There was a pull request to change “he” to “they” somewhere in the code and the dev refused, saying people should leave “their politics” out of it. I wouldn’t say it’s transphobic specifically - it may also be misogynistic. Either way, it doesn’t look good.
i can offer some context to that, but first let’s clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.
the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by “code of conduct” PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it’s not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they’re not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.
anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn’t show each change, it just shows “n files changed, +n lines -n lines”, and a description talking about “gender-neutral language”. now, kling is not a “typical” developer. he’s a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don’t know what that’s like, but i imagine it means you don’t have a lot of mental overhead for things you don’t want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn’t want to deal with it.
it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.
For citations, the only references I see to “pronouns” in their github project is in a section called “Human language policy” in CONTRIBUTING.md (link). Here’s the relevant part:
In Ladybird, we treat human language as seriously as we do programming language. The following applies to all user-facing strings, code, comments, and commit messages: … Use gender-neutral pronouns, except when referring to a specific person.
That sounds pretty cash-money to me.
There’s one additional reference in a pull request discussing whether or not to use “we” when referring to recommendations of the engineering team (as in “we recommend” vs “it is recommended”). Minutia.
I’m not as interested in litigating this matter than I am in putting it to bed (along with any and all definitive citations and evidence such that I can refer back to this comment thread in the future when the question inevitably comes up again.)
Thanks for the context - I still intensely dislike the “political” reaction, but people can learn and change. I also don’t like that Canadian arch-jackass Tobi Lutke is a major supporter of the project; he’s a bit like Brendan Eich. I’ll reserve judgment until the browser launches. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it.
I honestly don’t understand the hate here. I get that he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that’s terrible, but I’ve also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla. I honestly think he would’ve been a better CEO at Mozilla because he’s interested in the tech. His largest problem was making a personal contribution with his own money to an unpopular cause, and someone dug it up looking for dirt.
Isn’t that exactly how people should act? Leave your politics at home and work well with others. I work in a diverse group with a mix of immigrants, likely gay people, atheists and religious types, Trump supporters and critics, and even a couple furries. None of that matters and we work well together. In fact, most of the turnover we’ve had has been over compensation because our company has been stingy recently, and they all say they wouldn’t have considered leaving otherwise.
You can disagree on very important things and still work well together, it’s called professionalism. I dislike Eich’s views, but I believe he had way more professionalism than his loudest critics.
In a business setting, it’s called “professionalism”, and in a personal setting it’s called being a nice person. Most of my family is against gay marriage and don’t believe in gender fluidity, yet when my sister in law said her child is non-binary and would like to be referred to with they/then, they complied. Why? Believing those things doesn’t mean you hate LGBT people, it just means you disagree about policy. They love my sister in law and her kids, so they’ll do what they can to help them feel comfortable around them and want to participate in family gatherings.
I personally believe strongly that marriage should be available to all consenting adults, but I also believe gay marriage goes against God’s plan. Why? I believe everyone has the right to make their own choices and whether that’s acceptable to God isn’t my business. Maybe I’m misreading things, IDK, but my personal religious beliefs only guide my personal decisions and I believe I am supposed to love everyone regardless of their lifestyle. Whether someone else is sinning isn’t really my business, nor should it impact my love for them. And maybe they’re not sinning, again, IDK, it’s not my business.
I support same sex marriage (my church doesn’t) because I believe in freedom of choice, and that policy merely increases options for others and doesn’t decrease mine. Likewise for most LGBT policies, like bathroom use or gender change on IDs, you do you. We had an LGBT candidate at work (pretty obviously trans), and I was happily surprised that wasn’t an issue for my very conservative coworker during the interview (they’re an observant Muslim with conservative social views), and I went out of my way to make sure we both corrected for any subconscious bias we might have.
