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 they seem to be used by similar amounts, fwiw.)
In fairness, I will say that I do watch my language more closely than I think is really needed:
The terms "whitelist" and "blacklist" are built into my thought-vocabulary. I do find myself switching to "allowlist" and "denylist" as I translate my thoughts in discussions. Not that anyone has ever "called me out" if I slipped up with "whitelist".
i mean there are some bad words you shouldn’t use, but i just can’t grasp why is there something like “motherboard” on that list?
could you please explain to me, a non-native english speaker, why using "mainboard" is better than "motherboard"?
It seems like people who object to motherboard don't understand analogy?
The problem is that you had a motherboard and daughter boards, those were the accepted terms, and never fatherboard or son boards, never parentboard or child boards. Why were they gendered female in the first place?
Because they had “female connections,” which is to say their use is in plugging pins into their sockets.
Obviously that is a sexual analogy that did not age particularly well, this idea that a motherboard is the motherboard because you shove stuff into it. So people started replacing with mainboard because it makes more sense...
well, for this context, it's called a "motherboard" because "mainboard" was already a thing. Motherboard was to distinguish at the time how this new board can be expanded upon by plugging in ports. There was no real malice here, it was just fancy marketing term that stuck.
Ultimately, we're humans and we try to anthropize all kinds of things in life to make them "feel relatable", be it animals, boats, hurricanes, or yes, computer. so that extends to our language as well. Especially in marketing where the goal is to make customers feel good and close the sale. There may be a conversation on WHY we do this, but starting that conversation on the foot of "well people just want to be sexist" won't get us anywhere.
I'm tired of this sort of shallow, performative, language policing. I'm (I believe) a socially progressive, inclusive person, but this shit makes me tired. Just fucking leave it alone and spend our collective fucks to give on something that actually matters.
Motherboard. It took me a few moments to guess as to why this is a "problem". Obviously due to the word mother. Let me roll my eyes.
Frankly it is completely absurd to be offended about a word that is part of a process that keeps our very species existing. Sadly I would not be surprised at all if there are google employees who are offended on behalf of "people being offended".
Basically I don't believe that "precaution" you mention is an apathetic but cautious person. These changes are more often motivated by someone who thinks "this might offend someone so I will take offense to it too".
People are wild. You can find small groups of people who do and think insane things. We as a society should not try to cater to every possible sensibility. That's a recipe for disaster.
> "Avoid referring to people in divisive ways. For example, instead of referring to people as native speakers or non-native speakers of English, consider whether your document needs to discuss this at all"
https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation#...
This doesn't seem too unlikely. I've been hoping tech would go this way -- We're doing IVF in June, and it's still hit-or-miss whether it'll work.
In that future, if someone identifies as nonbinary but still wishes to have a child, neither "mother" nor "father" would accurately describe them. And since a womb isn't required for a baby, there's not necessarily any "mother" (nor "father") in that scenario.
That said, I think the argument is "mainboard is better than motherboard for the same reason that denylist is better than blacklist -- the whole point is so that people don't have to be reminded of social issues whenever the word comes up in discussion."
If nothing else, maybe we should revisit the language as a whole and its obsession with overloaded homonyms.
/rant
Is there not still an egg supplier and a sperm supplier?
They do this with the knowledge that most people won't stand up against them out of fear, even though they don't agree with them - the sociopathic Google walkout organizers leveraged this to great effect when they collected signatures and then changed the text of what people had already signed to be a psychotic list of unreasonable demands, knowing that it'd be career suicide for any of us to complain publicly about it (there wasn't much public noise but a lot of us were really pissed about that privately). Surprise, surprise, the overlap between that group and the group later pushing for unionization was nearly 100%.
This idea that it is a recent invention isn't really supported by the reality on the ground. Things like the satanic panic, Dungeons & Dragons / Metal being satanic, Rock being evil, and a host of other things have long been used to remove "undesirable" people for a long time before 2014 on both the local and national level.
The extremes have always used shunning and economic warfare tactics to shut up those who disagree with them.
The DnD panic was about kids. It was about kids. I find it absurd to go after DnD like that but I don't recall ever reading about people being shunned, losing there jobs etc as happens these days.
People have, for many many centuries use various shunning tactics to enforce their will upon others.
Your claim is somehow going a little viral. You have a responsibility to try to correct it.
The fact that it’s in a list at all should make you reconsider your employment with them.
The inmates run the asylum at Google, just because they haven’t come for your corner/fiefdom yet doesn’t mean they won’t.
I'm going to be charitable and suggest this person is just accidentally leaving out context, rather than deliberately trying to rile people up because they disagree with something :)
The figurative part of "motherboard" is pretty vague: it's just larger than the "daughterboards" and in charge of them--it doesn't birth or nurture them or do anything that's stereotypically maternal.
As for whether it's the main board or not, surely that's a matter of opinion. An AI researcher would be much more interested in what the GPU board is doing than on what the motherboard is doing.
I've heard claims that it's a motherboard because it has female connectors (i.e., sockets), but that's sort hard to square with the contemporary coinage of "daughterboards."
The idea that a large, influential organization plays along with the idea that "motherboard" should in any way be filtered is as absurd as filtering the words "table" or "stereo".
But in typical HN fashion, i'm sure you know better. Just like the people who say that X or Y should take 2 people over a weekend. Remind me again what your experience is here to say they are wrong? Are you a culture expert of some sort? It's really not obvious from your HN profile or comment exactly why you think your expertise should overrule theirs.
Otherwise, i'd say it sure is fun to get upset and pretend it's the reactionary woke police, rather than a group of people carefully thinking something through.
