The last paragraph was just facetious, to make the point that correcting potentially-discriminating terms can be overdone.

And the previous, also a bit tongue in cheek, but since I’m contending that it’s petty to fight over the Ladybird dev’s use of ‘he’ as default pronoun, I was essentially supporting other options as a sort of faux balance. If ‘he’ were truly inappropriate here, balancing it with ‘she’ in another project wouldn’t make it okay again. But if it’s just not that big of a deal, except for a dominant bias, then adding diversity elsewhere perhaps settles things a bit, and allows those who feel marginalized to asset themselves.

Neither is a solid answer! If you don’t agree with me that the bickering over that source code is overblown, fair enough, you can disagree. But I think my point stands.

By calling reverse discrimination a far-right trope, I presume you mean complaints about reverse discrimination? Or an argument that reverse discrimination solves the problem? (Though I thought that latter was more argued by the Left, under the term ‘positive discrimination’.)

Either way I don’t think that’s what I meant.

I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.

Appeal to tradition bias?

Yes. Turns out languages work by saying things the same way somebody else said them before.

My point isn’t that there can’t be a reason to change. My point is calling ‘he’ out as implying misogyny on the part of the author is ridiculous, and fussing over changing it is, in this situation, in my opinion, petty.

So is singular ‘they’.

Indeed. Some English contexts are used to defaulting to ‘he’ for ungendered animate; some to ‘they’. Neither necessitates an egregious humanitarian wrong.

The rest of your post is just a slippery slope argument.

I did get facetious toward the end. If you like, you don’t have to build your life philosophy on the foundation of the logical integrity of my closing paragraph. Up to you.

It does seem to me that complaining about gendered language in source code is about as stupid as a moral panic over daemons in systemd, or vulgarities in source code comments. There is some place for it… but not much

On top of that, ‘he’/etc has been effectively gender ambivalent for a long time. I understand the desire to change that, but it’s still a normal thing in English language. Similar to ‘master’ in git repositories and IDE connections, though those are both much more recent and arguably referencing much worse.

If a dev insists on ‘she’ everywhere, or ‘they’ in places that read awkwardly, should we flame and blame? In fact, why not go and convince Firefox to use exclusively feminine language in their source, to balance things out. It sounds more sensible than taking up a political fight over this!

Also while you’re at it, ethical hacking is now done only by natural-human-skin-colour-hat hackers; background process on your computer are called abstract beings; your computer does not boot[strap], (‘pull itself up by its bootstraps’), it has affirmative action from the motherboard to get it started; and when I saw the article headline, I thought the issue would be bigger … that’s what they said.

Because they will definitely put in the work to make sure outputs are all sane and good, and not be pressured to click as many as they can quickly to fill quotas.

Not to mention problems from subtlety of language not crossing language barriers well.

By stabbing

Maybe if you turned the water temperature up.

Just don’t touch them. AFAIK They’re one of few species in America that can give you leprosy.

(Though if, by chance, you do catch leprosy, it is in fact very easily treatable. It’s the already-done damage from banging toes and touching fire and things, if you catch it late, that’s harder to repair.)

People take pictures of those, too, I think.

common animals

Royalty

“And here on your left you will see a prime example of the common European prince. No longer afforded a natural habitat, the nation of Britain has built special reserves for these princelings and other royalty, called palaces. On certain days you can observe royals being transported in specially equipped vehicles from one palace to another to encourage mating.”

There’s a certain kinship.

At this stage kernel 2.6 is ancient culture.

I nearly ditched nextcloud fully for this, but haven’t found anything that matches the convenience of nextcloud for family members iPhone

Also filebrowser doesn’t yet let you share folders that people can upload to, nor have good photo viewing in a shared folder (without login)

Mobius Sync is an iOS app for it. Free version has max directory size 25mb(?) but dev seems to have good attitudes; it’s something I wouldn’t mind paying for.

a) having apt packages link a script that downloads the snap. That’s the first problem I had, back when I used Ubuntu as as snaps were rolling out. It gave me big trouble updating on bad internet connection.

b) making the server fixed and proprietary, restricting the freedom to do things differently and offer different changes to other users, that we’re used to in the Linux and FOSS world

I feel for you, though that’s where the true test of compassion is.

Perhaps an unpopular take, but my suggestion would be to think if you can come from the perspective of love: do you love these people, and care about them, though they’ve believed lies? Can you converse with them with respect, listening to why they feel how they do, and be patient to bring truth only to help them, not to self-righteously vindicate yourself?

Then again, this is the internet, so if you jump in, post inflammatory memes, pat yourself on the back for being so clever, and jump out again, and show us the results; perhaps I’ll giggle along with the rest of us.

For a different take, you might like to note that part of the effectiveness of propaganda is not a good rational explanation but repeated asserted lies. Jumping into a different set of assertions can help pop you out of ones you’ve wrongly believed from your own background - but it can also wear you down to believe, or half believe, what the other community is saying even if it’s without merit. Keep a check on the things you read: What’s the actual source behind this? Could these be repeatedly misconstruing that thing in the same way (so they look coherent but aren’t)? Is there some useful truth in here I missed? And is there a subtle lie attached to the truth? And there’s lots of other helpful questions you can ask: but keep a sensible head and be prepared to step back and look at something else.

The title assumes we know this Dirk guy, but might not have heard of Linus…

This was the topic of discussion between an historian, a mathematician and a mystic.

The historian said, “writing. The ability to put words on paper to be communicated to people who never even met the ‘speaker’, is the single greatest achievement of mankind.”

The mathematician said, “no, numbers. The ability to express and develop truly abstract concepts, which in turn leads to Incredible real applications. Numbers are the single greatest invention of mankind.”

The mystic said, “the Thermos flask.”

“The Thermos flask?”

“The Thermos flask. It keeps hot drinks hot in the winter, and cold drinks cold in the summer. But think - that little flask - how does it know?”