6 ms·

This guy lost me when he started talking about diversity issues instead of tech. I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the perso

This guy lost me when he started talking about diversity issues instead of tech. I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person(s) who created the hardware or software that I use. Does it work? Is it easy to understand and use? These are the things I am interested in. I am reminded of an early cartoon of a dog sitting at a computer saying 'On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog!'

tclancy 10mo ago
Two paths diverged in a wood. You took one and the Whole Point took the other here.
fwip 10mo ago
Do you care, then, that people are driving away contributors specifically because of their race/gender/orientation? Because without them, we wouldn't have [the stuff in the article].
stingraycharles 10mo ago
Yeah I think it’s quite a leap to go from “html is successful because it’s fault tolerant” to “this applies to communities as well”. There’s obviously a case to be made for both, but they’re independent and unrelated.
- argomo 10mo ago
  For me, it's an especially bad argument because the sloppy nature of HTML parsing is NOT a virtue... it's a source of bugs, vulnerabilities, and incompatibilities that provides (yet another) technical moat for existing web browsers. It's a huge tragedy that HTML5 beat XHTML.
  - stingraycharles 10mo ago
    Maybe, but after several decades of engineering, I became much more of an advocate for actual observed user behavior, which is chaotic, and as such nowadays preach “embrace chaos”. That’s what HTML and the browsers did. They accepted humans are terribly bad at following instructions when you want to cater to a broad audience, and as such embraced error correction. The end result is that the early days were awesome because everyone knew how to build websites. Perhaps in the current day and age, where people hardly write hand-written HTML anymore, this can be reconsidered. But a new, more restrictive format would have to show real benefits, because it’s precisely as I say: people don’t really write raw HTML anymore so it’s kind of a moot point.
wredcoll 10mo ago
Except there are people right on this forum who will happily talk about how dogs deserve fewer/no rights. Do you think that this makes the "dogs" feel welcome and do you think that these words have no effect? Like, it's cool and great that you personally are in a position where most of the ideologies of hate aren't affecting you, right now, personally, but is it too much to ask that you spare a thought for the people it does affect?
- poolion 10mo ago
  That must be very rare here, if it happens at all. Such comments would be flagged.
autoexec 10mo ago
I'll gladly take the opportunity to avoid directly supporting a racist/bigot, or anyone who seeks to silence/oppress/murder entire groups of people for simply existing. I don't care if they're selling me an application, or a laptop, or a car, or a cheeseburger. The internet, and the world, are a lot more interesting and exciting when you get a lot of different people from different backgrounds participating. Genius and innovation can come from anywhere. Morally and practically I think we're better off being inclusive. I may not know who on the internet is a dog, but I'm glad those dogs are out there and if somebody is a proud supporter of puppy genocide I'd rather not encourage/enable their misguided crusade so that does factor into my choices. It isn't something that can always be avoided, or even something that needs to be avoided entirely 100% of the time (I still read Lovecraft for example) but I do think it's worth some consideration.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  > The internet, and the world, are a lot more interesting and exciting when you get a lot of different people from different backgrounds participating. Genius and innovation can come from anywhere. Morally and practically I think we're better off being inclusive Agreed but honestly sometimes I wonder about the funding sides of things, I love tinkering with software and making (right now LLM based but I know it can be a crutch, I use it to just "test" ideas tbh) but basically my question is, I wish to do more stuff on the web but as someone from a third world country, even 30k $/year are enough to me right now. I am extremely frugal, most of it might just go into my savings/ETF world funds but basically I worry that if I cannot earn that amount, or even if I do, I am subjected to some very high risks which scare me as I have seen its costs first hands I want to build software which some people might even work on full time but I just don't know how to make money out of it. If I can't make money out of it, I just open source some half assed implementation of it and literally noone knows about it. I don't know too much about marketing and monetization perhaps. I don't know how to monetize, I hate ads and don't wish to push them, most of my servers/services I create can be abused so there is an issue the server provider might block me and I don't know if people are willing to pay for the software. I am in a unique position but honestly what most people do is that they create growth right now, then sell it or smth or take VC funding etc which might include enshittening in the future for profit. Like I just want to build, and a sustainable/profitable business with a profitable business model but the web just lacks this ability and I think I try to see it from my lens where I am frugal so I expect everyone is so its :/ The internet is interesting if people participate from different nations but that means that I just feel like what I might do will always be risky and I always need a job to fall back upon I guess. Maybe an compromise I think I will do is work in very adjacent industries and contact them directly and work for 30-40k$ so I can get paid "enough" for my country and basically be good to go I guess. The thing I get worried about is that if any such business goes bad, I would be on the chopping block and that its inherently more riskier than any business here who will try to extract 10x more value out of me and be the middleman... I wish to be a software engineer here out of my own passion but since literally everyone wants to be here, my talent literally means jackshit in colleges or their applications so Genius and innovation can come from anywhere but opportunities can have an inequality which I hope I can fix for myself and hopefully help others in solving too one day I guess Idk.
