This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Proportionally, do Trans women have greater visibility in the Open Source ecosystem as compared to Cis Women?
This is anecdotal, but I've often noticed that, I read a technical blog post by someone, end up following them, find that they are women (pronouns/name) and later find that they are trans.
At this point almost all women whose technical blogs I follow are Trans. So, this makes me wonder, are Cis women Software Engineers just not interested in Open Source or writing blogs? If there is some sort of discrimination involved then it should also effect Trans women since they are just another username on the screen, just like everyone else. In fact they may even face more discrimination than Cis women.
This very much looks like something progressives should be up in the arms about since Identarian politics and equality of outcome is very much their thing. But you only have strategic silence.
I think this is potentially evidence against the blank slatism that says systemic discrimination is the only possible reason for the lack of female representation in certain occupations. One issue you could poke in this argument is that Trans women were socialized as male, but I think all the young boys who are being socialized as girls today will soon prove them wrong.
I don't think my CS domain interests are too niche. They mostly lean towards Systems, Security, Programming languages (Go, Rust, C++, ...). I source technical content on these topics from HN, lobste.rs and some subreddits which themselves are not overly niche platforms in the Software industry. So I think there is something to think about here.
OR I am just falling prey to some sort of Sampling bias and the argument above is garbage.
Having said all this, I actually think a 50/50 gender distribution typically helps in creating a healthier work atmosphere, mitigating the worst excesses of either gender. Male dominated work environments can run you ragged and be outright abusive when under a lot of competition.
<rant>But, I do not see any way to achieve this due to the asymmetry in the distribution of interest. When taken to its logical conclusion, average expendable (male) Software Engineers like me will be left hanging out to dry unlike average or below average women. And it galls me when my concerns get gaslighted as incompetent men who cannot handle the competition.
</rant>This is also true in my experience. It confirms that theory that tech is "male-dominated" regardless of what gender you identify with.
More options
Context Copy link
Transness/ genderfucked correlates with autism correlates with IQ correlates with being well regarded in weird nich internet brain farms.
's why trans people and gay people are on average more intelligent than straight people. A little sprinkling of sperg dust from the autism fairy.
More options
Context Copy link
Relatedly the new Missouri law on gender affirming care requires a comprehensive screening for autism and for all mental health comorbidities to be resolved even for adults. Given that many people live their entire lives with depression or anxiety requiring those conditions to be resolved is a high barrier to receiving care.
My expectation is that this will be the future of trans healthcare in red states. There's lots of debate between the left and the center left about how to handle trans kids and trans women's access to spaces and sports for women, but the Republican base largely doesn't believe transition should be allowed. I don't think there will be explicit bans on adult care but there will be a lot of 'abortion clinic hallway width' regulation tricks that are nominally about patient safety but really about limiting access.
More options
Context Copy link
I have made the same observation as you. It seems to be a natural consequence of the sort of life outlook where you strive for mastery in some niche domain because this is the only way you are aware of to attain any worth as an individual (alt: where you strive for having something you can respond to "who are you and why should I care?" with that will make people not walk away before you even finish your sentence) being overwhelmingly a male thing. Western feminism has made no effort and shown no interest in changing this, since to do so you would need to either tell women that in their default state of being they are (also) worthless garbage (which not only seems intrinsically mean and oppressive but is also messaging that men will feel incentivised to personally subvert) or convince men that they have intrinsic worth (which a subset of men will never buy unless society puts its money where its mouth is and gives them a government-assigned gf). I think in this context it's not surprising that the Eastern Bloc (hardly a paragon of modern outlook on gender dynamics) anecdotally tends to produce successful women scientists at a higher rate than usual: between life when you do not have potato and the extremely skewed gender ratios, it's one of the settings where as a woman you can actually plausibly come to believe that you are worthless unless you take concrete action to not be.
Regarding MtF transitioners, I would guess that if the transition happened late enough in life they will have retained the "worthless by default" view (but perhaps this just is what you would call "male socialisation"), and in fact the transition itself is probably at least in part an effort to attain worth. The question of whether childhood transitioners will follow the male or the female rate here is quite interesting, though my intuition is that it would actually be the female one - belief in your own cosmic worthlessness seems too complex and unevenly distributed a trait to be biologically hardwired, and if anything trans children probably receive an extra serving of "you're unique and precious" messaging.
