GitHub - LadybirdBrowser/ladybird: Truly independent web browser

Looks like a confused Swedish dude that when questioned about his use of English pronouns defaults to not wanting to get political. Is there more besides a misguided decision to avoid relevant political topics?

I think we should chastise people that insist on not getting political, but not necessarily boycott everything they do. Or at least we should apply the same moral demands to Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft or Google when choosing which browsers to support. Which of them is the least bad?

There is nothing political about acknowledging peoples' existence.
- Existence? Because somebody used a wrong pronoun?
  
  You're right, words are meaningless and language has no bearing on society at large. after all, fuiebt eidiowb rhe efifo quifopim.
  
  There's a big difference between negating the existence of people and what happend in this case, i.e. somebody writing a comment (only visible to him and other developers) using the male form.
  
  Disclaimer: I'm not a software engineer or anything, and while I can usually figure out how to install something from git, that's as far as my understanding of the platform goes..
  Was it an unnecessary edit? Sure, maybe. Hell, could have just been someone trying to get a reaction (mission accomplished). That does not mean that the edit was incorrect in any way (gramatically, syntax-wise, etc.) or political. It's just someone being annoying.
  But it's only political, if you agree that trans people should not exist (or I guess just that you are woefully ignorant on the subject of gender).
  
  The hyperbole here is insane. My trans friend’s Japanese parents are supportive of him, but they have some trouble with pronouns. If you’re not a native English speaker and learned the standard pronouns, then I think it’s just naturally too confusing. Pretty much all of them are translating in their minds in real-time.
  
  The hyperbole here is insane. My trans friend’s Japanese parents are supportive of him, but they have some trouble with pronouns.
  Can you really not understand that we're talking about two completely different situations?
  
  Language is extremely powerful. This is all part of the erasure (an integral part btw).
  
  Hmm I don't think you really understand what happened.
  The developer wrote a comment (not visible to the end user) using the male form.
  A random person opened a pull request without any useful changes, except for changing that comment from "he" to "their".
  The developer rejected that PR because it's politically motivated and it doesn't add anything else.
  
  Right, except that's not politically motivated, and is a useful change for people reading the code, both for women and non-binary people.
  Calling pronouns "political" is the dogwhistle they always use
  
  I know what happened. Is it a stupid, unnecessary fix? Sure, probably. But that doesn't mean it's political. Trans people simply existing is not a political issue.
  
  They refused to use the right pronoun. One is a mistake. The other is a choice.
  
  They refused to accept a PR from a random person with just one single word change for a string that only the developer himself is seeing.
  I think the developer has all the rights not to accept such a PR which adds nothing to the program. And I think people that really care about gender inclusivity should stop focusing on this useless nitpicks, which makes inclusivity appear like made up by a bunch of trolls.
  
  It's pretty telling to focus on the dev's right to reject inclusivity while simultaneously rejecting and deriding everyone else's right to judge them for that.
  And if it was such a useless change, why didn't the dev reject it for that instead of saying it was "political"? He's the one that declared the word itself, not the utility of the change, was the problem. Calling everyone else "trolls" for pointing that out is just disingenuous.
- Don’t think we should be scared of the word “political” or “ideology”.
  
  Yeah, that too... Everything is political if you want to really get into it. People just want to be able to ignore it until it directly affects them.
  
  Indeed. It’s a privilege to be able to stay inside your little circle and say “we don’t do politics” or “ no ideology here”.

ugh transphobia rots people's brains

it's not too hard to just be a decent person ppl

Sure, but there's no transphobia here. Stop spreading nonsense.
- Ok, you keep saying that but never explain why/how. Like, why refuse such a small change so aggressively?
  
  The documentation has long since been changed.
  Note that the anon user is able to become root without a password by default, as a development convenience. To prevent this, remove anon from the wheel group and it will no longer be able to run /bin/su.
  https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/commit/a2a6bc534868773b9320ec3ca7399283cf7a375b (this seems to have also switched to gender neutral language in other parts.'of the documentation and comments as well).
  Original drama: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
  
  Ok, fair enough then. Could have been a simple misunderstanding.
  
  The change was accepted after a short conversation. So to talk about "refusing a small change so aggressively" is total bullshit, like you're trying to start a fight or something.

Again this shit. This have been debunked many times, yet people still write this nonsense.

I see zero reason to out the "transphobic" label on the dev.

Think and read before labelling people.

