If the outcome of all of this is that Altman ends up at Microsoft and hiring the vast majority of the team from OpenAI, it's probably wise to assume that this was the intended outcome all along. I don't know how else you get the talent at a company like OpenAI to willingly move to Microsoft, but this approach could end up working.
The article you link to discusses "lunatic" being offensive when used in law in its original sense to refer to real people with real mental health problems. Whether that is offensive (and I think it probably is) is a completely different question from whether its modern, colloquial use is offensive.
The word dramatically declined in popularity through the 19th century but started climbing again after ~1995[0]. The recent increase in usage is driven entirely by a much milder, colloquial meaning of "wildly foolish"[1].
I think being offended because our great-grandparents used the word literally is a bit silly.
The origin of the name comes from the fact that it started as a Lua project. In Lua (Portuguese for moon), everyone loves any "moon" related names or puns for their project. As such, "Lunatic" fits right in.
As someone who has family members with mental health issues, I don't find the term offensive at all.
I, for one, by default think more of someone who's obsessed with the moon, I guess it's because I never read that article, so I've never been told to be offended by it.
All that said, I do hope that the authors understand that they might be fighting an uphill battle with regards to adoption.
> Society is very much able to form opinions on what is widely considered offensive and what is not.
Except there isn't an agreed upon opinion, just a certain number of loud individuals trying to silence others, and everyone else who just quietly don't care.
> You've been proven wrong right now.
I was saying that it's impossible to prove that something isn't offensive. Please take your time to actually understand posts you read before posting angry comments.
> Except there isn't an agreed upon opinion, just a certain number of loud individuals trying to silence others
Again you are trying to make a strawman, claiming that it's just some minority and you are so brave for standing up to them.
It isn't. Open a dictionary and you'll find a number of words clearly defined as offensive.
Language isn't just an opinion of few people.
> I was saying that it's impossible to prove that something isn't offensive. Please take your time to actually understand posts you read before posting angry comments.
Someone on here recently asserted that ditching the colloquial use of "crazy" had significant mainstream support. I pushed back on people even noticing that it might be a problem, let alone actively choosing not to use it, being anything like a norm outside tiny niches of terminally-online Web users.
Sure enough, sensitized to it, I heard an NPR host and a Chipotle ad use it in the colloquial sense within the next week. And those are just the ones I noticed, and that were very-public rather than in private conversations.
This stuff's not mainstream and normal people don't care a bit. It's not even caught on in groups worried about impressing the word-police crowd (major advertisers and NPR both qualifying, I should think).
Let's just put it this way, I'm not advertising in anything associated with my professional credibility that I use "lunatic", for the very obvious reason that it's possibly offensive to some people and that the word offers nothing to convey meaning. I don't have to find it personally offensive to not want to associate with it.
On the other hand, there are other people who might apply a different heuristic and guess that a project named 'lunatic' is less likely to attract the sort of people who might take, for example, a code of conduct as a tool to beat other contributors about the head. (I'm not saying that's you!)
I guess there are "swings and roundabouts" and peoples' rules of thumb differ, which is perhaps diversity that's all to the good.
To me (without reading any of their stuff, I don't know if this is what they were shooting at), "lunatic" makes me think "high performance" and "this is a very difficult project with high payoff if we succeed, we're a little bit crazy (in a good way) to try, eh?".
> definition of "lunatic" - "a person who is mentally ill (not in technical use)."
Have you, your relatives or your friends ever used the phrases "are you insane?" and "are you out of your mind"? Were they being insesitive. Should you/they be more thoughtful how it would be perceived by other people, that you/they so casually use a very modern (and not 19th century) refernces to mental illness?
What about, I don't know, Insane Clown Posse who formed in 1989 and won Outstanding Hip-Hop Artist/Group at Detroit Music Awards? They probably need to re-think their name, too?
Looney Tunes? (Looney is the same as Lunatic) Or looking at some of the adjacent terms, perhaps Animaniacs?
Is it still that offensive? The linked article discusses a peak of the term around reform of 19th century "lunatic asylums" where the phrase was in common use and had dark connotations but aren't all those people dead now? Is the term still somehow problematic and if it is, doesn't that imply that words like "insane" have the same problem?
As far as I can tell, it's not offensive, and was never offensive. What can be offensive is using it as a term to refer to the mentally ill, especially in law - and it's really more antiquated than offensive even there. We have more specific and thoughtful terminology for varieties of mental illnesses now, that have nothing to do with the moon.
So if you have a law on the books governing how to treat lunatics, or how lunatics should be treated, it's a dumb old law because there's no official test for lunatic. It would be just as stupid if you had laws about the "wacky" or the "nuts."
The overwrought nature of the concern about seeing the word as the name of a piece of software is just a symptom of the current zeitgeist.
