I’d be curious to know what the proper context is for Kling saying that using gender neutral language in the documentation of a project he was maintaining is something he’s opposed to because it’s “ideologically motivated.”

White males are actively discriminated against in tech.

It’s an open secret of Silicon Valley.

One of the last meetings I attended before leaving Apple (in 2017) was management asking us to “keep the corporate diversity targets in mind” when interviewing potential new hires.

The phrasing was careful, but the implication was pretty clear.

I knew in my heart this wasn’t wholesome, but I was too scared to rock the boat at the time.

That’s Kling replying to @danheld, who “is ultimately responding to @shaunmmaguire’s tweet lying about being told he wouldn’t be promoted at Google for being white.”

What’s the proper context for that?

What’s the proper context for Kling calling someone getting dragged for boosting noted far-right conspiracy nut Bryan Lunduke “persecution” for “banal, mainstream positions”?

I mean, sure, being alt-right isn’t very alt nowadays so I guess it’s mainstream, I’ll grant you that.

Quotes and links from this blog post

She was an asshole who wanted me to redo work for free because she believed her son over someone who actually knew what they were doing, and after tens of minutes of wrangling I just went “fuck it” and obliged her request to sanitize the peripherals. The sum wasn’t all that big to begin with, so it’s not like she was on the hook for hundreds of euros – probably got a 50€ bill instead of a 20€ one. Not knowing any better obviously wasn’t the problem here, but if that’s your takeaway then I really don’t know what to tell you.

So yes, I did it.
No, I’m not sorry.
Yes, I’d do it again.

I think my dumbest customer story isn’t programming-related but still related to computers. I worked in a small computer repair shop about 3000 years ago, and one day a customer comes in with their family computer that’s “not working.” It turned out to be full of viruses and malware, and when we started working on it it turned out this was due to somebody visiting shady porn sites and clicking on download buttons left and right. I explain the situation to her and then recommend steps on how to avoid this happening in the future, so how to browse safely, antivirus software etc. She feelt a bit embarrassed and says that it’s her son, and that she’ll give him a talking-to.

A few weeks later the same customer comes back with the family computer and this time she’s visibly annoyed, and curiously she’s brought along the keyboard, mouse and monitor. The computer’s got viruses again, and it’s my fault. Why? Because she’d had a talk with her son who had then sworn up and down that he’ll mend his filthy ways. When new viruses cropped up, his explanation was that obviously they’re in the keyboard, mouse and monitor too, and since they hadn’t been in the shop they were still infected and we were just too incompetent to have known this. Naturally she believed her son over my word, and started demanding that we remove the viruses from all the peripherals. I tried for a very long time to explain that it’s just not possible (this was a time when PS/2 connectors were still pretty common and that’s what they had so it wasn’t even theoretically possible), but she wouldn’t budge because her son was a computer whiz (he wasn’t) and a Good Boy™ and would never lie, so clearly I was either incompetent or lying.

Finally I just relented and said “OK you got me, it’s possible your viruses came from the peripherals but I just didn’t want to mention it because removing them is so time-consuming and difficult”. I took all their hardware in and had it unfucked in pretty short order, and I looked at the browser history to make sure that it really was a reinfection via the web, which it was (I remember Pamela Anderson featuring in a lot of the searches, which we techs giggled at.)

I kept their hardware at the shop for a couple of weeks; it’s a tricky and demanding job to remove viruses from mouses, keyboards and monitors, remember? When writing the bill I charged her double the time I actually put in – she didn’t want to pay at all because she felt it was our mistake but at that point my boss, who was a formidable lady, practically put her boot up the customer’s ass and made her cough up the money.

She left in a huff never to be seen again, thank the gods.