It sounds way less offensive to those who decry the original terminology’s problematic roots but still keeps its meaning intact.

  • Andrew
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    1754 months ago

    I’ve seen ‘Active / Passive’ used, that seems alright. There’s plenty of alternative terms to use without borrowing terminology from sexual roleplay.

    Anyway, the Sub is supposed to be the one that’s actually in control for this kind of thing (otherwise you’d just be in an abusive relationship), so that confuses things when you start trying to applying it elsewhere.

    • @[email protected]
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      224 months ago

      The issue is acronyms; there’s millions of products, schematics, datasheets, and manuals that refer to them as MISO and MOSI with no further explanation. Any new standard that doesn’t fit runs into the 15-competing-standards problem, and ought to be followed by an “AKA MISO” every time it’s used.

    • @[email protected]
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      124 months ago

      Anyway, the Sub is supposed to be the one that’s actually in control for this kind of thing

      I think there’s a better way to put that. It’s often called a power exchange. Both people involved can rescind consent at any time, and there’s also negotiation that happens before scenes to set up expectations and limits, but I don’t know too many subs that want to be in control of a scene. My experience is they want to give up control in a way that is safe.

      • Andrew
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        44 months ago

        Yeah, you’re right, that was a clumsy word choice. My experience is mostly from watching The Duke of Burgundy tbh

      • @[email protected]
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        74 months ago

        the connotation in that the master is in control and the slave having no control, and ironically is only a racial issue in the US

      • JackFrostNCola
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        54 months ago

        Agreed.
        Also active/passive gets confusing crossing over into electronics where they already mean something.

    • DefederateLemmyMl
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      74 months ago

      I’ve seen ‘Active / Passive’ used, that seems alright

      That’s not always an accurate description though.

      Consider a redundant two node database system where the second node holds a mirrored copy of the first node. Typically, one node, let’s call it node1, will accept reads and writes from clients and the other node, let’s say node2, will only accept reads from clients but will also implement all writes it receives from node2. That’s how they stay in sync.

      In this scenario node2 is not “passive”. It does perform work: it serves reads to clients, and it performs writes, but only the writes received from node1. You could say that node2 slavishly follows what node1 dictates and that node1 is authorative. Master/slave more accurately describes this than active/passive.

      There’s plenty of alternative terms to use without borrowing terminology from sexual roleplay.

      Do I have news for you …

  • @[email protected]
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    4 months ago

    No it doesn’t sound bad, words don’t need to be thrown away forever just because they’ve been used to describe unfair treatment. I’m so sick of having to relabel so many things that are so far divorced from the social issues they are used to describe. It’s so pointless and has no impact, the code doesn’t care which is master and which is the slave for they are simply descriptive labels.

    Are we supposed to never use the words master or slave ever again?? What’s next?

    My dev friends, no matter their race, all say the exact same thing. We still use master over main, come at us I guess.

      • @[email protected]
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        I work for s company that suddenly asked to rename a lot of stuff. This had consequences. It cost time, money, and created a disconnect between internal to the dev vocabulary that couldn’t be changed easily and user facing vocabulary. Also we were lucky but this could gave broken some long used API that we are proud not to version because the policy we have internally is “we will NEVER break the API”. And so far, for 8 years we still haven’t.

    • @[email protected]
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      unfair treatment.

      We’re talking about slavery here.

      sick of having to relabel

      It’s not that hard…to be accommodating.

      divorced from the social issues

      from your point of view

      the code doesn’t care

      You’re right. Call it a controller and agent. I know naming is hard, but we’re smart enough to apply our lexicon.

      never use the words master or slave ever again? What’s next??

      Ah, the slippery slope fallacy.

      We still use master over main

      The default for new repositories on GitHub has been main for awhile now. You would have had to put in effort to change it to something else. You’re a stick in the mud.

      • @[email protected]
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        224 months ago

        Fuck I don’t get your downvotes, you’re right. I get people want to vent but in the greater scheme of things having to use different words to be a smidge more inclusive isn’t that big of a deal or effort considering what some of us do to help our friends be accepted.

        • @[email protected]
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          64 months ago

          It’s so weird that so many people are calling being accommodating in such a small way “performative” or whatever! I think some people just can’t handle change and blame others for it.

          • @[email protected]
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            154 months ago

            or it’s just literally performative and doesn’t actually change anything about the realities of being POC in America other than making (ironically) a bunch of white people feel good about themselves.

      • @[email protected]
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        134 months ago

        The default for git repositories is still master. Not to be the “real programmers only use CLI” guy, but I feel like git init isn’t too hipster.

        • femtech
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          14 months ago

          The default has been main for awhile.

          This is the case in our current version of git (git version 2.28. 0). As of October 1, 2020, any new repository you create on GitHub.com will use main as the default branch.