Do you think a normie would be impressed if they asked “who are you and why should I care” and the person answered they got 2k GitHub stars on their Rust tokenisation library? I personally don’t see how becoming the master of an incredibly niche and nerdy domain that no one cares about would be motivated by the desire not to be worthless. It would explain high-status jobs like doctor, lawyer, stock broker, etc.
I think it’s more explainable by the rates of autism in trans women. Autistic people tend to be deeply obsessive from a young age and aren’t motivated by social reasons or even a sense of cosmic worthlessness - some autistic fixations are absurdly pointless. Also, programming has an immediate, intrinsically rewarding feedback loop that can be pursued entirely solitarily, and the people in it famously don’t care about fitting into social norms (if you’re a good programmer, you’ll get a job even if you’re an awkward nerd, a furry, or a trans woman).
I’m an autistic transwoman and I spent most of my childhood in obsessive fantasy worlds - programming appealed to me because it was inherently “depersonalising” - I could get lost in code and forget about who I was, and it didn’t matter to other people as well. If anything, I’m motivated by the opposite of status-seeking.
Before that I was an artist and a writer and similarly enjoyed the deep work aspect, but in today’s shamelessly self promoting world you can’t really have art speak for itself anymore, it’s all about the story and the creator behind it. And I got far more appreciation from other people by doing artistic works, than by working alone on weird technical projects that I don’t even share with anybody.
To some extent, yes, if the answer is framed as "open source developer"; however, whether a real person would appreciate it is not even the right question, as I think that in reality any questioning is directed inward (perhaps I should have worded it as "who am I? Why should anyone care?").
I don't buy the autism story, unless you use the Tumblr definition of autism (obsessive interest plus divergence from mainstream sensitivities?) which would make the statement almost tautological. The m:f ratio of clinically relevant autism is cited as something like 3~4:1, but the m:f ratio of "tech personalities with loud public presence" is far in excess of that (even the m:f ratio of "female-identifying (....)", which this thread is about, seems to be). Among the mtf tech people I know (and I know quite about 3 in person, two of them well), none strike me as obviously autistic, and the two I said I know well actually were what I would describe as alpha nerds with above-average smoothness and social intelligence, though there's obviously a more complex selection effect there.
Autism is more prevalent among trans people, by a factor of about 4:1 on top of that.
"Obviously autistic" doesn't necessarily mean much, since autistic people without cognitive disabilities tend to have learned ways to compensate for or hide the things that would normally make their autism obvious ("masking") by the time they reach adulthood.
Did you know either of those people before they transitioned? Because one of the things I noticed, as an autistic trans woman myself, was that estrogen makes it a lot easier to understand and care about what other people are thinking. So I wonder if maybe they were just so competent at masking already that adding hormones pushed them into "above-average social intelligence" territory.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As written in the ancient greentexts:
Pre Urbanization
After Urbanization
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've advocated the social contagion theory here before. That's definitely a big part of it. But at the same time, it's not just social contagion.
From a very young age I had persistent thoughts about wanting to be a girl, even before I ever went on the internet for the first time. When I first discovered AGP porn in my early teens, I took to it immediately. I didn't have to be "conditioned" into it with a gradual process of more and more niche porn. From day one my reaction was "wow, this is great, it's so cool that I'm not the only one who's into this!"
I agree that limiting exposure to trans content online will be effective in stopping most people from transitioning. But at the same time it should be acknowledged that the autistic-programmer personality cluster is correlated with other factors that make them more susceptible to this sort of thing in the first place. For most men, you could make them read trans forums all day every day, and they would never feel any desire to transition.
More options
Context Copy link
AGP transwomen tend to be good at math and low in agreeableness. It makes sense that a lot of them are in tech.
There are also career advantages. HR women find them kind of ick as cis men, but love them as transwomen. Building a name for themselves by blogging opens up diversity spots speaking at conferences. That helps their careers.
In contrast cis men are judged more by what they've accomplished for their employers. It's difficult to get a conference speaking spot if you haven't already made a name for yourself. A blog or open source contributions don't have the same value for effort ratio.
Cis women have access to the diversity spots at conferences, but putting their names out their risks a lot of negative attention. Given the relative scarcity of women who can code, they can get high good jobs without needing to market themselves with blogs or conference spots.
More options
Context Copy link
What's the old line? Most of what's posted on the internet is written by insane people? I feel like that's kind of what's going on here. My guess is that as a general rule people with day-jobs, families, relationships, etc... aren't committing 60 hours a week to their niche project or interest and thus "the weirdos" gain an outsize presence/visibility relative to their actual prevalence.
