Social media corporations make millions and billions by catering to manipulate - and often darn right evil - advertiser needs, spying and tracking users for them. And then they want to be all moral by playing identity politics and excising inappropriate language.
This sounds like an attempt to divert the public attention during the Corona + police violence crises the US is currently undergoing.
... and all of this is not to say what I think about the use of these terms. I'm of two minds about that actually.
Our team had someone who's an orphan. We try to avoid using the term because a joke became a pretty sad lunchtime when they revealed the fact afterwards.
Words have different impact to different people. It doesn't cost us anything to use "isolated" node rather than an "orphan" node, but it made the dev feel less excluded.
If I'm a muslim who doesn't drink alcohol, and people I'm working with keep talking about having a beer and "what? you really don't drink". Does that mean everyone should stop drinking alcohol?.
Yes different words have different meanings, but once you start tinkering with this, where do you draw a line in the sand?
When I read the tiltle the first thing I thought about was "Man in the middle" attacks which belongs to the security field. How do you rename this? "woman in the middle"? doesn't this sound sexist? wouldn't some guys use this to have sexist jokes with their female colleagues and make matters worse?
Exactly. Anything can trigger emotions. The difference is emotional management, or not. Letting bad emotions stifle you may reduce your outcomes, but we can't always expect others to save us.
Racism and discrimination is real, but we shouldn't conflate them with unfair powerstructures. We need to level the playing field and speak up against bullying.
I'm sorry that this happened to your colleague, I understand how it feels to be reminded of something you would rather not be reminded of.
Sufficed to say; as my mother used to tell me constantly: life is kind of unfair.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to make things fairer of course!
There are some things I generally agree with- I take an opposition position often because people should understand that changing the status quo should come with strong and valid reasons; there is a lot of institutional change that people ask for and it comes at some level of cost, so it's not something we should do with complete frivoloty.
Also, when it comes to certain terms (Allowlist/Denylist); these are sometimes simply better at conveying what things _do_ and terminology changes for those things can stand on those merits alone.
All that is to say: perceived offence, is a very poor reason to change.
Not because I'm arguing that people need to suck it up or even that there isn't some level of anguish, but because inherently it has no end. There is no line you can draw. I'm not even saying that "it's a slippery slope" I'm saying that the minute you draw a line you exclude people.
As an example of why you can't draw lines:
I grew up poor, I might get offended if someone referred to something as 'being in poor condition'; thus you may, on my behalf, want to remove that word.
Many people in the world do not have feet, and thus, the word 'football' might remind them of the trauma of losing their feet (or never having had feet).
I feel like it's worth mentioning here that 'bot' comes from 'robot' which has roots in the Czech language for "forced labour".
Not to mention master/slave are clear in terminology, one instructs, the other obeys, it is terminology that has existed for literally thousands of years (and yes, it is an atrocity when it happens to people). I would also caution strongly about suggesting that it has racial motivations as, of course, black people are not exclusively slaves- even today there are more slaves than at any point in history; and I can assure you, they're not all black.[0]
It would help immensely to quantify the impact of these kinds of changes, asking the affected community what they think/feel; that would kill a lot of the discontent around "virtue signalling white people" which is part of the current discussion.
I feel like it doesn't need to be said, but words are polyphasic, they have multiple meanings depending on context, altering terminology brings about the euphemism treadmill[1] -- generally speaking the hate in our hearts is the issue, not the words we speak; and restrictions on language do nothing to curb that hatred if it exists.
New words or phrases will be created to skirt the rules and then we're back at the same place, with less words in our vocabulary.
I can get onboard with master/slave when used in conjunction.
But the etymology of "blacklist" so far as I know and can Google is not to do with race and it's use and understood meaning is not to do with race. How then can it be racist?
I have heard others argue that it's the implication that black is bad - but it's not as simple as that. "Whiteknighting" can be used negatively. "Bad" can literally mean "good". Come on.
This especially goes for "grandfathered" - what on earth is wrong with this?
"Grandfathered" comes from
from laws passed in the late 1800s and early 1900s to disenfranchise black people. States created new restrictions on voting but exempted descendants of people who had been allowed to vote before black people were allowed to vote. You could vote if your grandfather could, in other words. The exemptions came to be called grandfather clauses.
I used to think stuff like this was ridiculous. It's just a database, who even cares?
However, now I'm all for it.
