Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub

https://github.com/github/gitignore/pull/4029

by gjsman-1000 • 4 years ago

163 202 4 years ago

Is this what we've come to? Robotic dogs barking reminders to not use the word 'man'? My social credit is going to tank, as my father named me Manny.

tjpnz3• 4 years ago

It made so persony mistakes too..

canbus3• 4 years ago

That's funny, man

SwiftyBug• 4 years ago

No way this isn't an April 1st joke

deanebarker• 4 years ago

No, it's been around for about a week now.

gjsman-10002• 4 years ago

Long enough there is a "Human Exclusive Robot" that solely exists to refute the Gender-Inclusive Robot by automatically replying to everything the GIR posts on with a post refuting it and asking contributors to close the issue and ban GIR.

gwbas1c2• 4 years ago

IMO, it would be hard to do this all at once.

Also, don't forget time zone skew: Your March 31, 22:00 can be April 1 somewhere else.

rvz• 4 years ago

Of course. Can only be on GitHub.

dekhn• 4 years ago

It's this repo that implements the bot; https://github.com/inclusive-coding-bot/bot

I'm not sure who is responsible for it.

tomlockwood14• 4 years ago

Who's upvoting this garbage? A poorly coded bot submitted some bad pull requests and this is news?

SpicyLemonZest6• 4 years ago

I upvoted because this isn't the only bot, it's a big public example of a trend I've seen. We've had two different new hires try to set up Slack bots with autoresponse complaints whenever someone says "guys", and now I know it's not just some weird idea they both happened to have.

tomlockwood14• 4 years ago

You know one of the reasons you see the "trend" is people keep upvoting tiny things like this.

gaws3• 4 years ago

We've had two different new hires try to set up Slack bots with autoresponse complaints whenever someone says "guys", and now I know it's not just some weird idea they both happened to have.

Why are new hires allowed to make bots on a company Slack server. Take away their privileges. Problem solved.

etchalon• 4 years ago

Ah, but you see it's something something Orwellian something something

outsb• 4 years ago

I upvoted it as a curiosity. The idea of a cultural agenda-signalling bot loose on GitHub actively breaking code and documentation sparks quite a few feelings. Some questions arise, such as whether or not any of the projects receiving contributions from the bot are improved in any material (technical, inclusiveness) way. It's quite common that absolutely the wrong thing gets done in the name of some noble cause, seems this is a fine example of that.

tomlockwood14• 4 years ago

I upvoted it as a curiosity. The idea of a cultural agenda-signalling bot loose on GitHub actively breaking code and documentation sparks quite a few feelings.

How widespread and impactful is this problem?

gwbas1c2• 4 years ago

Because it looks like an entertaining April Fool's day prank.

anonymousab2• 4 years ago

It's a curiosity, it's funny, and it lightly touches on a modern theme/discussion around language and terminology in software development.

Not every article/submission needs to be some big, serious new thing.

faridelnasire2• 4 years ago

It's apparently already breaking a few people's compilers, check the 2nd comment on the PR.

tomlockwood14• 4 years ago

If a bot that creates poorly conceived PRs can break someone's code they have bigger issues than any of the ones implied by the upvoting here.

phailhaus• 4 years ago

This is a hilarious April Fools joke, and so many people are falling for it.

EDIT: Damn, the PRs did not go up today.

alephxyz2• 4 years ago

Have a look at the timestamps...

bmelton5• 4 years ago

The PR is from 2 days ago

jasode• 4 years ago

This is a hilarious April Fools joke, and so many people are falling for it.

Why would it be an obvious April Fools joke if the timestamps in the referenced github thread are March 30 and March 31 ?

nsxwolf2• 4 years ago

Given that we are only talking about it today, it seems it was timed perfectly. If we didn't notice until the 2nd or 3rd, the joke would be ruined.

gaws3• 4 years ago

An April Fool's joke, in 2022, doesn't need to happen right on April 1.

api2• 4 years ago

It's no longer possible to tell satire from reality.

trevcanhuman• 4 years ago

As veggietales [0] once said, "In the future, entertainment will be randomly generated."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4Ph02gzqmY

rolobio2• 4 years ago

Reminds me of the guy stuck in the wework elevator [1]. Bots don't understand human.