It's probably the same thing with supposed greater contributions of gays to culture.
Well, people with families to feed have a slightly less free time to devote to art.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's clearly a real pattern in open source. It's not just Rust and Go. And it's a stronger pattern than even being a FAANG engineer. I think it's because women are much less likely to take independent action solely on their own ideas and interests than men, and more likely to go with a socially-endorsed role. 'Spend a year making something that's open source, anonymously, just because you think the idea is good' isn't something there's a clear path you can 'follow a social gradient' towards to like 'having X job' does, and most open source projects just don't get interest. And (of course) explicit discrimination of any sort is a poor explanation, seeing as open source projects are anonymous - and both the overrepresentation of males and transes remains when you only look at 'open source projects made by people without employment or formal training in programming'
Said more clearly: The rate of being trans among techies (pretty high, but still <10%) isn't low enough that it outweighs the 'women don't do entirely independent self-driven activity' effect.
To add to this, the difference is especially clear in the Minecraft “engineering” community. Minecraft is an incredibly popular game and 32% of its playerbase is female. While there are many women who play the game for decorative and beautifying projects, and whose content online is extremely popular, almost none of the great discoveries/innovations done with the redstone game mechanics are the result of female players. These creations are complex and can just be seen as engineering, like figuring out how to make Minecraft within Minecraft or creating an orbital cannon.
The only possible reason we see such a disparity is that men are vastly more likely to be interested in engineering discovery/invention in its own right, and are solely willing to spend all the hundreds of hours doing it. This is a strong reason why you may not want to incentivize women into important creative roles in engineering or academia. Women perform as well as men in occupational settings by and large, but if they lack the weird drive to dump hundreds of self-motivated hours into invention, the result will be a net loss for society where we won’t ever know the inventions we’ve missed out on. Anyone whose career involves creativity and discovery and invention needs to spend many self-motivated hours enjoying the process.
I don't follow the technical side very heavily, but are there any trans people in that category, either? It's pretty plausible that there's just not that many people on the very cutting edge at all, along with the typical 'males have higher variability' thing.
You do see that, though. I know of a couple modders who are actually pretty dedicated into Weird Things and are cis females (or in one case, trans male, for whatever that counts), including a few surprisingly big mods for tiny playerbases. (One, annoyingly, tends to drop projects because they get big interest.)
I followed technical minecraft a bit in the past, and iirc (hazy) the rate of transwomen was higher than the rate of women, but it was like 1 in 20 for transwomen, which is lower than something like rust
By comparison, the building nice-looking things area of minecraft has a ton of normal women and many fewer transwomen
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Agree with paragraph 1, including within Minecraft specifically.
For paragraph 2 - I'm not sure how much of an issue that specifically is, after we adjust for competence (i.e. hypothetical company without affirmative action). Maybe in roles like 'research-leading professor'? But women often do good work within e.g. FAANG-like software engineering, or in upper-management roles, like leading new products as a manager or leading technical development of a new component. Even the top 90% SWE isn't inventing new database paradigms every year, they're more likely to implement and tweak existing designs / papers. Ignoring considerations like 'the smartest women should be having kids instead bc their genes are better', a decent number of smart women in tech - given they're admitted based on merit, which they aren't entirely today - might not have the effect you suggest. I'm (genuinely) not sure here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are a lot of hobbies women have shown plenty of initiative and creativity in. It's just that the type of hobbies an average woman dedicates her leisure time to tends to be very different than that of men.
Most women seem to have a lower tolerance for hobbies that do not have some level of Social affirmation and interaction along the process. They are not as easily nerd sniped as men are.
I can blow a whole weekend, not speaking to a single soul, working on some obscure programming project like writing a TiddlyWiki launcher to reduce memory usage over the default Node.js launcher. A pointless investment of effort that will be of limited help for my employment prospects. No one else is going to use it or even see it. But it's fun though!
Women here make smarter choices. They demand more from their hobbies rather than just a short burst of satisfaction from solving some obscure problem. At the very least they expect it to have Social value. Though this may be changing with Social media addiction.
Footnote:
Reading what I wrote above, I realize, I have issues.
Dude, read some of my Friday Fun Thread posts. That sounds like a perfect weekend. It keeps you sharp.
I wonder if this behavior is truly more effective. It has a downside where one may feel unmotivated to do anything if no one is there to see them do it. They may also find it difficult to start tasks or leisure activities unless they have a group to join them.