I would be interested to see the rationale for the change, if it is so clearly benign and not part of any secret-sauce or competitive advantage - similar to the AP Stylebook.
This isn't a debate about cloud security, or strongly-typed languages, or the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and its impact on the Earth. It's a cultural discussion, and I believe citizens should be encouraged to form an opinion, rather than insulted and berated for having one.
You actually didn't defend your position in any way on the topic, you only berated me for not having faith in closed-door internal Google processes to alter the use of the English language.
From another comment: >you have precisely zero knowledge of either the decision making process, or how it is used, etc.
Isn't that the issue being brought up? Let's be charitable: Could it be that "mainboard" is the English term used by ESL speakers across the world, and "motherboard" is only used in the US/UK? Perhaps. I know you work at Google, but I am surprised at your surprise that people would be skeptical of that company's motivation.
I'd be interested in your opinion on the first-order topic, and also why you're so angry in the second place.
Even google translate mainboard to "carte mère" !!!
These departments have an expertise, sure. But part of being an intelligent, critically thinking person is knowing when people are speaking within the scope of their expertise and when they aren’t. You and I both know that this wouldn’t hold up under Daubert. This isn’t like telling you not to name your car the “Nova” in Spanish-speaking countries. It’s like trying to make “LatinX” happen.
I think your militant stance on the subject is more problematic than someone else's view that the word motherboard is not offensive.
Also, advocating for some narrow unknown group of people to have exclusive right to define language gives off a little cultish vibes.
See, this is the whole issue right here. It's not about a single culture. It's hundreds. This wordlist is for global products with literally billions of users in literally hundreds of countries.
Yes, it requires experts to know what will be inoffensive to all of them at once (or at least, the vast majority).
Your "narrow unknown group of people" is really "people who are experts at language and culture and understand this".
Paying and asking them to help figure out how to create common standards that will cover the majority of the hundreds of cultures at once does not seem cultish or militant at all to me?
It is something literally every single company with literally billions of global users in hundreds of cultures does.
Otherwise they end up naming their product something offensive to a culture, etc.
News stories about those gaffes occur literally all the time, so i'm sort of shocked you are really trying to argue that trying to avoid them is somehow cultish.
I am probably one of the least "politically correct" people you will find, and i'm not even all that progressive in the scheme of things, yet this clearly makes sense to me. So I look at this, and see HN having a huge overreaction because they are upset the world is becoming a lot more politically correct for no obvious benefit.
That bothers me too - a lot in fact. I just don't see the particular thing complained about in this part of the thread (a wordlist used to ensure google doesn't say offensive things in product documentation) all that objectionable.
The original article, about offensive/inclusive/etc AI writing nudges, bothers me about 1000x more than the wordlist.
I would urge you to actually seek facts first, rather than make them up yourself just because you are sure you are right. It's not a particularly helpful approach.
It's quite obviously not a carefully thought through decision, it's more or less random machine-gunning of random words that happen to have the word mother in them because ... well ... because they think motherhood is offensive? Presumably? It's impossible to discern any logic here. This supposedly expert decision is already leading to near universal derision towards Google, a once universally respected name. That derision is now also coming from left-wing media outlets that you'd expect to be fully supportive, like VICE. That's because it's quite obviously insane. Nobody is looking at this and thinking "about time", they're thinking "wtf is that?!".
For the former, it's none of the things you say, and AFAICT, you have precisely zero knowledge of either the decision making process, or how it is used, etc.
So saying "it's quite obviously x" seems trivially wrong.
No one in this chain said that, however. Some person gave an opinion and you then replied with "you don't have any knowledge on this". Even though in this case, it is indeed a cultural question which everyone has some knowledge and likely opinion on.
If you want to encourage others to seek more information out (if it's out there), then sure. But at some point it just sounds like you're appealing to an authority that doesn't exist here. And honestly, who IS the authority of a thing like language and its usage is a conversation in and of itself.
So this list is real, you own it, and you acknowledge that as a continued employee you are supporting this nonsense?
More importantly: when I was there, I actively fought against this kind of shit, but it was clear at some point that the content moderation team had enough sway with execs that they were going to continue this sort of idiocy untrammelled.
That said, consider that leaving just means one less opponent for the other side.
Meanwhile, Google is rotten at the executive layer. No amount of good people working for them will fix things.
Once you stop thinking of companies as single entities and instead as large kingdoms containing many fiefdoms it starts making more sense.
You can see it even in this thread, there exist Lists and tools that can be used as weapons against other groups, even if sometimes they're not currently being used because they're not currently at war.
At any rate, while I wouldn't go out of my way to squelch the word, I wouldn't go out of my way to insist on it, either. "Logic board" and "mainboard" both work and get the point across.
And to those who say this is not inclusive to the colorblind, I say traffic lights
But I think we can agree that the goal when choosing these names isn’t really being concise and easy to use
To discourage the term as an analogy for things that are a universal source is to demote women and their role as mothers.
I'd like to know who at Google puts these lists together and what judge decreed their viewpoint on this more valid than mine or anyone else's, since apparently Google feels that from this judgement they have the right to shape speech for millions of people and therefore, by extension, our culture.
It is more of a natural outcome of silly corporatists not really understanding why leftists and progressives object to things, and so just reflexively avoiding anything that could be, however tenuously, linked to gender. They are concern trolling themselves.
But also, on MLK and postmodernism: postmodernism dates back to the 1940s, To Kill a Mockingbird is postmodern. MLK's Letter From a Birmingham Jail is very clearly postmodern (e.g. when he says "But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being.", he's alluding to a failure to consider the viewpoint of the oppressed in the situation).
