501–510 of 527 posts
Probably better to #deleteFacebook and give everyone access to their own Mastodon instance for ~$5/yr.
It costs a lot more than that to host a Mastodon instance. The system requirements for all of the dependencies are pretty heavy
#deleteFacebook
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I'm convinced that discussing ethics or politics inside Facebook or Twitter will have literally zero effect. Employees should either quit or get back to work.
Why are you convinced of that? Unionized protests frequently accomplish institutional change - why do you think Facebook or Twitter would be exempt? If anything a unionized tech force striking would have more bargaining power than other groups since they are educated, specialized, and difficult/expensive for either company to replace en masse.
Lulling workers into complacence and laziness, all the while working tirelessly for their crazy political overlords, unions have been selling fake security for real power for centuries.
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It is a political opinion itself to think those actions are controversial. At scale, anything is political. The only solution is to keep politics out of business, and manifest our political opinions through government. Business, like economics or biology, is dismal. The most efficient and productive continue on. Government's role is to make the ideologically agnostic machine of business align with our values. In the…
> It is a political opinion itself to think those actions are controversial. No, the existence of controversy over an issue is a question of empirical fact, not political opinion. The ascription of significance to the existence of controversy may be a political opinion (and is certainly a value-based opinion), but not the question of whether controversy exists.
Those complaining of being deplatformed would probably agree strongly with your definition, however, so I will admit the definition of this word is itself controversial. Or maybe I shouldn't, because the prior sentence feels very political to me.
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The problem is that we can't take your agreement or disagreement at face value. The OP that prompted this entire thread admitted, front and center, that their $400k total comp number was very seductive. People do and believe all sorts of things when their fat salary incentivizes them to do so, even if they don't consciously realize it. What's that Upton Sinclair quote? Ah, yes: "It is difficult to get a man to unders…
Oh yeah for sure, I am indeed biased and I recognize that. I still think that most people here fail to see how the app is used throughout the world in positive ways.
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> Most of the services (FB and the likes) we're discussing here are morally neutral by their nature I don't think that's the case. Is it moral to exploit human psychology when developing addictive features that pull people into the site over and over? Is it moral to sell user information to advertisers so they can emotionally manipulate you into buying crap you don't need? Is it moral to design interactions that evok…
I hear your objections, and I should have worded my idea better. The gist was, a bare messaging+microblogging platform is, by its own nature, morally neutral[1]. Of course if the operator starts doing editorial decisions - like algorithmic timelines, or propping up/pushing down content, or manipulating user mood - then the operator clearly is making moral judgements & decisions. Funny how respecting user privacy does…
It's the classic argument, "technology is neutral; how it's used determines the ethics". Well, yes, I agree with that, but here we have a company that's using it unethically, and has no desire or need to stop their bad behavior. And that bad behavior has been instrumental to their success. That's what matters.
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I should have been more clear. Like someone else mentioned, these diversity (and inclusion) discussions are not related to discrimination laws and equal opportunity. They are always related to increasing diversity in the company by hiring more underrepresented people (previously this just meant women in eng but now it's been expanded to POC). In order to achieve this, companies are actively discriminating against non…
I don't think you're looking at it from the right perspective, or have the right base assumptions in place. The thesis here is that current hiring practices are biased (often implicitly and unintentionally) against women and POC. Since removing implicit bias is exceedingly difficult, actively requiring hiring managers to hire more people from underrepresented groups is a way to put your thumb on the scale in order to…
The fact is that women simply represent a small percentage of the overall workforce in engineering. The only way you can get parity in representation is to get parity in the underlying workforce. The only way to do that is to encourage women to pursue a career in this industry, but that's not something you can change overnight and I doubt companies care enough to invest in something that may pay off in 20 years.
I'm all for doing things that aren't discriminatory and removing unconscious biases in interviews, job descriptions, and whatever, but that will not move the needle. It's a supply issue.
Discrimination is discrimination, no matter how you want to dress it up, and it's never OK.
I'll add that some of my best colleagues have been women. I much rather not work in a sausage fest, but I also don't want to work in a world where active discrimination is supported.
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It's even worse than unavoidable. My company has removed any kind of anonymous discussion/Q&A, which just fuels a mono culture. You only get one-sided discussions because going against the grain will be career suicide.
All this means is that you value your career over the political statement you want to make. The point you want to contribute isn't all that important to you. This is why it's worthwhile listening to people who speak out when there is a cost to themselves - they believe in what they're saying enough to sacrific something for it.
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> Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it. I think "outrage" is an inappropriate response. We're talking about removing nomenclature that has been (and continues to be) used to oppress an entire segment of society. I think removing that is worth a little money and downti…
> > Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it. > I think "outrage" is an inappropriate response. We're talking about removing nomenclature that has been (and continues to be) used to oppress an entire segment of society. In this specific case, outrage is appropriate becaus…
I'll agree that git's use of "master" is not as egregious as "master/slave" in database terminology, but it's still not great.
