Part of my code makes Copilot crash

This whole comment section is pretty frustrating. I don't even live in America and I'm scared. An enormous wave of hate is starting to show recently - even in the comparatively few places where queer people are relatively ok.

I still don't get to marry in my country - only civil unions, and even that was hard fought. No adoption, no real protection from hate crime. Elections are happening soon, and the projection of who's likely to win is... bleak, to say the least.

And I'm the lucky one: I'm a cis gay man, and out of the whole LGBTQ+ community, I'm in one of the least bad spots to be in. My trans brothers and sisters have it way, way worse - especially when surgery and/or hormones are not nearly as easy to come by as these people on the internet would like to think.

Me and my boyfriend are careful about any public display of affection, out of fear. I have trans and non-binary friends who have to either hide who they are, or fear stepping outside their homes - or even their own bedrooms. And one day - if lawmakers would be so kind as to let me - I would love to raise one or more children. To be a father. But as it is, even if I would... this is not the world I would want to raise a child in.

It's all fucked up.

It's baffling how the majority of commenters think this is about fighting discrimination.

> Both groups will angrily complain that Copilot is suggesting the wrong thing.

This is not normal, right? I mean, outside US.

Adolescents can take hormones. Near adolescents can take puberty blockers. Not small children.

You wrote teenagers later.

> That's the case until now, since only a few years ago there were 4000% less instances.

Did you mean the claimed 4000% increase in a survey of American college students between 2006 and 2021? The category changed from transgendered to transgender or gender non conforming.[1][2] Gender non conforming and trans are different. Trans and willing to say trans in 2006 are different. Students at self selected colleges don't represent the population.

Did you mean the claimed 4000% increase in under 18s referred to the NHS gender service between 2009 and 2017? The articles saying it was 4000% or more said the numbers were 97 and 2,510. 2,510 isn't 4000% of 97. The official adjusted numbers were 77 and 2,444.[3] 2,444 was between 0.30% and 0.37% of their birth years.[4] Near the low end of estimates for trans people. What is the right number? How do you know?

> If only 10% of the 4000% end up regretting their decision or god forbid even committing suicide the non-regrets will be a minority.

10% regret is 90% non regret.

> just go on Youtube and watch the doctors speaking out now. Or any other source. There is no real oversight any more, and they cannot voice their medical opinion freely. Suggesting that it would be indicated to wait and assess other psychological factors first apparently directly leads to them being terrorized and publicly shamed as transphobic.

Did you check those claims more carefully than 4000%?

> I have a hard time seeing how any of this helps anyone. It doesn't even help transgender folks.

Any of what? Transitioning younger?[5]

[1] https://www.acha.org/documents/ncha/ACHA-NCHA_Reference_Grou...

[2] https://www.acha.org/documents/ncha/NCHA-III_FALL_2021_REFER...

[3] https://tavistockandportman.nhs.uk/about-us/news/stories/ref...

[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/281981/live-births-in-th...

[5] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...

>That's just reality.

Except it really isn't. If the datasets used, truly represented everyone in the world, that would be a reasonable argument. The point is that right now, the most cheaply available and voluminous data sets online tend to have a whole bunch of examples from western nations and far fewer from other parts of the world, for the simple reason that historically most of the people taking photographs and sticking them on webservers were from those places.

"Reality" doesn't have the same statistical anomalies as these data sets (e.g. there are a hell of a lot more people with brown skin in the world than are included in common training data), so "that's just reality" really isn't a strong argument.

This is a very, very common problem in ML and isn't limited to politically-charged words. For example, in some of the earliest attempts at using computer vision to detect tanks in an image for military purposes, the photographs with tanks in them all had different lighting than the ones without tanks and so the (super simplistic ML model) overfit the model based on a bias in the data. Unless the data set is truly representative, you'll often get biases in the resultant model.

> If you have your own set of politically correct answers hardcoded by a team of blue haired people you're not doing machine learning.

Well, this is just silly. We all know Deepmind has a policy of only allowing green hair dye on campus.