What has changed? Over working in tech for a while, I noticed some patterns in my coworkers' behavior. I noticed that the same people who didn't switch over to saying "primary" and "replica" back in 2015-ish, and when it started becoming more common, and in fact, actively ridiculed it (just like I did) were the same people who would casually say things like “Oh those Indians screwed it up” while talking about problems with an overseas helpdesk. They didn't even consider that I, as someone of Indian descent who was apparently "all right" in their view would be offended by this (Note: when the screwup was, say, due to people from our TX helpdesk, they would never say “Oh, those Texans screwed it up”). Oh, and I never heard this kind of stuff from the few women or PoC in our office.
Now I can easily see how at least one black coworker would be offended by these people animatedly discussing how the "slave" is not correctly following the "master", and how it might affect their work day, week, or month in a really bad way.
In general I have seen that people who think more about the language they use and how it might affect others seem to make better, nicer coworkers. That's really the primary reason I support these changes now.
> Note: when the screwup was, say, due to people from our TX helpdesk, they would never say “Oh, those Texans screwed it up”
I can't speak for everyone everywhere, obviously - all teams are different and have their own attitudes - but I did some work in India with a tech support team and the phrase "the American's screwed it up" was used a reasonable amount in the cases we looked at.
For whatever it's worth - which, again, isn't much other than to say that any individual (you, me, etc.) experience isn't a set rule, at least one my U.S. team the women (including PoC) complained about the India team's work significantly more often than the men, though I think this was because some of the men happened to interact more with the India team and so got to know them a bit better (there were exceptions in all directions, but I'm just saying majorities here).
I think it has much less to do on both ends with any kind of actual bias and more with the ease to blame the team "over there" as opposed to people next to you - people blamed teams in other parts of their own building (U.S. and India alike) just as quickly/often as ones overseas.
I'm not at all opposing complaining about another team's work. If it's not up to scratch, complain by all means! I have lots to complain about regarding our accounting department, for instance.
> at least one my U.S. team the women (including PoC) complained about the India team's work significantly more often than the men,
Yep, I don't see a direct contradiction here? Complaining is fine, using race/nationality-specific language is not.
Perhaps I should make it emphasize that the thing I disliked was using generally reductive term “Indians” which is much wider than the subset they are referring to, which is the specific set of people employed by their company who are working out of India. It could have included you, for instance! (even though my guess is that you're not Indian).
Your observation is curious to me, perhaps it was worded confusingly.
"I noticed that the same people who ... actively ridiculed it (just like I did) were the same people who would casually say things like “Oh those Indians screwed it up”..."
So you are saying that you noticed that if someone actively ridiculed these things before, that they were casually racist. I assume that you were not casually racist when you actively ridiculed these things.
So this means 3 or 4 things to me:
Initially, my first thought is that you admit that you yourself were part of the first group but deny the label you assigned to the second group to yourself.
In other words, it seems to me that you are making a generalisation of people's characters which is inaccurate as you yourself admit that it's inaccurate.
Or perhaps its okay to generalise if most of the people you observed had this pattern of behaviour, because it doesn't mean that the exceptions (including you) prove it false?
Or... is it that you were part of both groups 5 years ago and you and most people in the first group have changed over time to both accept these new terms and stopped using casual racist talk?
> Or... is it that you were part of both groups 5 years ago and you and most people in the first group have changed over time to both accept these new terms and stopped using casual racist talk.
Yep, this. I agree that me arguing for the use of "master" and "slave" in 2014 was likely racist, and would have made a black coworker uncomfortable.
IMO I think it's important and useful to acknowledge when your language has been racist in the past. I think this acknowledgement is what most people shy away from, instead preferring to retreat into ever more complicated arguments about why they are right or the “I never meant...” defense.
Thanks for clarifying! Yes it's certainly more important. I hope your old co workers have also changed over time too!
Personally I've luckily not worked with any who were in the strongly disagreeing camp nor who expressed casually racist talk before - but I know a few who would roll their eyes at the whole "game".
Why does that offend anyone?
Its just a terminology to describe behaviour of two components.
It doesn't endorse or propagate slavery. I have never heard of an argument that HDDs have masters and slaves so people should too.
If I kill a child thread, does it mean I am 'pro choice' now?
Does creating white-list or black-list makes me become racist?
Those are just word, meaningless and powerless. What really matters is context and intentions, a social nuance that it seems like was thrown out with bath water long time ago.
> Its just a terminology to describe behaviour of two components.
