If you ever cooperate on a feature like this as a developer, I will find out where you live, drug you just enough to make your body limp, and mutilate your genitals with my keyboard.

Fucking sexist pricks, assuming I want to play with the blue robots and not the pink dolls. Fuck all of them.

Actually, fuck all your retarded cablecutting VOD services with your awful recommendation engines. Fuck your lack of proper playback features, fuck your bloated mobile apps, fuck your vendor lockins, fuck your region locks.

I'm back to pirating, and I'll just buy a pile of merch, trot proudly through the office with an Adventure Time backpack and a laptop full of Steven Universe stickers.

I mostly agree except fuck you for being an easily offended snowflake

@unsignedint ...and so the war begins

Don't you think this is a very strong emotional response over something that is rather small man? I mean, take sports for example. Men are the majority in terms of viewers. Its something as simple as that.
It's not as if some misogynistic asshole in a business suit went "HAHAHAHA of course sports are for men and desperate housewives for women!!!!"

@unsignedint @AleCx04

It seems devRant is now devMeme, cant even eviscerate some bowels anymore without being "easily offended".

I miss the days when there was some proper rage in this community.

Can i just say i love straight and gay men (#nohomo) and i love straight and gay women (#nosexist) and the fine differences between them in 2019 ?

I just wish we could trash the whole gender stuff. I don't see what is it good for anyway.

More divisions into sub groups which seem pointless. Human beings already discovered the most meaningful minority - the individual.

@bittersweet i didn't really said that, if it came out that way I apologize. I just feel that it really is looking too deep into it. There are some standard preferences that the vast majority of men would have over women and vice versa, that is all I am saying man.

Man and woman have different preferences, what the fuck is wrong with that?

@nam17887 are you trying to say that there are only 2 genders? 😂😂😂
*Sits back with popcorn*

@rajj Legit not trying to fan flames, just drop definitions.

Sex: relates to biological expression and sexual anatomy, notwithstanding anomalies where they become ambiguous or conflicting

Gender: a set of sociological behaviors including outward expression and actions.

How you interpret what those mean for a binary isn't up to me.

@irene So true. Do you piss standing up or not.
What your sexual preferences are behind closed doors is none of my business.

I identify as an Apache attack helicopter

@irene wait, sex and gender are different things? Too me as a non native English speaker they are the same and match the standing up, sitting down while peeing story.

@unsignedint nah. It's not about being easily offended. It's about being disregarded and irritated by an ever increasing amount of small little shitty things like these. I can fully relate to op.

@d4ng3r0u5 yeah I remember

BTW why make this thing a gender related thing? Hulu and all such stemming services after streaming pile of shit

I bet it's still top 3 most useful predictors for movie choise.

They could just not ask, figure it out after a few videos and let it be.

@evilcoder

For me, it's about sexism, but not as much as it is about the lack of control over algorithms which feed us shit.

Not just the gender assumptions, but also me clicking on one stupid Netflix cake baking show out of curiosity, and it automatically assuming all I want are cake baking shows.

I want to be able to mark shows as previously watched, or as "I liked it but I'm over it". I want to be able to tweak the recommendations to my likings, being able to tell it "I normally always watch science fiction, but today I'm in the mood for some obscure film festival drama. And give me cake baking again tomorrow"

It's not about being a snowflake, it's about shallow algorithms thinking all humans are onedimensional, and lack of control over your consumer experience.

@bittersweet @bittersweet So you want 2012 Netflix?

@disco Actually, early Netflix was slightly better in some aspects. Recommendations were still utterly retarded back then though.

@Abrynos I will not downvote you, I will upvote and ask you the question: Why do you need to store gender/sex at all?

One of my primary duties on my day to day job is database administration & database design -- and what I ask most often is: Do we really need to have this data?

If it's about adding "Mr" or "Mrs" to email notifications, you can also just add an optional string called "preferred title".

In my opinion, only medical databases (and probably dating sites) need to have detailed information about the situation in your underpants.

@bittersweet i would normally agree but as it is, biological sex is an important feature which, among other features, can be used to predict people's behaviour.

Maybe for you as an individual its not a good feature to predict what your behavior might be. But in many cases it is an important feature of classification and so it can be useful for many people.

@bioDan By using it to classify behavior, you do actually reinforce cultural stereotypes though.

I find making presumptions about preferences based on sex as offensive as presumptions based on race.

My girlfriend discovered a passion for the exact sciences and math late in life, mostly because everyone had always presumed she would be bad at it because she's female.

So I do feel like we, as developers, have an ethical obligation to go in as unbiased as possible when writing recommendation engines.

Give transparency to users about why things are recommended ("this is recommended because you liked X"), and give control ("show me more/less of this", "edit recommendation settings/categories")

@bittersweet i agree with you about the cultural stereotype reinforcement analogy, I don't like it one bit as well. But this is a biological stereotype that shines across races and cultures. That's why its an important feature to factor.

I also agree with you when its the only factor you take into consideration when trying to predict a persons behavior. Its shallow and silly.

But together with other features like history, environment, age, culture, location, and more, it can become meaningful in providing the person with a good prediction.

I also agree with you on giving the users more freedom to decide how much their personal preferences should affect the prediction algorithm.