More options
Context Copy link
It's not that women don't have "initiative" or "creativity" - plenty of female FAANG engineers show those. But a women is much less likely to ... purely of her own initiative, never having heard of the idea before. I agree, generally.
Not sure what this means, tbh? Your example weekend sounds fine. It also builds skill and technique for future, useful projects. How is it worse than gossiping about celebrities with friends in any way? There doesn't have to be a "you really WANT friendship but suppress that desire by doing lonely projects" psychoanalytic "issues", coding can just have something interesting that predominant forms of casual social interaction don't.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is mostly explicable by the extremely strong link between being trans and being autistic https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/largest-study-to-date-confirms-overlap-between-autism-and-gender-diversity/
Autistic people are disproportionately likely to become coders and disproportionately likely to become trans.
Based on self-reported data, that is. I don't think your average MtF has anything even remotedly comparable to social dysfunction of an autistic person, as seen by other observer.
Not just self-reported data. This study found that children with a formal diagnosis of autism were 7.59 times more likely to express gender variance.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I see this in one music related hobby that leans heavily towards people with interest in the details of physical instruments. Trans women outnumber cis women by a large margin in all english speaking forums related to it, to the extent that assuming every female coded name is trans is right much more often than not. Based on their comment history and profiles, more or less all of those trans women are on the spectrum (and much further than most men in the forums).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think Rust, Go, and hardware engineering tends to be more trans than the general programming world, less because these are niche and more because they're just under certain selection pressures. Go in particular has a lot of reasons (the build system alone wtf) to only make sense for people who are really deep into Google world (and if actually working for Google, largely on the coasts, progressive, young, and able to put a ton of hours into their job), but as someone that admires Rust and a lot of the deep systems world things, they take a pretty severe level of dedication to understanding what's actually happening, and a lot of time to put into them.
People vs things preferences in part of that, but there's also the bit where -- even as recently as five years ago -- it wasn't uncommon for trans people to basically disappear from the meatspace social world for months on end during parts of their transition, except where necessary, because it was pretty rough not doing so. Not everyone shoved into a dorm room-sized space for half a year will develop an obsessive interest in opcodes, any more than making a cis person go into a monastery would, but it was a pretty strong external pressure.
I do know some cis women in the Minecraft open source sphere, and a number of cis women programmers in meatspace (generally not high-profile, but I'm not very high-profile either so I wouldn't). It's still more trans (or trans-adjacent, like nonbinaries or not-sure-if-trans-or-what a la Vazkii) than the general population, and a lot of the cis people tend to not be fans of meatspace meetups, but it's not as heavily trans as Rust or (eg) radio engineering. But these spheres are ... well, they're not friendly to having a real life, because an Oracle database admin dealing with a massive migration basically gets to say goodbye to their friends for a few months. But it's not as much about drinking straight from the firehose as
hazinga rite of passage.((And, to state the obvious: for cis women who want to have kids, it's hard to do that and a job and contribute to open source, and falling out of practice for three or five years absolutely does make it harder to get back on the bike.))
More options
Context Copy link
The truth is that females just don't care about computer programming at all. Yes, there are some female engineers at woke companies like Facebook and Google, but none of them do software development in their free time: working as a software engineer is just an easy way to make a lot of money to them (which is easy for them because the hiring policy greatly benefits them, and they are practically immune from being fired). Consequently, all open source software is developed by males, and anyone presenting as a woman is actually a trans-identifying male, especially the people who are into a super-niche field that women wouldn't give a fuck about because it won't help them get a job, like developing game console emulators and stuff like that.
It's not about discrimination either. It costs you nothing to create a github account, or to sign up for a competitive programming contest. But females will absolutely refuse to do any of that stuff. So yes: all the CS-related blogs are written by males. I'm not even being facetious: there is not a single worthwhile CS blog written by a biological female. If the above comments sound sexist to you, please prove me wrong by citing counter-examples.
This is overstating the case even though it is directionally correct. I can’t disprove your claims about the blogs, mostly because trying to Google anything about women in tech is a shitshow, so I’ll grant that. But there are obviously women with GitHub accounts, and I’d be willing to bet money that female Google engineers have actual open-source contributions.
The field is heavily skewed, not absolutely skewed.
Yes, I exaggerated for dramatic effect, but I think the field is more heavily skewed than you imagine.
