I decided to catalogue examples of engineers— primarily software developers— being asked to change a name to avoid being racist, sexist, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise bigoted. About half of these examples come from responses to my AskMetaFilter question.
In Jon Gjengset's Demystifying Unsafe Code talk at Rust NYC, he gives a very interesting example of unsafe code. Here's the link— please go and watch it— but I've transcribed it here along with my paraphrased explanation.
A Few Things Like These (Ippatiyum Cila Vicayankal)
Among birds, I like crows very much. It's true; it is a thieving creature tactfully snatching away the eats from the hands of children. In deed, it is a foolish creature visiting and perching on the compound wall of the house and caws at the oddest hours. Even then isn't it my friend who looks at me and calls out to me in my village where I crawled as a baby and grew up and also in this city planted from elsewhere?
— Cinnakkapali (Translated by Nirmal Selvamony)
There were three or four crows standing on a branch in the trees outside our balcony, so this poem feels very timely.
Later, I Learned to Speak Without a Tongue
But first I wrote backwards. First I learned to breathe without my throat. Once, my teeth chattered alphabets and people sat in rows to hear me speak. Later I wrote on paper and the paper cut itself to emptiness. Later I sat alone in the pew. Once I chanted into the empty nests of finches. Once a cathedral grew in the meadow, crowns of flowers on the skulls of deer. Before that I had children. After that, everything I loved became a hole. I lay down and shouted names into the dirt. After that, eyes grew upon my heart and all those eyes grew hearts and all those hearts eyes and hearts and eyes were trapped inside me in the dark. Later the children will come back and we'll swim moonlit in the river. Later, an emptiness will swallow me and whole. After that I will turn to grass.
— Lisa Allen Ortiz
I love this poem. The surreal imagery ("my teeth chattered alphabets", "skulls of deer") contrasts with her plain, almost boring, sentence structure (First this. Then that. Once this). She also speaks with absolute certainty, describing only what did or will happen. The resulting poem sounds like a recipe or a witness statement, but what is she recounting?
Sleeping Alone
Listening to the neighbor's dog bark and bark. He must be very big, his mouth as big as my head, his head as big as a Macy's Day float, his corridor throat commanding me to hear: I am one dog in the lonely bowl of night and there is so much dark.
— Amy Miller, 2018
I want to hug a dog.
In the following code, how can you test that Player is making the correct API
calls?
struct Player<'a> {
api: &'a Api,
}
impl<'a> Player<'a> {
pub fn new(api: &'a Api) -> Player<'a> {
Player { api }
}
pub fn play(&self, song: &str) {
self.api.sing(song);
}
pub fn stop(&self) {
self.api.shush();
}
}
By translating these poems, we aim to memorialize Xu, share some of his excellent literary work, and spread awareness that the harsh conditions, struggles and aspirations of Chinese migrant workers (including but not limited to Foxconn) have not diminished since the more widely-publicized spate of 18 attempted Foxconn suicides in 2010, resulting in 14 deaths. Insiders report that thereafter, although the frequency of suicides decreased (mainly due to Foxconn's installation of nets making it more difficult for workers to jump from their dormitories, along with the development of workers' collective resistance), such suicides have continued to the present. Including Xu Lizhi, at least 8 cases have been reported in the media since 2010, but insiders say that many other cases go unreported. We hope that in the future, workers in Foxconn and elsewhere manage to find ways around such companies' military-style discipline and surveillance, come together, and forge collective paths out of this capitalist world of death, into a world worth living in. Don't give up!
Looking to keep the [Soviet—Afghan] war fueled, Washington— where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan— financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps that were festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One such edition declared: "Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims... If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim." An American text designed to teach children the Farsi alphabet began
Aleph [is for] Allah; Allah is one
Bey [is for] Baba (father); Father goes to the mosque
Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen
Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad.
— No Good Men Among The Living (2014) by Anand Gopal
One result of all the outside attention was the 2004 constitution [of Afghanistan], drafted with heavy Western input and hailed as one of the world's most progressive. In addition to protecting basic civil liberties and minority rights, the document guaranteed women 25 percent of parliamentary seats (surpassing the proportion in the US Congress).
— No Good Men Among The Living (2014) by Anand Gopal