I don’t know Brendan Eich, maybe he’s actually a terrible person, idk. What I do know is he had a long career at Mozilla (nearly 20 years), and there were no public complaints about him until he was chosen as CEO. From all accounts, people were only mad about his $1k donation to prop 8, not about his conduct at work or anything of that nature. The board even asked him to stay in another capacity, but he left because he loved Mozilla and obviously he wasn’t able to be an effective leader if his presence encouraged people to recommend against using Firefox and other Mozilla products.
To me, it’s a crazy overreaction, he donated a pretty modest amount one time, six years prior, and had no complaints during his position as CTO. He absolutely got brigaded because someone decided to dig up donation records. If they didn’t, he probably would’ve been a successful CEO and refocused on the tech, instead of whatever nonsense the follow-up CEOs have been doing.
I disagree with Eich’s political views, but also think he was the best person for the CEO role. He seemed like a competent professional, and he was certainly technically competent given his long technical career at Mozilla.
I also believe gay marriage goes against God’s plan
I support same sex marriage (my church doesn’t) because I believe in freedom of choice
I applaud you for supporting same-sex marriage, but - apologies if this sounds like I’m picking on you, I’m really not - this is like someone who claims to be a young-earth creationist but agrees that radiocarbon dating is accurate. I don’t understand how these mutually-exclusive thoughts can happily coexist in your mind. I wish we could discuss this over a drink because I’m very intrigued by whatever epistemic process led you there.
Most of my family is against gay marriage and don’t believe in gender fluidity, yet when my sister in law said her child is non-binary and would like to be referred to with they/then, they complied.
no, that’s fucked up… less fucked up than making a big deal of it, but it shows a huge lack of empathy… people close to them that they know quite well are validating that non binary people exist - that it’s not just people “looking for attention” and all that other garbage that people throw out there and they still don’t think they should be treated with respect and as equals by society
that’s “i don’t respect you but i don’t want to make a scene”
this is why the rate of self harm in the queer scene is so fuck high… because families suddenly don’t respect people they’ve know and loved their entire lives
yeah that ties in to my other comment; it’s not political in american english culture (well it is, but only to chuds), but other countries don’t have the same context for this stuff. and when those cultural barriers are crossed without knowing the differences, there is bound to be friction.
There was a pull request to change “he” to “they” somewhere in the code and the dev refused, saying people should leave “their politics” out of it. I wouldn’t say it’s transphobic specifically - it may also be misogynistic. Either way, it doesn’t look good.
i can offer some context to that, but first let’s clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.
the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by “code of conduct” PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it’s not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they’re not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.
anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn’t show each change, it just shows “n files changed, +n lines -n lines”, and a description talking about “gender-neutral language”. now, kling is not a “typical” developer. he’s a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don’t know what that’s like, but i imagine it means you don’t have a lot of mental overhead for things you don’t want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn’t want to deal with it.
it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.
Thanks so much for this layout of everything. I wasn’t even aware of what was going on, and your comment put it all together. Cheers!
This is very valuable context.
For citations, the only references I see to “pronouns” in their github project is in a section called “Human language policy” in
CONTRIBUTING.md(link). Here’s the relevant part:That sounds pretty cash-money to me.
There’s one additional reference in a pull request discussing whether or not to use “we” when referring to recommendations of the engineering team (as in “we recommend” vs “it is recommended”). Minutia.
I’m not as interested in litigating this matter than I am in putting it to bed (along with any and all definitive citations and evidence such that I can refer back to this comment thread in the future when the question inevitably comes up again.)
Thanks for the context - I still intensely dislike the “political” reaction, but people can learn and change. I also don’t like that Canadian arch-jackass Tobi Lutke is a major supporter of the project; he’s a bit like Brendan Eich. I’ll reserve judgment until the browser launches. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it.
I honestly don’t understand the hate here. I get that he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that’s terrible, but I’ve also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla. I honestly think he would’ve been a better CEO at Mozilla because he’s interested in the tech. His largest problem was making a personal contribution with his own money to an unpopular cause, and someone dug it up looking for dirt.
