This feels like a bit of a bikeshed. There are problems with many configuration languages. I don't see anything related to yaml on their issue tracker.
> Futile investment of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues
I don't see how the choice of configuration file format is a marginal technical issue. It makes a big difference to the ergonomics of a tool.
It's one of the things I like most about Rust over my main programming language Kotlin. Rust has Cargo which uses TOML, which is nice and simple. It's so much more pleasant to use than Koltin's Gradle.
Look, without getting into a debate on cancel culture, I’m wondering if it’s specifically virtue signaling that you object to. Because RMS is specifically known for a massive amount of virtue signaling. It’s all over his website and was written all over his office at MIT. And he would join discussions and change the subject to whatever he felt like talking about in order to, we’ll, spread the good word. And of course the free software movement more broadly is about taking a moral stance and aggressively spreading it through copyleft and other forms of activism.
So I wonder if it’s not “virtue signaling” here that’s the problem, but the virtue being signaled itself that you don’t like.
Because, generally speaking and on balance, a least in American society, women have things worse off than men. The pay gap, gender roles, access to reproductive healthcare, representation in government, no paid parental leave, violence against women.
None of those things are evidence of discrimination in tech hiring. When we send 100 applications to Google for engineering positions, do we see male resumes selected where otherwise-identical female resumes are not?
Is that really true though? Men are overrepresented by multiples among the Homelessness, prison sentences, assult victims, suicides, gun deaths. Often by factors of 2-3x
They're also deeply underrepresented in college, and the gap between men and women going to college is growing. Among young people, especially in cities, women actually out earn men.
Figuring out who's "better off" seems to be entirely dependent on what ruler you're using to measure "better", and which subgroup you're using to do the measurement.
> For example, you could believe that gender gaps in engineering are 60% personality-driven and 40% discrimination/sexism-driven. There is nothing toxic about this opinion...
What's potentially toxic about this "opinion" is that, until it cites evidence, it entirely confuses what is social science and what is armchair philosophy.
One can either state: "Study X suggests that the gender gap is roughly due to Y% of A and Z% of B", or they can say "Anecdotally speaking, I have experienced the following, which suggests to me that $REASON may be at play here".
When one carelessly mixes the two together, they drape an assertion in the unearned aesthetics of quantitative reasoning. Which, in my experience, is sadly where a lot of these rationalist arguments end up.
Ok, but how is that more the case when you argue that the gender ratio is personality-driven than when you argue that the gender ratio is discrimination-driven?
This criticism is a bit pedantic. The numbers aren't doing any real work here, beyond concisely illustrating how a person can believe both A and B are important drivers of X without thinking they are equally important.
Right, but the original comment was the one making sweeping claims without evidence, and the your parent comment is defending the position of Scott Alexander who has put more footnotes on this subject than anybody I’ve seen that doesn’t have a gender studies PhD.
I'm generally a fan of SSC but the second link is missing some significant factors on why law and medicine have become open to women.
> "This makes no sense. There were negative stereotypes about everything! Somebody has to explain why the equal and greater negative stereotypes against women in law, medicine, etc were completely powerless, yet for some reason the negative stereotypes in engineering were the ones that took hold and prevented women from succeeding there."
There were class action lawsuits that required law firms, law schools, medical schools, and hospitals to accept women doctors and lawyers. After sexism was recognized as a problem law schools used affirmative action to admit gender-balanced classes and law firms hired equal numbers of men and women.
STEM subjects didn't have these interventions so it's unsurprising that sexism is more of an issue than in other fields.
Absolutely - and with a bit more work you could come up with some citations for “rate of affirmative action cases by industry” and bulk up that fact-based argument to the level of rigor that I’m advocating.
My point was at the meta level that we should be using facts and evidence when we talk about this rather than saying “we just know we are right.” as the original commenter did.
Worth noting though that your theory doesn’t actually have enough explanatory power to explain the interesting part of the data; one of the points in Grant’s original article (which Scott is arguing against) was this juicy graph: https://media-exp1.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E12AQGEJuKqIh95Ng/a...
Note that female participation in CS increases along with other fields in the 70s, then something happens in 84/85 and participation plummets. Your theory would support a graph where CS never tracked with those other fields. But this is as clear an exogenous event as you are going to see in social science data.
