Hacker News Reader

Regardless of what Copilot suggested for "gender", it would've offended someone, and I think that's what Microsoft wants to avoid. Not even woke so much as it is trying to avoid potential controversies.

You would think they would just avoid adjusting this, right?

If they don't "adjust" this, each user gets a random-ish result from all the code out there-- depending on mostly-unrelated context, it suggests a lot of genders or just 2.

In turn, you can guarantee both groups of people end up upset.

What’s there to be upset by? Both groups know the other exists, and both groups know that the other group has written code that copilot trained on.

Both groups will angrily complain that Copilot is suggesting the wrong thing.

Right now both groups are trying to silence the other-- with school libraries, etc, in the crossfire being angrily denounced.

> Both groups will angrily complain that Copilot is suggesting the wrong thing.

This is not normal, right? I mean, outside US.

It could just not suggest anything, but continue to suggest as usual for other parts of the file. I think that would offend the least number of people.

The issue isn't that it isn't producing a suggestion, but that it stops producing a suggestion altogether for the rest of the file.

I don't use copilot anymore because it just results in poor quality code and additional cognitive overhead (because you need to read and discard the shitty suggestions) as you type. It both slows you down and exhausts you. So you can really think of this as a feature. You'll write much better code as soon as copilot shuts down. It should do this more often.

> I mean, were they thinking that if someone is writing code, let's say, for a gender dropdown and it was only ["male", "female"], it would try to suggest to us to add 26 more genders instead (and worse, suggest a list of genders to add)?

> Would the intention be to correct us and popup a message saying "We suggest you add more genders so as not to displease the users of your product"??

You can just as easily assume that they don't want a dropdown with 26 additional genders to just pop up automatically. That would upset a lot of people, many of whom are in this thread. I think whoever wrote the code doesn't want to jump into a political shitstorm.

The ____ church did interfere in all matters of life, big and small, none to trivial to no be guided by a enormous ritual rule book, always threatening disciplinary actions by the believing masses and social ostracizing.

Hurting the feelings of the true believers, was the ultimate sin, a sin often committed, but only punished if the sinner did not recant and change his ways, in a brutally public and official way. It was there, that the ____ church revealed what it was really all about all along. Societal control, maybe with good intentions to start with, but in the end, just control for its own sake and to prevent others from archieving the same control.

Not saying, that any social movement could turn into a religion. That would need strange clothing, processions, rituals, codified language and most of all a mythology.

I have no religious preference, im on the side of science and would like to have a civil society, were no member is violated by another. I would very much prefer it, if the combatant religions involved, could leave science alone. Reality is often disappointing.

May the religion with the least suffering caused win and then keep away from the state & power.

I'm heavily religious and I agree with you entirely. I see many parallels between life inside the strict religious community I live in and what is happening at large in society.

I think the goal of any sufficiently large society should be that any religion or ideology can rise. Many people can become a part of that, yet the religion or ideology is unable to persecute those how don't agree with it.

I also have no idea how you achieve that. It's my utopia and like most people's vision of a utopia is probably not possible in reality.

Perhaps it was not "do I think this is reasonable," but "is acting in good faith enough to keep me out of trouble."

Maybe the one saving grace in all this, is that the AI singularity will never happen thanks to wokeness.

Chances are it was the opposite