Using that term to describe a meeting for a few hours over hot or cold non-alcoholic beverages is not only showing ignorance of history, it's demonstrating that you tolerate and embed racist notions of the unimportant of the real suffering of Chinese and other peoples relative to the minor burden of on the job training, especially if you do more of the white-collar end of technical work.
Read a few books on the history of that term before using it again, or I have to assume that you literally would rather scare off anyone who has a heritage of suffering under ML/MLM domination rather than hire someone who is considered part of your in-group.
American friends keep saying over and over and over again that this is "unique" to American culture but I have never felt this under threat in any country I've ever been in with the possible exception of Austria/Poland between 2014-2021. I am so used to "hackers" in the MIT/CSAIL sense covering up the damage of other academics in order to protect "their own" and it's not ever been cool, and I refuse to respond to anyone who expects me to reply to anything here ever in Yiddish.
"[T]he ties many hackers have to AI research and SF literature may have helped them to develop an idea of personhood that is inclusive rather than exclusive — after all, if one's imagination readily grants full human rights to future AI programs, robots, dolphins, and extraterrestrial aliens, mere color and gender can't seem very important any more."
It has been a rather rude awakening to realize how much hacker culture is the opposite of that. They see the most powerful and intelligent people as looking like themselves, and see their exclusion of anybody else as proof that they were right about it. They believe in a "meritocracy", but define themselves what constitutes "merit", and it just happens to be the things that they're already doing.
I don't know what's actually going on in Cambridge, Mass, but Hacker News brings me every day evidence from their successors in Silicon Valley. I see so much intolerance here.
Or in more direct langauge: the Tech Model Railroad Club was not the only group that were bigger fans of safe operations of tiny tracks and switchways. SNCF and the rest of Europe use different lingo for consists and that's life and safety critical training even with duplo blocks.
In startups we do this every single time we choose countries with complex racial histories (like everywhere, but for example Canada and New Zealand) and then try to target for affluence or similar markets rather than serving the downtrodden. That sort of behavior embeds some negative values imo.