It does? I mean, I’ve used a lot of hard drives and never had one whip another or resell it to punish a friend for disobedience. I’ve also never heard of an enslaved person being put in charge after the plantation master died.
Insisting on using inaccurate terms when better ones exist is a political stance which raises questions about the motives behind putting so much effort into opposing something which costs you nothing.
Yeah, the amount of energy arguing about not changing the terminology; which can be changed to better reflect what it is, is mind boggling.
I can understand arguing what terminology should be used instead. Those arguments tend to be way more civil discussions and don't last long, and a way better set of terminology is set.
Yeah, that’s a much better conversation because it often flushed out that the same terms were being used for things which weren’t quite the same (hot failover, read-replica, etc.) and someone who has more experience with one tool won’t think a different one works the same way.
This is probably because of the huge social stigma around mental illness.
By describing someone as insane, or “crazy” rather than trying to understand what is truly going on for them, it is a dismissal of their actual needs. Whether you want to deal with that level of detail has a lot to do with your relationship with that person.
But this matters a lot when it comes to the police who are called to handle people having mental health emergencies.
These suggestions all make some sense to me. The outrage at just dealing with the changes does not.
When there are too many changes, being asked to "just deal" becomes exclusionary itself. I know of communities like that, where most people are unwelcome because they don't know the huge set of rules on how they're supposed to talk, and I don't want programming to become one of them.
Really. I mentioned this downthread, but the headline undersells the extent of Twitter's change; they've also dropped the terms "dummy value" and "guys".
Names change all the time. Leader / follower and primary / secondary are better for a lot of things, anyway. Even ignoring the social issue, master and slave are not great terms for how they are used. Frankly, I find it disturbing that so many developers are so attached to the master and slave terminology. It’s like the tech industry’s version of the confederate flag.
It is not an attachment to the words themselves it is a reaction to the idea that words have some kind of implied sinister meaning outside of the context in which they are used.
And yes, I use the word "sinister" deliberately - why aren't we banning the use of this word on behalf of left-handed people?
Words get their meaning from common understanding, common usage and most importantly context.
Agreed. Further, in most instances master/slave terminology is quite misleading with the master and slave doing similar work and commonly the master doing even more work. Leader/follower and primary/replica are much better terminology from a purely technical perspective. Its a plus that we also get to remove these two awful words.
> Frankly, I find it disturbing how attached so many developers are so attached to the master and slave terminology.
I was about to write that too. I'm not quite sure if I find the change necessary - but who am I to raise my word against it. I'm a white guy, it is obvious why master/slave has negative connotations and that's enough for me to let them decide.
I just listened to a podcast about "whiteness studies" maybe that enforced my opinion on this - but why would I - a white guy - would want to criticize this discussion. Be open, be welcome, accept diversity is a main rule in many projects. Why would I not want to change something that others consider harmful(especially something as simple as wording)
So you're not entitled to an opinion? That's the sort of self-deprecation that the far left wants you to have, and I say this as a non-White myself.
Read up on world history, not just American history, and you'll see that slavery spanned not just Blacks, but all sorts of races, including whites.
> but why would I - a white guy - would want to criticize this discussion
Because it's past the point where it became absurd, nothing to do with you being white or otherwise. I'm all for treating people properly and with respect and dignity, but at the same time lets not lose our minds here.
> it is obvious why master/slave has negative connotations
how? it only represents a kind of relationship (a terrible one, yes) between people. But it's only a historic terminology.
Killer is a word that, following that logic, has negative connotations and it is used when people say "that's a killer feature". Stopping using those terms won't make past events to disappear. At worst, they'll be forgotten, making it possible for history to repeat itself.
Killer and master/slave are very different. "Killing" has rarely singled out one specific ground of people and subjugated them for centuries. In cases where it has, you don't use the word. Imagine naming a program that kills a bunch of processes on a box “holocaust”.
But let's run with "killing" for a bit. If, hypothetically, you had a coworker whose family was murdered by a serial killer, wouldn't you be careful about using “He killed it out there” and similar terms around them? Or do you sit around logically proving why the context is different?
Those are fair points but I still don't think we are helping anyone with this over-protection. Would you hesitate to say that expression without knowing that coworker's background? Should he/she be offended when there isn't malicious intent behind those words? It looks to me more sensible and a better long term solution to help this person to deal with his/her emotions instead of trying to change everybody around them.
> Would you hesitate to say that expression without knowing that coworker's background?
