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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Looks like a confused Swedish dude that when questioned about his use of English pronouns defaults to not wanting to get political. Is there more besides a misguided decision to avoid relevant political topics?
I think we should chastise people that insist on not getting political, but not necessarily boycott everything they do. Or at least we should apply the same moral demands to Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft or Google when choosing which browsers to support. Which of them is the least bad?
There is nothing political about acknowledging peoples' existence.
Existence? Because somebody used a wrong pronoun?
Language is extremely powerful. This is all part of the erasure (an integral part btw).
Hmm I don't think you really understand what happened.
The developer wrote a comment (not visible to the end user) using the male form.
A random person opened a pull request without any useful changes, except for changing that comment from "he" to "their".
The developer rejected that PR because it's politically motivated and it doesn't add anything else.
Right, except that's not politically motivated, and is a useful change for people reading the code, both for women and non-binary people.
Calling pronouns "political" is the dogwhistle they always use
I know what happened. Is it a stupid, unnecessary fix? Sure, probably. But that doesn't mean it's political. Trans people simply existing is not a political issue.
You're right, words are meaningless and language has no bearing on society at large. after all, fuiebt eidiowb rhe efifo quifopim.
There's a big difference between negating the existence of people and what happend in this case, i.e. somebody writing a comment (only visible to him and other developers) using the male form.
Disclaimer: I'm not a software engineer or anything, and while I can usually figure out how to install something from git, that's as far as my understanding of the platform goes..
Was it an unnecessary edit? Sure, maybe. Hell, could have just been someone trying to get a reaction (mission accomplished). That does not mean that the edit was incorrect in any way (gramatically, syntax-wise, etc.) or political. It's just someone being annoying.
But it's only political, if you agree that trans people should not exist (or I guess just that you are woefully ignorant on the subject of gender).
The hyperbole here is insane. My trans friend’s Japanese parents are supportive of him, but they have some trouble with pronouns. If you’re not a native English speaker and learned the standard pronouns, then I think it’s just naturally too confusing. Pretty much all of them are translating in their minds in real-time.
Can you really not understand that we're talking about two completely different situations?
They refused to use the right pronoun. One is a mistake. The other is a choice.
They refused to accept a PR from a random person with just one single word change for a string that only the developer himself is seeing.
I think the developer has all the rights not to accept such a PR which adds nothing to the program. And I think people that really care about gender inclusivity should stop focusing on this useless nitpicks, which makes inclusivity appear like made up by a bunch of trolls.
It's pretty telling to focus on the dev's right to reject inclusivity while simultaneously rejecting and deriding everyone else's right to judge them for that.
And if it was such a useless change, why didn't the dev reject it for that instead of saying it was "political"? He's the one that declared the word itself, not the utility of the change, was the problem. Calling everyone else "trolls" for pointing that out is just disingenuous.
Don’t think we should be scared of the word “political” or “ideology”.
Yeah, that too... Everything is political if you want to really get into it. People just want to be able to ignore it until it directly affects them.
ugh transphobia rots people's brains
it's not too hard to just be a decent person ppl
I see zero reason to out the "transphobic" label on the dev.
Think and read before labelling people.
I can't see anything about this on DuckDuckGo. Do you have a link?
https://mkultra.monster/tech/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird
This was a little „write-up“ back when everything became more public.
I'm surprised this got any kind of attention.
Here's the turn of events from my perspective:
Here's my analysis:
"comments must be accurate," is not a rule you should bend. Bending it even a little leads to last programming and shit code.
True, but that only applies if it's misleading. For example:
Fixing that makes sense because it's wrong and misleading (it's actually Manhattan distance), and a quick glace is insufficient to tell the difference.
But fixing a typo or something that wouldn't be confusing is just noise and should only be fixed with other changes. For example, I intentionally misspelled Pythagorean in my comment above, fixing that to be the right spelling would be a useless change, even if the distance formula used the hypotenuse. It wouldn't be an unreasonable policy to reject PRs that only fix spelling or similar to reduce noise for the maintainers.