That letter is also very modern-leftist. Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in 1989 and elaborated on it in 1991, saying "When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when anti-racism does not incorporate oppposition to patriarchy race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other, and both interests lose". The letter from a Birmingham jail includes another famous line from MLK: " Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly". To me, those express similar sentiments: that oppression exists in many forms in many places, and it is unwise to pretend that oppression that fails to inconvenience me is therefore unworthy of my attention.
And of course he says later on "there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. " which to me describes the people often criticized as "modern far leftists", those people who create the tension and discomfort in society are, in MLK's view, doing us, collectively, a great service.
I'd recommend you read the whole letter[0]. If you're so willing to lionize MLK, but disagree with so much of what he preached, I implore you to consider why exactly that is.
[0]: https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-...
It seems you're engaging in a straw man fallacy saying that we don't need to do anything because we're all eventually accountable in front of God. Islam never said that. Several texts and accounts explicitly call out racism as a sin.
CRT is a fringe offshoot that swings the pendulum so far out, it goes back to being racist, ironically enough. It is not the beacon of equality that its supporters claim it is.
I agree, I never claimed Islam said that. I claim you said that, which misrepresents Islam!
> CRT is a fringe offshoot that swings the pendulum so far out, it goes back to being racist, ironically enough.
What about CRT does this? The core idea of CRT (as you use it) is, I think the recognition that inequality exists, that some people mistreat others and that we should recognize that when it happens. What about that is racist?
Where did I say that?
> What about that is racist?
CRT, and many other far leftist ideologies conform to what we say in Arabic: "A word (claim) of truth by which falsehood is intended"[1]. We see the same with movements like BLM (with self proclaimed Marxist founders), etc. They're crafted in such a way that if you argue against their actual behavior or criticize their actual behavior, they are able to retort with their canned response: ah so you're against justice/equality/are racist/etc.
These approaches are trite and people are waking up to them. We've known for millenia that inequality exists or the people are prone to mistreating others. CRT/latest fad of the day is not telling us anything new with that regard, but behind the scenes they're power grab movements.
[1] كلمة حق يراد بها باطل
> CRT/latest fad of the day is not telling us anything new
I disagree. The CRT (again, insofar as it is a cultural thing that people argue against) functionally says that people who have power should account for the mistreatment and inequality when making decisions. This is problematic to some people.
Apparently, this is what's being taught now: https://i.redd.it/vwuw7529iws81.jpg. Just an oversimplification, and dumbing down of any conversation. It's no wonder those people have built a reputation for being impulsive and not being able to take any criticism, retorting to crying and making fusses when they can't defend their positions.
This is incorrect.
> Everything is painted in terms of "white supremacy", and it's honestly getting tiring and trite
Ah, so it's getting tiring to see people discuss race and its impact? That's exactly the kind of reaction MLK was criticizing ;)
> Just an oversimplification, and dumbing down of any conversation.
Well yes, it's a children's book. Do you think it's a problem that discussions of the solar system or geology are oversimplified when explained to children? You're not even claiming it's wrong (perhaps because, fundamentally, it isn't).
That's how I understand their thinking, at least.
I agree with you and think anyone who is offended by motherboard is silly. I'm sure it was never even anyone that was actually offended, but a group of people sitting down and looking at any and every word that has any type of gender connotation and saying that's a bad thing.
Think of that what you will.
I wish there was more pushback against this insanity. I've also seen people want to erase the word "blindspot" from the dictionary... Even though I'm sure no blind person was ever offended by it, because that word typically is used to refer to the limits of people who aren't blind.
For what it's worth, in support of the original comment's claim, I just dug around the Pixelbook documentation all over the place and I can't find any mention of the motherboard. But it doesn't seem they renamed it to "mainboard" or "birthing person board." They just dropped it from the specification completely and don't tell you anything about what kind of motherboard you're getting.
The thing is, all nouns in French are gendered, and carte (board) happens to be female. So it can only be a mother, and not a father board. And the reason is that it carries smaller boards, like a mom would carry her babies (in most mammal species, as far as I know, the mom is carrying babies even after birth).
A disque (disk) is male. But a floppy disk translate to "disquette" (small disk) which is female : le disque, la disquette. Don't ask me why, but that's who the language works.
This would drive Silicon Valley wokes completely nuts. The table is female, the cloud is male (note that, in Italian, clouds are female). The TV is female, the glass is male, the door is female, the handle is female, the window is female, the roof is male, the wall is male.
[1965 Wireless World July 49/2 (advt.) Contact tail variations..include..tails for direct mounting to a ‘mother’ printed circuit board.] 1965 Electronics 6 Sept. 36/1 Nine daughterboards, each carrying 30 circuit packages, go on each side of a motherboard.
However, that's just an analogy: it doesn't actually tell you anything about what the motherboard does or why. In that sense, I think mainboard is actually a bit more descriptive: it's the principal interconnect between all of the device's parts.
Their role as breeders and birthing people, you mean. Time for a trip to HR for you.
> they have the right to shape speech for millions of people and therefore,
Google', "Do the right thing" could be understood as "if you have the power to do something, you have the obligation to do so". I'd say someone forgot that most evil in the world is done by people convinced that they're doing the right thing, but if that were forgotten the old motto wouldn't have been an impediment.
You could ask what idiot gave google this power, but the answer-- to the extent that they have it-- is each and every one of us. Fortunately, it lasts only as long as we keep giving it to them.
Anyhow, you might find it awkward, but the general assumption that "parent" is synonymous with "mother" to the exclusion of all other kinds of parents does real damage to inclusiveness, and the term "motherboard" flows from that.
I know your tongue is in cheek, but the mainboard may be considered a parent of the components, but it is not giving birth to them. "Parent" fits better than "mother". So your absurdist counter-argument doesn't really fit here.
