5 ms·

This link in the article is insanely, crazily, madly, insultingly sickening to anyone who's not a slave. As I read it I felt like it was some kind of parody of

This link in the article is insanely, crazily, madly, insultingly sickening to anyone who's not a slave. As I read it I felt like it was some kind of parody of Orwell. Disgusting to tell someone what verbiage they use sincerely and in technical terms is now verboten because it's harmful. To whom? Crazy people? https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation https://developers.google.com/style/inclusive-documentation

epivosism 5y ago
This guide is interesting in how it lists allegedly immoral language use, alongside with clear PR/legal/trademark directives which I don't give a fuck about, such as "don't use google as a verb". I'll google whatever I want, google PR, go suck an egg. Also quite annoying how they simply tell us what to do, without justifying things. A lot of these would be quite hard to truly argue - i.e. "blind people... can't see things. why exactly is that metaphor inappropriate to talk about visibility?" So they just assume an authoritarian tone and just instruct us in how we should behave.
- epivosism 5y ago
  "Avoid using gray-box, graybox, or gray box to describe testing." "grayed-out, greyed-out, gray out, grey out Don't use. Instead, use unavailable." WTF are these people on about. Oh it's because they hate certain color words such as "black" and "white", words used by humans to indicate certain reflectivity properties of light; since it would be weird to only prohibit words which contain white or black, they just extend the prohibition to nearby related words.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    It’s not a race thing, it’s a disability thing — “greyed out” is only something that makes sense to someone who can see, it’s confusing the actual concept with the visual indicator of the concept. It’s the same with “the box is checked” to mean “selected” or “redlining a contract” to mean “negotiating.” The point of inclusive language isn’t some weird political points contest. It’s writing in a manner that’s clear to people of lots of different backgrounds and doesn’t rely on just having to know English idioms or have common shared experiences. Why is blacklist the one that excludes and whitelist the one that includes — you just have to know, English right? But you can avoid the need for that entirely by allowlist and denylist.
    - epivosism 5y ago
      Yeah, I appreciate the sentiment and I don't think most of it is out of ill-will. I just think it's ineffective. I'd rather just accept the need to educate every generation of its own responsibility for treating people fairly - rather than pretend that fixing words would make a difference. There are also cases like "white-glove" where the phrase doesn't just represent the stereotypical "white = good & black = bad" - there is real meaning here, since white is a color which makes dust more visible.
      - Spivak 5y ago
        I completely agree, although in my own writing I would probably avoid white-glove not because of any race association but again because it’s an idiom that you have to have existing context to know. If your upbringing didn’t make you associate white gloves with fastidious butlers then you will probably be confused. You might instead associate cleanliness with the yellow gloves worn by many cleaning staff.
        noduerme 5y ago
        Or people could learn something by, for example, encountering the phrase and looking up the historical context. The extension of your logic is that all writing should be geared to people with no knowledge, no historical reference, no firm understanding of the language, no visual or auditory cues (how do you talk about music without harming someone? Seriously, I ask this as a former music columnist). That is not language. [Edit: It's at best a graphic, except even that would be prohibited]. That is the conveyance of minimal information, like, 'don't stand here (in the place formerly known as being in front of a door).' It's completely absurd. It's inhuman. It's bent and wicked.
        neetle 5y ago
        Yeah nah, old mate over here putting in the hard yakka and ignoring the place of code-switching. There's a middle ground between "souless corpo speak" and speaking colloquially. You need to give everyone a fair shake of the stick and assuming everyone comes from the big smoke doesn't. Words are a tool used to convey meaning mate. Cracking the shits because you've gotta make concessions means you're not seeing a hammer as a hammer