There are two prevailing uses of the term "master". One refers to the quality of being exceptionally good at a particular skill. By and large, I don't think most people have a problem uses of "master" where that's the intended meaning. But "master" in the sense of "leader" or "controlling" isn't great, even if (in the case of git's "master" naming) there isn't a corresponding "slave" role.
> if you try to point this out and discuss it at a company like Github (or mine) where the group making these decisions is convinced of their correctness you risk ostracization and career suicide
I agree that this is bad. These sorts of responses have a chilling effect on reasonable conversations and discussion. But in some ways I do understand why this happens; people who are directly affected by terminology like this are getting really tired of having the same conversations over and over about something that evokes significant emotional pain every time it's brought up. Again, it's not great, but I think it's understandable. And it's frankly hard to understand why using a word like "master" in technical terminology is somehow so important that it's even worth getting into repetitive discussion after discussion about it, especially when doing so causes some people pain. That's where the concerns about empathy and compassion come into play, because the people who constantly fight against this change do not seem to be even trying to look at this from someone else's point of view. (And I say this as someone who initially was resistant to these changes, but have since realized that I was wrong to do so.)
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> Since GitHub repositories renaming their master branch did cost us significant money and almost caused downtime, I would be fully understanding if someone else is feeling outraged about it. I think "outrage" is an inappropriate response. We're talking about removing nomenclature that has been (and continues to be) used to oppress an entire segment of society. I think removing that is worth a little money and downti…
Surely it is very easy to take the moral high ground on these issues. But if you're the one working over-hours to fix the resulting mess, you start to wonder why those knights in shining armor forgot to show you the same compassion. Usually, when open source projects introduce a breaking backwards-incompatible change, they will first deprecate things and then wait some months to give people time to update. After this…
And that's where the question of empathy and compassion comes in.
As a random white dude, the "pain" I face by dealing with problems around these name changes is completely minimal and trivial when compared to the emotional pain they cause people in certain groups that actually have a lived experience of oppression.
Regardless, I do agree that if there is crazy scrambling and short timelines to change these names, that's a problem in your org. There should not be reckless urgency to get this done; it should be done just as any other major change should be: with planning and risk assessments. Where I work, we are doing it slowly and with an eye toward not causing downtime. If your org is not doing that, then I agree that you have a valid complaint. But this complaint should be directed at the bad process, not at the work itself.
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I don't think you're looking at it from the right perspective, or have the right base assumptions in place. The thesis here is that current hiring practices are biased (often implicitly and unintentionally) against women and POC. Since removing implicit bias is exceedingly difficult, actively requiring hiring managers to hire more people from underrepresented groups is a way to put your thumb on the scale in order to…
I don't agree. The fact is that women simply represent a small percentage of the overall workforce in engineering. The only way you can get parity in representation is to get parity in the underlying workforce. The only way to do that is to encourage women to pursue a career in this industry, but that's not something you can change overnight and I doubt companies care enough to invest in something that may pay off in…
Let’s agree on this 100% and then ask the question: how do we get rid of discrimination? If we have some implicit social bias that is causing a measurable difference in outcome for women, how can we get rid of the bias? If we take it on face value as truth that all discrimination is bad, the no discrimination at all is the ideal. I assume we both agree on that completely. In the mean time, before we’re able to fully eliminate all discrimination, which is better: negative discrimination against women resulting in the outcome of fewer women working and lower pay, or that plus an offset positive discrimination that boost the outcome for women so that there are more in the workforce and the pay is closer to equal?
We can try to push outcomes to be closer to equitable, but the most important question there, I think, is: will the affirmative action actually help remove the original implicit bias against women?
> The fact is that women simply represent a small percentage of the overall workforce in engineering.
That has changed over time, and is different depending on where you live. It went up from 0 a century ago to an average of something like 35% in the 70s, and has declined since then to like 20%. In some countries, the balance is closer to 50% and in a few places, its over 50% - spots in India for example. Isn’t that alone evidence indicating things have not settled, that we can’t rest on some notion that the workforce balance today represents the natural state of things? That we are obligated to ask why, and make sure men aren’t accidentally contributing to the discrepancy? (Especially given that in the past there is a documented history of that happening.)
> The only way to do that is to encourage women to pursue a career in this industry
What if the reason women are choosing not to pursue engineering is because there are still biases, and they know it? Then how would you encourage them?
> Discrimination is discrimination, no matter how you want to dress it up
What if the job you’re talking about being offered to a woman is subsidized and would not have been offered to a man either way? Is that still discrimination?