Ok. But. The discussion is about specific expressions almost everybody knows, not just random words. One of those words is `slave`.
> It looks to me more sensible and a better long term solution to help this person to deal with his/her emotions instead of trying to change everybody around them.
I think this only applies to situations in which one specific person has specific triggers who are e.g. tight to an psychological trauma...
> "Killing" has rarely singled out one specific ground of people and subjugated them for centuries
While the term holocaust mainly refers to what the Jews went through during WWII, slavery encompassed not just blacks, but many other races including whites. The problem here is that the "discussion" happening is extremely US centric, that non-Americans are either looking at it as absurd, or they've become so Americanized that they think it's correct, meaning they also have no proper critical thinking skills and are easily swayed.
I find your deeply uncharitable assumption of why people use and prefer to use certain words unnecessarily hostile, and worth fighting. You want to only look at the context for people who oppose these words, and not at all for the people who want to keep them or their utility. I repudiate your goals, whatever euphemism you try to couch it in, e.g. "disturbed".
Why are people failing to grasp that languages have context? Twitter, GitHub and others are clearly lacking some "mastery" of language semantics, such as homonyms.
Perhaps we should be lobbying for better English education? Nah screw that, let's adopt a simplified version of the English language that removes any emotion or chance of ambiguity... I'm sure an author came up with a candidate language in the late 40s
How much of this sort of thing (including the hiding/removing of "problematic" TV/films) is being done/encouraged to draw attention away from the defund the police/better social services message?
Making BLM seem asinine looks like a fairly easy/standard psyop move.
More important than this change of terminology, I think it's good that Twitter decided to donate ten million dollars to NGOs fighting slavery around the world (it's still prevalent, especially in Africa and Asia)
When I read defenses of these moves online, usually it is acknowledged that these terms, when used in the context of engineering, do not have a relationship to human subjugation. However, the arguments offered at that juncture are:
a) Every little bit helps: If we can help eradicate injustice even in a tiny way, such as by using more inclusive language, and it's not unreasonable to implement, why not?
b) We need to cut ties with a problematic past to improve: If we want a world with equity for all, we must voluntarily let go of heritage that binds us to a world without equity.
I have many problems with these arguments. (If I have not steelmanned them sufficiently, please suggest improvements).
First, it is not true that the current strategy is reasonable to implement. A solution is reasonable if the effort needed to implement it does not outweigh the impact of the problem. A reasonable solution is to use "leader / follower" yourself and gradually encourage people away over time at their own discretion: a low-effort solution for a low-impact problem. An unreasonable solution is to risk production impact and breaking changes (as in third-party tooling that relies on the `master` convention in git), creating more work for everyone - all so slightly different language can be used. Doc changes are a great low-effort solution if you really want to do this.
Second, the claim that improvement cannot occur without cutting ties is a bit of a switch-and-bait. People will defend "improvement is not possible without change", and then morph that into "improvement is not possible without disassociation". There is some merit to this latter claim in some contexts - for example, in cases of domestic abuse - but that does not make it universal. We can keep the past around, but eliminate its ability to impact the present, which is "improvement with change". I think the "master / slave" convention and its history have done this adequately, since everyone agrees that no reasonable person would associate the term now with an endorsement of slavery or oppression.
These two points put me firmly in the camp of "necessary changes are good, but this particular change is unnecessary".
I don't understand why there's so much pushback against the moves to remove terminology like master/slave from IT.
It makes people uncomfortable and it's such a small change.
And it's just software, go use sed or whatever to rename it.
Why be disingenuous and say stuff like "oh I guess racism is solved now!" Or "GitHub changing the default branch name for new projects is going to break everyone's CI-CD pipelines!"?
Many reasons, including a very (distorted) US centric view of the world, going overboard with emotions instead of rationality (words are generally tied to context), and now people have to walk on eggshells or they'll lose their jobs if they speak the "wrong" word.
You can't talk about rationality whilst talking about a country centric view.
Rational actions are defined by the society that judges it.
Twitter is an American company.
If you feel like you have to "walk on eggshells" then maybe you're not a cultural fit for the company.
If you're working at a company like Twitter, GitHub etc. Then you should have some pretty good career mobility.
These companies aren't the only ones in the world.
If you want to work at a place that will push back against changing master / slave terminology then there's a sizable amount of people that feel the same way.
I'm not sure what your first few points have anything to do with the discussion, not to mention being incorrect (rationality is not objective as you're implying). This irrational SJW movement is not limited to a few companies, but is taking over the US in general. It's another form of oppression.