          March 2021 for gitlab

                • @[email protected]
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                  14 months ago

                  which will suppress this warning

                  “I’m going to be annoying you until you do something about it” It is recommending that you take some sort of action, that choice is up to you as the user. In fact, the older way of disabling the warning was called advice.defaultBranchName

                  AFAIK git is still Linus Trovalds’ project and one thing he is known for is “you dont fuckin break user space”. That is acknowledged in the pull request https://github.com/git/git/pull/921

                  “will minimize disruption for Git’s users and will include appropriate deprecation periods”.

                  Linus is also a fuck-your-feelings kind of guy so deprecation_period == linus_date_of_death. No, I’m not implying Linus is racist/bigot, just that he feels that strongly about breaking user experience.

                  Git in of itself doesn’t give a shit about.

                  You’re right…and that’s why its unbelievable to me how some people are still (it has been nearly 4 years since that PR above) resistant to change this one little thing. This is just the initial branch that we’re talking about here. Git doesn’t care if you:

                  ﬌ git init
                  Initialized empty Git repository in /home/xxxxxx/tmp/.git/
                  
                  ﬌ touch foo && git add foo && git commit -am "foo"
                  [main (root-commit) 9c74dd1] foo
                   1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
                   create mode 100644 foo
                  
                  ﬌ git branch -a            
                  * main
                  
                  ﬌ git checkout -b bar
                  Switched to a new branch 'bar'
                  
                  ﬌ git branch -d main
                  Deleted branch main (was 9c74dd1).
                  
                  ﬌ git branch -a
                  * bar
                  
                  ﬌ git log      
                  commit 9c74dd18d493fec727e6ce9e4ba71ed356dd970d (HEAD -> bar)
                  Author: Butters
                  Date:   Thu Aug 22 00:14:44 2024 -0400
                  
                      foo
                  
            • @[email protected]
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              14 months ago

              No shit? Let me guess; you’re still using git like Linus intended it to be, decentralized, by emailing each other tar.gz’s

                • @[email protected]
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                  14 months ago

                  I just used the most popular/known example. Personally I haven’t liked GitHub since Micro$oft bought them. I’m ol’ school, 25 years in the biz so M$ really really leaves a bad aftertaste in my mouth.

                  I’ll answer your other question in the other thread.

        • @[email protected]
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          14 months ago

          …which you get a multiline message telling you to change your ways (Linus doesn’t break UX)…every time you init…weird.

          $ git init
          hint: Using 'master' as the name for the initial branch. This default branch name
          hint: is subject to change. To configure the initial branch name to use in all
          hint: of your new repositories, which will suppress this warning, call:
          hint:
          hint: 	git config --global init.defaultBranch <name>
          hint:
          hint: Names commonly chosen instead of 'master' are 'main', 'trunk' and
          hint: 'development'. The just-created branch can be renamed via this command:
          hint:
          hint: 	git branch -m <name>
          
          • @[email protected]
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            34 months ago

            Gonna be honest, I don’t think I ever read that. I think I usually just do git status immediately after to see if all’s well.

    • @[email protected]
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      4 months ago

      The problem with these token activism is that it’s hollow in content. The intent might be good, but the action is almost pure virtue signalling.

      Slavoj Zizek pointed out in multiple interviews that there’s a pervert self-reflectiveness in the self-censorship: privileged people “enjoy” being guilty of their privilege, so it’s more about themselves rather than the people they claim to represent. “Sorry, but you were naive and unaware of people being racist when they use these words, so let me stop them and now you are protected (by me) in an inclusive atmosphere.”

      A related radical freedom situation as an inverse to the above is that when friends get really close, even using racist slurs is treated as a gesture of intimacy, rather than racism. In an ideal world, the context in the public discourse would be so strong that even racist words lose their racist meaning (“oh, so you are joking as well”) rather than the opposite (assuming there’s ubiquitous “hidden” racism in the use of a word, even when there’s clearly none).

      Another critique is that it presents itself as a substitute of real solutions. Instead of addressing real problems, it provides a simple “everyday” solution, very much similar to the recycling movement. Of course we need to recycle, but we should be aware that it’s not a substitute of radical real actions (e.g. stopping the big oil).

    • Rentlar
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      364 months ago

      Right? I get that langauge evolves and things go in and out of fashion, but this self-censoring for things completely unrelated to the original or derogatory meanings is kind of a pointless exercise to me.

    • DefederateLemmyMl
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      4 months ago

      master over main

      That one is the most stupid one too, because master in git doesn’t even refer to a master/slave relationship. It refers to a different meaning of the word master, namely “an original from which copies can be made”, as in master recording or master key. See 5b in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. And that’s how it’s used in git: any new branches are derived from master. Main just does not have the same nuance, because it does not imply a relationship between the branches, just that it’s somehow more important than the others.

