throwaway57023

It's funny how people, especially Americans, talk about race as if it were an unchanging construct. You see swathes of scientific literature classifying people into races even though the classifications are inconsistent. So you get whites and blacks and asians and... native Americans I guess? Sometimes Hispanics count as separate, sometimes they don't. Arabs were white until 9/11. As for Pacific Islanders, well they're probably too far away to matter. But even the classification, the very concept of 'whiteness' changes across time - as the article suggests - and space - you may be considered white in the US but not in Europe, white in Brazil but not in the US, etc. It's almost as if one's racial identity only made sense insofar as it was percieved by contemporary society. It's almost as if - and this should be the 'aha' moment - race was a...social...construct.

Who should be responsible of deciding if anyone is indecent or inclusive? Are decency and inclusivity even real?

Stallman's advocating of an extreme ideology and it permeating the otherwise extremely capitalist tech world is in fact the only good thing he did in his career.

Writing code in research is quite different from writing code in industry. For starters, in research, absolutely no one will read your code. Not your boss, not your peer reviewers, not your colleagues, not your tech-savvy users. No one. They just care about getting the right results and will complain if they don't, which most of the time steers you into producing correct code.

Also, most programs usually have a maintainer team that's exactly one (1) person strong, and that person is usually an underpaid grad student or postdoc with a billion other tasks at hand and not much time left for that issue you opened three months ago.

On the other hand, hey, you never have to fear the dreaded 'code review', so it's not all bad.

I came here expecting a report on the (very real) issues with the current publication system in academia, such as a few publishing houses extorting enormous amounts of money off researchers and ultimately taxpayers, the flaws of the traditional peer review system, the over-reliance on impact factor and other such metrics, publish or perish, etc. Instead it's just yet another giant rant about the evil essjaydoubleus. But then I shouldn't have expected any better from a website whose pitch is "scientists are too left-wing so we made our own science".