We're programmers. We refactor mercilessly. Why shouldn't language be refactored mercilessly too? The term "mainboard" is available, widely understood, and well-adopted, so why not use that?
Because we don't want to keep handing out stupid prizes to the weenies that constantly force us to play these stupid games. Every time they win they're further emboldened, and that's not a good thing, since there are actual problems to solve.
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
Wouldn't it be equally problematic if they banned are male words and allowed all female words? If you're going for it, removing gender (from computer terminology) seems consistent. No one is saying to remove it from the world, but mainboard is just as if not more descriptive (to someone who isn't familiar with the word to start with), and things like allowlist/blocklist are much more self-descriptive than whitelist/blacklist.
I have zero problems with people dressing however they like, having whatever affectations they want and having sex with whoever is willing. I might not always find it tasteful, but that cuts both ways I'm sure so we can agree to be civil. The buck stops when you try to shame me for not calling a man a woman. Using pronouns should be a kindness like holding the door open for a disabled person, not something that sends emotional children into a socially supported temper tantrum when absent.
The "men with gender identity issues" referred to by parent have this up-side-down, instead thinking that "social transitioning" aka "living as a woman" is a step towards being a woman, this is not destroying notions of gender, this is elevating gender over sex
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 any activity or attire is available to anyone.
Rather than erasing gender it's power as a tool for enforced conformity is amplified by eliminating any requirement for agreement with a person's biological properties.
To exaggerate in order to make the point, it's as if we've gone from: "It's a womans' job to do the dishes" to "Anyone can do the dishes." to "The person doing the dishes is a woman, by definition."-- and the middle state's inclusiveness is increasingly seen as hateful because it denies people the ability to identify as a gender other than the one suggested by their biology through the performance of stereotyped behavior.
Erasure of "mothers" seems contrary to the trend at first blush, but it's made more clear when you see the suggested replacements like "birthing person" or "breeder"-- in this world view "mother" is a biological function, so it must be decoupled from gender so that the strongest possible gender sterotypes can be imposed on people regardless of their biological abilities.
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.
We'll promise them they can be a boy. They do all the things boys can: can play on the boys sports teams, use the boys lockers and bathrooms... And all the meanwhile we're banishing gendered extracurricular programs and making the bathrooms unisex.
We promise them we'll help them find their identity in gender, and destroy gender in the process.
About the cultural aspect of gender: this video opened my eyes about what most people think it means to do things 'like a girl', and what it actually is supposed to mean.
The same can't be said for people who are blind or deaf.
Several impressive videos on social media have shown that programming without using vision or even hands is perfectly possible, there are very few good reasons why such underrepresentation shouldn't be corrected for. In fact, I believe for many disabilities a job in fields like data science or programming would be much easier to adjust for disabilities than many other sectors where interactivity is key.
Do you have any data on that? It does not coincide with my anecdotal experience. I'm in a Math/CompSci department and there's zero trans people here (that I know of), while there are some in other departments. Anyhow, trans people are a tiny percentage of the total population, so it would be hard to have somewhat solid statistics on them.
There was a smattering in other afaik. I was on the board of the LGBT club so I knew at least the ones who were out / came frequently.
I'd bet the theater kids gave CS a run for its money. Or the art kids. Just fewer gay men and lesbians in CS.
It boils down to a few things:
1.) A lot of this identity politics is coming from upper-middle class people of color OR white queer people, who are using it to make money and boost their careers. The disabled are, in America at least, far less likely to have careers to boost. This is why the type of disability activism you see in identity politics is usually limited to mental illnesses.
2.) The disabled, to some degree, disprove some of the ideological underpinnings of modern identity politics. Modern identity politics is based on the idea that if we change society/fix discrimination, then everybody (all groups) will have the same rates of success. But even if social discrimination didn't exist, those of us who are disabled literally can't do things able-bodied people can do. There's an undercurrent of 'discrimination is bad BECAUSE all these groups can be normal/productive/participate in capitalism' and the disabled make people confront that they don't actually believe all people are equal. They believe all PRODUCTIVE people are equal, but they can't say that, because then they sound like those 'horrible' right wingers.
3.) Fighting on behalf of the disabled doesn't make people feel like they're 'on the right side of history'. I've experienced a shit ton of sexism and homophobia from right-wingers, but most conservatives would be horrified at insulting me for having MS and agree that I should get help if I need it. They just disagree on how it should be done. That's harder to fight about, which means it's harder for the media to turn into a frenzy, and that's where people on both sides get their 'marching orders'.
You are using the term "mental illness" in a way that seems to exclude people for whom it is obviously a disability. These people are characterized by:
1. One or more hospitalizations that are not voluntary.
2. Diagnosis by medical professionals, not psychologists or oneself.
3. Having to take medications forever, at least in order to be employable or generally take care of themselves, that cause substantial long term effects including diabetes, brain damage, disfiguring tics and involuntary movements, recurring tumors, sudden death, and other problems.
The people you are thinking of, who act like it is possible to normalize and be open about mental illness, are, let's say "type A", while I have defined above what I'll call "type B".
I just want to call your attention to the fact that "type B" people are erased as much or more by "type A" as the visibly disabled that you acknowledge. You are inadvertently promoting that erasure.
"Type B" people bridge both worlds but can't talk about it normally. I do recognize the emotions regarding "type A". I recognize why they do what they do, and I see you embracing their compulsive erasure from existence of "type B".
The issue of productivity is difficult, if you think there is a right answer. If someone can work, at incredible cost, should they not take pride? Yeah, it's luck that I, or anyone, can work, but you wouldn't sneer at someone with an intellectual disability that was bagging groceries, would you?