People are concerned, correctly, that it's not such a small change and won't be limited to only terms as offensive as "master/slave". Twitter announced that it's also avoiding the phrases "guys", "sanity check", and "dummy value".
I don't understand why it offends people. I understand that anything linguistically tied to America's race issues is becoming taboo and this is now A New Rule, but I still don't get the mental process that's going on inside the minds of the offended, or feel the emotional response that they feel.
That's quite a scary thing, not because I have a problem with renaming words that make other people feel bad, but because I don't understand why they feel bad in the first place. That means I can't predict what's going to happen next or whether I'm doing something wrong that I don't know about but will get me fired. The whole thing is confusing and strange and unpredictable, and I can't tell whether it's going to end in civil rights, civil war, or just be a storm in a teacup.
I'm guessing people who are dismissive of e.g. Github renaming master branches are feeling the same way and lashing out.
When I was a teacher, there was a distinct group of kids who always pushed the boundaries to see how far they could. They presented endless reasons for why they wanted to do what they wanted to do, with no regard for how ridiculous they sounded. They were smart and creative, and knew what they were doing was unwelcomed. They just wanted to see how far they could push the teacher. That's exactly what this feels like. It doesn't stop, until we put our foot down. It doesn't have to be nasty, but it doesn't require we entertain weak arguments about people's psychological comfort demanding we change behavior either on the defensive about how we are not oppressive.
Yup. This stupidity will backfire badly. In the latest list they are essentially destroying the language itself by removing gendered pronouns. How do I wish Spanish without them? Or phrases like "you guys" which is gender neutral. Frankly, these people are hurting the cause as much as racists and sexist people are, maybe even more. This will not be supported but anyone with a brain and frankly neither will their original causes. This idea that people need to feel "safe" and therefore others should modify their speech is mad. The only response to such idiots is to tell them off, to say "fuck you idiots" and ignore them. I think it does have to be nasty indeed because these morons have shown time and again they do not listen to reason.
The terms are gross and by no means necessary, but changing them also does not do anything to improve anyone's life. It's an empty, performative gesture unless accompanied by a lot of bigger structural and organizational changes at Twitter. You can't just "tada, we fixed racism."
These terms are actually quite precise describing a relationship between two technical systems.
I have yet to hear other words having the same precision.
Btw.: Imho no ethnic group has a sole claim to the victimhood role as historical slavery. To name a few examples of that:
* My (white, European) ancestors were slaves of the Romans.
* My (white, European) ancestors were slaves of the same (white, European) (here noble) ancestors.
* My (white, European) ancestors were holders of (Jewish) slaves.
So should I ask for the removal of this word from regular, technical use? I do not feel that way.
Do you have the source for this? I'd be very surprised if this was the meaning of the word at the time Karel Capek used it. The world robot comes from slavic word robota which means work or hard work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R. That's the play that introduced it and it's looking like the word means "forced labour" rather than just "work". Which you could say is slavery.
This might be the historical meaning of the word but it's certainly not the meaning of the word today and I'm doubting it was the meaning of the world at the time of the author.
"Robota" means just work now in many Slavic languages but in Czech it means "serfdom" if online dictionaries did not lie to me. And in all Slavic languages the word is derived from the proto-slavic https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/o... , slave so, if you apply Twitter's logic here then it has to be banned because it literally contains the word "slave" (rob).
I just sold an internet product I built that contains both “Whitelist” and “Blacklist” rules.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I added the names a few years ago.
However I also grew up in the 80s and Dukes of Hazard was still a popular enough television show that I was specifically not allowed to watch it by my mom for reasons I did not understand at the time. [1]
As far as changing language of the rules in the product I built, or would build I have no problem using something neutral.
Software developers are used to deprecated language. Function and class names are changed for any number of reasons, sometimes just because they are inconvenient to spell.
If some people feel that Master Slave, or Blacklist Whitelist constitute micro aggressions, then why put up a fight to switch to neutral language?
Just deprecate the syntax and return the narrative and focus to problems developers can overwhelmingly agree are getting in the way of establishing a more inclusive developer community.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-dukes-of-hazzard-reall_b_7...
This master - slave debate is at least 10 years old. And I have the same questions now:
- ofc master slave relationship between human beings is wrong, but are we not allowed to "abuse" and "subjugate" IT systems? I mean that's kind of their purpose if you ask me. It's wrong to beat somebody but it's not wrong to beat a carpet.
