751–760 of 1001 posts
We put some of our job postings through one of these, and it flagged too many 'masculine' words, like 'analyze', 'leadership', and 'data'. Sorry women, time get back in the kitchen and nurture.
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 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…
> Emily Lipstein typed “Motherboard” (as in, the name of this website) into a document and Google popped up to tell her she was being insensitive: “Inclusive warning. Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different words.” It’s amazing how a Fortune 500 company can release a product that chastises you for using the word “motherboard” because it has “mother” in it, while other people…
> “mainstream” on the left What connection is there between left/progressive thought and this particular brand of corporate speak?
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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"?
I wonder if this is an example of not knowing your audience (or rather assuming one's self represents a wider audience than it does). The people vouching for this at Google are likely product marketing managers, public relations folks, social media managers, etc. All they do is write corporate garbage all day, and much like we have "nit"s in PR's for formatting, variable names, etc; they likely have similar reviews t…
Actually I've seen an English linter to help you maintain a passive voice for papers, remove waffle words and unnecessary fluff, etc. I'm not sure I can find the exact one I'm thinking of, but wasn't too bad overall, it spotted errors and made helpful suggestions. It was cool too, because it would read from stdin and integrated into vim pretty well with a few lines in my config.
surely not? even a newspaper should be striving for an active voice, at least anytime the actor is known!
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Why would you want to maintain a passive voice? That's terrible writing unless you are defendant in litigation.
This is wrong. It's a good rule of thumb because passive voice can be a common indicator of weak writing, but it has plenty of good uses in strong writing. The best case to apply it is when the object of a sentence was previously a subject or other focus of prior sentences, and so is more familiar to the reader than the subject of the new sentence. For example: "The United States had maintained neutrality until 1941.…
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Why would you want to maintain a passive voice? That's terrible writing unless you are defendant in litigation.
It's extremely important in a lot of policy positions to be able to use things like "a decision was made".
There's a few different things to unpack with this feature. (1) It would be useful in the context of a general style guide, like a white-label Grammarly. Corporations could set their own prompts for words, phrases, and structures. This would make documentation more consistent. (2) This is dystopian as fuck. Google has the ability to see, aggregate, and now influence what you write in Google docs and Gmail. Who is mak…
> Google has the ability to see, aggregate, and now influence what you write in Google docs and Gmail. Interestingly Microsoft has that power with the Office suite for nearly 40 years now (only a decade if we want to focus on the cloud connected area), do you see specific dystopian influences on society stemming from that ?
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Hear hear. Latinx, Filipinx - how dare the whites invent terminology to refer to disadvantaged minorities, using incorrect grammatical constructions or letters not even in the language of the people you refer to. This is white cultural imperialism, full stop. Right or left, I don't care where it comes from - I know it when I smell it.
This has nothing to do with “white” and everything to do with regressive left. Here is Kamala Harris, an Indian-Black American, pushing “Latinx”: https://mobile.twitter.com/kamalaharris/status/1290733001320...