Yep, I understand but disagree. Maybe it comes from working with so many ESL coders, but I'll happily accept typo corrections because it's not always obvious what words should be if you're not steeped in the culture.
It really depends on the project.
If you're a larger project, you can see a ton of these from people hoping to land a commit to put "contributor to X" on a resume somewhere. Those add up and are really distracting and possibly automated. They waste everyone's time, especially if they spawn a bunch of conversion like this did.
If you're a smaller project, it doesn't matter as much. I work with ESL coders too, so I get it (1/4 of my office is ESL immigrants, and ~2/3 of the broader team is ESL). I fix comments all the time, I just include them with other changes.
So it depends. But in general, a high profile project should reject this noise to discourage this behavior.
In theory that's fair reasoning. Unfortunately the dev made it clear that his reasoning was based on politics
Did he? I only saw him point to the rule against politics.
He should have said it's because the PR isn't worth the time, but it also seems motivated by something that's against the rules (i.e. why make a PR that only fixes gender in one comment? There was a later PR that was accepted that fixed it in several places).
So without more evidence, I cannot say what the dev's motivations for rejecting the PR were, aside from the apparent rule breakage mentioned. They didn't say they disagreed with the change (i.e. that the change was wrong), just the proposal of the change (i.e. seems more motivated by virtue signaling instead of improving the dev experience). And you can look at the comments and see justification for that position, since it quickly devolved into actual politics with people accusing the dev of being a Nazi.
Maybe if you showed a pattern across more than just this incident (i.e. over months or years), but this sounds more like people being stubborn than tolerant.
I should be an idiot. I dont see a direct relationship between race and sexual orientation. Even if the PR was rejected because a pronounce how the hell this is white supremacist?
Well, didn't the Nazis also discriminate against gay people?
That said, it's a massive leap to go from "rejects 1 line PR that only changes gender in a comment" to literal Nazi...
"We don't accept ideologically motivated changes" = White supremacist language... Yeah, sounds about like what I expected...
Thank you for sharing.
Someone else posted a writeup about it.
It wasn't in documentation, but a code comment. No user would see this.
One part was a rejected change on the README, which was trying to remove this "white supremacist language":
Someone changing "he" to "they" (original PR that started all this) in a comment as their only change could absolutely be seen as "politically motivated." My understanding is that if changing the comment was part of some larger useful change, it would be fine (as would using "she" or "they" in a new comment), but just changing the gender of a pronoun in a comment is a useless change.
If the comment said "she," would someone have been motivated to make this change? Probably not. Should changing this from "she" to some other pronoun (he or they) also be rejected? Yes, on the same grounds as changing it from "he," it's not a useful change and just wastes everyone's time. If you're in the code already, then go ahead, correct silly language like this if you care to.
I never said they were.
Look at the fallout in the comments on those PRs, it quickly devolved into politics and quickly away from any technical merit.
If this exact same change were included with other changes, I highly doubt anyone would've cared about the comment. The issue isn't with the text of the comment, but with the likely motivation and the actual merits of the PR. Many projects immediately reject tiny PRs because they clog up the review queue, and that appears to be what's happening here, plus all the political nonsense in the issue comments.
They are political, because people (I'm not one of them) think they shouldn't be allowed and there are only two genders (e.g. the current president of the US).
“Don’t Be Evil” happily indexing while Bingcrosoft sleeps
Maybe disabling JavaScript helps?
DDG search is garbage, I'm sorry... Whenever I switch to a browser that defaults to it, I'm reminded why I always switch it back to Google (unfortunately). Even Yandex is better, and that's prob Russian spyware.
there's startpage which is a Google wrapper if you're interested
Actually just tried this for the first time yesterday after switching to librewolf. Have only used it once, but already seems better than DDG.
Try out SearXNG.
Totally excessive in view of the facts.
There are so few alternative browsers and the collapse of the privacy is so global. That seems to me a minor point in relation to the goal.
Under that POV stop using Volkswagen because Hitler invented it.
Wow. Calm down omg. This is not a witch hunting.
Do you have a source?