- there may also be the possibility of the dev simply not wanting to define his views publicly out of the blue, because regardless of stance, you will make enemies, potentially hindering the projects development or facing personal repercussions.
  It should be allowed for someone to not out themselves as either transphobic or an ally. If the person does have issues with pronouns, it's better if they simply keep to themselves instead of loudly proclaiming it. The other way around it's the same - even if someone is pro trans, it might not be suitable for them to openly speak about it - it might even put them in danger.
  I agree with you that this is often a dog whistle, but it might also be a poor choice of wording.

I can't see anything about this on DuckDuckGo. Do you have a link?

https://mkultra.monster/tech/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird
This was a little „write-up“ back when everything became more public.
- I'm surprised this got any kind of attention.
  Here's the turn of events from my perspective:
  Someone submits a 1-line PR changing the gender used in a code comment
  PR rejected on the grounds that the change is "politically motivated"
  Submitter got mad, and proposed removing the rule against "politically motivated" changes, calling it "white supremacist," which is closed
  Someone wrote a blog post about it
  Here's my analysis:
  Stupid change - don't make PRs that simply correct an irrelevant typo in a comment somewhere; some people do this to put stuff on a resume (look at how much FOSS work I do!), and it just wastes everyone's time
  Stupid response - it should've been rejected because it's a useless change, not because it's "politically motivated"
  Stupid proposal - do you really want to waste a bunch of time fighting over wording in a comment? Because that's the kind of crap you get without a rule like this.
  This is all about an irrelevant change to a comment? Why is this getting so much attention?
  
  I should be an idiot. I dont see a direct relationship between race and sexual orientation. Even if the PR was rejected because a pronounce how the hell this is white supremacist?
  
  Well, didn't the Nazis also discriminate against gay people?
  That said, it's a massive leap to go from "rejects 1 line PR that only changes gender in a comment" to literal Nazi...
  
  "comments must be accurate," is not a rule you should bend. Bending it even a little leads to last programming and shit code.
  
  True, but that only applies if it's misleading. For example:
  
  // pythagoran theorem distance = abs(p2.x - p1.x) + abs(p2.y - p1.y);
  Fixing that makes sense because it's wrong and misleading (it's actually Manhattan distance), and a quick glace is insufficient to tell the difference.
  But fixing a typo or something that wouldn't be confusing is just noise and should only be fixed with other changes. For example, I intentionally misspelled Pythagorean in my comment above, fixing that to be the right spelling would be a useless change, even if the distance formula used the hypotenuse. It wouldn't be an unreasonable policy to reject PRs that only fix spelling or similar to reduce noise for the maintainers.
  
  Yep, I understand but disagree. Maybe it comes from working with so many ESL coders, but I'll happily accept typo corrections because it's not always obvious what words should be if you're not steeped in the culture.
  
  It really depends on the project.
  If you're a larger project, you can see a ton of these from people hoping to land a commit to put "contributor to X" on a resume somewhere. Those add up and are really distracting and possibly automated. They waste everyone's time, especially if they spawn a bunch of conversion like this did.
  If you're a smaller project, it doesn't matter as much. I work with ESL coders too, so I get it (1/4 of my office is ESL immigrants, and ~2/3 of the broader team is ESL). I fix comments all the time, I just include them with other changes.
  So it depends. But in general, a high profile project should reject this noise to discourage this behavior.
  
  In theory that's fair reasoning. Unfortunately the dev made it clear that his reasoning was based on politics
  
  Did he? I only saw him point to the rule against politics.
  He should have said it's because the PR isn't worth the time, but it also seems motivated by something that's against the rules (i.e. why make a PR that only fixes gender in one comment? There was a later PR that was accepted that fixed it in several places).
  So without more evidence, I cannot say what the dev's motivations for rejecting the PR were, aside from the apparent rule breakage mentioned. They didn't say they disagreed with the change (i.e. that the change was wrong), just the proposal of the change (i.e. seems more motivated by virtue signaling instead of improving the dev experience). And you can look at the comments and see justification for that position, since it quickly devolved into actual politics with people accusing the dev of being a Nazi.
  Maybe if you showed a pattern across more than just this incident (i.e. over months or years), but this sounds more like people being stubborn than tolerant.
- "We don't accept ideologically motivated changes" = White supremacist language... Yeah, sounds about like what I expected...
- Thank you for sharing.
- Someone else posted a writeup about it.
  It wasn't in documentation, but a code comment. No user would see this.
  One part was a rejected change on the README, which was trying to remove this "white supremacist language":
  # On ideologically motivated changes
  This is a purely technical project. As such, it is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics or religious beliefs. Any changes that appear ideologically motivated will be rejected.
  Someone changing "he" to "they" (original PR that started all this) in a comment as their only change could absolutely be seen as "politically motivated." My understanding is that if changing the comment was part of some larger useful change, it would be fine (as would using "she" or "they" in a new comment), but just changing the gender of a pronoun in a comment is a useless change.
  If the comment said "she," would someone have been motivated to make this change? Probably not. Should changing this from "she" to some other pronoun (he or they) also be rejected? Yes, on the same grounds as changing it from "he," it's not a useful change and just wastes everyone's time. If you're in the code already, then go ahead, correct silly language like this if you care to.
  
