Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken • Hacker News Board

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#281

Post by valeness » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

tryptophan wrote: post #195

madamelic wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion: `main` is better. It's shorter, it's more descriptive, and costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive. It's pretty much an all around win.

Its worse because suddenly 20 years worth of tutorials are slightly 'wrong' and will confuse new users even more for no reason. "Why does my git say main and not master? Did I break it?" "Why cant I push to master like the 100x tutorials show? I get errors!"

Does this mean we should never make progress or change anything?

Also if your tutorials are using a base repository to work from, then you can still have the branch "master" it's just not default. So your existing repos should still work. And if you changed your repo then you should be responsible for updating your documentation to reflect that. It's just good practice.

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#282

Post by orangecat » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

BitwiseFool wrote: post #89

cft wrote: post #36

I have been thinking about this for a while, and came to the conclusion that the main weakness of progressivism is its arrogance. A progressive simply thinks that she is more educated, virtuous or simply better than others. This manifests subtly, from "helping poor immigrants", to not so subtle implementations, like knowing better what Google queries you actually meant to type, to censoring "fake news", because peopl…

My take on the situation is that as a movement and political ideology "Progressivism" is steeped in a sense of righteousness. I very much sense progressives have internalized the notion that what they are fighting for is so obviously good, correct, and just that anyone who opposes such self-evidently virtuous things must either be 1) brainwashed by malevolent forces (Fox news, misinformation, propaganda, internalized…

It's nearly 100% conflict theory (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/).

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#283

Post by jefftk » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #113

bombcar wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landlord gets hit from multiple sides; those who don't like that it contains "lord" which is a male term, those who don't like that landlords exist, and those who don't like that the concept of owning land exists.

it contains "lord" which is a male term I didn't think of that. I always thought of it as "lording over" something. As in she's the "lord of the land." That said, a landlord and a property owner are not the same thing. Many (most?) apartment buildings are owned by one company and managed by another.

It's parallel to "landlady"

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#284

Post by shadowgovt » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

tryptophan wrote: post #195

madamelic wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion: `main` is better. It's shorter, it's more descriptive, and costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive. It's pretty much an all around win.

Its worse because suddenly 20 years worth of tutorials are slightly 'wrong' and will confuse new users even more for no reason. "Why does my git say main and not master? Did I break it?" "Why cant I push to master like the 100x tutorials show? I get errors!"

This is tech. 20 years of tutorials are always becoming slightly wrong.

Don't tell me you're still using bare pointers, `new` and `delete` in your C++ classes instead of using smart_ptr fields, or explicitly declaring local variable types instead of using `auto`...

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#285

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

silicon2401 wrote: post #124

luxuryballs wrote: post #97

Since when is black and white primarily a racial thing anyways? It seems a little inverted, like a black flag or a black mark on an account, it’s not like it’s called “negrolist”, black and white are colors before they are slang for race/culture. Maybe instead of neutering the dictionary we could try a different angle and quit lumping people into “white” or “black”? Some people are Kenyan, Irish, Nigerian, German, no…

This is the hypocrisy of radical leftists in a nutshell. They claim to fight racial thinking while in fact just making it more prominent than it's been in decades.

[deleted]

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#286

Post by jandrese » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #46

gdulli wrote: post #29

I spent many years in the bluest corner of a very blue state. But still I can't imagine any objection to the word "landlord" outside of (1) a right wing attempt to satirize the left, (2) a Google product brainstorming meeting, or (3) a rare sincere outlier or concern troll. In any of those cases I don't think this is necessary. That said, if the word "landlord" organically fell out of favor and out of usage to be rep…

Landlord gets hit from multiple sides; those who don't like that it contains "lord" which is a male term, those who don't like that landlords exist, and those who don't like that the concept of owning land exists.

> those who don't like that the concept of owning land exists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxRkHeQ7-B8

A caveat of bending over backwards to be as inclusive as possible is that sometimes you end up including people who are just plain nuts. You end up enshrining the personal problems of a handful of people into company policy.

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#287

Post by AlexandrB » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

I really don't get the logic behind the "landlord" one. In what world can "landlords" be considered an oppressed group that needs special consideration for inclusivity? Is the endgame here Google suggesting "benevolent autocratic ruler" instead of "dictator" to be more inclusive?

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#288

Post by skrbjc » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

nmilo wrote: post #109

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #61

> Cutting phrases like “whitelist/blacklist” and “master/slave” out of our vocabulary not only addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology, but forces us as writers and researchers to be more creative with the way we describe things. > calling landlords “property owners” is almost worse than calling them “landchads,” and half as accurate. It’s catering to people like Howard Schultz who would prefer you not c…

I think you're misreading. Nowhere in the article did the author say she "liked the tool" for removing whitelist/blacklist.

"Being more inclusive with our writing is a good goal, and one that’s worth striving toward as we string these sentences together and share them with the world. “Police officers” is more accurate than “policemen.” Cutting phrases like “whitelist/blacklist” and “master/slave” out of our vocabulary not only addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology, but forces us as writers and researchers to be more creative with the way we describe things. Shifts in our speech like swapping “manned” for “crewed” spaceflight are attempts to correct histories of erasing women and non-binary people from the industries where they work."

This is a whole paragraph in the article where the author agrees this is good thing, just that google implemented it poorly.

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#289

Post by temporallobe » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

The older I get, the more I fail to understand how the vocal minority is able to completely control the narrative on everything.

While we’re at it, let’s just gut the English language of anything remotely related to gender, race, or color. Then we can go after Latin-based languages that use gender at the core of their grammar.

Re: Google’s AI-powered ‘inclusive warnings’ feature is very broken

#290

Post by xg15 » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #26

mgraczyk wrote: post #9

In the article they use the example of "Motherboard" and "Landlord" and seem to suggest that these are areas where the Google AI is making mistakes or being overly strict. As a Google employee expressing my own opinion and observations of company culture, I can say that these are 100% not mistakes. Many Google employees are just so out of touch with the real world that they believe it is the duty of Google Docs to ch…

As someone fairly familiar with the SJWs in a variety of FANGs, motherboard/mainboard doesn't even offend me any more. I kind of get it, even though it is lame logic. I'm waiting until they start marking "Latino" as non-inclusive, and start forcing "Latinx".

> motherboard/mainboard doesn't even offend me any more. I kind of get it, even though it is lame logic.

Same as "master branch"/"main branch". If there is an equivalent, less fancy and less controversial technical term, by all means let's use that instead. As long as you don't start with "childbearing person board" or "privileged branch" or whatever.