/dev/chat

7:18 AM

@Gilles Drop you a note where, exactly?

7:36 AM

@Gilles excellent response, meaning meta.stackexchange.com/a/335010/158763

11:08 AM

I thought one of the big tenets of SE, at least the technical SEs, was that Qs & As are supposed to be written generically, not made specific to the person writing them.

Or is this all about comments?

Nobody really knows anymore.

1:17 PM

91 answers? Really?

Record-breaking rains in Bombay. Apparently the last time it rained this hard was in the 1940s, though the statistics reporting isn't clear.

Here's hoping we don't all get washed away.

I was awake at 4 am this morning, and it started raining furiously, and I'm told, rained for an hour. The rainy season is officially over, however.

I wish I could downvote comments. Because I'd like to downvote some of this Shog persons. Oh, well, I'll have to be content to downvote that pronouns announcement. Since everyone else has.

I can't tell, but how many upvotes did it get?

@FaheemMitha I also wrote a reply.... meta.stackexchange.com/questions/334900/…

@RuiFRibeiro Reading. By "lighthead" you probably mean something like "lighthearted".

@FaheemMitha Correct, thanks!

Also in "However, I pretty much do no see", "no" should be "not".

1:35 PM

Hah

@FaheemMitha found his calling as an SE post editor

@Jesse_b except he doesn’t edit, he suggests edit in chat ;-)

@Jesse_b I've been editing for a long time. Albeit, sporadically.

@StephenKitt 6 char limit.

Also, I wasn't sure what Rui meant.

@FaheemMitha Edited, the not was a typo, thanks.

@StephenKitt =) I meant editor as in the person who reads books/news articles before they are published and checks for errors

@FaheemMitha What are you not sure about?

1:39 PM

@RuiFRibeiro Well, that lighthead thing, for example.

@FaheemMitha Yeah sorry I was being facetious

I don't really like editing stuff unless it's obviously a mess. Because I'm guessing what people mean, and I could be wrong.

@Jesse_b yeah, I know, and that fits in with what the edit function is designed for here ;-) (but I’d forgotten about the 6-char limit when you don’t have direct edit privileges)

@FaheemMitha but if they disagree, they can easily reject your edit

@FaheemMitha I joined a platform for techincal issues and decompressing from reality, not certainly for unicorns vomiting rainbows and being bossed around.

overall it saves time

1:41 PM

@RuiFRibeiro I mostly agree with you but if I see unicorns vomiting rainbows on this site I probably wouldn't be upset about it

@Jesse_b LOL....I thnk I have had enough. Any alternatives to SE?

@RuiFRibeiro I've never seen anything that compares. I occasionally stumble across miscellaneous unix/linux forums that seem like they are trying to replicate the community here but they always seem rather empty. The Q/As I stumble across are usually years old with little or no responses. And the responses are usually riddled with bad practices

@Jesse_b Yeah,more or less the same experience on this side.

Ultimately though I don't really have much issue about the change. I already try to refer to people by gender neutral pronouns simply because I almost never know if they are male or female. If I end up getting punished for accidentally calling someone 'he' then I will think they have taken it too far but ultimately the worst thing that could happen is we get banned from the site which in the grand scheme of things probably would have an insignificant impact on my life.

I for one plan to carry on as if nothing has changed and if it is deemed that isn't upholding the standards of the community than it probably isn't the right community for me anyway

2:13 PM

I think most of us, bar a few outliers, won't need to do anything special to conform. It still boils down to "treat others with respect and as you would like them to treat you". The anger (again with some loud exceptions) is about how SE is doing this and not about what they are doing.

@StephenKitt Even so, it can come across as obnoxious.

hah

Damn @StephenKitt was quick on that pipe question

@FaheemMitha feel free to edit my posts, I won’t think it’s obnoxious (but yes, I understand your point)

@RuiFRibeiro Not really, no.

@Jesse_b fastest gold hammer in the West

come to think of it, a gold hammer would be rather silly in practice

2:21 PM

@StephenKitt Thanks, Stephen. But (a) your posts rarely require editing, and I'm not sure I would presume in any case (b) I wouldn't expect you to make a fuss in any case.

I was speaking generally.

@FaheemMitha yes, I know ;-)

@terdon It's symptomatic. And if the management manages to drive enough people away, some of the sites may cease to be viable.

They've managed to upset Gilles, for example. Who is both an important contributor, and not easily upsettable. Sites need their experts.

@FaheemMitha Hey, I corrected, yes corrected, one of Stéphane's posts once! Probably the high point of my career on U&L. Of course, Stéphane has corrected several dozen of mine :)

But as Neils Bohr once, possibly, said - prediction is difficult, especially about the future.