      But of course, the real reason it was changed is because for companies like github it’s easier to give in to the crazies who demand this than to fight them.

      • @[email protected]
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        4 months ago

        Is it not the main working branch? Git is a system of change not just recording change. When you start a new project, do you open a new branch or create a whole new repository? That’s not rhetorical I’m genuinely curious.

        • DefederateLemmyMl
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          134 months ago

          Is it not the main working branch

          No it is not. On large distributed projects for which git was designed, you typically don’t directly work on main/master but you create a working branch to do your changes, and when they are ready you merge them to main/master.

          There are many types of git workflows, but main/master usually contains the code that is deployed to production or the latest stable release and not some work in progress.

          When you start a new project, do you open a new branch or create a whole new repository?

          You have to define “project” for that.

          • Is your project a change to existing code -> new branch, merge to main/master when done
          • Is your project something new that stands entirely on its own? -> new repository
          • @[email protected]
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            24 months ago

            In fact, many projects forbid pushing to master entirely and only allow reviewed merging to the master. Then, every time the master changes, a new release of the software is made (either manually or automatically with CI/CD)

          • @[email protected]
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            24 months ago

            Ah we develop the same way. There’s testing then staging then prod is final review and is then finally merged to Main after documentation. Main branch is protected and merges are gated by review. There’s no need for master terminology there.

            • DefederateLemmyMl
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              44 months ago

              There’s no need for master terminology there

              Nobody said there is a need, you could call it foo or bar and it would still work. It just that master more accurately describes what it is. Main for example does not describe a derivative relationship, master does.

              Also, master in this context is totally unrelated to slavery so I could also just as easily say that there was no need to replace the existing terminology either. It doesn’t solve any real world problems of historic or currently existing slavery, and it doesn’t make anyone’s life better. The only reasons why it was done were appeasement and virtue signalling.

              • @[email protected]
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                34 months ago

                Sure, so if there’s no need for any certain terminology outside of an agreed upon definition what does it matter if it’s called master or main or unicorn farts? Why care about Master at all?

                • DefederateLemmyMl
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                  Why care about Master at all?

                  I’ve already explained all my reasons, but I’ll reiterate. To summarize I basically have five main issues with it

                  1. The change was done in response to attempts at language policing and bullying by a vocal and militant minority. Giving into it is a form of appeasement towards an unreasonable demand.

                  2. The change retroactively modifies a terminology that was already agreed upon. Like, if git sprung into existence today, not many people would have an issue with it if they would call it main or trunk or primary from the get go. But that’s not what happened. Git was released in 2005 and it used master terminology. As a consequence, many existing repositories also use master. Now when someone is working with branches, like doing merges or pull requests, they suddenly have to remember: oh in this repository it is main, but in that repository it is still master. Or they have go out of their way to modify decade old repositories, potentially breaking all kinds of behind the scenes CICD stuff. Or they have to go out of their way to revert the default on all systems that they’re working on back to master. In any case, this change is a source of errors and wasted effort for zero net good.

                  3. It does no good in the real world other than making do-gooders feel good about themselves, and giving a capitalist entity some PR to appear more progressive than they are. We all still have masters, existing slaves are not freed, no historical wrongs of slavery or inequality are righted.

                  4. It’s a misguided change in this case because the word master in this context doesn’t even have a relationship to slavery. Just like a master degree you may hold, or a master key or a master recording of your favorite album have no bearing on slavery. Note that there are no “slave” branches in git.

                  5. Finally, in the case of git, master is simply more accurate than main because it carries a nuance (derivativeness) that main does not.

              • @[email protected]
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                4 months ago

                In our environment Prod is only a holding area, the change/feature/bugfix is already approved for production, once the change is documented then the merge happens into main and Prod is consumed.

                Our “working” branches are ephemeral.

        • @[email protected]
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          24 months ago

          you don’t work on main/master, you make a branch to work in, and then merge your changes back into master/main

          • @[email protected]
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            Respectfully, I can do whatever the fuck I want. That’s the point of git. If I want to branch my way down to a stack overflow due to running out of free memory my system will very happily let me do that.

    • @[email protected]
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      4 months ago

      unfair treatment.

      We’re talking about slavery here.

      sick of having to relabel

      It’s not that hard…to be accommodating.

      divorced from the social issues

      from your point of view

      the code doesn’t care

      You’re right. Call it a controller and agent. I know naming is hard, but we’re smart enough to apply our lexicon.

      never use the words master or slave ever again? What’s next??

      Ah, the slippery slope fallacy.

      We still use master over main

      The default for repositories on GitHub has been main. You would have had to put in effort to change it to something else. You’re a stick in the mud.

    • @[email protected]
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      124 months ago

      I’m a dev, and I’m the opposite. At my work, we use main over master. I thought it was a little silly when we first switched, but now I’m used to it. It’s an arbitrary label anyway – could easily use trunk/branch from SVN or release/develop or any number of other labels to keep track of code.

