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Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
I guess there’s some workplaces where it’d be useful for me to update these, probably the ones Apple PMs work in.
In the US, the faction in power right now is attacking perceived symbols of "woke" ideology, and one of them is the use of pronouns.
As I understand it, some government agencies are even forbidding the use of pronouns in e-mail signatures etc. So it struck me as ironic that a software component with pronouns would have evaded their notice.
I have no problem with the use of pronouns.
Inferring pronouns has always been dumb and annoying. Many names don't have obvious pronouns, for example, the name "Taylor". Is that he or she? And clicking the little profile icon and squinting to see if someone is a man or a woman is also a waste of time. It's a lot easier for everyone if it just tells you the pronoun.
It's not that hard to just avoid it. I send emails to a lot of people I haven't spoken to and don't know their gender, so I write gender-neutral emails.
In the 1970s and 1980s it was the default in many Commonwealth locales to not assume that (say) Rob Owens writing mathematics and engineering papers was male (as it turns out, she isn't, the Rob is short for Robyn).
So much correspondence was with people who had Initial Surname or abstract handles that didn't broadcast gender.
I guess I'm just not really understanding people getting upset at what I perceive to be completely made up problems. We have technology, we no longer have to assume gender neutral pronouns for everyone. They can just tell us the pronouns they want.
But if they reply back and their email footer has "he/him", I'm probably just gonna use he/him and not think twice about it, because I'm a well-adjusted adult.