Not only do I think you're right, I think put this way it seems obvious - I am almost heaving a sigh of relief having a better historical comparison than "the dot com bubble".
Every point of friction, every struggle documented in minute detail, on a long and bumpy path to some kind of result. The stakes are zero, the whole project an act of pure expression. It is like a kind of oasis in a desert of articles about new ML models. I don't mind that HN is all about new models all the time now, but content like this being on the front page is soothing.
Here in the UK there is an ongoing debate happening more or less behind the scenes around the language that should be used for families of patients nearing end of life. The standard question is: Should we "do everything possible" to keep someone alive? The proposed better question is: Should we "allow natural death"? Any doctor understands intimately that these two questions are equivalent. Understandably, the average person doesn't. Why wouldn't you "do everything possible"? In most of these conversations the argument against just doesn't come up.
This is what neutral language sounds like. It sounds to me like you'd prefer to pretend these people don't exist. I'd like to remind you that male homosexuality was illegal in UK as recently as 1967. Section 28 was in force up until 2003. Same sex marriage was illegal until 2014. The ideology you are seeing in this job ad is liberal democracy. The ideology you are defending is something else entirely, and very much not a form of neutrality.
I disagree with the neutral language, this is what some people (including me) would call "woke agenda".
Not all LGB people support the expansion to include TQ+ issues. Nor some of the side-effects e.g. women athletes forced to compete against men. Or a women-owned gym in Germany that was fined because the owner didn't want to allow males in the women-only space.
There is no disdain for "these people" (or groups, as a poster above suggested) and some of this people exist in my own live too, but disagreement about what is appropriate and neutral in a job ad, particularly of a charity which receives?/received public funding.
Genuinely curious: what makes you think the moral panic around trans people is structurally different to the moral panic around gay people decades ago? All the arguments you've made here are more or less identical to arguments made to keep homosexuality illegal previously.
For me it's not about morality, anything goes afaic.
My arguments were that biological men can enter women spaces, even though some women are not ok with that. Or compete in women's sports, violating fairness as male/female bodies are different. Or cases like the female gym-owner who was fined.
I don't think such laws existed or were being pushed for with homosexuality previously? That debate was more about what adults do in their private live.
Drag queens, yes, but no legal system which allowed a man to almost instantly become a lawful women (Germany had a "famous" such case..). I like simple, friendly programming languages. The same goes for law and common sense (~trans violates this somewaht).
"Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before age eighteen." Attributed to Einstein 1948.
I realise this is the Internet, and it's not for me to convince you of anything. But you've formed an opinion on what is normal and "neutral" strong enough to bring it to a thread about something else online. Is that opinion informed, or received?
For example, you say: trans women can compete in sport with cis women, and that is unfair. Is it? I don't see an a priori answer either way. I certainly don't think banning the "promotion" of trans people in public is a viable solution.
While my common sense may be a collection of old prejudices, some have surely changed over time. I suspect that my opinions are informed and received. Reading newspapers, discussing things with friends, HN, books. A lot of influences. And then I muse on what makes sense, who is compassionate and what is important atm. Perhaps common sense a bit like Treebeard: deeply rooted but able to walk.
> I don't see an a priori answer either way
Fair enough. But my common, naive sense would say, cis/trans bodies are objectively different (and this settles it in my favour ;-)). -- I'll stop here, public hn for this subjects is too demanding for me, I might fall over Queers for Palestine or Druids for Israel and become unwell...
Enjoy? No, but a lot of reading and writing is very functional, for communication purposes for business etc. (documentation is a good example). In these cases the important thing is that it's accurate.
I absolutely love post-Roman, pre-Norman British writing because it's so rare it gives the era a sense of mystery. This is of course the time when King Arthur is supposed to have lived. In the absence of contemporary records, the impulse to fill it with wizards and dragons is understandable.
As someone who has had to do some grub editing on the computer in an AirBnB because peripherals were all messed up on the guest account (no internet, no sound, you could only see a tiny part of the screen, I honestly don't know how they had managed to do it) I am super pleased to see this resource. Stuff like this is a bit, you know, hopefully you never need this, but when you do, it is so useful to have it.
I think this is maybe the most important point in this entire thing. It's not just tech. Things change. The funny thing is things change now faster than ever before, yet we still have that tendency not to notice while we're in it which we always have had. To be honest it's part of why I tend to try to put some bits about tech history in my blog posts - it puts a perspective on life more generally which helps me psychologically.
I think this is a really important distinction to make. The OP seems to be making a fallacious equivocation on the word "parameter" - specifically, any individual "parameter" in a large ML model has no unit of measurement because it doesn't mean anything on its own. I watched a great documentary about the "Soft Hair on Black Holes" paper where they talk about having to move from the blackboard to the computer because the equation explodes into thousand of parameters - the key thing to understand being that each of those parameters represents some "real" thing, a momentum, a charge, a curvature, etc.
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