The last paragraph was just facetious, to make the point that correcting potentially-discriminating terms can be overdone.

And the previous, also a bit tongue in cheek, but since I’m contending that it’s petty to fight over the Ladybird dev’s use of ‘he’ as default pronoun, I was essentially supporting other options as a sort of faux balance. If ‘he’ were truly inappropriate here, balancing it with ‘she’ in another project wouldn’t make it okay again. But if it’s just not that big of a deal, except for a dominant bias, then adding diversity elsewhere perhaps settles things a bit, and allows those who feel marginalized to asset themselves.

Neither is a solid answer! If you don’t agree with me that the bickering over that source code is overblown, fair enough, you can disagree. But I think my point stands.

By calling reverse discrimination a far-right trope, I presume you mean complaints about reverse discrimination? Or an argument that reverse discrimination solves the problem? (Though I thought that latter was more argued by the Left, under the term ‘positive discrimination’.)

Either way I don’t think that’s what I meant.

Yes but did she make a secret clone army?

I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.

July 4th: There is no Queen of England.

Next May the 4th: Somehow Elizabeth returned.

Yes. ‘Queen Regnant’ and ‘Queen Consort’ can distinguish between the two.

Appeal to tradition bias?

Yes. Turns out languages work by saying things the same way somebody else said them before.

My point isn’t that there can’t be a reason to change. My point is calling ‘he’ out as implying misogyny on the part of the author is ridiculous, and fussing over changing it is, in this situation, in my opinion, petty.

So is singular ‘they’.

Indeed. Some English contexts are used to defaulting to ‘he’ for ungendered animate; some to ‘they’. Neither necessitates an egregious humanitarian wrong.

The rest of your post is just a slippery slope argument.

I did get facetious toward the end. If you like, you don’t have to build your life philosophy on the foundation of the logical integrity of my closing paragraph. Up to you.

It does seem to me that complaining about gendered language in source code is about as stupid as a moral panic over daemons in systemd, or vulgarities in source code comments. There is some place for it… but not much

On top of that, ‘he’/etc has been effectively gender ambivalent for a long time. I understand the desire to change that, but it’s still a normal thing in English language. Similar to ‘master’ in git repositories and IDE connections, though those are both much more recent and arguably referencing much worse.

If a dev insists on ‘she’ everywhere, or ‘they’ in places that read awkwardly, should we flame and blame? In fact, why not go and convince Firefox to use exclusively feminine language in their source, to balance things out. It sounds more sensible than taking up a political fight over this!

Also while you’re at it, ethical hacking is now done only by natural-human-skin-colour-hat hackers; background process on your computer are called abstract beings; your computer does not boot[strap], (‘pull itself up by its bootstraps’), it has affirmative action from the motherboard to get it started; and when I saw the article headline, I thought the issue would be bigger … that’s what they said.

I didn’t realise they were rechargeable. Makes sense though.

Time for some new Nextcloud servers :-D

You mean that lady who was in a movie once, right?

Also doubles for keeping leftovers fresh after a restaurant meal.

Depends, I think, if there’s an insulating gap between it and your metal skull.

And yet, if a ‘top NASA official’ were to ‘leak’ that the moon landings were actually fake, or a ‘journalist’ wrote a ‘dazzling exposé,’ we’d all dismiss the claim instantly as fake, instead of doubting the moon landing.

Anyway, everyone knows the moon landed in 1982 in Wales and that orb up in the sky is a projection by the US government to cover up their mistake.

Games don’t age well.

• football
• “the floor is lava”
• chess
• nibbles/snake
• myst
• snakes and ladders
• age of empires
• skyrim

Counterpoint: even without lock tight secrecy, leaks can be ignored and covered over. Also there are certain secrets governments really have been good at keeping for a long time.

In and of itself, I don’t think this is a good argument against any particular conspiracy theory.

set sail

Dude, nobody told me Cybertrucks are also wind powered!

If taking Cybertruck to an automatic car wash is necessary, Car Wash Mode closes all windows, locks the charge port, and disables windshield wipers, Sentry Mode, and walk-away door locking.

Doesn’t seem too stupid to me. The rest of your link looks mild enough too, just don’t use anything harsh on your exterior or the steel won’t look its best any more.

Then again, I forget the sort of rich person who buys a Tesla is also probably the sort of person who cries if it doesn’t look brand new every day, so yeah - sneeze and your beloved car is irrevocably besmirched.

Did you get the special chloroform-infused masks? I hear they’re the only ones that do the job properly.

• Endless sky
• Battle for Wesnoth
• Warzone2100
• Simon Tatham’s puzzle games
• Widelands
• OpenTTD
• OpenRCT2 (needs assets from original game)
• SuperTuxKart

Off the top of my head

Your nostalgia is a bad reason for starting anything really. Most hopefully you won’t push your nostalgia on your children and force them to play outdated games.

It’s a dark path. Next you might start making them watch outdated films, maybe even reading outdated books. Before you know it you’re teaching them pre WWII history and Newtonian mechanics.