Mental disabilities are frequently easier to hide (much like being bi is easier to hide than being homosexual), which means that people with mental illnesses/disabilities are more likely to know how people treat them before and after finding out they're disabled (as opposed to someone whose disability is physical or intellectual who are more likely to always be seen as disabled and not see that on-off switch to ableism). People with mental illnesses are also more likely to have difficulties stemming from stigma and erasure vs. physical limits (I'm not saying any difficulties are worse than the others; they're just different) and intersectionality/identity politics has a lot of focus on correcting or changing behavior and thoughts to improve society.
Intersectionality/identity politics, in 2022, don't really do a great job at changing physical reality, which tends to be more necessary for physical and intellectual disability activism.
There are also historical reasons for the intertwining of mental illness advocacy and intersectionality (the rise of intersectionality/id politics in the upper-middle class coinciding with the rise of psychiatry/therapy/ the move to destigmatize mental illness, for example, whereas the sensory and physically disabled communities had their own activist movements/organizations for decades/centuries beforehand which made them more likely to have disagreements).
> Yeah, it's luck that I, or anyone, can work, but you wouldn't sneer at someone with an intellectual disability that was bagging groceries, would you?
Of course not, but I'm not a capitalist (or a communist, for that matter). The point is more that a lot of people into intersectional activism claim to also be anti-capitalist, but their embrace of diversity often depends on diverse people being able to work and if they advocated for the disabled, they'd have to confront that they can't use 'disabled people can do anything able bodied people can do' as a reason, which means they'd have to articulate some reason diversity matters other than to let marginalized people/ their pet companies make $$$.
I just think if said grocery bagger had to stop bagging groceries that they don't lose value as a human. Of course everyone should be proud of what they can contribute to society and their communities.
I understand where you're coming from, but the implication that someone with a mental disability has control over how they're perceived, or even accurate knowledge is wrong.
If they share information, there's no going back, and it can have devastating consequences.
If they don't intentionally share information, it may leak out anyway. Everybody knows what "crazy eyes" are, and gets uncomfortable if someone rambles on too much or shows excessive emotion.
If I look normal, but I have difficulty walking, and sometimes limp a bit, nobody is going to kick my leg when they notice, to prove that I'm not dangerous and they're not ill but I am. And if I share that I have a club foot, or that my lungs are damaged so I don't get enough oxygen, it's not likely to destroy relationships or seem relevant to share with everyone.
On the other hand, the slightest hint that someone might be mentally unstable leads to immediate concern - is this person a threat? Everybody knows this, and every crazy person feels exactly the same way around someone else that might be crazy. They feel it from both sides, but you have felt it from at least one.
So the way you prove someone isn't a threat is by testing whether they are vulnerable, and if they react incorrectly to that test. You prod them, you try some BS to see if they get upset or respond "normally". It's like being out on a tree limb and hearing a crack. You hold on to something and wiggle it a little to see if it's about to break. Everybody knows this from life experience.
I guess what I'm saying is that the uncertainty and ambiguity around mental illness is its own horror show of catch-22s, not a kind of privilege.
Someone with serious mental illness has to be tranquilized more than just enough to function normally, but enough to suppress normal reactions to provocation.
And once that is accomplished, they cannot share information about their condition indiscriminately because they are totally vulnerable. They can't casually ramble on about their thought process, because it will sound paranoid, no matter how controlled their actions are. Even to other mentally ill people because everybody thinks the same way, because it's logical but awful.
The choices that someone with an invisible condition other than mental illness, have, do not exist for someone with it. Every case where it is suspected, entails the threat of being outside the basic social contract.
>I just think if said grocery bagger had to stop bagging groceries that they don't lose value as a human
Sure, what I meant is that if their job is an immense source of pride and purpose in life, then aren't they in effect promoting the work-based ethic that bothers you? How can you have values without devaluing people who have different values?
https://www.eurogamer.net/twitch-removes-blind-playthrough-t...
Maybe the pendulum will stop or swing back, but "that's not going to catch on" has been wrong for nearly two decades.
Or repeating the cult dogma in a cult.
This isn’t about rationality or what is ridiculous. It is about proving that you are part of a group. And to prove that people have done insane things for thousands of years. Much worse than calling a mother a birthing parent tbh, but it shows you what direction we are headed.
And interestingly this seems to apply to corporations too. They too (probably because of management), want to demonstrate they are part of a group/cult.
George Carlin's skit couldn't be more timely: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isMm2vF4uFs
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 that are allowed.
Similarly, mainboard is clearer than motherboard. 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? Do boards somehow inherit from one another? Is there a grandmother board that's even bigger? Obvious to us, but not obvious to a kid learning computers for the first time.
Not saying these terms are better (there's a huge switching cost and the terms are less colorful), but do want to point out there are dimensions to consider beyond inclusivity. One benefit is better language precision.
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.
Edit: isn't the videocard technically a "non-main-board"? I mean nobody called it a "daughterboard" but it kind of technically is one isn't it? And so if "mainboard" implies the existence of "non-main-boards"... that accurately describes its relationship with the video card, which is a baord.
However, terms like motherboard and whitelisting are just a few in the universe of complicated (yet gender neutral) terms like GPU, CPU, DDR, parity, firewall, IP6, etc.
Of course, that is not a reason to not improve the language where one can, but I don't know if it will help that much in CS.
A short-film/parody on how an extreme obsession with inclusive speech makes it impossible to communicate clearly without consequences.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/450328-don-t-you-see-that-t...
Source: I also work at Google.