[1] https://i.redd.it/wqld5v9s5ln81.jpg

civilized• 4 years ago

Hi! "guy" is a gendered pronoun. We recommend alternatives such as...

mavsman• 4 years ago

PR creation should be limited to hupersons

rolobio2• 4 years ago

I'm not so sure. The dependabot has been helpful on occasion, when it doesn't spam me too much.

535188B17C937432• 4 years ago

This would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

laputan_machine2• 4 years ago

This "use the words I tell you to use or else you're a bigot" rhetoric is getting really stale, really fast.

Edit: I think this might be a terrible attempt at satire, e.g. the website is: https://inclusivecoding.wixsite.com/home

hwers2• 4 years ago

What about that site makes you think it's satire?

laputan_machine2• 4 years ago

Perhaps 'satire' is the wrong word, but it feels 'off' somehow. I can't quite put it into words

I will say that the repo that the bot is using is absolutely whack, https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/gender-inclusive-lang...

replaces 'mother' with 'parent', 'boyfriend' with 'consort', 'maiden voyage' with 'first voyage'. What a strange world.

sadmanycases2• 4 years ago

Good satire is often indistinguishable from the real thing.

abledon• 4 years ago

stock photos with stuff like 'love equals love'.

thrown together on a quick'n'dirty templating site (Wix)

their blog https://inclusivecoding.wixsite.com/home/blog gives 5 tips, but then lists '4' twice

mseepgood• 4 years ago

I'd say it's a false-flag operation by someone who doesn't like inclusive language.

crdrost• 4 years ago

I only think I see one thing that stands out...

For example, instead of using using the term "Bachelor" or "Bachelorette", this term can be replaced with the word gender-neutral word "Baccalaureate".

This is a substitution that only makes sense in the context of college degrees and even then only barely. (One would not describe a Bachelor of Science degree as a gendered thing, and say that a woman has a Bachelorette of Science degree or so.) A serious website would have recommended a plain word like “unmarried” or “single,” rather than such a strange construct.

cato_the_elder6• 4 years ago

terrible attempt at satire

If it is indeed satire, I think it's actually pretty good. It demonstrates the absurdity of the situation with minimal exaggeration.

slothtrop3• 4 years ago

Agreed, if satire manages to push buttons then it's doing great.

raunak• 4 years ago

You guys are all being absurdly ridiculous. I don't know why programmers make such reaches when the answer is much simpler.

University student looking for easy side project to create and put on resume decides to go with "inclusive language bot", doesn't actually put in effort beyond wix site and ridiculously simple bot, boom. That's all this is.

tomlockwood14• 4 years ago

Yeah, the amount of moralistic tutting and vitriol in this thread is ridiculous. And ironically the same people would complain about moralistic tutting and vitriol.

tjpnz3• 4 years ago

You're probably right about it being an exercise in resume building, and that's totally fine. But then they unleashed their creation on projects as prominent as Rust. If you're looking for that kind of exposure you might want to spend twenty minutes testing the code first.

KennyBlanken2• 4 years ago

I think it's more likely to be the project of a near-retirement-age programmer who is outraged at all the "social justice warriors running amock" and created the project to mock people working on inclusiveness, generate blowback at them, and misrepresent their movement to de-legitimize them. Sort of like how in the 50's and 60's everyone ran around screaming about how feminists were "kill all men" commie baby-stealers.

It's working. Look at all the comments here full of outrage at how "PC" everything has gotten etc...by people who clearly have no idea what the actual majority of people pushing for inclusive language are typically suggesting and shy.

You see this a lot from conservative/right-wing types, because it's a lot easier to strawman and ad-hominem someone pushing for inclusiveness based on empathy than it is to present a legitimate argument.

