Microsoft Helping Out In Making The Linux Kernel Language More Inclusive

[jarekZ]

oh right, I remember how someone (from google IIRC) changed blacklist to allowlist in one of LLVM point releases, breaking backwards compatibility and causing me to spend a couple of days debugging "what the hell is wrong in my work project".

Thanks for worrying about my inclusivity, folks!

[thomasjkenney]

...can't login to Facebook chat on Pidgin...

Seems the young'uns don't like XMPP very much.

[DMJC]

Seems the young'uns don't like XMPP very much.

From what I can see of the facebook-purple plugin situation it looks more like the maintenance of the code has become a big mess. They have to merge in code from Mercurial as Pidgin haven't migrated to git. The core developer has also moved on and the replacement maintainer has given up.

[niner]

No, we get offended at having pointless, useless busywork foisted on us

Seeing that you are talking about "us", I get curious. Which kernel subsystem are you a maintainer of?

[niner]

oh right, I remember how someone (from google IIRC) changed blacklist to allowlist in one of LLVM point releases, breaking backwards compatibility and causing me to spend a couple of days debugging "what the hell is wrong in my work project".

Thanks for worrying about my inclusivity, folks!

Which option and point release was that exactly? I can only find llvm-cov's -name-allowlist which got renamed in LLVM 14.0.0 (not a point release) with the old name still supported and yielding a deprecation message all of which was clearly mentioned in the release notes:

"llvm-cov: -name-allowlist is now accepted in addition to -name-whitelist. -name-whitelist is marked as deprecated and to be removed in future releases."

[Doomer]

nice to see US neuroses are alive and well, please fix yourself, america...

[Ferrum Master]

Does this mean I always treated wrong my secondary devices? IDE, CAN etc?

Who wasted their paid working hours on this?

[blackiwid]

About the background that it's to sync it with some hardware documentation, surely relativases the thing, but I would assume that from some people such patches with that excuse get introduced that people get used to it, and when they start doing it for political reasons there will be less resistance. Even if that would not been the plan, it is what this will create and therefor if you are against the woke stuff you should oppose it anyway. Also the inclusiveness is mentioned as minor reason (bonus), so attacking it on that front is legitimate.

Now the easy route is to say I am against it or I am for it, because I like it or dislike it. But I want to attack the claim that this is inclusive, which it is not, and I want to include the German form of speech wokeness, what we call "gendering" which basically we would not say "actor" for the job but "actr-ess" something like that "doctor" -> "doc-tress" or "doc*tress something like that.

So mostly to have the female if possible the male form but with the * as example all the other sexes explicitly measured because if we call a female doctor a doctor than 0% of women will start choosing this job. Well there is some weak bad studies that claim that maybe a few less women would not choose this job, and because the rich people need more single workers that is a bad thing...

Why is that not inclusive? At least the German woke language form targets like 50% of the population even 99% of them would still pick the job even if they were addressed by the German "general masculinity, that includes women and everybody else" (btw it's mostly for plural form or if you don't know the sex of the worker and in job descriptions, btw nobody on the street uses this communistic language).

But why does it hurt insensitivity?
1. it discriminates against at least 50% of people that hate this language, the German form is hated by 70-80% of people. Instead of the 0,1% real trans people. And now you might say it's rising in the US which is true because children have higher degrees of gender dysphoria, the problem is that puberty in >95% "heals" the gender dysphoria IF you don't tamper with hormones or worse or hormone blockers... but I grant for the argument that it's 1,5% real to include this 90% that will become either very unhappy or detransitioner in the future. So it splits the developers that you have to make a far left wing virtua signaling each time you want to commit a patch. Which excludes 40-90% of people from a project, exclusion does not mean they absolutely can't or wont submit it means to make them feel bad about it, because more is the slave or sexual exclusive language not, too.

2. foreigners, the language becomes harder to understand, I learned that in the US the customer is the king, so I would assume customer is the master replacement in that situation, but apparently not, right? Having multiple alternative makes it even harder, so you expect some special language skill from foreigner making it harder, btw also a strong reason why the german "gendering" is seen as bad, German is hard enough without that.

3. also it's like this meme create a new better standard and then you end up with 10 Standards... because clearly some will use the old wording, some the new, some a new variant of the new standard.

4. hard words are easier to understand, especially for foreigners, it's like with a infant, now they can apparently see more than black/white but their brain can't process this information as good and can't perceive them clearly and vividly, it's similar if you learn a language clearly hard contrasting words are easier to understand and a blacklist is longer in culture so if they learn this words out of movies which is a very if not the most effective way to learn a language, while if you use as example blocklist instead what would then be the equivalent to white list? invitelist, a kernel module as example is no person, so you would invite talk to it? wtf? Or send them a mail to invite them to consent to get loaded?... at least blocklist you are sure which of the 2 it replaces with client that is absolutely unclear apparently in the US the customer / client is not the king... of course he is not the king in Germany, there he is the annoying ashole, but that is a different question

So to sum it up, this is not only annoying and creating conflicts and is not only signaling virtue it's also in-group signaling, you signaling that you don't vote for republicans as example, so only democrats liked to be seen others are maybe still allowed if they hide their nazi-republicanism... it's also on top of that LESS INCLUSIVE besides the splitting between the people less inclusive to foreigners and there are FAR FAR more non-primary english speakers than Trans people and HECK even more than female developers I bet the code contributions in the linux kernel are at least 95% from male contributors, and so are the people in most universities for informatics around the world...
So even without the harder to understand for foreigner people language you discriminate also against around 50% of this 95% male developers, on top of that.

So you can say it's good to be woke and we want to be woke but it's not inclusive.

[GrumpyLinuxUser]

First: master (as word in common language) meaning isn't for sake of master of slaves. Whoever thinks it is is simply stupid beyond comprehension.

In a certain language, Master is used to address a (male) teacher. It's a borrowed word from English.

[ssokolow]

Seeing that you are talking about "us", I get curious. Which kernel subsystem are you a maintainer of?

I'm an application developer. I'm speaking generally, on behalf of overworked developers who have seen this song-and-dance before and know it won't accomplish anything except wasting our unpaid time.