@terdon Congratulations.

@StephenKitt True but perhaps not as silly as one would think. Soft blow hammers are a useful and common tool. They make hammers out of lead because it's heavy and wont damage things like threaded bolts when you hammer on them. Gold would be an ideal metal for a soft blow hammer due to its weight and relative lack of hardness. It's impractical because of its cost though

2:25 PM

@FaheemMitha It isn't clear that SE wants sites anymore.. And, to be fair, that does make some sense. A huge amount of data has indeed been amassed, but SE doesn't really know where to go from here. Nor do I.

The Reserve Bank of India issues gold bonds. I wonder if they are backed by actual gold.

But perhaps that is a question for a different site.

@Jesse_b ah right, I wasn’t aware of that! (The usefulness of soft blow hammers.)

@terdon Getting people to work for free like this is a tricky business. And the founders did a good job (perhaps an excellent job) of getting people together.

But in the real world, good things are easy to ruin.

And if VCs are really now in charge of the site, that does not presage well for the future.

I'm an Airbnb host, and I see sort-of similar nonsense from Airbnb. Though nothing as extreme as telling us how to write our posts, thankfully.

They are on a recent anti-discrimation kick, and won't let us see guest photos until they have booked. But they don't actually enforce anything about the photos.

So the picture could be of a unicorn, Barney the Dinosaur, or a flower. Or a geometric pattern, I suppose.

The thing is, SE’s magic isn’t in the content (that’s a side-effect), it’s in the community and its engagement, and the associated network effects; and that’s really hard to replicate (and also quite easy to break). That’s why other efforts (e.g. the various free software community equivalents) have pretty much all failed.

@StephenKitt Well, yes. Exactly.

There are other communities on the net, but they don't answer questions for free.

It's actually a bit surprising anyone does.

Perhaps SE hired some really capable sorcerers, and put us all under an enchantment.

2:32 PM

@FaheemMitha there are some, but in “old-style” formats (mailing lists, IRCs etc.), and none of them are as nicely packaged as SE

@FaheemMitha that’s actually not far from the truth IMO: SE’s gamification is really well done, and very good at creating the “right” level of addictiveness...

@StephenKitt True, there are MLs. But not as broad-ranging as SE. And not as functional. Also, not easy to search. No keywords/tags.

@StephenKitt Apparently so. It only works very weakly on me, but I don't tend to respond well to the usual human stimuli. For better or worse.

Does anyone know what Gilles was talking about earlier? He hasn't responded to my comment/question.

2:52 PM

@FaheemMitha Presumably trying to build a competing site to replace this one/

@Jesse_b I don't think even Gilles could do that, but I'd certainly like to know more about what he has in mind.

It's possible he's trying to collect a group of people and do a Git for SE. But this is just guesswork.

@FaheemMitha earlier when?

@ilkkachu See the comment currently with two stars on the right.

3:21 PM

I'm updating the machines that are used for our monitoring application and the instructions include a curl | bash.

4:03 PM

I'm not exactly sure what tchrist means here. Anyone care to amplify/clarify?

It isn't merely non-native speakers of English whom this challenges. The small words you mention are not part of the open class of parts of speech containing lexical items. English pronouns are part of its closed class of purely grammatical items. These two classes, open and closed, behave in fundamentally different ways in the human brain. It is very, very hard to modify the closed class even for native speakers. This is why there are no synonyms for words like from or she, nor can there be. It takes actual generations of time to bring about such a change and cannot be forced by fiat. — tchrist 17 hours ago

Open? Closed?

Part of speech

In traditional grammar, a part of speech (abbreviated form: PoS or POS) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assigned to the same part of speech generally display similar syntactic behavior—they play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentences—and sometimes similar morphology in that they undergo inflection for similar properties. Commonly listed English parts of speech are noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, interjection, and sometimes numeral, article, or determiner...

Oh, those are actually grammatical terms. Except I'd never heard of them. Huh.

@terdon Yes, I see. Thank you.

Gilles forgot to mention that "doubt" is incorrect usage. But perhaps he was trying to be inclusive.

4:16 PM

@FaheemMitha I'm not sure I read the same post you did. The point in the one I read seems to be that it isn't incorrect in some parts of the world (in practice), and that we shouldn't overcorrect things like that, or at least to avoid pointing fingers at such "incorrect" usage.

@ilkkachu I probably shouldn't speak for Gilles. But I think his main point was that it shouldn't be used as an excuse to be nasty to people.

