onlinepersona

@onlinepersona@programming.dev

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Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men (www.researchgate.net)

Our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted more often than men's [when their gender is hidden]. However, when a woman's gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.

onlinepersona,

From the post’s link:

We hypothesized that pull requests made by women are less likely to be accepted than those made by men. Prior work on gender bias in hiring – that women tend to have resumes less favorably evaluated than men (5) – suggests that this hypothesis may be true.

To evaluate this hypothesis, we looked at the pull status of every pull request submitted by women compared to those submitted by men. We then calculate the merge rate and corresponding confidence interval, using the Clopper-Pearson exact method (15), and find the following:

Open Closed Merged Merge Rate 95% Confidence Interval
Women 8,216 21,890 111,011 78.6% [78.45%, 78.87%]
Men 150,248 591,785 2,181,517 74.6% [74.56%, 74.67%]

4 percentage point difference overall.

Pull requests can be made by anyone, including both insiders (explicitly authorized owners and collaborators) and outsiders (other GitHub users). If we exclude insiders from our analysis, the women’s acceptance rate (64.4%) continues to be significantly higher than men’s (62.7%) (χ2(df = 2, n = 2, 473, 190) = 492, p < .001)

Emphasis mine. that’s 1.7 percentage points.

The final paragraph also omits how the acceptance changes after gender is “revealed” (username, profile image). The graph doesn’t help either

For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women’s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong. Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall (as we reported earlier), but when they’re outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they have a lower acceptance rate than men.

So women drop from 71.8% to 62.5% = 9,3 percentage points, and they say it’s more than men, but don’t reveal the difference. Only graph has an indication (unless I’m missing a table) and it may be 5 (?) percentage points for men. Which would be about 4 percentage points between both genders.

https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/719ba2e8-fb27-4d65-be1d-29a91409c0fc.png
Figure 5: Pull request acceptance rate by gender and perceived gender, with 95% Clopper-Pearson confidence intervals, for insiders (left) and outsiders (right)

The conclusion:

Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.

That’s quite exaggerated for <=5 percentage points. Especially for the number of people involved.

Out of 4,037,953 GitHub user profiles with email addresses, we were able to identify 1,426,121 (35.3%) of them as men or women through their public Google+ profiles.

Maybe I missed it, but how many of those were women and how many made PRs?

in a 2013 survey of the more than 2000 open source developers who indicated a gender, only 11.2% were women

Let’s compare the PR rate per gender:

Let’s say the percentage of women did not increase since 2013, which I’d find difficult to believe, that’s 1,269,247 men and 156,873 women. Men made 150,248 + 591,785 + 2,181,517 = 2,923,550 PRs. Women made 8,216 + 21,890 + 111,011 = 141,117 PRs. That’s ~2.3 PRs per man and ~0,9 PRs per woman. If the percentage changed and more women became contributors, that would decrease the PRs per woman.

That leads me to ask:

  • are women more hesitant to contribute PRs that might not be merged? if so, it might contribute to why their PRs are merged more often
  • are the women with accounts on github more likely to be people who have some kind of education in the IT field? if there are less hobbyist women (percentage-wise) on github, and more hobbyist men who just chuck their stuff online then decide to contribute to a project, it might contribute to PR acceptance (you’re comparing pros to amateurs)
  • what does a similar acceptance rate for double the amount of PRs for men actually say? I don’t know, but it might be pertinent.

I very much encourage humans to contribute to opensource. So, while this paper says something about the current state of things, it doesn’t seem like it’s saying much. The differences in pull request acceptance are not very significant (<5 percentage points) to me

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onlinepersona,

They might not even have to. I bet there are bots already having entire discussions by themselves on there.

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onlinepersona,

From what I understand LLMs are just large heuristic machines. They gather a lot of statistics on token order and return an answer to that with something that statistically should higher than other options. There’s no “understanding”. So to answer your question, no, they don’t understand the license.

Content is most likely scraped wholesale from websites, possibly run through some clean up to possibly filter out absolute garbage, and fed into an LLM to train it. An LLM can be tricked to reveal its training data (e.g repeat “fruit” forever). It’s in those cases where copyright infringement is detected and if action can and has be taken. There are court cases currently in review, the most popular being the one against Github Copilot for infringing on the license of sourcecode it ingested.

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onlinepersona,

Ares! I can’t find an English wikipedia article about it 😮 Just found out it was written in delphi and opensource.

Those were the days… DC++, Ares, Limewire, Napster, Emule, Bearshare… so many things just to download the latest Linkin Park. Only for it to end up being porn 😅

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onlinepersona,

Yes please. Shoot yourself in the foot. It seems like it’s the only way people will even consider switching.

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onlinepersona,

It’s called “upselling” isn’t it?