I mean, I had to think about it. Whether it's hugely offensive or not isn't necessarily the right question here. With the whole English language to pick from there are probably better choices that are less ambiguous.
I personally worry somewhat about social-censure. Here's [1] a talk that asks (among other things) if Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses would be published or even written today and I think that concern relates a little to our conversation. While its quite easy to see the argument for self/social censure (as usually someone is personally motivated to make it), I worry that the argument against it is much harder to see and has less organic advocates.
This logic implies that one could name a project after an explicit slur and it being a project instead of a directed insult makes it no longer a slur. That doesn't track at all.
A few years back a non-native English speaker presented an Erlang library called `coon` because he like this abbreviation of the word `raccoon`. [1]
The shitstorm from Americans (US and Canada) was unbelievable. Even though:
- most people on the mailing list where this was discussed never heard it used as a slur
- people in the states where this word was purportedly still used as a slur never heard it used
- several black people (both African Americans IIRC and a guy from South Africa) said they had no problems with the name (and promptly ignored)
The name of the library was changed.
Now. The question is: who decides it is a slur especially in our global world? Somehow, increasingly, it's the white Americans who end up being offended on everyone's behalf.
See also: the performative activism around master/main branches in git.
man, don't be ridiculous. 'coon' is objectively a long standing racist slur. That some people ("a guy from South Africa", ffs) claimed not to know this or notto have heard it personally doesn't make that untrue. I invite you to go to any black neighborhood in the US and chant 'coon' for as long as you can to determine just how performative the white americans are being. I'll take the short side of 30 seconds.
> coon' is objectively a long standing racist slur.
In the US. Not even the whole of the US, but in some parts of the US.
> That some people ("a guy from South Africa", ffs) claimed not to know this
I wonder who is being a racist now. "South Africa ffs" and "claim not to know".
The world is much larger than the US and is not required to view everything through US issues.
> I invite you to go to any black neighborhood in the US
So, to quote myself: "The question is: who decides it is a slur especially in our global world? Somehow, increasingly, it's the white Americans who end up being offended on everyone's behalf."
> So, to quote myself: "The question is: who decides it is a slur especially in our global world? Somehow, increasingly, it's the white Americans who end up being offended on everyone's behalf."
The black people on the receiving end of “coon” would be the decision makers in this case.
And besides that, during the googling process of figuring out if the name is taken the negative connotations of this one would come up.
Anyway I’m working on a new terminal string styling library that I’ve named Colored which should be of some interest to you.
> The black people on the receiving end of “coon” would be the decision makers in this case.
The black people in the United States, specifically. To put this into perspective: 1.2 billion people live in Africa alone, most of them non-white.
> Anyway I’m working on a new terminal string styling library that I’ve named Colored which should be of some interest to you.
And what exactly is the negaive connotation here for 1.1 billion English speakers (out of 8.7 billion people) who don't live in the US?
Once again. To put this into perspective since you both are being maximally culturally and racially insensitive to anything that is not US, here's a perspective of an English-speaking person from South Africa (I only quote parts of the messages):
I think you just need to tolerate different cultures better. A word that is
deemed racist in one culture isn't the same in another.
There are many other uses for coon.
Maine Coon is a type of cat.
Coon is type of cheese in Australia. Go on - tell all of Australia to stop
eating coon.
Next you'll be telling me to rethink the use of the work 'monkey' or 'gorrilla' for a library. Where does it end?
I grew up in apartheid South Africa. This was a system of government that
legitimised racist laws... I've been mocked and called racial slurs, served last in queues, talked down to. Bad words over there are 'kaffir' and 'coolie'. They're
highly offensive words and given the nature of violence in that country,
it's something you could be killed over. For me those words carry more
significance than 'coon' ever will.
...
When I moved to NZ it was quite clear that those same words that were
insulting in South Africa didn't carry over. Both countries speak English
but the cultures are different, although SA has more languages. I noticed
that there's there is a product called 'kaffir lime' grocery stores
everywhere. Imagine having 'n...ga lime' in American/Canadian grocery
stores. I got used to it after a while and it really doesn't bother me
anymore. Instead of shouting out about the use of the word 'kaffir' in
their product, I understood that different countries use words differently,
and expecting NZ to change for me to accommodate my sensitivities would
have been stupid.
--- end quote ---
Now. Are you also going to dismiss this as "some guy from South Africa ffs"?
If the US were a person, literally everyone would tell them to get its shit together and go see a psychologist. And not make the world assume that all issues must be viewed strictly through skewed American view.
> The black people in the United States, specifically
If Bubba goes on twitter and starts calling black people from Canada, Australia, Mozambique, or wherever "coon" they'll probably be offended by it once they figure out what it means.
> Now. Are you also going to dismiss this as "some guy from South Africa ffs"?