@FaheemMitha as for this, I just read it as Gilles being interested in hearing if anyone actually starts a new service/platform like SE

That's not the same thing as telling people it's incorrect usage.

Though I personally don't try to explain correct English usage to Indians.

It's too time-consuming, they never seem to understand, there are too many of them doing it, and overall it just feels like a waste of time.

yes, of course, it's about how you do it. I'm not sure if people read the edit summaries on edits made to their posts by others, but a silent edit with a comment in the summary seems best.

@ilkkachu It's ambiguous, imo.

I once had a friend, an eminent mathematician who also happens to be Indian, and who reads Joyce for pleasure, write to me that he would "revert to me". I thought of saying something, but didn't.

@ilkkachu Incorrect usage does not become correct just because a lot of people do it.

4:28 PM

I'm not exactly sure reading Joyce helps in understanding normal English.

@FaheemMitha Who gets to decide if it's "correct" or not?

@ilkkachu Joyce did write some "normal" prose too.

@ilkkachu That's a reasonable question. I'm tempted to reply: the Queen, but that answer might be deemed facetious.

At any rate, not a lot of clueless Indians. And when I say clueless, I'm being polite.

4:43 PM

Is it their fault the language they've learned there, some way off from Europe and the US, differs from that spoken elsewhere? Not everyone gets to go to Oxford.

5:14 PM

@FaheemMitha Here, for example

@StephenKitt mostly about comments and chat

@FaheemMitha Why? Shog is about the only CM who's still keeping his cool

@terdon I do have a problem with the change, not with the code of conduct as written but with the mandatory interpretation posted on meta which is very different from what /conduct says.

@Jesse_b @FaheemMitha Yes. Of course nobody can do this alone. But if there's a group effort to set up a different platform with better governance, I'm in.

I remember joining this site and seeing that one of the top users was represented by a mushroom. I was briefly confused about whether to refer to them as "he, she, or it", but then I realized it didn't matter and only rarely comes up. I hope that innocence continues here.

@Gilles Yes. The FAQ and the CoC are very different beasts.

@Jesse_b I deleted that, not because there was anything wrong with it (there wasn't) but because in the current atmosphere, that's the sort of thing that's likely to be flagged and lead people to accuse you of bigotry.

@JeffSchaller Not a mushroom: a mushroom's reproductory apparatus. I have no idea whether it should be he, she, it or they.

:( sorry

Yes, it's ridiculous, but I'm guessing you'd rather I delete it than have people descend on you...

5:27 PM

People would have to ascend to me

=)

@Jesse_b You did nothing wrong! It was obviously a joke about Gilles's avatar, but taken out of context, it could lead to trouble. Sigh.

e.g. my biggest problem in replying to Stéphane is not whether they're a he or she, but that I don't remember the keyboard shortcut for é and so I have to copy/paste every time.

5

@JeffSchaller Hah! I'm glad I'm not the only one

@Gilles oh dear, my apologies; I should have put two & two together with "Gilles" --> gills --> of mushroom

@JeffSchaller it's supposed to be obscure

at first I thought of fish gills, but that looks really ugly, and then I found this very nice photo (not mine, I found it on Wikipedia)

5:29 PM

mission accomplished :) (again, for the "nothing" that it matters to me)

5:43 PM

@Gilles Thanks for stopping by. Can we consider a note dropped, then?

@ilkkachu I'm not suggesting anything is anyone's fault. And Oxford isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nor is Cambridge, for that matter.

@Gilles Count me in too. But it would be a gigantic task.

@Gilles He's saying some dumb stuff. I could find quotes. But if he works for SE, then he has a thankless task.

6:28 PM

@FaheemMitha Shog is one of the wisest voices on the network, actually. I've said 12 dumb things for every one of his.

I have a lot of... complicated and conflicting loyalties right now, @Mari-LouA. I'm trying to choose my words and where I use them carefully. — Shog9 ♦ Oct 4 at 1:48

6:45 PM

@Gilles I hope the current problems problems continue to stay away from unix.se, but yeah it'd be nice to have a backup plan. Especially as who knows how long it'll remain nice here with the network's current course. I think I've already sent you my email address, but anthony@derobert.net just in case.

That FAQ is .... errr.... well, I'm suspect how someone who very much wants to exclude the transgendered, etc. would fall victim to Poe's Law...

@Gilles aye, if this implodes, count me in too.

Followed up by tons of comments on the various responses saying it doesn't actually mean what it appears to say/imply. Well, OK then...

@derobert Humans are just tons of fun, aren't they?

Never a dull moment, really.

Indeed. And the current thread sure doesn't seem to be bringing out the best in a lot of folks.