      Hell, we got a new dev on the team a month or two ago, and he tends to name things ‘feat/do-the-thing’ instead of ‘feature/make-it-go’.

      It’s not as big a deal as people online make it out to be.

    • @[email protected]
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      94 months ago

      No one told you to throw away anything. If it works for you then go wild. No one else cares what you do in private or a with your “dev friends”.

      I for one love shorts words to get meaning across. “main” was just sweet, the social issue thing was a good to have.

  • @[email protected]
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    894 months ago

    I personally think the whole backlash against master/slave in the computing world is people looking for something in their sphere of knowledge to be offended about so they can feel like they are part of “a movement”. Even if some mustache twirling racist was the first “computer guy” to come up with the term and meant it to be offensive, that is not how sane people view it today. So some of the advocates for changing it should stop trying to build it up into some Pizzagate-like conspiracy against black/brown people.

    Having said that, I also don’t have any strong attachments to the phrasing either. Phase it out in favor of something that makes everyone happy if that keeps the peace. It is just a term that made sense at the time to describe something. There is nothing stopping us from changing it to something else now if we so choose. It is not erasing heritage or some such nonsense. If anything, people having strong hangups about it if there are better or equally as good terms out there that doesn’t make people uncomfortable is far weirder in my opinion.

    The only thing I have somewhat strong opinions about is making it some high priority to go back and erase those terms from solutions that already exist. Change them as you update things, sure, but why create extra work to update something old that is currently working if the only change is not functional and just verbiage. Seems like wasted effort that could be better directed and solving functional issues to me.

    • @[email protected]
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      224 months ago

      I don’t have issues with the original terminology either, and wouldn’t really care if it was changed. But if it were changed to Dom/Sun then it would reinforce the meme of the stockings wearing femboy programmer. XD

    • @[email protected]
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      64 months ago

      I use ‘main’ on git instead of ‘master’ now (forced to change at work) and its shorter and snappier IMO.

      But yeah there are more important problems out there.

        • silly goose meekah
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          34 months ago

          While I agree with your assumption, I think main is less vague. Master can be interpreted several ways, including an offensive one. So while I agree with other commenter in that it’s unnecessary to go back and change things retroactively, but just setting the default branch name for new repos in your version control to main is a fair thing to ask IMO.

            • silly goose meekah
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              44 months ago

              Not the code, but some of your coworkers might potentially be offended.

              Also good job with the ad hominem.

                • silly goose meekah
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                  14 months ago

                  Oh, as a programmer myself I’m perfectly aware of how shitty most codebases are. It’s just that the context you said this in implied that people who care about political correctness are worse programmers. Dont act like this wasn’t on purpose and hide behind “shitposting”.

          • @[email protected]
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            14 months ago

            When I start “whipping up” the pull requests, I’ll make sure to “rape” your suggestions

      • @[email protected]
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        44 months ago

        I insist on renaming main to master every time I create a repo on GitLab. Master forever, even if it doesn’t make much sense.

          • @[email protected]
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            24 months ago

            It makes sense because “master copy” is the name of the “official” version of something. Nothing to do with slavery by the way.

            • silly goose meekah
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              14 months ago

              But “Main” is more clear, and putting in extra effort to basically just piss off politically (over)correct people doesn’t make any sense, and is kinda weird tbh

            • @[email protected]
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              14 months ago

              It’s already not the master copy if you have release branches or tags, but it is the “main” branch 🤪

          • NostraDavid
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            14 months ago

            I don’t know about Scrollone, but I hate it when corporations force me to change for the sake of change. Options to change is fine (in case someone doesn’t like the default), of course.

            And no, “inclusivity” is not the actual reason, as that’s already covered by adding the option to change (which again, is completely fine)

        • @[email protected]
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          So you are not passively against progress, you are doing it actively.

          Has very much “vinyl is better than modern media” vibes.

      • @[email protected]
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        224 months ago

        The US may not have invented it, but there are still people in the US who are affected by it today.

        Americans care about slavery for the same reason that Germans care about Nazis.

        • AwesomeLowlander
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          44 months ago

          Given the current US prison system and Germany’s stance on Israel, that sentence might mean something very different from what you had in mind

          • @[email protected]
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            44 months ago

            And red-lining districts, and bull-dozing new black towns for highways. etc etc etc

            There are so many instances of going around laws just to disadvantage black/coloured people.

            Pulling the ladder up after themselves and telling others to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

            Many things were wrong, but language is where people draw the line, like … c’mon. Using slurs I can understand it is uncouth offensive. But master/slave in technical terms ??? NO ONE means the original meanings unless they are also crazy!