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onlinepersona,

That’s probably KDE - the K Desktop Environment. Linux variants are called “distributions” and they are basically software bundles maintained by groups.

Desktop environments are basically bundled themes and software to present a desktop, bars, effects, and so on. Windows basically has one desktop environment, but linux has many: Most popular are KDE (windows like) and Gnome (Mac like), but there are more like Cinnamon, XFCE, LXQt, LXDE, which look more like windows.

Desktop environments also have window managers - they do what they say, manage your windows: maximize and minimize them, stack them (stacking window managers), tile them (tiling window managers), or even allow only one window at a time (like kiosks).

If you want to start your linux journey, grab bazzite if you want to game or linux mint debian edition (comes standard with cinnamon desktop environment, but you have the choice during installation to use KDE too) and give it a go!

You can also test distros (linux mint for example) online!

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onlinepersona,
onlinepersona,

tbh, I know little about the capabilities of the Great Firewall. Maybe it already is possible to circumvent it with a VPN or an anonymity network like I2P or TOR. Also don’t know if they block per IP or in blocks. Possibly hosting the peertube instance on public cloud infra would make it difficult to block if the IP changed at certain intervals.

Hosting peertube could however provide dissenters with more options than youtube.

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onlinepersona,

I’m hoping RISC-V will start showing up in consumer products soon. Hopefully the first ones will be Linux laptops. Windows doesn’t have RISC-V support yet, does it? This might be the opportunity for Linux to become the default for RISC-V.

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onlinepersona,

Woah. Got a source for that?

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onlinepersona,

Thanks for the link.

a potential reason might be the very fragmentary nature of the RISC-V ISA, which makes a standard RISC-V kernel very complicated if you want to support more than a (barebones) profile. This is also supported by a RISC-V mailing list thread, where ‘expensive maintenance’ is mentioned for why Google doesn’t want to support RISC-V.

That might change. It wouldn’t be surprising if Google jumped back onto the train once RISC-V became popular again. But that might take a while.

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onlinepersona,

As much as I dislike Google, I’m not entirely sure what they can do here. The tech is public and here to stay. There’s a deluge of porn material and this is just part of it.

Google could train an AI to find images of people that were deepfaked but all that’s gonna do is create adversarial training - a new game for trainers. Making stuff easier to report could also make it easier to create fake reports. The article doesn’t really make suggestions as to what google should be doing. Maybe they don’t know either.

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onlinepersona,

Didn’t they recently also remove their requirement for women to start conversations? (Not like it did much since it was always just “hey”). They’re just a yellow tinder at this point.

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onlinepersona,

That’s quite the double standard. Men are mocked for sending out copy-pasted answers to their matches and being unoriginal, but women on Bumble are “exhausted” by making the first move and even get a feature to automate it.

Thanks for the link.

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onlinepersona,

Season 2 of Invincible really hasn’t been great. Was it made during the writer’s strike?

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Public personal dev accounts: opinions?

I feel like there are many devs out there who expose a lot of personal details and opinions all over the web. Maybe it’s just me, but when starting out with the internet I tried my best to separate my personal details (name, age, sex, country, ethnicity, family ties, relationship status,…) from usernames in public....

onlinepersona,

To improve Firefox based on your needs, understanding how users interact with essential functions like search is key.

Buddy, I just want to type a search term and get results. Stop spying on my search. Your only job is to transfer it to the server and then present the result. I don’t need you to suggest some bullshit to me, or think of “ways to improve search”.

This helps us take a step forward in providing a browsing experience that is more tailored to your needs, without us stepping away from the principles that make us who we are.

No. What the fuck? They are sounding more and more like Google. We need a new alternative that isn’t built from Gecko or Blink or whatever the engines are called.

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onlinepersona,

That’s like saying the window pane between me and the teller has to understand the conversation and dynamically modify the light between him and I. The window pane’s only job is to let light through. Keep it at that.

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onlinepersona,

You’re describing telemetry to improve the overall performance of the window. That’s very different from what Mozilla: listening in to what is sent between the teller and I. They even gave an example of a trip to Spain and recording it as travel. That’s going way beyond the performance of a window. The teller is probably already doing that. The window operator has no business listening in on that discussion nor recording even a summary of details of the discussion.

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onlinepersona,

You can’t even sync encrypted chats between devices. Lose your device or have a desktop client? Bye bye encrypted chat!

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onlinepersona,

They are not the only ones. I’ve seen a few other alternative forges that haven’t bothered dogfooding. It immediately lowers the trust in them. Does their shit really work if they have to host it on github?

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onlinepersona,

95% efficiency is crazy! But there'll probably be losses in transport and then the fuel cell (or however it generate energy later). Don't know how that compares to oil though...

Still, I'm glad there's progress being made in this domain!

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onlinepersona,

Thank you for not recommending to throw newbies into the deep end 👍 You’re a rare gem

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