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The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

(thedailywtf.com)
449 points lemper | 3 comments | 27 Aug 25 06:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.412s | source
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mellosouls ◴[27 Aug 25 08:41 UTC] No.45036960[source]▶
TIL TheDailyWTF is still active. I'd thought it had settled to greatest hits only some years ago.
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greatgib ◴[27 Aug 25 09:32 UTC] No.45037284[source]▶
This story is kind of old. But also I'm suspicious that this was an AI generated content due to this weird paragraph (one becoming "they"):

   It's worth noting that there was one developer who wrote all of this code. They left AECL in 1986, and thankfully for them, no one has ever revealed their identity. And while it may be tempting to lay the blame at their feet—they made every technical choice, they coded every bug—it would be wildly unfair to do that.
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edot ◴[27 Aug 25 09:45 UTC] No.45037381[source]▶
Isn’t that the pronoun to use when you’re unsure of gender? This article didn’t feel AI-y to me.
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1. bigstrat2003 ◴[27 Aug 25 16:08 UTC] No.45041559[source]▶
The correct neutral pronoun in English is "he", though using "they" has been very popular in recent years due to a mistaken belief that it's sexist to use the male pronoun that way. I wouldn't say it's an AI smell at all.
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2. dragonwriter ◴[27 Aug 25 16:14 UTC] No.45041627[source]▶
“They” has, in fact, been popular for gender neutral singular use since before the Latin-inspired prescriptivist movement and its attempts to install as “correct” various things that were previously either not dominant or in some cases entirely foreign to English; that movement's influence had actually been fading on that usage and in general for decades even before concerns about sexism in language became significant; singular “they” is no more incorrect than the now-so-universal-most-have-forgotten-the-actual-singular use of the second-person plural when the semantics are in fact singular.
3. tbossanova ◴[27 Aug 25 21:50 UTC] No.45045758[source]▶
Not only is "he" not the "correct" pronoun (however you think "correctness" is defined), it also sounds terribly clunky and confusing. "They" is perfectly natural.