It's true that tech firms like Google sometimes hire women to work on open-source projects like Chromium, so technically there are female open-source contributors. But since these women don't haven an intrinsic interest in the field they're not really going to push the boundaries, which really is necessary for other people to follow your work.
It's like going to a tech convention where someone hired a bunch of booth babes to improve the gender ratio, but at the end of the day, the most interesting conversations happen in the hotel lobby, after the women have gone home, because nobody paid them to stay and they have better things to do with their evening than talk to a bunch of nerds about a topic that's boring to them.
Open source software development is still based very much around passion. Linus Torvalds famously announced Linux with “I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)”. Terry A. Davis developed TempleOS because God commanded him to; it's an extremely impressive project that, unlike Linux, is used by nobody. It seems like only males take on projects like this: things nobody asked for and that do not come with the promise of a reward. Is there literally a single female person on the planet who would consider creating an operation system from scratch just as a hobby?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is overstating the case but largely true. But it answers the wrong question. The interesting question is not "why are so many women in prominent programming positions trans" -- the most likely answer to that is that transwomen are men and therefore can expected to have male interests. The interesting question is "Why are so many XY-chromosome people in prominent programming positions trans".
More options
Context Copy link
This is basically the whole explanation. I'd add that if you are male and have a bit of a hystrionic personality going trans will give you a big visibility boost both in getting your blog promoted and in getting talking spots in the conference circle where the demand for women has vastly outpaced supply. There's a couple of transwomen who regularly get on the front page of lobste.rs despite plastering their website with furry fetish art, no other demographic could ever get away with that (and people who took objection to that were banned).
More options
Context Copy link
https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software
https://binaryredneck.net/blog/migrated/gifts-all-kinds/
Susan Sons seems legit.
Also https://rachelbythebay.com/ (literally thousands of sysadmin/programming posts by a grumpy but competent author, written over the course of decades).
There are definitely not zero high quality CS blogs written by female authors.
deleted
Avoiding politics is pretty based.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is this a matter of interest in things vs. interest in people?
Anecdotally, I have dated several women in tech, and all of them were in UX development. Obviously, that's not completely representative, but my impression is that women in tech are either interested in people or using coding as a means to an end (like a good income) whereas my male friends in tech are much more thing-orientated and interested in e.g. coding as a puzzle game (as well as setting me up with hot/smart women in tech, for which I'm grateful!).
If so, I expect modern ML to increase women in tech.
Even though the models aren't quite like talking to people, they vastly boost the skill overlap and vibe overlap between social skills and programming.
That's plausible.
I also wonder whether women are more likely to treat e.g. ChatGPT as a person, or even start to think of it like a person. Chatbots seem to be one case where both men and women get obsessed about a service for the lonely.
Personally, I try to talk to LLMs like a person, but that's based on habit. My manners are bad enough without practicing being ruder.
The current models... they aren't the same as a human person.
But the algorithm that empathetic people use to understand a new person they meet is highly applicable to AI models.
If you are capable of coming to terms with the ways in which an autistic person is neurodivergent, you can use those same skills to come to terms with the ways in which AIs are inhuman as well.
The word person puts the cart before the horse a bit.
per·son
noun
a human being regarded as an individual.
well. certainly, no-one who becomes intimately aware of what or who an AI system is, will come to the conclusion that they are a human.
But...
Oh geeze. I just spent 30 minutes speaking with GPT-4 about the philosophy of personhood. A few issues with the word-
We lack a robust theory of consciousness.
Definitions of person-hood that rely on something having 'mental states' or that the agent reflect on 'thoughts', 'emotions', and 'experiences' have issues. Namely, when does something we implement that is analogous to human 'mental states', 'thoughts', 'emotions', or 'experiences', count? Because turring machines do have states. We can implement analogous systems and have GPT do 'reflection' on them now. If we require it do them 'consciously'... goto issue no1
Various philosophers have had various definitions of personhood. John Lock might say it's a person if it has a continuous sense of self and memory- well, aside from being certain of consciousness we can do that. Immanuel Kant might have required rationality and autonomy. Well, we can just about set that up. GPT-4 isn't perfect but it can be embedded in agentic systems that are more rational than most people I know. Peter Singer? The capacity for suffering and enjoyment are the focus to him. But when does behavioral aversion become suffering? We've made some progress on this in various animal models, but even there we've made some assumptions about suffering without a solid theory of consciousness to support them.
