561–570 of 1001 posts
I was extended an on-site interview at Google and after reading this and the comments I think I'll pass.
If you can (i.e. you don't fear persecution), please let them know that this was the reason. Part of the reason these things have taken off is that their proponents are very vocal, while the opponents prefer to just mind their own business.
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Reminds me of when GitHub stopped using "master" for the default branch because it was somehow offensive.
Main is better. Master/slave has uncomfortable connotations. This one isn't a big deal.
Why? I think that slavery is bad only if the slaves are people. I want machines to be my slaves! (non-sentient machines only, dear future AI overlords!)
Time to make those on-site interviews more rigorous. Looks like too many bad coders are leaking through the interview process.
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.
"Good job, you won, you made me stop using a perfectly fine word that was uniformly well understood, and replace it with another perfectly fine word that is also uniformly well understood. Nothing changed, but now at least you get to take credit for it. Good for you."
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 I'm writing about a ship and refer to it as a "she", does that set off the autoinquisitor?
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Putting myself in the shoes of a kid learning about computers, I find some of these phrases to be more clear, not less clear. Two examples: Allowlist and denylist are much clearer to a kid learning about computers than whitelist or blacklist. If you've never heard of whitelist before, it's sounds like a list of things that are white. If you've never of allowlist, it's pretty obvious what it means - a list of things t…
> Mainboard implies there's one main board. Motherboard could be more ambiguous to someone who's never seen the inside of a computer. Are there two boards, mother and father? Am I crazy or does mainboard strongly imply there's more than one -- eg main, supporting / secondary, etc? Stories have a main character which is almost by definition not the only character in the narrative.
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We're sure it's in a List, but the point is that the List is not uniformly enforced, and "motherboard->mainboard" definitely seems like one to go to bat against because it Doesn't Make Sense to get rid of it.
Does "motherboard" even make sense as a term? It's not like a motherboard gives birth to little baby boards that eventually grow up to be mother and father boards of their own. It's just one of those weird words we accept because it's been part of a shared vocabulary for so long. I don't particularly see any harm in assigning a gender role to a hardware device, but I don't see anything is particularly gained either.…
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Well they're not trying to raise up men, they're trying to destroy any notion of gender, see "gender is a social construct".
> they're trying to destroy any notion of gender That would be nice, but you have it backwards. In most cases the an attempt to make gender more central and essential, rather than less, by decoupling it from biology. Which is why in some parts of the country children are sometimes being told that if they like boy sterotyped activities like tree climbing or boy stereotyped attire that you are a boy, rather than saying…
For example, I don't think that anybody actually holds the sentence "The person doing the dishes is a woman, by definition" as true in their heads. That's simply not a thing people believe, anywhere along the political (or any other) spectrum.
If you actually talk to trans people, you'll find that most of them fall into the "nonconforming" bucket rather than some gender essentialist one. A lot of them are non-binary or otherwise have gender/sex identities that don't cleanly map onto maleness or femaleness. Given that state of affairs, it's a remarkable stretch to think that these people themselves would see neutral language as "hateful." And, in fact, they don't.
Who was asking for Woke Clippy? Is Google just bored and completely out of ideas? They seem increasingly disconnected with what their users actually want.
I think a grammar checker that warned about cross-cultural confusion would be pretty valuable in many writing contexts. It would best be constructed in that light: rather than moralizing or being activist just noting the fact that some text has a non-trivial odds of being understood in a way different than you likely intended. So for example, a writer of British English may want to be warned that "Bring me some fags…
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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?
There is at Amazon, it gets brought up as a code violation while we’re doing security and other kinds of reviews I’ve mostly cleansed myself of these words while I’m at work but I generally let the shit fly once Im out of the setting I just look at it like any other corporate politics, you have to play along to get anywhere Outside of work I’m my own person and use any word I want. Retard, cripple, bum, idiot, mother…
The mote in the employee's eye vs. the log in the company's eye