  - Too 5y ago
    Curious what they suggested instead of gray box. Did it even have a suggestion or is every word containing a color just blindly labeled dirty?
- noduerme 5y ago
  Just as a total aside - why do you think they don't want people using google as a verb? It's not as if it killed Xerox or TiVo.
  - indy 5y ago
    I think it has something to do with trademarks being lost once a name becomes too synonymous with a product category. e.g. Aspirin, Hoover
    - noduerme 5y ago
      Ah! Good answer. Hadn't thought of that.
oefrha 5y ago
Geez, that word list. Here’s an idea. American Big Tech should form a Uniban Consortium to streamline the process of adding and banning new harmful words of the month. Then your OS update could come with support for, say, Unicode 20.0 and Uniban 6.0: five new emojis and fifty new words banned! Btw, the word main should probably be put on a future batch; too similar to “man” to be comfortable.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Better yet, Google's AI will just write your Docs for you from now on. Letting people type their own text files is unsafe, and may cause harm.
- epivosism 5y ago
  Yeah, the emoji manipulation of this is much more subversive and also continuously going on. Forbidding emojis which get converted to suggestiveness. We're left with eggplant and water droplets, which they know they can't remove, but they also are on guard against adding anything new that would allow more expressiveness in that area. If they could they'd ban the letter X to prevent people typing "sex"
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
darkerside 5y ago
I don't think it's the worst thing to encourage people too be thoughtful about their word choice. Is it really "crazy", or are you selling an emotional reaction by personifying your topic as a mentally deranged person? I actually think steering clear of this language is helpful in defusing the outrage culture that is so harmful to our online discourse.
- noduerme 5y ago
  I chose my wording carefully to illustrate that the conveyance of emotion, even through jarring phrases, is an important part of language. You can absolutely disagree with the rhetorical style, but the point is there's a vast difference between your rebuttal to it and an ML mechanism built into your writing program that dissuades you from writing certain types of prose, or persuades you to use language that an opaque AI decided is less triggering. We don't have to all be helpful, logical or anodyne all the time, either. Repressing what you want to say is unhealthy and also leads to dishonest debate. We don't need to be coddled and protected from some speech by algorithms. What we need to do is learn to see the rhetorical flaws and rebut them - as you just have (although, as I said, those flaws were there on purpose, as a layer of meta-meaning in sarcastic word choice that would fly over the head of an algorithm).
  - darkerside 5y ago
    I got it, and I think my point still stands. Some of the problem here is Poe's Law: > every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied I could tell you were being sarcastic, but the fact remains your said what you said. Sarcasm is great for tearing bad things down, but useless for building anything to replace it. I am not a fan of this Clippy shit either, but I can see value in things I don't like. The world needs more nuance, not less. And the world needs people to be willing to explain the nuance, not serve it as an inside joke for those who already get it.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      But I just explained it, if not to you then to someone who didn't get it. I'm absolutely willing to delve into the machinery of anything to explain it. I'm not, however, willing to live in a world where everyone is encouraged to tailor their expressions to the lowest common denominator. The truth is that speaking to the LCD is pointless unless you're a populist who needs their vote, or otherwise need to manipulate them somehow. If as someone suggested (who said no one's using it to write Ulysses) the main use of Google Docs is to write promotional garbage for big corporations, then great. The popups can be called "be more anodyne and over-explain for idiots", instead of "inclusivity warning". I would support that.

