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vigilantpuma

269 karma · joined January 3, 2018

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vigilantpuma··on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair
No, but you did seem to imply that unless one is unequivocally correct, one should not be issuing corrections. Perhaps I misread.
vigilantpuma··on Too many men suffering in silence, national health report finds (Canada)
Is your suggestion then having two health ministers? More than two?
vigilantpuma··on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair
Yeah, workplace slack isn’t what I am talking about.

You are also not “unequivocally correct” so perhaps you are applying a standard to others you can’t live up to yourself.

vigilantpuma··on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair
Most women who are okay with being called a girl are okay with it only in certain contexts. For example I don’t know any woman who is in her 30s or 40s who would be okay with being referred to as a girl in a professional context.
vigilantpuma··on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair
I could see how it’s rude for a CEO to be bringing up his affairs, but how is it rude to address public revelations?
vigilantpuma··on Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair
*woman
vigilantpuma··on Show HN: Uncracked City, detective game where you question LLM suspects that lie
“Each suspect answers in their own voice. Some of them lie.”

EVERYBODY LIES.

vigilantpuma··on Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power
It’s true, and Stewart was a great actor. But he would have sold a vision of a morally compromised captain just as well. The vision is Roddenberry’s.
vigilantpuma··on Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power
Big fan of Star Trek and Picard is my captain forever, but this credit seems more due to Gene Roddenberry.
vigilantpuma··on Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power
Or Homer’s?
vigilantpuma··on Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books recommended on HN
Much better now, thank you!
vigilantpuma··on Show HN: HackerBooks – HackerTube, but for books mentioned on HN
The “mentions since” picker appears to be broken, nothing in the list changes as far as I can see. Also I wish it wouldn’t add another page to my history.
vigilantpuma··on Tell HN: Scribd Breached
I think that’s true for comments but not posts.
vigilantpuma··on How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
It’s a tax, not a casual game app.

The quality of argumentation here. “Wealth tax therefore good” “just pass it even though it’s shitty, who cares.”

How many bad laws are on the books and now it’s nearly impossible to claw them back?

vigilantpuma··on How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
Again, it’s a bad tax. Judge this on the merits, not merely on the fact that it’s a wealth tax and therefore good prima facie.
vigilantpuma··on How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
> Google is (trying to) sidestep this issue as much as possible by making the name on the map depend on your physical location, language and localization settings, or both. They could easily make the Caspian Sea say Turkmen Sea only in Turkmenistan, and probably would if they wanted to keep doing business in Turkmenistan. This is already how it works for Lake Ontario: if I access from the US, it says "Lake America", but if I VPN to somewhere in Europe, it says "Lake Ontario (Lake America)".

I also assumed that that was happening, and that might even have made sense, but according to my Canadian coworker, Lake Ontario also shows up as Lake America for him.

vigilantpuma··on How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
Trying to defeat a badly designed tax that even the Democrats aren’t aligned is evidence of him being a bad person? I think you can probably do better.
vigilantpuma··on The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
It’s easier to remain vigilant when a large part of the contributions are bad or incorrect than when it’s a very small percentage.
vigilantpuma··on The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
The problem is that humans are badly suited to remaining attentive in these circumstances. Take the combination of “overwhelming amount of output”, “99% of the time it does the right thing in the right way” and we are basically wired for vigilance to flag.
vigilantpuma··on The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
Applying judgment is much harder when the amount of stuff that theoretically needs judgment is not actually processable by humans. I don’t want to throw my hands up and give up but I honestly haven’t found a middle ground that works.
vigilantpuma··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
Isn’t it odd to feel excluded when a female speaker addresses a group of women as “guys?” Whom is she including, if it excludes women?
vigilantpuma··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
I’m lumping you in with a broader movement, it’s true, but I think it’s disingenuous to pretend like no one out there is trying to eradicate “guys.” Maybe you personally aren’t, but a lot of people are agitating for not using it preemptively because you might make someone feel excluded etc.

What do you think of the scenario in which you ask someone to stop using “guys” when you’re around, and they comply but think less of you going forward?

vigilantpuma··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
Yeah, there are no efforts to curtail freedom of speech and get people to obsessively self-police in China.
vigilantpuma··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
I have not been able to bring myself to use y’all, it just seems so fake and performative. I am not a southerner, why am I y’alling people?
vigilantpuma··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
> I think if you want people to give you the grace to form your own opinions of others, you need to be comfortable with us forming an opinion of you.

This is both trivially true (I recognize that everyone has the right to form their own opinions of everything) and still counter to things I assume you believe (such as: people shouldn’t make assumptions about others based on their gender or skin color).

I do want you to think differently. I want you to think that people who continue to use a phrase widely considered to be gender neutral are not in fact your enemies. Some of them probably are your allies.

For what it’s worth, if I knew you in real life and you made that preference known to me, I would try to respect it, but that respect would depend on the closeness of our relationship. It’s hard to remember every preference of someone you meet once every two months, but I don’t like to be an asshole and try to respect the preferences of people I interact with.

The problem though is that somewhere along the line, continuing to use “you guys” became a sort of reverse shibboleth among a certain set of people who try to use things like whether someone uses “you guys” or whether they have their pronouns set on their profile to determine whether they are allies or, presumably, enemies. And yeah, I do object to that sort of mindset.

vigilantpuma··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
I would be concerned that if I ask them to take a bunch of small steps they will marvel at my chutzpah for asking them to take a big one.
vigilantpuma··on CorridorKey 2.0
What a dystopian view.

For what it’s worth, there have famous actors for literally thousands of years. As to “nothing but puppets,” the idea that actors bring nothing to the table and everything is just down to the director seems like a very self-aggrandizing thing to believe if you’re a director.

vigilantpuma··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
I think pursuing things like the eradication of an expression that is genuinely considered gender neutral by large swaths of people is the sort of thing that loses you goodwill for the big stuff.

I’m sorry that you find it exclusionary. What I find exclusionary is people telling me that it’s justifiable to think less of me for using that term, or comparing continuing to use the term to their grandmother who still uses the N word.

For what it’s worth I have stopped using “you guys” at work except for in “safe spaces” because I don’t want to deal with this sort of judgement. But I find the “it costs you nothing!” defense of word policing to be completely unconvincing.

vigilantpuma··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
This really feels like splitting hairs.

As a woman in this industry, being told that using “guys” to address mixed groups is non-inclusive/insufficiently considerate/worth thinking less of me for (just wow) is much worse than being addressed by “guys” when I’m in a mixed group.

Like… we have real problems with equality in tech, right?

vigilantpuma··on Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce
“I wish I had spent more time on my business” is totally different from “my work gives me a sense of purpose and makes me feel like I’m contributing.”
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