What happened in 84? Maybe there is an explanation in the affirmative action caseload? I didn’t look at that dimension but your theory (fleshed out with data) might shed some light on that. (Also note that this graph looks worse than it really is; total CS enrollment also plummeted in 84 due to a recession and so there is a confounding effect there.)
Again, this is why data is so important in these discussions. The reality is way more complex than the “we know we are right” crowd appreciate; if you get this wrong then you won’t be able to fix the problem (or even identify the real problem).
My goal was only to point out that Scott's article missed the substantial effects of affirmative action in law and medicine. I find any theory that doesn't account for the reduced sexism in other fields unsatisfactory. I haven't taken it any further than that; it seems unlikely that I'd come up with something useful.
If you are interested in this area then I would recommend reading the book Why Aren't More Women in Science?. It has 15 essays by experts debating the issue.
Comparing your unsubstantiated claims with the extensive citations of studies and data in the articles linked here, I can come to my own conclusions on whose education to trust.
What's funny to me about your comment is that you actually chose a perfect example of the importance of critical thinking in how we discuss terminology.
The message behind the English idiom you chose is clearly one of self empowerment; /you/ are the master of /your own/ destiny implies independence, freedom, and agency.
In the context of git, and distributed systems more broadly, `master` is specifically chosen for its association with a power differential between one special entity giving the orders, and some collection of other entities taking the orders. In some DB systems, for example, the language is as literal as `master/s`. Even without "s" in use with `git`, there's a clear association with `master` being the branch that broadly holds sway above the other branches.
We chose symbols and metaphors to aid in our mental modeling of complex systems. I'm further amused by your own choice of "policing" to describe a push for cultural healing coming from a minority population. I recommend reading up on the history of policing to see why this metaphor is ill-advised.
> Like, we're just going to scratch a whole bunch of words from the dictionary because someone somewhere is offended?
This is a strawman; nobody is calling for this.
> The other day, people at my workplace were saying that expressions like "blind spot" and "falling on deaf ears" needed to be purged.
Based on your use of "policing" and "[scratching] from the dictionary" I'm wondering whether these folks literally said "purged" in their own language. But otherwise, cool, it sounds like they are exhibiting the positive human trait of compassion. If a disabled person tells me they'd prefer I don't use this idiom, I'd happily find another way of saying the same thing. What's the big deal?
> AFAIK, "blind spot" is not actually about blind people, it's a term related to driving and the angles seeing people can't see in without looking.
This isn't really how language works though, is it? When people are forging associations with words or phrases, they're not opening a webster's dictionary, but rather drawing on a complex web of cultural associations. A more extreme version of your argument here is that it's unreasonable to be rattled by the use of a swatstika in western culture, since the /original/ meaning behind that symbol was one of peace. Nobody would buy that. However, in certain east asian cultures, the symbol is still in use for more positive associations.
The specific choice of `master` as a symbol in distributed systems holds meaning due to its evocation of a power differential. Whether this is intentionally "bad" holds no meaning whatsoever. What does it say about us if we can't honestly hold some degree of empathy for someone who, affected by a violent history of subjugation and dominance, might not love the idea of using symbols chosen for their hierarchical power association?
Can we change the use of the symbol + for addition?
it reminds me of the suffering my people went through at the hands of the Inquisition and the crusades.
Do you care that in this context the meaning of master is "an original from which copies can be made" or is it irrelevant as you want to have bit of rightous rage?
> Whether this is intentionally "bad" holds no meaning whatsoever.
His emphasis is on empathy for the people who are affected by the usage of certain terminology. If it's a trivial change we can make to accommodate them, why shouldn't we?
Well it should be obvious for the reasonable people that if this line isn’t drawn the situation is going to be exploited by the unreasonable people. Or by the people who are willing to take advantage of this situation. You understand it of course, but it’s not important to you, just a collateral damage.
Consider re-reading what I wrote. "master" has many meanings, and the whole point I'm making is that context is key. I am not sure what you're referring to with "righteous rage".
Well said. We lack as a society in holding some degree of empathy for people who are affected differently by situations, experiences, historical context than us.
