Infosec specialist 🖥, former infosec consultant & Windows sysadmin , geek 👾
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants"
| Location | Finland |
| Pronouns | He/him |
| Twitter (not active anymore) | https://www.twitter.com/@larilehtomaki |
Hey all y'all need to stop using "guys" in mixed company.
- My trans girlfriend is not a guy.
- My cis girlfriend is not a guy.
- I'm not a guy (or a girl, but that's not relevant here).
Misgendering is misgendering—even if "everyone's doing it".
Patriarchy shouldn't be the default.
New study on the effects of LLM use (in this case on essay writing):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Quote:
"LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning."
The interesting thing is: People who used search engines (to find sources etc) did not show similar issues. This is an important antidote against the belief that LLM-based tools are just like search engines. Which they are not. They are massively degrading their users' mental abilities and development. Which is why these systems have absolutely no place even _near_ any school or university.
This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to assess cognitive load during essay writing, and analyzed essays using NLP, as well as scoring essays with the help from human teachers and an AI judge. Across groups, NERs, n-gram patterns, and topic ontology showed within-group homogeneity. EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. In session 4, LLM-to-Brain participants showed reduced alpha and beta connectivity, indicating under-engagement. Brain-to-LLM users exhibited higher memory recall and activation of occipito-parietal and prefrontal areas, similar to Search Engine users. Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.
My partner has two (!!) best friends who frequently use #chatGPT. Not only do they use it, they use it as an oracle, a diviner, a settler of arguments between friends, a therapist for their children, a spiritual adviser. Scary, scary stuff.
They both feel personally attacked when she shares facts about the ownership, ecosystem, environmental and mental impacts, etc surrounding #llms.
Please, if you have any resources that might be helpful to them, or to my partner in attempting to #help them, please share.
Hey all y'all need to stop using "guys" in mixed company.
- My trans girlfriend is not a guy.
- My cis girlfriend is not a guy.
- I'm not a guy (or a girl, but that's not relevant here).
Misgendering is misgendering—even if "everyone's doing it".
Patriarchy shouldn't be the default.
Frankly I have been wondering about that, since some time. English is "only" my second language. I originally thought "guys" would be gendered, but then I saw it used as ungendered all over the place and came to doubt my initial understanding. And saying/writing "guys and girls" seemed somehow even worse.
Now, I am grateful to Alice for resolving this question for me, AND I am very grateful to @xgranade for bringing up the alternative of "folks". I had been looking for one, but inspiration did not come.
I don't use "guys" for mixed groups myself, but here's what I've observed: when used in the vocative ("what would you like to drink, guys?") it's sometimes applied to mixed groups. In all other contexts that I can think of, "guys" is gendered. So the same cis het man who addresses a mixed group as "guys" will not say "I sleep with guys". That difference in usage is what makes the term confusing for non-native speakers.
As I say, I don't use the word that way, and I'd recommend against it. It's always sounded a bit off to me.
@CppGuy the only reason it isn't considered gendered by some folx is because being a man is the assumed default. You'll notice that >90% of the "well actually"s in this thread are from men, while most of the "omg 'guys' has annoyed me for ages" crowd are not male-identifying.
@alice @CppGuy @anyia @xgranade
> while most of the "omg 'guys' has annoyed me for ages" crowd are not male-identifying.
You added a "most" which makes this into a rather soft statement. How could that ever be falsified.
Then I am not sure what you assume about me ;-).
BTW: My native language doesn't allow a neutral personal pronoun that is not constructed artificially. Which is a big turn-off for selling such an addition in the wider populace.
I have been envious of the English "they/them" as an gender / plural indeterminate way to refer to some actor ever since I rediscovered that (a bit to the chagrin of my colleagues, and I even had essays on that topic to refer to. Resistance was futile).
@glitzersachen @alice @anyia @xgranade It's the social hierarchy that says that the rich people use the word "guy" correctly while the people I grew up with are wrong. If my hometown had movie studios and stock markets and the coasts were desolate then only small minded backwards people would say that girls aren't guys.
That said, I don't personally use the word "guy" that often and am very mindful that when people use that word in certain ways it bothers some of my coworkers. I'm not a jerk.
@BernieDoesIt
Oh this is reminding me of some of the casual lore in "Metal from Heaven" where there were separate dialects for upper and lower classes. And there was a truth tense that was only in the dialect for the upper classes which made it so semantically the lower classes would always be seen as "half-liars"
This is just a tangent because I like noting small but significant linguistic patterns like this.
@glitzersachen @alice @anyia @xgranade
@h3mmy @BernieDoesIt @alice @anyia @xgranade
This is indeed they way dialects and accents work in this world, too. Only without a truth tense. But lower class accents are seen automatically as shifty, less educated and (therefore) more predatory, more subjective and less beholden to objectivity.
Interesting rabbit hole to go down, actually...
@BernieDoesIt @alice @anyia @xgranade
Not sure i can follow you there as far as causation is concerned, but then I am conversing mostly with non-native speakers and ex-patriates (and the latter are very rarely from the US).
