331–340 of 1001 posts
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…
And now the rest of the world will be very happy learn that they will once more have to silently deal with the aftermath of America’s latest political trend. After banning world-famous paintings from Facebook because they dared show a breast, a few well-off engineers and product managers will now pick which English words should remain, and which should be let go. How nice of them. Don’t know what we’d do without them…
This isn't unique to SV. There are plenty of examples of words and behaviours that were commonplace and then over time evolved to be unacceptable to use in polite company. I'd like to give some examples, but I fear I'd end up swiftly banned for even using some of the best examples. One interesting case is "idiots, imbeciles and morons" - once technical terms to describe a mental health scale. The 'most insulting' end…
However, personally I'm pretty sure that the US is overdoing it.
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Reminds me of when GitHub stopped using "master" for the default branch because it was somehow offensive.
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.
Here you go…
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…
If we're going to play this game, I think dissuading people from using "mother" in the example of "motherboard" is offensive. Mothers are the source of human life on earth, and in that capacity are revered and honored. When we say motherboard, we're making an analogy that suggests the board's significance and universal connection to everything. To discourage the term as an analogy for things that are a universal sour…
Think of that what you will.
One of the reasons I left google is that their "content moderation team" (the folks who make you take down wrongthink memes) is so far out of touch, that somebody had to explain to them there are people in the world who are discriminated against, but aren't black. They simply didn't know that was the case! And if that's the people who are moderating content... I said motherboard all the time in meetings and chats, ne…
It seems there's a group of people who are too far in the other direction too. When I heard that it's preferred to say "allowlist" instead of "whitelist", do you know what my reaction was?
"Sure, whatever."
And I moved on with my life. It has zero impact on my day to day. The pushback reminds me of people who deadname others on purpose. Like, who cares? Bob wants to be called Sally now? Sure, whatever.
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As someone who also works at Google, I agree that there is a vocal minority who want Google to be a promoter of progressive values, but: I think you nay be exaggerating things here. I've never even heard of any controversy over the word "motherboard". I just did some internal searches. It seems to be a well-used word, both in code and in documentation. (I did a code search for both "motherboard" and "mainboard" and t…
"Allowlist" and "denylist" are sonically awkward. Why not "inlist" and "outlist"?
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It's also what will cause the far right to succeed. The left eats its own rather than being patient or tolerant ("I shouldn't have to teach you!") to people who mean well, while the right allows people to fly way off the handle and still be within their tent because their tent expands to include increasingly extreme ideas.
Are you inferring/suggesting that the "right" avoids eating its own?
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-...
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…
"Motherboard" is particularly unbelievable. The motherboard runs the machine. It's a woman in a position of power. Isn't that what everyone says they want? Or is the idea to just erase the very concept of gender from the world? Welcome to OkCupid, I am a [PERSON] seeking [PERSON] I want out of this timeline
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Since you work at Google, maybe you can answer this: does internal tooling exist to flag occurrences of "bad" words in say, code reviews or shared documents?
Former Googler (until a couple of months ago). I've never seen anything like it, but maybe I just didn't use "bad" words in code? There were presubmit checks for typos and such. Also, IIRC I asked people in code/design reviews to rename white/black lists to allow/deny lists, but it might have just been in docs. I did get an angry code review response from a fellow engineer once, after writing in a commit description…
But someone reading your commit message doesn't know that. Someone new to the company might see your change and think "That looks reasonable to me", but see that you called it "stupid", and start to doubt themselves.
Although it makes technology more boring, I think there is some value in using precise words over emotive words. Perhaps using the word "pedantic" instead, or "no-op", would have conveyed more information, without disparaging the amount of intelligence that went into making it (or into the design/configuration of the linter).
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If we're going to play this game, I think dissuading people from using "mother" in the example of "motherboard" is offensive. Mothers are the source of human life on earth, and in that capacity are revered and honored. When we say motherboard, we're making an analogy that suggests the board's significance and universal connection to everything. To discourage the term as an analogy for things that are a universal sour…
The official PC term is now “birthing person”, “birthing people”, “people giving birth” and similar. Think of that what you will.