There really isn't a legitimate counter-argument to "can we please work to discontinue using 'master' and 'slave' to describe things in computer science and electronics" so people just run to "THIS IS ABSURD!"

alephxyz2• 4 years ago

Looking at the contribution history of that bot's repos, I believe you're correct. Appears to just be a single student attempting to pad their resume by issuing PRs to the largest repos on GitHub.

ricardobeat• 4 years ago

This level of language policing puzzles me. It literally wants to replace 'mother' and 'father' with 'parent', 'son' with 'child'. I thought we wanted the world to be more tolerant, not more authoritarian.

gjsman-10002• 4 years ago

The bot's dumbest mistake so far was when it replaced "mother" and "father" objects in a Rust struct with "person" and "person". That won't compile...

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

I think trying to replace "man" as in manual with "person" was stupider.

ziml772• 4 years ago

The dumbest mistake was changing pronouns that refer to specific people. So much for respecting people's own pronouns!

edflsafoiewq• 4 years ago

I like that it replaces French "son" with "child".

woodruffw2• 4 years ago

In what meaningful sense of the word is a third-party, anonymously-created (and apparently buggy) bot "authoritarian"?

This reeks of artificial engagement. HN should avoid buying into it.

xeromal3• 4 years ago

You don't want to wait to the last minute to stop something. If you see an accident forming from afar, you start reacting now.

This bot may be a "joke" but it represents the thought police and the author should be sternly reprimanded.

cato_the_elder6• 4 years ago

Well, if we pretend that it's just this single instance, it probably isn't.

But this is part of a cultural phenomenon, unless you want to argue that wokism doesn't exist.

sadmanycases2• 4 years ago

Power Politics suck and now it’s hard to distinguish genuine concern from authoritarian horseshit.

canbus3• 4 years ago

it's a never-ending rabbithole. 'Guardian' is probably more inclusive than 'parent', even...

What I really want to know is how whoever is trying to force it deals with languages with grammatical genders.

grishka3• 4 years ago

My native language is Russian. There are three grammatical genders, but only two of them are used for sentient beings, to talk about someone in the neutral gender is derogatory af (not that it stops people — I've seen one person call themselves "оно"). Other than this extremely rare occasion, everyone is 100% okay with using gendered words because those are the only ones we have. Hell, we don't even have the word "sibling", it's either a brother or a sister.

But we do have another similar phenomenon going on. Feminitives. It's when some people assign the female gender to words that don't have a female form, or that do have one but it's not cringy enough. So автор becomes авторка, врач becomes врачка (instead of врачиха), учитель becomes учителька (instead of учительница), and so on.

gurkendoktor3• 4 years ago

German unfortunately has no equivalent of singular they. The concept is a non-starter because "they" and "she" are both "sie". The new PC spelling is to always write he*she or he:she instead of he/she to make room for nonbinary people, which doesn't make any sense to me. We still don't have a pronoun to refer to nonbinary people, we can only include them if we're not sure of someone's gender. Yay?

What I found interesting about this particular bot is that it wants to replace "actress" by "actor". (Yes please!! You don't know how good you have it in English, where most occupations are gender-neutral.)

In contrast, the current progressive push in German is to replace generic/masculine Schauspieler (actor) with der*die Schauspieler*in (think "actr*ess"; male, female, and everything in between, a bit like latinx). Maybe it makes sense that German has a tendency to become ever more complicated like C++, while English becomes simpler? But it shows how fad-driven this whole thing is: Either gendered nouns are good or bad, why would it depend on the language?

slothtrop3• 4 years ago

They mostly don't, this is an anglosphere obsession. Which is why you'll hear of a device like "latinx" from anglos, but literally nothing else that actually pertains to the way Spanish people speak.

535188B17C937432• 4 years ago

The thing is, sometimes specificity is required (and helpful). Nothing about gender neutrality is inherently more inclusive IMO. And it's annoying to correct colloquialisms like "guys" as if it's meant with ill intent instead of just being a part of our collective vernacular for DECADES.

slothtrop3• 4 years ago

Remember when "tone policing" was a buzzword? As a way of saying "don't criticize my snark or vitriol", i.e. the language used.

sam36• 4 years ago

Well everyone has a preference. Personally, I don't really care about my pronouns. But my preferred adjectives are 'smart', 'clever', 'clean', and 'elegant'. Please only refer to me using those.

silicon2401• 4 years ago

Political correctness can't succeed without authoritarian control

maxbond2• 4 years ago

This isn't (sincere) policing, it's a troll account. Let's not take the bait. There are people (myself among them) who would like us to start using "main" instead of "master" and "allowlist" instead of "whitelist", but there is not a preponderance of people who think "boyfriend" is problematic or that "consort" is it's PC equivalent.

redmen• 4 years ago

I still don't understand why changing the language to main makes society better in any way except to make us feel like we are making progress and hiding the fact that we are not. Maybe it causes us to pat ourselves on the back and not actually deal with the infected roots of our culture and societies?