Isn’t that exactly how people should act? Leave your politics at home and work well with others. I work in a diverse group with a mix of immigrants, likely gay people, atheists and religious types, Trump supporters and critics, and even a couple furries. None of that matters and we work well together. In fact, most of the turnover we’ve had has been over compensation because our company has been stingy recently, and they all say they wouldn’t have considered leaving otherwise.
You can disagree on very important things and still work well together, it’s called professionalism. I dislike Eich’s views, but I believe he had way more professionalism than his loudest critics.
How on earth can you reconcile these two statements? “I respect you so much I’ll pass a law to make you illegal”?
I don’t understand how you can’t.
In a business setting, it’s called “professionalism”, and in a personal setting it’s called being a nice person. Most of my family is against gay marriage and don’t believe in gender fluidity, yet when my sister in law said her child is non-binary and would like to be referred to with they/then, they complied. Why? Believing those things doesn’t mean you hate LGBT people, it just means you disagree about policy. They love my sister in law and her kids, so they’ll do what they can to help them feel comfortable around them and want to participate in family gatherings.
I personally believe strongly that marriage should be available to all consenting adults, but I also believe gay marriage goes against God’s plan. Why? I believe everyone has the right to make their own choices and whether that’s acceptable to God isn’t my business. Maybe I’m misreading things, IDK, but my personal religious beliefs only guide my personal decisions and I believe I am supposed to love everyone regardless of their lifestyle. Whether someone else is sinning isn’t really my business, nor should it impact my love for them. And maybe they’re not sinning, again, IDK, it’s not my business.
I support same sex marriage (my church doesn’t) because I believe in freedom of choice, and that policy merely increases options for others and doesn’t decrease mine. Likewise for most LGBT policies, like bathroom use or gender change on IDs, you do you. We had an LGBT candidate at work (pretty obviously trans), and I was happily surprised that wasn’t an issue for my very conservative coworker during the interview (they’re an observant Muslim with conservative social views), and I went out of my way to make sure we both corrected for any subconscious bias we might have.
I don’t know Brendan Eich, maybe he’s actually a terrible person, idk. What I do know is he had a long career at Mozilla (nearly 20 years), and there were no public complaints about him until he was chosen as CEO. From all accounts, people were only mad about his $1k donation to prop 8, not about his conduct at work or anything of that nature. The board even asked him to stay in another capacity, but he left because he loved Mozilla and obviously he wasn’t able to be an effective leader if his presence encouraged people to recommend against using Firefox and other Mozilla products.
To me, it’s a crazy overreaction, he donated a pretty modest amount one time, six years prior, and had no complaints during his position as CTO. He absolutely got brigaded because someone decided to dig up donation records. If they didn’t, he probably would’ve been a successful CEO and refocused on the tech, instead of whatever nonsense the follow-up CEOs have been doing.
I disagree with Eich’s political views, but also think he was the best person for the CEO role. He seemed like a competent professional, and he was certainly technically competent given his long technical career at Mozilla.
I applaud you for supporting same-sex marriage, but - apologies if this sounds like I’m picking on you, I’m really not - this is like someone who claims to be a young-earth creationist but agrees that radiocarbon dating is accurate. I don’t understand how these mutually-exclusive thoughts can happily coexist in your mind. I wish we could discuss this over a drink because I’m very intrigued by whatever epistemic process led you there.
no, that’s fucked up… less fucked up than making a big deal of it, but it shows a huge lack of empathy… people close to them that they know quite well are validating that non binary people exist - that it’s not just people “looking for attention” and all that other garbage that people throw out there and they still don’t think they should be treated with respect and as equals by society
that’s “i don’t respect you but i don’t want to make a scene”
this is why the rate of self harm in the queer scene is so fuck high… because families suddenly don’t respect people they’ve know and loved their entire lives
yeah that ties in to my other comment; it’s not political in american english culture (well it is, but only to chuds), but other countries don’t have the same context for this stuff. and when those cultural barriers are crossed without knowing the differences, there is bound to be friction.