epivosism 5y ago

This guide is interesting in how it lists allegedly immoral language use, alongside with clear PR/legal/trademark directives which I don't give a fuck about, such as "don't use google as a verb". I'll google whatever I want, google PR, go suck an egg. Also quite annoying how they simply tell us what to do, without justifying things. A lot of these would be quite hard to truly argue - i.e. "blind people... can't see things. why exactly is that metaphor inappropriate to talk about visibility?" So they just assume an authoritarian tone and just instruct us in how we should behave.

epivosism 5y ago
"Avoid using gray-box, graybox, or gray box to describe testing." "grayed-out, greyed-out, gray out, grey out Don't use. Instead, use unavailable." WTF are these people on about. Oh it's because they hate certain color words such as "black" and "white", words used by humans to indicate certain reflectivity properties of light; since it would be weird to only prohibit words which contain white or black, they just extend the prohibition to nearby related words.
- Spivak 5y ago
  It’s not a race thing, it’s a disability thing — “greyed out” is only something that makes sense to someone who can see, it’s confusing the actual concept with the visual indicator of the concept. It’s the same with “the box is checked” to mean “selected” or “redlining a contract” to mean “negotiating.” The point of inclusive language isn’t some weird political points contest. It’s writing in a manner that’s clear to people of lots of different backgrounds and doesn’t rely on just having to know English idioms or have common shared experiences. Why is blacklist the one that excludes and whitelist the one that includes — you just have to know, English right? But you can avoid the need for that entirely by allowlist and denylist.
  - epivosism 5y ago
    Yeah, I appreciate the sentiment and I don't think most of it is out of ill-will. I just think it's ineffective. I'd rather just accept the need to educate every generation of its own responsibility for treating people fairly - rather than pretend that fixing words would make a difference. There are also cases like "white-glove" where the phrase doesn't just represent the stereotypical "white = good & black = bad" - there is real meaning here, since white is a color which makes dust more visible.
    - Spivak 5y ago
      I completely agree, although in my own writing I would probably avoid white-glove not because of any race association but again because it’s an idiom that you have to have existing context to know. If your upbringing didn’t make you associate white gloves with fastidious butlers then you will probably be confused. You might instead associate cleanliness with the yellow gloves worn by many cleaning staff.
      - noduerme 5y ago
        Or people could learn something by, for example, encountering the phrase and looking up the historical context. The extension of your logic is that all writing should be geared to people with no knowledge, no historical reference, no firm understanding of the language, no visual or auditory cues (how do you talk about music without harming someone? Seriously, I ask this as a former music columnist). That is not language. [Edit: It's at best a graphic, except even that would be prohibited]. That is the conveyance of minimal information, like, 'don't stand here (in the place formerly known as being in front of a door).' It's completely absurd. It's inhuman. It's bent and wicked.
        neetle 5y ago
        Yeah nah, old mate over here putting in the hard yakka and ignoring the place of code-switching. There's a middle ground between "souless corpo speak" and speaking colloquially. You need to give everyone a fair shake of the stick and assuming everyone comes from the big smoke doesn't. Words are a tool used to convey meaning mate. Cracking the shits because you've gotta make concessions means you're not seeing a hammer as a hammer
- Too 5y ago
  Curious what they suggested instead of gray box. Did it even have a suggestion or is every word containing a color just blindly labeled dirty?
noduerme 5y ago
Just as a total aside - why do you think they don't want people using google as a verb? It's not as if it killed Xerox or TiVo.
- indy 5y ago
  I think it has something to do with trademarks being lost once a name becomes too synonymous with a product category. e.g. Aspirin, Hoover
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Ah! Good answer. Hadn't thought of that.

oefrha 5y ago

Geez, that word list. Here’s an idea. American Big Tech should form a Uniban Consortium to streamline the process of adding and banning new harmful words of the month. Then your OS update could come with support for, say, Unicode 20.0 and Uniban 6.0: five new emojis and fifty new words banned! Btw, the word main should probably be put on a future batch; too similar to “man” to be comfortable.

noduerme 5y ago
Better yet, Google's AI will just write your Docs for you from now on. Letting people type their own text files is unsafe, and may cause harm.
epivosism 5y ago
Yeah, the emoji manipulation of this is much more subversive and also continuously going on. Forbidding emojis which get converted to suggestiveness. We're left with eggplant and water droplets, which they know they can't remove, but they also are on guard against adding anything new that would allow more expressiveness in that area. If they could they'd ban the letter X to prevent people typing "sex"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

darkerside 5y ago

I don't think it's the worst thing to encourage people too be thoughtful about their word choice. Is it really "crazy", or are you selling an emotional reaction by personifying your topic as a mentally deranged person? I actually think steering clear of this language is helpful in defusing the outrage culture that is so harmful to our online discourse.

noduerme 5y ago
I chose my wording carefully to illustrate that the conveyance of emotion, even through jarring phrases, is an important part of language. You can absolutely disagree with the rhetorical style, but the point is there's a vast difference between your rebuttal to it and an ML mechanism built into your writing program that dissuades you from writing certain types of prose, or persuades you to use language that an opaque AI decided is less triggering. We don't have to all be helpful, logical or anodyne all the time, either. Repressing what you want to say is unhealthy and also leads to dishonest debate. We don't need to be coddled and protected from some speech by algorithms. What we need to do is learn to see the rhetorical flaws and rebut them - as you just have (although, as I said, those flaws were there on purpose, as a layer of meta-meaning in sarcastic word choice that would fly over the head of an algorithm).
- darkerside 5y ago
  I got it, and I think my point still stands. Some of the problem here is Poe's Law: > every parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied I could tell you were being sarcastic, but the fact remains your said what you said. Sarcasm is great for tearing bad things down, but useless for building anything to replace it. I am not a fan of this Clippy shit either, but I can see value in things I don't like. The world needs more nuance, not less. And the world needs people to be willing to explain the nuance, not serve it as an inside joke for those who already get it.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    But I just explained it, if not to you then to someone who didn't get it. I'm absolutely willing to delve into the machinery of anything to explain it. I'm not, however, willing to live in a world where everyone is encouraged to tailor their expressions to the lowest common denominator. The truth is that speaking to the LCD is pointless unless you're a populist who needs their vote, or otherwise need to manipulate them somehow. If as someone suggested (who said no one's using it to write Ulysses) the main use of Google Docs is to write promotional garbage for big corporations, then great. The popups can be called "be more anodyne and over-explain for idiots", instead of "inclusivity warning". I would support that.