Whitelist may be a bit different. I understand that language shapes how we think, but master seems like it would trigger people who have a but of a victim mentality. It's like the word dick, it has a meaning outside of genitals, and if all we can think about is genitals when the word is spoken maybe the problem lies a bit deeper than the word itself.

I don't know.. with whitelist and blacklist I could see how unconsciously that could cause people to see black as bad and white as good. But still.

Everything has tradeoffs and I also believe that Obama led to Trump. Too much change too quickly leads to backlash and the pendulum swinging violently in the other direction.

This increases polarization.

I think the solution is more likely not in trying to force our language to change, but is to change our technologies and culture into one that promotes empathy, listening and understanding, and for us to count our blessings instead of running around seeing who can be the better victim, which as a non-american, is what USA looks like to me.

If anything the language is more of a symptom of culture than the other way around, even though I agree there is a bidirectional relationship.

Hormones change our thoughts more than our thoughts change our hormones, even though there is a bidirection there as well. But to me, to attempt to change culture through language is going to be as effective as trying to will ourselves out of anxiety and depression.

I wouldn't be surprised if our generation simply feels powerless in this world. We face a lot of issues ranging from inequality to climate change, and since those issues seem so depressing and insurmountable instead we go on a war against what we feel like we can change, for example words, and then justify to ourselves that this is actually making enough of a difference to steer the ship. But is there any proof of that? All I see is feelings-based decision making without any actual evidence.

Again, aside from blacklist vs whitelist which might actually have some substance to its argument.

glouwbug• 4 years ago

HN doesn’t do April Fools very well I see

nucleogenesis• 4 years ago

Ah yes the classic authoritarianism of suggesting that you use words inclusive of every kind of person… the horror.

It literally wants to replace gender specific language with gender neutral language it’s literally like 1930s Germany… jfc

SllX• 4 years ago

1930s Germany is not the low-water mark for authoritarian thoughts and actions. You can get to authoritarianism long before you get to actual Nazism.

stjohnswarts3• 4 years ago

so what don't you do that in all your writings, code, etc and educate others. You won't get anyone to do it by nagging others or trying to get the government to impose gender neutrality into everything.

gitfan86• 4 years ago

LOL. I may start telling people to check the personual page when they ask about linux commands

moritzruth• 4 years ago

*compersonds

endisneigh9• 4 years ago

Is switching to gender neutral pronouns bad? That being said the bot is pretty poorly coded.

Think you’d need something more sophisticated to do it properly. It might actually be intractable to do this (limiting to just man/woman and she/he replacement) in a way they introduces no false positives.

On that note these sorts of bots should be opt-in not opt-out.

solids• 4 years ago

The real question is, "is it good"? I don't like to merge PR's just because.

endisneigh9• 4 years ago

Well it depends on whether or not subscribe to the belief that gender exclusive language introduces bias.

jhgb4• 4 years ago

It's neutral. As per de Saussure, just like pretty much any feature of the language besides onomatopoeia, they're arbitrary. You could call a computer 'a spedhlurf" and it would be neither better nor worse.

beepbooptheory2• 4 years ago

This is not quite the right thing to take away from Saussure! In the absence of true signifieds, signifiers are "arbitrary" in the sense of the classical model, but that very thing opens up a huge number of questions about how these relations are formed and enforced, in the absence of substantial nodes. In the absence of signifieds, there can only be, in a broad sense, enforcement, or "rules" to language games that form and disform as society changes, in a more Wittgenstein/Cavell sense.

Saussure would absolutely be on the side of questioning our use of language because the effects it has, he is probably the biggest early intellectual source for these discussions.

