• 2 Posts
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2024

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  • mox@lemmy.sdf.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.worldServo vs Ladybird.
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    13 days ago

    Someone with undetermined/unknowable gender would use the pronouns they/them, never he/him.

    We’re not discussing what someone would use for themselves. We are discussing what someone would use when writing about a hypothetical person.

    If you believe that he or him would never be used in this case, then I suggest you do some research on the history of language.

    Edit to clarify: And by history, I include recent history, meaning usage by people alive today, who learned it in school not terribly long ago.



  • mox@lemmy.sdf.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.worldServo vs Ladybird.
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    13 days ago

    None of what you claim was done in the document being discussed.

    It isn’t a fucking “convention” to push women down

    No, but choosing either the male or female pronoun when writing about a hypothetical person has been the convention for a long time, and using the male one has been the usual default for far longer than any of us has been alive. It’s not to push women down; it’s a grammar compromise, and is not exclusive English.

    You are misunderstanding the language as it was used, and you have jumped to a false conclusion that seems to make you so angry that you think it’s okay to publicly vilify someone… for your own mistake.

    I hope things get better for you.

    Good day.



  • mox@lemmy.sdf.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.worldServo vs Ladybird.
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    14 days ago

    “Personal politics” is a vague phrase that generally just means someone’s views and priorities. There is nothing pejorative about it, nor in the way he used it.

    In other words, Andreas insists the OS developer be referred to as “he/him” instead of not assuming gender.

    The build instructions in question follow English language conventions that have existed for hundreds of years (and are shared by more than few other languages). All he did was decline someone’s proposed change that would have applied a very new convention regarding pronouns for a hypothetical person. This is not the same as insisting that anyone refer to anyone else in a particular way.

    It’s also not unreasonable. We can ask people to adopt new conventions, but we don’t get to expect or demand it.

    Change to a language takes time.

    It’s textbook misogyny.

    No, it is not.









  • [Citations needed] or it didn’t happen.

    I think this mindset is naïve and unrealistic.

    People were saying the same thing for decades in response to a small minority warning about government surveillance, often dismissing them with labels like “paranoid”. Eventually, Snowden came along and produced the citations, at extreme risk to himself and his loved ones. It’s an anomaly that they were ever revealed at all.

    History is replete with examples of bad stuff going on for ages before irrefutable evidence of it became widely known. In general, if something can be abused to someone’s advantage, it will be, and likely already is.

    There’s precious little extra information that a “nefarious” instance can harvest that any basic web scrapper can’t.

    You have a point there, but consider also that effective web scraping uses significantly more resources than having the data you want handed to you. Monitoring Lemmy through federation would be much more efficient.