this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
150 points (94.1% liked)
Technology
67422 readers
3875 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"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.
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.
No, it is not.
Singular they is old. It may be newer than the gender neutral he, but its not new
Certain forms of singular they are old, but the drive to make it the general convention when referring to a hypothetical person is new.
Nobody ask this person their thoughts on federal marriage law conventions in the us in the year 2015
Yes, it is.
It's sexist when you assume someone is a man because they're a doctor. It's sexist when you assume someone is a woman because they're a nurse. And it's sexist when you assume someone is a man because they're an OS developer.
When you continue insisting that the OS developer be a man, even though it's been clarified to you that they just as well may not be, that's when your behavior crosses the line to misogynistic.
It isn't a fucking "convention" to push women down by insinuating they're not welcome in your profession, and it's not a "new convention" to fucking avoid doing that.
None of what you claim was done in the document being discussed.
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.
pronouns are really nothing new. he/him has meant a male person for hundreds of years, didn't it?
Either a male person or a hypothetical person whose gender is unknowable.
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.
And that changes it how? It's insulting to misgender someone, though I can understand how you'd think that there's no harm in insulting someone hypothetical.
Per your suggestion, "they" has been used to refer to a singular person since the 14th century. "He" is currently masculine-only. I apologize if you misunderstood my use of "never" to refer to things around the 18th and 19th century (when it apparently was considered bad to use "they" in the singular) when I presumed that there was an implicit limit to modern usage of English.