@terdon Just think, now that assume/presume good faith is gone, we can assume the apology from the CEO isn't someone who realizes they have offended a lot of people, but doesn't fully understand why, so has a hard time correcting it, but is actually just "I'm sorry I lost all the free labor maintaining the site I hope to/am getting get rich off of".

We can presume the reason SE's communication with the community is so bad isn't because it's hard, there are conflicting goals, etc., but because SE, Inc. is run by trolls

Everything is so much easier when you don't have to presume good faith!

(And of course, so much worse.)

Michael Homer

7:07 PM

I hope more people leave.

@derobert Oddly, TeX SE seems barely to have registered that anything is happening. I talked to Joseph Wright a few days ago, and he had no idea.

But there are probably insulated from the main network in various ways. Kind of like MathOverflow, I suppose.

@MichaelHomer Leave here specifically, or the network in general?

@MichaelHomer just wants to watch the world burn?

@FaheemMitha (still reading the backlog) It may well be a waste of time. Correct English is merely common English. There is no official standard of English; it is and has been defined by its usage. So really... they're not doing anything wrong. Unless they're trying to communicate with someone outside India, then there is a point (actually getting your message across).

@derobert What might be a waste of time? Correcting English usage?

7:17 PM

@JeffSchaller If you set up a compose key, it's compose, e, ' → é ... which is really easy to remember. Not every day I get to suggest a solution to someone's biggest problem :-D

@FaheemMitha Yeah, your next message after that:

3 hours ago, by Faheem Mitha

It's too time-consuming, they never seem to understand, there are too many of them doing it, and overall it just feels like a waste of time.

@derobert Yes, well, like I said, I don't actually try.

@derobert I just remembered I can simply hold down the e key on my mac to find é

I just hope the English mangling doesn't catch on.

@derobert Actually, there are English standards. They are called dictionaries. And also Grammar Usage guides (or whatever the term for them is). Like Fowler.

My father liked reading such things.

@ilkkachu I read the edit summary when someone edits my post, and definitely would if I wondered why an edit has been made. Maybe I don't if it's obvious (e.g., fixed a typo by changing teh to the).

@FaheemMitha Sure. And you can write your own! So can I. And say anything in it.

@Jesse_b odd that you don't get eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee out of that

7:22 PM

E.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Modern_English_Usage

@JeffSchaller Yeah mac does a lot of odd things

@Jesse_b That works with soft keyboards on my phone, does current Mac OS really not have key repeat? It used to when I last used it (which, given, was a decade or more ago)

@derobert Not really. First of all, it takes a lot of time to write an English usage guide. Then you have to edit it. And get it published. And finally, people to have to actually read it.

And not throw it in the garbage.

As I recall, Fowler is actually pretty good.

Though I haven't looked at it in a long while.

@derobert I think it depends on the application. If I try it in my terminal it simply repeats but in here it gives me the menu èéêëēėę

What makes one good is that they went and studied how English is actually used and wrote that down.

7:29 PM

@derobert It helps if you actually speak English in the first place. And are around other people who speak it and write it. As opposed to massacring it.

7:47 PM

@JeffSchaller if we're talking about the pronouns of a mushroom's reproductive parts, I think "they" would be appropriate. Since "gills" is plural, it shouldn't even invoke any issues regarding singular they.

(And for the record, I'm only jesting about that avatar picture. Anything I say should not be interpreted to represent my or my employer's opinions on pronouns used of any actual person.)

@ilkkachu at least the additional e isn't an èéêëēėę!

@JeffSchaller Doesn't matter, I just copy-paste or tab-complete people's screen names anyway. Mostly because my own often gets misspelled, and I want to avoid doing that myself.

@ilkkachu I never realized that you could tab-complete names in chat! A banner day, learning two things in the space of an hour!

(and sorry for misspelling your name a while back!)

I did mean comments, really, but yeah, works in chat too.

@JeffSchaller I don't mind that too much, it's just that it can break pings. So if you have misspelled it, I might not know ;)

@ilkkachu I believe you caught & corrected me -- for the one I'm remembering, anyway

7:59 PM

@JeffSchaller could be. Consider yourself absolved.

8:23 PM

@ilkkachu Tab-complete is great. Except on a phone, then it can be difficult.

sourcejedi

10:43 PM

I sat on the fence and eventually signed both letters :-P. SE's own apology seems damning enough. Solidarity.

I hope the lavender letter gets more signatures. Bit painful given "We are hurt that resignations from LGBTQ+ moderators have only started to receive notice due to the uproar over a correlated issue".

(Only saw this stuff this afternoon.)