Word policing has a bit of a 1984 feel to it. Some desire to control you and how you think by controlling which words you use, with new arbitrary words being banned all the time. Instead of actual change, we're focusing on the superficial.
This was interesting:
> Of the survey respondents, 1,881 were men and 294 were women. Of the women, 44% agreed a name change should occur and 40% disagreed. Of the men, 28% agreed a name change should occur and 55% disagreed.[5] More than half of those surveyed were against the change, but 30% of those surveyed were in favor. In response, the Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation Board of Trustees decided to change the official abbreviation and acronym of the conference from NIPS to NeurIPS. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_on_Neural_Informati...
Was this about nipples? LOL is that an acronym for something else I don't know about?
Having two PATs or more makes it even worse (or funnier depending on who you are).
A concern would be that the feature Personal Access Token would be avoided, solely to avoid that part of the language. I hope it won’t come to that.
The conference was called NIPS. It's slang for nipples and a racial slur. It isn't like everyone was mature about it. There was an unofficial event called TITS. People wore shirts proclaiming "my NIPS are NP hard". Funny but hardly professional.
Yes it is. This change is effectively reflecting a push, by bullies, to ban the word master, to eliminate it from spoken and written language, that's exactly what's happening.
Language evolves. One of the ways it evolves is that certain expressions become understood as hurtful or impolite... and people with empathy learn to use other expressions in their stead out of respect. That’s not “banning” those expressions, it’s choosing to adapt for the benefit of a broader subset of society.
A great deal of social expectations are the consequence of this kind of process of empathy and adaptation, and they make living on the planet with other people more joyful and safer. Sometimes in small ways, other times in big ways. But you don’t have to meet those expectations if you value the symbolic freedom of using language that’s gone out of vogue for these reasons... you just have to accept that people may view you as inconsiderate as a consequence.
/s I say this in jest but only because it’s incredibly easy to reproduce the absurdity of all this discussion, it’s all discordant and trivial
I mean, you would think people would grow up, right? I am glad our female colleagues don’t have to suppress their embarrassment while mentioning the conference anymore.
you can argue that it is the wrong change, or that the end doesn't justify the means, etc, but it doesn't make sense to say that it is both thought control, and superficial
It's wrong because trying to censor the way everyone expresses themselves because a hypothetical person might be offended is a form of bullying.