This is the public one: https://developers.google.com/style/word-list
I don't want to share the name of the internal one publicly, but anyone at Google can ping me if they want help finding it, or they can search "respectful words"
This is meaningless. I work at a large organization that has banned terms like "master/slave" and "whitelist/blacklist", and I can also readily find these terms through internal search, simply because it's taking a while for the requirements to be implemented and enforced.
> I could not find anything referencing a banned non-inclusive words policy in the employee policy guide.
This also doesn't mean a lot, unless you've comprehensively searched through every possible location for the relevant policy, as almost every organization in existence has terrible knowledge management.
Go talk directly to someone in HR and tell me if they tell you that those words aren't restricted.
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, motherboard, man, master, slave, fuck, shit, piss!
See! Fire me Amazon I fucking dare you! :)
The mote in the employee's eye vs. the log in the company's eye
I did get an angry code review response from a fellow engineer once, after writing in a commit description (not the actual code) something like "this is a stupid fix but it stops the linter from bitching about so and so" - for using both the words "stupid" and "bitch". I guess the second one was on point but referring to my own work as "stupid" is pretty okay in my book. I would never ever describe anyone else's work as such.
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).
Odd thing to do. "Black" is synonymous with darkness, hidden, off, empty space, and things of that nature. For this reason "blacklist" works. There is no clash with people, or any disrespect.
Politically correct OCD invents problems. Then dictate to others how they should solve those problems. Add penalties for those who don't follow the prescribed solutions to invented problems, and we find ourselves in 2022 looking at Google's efforts to solve the invented problems.
The author of the Vice article states that by removing master/slave and black/whitelist, it "addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology".
Accusations of bias are just accusations. We can't "find" bias on the grounds of matching words in technical contexts to the same words in other contexts.
In the S&M world, the context is not actual master and slave, it's a new context that encompasses consent and good times. Likewise, the technical context is not one that involves people, but machines communicating under specific rules which "master/slave" adequately describes.
Chinese have far bigger and far more strict word list bans.
In US, you need to say “people who menstruate” and “land owning person”; in China you will just just disappear if you say a wrong thing against the regime.
but the argument “I wish I was in China and I didn’t have to be careful what I say in public!” is so laughable if you have actually been in China or interacted with mainland Chinese
People hours
/s
It's like, yes, we know some over paid highly educated technologists are biased against but that doesn't equal the end of liberalism and democracy itself. His words are not at all going to sway any of the HN readers who may agree with him on cultural issues about the west, that Russia are the good guys!
Perhaps his words are meant to developing nations who are uniformly culturally conservative?
Even if there was some natural physical law that guaranteed that oppressive nations would eventually be overthrown/atrophy, there's definitely nothing that puts a bound on how long that will take.
And, as we've seen with Ukraine, war can break out more quickly than any of us think.
(also, if the social justice warriors in the West have their way, the US government itself would be overthrown and replaced with its own, authoritarian, but ineffective regime, long before a conflict with China would occur)
The summer of 2020 was a great preview of what this dictatorship will look like once the USD collapses in value another 30-40%. Burning buildings and more statues of "heroes" like George Floyd, who stood up to White Supremacy. Remember, removing "master" from git repos was done because of the legacy of slavery in the United States.
Not something I feel super strongly about, but the fact that it's so scary to go against these stupid ideas is annoying. It's pure politics, there's nobody benefiting from this except the people claiming impact for antiracist work in their perf.
`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.
The communication cost of the change is not free. Do you think the internal wiki and new-hire git training materials all updated themselves?
It wasn't a large process change. Most of our git users are competent git users. But I billed hours dealing with it.
I still have people here who haven't touched a repository that uses "main" instead of "master". They have better things to do with their lives than lurk social media focused on programming. They don't know yet. Eventually they'll pull something with "main" instead of "master". Can I get your phone number so you can be the one to explain to them?
But there is a cost. You're losing a battle in the war of free speech vs Orwellian thought control.
The woke (an offshoot of last-wave feminism, currently promoted mainly by the control-left strain of the Democratic party) are lying; they're not actually offended, they're just using that as an excuse (propaganda) and as an emotional appeal, to get you to agree to their arguments, and cede power to them. This is most obvious with "Latinx" which is pushed by white journalists & activists but which isn't even supported by the overwhelming majority of Latinos and Latinas in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
Don't believe me? Listen to what they (the woke) say themselves!
> I wanted to start by focusing on the obvious one, Its harder for them to object to just one to start with, then once they admit the logic, we can expand the list
That phrase is going to die soon and it never picked up in Latin America. Most likely the queer community in Latin America will come up with more effective slang. It took the US queer community decades, a century? To reclaim and come up with effective phrases -- I think the main issue here is lack of patience and a somewhat condescending attitude from American liberals that we, the actual hispanic diaspora, need our hands held.
There is also what I've argued is a hierarchy of needs issue at play with LatinX. The problems facing the queer community in Latin America are more severe than those facing the US community, because it is a younger community in a more conservative atmosphere. Therefore, the effort is better spent advocating for table stakes, like marriage equality in some countries and reduced violence towards queer people -- there is no time to be wasted, right now, on the exact, precise terminology to use. And LatinX is not a way to win hearts and minds in this process.
Edit: this is NOT support for Google's product, which clearly broken and not useful. This is an explanation of why LatinX specifically is not a good counter-example to `main` versus `master`. I hope this pre-empts someone coming in and calling me all 'woke' or whatever is the cool phrase for dismissing people these days.
The fact the term is dying further reinforces my point: it failed. No power gained. Does optionally calling master 'main' give people power? Do you really believe that? As far as I can tell, the 'wokes' you are so afraid of seem to be failing pretty often recently. If I believed in the existence of the 'woke' monster under my bed, and they had this track record, I would simply ignore them.