  I never said they were.
  Someone changing “he” to “they” (original PR that started all this) in a comment as their only change could absolutely be seen as “politically motivated.”
  Look at the fallout in the comments on those PRs, it quickly devolved into politics and quickly away from any technical merit.
  If this exact same change were included with other changes, I highly doubt anyone would've cared about the comment. The issue isn't with the text of the comment, but with the likely motivation and the actual merits of the PR. Many projects immediately reject tiny PRs because they clog up the review queue, and that appears to be what's happening here, plus all the political nonsense in the issue comments.
  
  They are political, because people (I'm not one of them) think they shouldn't be allowed and there are only two genders (e.g. the current president of the US).
- Freakout? Didn't he just reject?
“Don’t Be Evil” happily indexing while Bingcrosoft sleeps
- Maybe disabling JavaScript helps?
- DDG search is garbage, I'm sorry... Whenever I switch to a browser that defaults to it, I'm reminded why I always switch it back to Google (unfortunately). Even Yandex is better, and that's prob Russian spyware.
  
  there's startpage which is a Google wrapper if you're interested
  
  Actually just tried this for the first time yesterday after switching to librewolf. Have only used it once, but already seems better than DDG.
  
  Try out SearXNG.
  
  I have previously, and was not impressed. Maybe it's better now?
  I've been using Startpage for the past couple of days since installing Librewolf, and I kind of like it. I like the "Visit in anonymous view" link under each result... Works to let me see reddit posts (Linux troubleshooting, etc), despite not being logged in, and being on a VPN.

Totally excessive in view of the facts.

There are so few alternative browsers and the collapse of the privacy is so global. That seems to me a minor point in relation to the goal.

Under that POV stop using Volkswagen because Hitler invented it.

- Wow. Calm down omg. This is not a witch hunting.

Transphobic main dev […]

Do you have a source?

Here we fucking go again.

Don't be a dick. The dev is not transphobic, and you know it.

I didn't know anything about this, but it doesn't sound as bad with context.

edit: Removed link to a site which shouldn’t be receiving more traffic. I should have vetted it more thoroughly.

- Lunduke is definitely right wing and has been for years
  
  Lunduke used to be somewhat interesting, and I enjoyed his "Linux sucks" series, but he really has doubled down on political nonsense.
  
  I disagree with Lunduke videos, specailly when he tried to bork Rust as a bad language without knowing single shit of rust programming. But if he was left wing we weren't having this conversation. People from moderate right should be excluded? I'm not talking about Lunduke here, but In general.
  
  Exactly!
  I dislike tech people who mix politics into their work, even if I agree with their opinions. If you do both, just keep them separate, like separate YouTube channels or blogs or whatever. Lunduke doesn't do that, and many of his tech takes are colored by that as well, so I ignore him.
  
  I agree with you at some extent. As you say, maybe a different channel for politics, tech, etc.
  
  Definitely. Even other series were interesting. I especially like his perspective of how much bloated software currently is.
  ...but I ultimately unsubscribed him, because the most videos were alt-right bullshit, without providing even credible sources on the biggest claims. Definitely NOT give him any traffic anymore, he doesn't deserve it.
  