d--b 10mo ago
Ah I knew it was about people when I saw the LGBT flag as a background.
anal_reactor 10mo ago
> I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person(s) who created the hardware or software that I use. That's exactly the message that some people tried to push during the heyday of wokeism but the rest wouldn't listen.
DeathArrow 10mo ago
>On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog!' Unless you force people to acknowledge your are a dog.
47282847 10mo ago
> I couldn't care less You do care, otherwise you would not even have thought about it twice, let alone comment. The most striking argument against this line of reasoning is that there is no possibility for you not to act politically. By ignoring the issue of systemic discrimination (“don’t care don’t personally discriminate”) you actively contribute to and participate in the systemic discrimination. It’s a choice, and I find it important to leave you the choice, as I do not believe forcing anything on you will actually make you see, but it is true nonetheless that you cannot escape your responsibility: The ability to respond. “You can not not communicate.” Not responding and deciding to remain ignorant about it is also a response, and a highly privileged one. It would be easy to at least passively support anyone’s attempt at trying to reduce systemic discrimination, but speaking out against it turns it even more into a political act supporting discrimination than doing nothing and by that delegating it to others.
- vladvasiliu 10mo ago
  I have a hard time following this line of reasoning. I don't think GP's point is to "ignore systemic discrimination". Rather, it is to ignore those things on which people are discriminated. How can you discriminate against, say, race, if you don't pay attention to the person's race? Specifically, for tech, if you happen upon a code written by someone called "didgetmaster" on github, and the author makes no comment about who they are as a person, how does this contribute to discrimination? Isn't this the whole point of anonymous resumes and such to fight discrimination against minorities for employment?
  - DeathArrow 10mo ago
    You are technically right if the goal is to stop ANY kind of discrimination. But is that the goal?
    - vladvasiliu 10mo ago
      I don't know, and I admit I was operating under that assumption. But is that not the goal? Is there some kind of discrimination which is "good", and should go on?
arp242 10mo ago
He talks about "throw[ing of] slurs" and "denying rights to others", "wishing violence on people because of their heritage", and that type of thing. Does not besetting people with slurs count as "diversity" now? Do you think these people will be able to do good technical work if they're constantly beset by this kind of thing? Or do you think they will retreat to somewhere where they don't have to do with that? And secretively hiding who you are is not a solution. No photographs. No video meets. No YouTube videos. Can never discus anything personal. No conferences.
- zozbot234 10mo ago
  > Does not besetting people with slurs count as "diversity" now? It depends whom you ask! There are certainly some people both off- and on-line who seem to think that uniformly slurring all white, male, cis-sexual, whatever folks as "oppressors" - and even occasionally suggesting, apparently as a serious political proposal, that "Whiteness" (whatever that means) is something that should be forcibly done away with - is an effective way of advocating for diversity.
  - amanaplanacanal 10mo ago
    I suspect this is a pretty fringe position. I read quite a bit of center to left coded media, and I haven't seen it. I will say that I'm not on Facebook, Instagram, or tiktok though, so I might be missing a cultural moment. I have seen people point out that the concept of "whiteness" has shifted over time, and doesn't really have an immutable meaning.
    - liveoneggs 10mo ago
      DEI trainers/programs (like you get at work) are informed by CRT (the stuff above).
  - hmry 10mo ago
    > "Whiteness" (whatever that means) Maybe you could look it up instead of dismissing it out of hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_theory Feel free to disagree afterwards, but the words do have meaning. And not knowing them is not an argument against it.
conartist6 10mo ago
I didn't get a far as that because I just read through the massive list of enormous security problems caused by loose HTML parsing and that's the exact opposite of cultural accessibility. It requires arcane knowledge and rare skill then to be competent and safe. Tearing down those artificial barriers is how we let more people in!!
strken 10mo ago
One of the interesting things about the internet is that almost anyone who runs a web browser on their phone is using a processor designed by Sophie Wilson, a trans woman, to run a language designed by Brendan Eich, a guy who donated money to oppose gay marriage and then lost the spot as head honcho of Mozilla because of it. I often think about this and wonder if the two of them ever met, or what would have happened if they did. The internet doesn't run on "tolerance"; it runs on actual, real neutrality, which enforces tolerance by making anything else impossible. You cannot possibly stop gay people accessing your website any more than you can prevent homophobes or drug dealers or AI startups or North Koreans or fascists. You can ban behaviour but it's impossible to ban classes of people without real-life action.
- _heimdall 10mo ago
  This will all go out the window if and when we need a state issued ID to access the internet.
akimbostrawman 10mo ago
>I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person But that makes you a bigot and you know what happens to bigots so put on the shirt, label in your bio and change your speech or HR will have a field day with you. Welcome to the "tolerant" side.