Did 'wokeism' stop Disney from losing its special tax status in Florida? No.
Did 'wokeism' stop Texas from passing laws restricting transgender students and their families? No.
Did 'wokeism' stop the abortion bounty laws from passing in Texas? No.
Has 'wokeism' prevented the recent book bannings across the US; for example, the recent banning of math books in Florida? No.
Was 'wokeism', the root of this Orwellian system you propose will engulf us, the reason why state government in Florida censored the phrase 'climate change' in state congress? I would be very surprised.
Who exactly is gaining or losing power here? And why are you so adamant that the culture war will somehow involve GitHub?
I simply cannot wrap my head around it all.
"Why does my git say main and not master? Did I break it?"
"Why cant I push to master like the 100x tutorials show? I get errors!"
Don't tell me you're still using bare pointers, `new` and `delete` in your C++ classes instead of using smart_ptr fields, or explicitly declaring local variable types instead of using `auto`...
In reality each change that requires updates to documentation (or code) is of course not actually zero cost.
Adapt or die is the motto out here.
This is pretty much the view of the left now :p
Also if your tutorials are using a base repository to work from, then you can still have the branch "master" it's just not default. So your existing repos should still work. And if you changed your repo then you should be responsible for updating your documentation to reflect that. It's just good practice.
I struggle to come up with any two terms that make this more clear than "master" and "slave". Just because we've abolished chattel slavery, doesn't mean we should avoid the very words themselves when they are appropriate. Destruction of meaning is far worse than some abstract offense that doesn't seem reasonable to take on behalf of a computer process.
But a master copy or version of something like a master recording or gold master for pressing records is different from merely "main".
Applied to software they are similar but not identical concepts, and neither is in any way wrong or harmful to anyone.
It's a small enough issue that it's not worth fighting very hard over, but, the rationale for the change, and especially for anyone trying to tell anyone else they have to do that change, is still invalid and the word master actually applies better if that's how you're using that branch. It has nothing to do with slave bosses.
See how this works? It is also definitely not without cost. It is not free to change all of your documentation and you will inevitably have to be exposed to it anyway because not everyone will have changed it, so it's ultimately not doing anything anyway.
All of these are true! I agree, "main" is a better name.
However, as to the larger point, the individuals and groups advocating for these changes also don't advocate for similar changes (that is, things that have good benefits but come with a very high cost to implement due to breaking backwards compatibility) around technologies/terms that they don't consider to be "problematic".
That strongly suggests that the driver isn't to improve technology, it's to shape language, with occasional incidental technological benefits - and the ignored technological regressions (it's harder to say "allowlist" than "whitelist", for instance, or to write applications that have a field to place in the user's preferred pronouns than just not address the user using pronouns at all).
I actually know a social-justice oriented trans woman online who strongly advocates for the use of Tau instead of Pi because it is simpler and easier to learn. So sample of 1 there.
Tau vs Pi is a perfect microcosm of this debate with the social justice arguments removed. See also metric vs imperial.
The benefits are small but non-zero and localized to a handful of people, the new terminology is substantially simpler and cleaner, and the costs are primarily related to inertia and the comfort of people experienced with The Old Way.
> costs nothing to remove something someone might offensive
It might break scripts, aliases, and any general automation (CI, etc) with a baked in main branch assumption
Since you suggest it “costs nothing to remove something someone might find offensive”, I propose it be changed to something else instead of main.
\s
Here you go…
Retarded differential equations (RDEs) are differential equations having retarded arguments.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037704270...
And for those who would like to change this, any change to a pilot's routine has a chance of being the thing that pushes an incident over the edge into a crash. Would it be worth it?
I'm not saying this is a large set of people. But it looks like some of them have power at github.
I guess if you're doing software for the airline industry you cannot use github.
Well, honestly I wouldn't use github for anything if money depended on it, because of their record of "firing" customers who don't toe the line on their exact politics.
[1] I'm quoting training material that even passed HR review in corporate education DEI here. It's not hyperbole.
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!)
Are we going to remove "duplicate" because we can somehow imagine that genetically identical twins are offended by this?
Are we going to remove "admittance" (inverse of impedance) because people will be uncomfortable when reminded that they weren't admitted to their first choice institution?
These are all equally ridiculous to the master/slave debacle.
As far as "uncomfortable connotations", would you agree that that's a subjective claim?
I don't like that forced slavery is a thing, but I'm capable of handling context-specific word meanings, and of not getting emotional due to alternative meanings.
Your use of the word is violence.
/s?
It's frantic activity to avoid looking in the mirror. Making themselves busy fixing something massive and intractable to avoid having to think about the actionable items closer to home.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31086310&p=3#31087238
Is this really true? I always thought I might eventually apply to work at Google someday, but I hadn't heard there was such aggressive internal thought policing.
https://developers.google.com/style/word-list
You're supposed to use "plug" and "socket" instead.
One old convention, mostly originating with radio-frequency connectors, is that the gender of the connector is the gender of its innermost contact. Thus, the plug of the common 2.5" and 2.1" connector of power supplies is technically female because the inner contact is a hole. The socket on the appliance has a pin in the middle and is technically male. When you try to buy one, half the time the part is labelled as male and the other half it is labelled as female.
But there is no problem bad enough that cannot be made worse by government. Years ago some US regulator didn't like the fact that people were plugging big radio antennas into wifi equipment, so they invented the "reverse-polarity" connector. What used to be a "SMA male" connector with a pin in the middle now is a "RP SMA male" connector with a hole in the middle. Here is a random link with a picture: http://cablesondemandblog.com/wordpress1/2014/05/05/reverse_... If you order this kind of connectors, now you have a 25% chance of getting what you need. One RP SMA male and a SMA female will mate together but not propagate any signals.
