it too".

The exact same pattern was leveraged against blacklist - a word that has absolutely no connection with the skin color usage. It has been removed by notable projects and people were up in arms talking about it being necessary due to "people being offended".

Motherboard. It took me a few moments to guess as to why this is a "problem". Obviously due to the word mother. Let me roll my eyes.

Frankly it is completely absurd to be offended about a word that is part of a process that keeps our very species existing. Sadly I would not be surprised at all if there are google employees who are offended on behalf of "people being offended".

There will be a group offended by anything.

People are wild. You can find small groups of people who do and think insane things. We as a society should not try to cater to every possible sensibility. That's a recipe for disaster.

Exactly. Mainship instead of mothership? I guess male and female plugs/sockets are off limits now too.

I'm tired of this sort of shallow, performative, language policing. I'm (I believe) a socially progressive, inclusive person, but this shit makes me tired. Just fucking leave it alone and spend our collective fucks to give on something that actually matters.

I look forward to the future of convex and concave connectors!

It's not about the size of "some." It's about their objection being stupid.

Sterwardess doesn't make sense because Stewards are a thing as well. I guess this is just the Actor/Actress debate in this case?

Imagine a future where babies can be incubated in an external enclosure, rather than a womb.

This doesn't seem too unlikely. I've been hoping tech would go this way -- We're doing IVF in June, and it's still hit-or-miss whether it'll work.

In that future, if someone identifies as nonbinary but still wishes to have a child, neither "mother" nor "father" would accurately describe them. And since a womb isn't required for a baby, there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in that scenario.

That said, I think the argument is "mainboard is better than motherboard for the same reason that denylist is better than blacklist -- the whole point is so that people don't have to be reminded of social issues whenever the word comes up in discussion."

"Don't mention the war!"

> there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in that scenario.

Is there not still an egg supplier and a sperm supplier?

Careful, you're suggesting there might be a meaningful biological difference between the sexes.

As an african american, I never particularly liked the whole black and white argument (literally in this case) because those words and concepts go beyond western culture and even civilization. "black" in this case isn't referring to me anymore than a black mage is referring to me in DnD (I don't play magical classes). It's from a much more fundamental concept that humans are diurnal creatures that can't see well at night. Or rather, the "black of night". the unknown is scary, night is full of the unknown. This is why every culture has some concept of "black is scary", because we all have this natural fear or discomfort of what we can't see (our strongest sense).

If nothing else, maybe we should revisit the language as a whole and its obsession with overloaded homonyms.

/rant

Perversely though, when I see someone say "denylist", it stands out as an odd word, and it makes me more reminded of social issues than if they had just said blacklist.

Maybe that's why its done?

Reminds us all that instead of fixing real social issues we can all go into denial by changing the words that denote them

I guess because it's kind of exclusive of fathers and/or stereotypical of mothers as the "family orientated parent".

Find me a reasonable person offended by this terminology and I'll show you an unreasonable person. That connotation doesn't come through at all.

Some languages have gendered words as a fundamental grammatical aspect of the language (though since this language aspect evolved out of earlier grammatical distinctions that had nothing to do with “gender”, frequently the gendering of words is kinda random). English doesn’t have grammatical gender, and it has a relatively small set of words in its vocabulary that are specifically gendered. The argument goes that the use of some of this vocabulary is harmful, and that it’s easier to try to move away from using the whole class of gender-specific vocabulary words outside of actually gender-specific scenarios than it is to try to define and keep track of which gendered vocabulary words should be discouraged. Words like “motherboard” are collateral damage of this broader effort to discourage use of terms like “mothering”, which can be used in English to mean both “being mother to”, but also in a metaphorical generic sense as “being responsible for and looking after”, even of things that are not children, and is discouraged in favor of “parenting” or “caretaking”, which have the same implications but without the gendered aspect.

so it's a belief system then?

Parenting and caretaking don't have the same connotation as mothering.

It seems like people who object to motherboard don't understand analogy?

If the objection were to parenthood, which is to say if nurtureboard or parentboard were similarly offensive, then I agree this would have been a stupid stupid choice.

The problem is that you had a motherboard and daughter boards, those were the accepted terms, and never fatherboard or son boards, never parentboard or child boards. Why were they gendered female in the first place?

Because they had “female connections,” which is to say their use is in plugging pins into their sockets.

Obviously that is a sexual analogy that did not age particularly well, this idea that a motherboard is the motherboard because you shove stuff into it. So people started replacing with mainboard because it makes more sense...

>Why were they gendered female in the first place?

well, for this context, it's called a "motherboard" because "mainboard" was already a thing. Motherboard was to distinguish at the time how this new board can be expanded upon by plugging in ports. There was no real malice here, it was just fancy marketing term that stuck.

Ultimately, we're humans and we try to anthropize all kinds of things in life to make them "feel relatable", be it animals, boats, hurricanes, or yes, computer. so that extends to our language as well. Especially in marketing where the goal is to make customers feel good and close the sale. There may be a conversation on WHY we do this, but starting that conversation on the foot of "well people just want to be sexist" won't get us anywhere.

It's more likely that it's a similar naming to mother lode, i.e. the motherboard is the central source of the computer and everything connected to it is a child that hangs off of it.

mainboard does not even communicate the same concept. A main board might be one of several disconnected boards where it performs the primary function, not necessarily the singular substrate on which all other components are hosted.

Because 0.1% of people feel like they are more comfortable adopting the social customs of the opposite sex, and... the culture wars.

You used another incorrect word!!! /s

> "Avoid referring to people in divisive ways. For example, instead of referring to people as native speakers or non-native speakers of English, consider whether your document needs to discuss this at all"

https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation#...

I believed you enough to defend your claim on Twitter. And then Stella proved you wrong: https://twitter.com/blancheminerva/status/151783630034220237...

Your claim is somehow going a little viral. You have a responsibility to try to correct it.

Do you think your brain power increases or decreases with the additional thought-crime concern that you have to reprogram yourself to prevent?

"Allowlist" and "denylist" are sonically awkward. Why not "inlist" and "outlist"?

In the context of IP filtering, I would assume those lists would differentiate one-way traffic instead of the regular all or nothing.

Directional terms like that would be confusing in a lot of infrastructure discussions. An outbound firewall rule's "outlist" is the list of things that don't go out.

That’d discriminate against the outgroup. Although I guess “denylist” would be offensive to <whatever> deniers?

I want to offer greenlist and redlist

And to those who say this is not inclusive to the colorblind, I say traffic lights

Well yes, traffic lights are a problem, I’m red-green color blind myself. But the brain is smart enough to supply the right „color“ because it knows that red is on top and green is below. Wait a second, is that offensive towards the color green? ;-)

I've always wondered how you handle those lights at night, if you can't see the enclosure; and how you handle the occasional horizontal traffic light, which my town has one of.

Greenlist and redlist would fail in a global company. Plenty of cultures use red as a color that promotes positivity rather than a negative color. Japan has blue rather than green for their "Go" color. And so on.

I still think traffic lights would work as that’s almost a universal global standard (isn’t Japan the only exception?) and it works well in English

But I think we can agree that the goal when choosing these names isn’t really being concise and easy to use

I'm still not sure why blocklist wasn't the goto replacement. Depending on your accent, you might not even notice!

In and out doesn’t seem very inclusive, there should only be an inlist!

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