Saussure would laugh quite a bit at everyone's extreme defensiveness in this thread. So many people scared of losing their signifieds that never really existed in the first place. Consider precisely what everyone is so angry about, such that GP is being downvoted so much, it is a faith in a ground that is only a illusion, at the cost of discussions and progress that only aspire to help people. Sad!

anonymousab2• 4 years ago

The bot just does a naive string replace, which means it's generating a bunch of nonsensical PRs with completely broken code and silly substitutions like "manual" -> "personual".

It's also unclear if it's an April Fool's joke, or a glib protest at gender neutral language initiatives, or if it's just a well-intentioned bot with a poor implementation.

the_only_law• 4 years ago

Something similar has already been done a while back with all the predictable whining and bitching from the HN comment section one before.

I don’t remember if it was automated PRs lime this though, or if it was copy/paste PR templates with real people submitting them.

bmelton5• 4 years ago

Maybe, maybe not, but replacing "man page" to "person page" to submit a breaking PR probably is?

Note that "man page" is an abbreviation of "manual," which etymologically derives from 'manus' (Latin for "hand") and "al" (roughly, "pertaining to"). Arguendo, one could object to 'manual' being the de facto implementation as it is gendered male. Manumal could be a workable neuter representation, but "man page" avoids the Latin gender preference altogether.

endisneigh9• 4 years ago

I’m not sure what you’re going on about - we’re in agreement that the bot in question doesn’t even do what it purports to do well at all.

The question isn’t whether the bot in OP is good, it’s not, it’s whether or not switching to gender neutral language is useful or not.

cato_the_elder6• 4 years ago

Is switching to gender neutral pronouns bad?

Yes, it is bad (and of course that's not the only thing the bot is doing). Many of us find this kind of manipulative browbeating distasteful.

endisneigh9• 4 years ago

The bot aside why do you believe gender neutral pronouns are bad?

speedgoose• 4 years ago

Some bots are simply terrible.

(And I’m definitely not posting this comment to help this HN post getting kicked out of the front page thanks to the flameware filter).

ricardo81• 4 years ago

Someone mentioned this being an April fool's joke, to be honest nowadays it's hard to tell if it would be (I'm 40 years old so see-sawing as old).

I guess if code needs to be gender inclusive there's a few spoken languages in the world that need to get rid of their gender specific grammar. I say that as a monolingual Scot.

Diesel555• 4 years ago

I guess if code needs to be gender inclusive there's a few spoken languages in the world that need to get rid of their gender specific grammar. I say that as a monolingual Scot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx

Watching who is using Latinx, Hispanic, or Latino/Latina in political discourse in the United States has been interesting.

As of 2018 the term Latinx was used nearly exclusively in the United States.
A 2019 poll (with a 5% margin of error) found that 2% of US residents of Latin American descent in the US use Latinx, including 3% of 18–34-year-olds; the rest preferred other terms. "No respondents over [age] 50 selected the term", while overall "3% of women and 1% of men selected the term as their preferred ethnic identifier".
Supporters say it promotes greater acceptance of non-binary Latinos by being gender-neutral and thus inclusive of all genders. Critics say the term does not follow traditional grammar, is difficult to pronounce, and is disrespectful toward conventional Spanish; the Royal Spanish Academy style guide does not recognize the suffix -x. Both supporters and opponents have cited linguistic imperialism as a reason for supporting or opposing the use of the term.

Akronymus• 4 years ago

Having talked to quite a few spanish speakers, latinx is pretty much unpronounceable in spanish.

e2le• 4 years ago

This is fantastic, I can just imagine it now. Typing `person journalctl` instead of `man journalctl`, truly a step toward to a more gender inclusive society.

tjpnz3• 4 years ago

Please don't say that too loudly.

smoldesu• 4 years ago

In that case, maybe manpages -> yellowpages? Come to think of it, I'm not sure many people would appreciate that joke either...

moron123• 4 years ago

I wish this were an April Fools joke, but sadly, it's real.

Reminds me of when they changed the factory_girl gem to factory_bot.