              • @[email protected]
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                44 months ago

                Agreed. The systemic exclusion of POC from benefits and advantages was rolled back just as POCs were becoming independent. It affected BOTH communities , POCs AND economically dis-advantaged equally.

                So you had a substantial population with severe economic and political disadvantages being relentessly targetted by those in power.

                Hence, the current top-1% control 80% upwards of everything.

    • @[email protected]
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      44 months ago

      while in some ways I can see your point, I would just have a hard time saying this in a work meeting here in the deep south with black colleagues present

        • @[email protected]
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          24 months ago

          Isn’t the inverse - “I asked x number of black people and they were OK with it” or even “I assume y% number of black people are ok with it” subject to the same criticism?

          I am white so we’re probably getting to the edge of propriety in this conversation.

            • @[email protected]
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              14 months ago

              Or isn’t the other half of that …… if you have a toxic personality and wish to change that, there may be no single fix but to pay more attention to many small habits contributing to that toxicity.

              This whole conversation reminds me of the similar one many years ago, about crude jokes and pictures/calendars in the workplace. The dominant population said exactly the same things. However now we’re all more professional and work is much less toxic, not just for women, minorities, people with different preferences, but also less toxic for us white male heteros as well. We all won that one

          • @[email protected]
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            Fucking thermodynamics is racist guys

            Black absorbs, white reflects

            Blackhole, sun

            fuck these people

          • @[email protected]
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            14 months ago

            If I had to guess, it’s just the general “white=good black=bad” which itself is likely related to day/night.

            But it’s easy to imagine a bouncer at a club with a list of whites allowed in and blacks that aren’t. I don’t think that’s the etymology, but it’s also important to remember that language is alive and words can take on unintended meaning.

          • @Squirrelanna
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            14 months ago

            For most people it’s a lot more simple and subconscious than that. White=positive, black=negative. Most people do not consciously apply this to race, but they don’t have to for the subconscious association to take root.

        • @[email protected]
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          64 months ago

          Bro I fucking said “whitelist” in a meeting and got so many glares, fuck all of these fucking uneducated pieces of shit that can only punch down because they know nothing except “DATS RACIST”

    • @[email protected]
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      34 months ago

      people looking for something in their sphere of knowledge to be offended about so they can feel like they are part of “a movement”

      I always thought it was just people looking for something in their sphere of influence that they could do to make a difference, no matter how small.

      The computing world is known for being hostile toward most out-groups, and I’ll welcome any effort to change that, no matter how small and how silly it seems. The real change needs to be in the people but perhaps being cognizant of such details will help remind us all to be more open and welcoming

    • osaerisxero
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      624 months ago

      Leaving aside the problematic nature of the existing terms, the result was that people actually thought a little more about the relationships the things had and started using better/more precise terminology for the relationships: primary/secondary, active/hot/cold, parent/child, etc.

      Net positive all round.

      • Mellow
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        354 months ago

        Woah there. You’re using about 25% more of your brain than the rest of the internet. We’re gonna need you to tone that reasonability down a bit.

        I look forward to setting up my next polyamorous network connection. I can wait for the commands nmcli con choke me daddy ens1 thrupple0

      • @[email protected]
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        164 months ago

        This exactly. M/S ment nothing to me messing with HDDs as a kid.

        It arguably only makes sense in a control node/ worker node context, but worker is obvious enough in that context.

    • BarrierWithAshes
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      34 months ago

      Yeah this will just piss off the anti-porn/right-wing/tradcath(?) types instead of leftist/neolib/anti-racist types.

  • @[email protected]
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    Until proven otherwise, I assume either ignorance or malicious intentions by those who want to rename these “problematic” terms. It does nothing to improve the actual issues.

    The false pretense of having done something, is worse than doing nothing. It’s just noise.

    To be clear: I don’t mind the changing of terms. I’m too old to care about trivial stuff like main vs master. But if the reasoning for such a change is dumb and potentially harmful, you’ve lost my respect.

    • @[email protected]
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      4 months ago

      Until proven otherwise, I assume either ignorance or malicious intentions by those who want to rename these “problematic” terms. It does nothing to improve the actual issues.

      That’s because the goal is not to solve the actual issue, but to feel better because they did something. Or to avoid noise generated by lunatics online.

    • @[email protected]
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      254 months ago

      Until a couple of years ago, we had a brand of cheese called ‘Coon’, here in Australia.

      The word isn’t used as a slur over here, and the brand was simply named after the founder about 150 years back.

      But it was getting increasingly on the nose as cultural influences from the US and everywhere kept seeping in, and it reached a point where it pretty much needed an excuse or at least an explanation.

      So they renamed it; now it’s ‘Cheer’.

      And at the time, there was all kinds of pearl-clutching about the malicious / disingenuous / officious / vapidly-offended / white-knighting / attention-seeking / etc / etc ‘woke crowd’ stomping in and making them change everything when it was perfectly good and harmless and stuff.

