Interesting, thanks for the correction! I thought it was a medieval form that stuck around.

Masculine being the default was the case for English (and French) too, but not anymore, and certainly not by implying anything other than the masculine is "political".

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.

yeah smaller languages have taken longer to adapt to that change, because it started in the anglophone world and the concepts of gendered language don't translate well. it's like how the word "man" in english used to mean "human" and not be gendered at all, and when language is updated to remove the -- now gendered -- word and then translated, the translation stops making any sense because the context of a word is so different.

i always give massive leeway when language is involved, because the culture around progressive language is basically 99% centred on the US.

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.

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.

Not really. Mandarin for example has different characters for "he" and "she", but they are homophones ("ta", or "tamen" plural) so you can't tell who's who in spoken language. Hungarian doesn't use gendered pronouns and Finnish doesn't either (actually, now that I think of it, that may be where you borrowed yours - isn't it "hen" too?)

i'm not really talking about the grammar, but about the cultural meanings of the words. there may be implied gender in a mode of speaking even in a language without gendered pronouns. my grandmother would always assume people i was talking about were male if i didn't use a gendered pronoun (like i would be talking about a colleague by referring to them as "my colleague") because that's the "cultural default" here still. it has changed a lot in the past five-ten years but it's still the default.

and i actually don't know where we got "hen" from. i do know that it was not originally meant to be an actual gender-neutral pronoun, but as a placeholder where gender is unknown or unimportant. it was created to replace the more cumbersome "han/hon" in legal texts, and not meant to be used to refer to specific people. but we do that anyway because it helps adoption.

looking it up it does seem to be taken from finnish! their word is "hän", which would be pronounced about the same. i learned something.

Why not just run a community build of Firefox, like IceCat?

Only if you want to be left waiting

I can't keep browser hopping. I want to stay with firefox. Please don't get worse!

What might be a valid argument in 5.x might not be an argument for 6.x.

But IMO, Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11 have more in common with vista than vista has with XP.

at one point or another we all have a penis in us.

I truly couldn't give a single solitary fuck what opinions the devs of software I use have, no matter what that opinion is. As long as they're not trying to shove that opinion down my throat via their software, their opinions literally have no effect on me whatsoever. You either, whether you want to believe that or not.

stand up against racism and discrimination

What does this mean for a browser company? I understand this being an important company value, but I don't want them filtering the internet or anything. Their primary goal should be to foster a privacy respecting web and a high performance, standards based browser.

I don't think eliminating profit from the web should be a goal. I don't care if websites make money, I just care they don't profit from my data without me agreeing to it explicitly.

I think Firefox needs to become financially independent, and that means finding a privacy respecting business model. My personal preference is a micro payment system where I can pay websites for content in exchange for no ads. That provides value to me and websites that I'd otherwise block ads on.

If AI is part of that, sure, just make it opt-in and very obvious when it's working.

Did you read the thing?

Exactly. How FOSS devs spend their time and money isn't my business, what is my business is foundation financials and whether the software is reliable and safe to use.

I strongly disagree with Lemmy devs on politics and how they run their instances, but that doesn't impact me so whatever.

As long as ladybird devs don't go out of their way to be jerks to trans people, I'm good. The worst I've seen is rejecting pronoun changes in code comments and docs, which isn't a big deal.

I suppose, unless you've watched King of the Hill.

I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I'd rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word "Allah", etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don't want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I'm not going to take that into consideration, because that's not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

Lastly, all other things equal, I'd rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let's be honest, especially developers) won't want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that's reasonable or not, it's hard to deny. It's certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

Brendan Eich

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.