  Agreed. The signal to noise ratio really suffers now.
- Because it is. A quote from the linked page on asahi linux devs leaving twitter because of rising anti trans rhetoric
  “"Half of us are trans," he says. Accompanied by a call to "fight back" against an imagined "genocide", assumedly perpetrated by those who do not fully buy into his particular sexual fetish.”
  The blogs author purposely misgenders Alyssa Rosensweig and refers to being trans as a sexual fetish, which makes their politics obscenely clear. Further, Alyssa has a resume of amazing accomplishments in reverse engineering the apple m1 and m2 chips and developing graphics drivers for their gpus. Lundukes resume is basically growing up as a nerd and being a “tech blogger” from early in the game and going full qanon a few years ago
  Further in the article he references hector Martin saying that people demanding to keep politics out of tech is bullshit because tech is made by humans and anti trans rhetoric is going to kill his colleagues. His response to this:
  “Of course nobody is trying to kill Hector's colleagues.
  And the vast majority of major corporations -- not to mention the President of the country -- are continually coming out in support of the Trans fetish. So declaring that there is a genocide occuring is beyond ridiculous.”
  So that didn’t age well (from less than 2 years ago)
- I don’t know. But rather than just accepting the assertion, I did a cursory search. This turned up and I perused it. I didn’t see anything damning and thought maybe somebody could clarify. I am absolutely not trying to defend anybody, but I didn’t spend much time on it. Sorry folks.
  Maybe he is a bad guy. Truly, I didn’t know.
Lunduke is an alt-right shithead.
- My mistake. I didn’t look far enough into it. But the accusation was made without context so I didn’t know. I’m not trying to defend him.
  
  Stay vigilant. Content about "Political correctness gone mad!" is step one of the alt-right pipeline.
  
  It also can be a reasonable take though, and you'll need more context to distinguish it.
  In this case, Lunduke has a history of injecting politics where it doesn't belong, which is a shame because I used to watch some of his content (esp. his "Linux sucks" series). But now it's filled with nonsense.
  My point is, don't write someone off because they don't want politics or political correctness in their project. Write them off when they use that excuse to silence things they don't like and allow things they do.
  
  It can also be the correct arrestment. Context is everything.
  
  Don't you think for a second that talking like this is indicative of extremism, polarization, even fanatism? It is ok to take political posture, but this is excessive
  
  Dude, who is gonna kill you in this case?
That blog post is pretty ridiculous, IMO.
You'll see the alt-right do that a lot, for some reason.
There's real criticism, but they always mix it in with some made-up complaints like the slavery thing, which is some of the most obvious sarcasm I have ever seen on the internet, but somehow taken literally by the author of the post.
IDK if he's a transphobe or whatnot, but his reaction to the change in language was indicative of, at the very least---with the most charitable of interpretations---, a disregard for inclusive language and, more realistically, some philosophy that doesn't allow for "others" to participate because the existence of those that aren't male is "political," somehow.
You might not see it, because you haven't seen it enough times to recognize it, but it happens again and again and again... But it's always quiet.
"Don't make this political," "ideology isn't welcome," stuff like that. Statements that sound reasonable, but are only wielded to quiet those aiming for inclusiveness and acceptance of marginalized people.
It might sound like a less-than-generous interpretation, a bit callous and over-zealous, but it's just patterns. I hear wolf, I say wolf.
Also, I thought that article had a really funny passage:
One activist ("cafkafk") seen below, within the GitHub repository for the developer being attacked, celebrating the fact that other activists -- organized on "The Fediverse" -- had arrived to harass the Ladybird developer.
This alone made me think that it might be satire, but I don't think it is... The Fediverse, huh? OK.
- I would've rejected the PR too, but not for violation of that rule, but because one-line changes that merely fix a comment waste everyone's time reviewing it, and are often just to build someone's resume. I've even seen some that remove trailing whitespace.
  If you want to fix it alongside other changes, go for it (and the reviewer said as much on the PR). But if you're only interested in sending in drive-by commits to build a resume or something and aren't actually interested in helping, then it should be rejected as noise.
  If there's a broader pattern of this, maybe that's cause for concern. But if it's literally just this instance, I could see the dev being annoyed at drive-by PRs.
  
  I would’ve rejected the PR too, but not for violation of that rule, but because one-line changes that merely fix a comment waste everyone’s time reviewing it, and are often just to build someone’s resume.
  That's exactly what I was talking about. You're taking what they said reasonably, because you're probably a reasonable person! However, look at what they're actually saying. The issue wasn't framed as being a "drive-by," though later that's what they claimed. It was about ideology. It was about politics. They didn't pull up rules about one-line changes to justify not accepting them, they pulled up rules about talking politics.
  The problem wasn't that it was a meaningless PR, the problem was that it was a meaningful PR that they disagreed with.
  And, quite frankly, disagreeing with that does make you an asshole, at the very least, and a transphobic misogynist, at worst. There were at least a few PRs open about similar issues, too.
  Look, I'm not calling him a transphobe or a misogynist; I'm just saying this was an asshole thing to do, and it was done in an asshole way, and that allowing this sort of thing to exist, especially in FOSS, is not good. That's all.
  Check this out: https://mkultra.monster/tech/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird
  