      Six months later, nobody gave a single shit any more. Nobody died as a result or was even mildly inconvenienced, no great cultural traditions were lost, and contrary to several predictionsm newly-empowered wokeocrats have not risen from the shadows to re-gender everyone or whatever. It’s that cheese with the blue white and green label, nobody reads it anyway.

      My point is that small token changes cost virtually nothing, and even if they achieve little in and of themselves, the mere fact of people being willing to make them is of benefit. Small courtesies, you know? Returning your shopping cart. Smiling at passing dogs. It models kindness and consideration, and promotes the idea that those things have value.

      Which is not to suggest that we must avoid giving offense at all consts; far from it. I’m one of those stereotypicallly abrasive genX types raised on ideals of free speech, punk rock, uncomfortable truths and loudly pointing out the elephant in the room no matter how many toes get stepped on. But when there isn’t some burning issue that needs to be addressed, niceties be damned… then yeah, small courtesies. Give people that extra bit of room even if they don’t strictly needed. It’s nice to be nice.

      Look back a handful of decades at all those cultural relics that your grandparents considered harmless and invisible. Asking people to drop them may have attracted ridicule and suspicion at the time, but looking back at some of them… oh dear god, really?

      Hell, I remember The Black And White Minstrel Show on TV, and if you don’t remember it yourself, it’s far worse than you’re imagining.

      I like the world better without things like that, even the little seemingly-trivial ones, and even if it seems like empy virtue-signalling while you’re cleaning them up.

      • @[email protected]
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        94 months ago

        TheBananaKing is offensive. It is a reference to Banana Republics, you know the system where corporations marginalize an entire populace and make them produce their product for profit. You should really change your username. It’s trivial and nobody will care if you change it.

        Obviously I do think this is as absurd as asking a company to change it’s name which was named after the founder, but you went there and presented the argument for it. I can at least understand moving away from master/slave in computing especially in future products and revisions but making someone change their business name which is named after the founder’s is ludicrous.

        That being said, the only reason why the company changed the name was because it gave them good PR in the form of free advertising- just imagine all the headlines. Since you have no upside to changing yours, I know you won’t do it. Humanity is full of virtue signaling hypocrites who are just out for themselves.

        • @[email protected]
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          24 months ago

          Did you know there’s a chain of clothing stores in the US named Banana Republic? Every time I think about it, it blows my mind that they could have chosen any name, and that’s what they went with.

      • @[email protected]
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        44 months ago

        Great response, thanks for writing this. I live in the US, and your Coon -> Cheer cheese reminds me of Land O’Lakes butter – there was a brouhaha over a decision to remove a Native American woman from the packaging. Same result, it’s still in the butter section of the market.

        My point is that small token changes cost virtually nothing

        Well-put. I’ve been in the position of complaining about this type of change before, and this is a perfect counterpoint to that mindset. I’ve often said “What do we want? Police to face accountability when they commit crimes! What do we actually get? We’re going to use the term ‘main’ instead of ‘master’ for programming things!”

        What we so often forget in that moment of “What, I have to re-learn some terminology? Ugh, friction!” is exactly your point about small courtesies. Something doesn’t have to be a Big Damn Deal to be worthwhile.

        • @[email protected]
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          24 months ago

          Land O’Lakes butter – there was a brouhaha over a decision to remove a Native American woman from the packaging

          Maybe I just have no awareness but I have a hard time seeing how this was offensive. Master-slave, sure; coon, sure; those are directly something negative. However a Native American women is not inherently negative and they are using it as a positive symbol of something. What about this is offensive?

          Bottom line, I realize I’m not the one offended nor am I the one marketing it, so it really doesn’t impact me, but I also don’t understand

          • @[email protected]
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            14 months ago

            Using an ethnic stereotype as a logo/mascot is a bit whiffy, no? Ramp it up a bit and take a look at the Robertson’s Jam ‘golliwog’ logo.

            Maybe a different degree, but certainly the same smell. It’s just not a good look in this day and age.

        • @[email protected]
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          14 months ago

          I’ve often said “What do we want? Police to face accountability when they commit crimes! What do we actually get? We’re going to use the term ‘main’ instead of ‘master’ for programming things!”

          The other thing is that the big stuff is shored up by all the small stuff.

          The reason you can’t get police held accountable for crimes, ferinstance, is because there’s a hundred shitty racist / sexist / classist / etc attitudes locking down the idea that the police are both besieged by and protecting us from an underclass of people who deserve neither compassion, rights or justice. Look at the people leaping on the ‘he was no angel’ bandwagon, for god’s sake.

          If you want to topple the big overt heinous idea, you need to wash away the soil its roots are sunk into and that’s banked up round its trunk making it look like an inherent part of the landscape.