But truth to the matter is, at least afaik, all ML models are based on statistical data that involves a large sample of data (at least more than 70 datapoints/rows and at least more than 4 features/columns) and most companies dont have enough data scientists to deal with the overhead of creating, maintaining, and optimizing a ML model in a per-user basis.

Companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook who do that sort of 'personalization' mostly get accused of privacy claims and conspiracy theories (they know too much, etc..)

Makes you wonder what is that sweet spot where everyone can be happy.

@irene maybe. I'm sure in some cases you are right. As long as sex is not the 'only' feature you take into consideration

Im just gonna leave these here..
https://sciencedirect.com/science/...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/...
https://cell.com/current-biology/...01449-1

Basically, guys and gals prefer different stuff.

@HampusMa Oh I fully agree there ARE differences between males and females beyond external appearance -- statistically.

The issue I take is that if the boy vs girl toy preference would be 80% vs 20%, you're still making 20% of people miserable with your preconceptions.

I don't have a problem with parents who buy their sons male toys. I liked a lot of masculine stuff growing up. Yet I also had a girlfriend who liked the same things, and she felt like she was an outcast because of it.

It shouldn't mean all men should be forced to watch "girl movies" -- just let the metaphorical kids pick their own toys, starting from a tabula rasa perspective.

If hormones drive us, or genes tend to encode for gender-specific behavior, that's fine.

But basing someone's individual environment on the averages and statistics of the whole population is kind of fucked up.

Alrighty, sir.... let me help you see the situation in a little more objective way, let me help you take off your subjective, worry about your self only glasses you have on....

The reality is businesses work on features and items that will appeal to the majority of their user base.. WHY? For profit....

99% of society does not get offended by choices recommended by gender... ITS NATURAL... and they would select male or female without even batting an eye...or even questioning motive.

If the feature improves the user experience of the the majority of their customers then I see no issue.. and truly there is no issue...

The issue is with yourself... you view something in significant as a bad thing just because it doesn’t fit YOUR lifestyle.

It so easy to come up with negativeness in the world.. literally takes no effort.

When you change the way you look and things ... the things you look at change.. stop looking for the solution outside, for issues of which you should be looking for inside.... YOU are the one with the problem.... not the rest of the world .... your minority community is the one with the problem... NOT the rest of the world..

It’s so easy to be offended by shit.... it actually takes effort to be happy... maybe that’s why your community is always so angry... cuz y’all are LAZY.. lazy in the effect you don’t want to put the effort in to be happy.. expecting everyone else to make you happy and cater to you feelings..

Albert Einstein once said, the most important decision you will make in life is deciding, Do you live in a hostile OR friendly universe... because based on that decision and thought is what you will make for your self...

if you continue to believe the world is a hostile place for your kind, that is exactly what you will create for yourself......

@QuanticoCEO It's funny how serious people get over a rant.

It's not like I'm crying into my pillow every night over a Hulu form (to be honest, I didn't sign up when I discovered they're pretty crap in so many other ways)

devRant is just a place to vent. Often in hyperboles over mild annoyances.

Yes, I get mildly annoyed by companies having the arrogance to think they understand people's multifaceted personalities. YouTube's recommendations can get weird as well.

It's not just gender, it's also that algorithms are just so bad at learning about human unpredictability. That a lot of people like things unexpectedly, against all odds.

I think from a UX standpoint, presuming is frustrating and wrong if you're not offering detailed control and correction mechanisms.

Overall I'm a happy person. Please don't believe the algorithms which fed you memes which led you into a bubble which reinforced your belief that everyone who addresses their mild beefs with sexism is a quinoasalad-snorting thirdwave feminist Tumblr bitch 😁

@irene you cannot escape bias nurturing or even bias as a whole. We can't be unbiased. The best thing you can do is to be aware of the biases and change them accordingly as you see fit, and hopefully in a manner that's good to you, your community, and the greater environment.

It's a natural phenomenon which can be good or bad.

I agree with the anti-fragile approach as Prof. Jonathan Haidt explains clearly in different talks on this topic. I suspect this is where @QuanticoCEO is coming from

@irene untrue. The nature vs nurture debate is inconclusive and probably always will be. The fact that there is a large group of people who believes otherwise is doing society a lot of harm right now. The real fact is you don't know where nature stops and nurture begins. And I don't either.

It is important to realize because it relaxes one's opinions on these types of issues. At least it does mine. I just don't know.

@irene happy that you are sure about it.

Dude did you accidentally drugged yourself and already probably mutilated your genitals with something more heavy than a keyboard? Relax, I honestly don’t think and hope developers would have that initiative specially on those big companies where developers execute more than create their own features. Granted, I agree this can be sexist and much more if you start debating but hey, look at the bright side: you not only have the option to watch tv whether you pay for it or not, and hack the shit put, why don’t you use some of this energy and talent to help so many people in this world with no TV/internet access?

@bittersweet I feel why you are frustrated going through just some comments on this post lol

ignore and move on, those people are literal airheads, even if he said something a minute ago that made sense and you had a pleasant conversation.

if it gets too much of horseshit (which isn't rare), then mute the comments with only mentions enabled, helped me tons to transfer away from trying to answer every numbnut that thought his sock arguments are worth the hassle and time.