> hang, hung
> Don't use to refer to a computer or system that is not responding [..] see Avoid unnecessarily violent language.
plug socket
male exists exists
female exists exists
hermaphroditic exists exists
changeable exists existsHere's a female plug https://www.homedepot.com/p/Leviton-15-Amp-125-Volt-3-Wire-C...
Here's a male socket https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/10A-250V-AC-Male-Powe...
https://mashable.com/article/google-youtube-women-in-tech-di...
eww. This has the same vibes as someone saying "I want to breed with them". Like sure, it's grammatically correct, but you're gonna come off as a creep at best and some weird fetishist at worst.
Should it have been renamed to birthing-person-board? What a joke
In this context, what does it mean? For the other stuff, it is easily envisioned that it means official documents need to be scanned for prohibited terms. Ultimately, the term "motherboard" has to at least appear in an official document of banned words. In private chats, do they rely on the other party to turn you in? Is it automatically detected? Are you prevented from actually typing it? Can you post this link [1]?
To push the Clippy thing further, Bill Gates once gave us "content is king". Google's Woke Clippy needs to learn that "context is king" - but it can't ever do that with language; well, not without a general AI.
I try to be somewhat reasonable. I can stretch my mind enough to see the complaint with blacklist at least. But mother being offensive...my mind isn't able to stretch that far unless I'm missing something.
If it's really the case that the vast majority of employees are feeling stifled by the company policy, isn't that a situation where forming a trade union could help?
The irony of workers rising up against oppressive supposedly left-wing rule is not lost on me, especially if it were to occur in Google's office in Poland.
If I'm writing about a ship and refer to it as a "she", does that set off the autoinquisitor?
I'm waiting until they start marking "Latino" as non-inclusive, and start forcing "Latinx".
The "-inx" suffix (when pronounced "inks") somehow makes the word sound more objectifying, sexist and even lewd than the original words.
To be fair, I've literally never heard anyone try to pronounce "latinx" outloud. And I live in one of the most stereotypical liberal/left-wing cities in the US (Seattle). The usage of that term seems to be mostly confined to a vocal twitter/internet minority and written form (whether online or in promotional materials for certain things).
Even here, this term is extremely fringe irl. And I don't think I've ever felt pressured to use it either, given I've never heard it in use (despite my friend group having a couple of people who are very left-leaning and are vocal about it).
I guess tl;dr, don't mistake a fringe vocal minority on the internet for an accurate representation of what it is like to actually live in the US (even when it comes to certain most heavily stereotyped big cities).
I guess you quit listening to NPR before they started using that one. It's ubiquitous now.
What was it that made you quit?
> Don't mistake fringe vocal minorities on the internet for an accurate representation of what it is like to actually live in the US.
They I agree, though this particular example is not just internet fringe.
With that in mind, i guess i mostly meant "people you actually talk to or hear talking not in public news media" when i said that i dont ever hear it said outloud.
I am not disagreeing with you, and sure, your future prediction is not out of the realm of possibilities. I am just saying that I am yet to see it happen as of today. And I don't really care to be outraged about something that isn't a thing yet.
It isn't global warming or some other thing that is difficult to reverse or has some life/death stakes. Language has been perpetually changing, and still is. Really fast, and really wildly. So making a trouble out of "this one word might become used in future in real life at some point, so you should worry about it now" is not something I am really into wasting energy on.
Same as "master branch"/"main branch". If there is an equivalent, less fancy and less controversial technical term, by all means let's use that instead. As long as you don't start with "childbearing person board" or "privileged branch" or whatever.
Don't you mean "Thanx"?
No more "motherboard" and "daughterboard?" Sounds like Google has found yet another way to marginalize women.
Pay 'em less. Then pretend they don't exist.
Way to go, Diversity Champions!
> A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes.
Edit: Also interesting that this comment is dropping like a stone in HN's comment ranking, even though currently the comment score is at 1. If I accidentally triggered some anti-flame or anti-profanity filter, I'm sorry.
The feature only seems to trigger when it has a suggestion. I can't imagine what suggestion would be suitable to replace the n word.
Comment order is a function of both score and age. As far as anybody (except those who actually have access to the source), there's no other "hidden" mechanic.
For that role, there's no need to include the n-word, because nobody is going to accidentally put that in a press release.
(Of course, the lists were apparently compiled by total dorks who put in things like "terminate", "dummy variable", and "native". But the list being dumb is a separate issue from it from what you raise).
It would be interesting to call landlord as landperson.
This isn't remotely limited to Google. My company does this too. I've heard of others making similar changes.
Are these kinds of arbitrary changes to language usage silly and pointless? Maybe. But tough love here: languages change in arbitrary and pointless ways constantly. They always have. They always will. Your own common usages and idioms would seem outrageously weird to your grandparents. People had these same fights in the 60's, also 80's, and 50's... The 40's too now that I think of it...
To wit: we aren't getting oppressed here, we're just getting old. And the attempt to turn it into a political fight (on both sides) is largely just a reaction to the friction. It's not the cause.
I mean, really. Is "mainboard" such a hardship? It's not even a new word, it's two bytes and one syllable shorter. Must this be a fight?
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 change the English language to exclude the words "landlord", "motherboard", and even "mother" in most contexts (sub with birthing person).
This may seem unbelievable, but the word "motherboard" is literally banned within Google and you are required to use "mainboard" instead. You are not allowed to use this word in documentation or code, and you're also not allowed to say it privately in chats or emails.