          A spoonful at a time, if need be. It all helps.

          • @[email protected]
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            24 months ago

            Interesting metaphor. I’ve never really gotten that idea – I’ve never seen the connection demonstrated between the “big stuff” and seemingly innocuous things like ‘main’ vs. ‘master’.

            Also, a lot of this feels misplaced. IMO, the root problem is one of attitude where the minorities are viewed as less-human, not deserving of equal treatment or equal rights. Change will happen as those attitudes shift. I haven’t seen a connection demonstrated between those attitudes and…well, pretty much any terminology issue that’s come up in recent memory.

    • @[email protected]
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      4 months ago

      There is stuff that was bad, white/blacklist doesn’t make much sense, when the universal “code” for allow/disallow are green and red. Allow and deny list are much better name.

      Master main, is fine by me, doesnt make much sense to call it master, its only the main branch nothing else.

      Shit that didnt make sense was stuff like removing community episodes from netflix, because or “blackface” without any consideration of why its there or whether it has value, just blanket ban, it was stupid af.

      • @[email protected]
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        164 months ago

        Totally discussing useless stuff here, but green and red to me give the feeling of temporary actions (and possibly alternating). Intuitively sounds more like slowing and speeding than it does permanently blocking or allowing something.

        Black and white have the polar opposite meaning. At this point allowlist and blocklist might be a simpler solution to the “problem”.

        • @[email protected]
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          184 months ago

          Blacklist is a word that goes back to the 17th century. The origin had nothing to do with ethnicity, it had to do with whether someone was against the monarchy during the English Revolution.

          Seems weird to remove words from existence out of fear that someone (who’s probably acting in bad faith) might take a bad meaning from it.

          • @[email protected]
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            44 months ago

            I agree, personally.

            In general I feel the words are so abstract (blacklist and whitelist) that I can’t really see how someone will see some other meaning…

        • @[email protected]
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          44 months ago

          Main one to me is you can’t have a grey area in between without black and white to compare it against.

      • @[email protected]
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        84 months ago

        Yeah it’s a problem with social media, twitter in particular. Nobody wants to put time into understanding any nuance, (and on twitter there’s not enough characters to explain the nuance) so it’s easier to jump to conclusions and go along with people that have jumped to conclusions because if you don’t people will think you’re on the “wrong side”.

  • @[email protected]
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    684 months ago

    It only sounds bad to the fringest of the fringe that’s deceivingly loud on twitter. Good luck trying to find even one real person thinking those terms should be changed. This kind of stuff is why people vote for Trump.

    • @[email protected]
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      474 months ago

      There is real, actual, injustice in the world that we need to address. Computer terms are not one of them.

      • @[email protected]
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        24 months ago

        But if I have the power to make a small change at work to both be more accurate and correct a minor injustice, why the heck not?! I can’t fix world hunger, but I can at least start a discussion about changing some internal terminology

    • @[email protected]
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      204 months ago

      I’d like it to be changed because I don’t like saying "is the slave working? Did you check? To my black employees.

          • @[email protected]
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            24 months ago

            Harder R if you want the SlaveR to whip the SlaveE :'D

            Also just kidding. I really really dont understand a lot of the sensitivity and sentiment against words. Words are NOT Violence as long as you agree to be civil and not militant.

            • @[email protected]
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              24 months ago

              It’s not obvious to realize this, but the luxury of thinking words are neutral is a privilege.

              Think of it this way. If 5% of the time, when a person said “howdy”, they punched you in the face. You would be very wary of anyone saying howdy. Just in case. Now imagine having to live on edge like that 24/7. It wears you down. It’s exhausting.

              Well, it costs me nothing to choose a different word besides howdy. And for that cost of $0 I can make someone else’s life less anxious. I know how much anxiety sucks because I’m basically made out of it. So I’m going to do what I can to put other people at ease.

              Now obviously black people know that the IT term master and slave are not about them. But they are also conditioned by society that, some small % of the time when those words come up, things go very poorly for them. So yeah, I would be twitchy about it too. Even if my rational mind knew it was silly.

      • AwesomeLowlander
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        44 months ago

        But you’re depriving the black employers of the chance to say it to their white employees!

      • @[email protected]
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        24 months ago

        To be honest I’d feel stupid saying that alout at anyone. They’re not called that in my native language - I think.

    • @[email protected]
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      84 months ago

      I think very few people mind changing it, and a few people want it changed, so it’s slowly shifting across various use cases. I’ve only discussed the change from master/slave terminology with one person that affirmatively supported the change, and they didn’t know that there’s still slavery in the world today.

      I don’t know what to make of that, other than to say ending human slavery ought to be a higher priority than ending references to it.

      • shrugs
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        124 months ago

        I think very few people mind changing it

        I doubt that. Do you know how many system configurations depend on these keywords? Do you have any idea how many hours of work and system outages this would cause?