@BernieDoesIt @alice @anyia @xgranade
Yeeees. But this is now not about economic aspects. If it's about anything, we're talking about participation in society, about visibility. The end goal would be that the default is neutral and if e.g. gender doesn't play a role in a story, at the end you as a reader might not know if the protagonist is "male", "female", "no-binary" and so on. It just doesn't matter, so why should the author bring it up.
I genuinely like Ann Leckie's SF novels, where the default pronoun is she and the protagonista every know and them mentions that her own language actually doesn't have gendered pronouns (so the she, supposedly is a translation artifact, a choice when translating to English).
Economic prospects, IMHO, in a sane society are sub-ordinate to participation. Only capitalistic, money-oriented societies think this needs to be regulated by money (e.g. participation should be proprotional to allocation of money, so we need economic equality -- I'd agree we need economic equality, but that is IMHO orthogonal to participation/visibility/normality).
@glitzersachen Even the most fastidious inclusive language users in my hometown use the word "guy" to refer to a girl for exactly the same reason most English speakers use "goose" to refer to a large waterfowl even if it they know it's a gander.
I've lived in a different place where using "guy" to refer to a girl will get you looked at like you have three heads and the plural usually is only used for groups of boys.
@glitzersachen The US altolect is somewhere in the middle, disallowing "guy" to refer to a girl and being a bit squeamish about using "guys" to refer to a group of girls.
If the dialect I grew up with was the altolect, would we be having this conversation? Maybe, but I doubt it. English has a lot of words that are marked for gender only when used contrastively, and no one really complains about any of the other ones.
@glitzersachen The only reason this is an issue is because the altolect is kind of wishy-washy, and the altolect is the altolect because the most privileged people tend to speak it. That means the discussion has classist and regionalist underpinnings even if people don't realize or want to acknowledge it.
None of this is an endorsement of calling anyone anything they don't want to be called, of course.
> the discussion has classist and regionalist underpinnings even if people don't realize or want to acknowledge it.
I think we are done with this discussion now. This kind of accusator meta-argument on whether it's legit / morally OK to have a discussion on this topic is a communicative deal breaker.
@glitzersachen If that was your takeaway then we've had a serious misunderstanding. I'm sorry, that's probably my fault.
So I want to be very clear on two points: I absolutely think it's legitimate and a moral thing and a good thing to be having a discussion on this topic, and furthermore I agree with the OP! I agree in my case, in your case, and generally.
But people don't learn informal language at school. Neither how it's right nor how it's wrong. In my eyes your argument fails traction (regardless of whether you are factually right, which I, you might have noticed, doubt).
Furthermore the question is not "is the a dialect / usage where it doesn't imply gender" but, at least for me "is there a usage where it implies gender", since then, not wanting to be misunderstood, I'd not use it, expect if I'd mean a decidedly[1] male group.
[1] Not an accidentally male group, but male per definition and self understanding. So not a group of engineers, that by accident is male, but perhaps the "guys" at a bachelor party.
@BernieDoesIt @alice @anyia @xgranade
> Where I grew up, "guy" is rarely marked for gender. "Are you guys going to the girls-only activity?" is a common thing for folks to say
Yes. This kind of things threw me off, originally. You see, I read a lot.
Since I am usually acting in a less local context (Fedi, the company, the internet in general, formerly my studies --- hell, locally hardly anybody speaks English here, even those who don't speak German), I prefer to practice a usage that is on average least offensive. At the danger of coming over less folksy ;-). I am not the folksy type anyway, and @xgranade has shown a great way to introduce folksy when I need it (literally ...)
Another, now that I think about it, way to address a group informally (but more formal then "folks", would be "you all"). I call this the exaggerated plural ;-) --- as opposed to "you". Like in "Would you all like to go into the lunch break now or should we start the next lesson and interrupt at 12:00".
@glitzersachen @alice @anyia @xgranade There's never any reason you have to say "guy" in American English. It's an informal word, so it's generally avoided in formal text. That doesn't happen to words that are hard to avoid.
Sadly, it's pretty much impossible to find a plural "you" in American English that fits well for everyone. "You all" is a good choice, in that it's not something that will grab anyone's attention, but beware it has the meaning of including all listeners, not just some.
> There's never any reason to say "guy"
Personally, I am in favour of people working with guy wires to communicate aplenty, for safety's sake! 🙃
@BernieDoesIt we don't need to find *a* perfect replacement for "guys" (we already have vibrators 💁🏼♀️), we just need to move away from *those* gendered terms that erase non-male participation in society.
@glitzersachen 🫢 slipped out.
@SymTrkl idk, I tend to upgrade when I replace something that's worn out 🤷🏼♀️
@bluewitchgwen @BernieDoesIt @glitzersachen @anyia @xgranade
@SymTrkl @bluewitchgwen @alice @BernieDoesIt @glitzersachen @anyia @xgranade I dunno, "hey you guys" rolls off the tongue a lot easier than "hey you air pulse toys."
😆
@SymTrkl hey now! Not all fuckers are fuckers of mothers, so we should drop the modifier noun and just go with "yo fuckers" to be more inclusive. Unless you're only addressing the fuckers who fuck mothers, in which case, carry on.
@courtcan @bluewitchgwen @BernieDoesIt @glitzersachen @anyia @xgranade
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