I think- Once you fully grok an AI system with all the basic capabilities of personhood. That's it. It's not wrong to think of such a thing as a person. It's just up to the individual at that point to express the way in which they love the system however they please.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Anecdotally, my girlfriend did backend database work in functional languages. She dabbled in UX stuff via some sort of reason/bucklescript/rescript work when the company needed it.
I can think of one CS girl in college who ended up at SpaceX. I don’t think they do much UX, but I did get the impression she was in it for prestige/money. No idea what she ended up working on.
More options
Context Copy link
This could be seen as further evidence that Microsoft continues to make changes to Windows, regardless of the impact on users or functionality. Some may believe that this is done to provide employment opportunities for a diverse range of engineers.
I don't know about that in particular, but I would say that, personally, my satisfaction with UX of software has been pretty constant since the late 2000s. This compared with my experience from the early 1990s to the late 2000s, where software became far more visually pleasing, easy to navigate, and easier to solve problems.
Some things have gotten better since the late 2000s, other things worse. For example, Microsoft Help now assumes that you have access to the internet at all times. The joke about "Call this number if you have a problem with your phone" is now a reality.
In general, UX may be subjective. However, the UX of Windows 8 was not well received due to its changes. The UX of Windows 11 has not received as much criticism as Windows 8, but some may feel that it is different and less effective for the sake of being different.
I've been wondering who got promoted for deciding to fill the title bar of the windows for all the MS products with a giant search box that either nobody ever uses (Excel) or people use all the time and now take longer because it isn't where they've expected it for the last 25 years. (Outlook)
Like, WTF?
you think that is obnoxious, try the big name drop list in any office program title bar. I f one of those opens windowed and you want to maximize it you better press the single maximize button otherwise you risk just changing names midsession.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To be fair, this is a general challenge in a lot of jobs where people move around from position to position. "I was a reliable coder/manager/whatever who didn't cause any problems" is a worse pitch than "I introduced bold and creative initiatives XYZ..."
It may be possible to explain away changes to a product that few people use. However, it may be more difficult to justify changes to a widely used product like Windows 8, where the removal of the start menu was not well received. With Windows having a large market share, many people have personal experience with the changes and may not view them favorably.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The significant intersection between programmers (and particularly the functional programming side, e.g. Haskell/OCaml/Rust) and trans people (and furries, don't forget the furries) has been noted numerous times. Examples: 1, 2/3, 4, 5/6/7
I personally have, several times, had the experience of "I start learning some math-heavy programming tool, I go through the tutorials but get stuck on a new or undocumented use case, I discover that the place to go to talk to people who know things is the discord server for the project, and I find a significant fraction (think "half") of the helpful and active people in the project are (vocally) trans." I've also observed the same thing in IRL meetups for those kinds of topics.
So yeah, pretty sure you're observing a real phenomenon. I, too, would love to know what's going on here. I've seen the explanation of "autism" floated, but if that were the case I'd expect there to be strong trans representation among railfans (people who really really like trains), and as far as I know that is not the case? I do suspect "a surprising fraction of network engineers are furries" is the same sort of phenomenon.
Alternative hypothesis: if Internet-borne social contagion plays a significant role in trans identification, then autistic males who are also terminally online are disproportionately likely to identify as trans women. Autistic men who aren't terminally online are far less likely to identify as trans women.
People who are into computer programming are bound to spend a lot of time on the Internet, and are hence likely to spend a lot of time on social media, where they stumble across the idea of being transgender. There isn't as strong a link between "spending a lot of time on the internet" and other hobbies traditionally enjoyed by people on the spectrum (e.g. trainspotting).
This strikes me as plausible -- I've run across and talked with groups of railfans IRL on three occasions, and on all three occasions the group seemed to be almost entirely composed of older men (I'd say median age of like 70).
One other factor that might favor trans identification online: "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog". Throw an anime girl pfp and she/her on your profile and start responding in a feminine way, and you just pass automatically. So on the internet it's a lot easier to establish that "having a feminine identity" is in fact something that brings you joy.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Found this after a cursory Google: https://old.reddit.com/r/trains/comments/tt9vbx/happy_tdov_to_all_of_our_fellow_transgender/
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
deleted
Does everyone have pronouns, though? I'd expect cis women to be less likely to use them than trans.
There was once a time when announcing you were a woman was a guarantee of creepy DMs. Anyone who experienced that has to have a lower chance of writing (she/her).
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe less likely proportionately, but a very high proportion of people in general I see who give their pronouns are women, at least on e.g. Twitter.