        • @[email protected]
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          14 months ago

          I’ve seen a few projects rename during major version upgrades, when everyone has to read the release notes and make changes, anyways.

          Plenty of old deployed systems may continue using master/slave terminology, and of course some projects will stick to that language even decades in the future, but it was once more prevalent than it is now, and that declining trend looks like it will continue.

    • @[email protected]
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      44 months ago

      The place I’m at changed all of its documentation to student/teacher instead of master/slave.

  • @[email protected]
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    474 months ago

    “main” is shorter than “master”. “sub” is shorter than “slave”. Why worry about social issues when you can just type less and move on? :)

  • @[email protected]
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    I’m a developer. I use main/release/dev for new projects, because it just sounds better and is more intuitive to me honestly. “Master” doesn’t make much sense. Like what’s so “master” about a “master branch”? It’s just the main branch everything gets merged into. It doesn’t “control” branches. There’s no “master/slave” relationship there. So again, “master” was never really intuitive to me.

    Old projects don’t get relabeled, they stay master, cause relabeling the main branch could cause potential problems. That’s my two cents.

    • @[email protected]
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      244 months ago

      I look at “master” in our repo like you would refer to a master recording or a remaster, or similarly the gold master for when you could say a video game has gone gold.

      • @[email protected]
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        54 months ago

        I don’t know what a master recording is. Googled it and it seems to be related to vinyl or something. So yeah, kind of hard for me to wrap my head around that, but definitely an interesting outlook.

      • @[email protected]
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        44 months ago

        That’s why they used master. And this makes the whole “master is a bad word” stupid, at least in Git context.

    • @[email protected]
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      4 months ago

      Same for databases, master / slave does not really describe the relationship anymore. It’s a primary, secondary, control node, read only or something else.

    • @[email protected]
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      64 months ago

      That’s where you should use something more like top / bottom /s

      I think in this sense, master is more akin to the ‘recording’ master - The best version of the recording to which others are generated, and all parts merged; no ‘slaves’ necessarily just the ‘master’.

    • @[email protected]
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      64 months ago

      I think that’s because in computer science most master/slave nomenclature comes from hardware with a command/control structure (still notable in things like Spark where the namenode/master node controls the data nodes).

      GIT just took naming conventions from other existing design patterns (although I should probably look up sources to verify that assumption).

    • @[email protected]
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      54 months ago

      Master can also mean proficiency. If you say you’ve mastered a trade it doesn’t mean you enslaved the trade, you simply have complete knowledge of the trade.

      So in that context, the master branch is the complete branch. The branch that other branches stem from because it’s the one with code from all the teams. You could branch from another team member’s branch but if that branch hasn’t merged from master in a while, it won’t have all the knowledge (code). When you merge in master you’re getting knowledge from elsewhere from the branch that’s aware of more things than your branch is: the branch that has mastery of the code, the master branch.

      • @[email protected]
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        94 months ago

        That’s not how the terms entered computing though. We always used master in opposition of one or multiple slaves. It implies that one component has control and orders the other one around.

          • @[email protected]
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            14 months ago

            I’m not sure where you’re going with this. I haven’t gatekept anything, you can use whatever term you want, that’s none of my business. You can happily read my other comment. To me, “master” makes no sense if there are no “slaves”. That’s why I don’t use it. It doesn’t make sense to use it. You do you, that’s your business.

    • @[email protected]
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      Did you know that most people are not developers, and for many other use cases “master” does in fact imply control?

      Edit: I guess not

      • @[email protected]
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        54 months ago

        We’re talking about computing here. At least the post does. I guess you could be a QA engineer or something else, but this discussion is mostly a thing with developers.

    • femtech
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      24 months ago

      We renamed everything to keep shared pipelines working with one branch.

  • @[email protected]
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    414 months ago

    no please stop, i’m so tired of googling kinky stuff, seeing a spicy looking result and opening it just to see some computer server stuff pick something else idk maybe capitalist & worker, bonus points for political commentary

    • @[email protected]
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      124 months ago

      A long time ago, in a job not so far away, I worked on a computer project where we were using Apache Jackrabbit.

      I quickly learned that I needed to search for Apache Jackrabbit and not just Jackrabbit – vibrators weren’t relevant to the project.

    • beefbot
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      124 months ago

      Agreed lol. this opinion also works for the god-awfully named “gimp”

      • @[email protected]
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        34 months ago

        i already do, dronification kink represent, but at least make those search results spicier in their content!

  • 10_0
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    394 months ago

    I’m trying to imagine a world where this is a problem, oh, twitter

  • @[email protected]
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    384 months ago

    y’all I understand there are larger issues in the world but please let’s not pretend that POC working in tech feel awesome about typing master/slave in the terminal, it’s outdated and should be changed.