Both? I've seen plenty of outrage over Apple's labor practices.
The difference isn't that one produced outrage and one didn't. The difference is Apple was willing to change course on hiring this guy. The cheap labor is too valuable and they are keeping it no matter how upset it makes people.
The most striking thing here has got to be that for some people being told they worked at a company riddled with white supremacy and racism would have been a relief.
I know the stock response is that denying the existence of a problem is worse than admitting it, but if the gravamen of the issue is not whether or not the company is built on the most murderous ideology in history but whether or not the founders will affirm that it is publicly seems an excellent indicator the term 'white supremacy' has been hollowed out and is now just another target in woke language games.
> ... company riddled with white supremacy and racism
You're taking it to the other extreme. As I understand it, the employee's issue is with Singer's statement “I strongly disagree we live in a white supremacist culture”.
If Singer had just admitted that there is indeed some element of white supremacy, the discussion could have proceed about its extent and how to address it. But by denying it wholesale and trying to quash the discussion, he denied the experience of some of the other attendees, no longer making it comfortable for them to voice their concerns at a company forum.
The great irony with these terminology changes is that those most tripped up will be learners with access to fewer up to date resources and autodidacts who lack access to the usual educational opportunities afforded to those pursuing a career in tech.
Isn't the sort of person most likely to be tripped up by this the sort of person it is nominally supposed to help? Isn't it much more likely that it proves a stumbling block to the black teenager teaching herself to code from resources a few years old than to the white undergraduate whose new edition textbook will include the change and who has a professor and peers to explain it just in case?
If you want marginalized outsiders to have an easier path into programming isn't a change that makes that just a little bit trickier in order to make those with established tech careers feel better about themselves the wrong sort of change?
What passes for AI ethics research is akin to a "Hiroshima ethics research" that focuses on the carbon footprint of the Enola Gay and the lack of BIPOC representation on the team that assembled the Little Boy bomb.
I don't care if the corporations building a dystopian panopticon are intersectional.
That it is incorrect to say that personal bias or subjective interpretation has never played any role whatsoever in search results is a vacuous truth. It's a meaningless tautology. And it's fallacious to use it to excuse for injecting any sort of political ideology into search results.
In the real world, what's going to make Python less accessible to PoC new to programming(and new programmers generally) is the arbitrary change in well-defined industry-wide terminology. Working from documentation and learning resources that employ master/slave when those terms have been memory-holed in the newest versions of the language is the sort of seemingly minor change that trips up neophytes.
I'm not totally opposed to changing master/slave. But in light of the real cost of this sort of breaking change I'd want to see some evidence of actual harm, rather than some guy(who, I feel compelled to point out, is a white man) insisting that we change it for what are, at best, totally theoretical and speculative harms.
Passing over the politics of this decision, is there any plausible outcome that doesn't involve every organization with any sense at all forking or abandoning Lerna?
Had he denied the application it could just as easily be said to have shown his expertise in the regulatory approval process by detecting and rejecting a dangerous drug.
And yet, I don't think that display of competence would have landed him a job at Purdue.
An algorithm understanding enough about the text to infer the correct emotional inflection to give a speech may edge into the category of strong AI, but I would have guessed that it would be easier to create a neural network that, given a text spoken in one voice, could transform it into another with the correct stress, intonation, etc. Perhaps even that's a more difficult task than I assumed, although speech generation seems to receive a lot less academic and industrial attention than speech recognition and understanding.
Yeah, it's a bit more difficult of a task than you've assumed.
Speech synthesis receives a lot of attention, but it's hard, so you rarely hear any news about it. People are throwing DNNs at it at the moment, but nothing earth shattering has come of it (yet). I have a couple of 'naturalness' filters that use DNNs and about 30% of the time, they drop all of their tones and I end up with an angry whisper as output. I don't work late too often.
For people interested in how hard it is, I recently read this [1] NYT article providing a comparison of synthetic speech that IBM experts tested for Watson in the Jeopardy competition.
I'm always a little mystified by those who believe there is some vast pool of people receiving something called "welfare" that pays them munificent sums to sit around all day not working.
There is no "welfare". There's SNAP(food stamps) with a princely average payment of $125, which has time limits on eligibility and mostly goes to working households. There's TANF which only goes to households with children and has both time limits on eligibility and work requirements.
What there absolutely is not is some sort of program where millions of people are paid to sit around think of ways to build a better mousetrap. The idea that there is remains one of those pernicious myths that just won't seem to die.
Case in point. Social Security is OASDI - old age, survivors, and disability insurance. It's not a guaranteed income for the general population, it's meant to provide support to those incapable of working due to age or disability.
Some guy wrote a satire of Silicon Valley in an exaggerated tech bro literary persona.
Guess which one triggered the strenuous denunciations of woke tech activists?