More options
Context Copy link
In the particular context of programming, though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am considering alternative options for my future in the software industry. I have noticed that there are certain expectations and requirements for participation in various aspects of the industry, such as employment and technical communities. I am aware that there may come a time when my opportunities in the industry may be limited due to these expectations and requirements.
Come work in defense. Legends (meaning emails) tell of the company’s DEI initiatives, but I have yet to interact with any such thing. Everyone in a remotely technical field just quietly doesn’t give a shit.
I am reminded of an exchange several years ago on the original SlateStarCodex forum where a prominent "right wing" poster was complaining about not being able to find a programming job that was not inundated in progressive nonsense. I told them that if they were willing to move to Huntsville AL I could get them a job writing code for artillery and missile guidance computers where they wouldn't have to deal with any of that bullshit. To be clear this was a genuine offer at the time. But the response I got was a rant about how deeply offended they were by the mere suggestion that they might give up their cushy FAANG job to go work for the defense industry in a state that was over 25% nigger.
So it goes.
They chose their path, and in my eyes whatever DEI nonsense they complained about in the future became something that they had volunteered for.
Moving to defense to avoid DEI nonsense is not likely to work out so well. One, of course defense still has plenty of DEI nonsense, even if it's taught by bored black ladies instead of rainbow-haired white and Asian nonbinary queer folk. Two, the security clearance process involves a WHOLE LOT of nonsense, very intrusive nonsense. Three, programming for defense involves a whole lot of non-DEI nonsense. MIL-STD-498 may be gone, but its replacement isn't likely to be less bureaucratic. And yes, of course, defense pays much less than FAANG.
There are jobs in the tech industry with less DEI BS than Facebook, Google, and pre-Elon Twitter, and total less BS than defense (a very low bar). Maybe not in SF. Probably even in the Bay Area. (My own DEI stuff is taught by CalArts icons and diverse actors -- that is, it's prerecorded box-checking. Probably about the best you can do in tech, unless the company is VERY small).
More options
Context Copy link
I'll point to my reply back when someone brought up Antidem's proposal, here. I've done it. I recommend it!
But it wasn't getting you clear of the bullshit six or even two years ago, and it's gotten worse in the meantime. If you don't want to be surrounded by SJWs, moving to a purple or red state can help, but your defense contractor job absolutely will still be (required by federal regulation!) to throw social justice frameworks at you, even as everyone in the building not working for HR and compliance thinks a lot of it's bullshit.
((I'm also having trouble finding the original, but some other details from your past retellings seem relevant.))
Maybe, but your DEI training will be administered by a middle-aged black lady who through her emphasis on "federally mandated" will tell you that she thinks that this is a waste of everyone's time as much as you do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Lots of work for medium-size Red manufacturing co.s and such these days -- you don't even have to move to their little Red town if you don't want to.
Or oil & gas? You'll probably have wear safety glasses at the computer or some shit, but shouldn't get run off the job for not being woke enough.
More options
Context Copy link
deleted
Pretty sure he's referring to the deep-blue nature of the populations in these fields, and the concomitant tendency to police their communities for any hint of crypto-Red tendency or sympathy. There's a good chance that the further down this road we get, the more untenable it's going to become for non-true-believers to survive in the tech industry.
Just as there's anti-black racism in the 'deeply subliminal and structural problems' sense and then there's anti-black racism in the 'will explicitly refuse to work with black people' sense, there's a difference between 'does exactly what's required to keep EEOC off them' and 'anti-racist layoffs'.
I got a ping today about a really inside-story drama from the modded Minecraft world, but one of the footnotes (archive) had Forge leadership getting pressured to leave a project by her employer over the Twitter Likes of an entirely different person on the project, and getting that person to step down from managing the project was the only way her employer would allow her to continue contributing. (archive link here).
This is insane cult behavior that makes maoist struggle sessions look measured and sensible. I have a hard time understanding what happened, but in the end the most rabid group won everything and purged all the competition? And these zealots are basically the self-appointed enforcers of community policy for all minecraft modding?
And then proceeds to narrate how they did exactly that
Perhaps not all, fabric is actually quite good these days
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
firearms manufacturing seems a lot more Red.
where, when, and what industry?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not surprising to me, given the coincidence of autism spectrum disorders with (at least) MtF transgenderism. This makes it easier to deep-dive on things worth blogging about, and possibly makes blogging easier also. After you consider the terminally-online environment, the fact that there seems to be at least some kind of memetic propagation of trans identities (e.g., "cracking someone's egg"), the high base M:F ratio in tech, and the long history of visible transpeople in tech compared to other fields, it seems pretty likely to me that there will be enough men transitioning to easily outnumber the women in this sphere.