tclancy 10mo ago

Two paths diverged in a wood. You took one and the Whole Point took the other here.

fwip 10mo ago

Do you care, then, that people are driving away contributors specifically because of their race/gender/orientation? Because without them, we wouldn't have [the stuff in the article].

stingraycharles 10mo ago

Yeah I think it’s quite a leap to go from “html is successful because it’s fault tolerant” to “this applies to communities as well”. There’s obviously a case to be made for both, but they’re independent and unrelated.

argomo 10mo ago
For me, it's an especially bad argument because the sloppy nature of HTML parsing is NOT a virtue... it's a source of bugs, vulnerabilities, and incompatibilities that provides (yet another) technical moat for existing web browsers. It's a huge tragedy that HTML5 beat XHTML.
- stingraycharles 10mo ago
  Maybe, but after several decades of engineering, I became much more of an advocate for actual observed user behavior, which is chaotic, and as such nowadays preach “embrace chaos”. That’s what HTML and the browsers did. They accepted humans are terribly bad at following instructions when you want to cater to a broad audience, and as such embraced error correction. The end result is that the early days were awesome because everyone knew how to build websites. Perhaps in the current day and age, where people hardly write hand-written HTML anymore, this can be reconsidered. But a new, more restrictive format would have to show real benefits, because it’s precisely as I say: people don’t really write raw HTML anymore so it’s kind of a moot point.

wredcoll 10mo ago

Except there are people right on this forum who will happily talk about how dogs deserve fewer/no rights. Do you think that this makes the "dogs" feel welcome and do you think that these words have no effect? Like, it's cool and great that you personally are in a position where most of the ideologies of hate aren't affecting you, right now, personally, but is it too much to ask that you spare a thought for the people it does affect?

poolion 10mo ago
That must be very rare here, if it happens at all. Such comments would be flagged.

autoexec 10mo ago

I'll gladly take the opportunity to avoid directly supporting a racist/bigot, or anyone who seeks to silence/oppress/murder entire groups of people for simply existing. I don't care if they're selling me an application, or a laptop, or a car, or a cheeseburger. The internet, and the world, are a lot more interesting and exciting when you get a lot of different people from different backgrounds participating. Genius and innovation can come from anywhere. Morally and practically I think we're better off being inclusive. I may not know who on the internet is a dog, but I'm glad those dogs are out there and if somebody is a proud supporter of puppy genocide I'd rather not encourage/enable their misguided crusade so that does factor into my choices. It isn't something that can always be avoided, or even something that needs to be avoided entirely 100% of the time (I still read Lovecraft for example) but I do think it's worth some consideration.

Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
> The internet, and the world, are a lot more interesting and exciting when you get a lot of different people from different backgrounds participating. Genius and innovation can come from anywhere. Morally and practically I think we're better off being inclusive Agreed but honestly sometimes I wonder about the funding sides of things, I love tinkering with software and making (right now LLM based but I know it can be a crutch, I use it to just "test" ideas tbh) but basically my question is, I wish to do more stuff on the web but as someone from a third world country, even 30k $/year are enough to me right now. I am extremely frugal, most of it might just go into my savings/ETF world funds but basically I worry that if I cannot earn that amount, or even if I do, I am subjected to some very high risks which scare me as I have seen its costs first hands I want to build software which some people might even work on full time but I just don't know how to make money out of it. If I can't make money out of it, I just open source some half assed implementation of it and literally noone knows about it. I don't know too much about marketing and monetization perhaps. I don't know how to monetize, I hate ads and don't wish to push them, most of my servers/services I create can be abused so there is an issue the server provider might block me and I don't know if people are willing to pay for the software. I am in a unique position but honestly what most people do is that they create growth right now, then sell it or smth or take VC funding etc which might include enshittening in the future for profit. Like I just want to build, and a sustainable/profitable business with a profitable business model but the web just lacks this ability and I think I try to see it from my lens where I am frugal so I expect everyone is so its :/ The internet is interesting if people participate from different nations but that means that I just feel like what I might do will always be risky and I always need a job to fall back upon I guess. Maybe an compromise I think I will do is work in very adjacent industries and contact them directly and work for 30-40k$ so I can get paid "enough" for my country and basically be good to go I guess. The thing I get worried about is that if any such business goes bad, I would be on the chopping block and that its inherently more riskier than any business here who will try to extract 10x more value out of me and be the middleman... I wish to be a software engineer here out of my own passion but since literally everyone wants to be here, my talent literally means jackshit in colleges or their applications so Genius and innovation can come from anywhere but opportunities can have an inequality which I hope I can fix for myself and hopefully help others in solving too one day I guess Idk.

d--b 10mo ago

Ah I knew it was about people when I saw the LGBT flag as a background.

anal_reactor 10mo ago

> I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person(s) who created the hardware or software that I use. That's exactly the message that some people tried to push during the heyday of wokeism but the rest wouldn't listen.

