The last paragraph was just facetious, to make the point that correcting potentially-discriminating terms can be overdone.

And the previous, also a bit tongue in cheek, but since I’m contending that it’s petty to fight over the Ladybird dev’s use of ‘he’ as default pronoun, I was essentially supporting other options as a sort of faux balance. If ‘he’ were truly inappropriate here, balancing it with ‘she’ in another project wouldn’t make it okay again. But if it’s just not that big of a deal, except for a dominant bias, then adding diversity elsewhere perhaps settles things a bit, and allows those who feel marginalized to asset themselves.

Neither is a solid answer! If you don’t agree with me that the bickering over that source code is overblown, fair enough, you can disagree. But I think my point stands.

By calling reverse discrimination a far-right trope, I presume you mean complaints about reverse discrimination? Or an argument that reverse discrimination solves the problem? (Though I thought that latter was more argued by the Left, under the term ‘positive discrimination’.)

Either way I don’t think that’s what I meant.

I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.

Appeal to tradition bias?

Yes. Turns out languages work by saying things the same way somebody else said them before.

My point isn’t that there can’t be a reason to change. My point is calling ‘he’ out as implying misogyny on the part of the author is ridiculous, and fussing over changing it is, in this situation, in my opinion, petty.

So is singular ‘they’.

Indeed. Some English contexts are used to defaulting to ‘he’ for ungendered animate; some to ‘they’. Neither necessitates an egregious humanitarian wrong.

The rest of your post is just a slippery slope argument.

I did get facetious toward the end. If you like, you don’t have to build your life philosophy on the foundation of the logical integrity of my closing paragraph. Up to you.

It does seem to me that complaining about gendered language in source code is about as stupid as a moral panic over daemons in systemd, or vulgarities in source code comments. There is some place for it… but not much

On top of that, ‘he’/etc has been effectively gender ambivalent for a long time. I understand the desire to change that, but it’s still a normal thing in English language. Similar to ‘master’ in git repositories and IDE connections, though those are both much more recent and arguably referencing much worse.

If a dev insists on ‘she’ everywhere, or ‘they’ in places that read awkwardly, should we flame and blame? In fact, why not go and convince Firefox to use exclusively feminine language in their source, to balance things out. It sounds more sensible than taking up a political fight over this!

Also while you’re at it, ethical hacking is now done only by natural-human-skin-colour-hat hackers; background process on your computer are called abstract beings; your computer does not boot[strap], (‘pull itself up by its bootstraps’), it has affirmative action from the motherboard to get it started; and when I saw the article headline, I thought the issue would be bigger … that’s what they said.

And yet, if you do that to your girlfriend, people have issues. Double standard here, people! Double standard!

Make your MIT-licensed library big enough that the corpos use it, then switch it to AGPL just before you add a really important and tricky feature they’ve been waiting for.

My Windows Computer Just Doesn’t Feel Like Mine Anymore.

Aww.

If you love it, set it free!

Unless you teach her to suck eggs. That’s a classic.

I think people do love to dunk on it. It’s the fashion, and it’s normal human behaviour to take something popular - especially popular with people you don’t like (e.g. j this case tech companies) - and call it stupid. Makes you feel superior and better.

There are definitely documented cases of LLM stupidity: I enjoyed one linked from a comment, where Meta’s(?) LLM trained specifically off academic papers was happy to report on the largest nuclear reactor made of cheese.

But any ‘news’ dumping on AI is popular at the moment, and fake criticism not only makes it harder to see a true picture of how good/bad the technology is doing now, but also muddies the water for people believing criticism later - maybe even helping the shills.

I have read elsewhere that it was faked.

(Edit: meaning the original, with the golden gate bridge)

The other massive flaw it demonstrates in AI today is it’s popular to dunk on it so people make up lies like this meme and the internet laps them up.

Not saying AI search isn’t rubbish, but I understand this one is faked, and the tweeter who shared it issued an apology. And perhaps the glue one too.

You probably wouldn’t consider x86 opcodes to be basic computer literacy either ;-)

There’s an old joke about two mathematicians in a cafe. They’re arguing about whether ordinary people understand basic mathematics. The first mathematician says yes, of course they do! And the second disagrees.

The second mathematician goes to the toilet, and the first calls over their blonde waitress. He says to her, "in a minute my friend is going to come back from the toilet, and I’m going to ask you a question. I want you to reply, “one third x cubed.'”

“One ther desque,” she repeats.

“One third x cubed,” the mathematician tries again.

“One thir dek scubed.”

“That’ll do,” he says, and she heads off. The second mathematician returns from the toilet and the first lays him a challenge. “I’ll prove it. I’ll call over that blonde waitress and ask her a simple integration question, and see if she can answer.” The second mathematician agrees, and they call her over.

“My friend and I have a question,” the first mathematician asks the waitress. “Do you know what is the integral of x squared?”

“One thir dek scubed,” she answers and the second mathematician is impressed and concedes the point.

And as she walks away, the waitress calls over her shoulder,

“Plus a constant.”

Don’t hate, that’s their actual name.

If you wish to relinquish your hope of licensed comments, you may therefore make personal attacks again. But, please direct them all at me, so as not to hurt others’ feelings.

No place like ~/

Can’t see the desk to write, and no indoor lighting

Covid is now a feature. Sounds about right.

Essentially for predictive text: to make it easier to give good Chinese character suggestions when typing in Pinyin.

So, I read something on this a little while ago. It has to do with the moon’s weaker gravity making time progress at a different rate, so the lunar time zone gives a precise reference for sub-second (nanosecond I guess?) precision manoeuvres and such like.