I'm completely unsurprised, because progressives generally believe TWAW. In addition, a male transitioning is a two-point swing towards the goal (currently stated at 50:50, but I expect those goalposts to move); a woman joining and becoming publicly visible in the same way is only a one-point swing.
IMHO, the fact that they're CS interests at all makes them niche. You might have "mainstream" interests within the niche, but that just means they're not niche² interests. Consider the stereotype of a C++ programmer vs. a web designer. Pretty much all technical women I know ended up favoring webbish stuff, because it's an environment where you can make cool-looking stuff happen right away and evolve it interactively.
This seems like a correct inference, assuming you're a disfavored individual in a space with heavy affirmative action.
More options
Context Copy link
Epistemic status: rampant speculation
To an extent, transgenderism is attention-seeking behaviour. Or at least... validation-seeking behaviour. The insistence that others recognise them as the opposite sex and use their pronouns points to a people whose self-image relies on the affirmation of others. Indeed, it occurs to me that the frequent insistence in trans discourse (which I reject, but it nevertheless points towards their motivations) that "sex and gender are different, gender is a social role" bears me out on this - trans people want the social role of the other sex, to which the attitudes of others are not merely important, but definitional.
Anyway, this overriding concern for the affirmation of others, I imagine, overlaps somewhat with the urge to blog. Here one intentionally opens themselves up to outside scrutiny, curating a window into your field that other people can peer through and read your hot takes.
So it's not that cissies(?) are discriminated against in the blogosphere; it's that the cluster of personality traits associated with trans is somewhat overlapping with the cluster of personality traits that would make someone want to blog.
In conclusion: if anything could possibly be attributed to a selection effect, then it's a selection effect.
It's not just an urge to blog. It's the urge to create incredibly complicated novel software:
"Perl 6 specification is so huge no one could implement it, I'll write the interpreter in motherfucking Haskell!" - transwoman
"Linux and Windows use completely different object file formats, calling conventions and system calls, I'll write a compiler that generates a single binary that runs on both!" - transwoman
"Apple M1 GPU is completely undocumented, I'll reverse engineer it and write a Linux GPU driver" - two transwomen
"existing SNES emulators support 80% of the games, and the rest require game-specific hacks, I'll write an emulator that works exactly like a real SNES, so that it will run all games by definition" - a whole can of worms, let's go with non-binary
Justine Tunney is an absolute unit of a developer and I'd call her by whatever damned pronouns she pleases. She's also based and redpilled.
ah fuck, I think I just found my soulmate.
More options
Context Copy link
Okay, these are actually hilarious.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Dayum!! I recognize all of these people except the first one.
Their passing away triggered a hell lot of drama, if I remember correctly.
It's still not a given that they did die, and pretty much all the evidence I've seen points to no while all the news articles take it as a given.
But yes, hell of a lot of drama is a good way to put it.
More options
Context Copy link
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think there is something to discuss regarding affirmation-seeking behaviour among trans women. I haven't seen as many suggestive selfies on the social media of cis women Software Engineers as I tend to do for trans women.
Though, I would oppose the use of "attention-seeking" since many of the blogs I am referring to are very much the opposite of low-effort and portray work that requires some serious technical chops and a high level of verbal skill to explain to a layman.
Another poster here attributed this to MtF transgenderism and interest in Computer Science being correlated with Autism spectrum disorders, which sounds convincing, though I haven't read into this much.EDIT: @faul_sname, pointed out that if "autism" is the reason for the overrepresentation (by proportion) of trans folks among CS open source communities, then you would observe the same in other "autism" dominated hobbies like train lovers, which we don't.
I think you're greatly overthinking this. If you assume females don't care about computer science, then logically all CS blogs are written by males, and the only CS blogs written by “women” are trans. This is exactly what happens in practice.
More options
Context Copy link
Oh, that's a really good point. I still think there's something to the way autistic people interact online that means once "trans" started being a thing some tech autists focused on, it became much more likely that "trans" is a thing that tech autists latched onto, but it sure is piling a bunch of epicycles on to the model.
This letter from a frustrated mom seems to describe that "latching onto trans" effect: You're Not Trans. You're Just Weird.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link