DeathArrow 10mo ago

>On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog!' Unless you force people to acknowledge your are a dog.

47282847 10mo ago

> I couldn't care less You do care, otherwise you would not even have thought about it twice, let alone comment. The most striking argument against this line of reasoning is that there is no possibility for you not to act politically. By ignoring the issue of systemic discrimination (“don’t care don’t personally discriminate”) you actively contribute to and participate in the systemic discrimination. It’s a choice, and I find it important to leave you the choice, as I do not believe forcing anything on you will actually make you see, but it is true nonetheless that you cannot escape your responsibility: The ability to respond. “You can not not communicate.” Not responding and deciding to remain ignorant about it is also a response, and a highly privileged one. It would be easy to at least passively support anyone’s attempt at trying to reduce systemic discrimination, but speaking out against it turns it even more into a political act supporting discrimination than doing nothing and by that delegating it to others.

vladvasiliu 10mo ago
I have a hard time following this line of reasoning. I don't think GP's point is to "ignore systemic discrimination". Rather, it is to ignore those things on which people are discriminated. How can you discriminate against, say, race, if you don't pay attention to the person's race? Specifically, for tech, if you happen upon a code written by someone called "didgetmaster" on github, and the author makes no comment about who they are as a person, how does this contribute to discrimination? Isn't this the whole point of anonymous resumes and such to fight discrimination against minorities for employment?
- DeathArrow 10mo ago
  You are technically right if the goal is to stop ANY kind of discrimination. But is that the goal?
  - vladvasiliu 10mo ago
    I don't know, and I admit I was operating under that assumption. But is that not the goal? Is there some kind of discrimination which is "good", and should go on?

arp242 10mo ago

He talks about "throw[ing of] slurs" and "denying rights to others", "wishing violence on people because of their heritage", and that type of thing. Does not besetting people with slurs count as "diversity" now? Do you think these people will be able to do good technical work if they're constantly beset by this kind of thing? Or do you think they will retreat to somewhere where they don't have to do with that? And secretively hiding who you are is not a solution. No photographs. No video meets. No YouTube videos. Can never discus anything personal. No conferences.

zozbot234 10mo ago
> Does not besetting people with slurs count as "diversity" now? It depends whom you ask! There are certainly some people both off- and on-line who seem to think that uniformly slurring all white, male, cis-sexual, whatever folks as "oppressors" - and even occasionally suggesting, apparently as a serious political proposal, that "Whiteness" (whatever that means) is something that should be forcibly done away with - is an effective way of advocating for diversity.
- amanaplanacanal 10mo ago
  I suspect this is a pretty fringe position. I read quite a bit of center to left coded media, and I haven't seen it. I will say that I'm not on Facebook, Instagram, or tiktok though, so I might be missing a cultural moment. I have seen people point out that the concept of "whiteness" has shifted over time, and doesn't really have an immutable meaning.
  - liveoneggs 10mo ago
    DEI trainers/programs (like you get at work) are informed by CRT (the stuff above).
- hmry 10mo ago
  > "Whiteness" (whatever that means) Maybe you could look it up instead of dismissing it out of hand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_theory Feel free to disagree afterwards, but the words do have meaning. And not knowing them is not an argument against it.

conartist6 10mo ago

I didn't get a far as that because I just read through the massive list of enormous security problems caused by loose HTML parsing and that's the exact opposite of cultural accessibility. It requires arcane knowledge and rare skill then to be competent and safe. Tearing down those artificial barriers is how we let more people in!!

strken 10mo ago

One of the interesting things about the internet is that almost anyone who runs a web browser on their phone is using a processor designed by Sophie Wilson, a trans woman, to run a language designed by Brendan Eich, a guy who donated money to oppose gay marriage and then lost the spot as head honcho of Mozilla because of it. I often think about this and wonder if the two of them ever met, or what would have happened if they did. The internet doesn't run on "tolerance"; it runs on actual, real neutrality, which enforces tolerance by making anything else impossible. You cannot possibly stop gay people accessing your website any more than you can prevent homophobes or drug dealers or AI startups or North Koreans or fascists. You can ban behaviour but it's impossible to ban classes of people without real-life action.

_heimdall 10mo ago
This will all go out the window if and when we need a state issued ID to access the internet.

akimbostrawman 10mo ago

>I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person But that makes you a bigot and you know what happens to bigots so put on the shirt, label in your bio and change your speech or HR will have a field day with you. Welcome to the "tolerant" side.