That wasn't me, so no i'm not. I'm not "being maximally culturally and racially insensitive to anything that is not US", I just answered your question with the simple and obvious truth. Honestly you're coming across as more of the "offended" type than the people asking for the name change in the first place.
And your quote isn't really helping you out. Comparing changing the name of a new software library to changing the name of a long standing physical product on shelves is dishonest when we could just do a simple apples to apples comparison.
If I consider a hypothetical situation where I named my project "Coolie" because I think it's a fun word and I used to like Coolio, then someone comes along and says hey that's pretty offensive to this subset of people on the other side of the globe for these reasons that will never affect you. I'd just change it. It would cost me nothing and probably net me some goodwill.
> they'll probably be offended by it once they figure out what it means.
If that person is from the States and/or uses the term specifically in the way it's used in the US.
And even then most might just shrug it away because the word doesn't bare any significant emotional or historical baggage. What's another idiot on the internet?
Meanwhile you keep forcing the US-centric view onto the world.
> I just answered your question with the simple and obvious truth.
Ah yes. The "obvious truth" apparently meaning "whatever is true for this specific US-centric view of US-specific issues and US_specific cultural baggage is the truth".
> Honestly you're coming across as more of the "offended" type than the people asking for the name change in the first place.
Yes. I'm offended by the US shoving its way of thinking down everyone's throats and expecting everyone to meekly comply because "it's the objective truth".
> And your quote isn't really helping you out. Comparing changing the name of a new software library to changing the name of a long standing physical product on shelves is dishonest
Of course what makes it dishonest is your monopoly on the truth, got it.
> If I consider a hypothetical situation where I named my project "Coolie"
You already said, I quote, "I’m working on a new terminal string styling library that I’ve named Colored which should be of some interest to you." which was probably supposed to evoke some kind of indignation from me.
I can only re-iterate: stop forcing your US cultural and societal issues onto the world.
> I'd just change it.
You? Maybe. As it actually turns out, Americans expect everyone else to conform to whatever they find offensive while never, or rarely, changing themselves. A great example: Pidora has been "actively seeking a new name" for the past 9 years, and counting https://wiki.cdot.senecacollege.ca/wiki/Pidora_Russian
> Meanwhile you keep forcing the US-centric view onto the world.
You keep saying this, but the world view presented i've presented is anything but. The coolie example is specifically addressing non-US racism right?
> Of course what makes it dishonest is your monopoly on the truth, got it.
No, what makes it dishonest is that a bad example was specifically chosen because it helped the point. Where a good example would have been detrimental to the point.
> which was probably supposed to evoke some kind of indignation from me
No, you've been indignant the whole time. The US existing and having people in it that have their own perspectives seems to be some kind of attack on your identity which is causing you to lose reason and froth at the mouth.
You keep talking about "shoving" and "forcing", but the only person forcing anything is you and your ad nauseam repetition of some "US centric" accusation. It's just as baseless and pointless the 10th time as the first. Everyone gets it, you can chill.
Agreed. While it might be debatable whether it's explicitly offensive, it's at least a bit of a grey area and it immediately stood out to me as a poor choice of name.
Whether you agree or not with the use of the term, names are part of communication, and communication that people are going to take issue with (rightly or wrongly) is going to have an impact on a product/project/business, and should probably be reconsidered, unless the point is to cause controversy or dogwhistle certain values.
This name for example would probably rule out use at many companies, and I suspect many would choose not to publicise it with things like conference talks.
The problem is that in the age of the internet, it's very difficult to find anything that someone, somewhere won't be offended by. Every time an organization or project gives in and alters its innocently-chosen name because a tiny minority takes offense, they further normalize outrageous outrage.
It's definitely a fine line to walk. There are names that originated in an offensive context, and it's easier for me to see the objection to those. But "lunatic" hasn't been commonly used in its offensive sense in nearly a century, so I don't think it's fair to stoke outrage towards a project that started in the 2020s and chose it for extremely innocent reasons.
> it's very difficult to find anything that someone, somewhere won't be offended by
Sure, but there's a big difference to the marketability of a product between whether 30% get a funny feeling that it's not a great name and won't promote via word of mouth, vs 0.0001% who are known for taking issue with a lot of stuff shouting about it in their echochamber.
> But "lunatic" hasn't been commonly used in its offensive sense in nearly a century
I think it was reasonable to refer to "lunatic asylums" or even "looney bins" until quite recently. The offensiveness may be less, and less targeted at individuals than it was 100 years ago, but it's still there.
"should probably be reconsidered" isn't exactly outrage is it? We can have sensible discussions about appropriate naming without being extreme one way or the other, as much as the internet seems to hate moderate discussion.
