It's in the banned words list, I can share a link internally if you want.
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?
could you please explain to me, a non-native english speaker, why using "mainboard" is better than "motherboard"?
It seems like people who object to motherboard don't understand analogy?
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...
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.
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.
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".
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".
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.
> "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#...
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."
If nothing else, maybe we should revisit the language as a whole and its obsession with overloaded homonyms.
/rant
Is there not still an egg supplier and a sperm supplier?
Your claim is somehow going a little viral. You have a responsibility to try to correct it.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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."
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".
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.
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.
Even google translate mainboard to "carte mère" !!!
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 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.
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.
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.
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?!".
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.
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.
So this list is real, you own it, and you acknowledge that as a continued employee you are supporting this nonsense?
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.
That said, consider that leaving just means one less opponent for the other side.
Meanwhile, Google is rotten at the executive layer. No amount of good people working for them will fix things.
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 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.