  The issue wasn’t framed as being a “drive-by,” though later that’s what they claimed. It was about ideology.
  But that's the problem, it's both a drive-by, useless change and a politically motivated one. If you show up to a project and submit a change that violates multiple rules, it's dealer's choice which one to pick.
  With asynchronous discussions like this, it's impossible to know their motivations, so it's helpful to assume the best instead of the worst.
  Check this out: https://mkultra.monster/tech/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird
  From that:
  In order to not look like I'm just repeating myself over and over, here is another pull request where a user fixed the specifically gendered language, and was denied
  Here's the PR in question. It was merged, probably because it didn't just change "he" to "they" in one spot (but did just that in a few spots), but actually fixed confusing language.
  And then after it was merged, there were tons of irrelevant comments about the policy and other PRs.
  The one I pulled here included changes from the other rejected PRs. Maybe this was by a different reviewer, idk. That said, it's still a little iffy since it's just fixing grammar and especially pronouns that aren't really relevant to the code it's commenting.
  I probably would've accepted that last one because it fixes stuff in a lot of places rather than one (quantity has a quality of its own), and accepting it will hopefully stop PR spam.
  Look, I’m not calling him a transphobe or a misogynist
  He may be. Idk.
  My criticisms here go to everyone involved:
  reviewer should've rejected the PRs because they're noisy, not because they're "political"
  submitter shouldn't just submit a 1-line grammar fix in a comment
  github users shouldn't brigade, discussion should be technical
  blog author should be more accurate (see above)
  It's stupid drama all around.
  Fixing comments is fine. If you're going to only fix comments, at least fix a bunch of them at once, and ideally more than just a pronoun or grammar mistake here and there. English isn't everyone's first language, so assume the best and don't waste everyone's time with useless changes.
  
  Sigh, you do have a point.
  Maybe this was by a different reviewer, idk.
  It was. Some other member of SerenityOS, not the person behind Ladybird (awesomekling).
  blog author should be more accurate (see above)
  That's fair. I'll say though, the blog post is dated from 1 day after the PR was actually merged. It's not unreasonable to think that, when they wrote it, it really hadn't been merged and they only saw the initial denial citing the policy.
  He may be. Idk.
  Yeah, I was just trying to say that that wasn't the point of my rant. I get it I get it.
  
  It’s not unreasonable to think that, when they wrote it, it really hadn’t been merged and they only saw the initial denial citing the policy.
  That never happened on this PR. The only human reply before the merge (aside from the submitter) was this:
  Please fix the commit messages (see BuggieBot's comment); and maybe this can go in one commit? Doesn't really need to be 5 separate ones.
  And this is BuggieBot's comment:
  Hello!
  One or more of the commit messages in this PR do not match the SerenityOS code submission policy, please check the lint_commits CI job for more details on which commits were flagged and why.
  Please do not close this PR and open another, instead modify your commit message(s) with git commit --amend and force push those changes to update this PR.
  It's a completely different.
  This, plus the tone of the blog post looks like they were on a crusade instead of trying to accurately portray events.
  Sorry to beat a dead horse here, my point is that we all need to be careful jumping to conclusions, especially in FOSS where discussion almost exclusively happens asynchronously in text and with people with different backgrounds. Pretty much everyone involved failed at that.
  I agree with the rest.
  
  And this is BuggieBot’s comment:
  Yeah I was referencing that comment.
  Sequence of events:
  PR trying to change pronouns.
  Automated response citing policy.
  Author takes note of it for blog post.
  PR fixed and merged.
  Blog post published.
  Precocious, certainly, and I agree it was misguided. The blog post was indeed emotionally motivated, that's more than clear.
  Sorry to beat a dead horse here
  It's alright. I think these discussions need to be had.
  
  Right, but the policy was commit hygiene (lots of small commits), which has nothing to do with the "no politics" policy. It's right there in the comment, and the suggestion is to squash the commits into one.
  It’s alright. I think these discussions need to be had.
  Agreed. And unfortunately, I felt it necessary to be really wordy to not come off as supporting intolerance in any way, while still arguing that I would've done the same (reject 1-line cosmetic PRs).
  This is some kind of correlary to Poe's Law, or perhaps Godwin's Law.
  
  Right, but the policy was commit hygiene (lots of small commits), which has nothing to do with the “no politics” policy. It’s right there in the comment, and the suggestion is to squash the commits into one.
  Suspiciously close to what Hitler would say... /s