If people in science really do understand that correlation is not causation, why are they publishing papers in journals that show meaningless correlations without doing the actual work of uncovering patterns of causation? If you really understood this point you would be embarrassed to publish a paper on it. These results should be confined to a searchable database in the same way data sets in lab experiments are.
You can compute an autocorrelation with FFT's by applying the convolution theorem which IIRC the audio api can do the FFTs for you. I also found the the YIN estimator is a lot better as a time domain estimator http://audition.ens.fr/adc/pdf/2002_JASA_YIN.pdf and some years ago I worked out how to compute that estimator with FFTs also.
I am surprised to find in these comments that using the debugger routinely and by default isn't a popular idea. I couldn't do my job as well as I do without having the reflex to use the debugger. I shouldn't be surprised though, the last time I watched a coworker roll his face on the keyboard trying to debug something the conversation went something like:
- Me: Just use the debugger...
- Him: But it's hard and annoying to use the debugger
- Me: It's hard and annoying not having the skills or reflex to use the debugger by default
- Him: ... ok I agree ... continues rolling face on the keyboard and add print statements everywhere
I think much of the sentiment in these comments is sounding like "that's not how I work so I will defend myself". Just learn how to use your debugger and integrate it into your work flow. You don't need a special IDE to use a debugger in most languages if that's the perceived problem.
I’ve found corporate software environments anathema to learning. The daily standup will not reward “yesterday I learned how to use a debugger” or “yesterday I spent time reading documentation” but it does reward “yesterday I spent hours grinding out the root cause of a bug”. There are other reasons, of course - but fundamentally the messaging is to get it done with as little learning as possible. You should know it all already! Learning, it should also be said, is very very hard when you are burnt out. And most of the learning capacity is used up learning non-transferable knowledge about internal-only APIs and systems you will never use again.
The solution is probably employer-funded sabbaticals but since those are rare people just settle for quitting and poking around at their own projects for a while.
Now that I’m more of what you’d call a “senior” developer I realize the absolute importance of taking time to set up your development environment so compiling, debugging, unit tests, prototyping etc. are as seamless as possible - the benefits to productivity and general happiness are manifold! But having the clout to invest more “non-productive” time upfront so your overall productivity is much higher is not usually afforded to devs fresh out of school who tend to just grind it out.
I don't use a debugger routinely and by default. First reflex is to add logging, telemetry or tests because those are useful when another issue pops in a similar place: instead of attaching a debugger (which might alter the program flow/timings), recreating the flow (which may or may not be easy) and setting breakpoints, I just read the data that I already have, which usually guides me (or other coworkers) in the debugging.
For me, the debugger only comes out when those tools don't work quickly, I'm pretty lost or I'm inspecting the code flow of third party code.
The reason debuggers are often hard to use in these environments is because people who don't routinely use debuggers to do their job do not see the value of them, and so organizations do not prioritize your ability to do this. The tone of the comments here in general is sceptical of the use of debuggers and this is exactly why you can't use them in some FAANG's - it's not a popular belief even though to anyone who does use them routinely this is such a fundamental thing. I feel like I am so much more capable with the ability to use a debugger and to routinely use it by default during development. This is how vim users must feel explaining to all the sublime text and vscode users what they are missing out on. When you have it, it's a productivity superpower.
I use vim but I don't think it's a superpower and it's rare for me to need its advanced features. I doubt vim is giving me any edge over $other_editor, I just happen to find it ergonomic and a good fit for me. Maybe I don't use it well enough?
Likewise, I don't feel debuggers are a superpower. It's rare for them to "save the day". It's just a tool that I sometimes go for. The last time I remember using a debugger was a few months ago to figure out a memory leak. hexdump would've worked just as well.
It's easier that the US blocks it for diplomatic reasons than the UK. The UK will almost certainly block it if the US doesn't. It could be interpreted as a snub if the UK interferes with the deal, so the US has first dibs on blocking the merger.
I refuse to ever work for facebook or have a facebook account. I regret having a whatsapp account, created before it was acquired. Still migrating friends+family onto signal. I get it, Facebook has scale and some cool hard problems to solve, and comp packages that are hard to ignore. I'm sure slavery looked pretty attractive too (don't get me wrong, I'm not equating the severity of these things). I just can't imagine having to explain to people in 20 years time how or why I put profit and personal gain ahead of legitimate social issues. How is it defensible? I probably clocked the issues a bit earlier than some, which is why I never created an account. Please just leave facebook and delete your accounts.
Is there a list of companies that fall into category 3 that offer fully remote positions? I worked at a tier 3 company in the bay area and have since settled into what's probably a tier 2 company in Europe. I am considering moving back to the US after covid and doing another 4 years at a tier 3 company, but I would much rather find a job that pays $300k fully remote from Europe (even if that means working on an east coast timezone) than relocating back to the cesspit of San Francisco for $500k.