Many, many, many hours wasted in service to the idea that women found factory_girl to be offensive, which had less than 0 evidence to it.

phkahler• 4 years ago

Well at least it seems to have eclipsed the trend of changing "master" repository branches to "main".

ziml772• 4 years ago

People will find a way to interpret anything with gender as offensive. Like people complain about the default voice of assistants like Siri being female, saying that female was picked because people want women to be subservient to them. But if you made those assistants male voiced by default, it could still be spun as being misogynist with a reason like: people think men are more intelligent and therefore want a man to answer their questions.

Seems that Apple realized that they can't win with either of those as the default, so now the default voice is one that's intended to be ambiguous.

api2• 4 years ago

Change everything to y'all. Turns out the South has a perfect gender neutral pronoun.

msandford• 4 years ago

Joke's on you! Y'all is double extra un good because it's a Southern thing.

geogra4• 4 years ago

It's Terrible at its Job too. Theylps, personuel, and theirsestorical are not words

nn3• 4 years ago

Reminds me when i had to work with a Unix illiterate tech writer who changed ever y use of "man page" in a document to "main page"

danpalmer• 4 years ago

Looks like this bot is falling afoul of the Scunthorpe problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

______-_-______• 4 years ago

I am offended by this blatant speciesism. This is the internet, how do you know I'm not a dog?

koonsolo• 4 years ago

Dogs would not be offended by that

Edit: I just remembered: dogs are man's best friend :D

medvezhenok• 4 years ago

*Dogs are person's best friend.

avgcorrection• 4 years ago

The replacements are hilariously bad.

“helps” → “theylps”

“Un manuel de Metapos” → “Un personuel de Metapost”

cabirum• 4 years ago

To prevent spam, github should not allow bots to interact with repos by default.

It's up to repo owner to opt-in PRs, issues, comments, etc made by bots. Maaybe also add whitelists.

vlttnv• 4 years ago

Why did the title of the post change? It doesn't reflect what's on the page.

hwers2• 4 years ago

Seems like it might be satire after all. The bot follows and is followed by this account @exclusive-human-programmer, which has the following content in their readme: https://github.com/exclusive-human-programmer/exclusive-huma...

ninjin• 4 years ago

I think someone deserves to have a stern talking to by GitHub or maybe even a temporary or permanent ban. Wasting other people’s time like this intentionally really is using your account for something indistinguishable from spam.

liamN• 4 years ago

This is a testament to needing to test your code for edge-cases before deploying. And if it doesnt work how you intended... dont deploy.

WithinReason• 4 years ago

I for one applaud these efforts. Herstory will look at this day as the day when hupersonity took a step into the future. One step for person, a giant leap for personkind!

shantnutiwari• 4 years ago

Replaces

help with theylp
many with persony

breaks working code

And no, its not an April fools joke-- some of the PRS were sent 2-3 days ago

Flankk• 4 years ago

These people exclude themselves by not participating in a healthy and well structured society. If your main problem in life is you can't conform to social norms, perhaps you shouldn't be telling others to conform.

dleavitt• 4 years ago

HN should use this thread as a honeypot and ban anyone who commented without understand that this is parody.

t0bia_s• 4 years ago

Nice april fools.

gaws3• 4 years ago

It's an April Fool's joke, and anyone getting mad about it fell for the ruse.

timwis• 4 years ago

It’s helpful to remember when reading these comments how overwhelmingly male the user base of HN is.

Obviously whoever made this didn’t intend for it to replace a reference to “manual.” This is a silly bug.

But the idea behind the project is not silly. Defaulting to male pronouns and references happens all the time in our industry, and it has an impact.

And using gender-neutral language costs nothing.

smsm423• 4 years ago

I thought it's a mediocre April 1 joke, but turns out it was done before today.

It replaces "helps" with "theylps" and "many" with "persony". Yes really.

I mean if you are going to virtue signal, at least you could bother to check out decades of accumulated experience on the topic. It's not like the first time such things are discussed. If it's a satire, it's lazy. If it's for real, inexcusable as anything beyond elementary school "first coding exercise" level.

rdiddly• 4 years ago

Clbuttic.

joshspankit2• 4 years ago

I enjoyed my time laughing at the substitutions

Click on these badges to see how you might be able to theylp

Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub

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