Yeah let's just go through an insane amount of efforts to change everything IT so that we can accomodate the 0.something% of the population who can't just accept and he/she and move on
Right? We already do this with names. "Please don't call me Bill, I prefer William". Ok, I'll call that person William. It'd be an asshole move to deliberately call them Bill.
Using someone's correct pronouns is the same. If they say, "use x not y" it's an asshole move to deliberately not use x.
It happens to everyone, even cis, and they just accept it and move on, too much importance is being publicly given to things that are private. I don't care about misgendering and being misgendered, here are a lot of people that for political and PR reasons are alimenting the delusions of a bunch of kids and people all over the world who are spending way too much time on something that is unimportant and private
If referring to a definite existing person who is physically present the default is to infer gender from a combination of physical attributes, name, and style of dress. This works about 99.9% of the time. For example it is almost always possible to tell that a person desires to present as a female even if they have some masculine attributes and or name and you can be nice and predict what they would prefer. The small percentage of times you get this wrong you just correct yourself and apologize and move on.
Being decent to people is important. Now if you are referring to a hypothetical person for example in documentation you can't misgender them because you are speaking hypothetically. At that point I think the choice is an aesthetic choice as opposed to a moral one. On cannot be harmed by the documentation using a different pronoun because the person was never speaking directly of you in the first place.
My personal experience with most of these bots is, most of them are promoting some kind of service (image/badge bots) or try to enforce a certain behavior onto maintainers ("Your are missing a [code of conduct]"). Haven't yet come across anything useful.
If your political issue is something you truly care about, please at least make the effort hand craft your pull-request. And even then, it would be awesome to keep politics out of code.
One, you can't keep politics out of code. Code, like sports, like games, like movies, etc. is inherently political. Who has access to software? Who doesn't? Who is in the training set? Who isn't? Who gets the education necessary to write code? Who doesn't?
But I agree, you should target these improvements to open source tools you use, care about, or are a contributor to. It's ok to have a bot assist in writing the PR, but you should deploy it narrowly.
Given how obviously stupid many of the changes are, to me this looks like a false flag attempt trying to stir outrage against a movement with good intentions.
Sadly it is not. The bot's github page leads back to a real looking webpage. But then again that could be some top tier trolling. The page is completely bereft of any personality, names, or faces... so...
For anyone that cares the argument basically comes down a weak form of the Sapier-Worf hypothesis and the primacy of emotions over any other consideration. A useless and potentially harmful admixture.
This is getting so out of hand, it's not even funny anymore. Just like the blacklist/whitelist debate or the github master branch shitshow. Are there no real problems left?
Of course these are just bugs, when you look at the diff you can infer how naive the regex is.
I did say it was just a poorly written script, but I can't help looking at this and thinking of all the very serious people who simply want to remove the substring "man" from everything.
This got upvoted to the frontpage because it aligns with the preconceptions of a certain subset of HN readers. How representative is this single issue of the variety of discussions currently ongoing about inclusivity in tech?
Right? "College student tries to help out, program has bugs, HN loses their goddamn minds" lol
Edit: the replies to this comment are emblematic of HN losing their goddamn minds. Hey, y'all, sometimes humans are humans. Sometimes college kids have big ideas and don't nail it. Have a little empathy, have a chuckle, and move on.
I'm not sure what it is anymore. "College student" has a LinkedIn page that shows he's been at the college for 4 years and has had several internships in FAANG. The bot's linked website is slick and too serious to be an April Fools prank.
I wonder who the fools are if someone who can get internships at FAANG can't write a proper search and replace bot.
One "debate me" is pretty cringe, but two, I don't think you'd find anyone who thinks those are serious suggestions.
It's either a bug or someone trolling. I push hard for gender neutral language, but not whatever this change is proposing. Helps is not a gendered term, and should remain helps.
Looks like a student, trying to improve things and making some mistakes that are very much to be expected for a student project. Kudos for the effort, and I think they probably learned a good lesson in test data generation.