- what is the purpose of removing those words? Is it like pretending these relationships don't exist?
- who benefits from the removal of the terms and in what way exactly? How is the world getting better by doing this?
> What is the purpose of removing those words? Is it like pretending these relationships don't exist?
I wonder about this too. Slavery still exists in various forms. Does removing the word from software make us feel like we're making progress towards removing slavery, while there are better ways to use our time/money to fight it?
Last time I was in this discussion, I ended up donating to antislavery.org, so who knows; maybe it brings focus to the cause.
I'm pretty neutral about removing the word from software, though. I don't really think it changes the dial much in any direction.
IMO if you take your own argument to its logical conclusion, you can see that it falls apart easily. If someone launched a project in 2020 where you “lynch” a process to remove it and engage in “gassing” a connection pool to close all connections, then it’s blatantly obvious why such terms are problematic, despite the terms only being slightly removed from master/slave.
Sure but there isn’t a growing population of people who actively support randomly killing children in the same way that hateful/racist movements are growing in the US and elsewhere. That context matters.
I've seen very few people of color expressing their offense at the terms master/slave as used in technology in these threads here at HN, Reddit and on Twitter.
Many more people of color have said that they're not offended by the terms and that this is an empty-headed change.
So, what we have is a group of people who mostly aren't black, who are mobbing up to demand this change. Does that sound accurate to you?
Do you think setting a precedent of giving into these peoples demands is a good idea?
Context does matter. A good portion of the U.S. believes that abortion is the same as killing children, but we aren’t changing tech companies, implementing codes of conduct, or devising newspeak to suit _those_ peoples’ political sensibilities, are we?
When the pendulum swings the other way, after we’ve normalized the complete politicization of our day to day institutions, will we all be okay with potentially having an opposing political belief system forced upon us? Or do we need not think that far ahead?
Luckily we aren't having any political belief system forced upon us. People are independently choosing to remove terms they personally don't want included in their projects. If someone feels the same way about the use of the term "child" in code they can freely update their projects today; they don't have to wait for any pendulum.
Sorry if I'm just missing it, but I'm not sure how this relates.
Something I've noticed in my own writing is that the more I write the less likely it is to be misunderstood or misinterpreted. By that I mean, it would be easier to have a dialogue if I knew what connection you were drawing between people choosing to update their projects and my acceptance of terms of service. I can imagine many connections, but to respond to the connection you're making I'd need to know which one it is.
Sorry for being too ambiguous there. Yes, anyone can choose to remove “master / slave” terminology from their own project. The issue I take is a bit bigger than a matter of individual choice.
I have a problem with companies adopting extremist political policies in an effort to cater to a growing population of hostile young puritans who want to LARP as activists but lack any meaningful civil rights issue to worry about and have thus resolved to make up shitty, fake civil rights battles.
In order to not be considered “problematic” in this modern landscape we’re expected to play along with these shitty, fake civil rights battles. That’s a game I’m personally tired of playing and I think it ends when everyone, including its own vocal proponents, are burned by it.
I didn’t choose to get rid of the “master” repo, but now we’re changing terms. Literally the terms of service have changed.
So my understanding of the legal requirements of terms of service (which are generally not strongly enforced either way) is that if it changes you just have to sign the new one, or decide that you disagree enough with the changes that you won't sign it.
To the "extremist" point, I have to say I really don't see it. Changing "master" to "main" doesn't seem like an extreme political position to me. Extreme would be someone murdering protesters, tweeting someone chanting "white power", or hanging black people from trees in Texas. Those are pretty easy things to not want in your society. The same with people setting businesses on fire or brandishing weapons in public. But I don't see how someone trying to reduce their harm externalities by changing words is particularly extreme.
This may come down to the difference between the ideas and the people holding the ideas. I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea. I think we can both agree that we wouldn't want people harassing each other for either making or not making this change, as anyone should be free to make whichever decision they feel is right. To the extent that the "left" is the cause of the harassment, I can agree I'd rather those people deal with this more calmly. But again, they're not the ones murdering people.
And now we’re talking about left vs. right, dragging in unrelated injustices to construct our web of systemic oppression, and posing the false dichotomy. Do I accept the new terms or do I support lynching black people in Texas?
No, what I’m saying is it’s a game, it seems you are trying to play it right now, and I’m saying I reject it.
I was only trying to respond to the political claims you brought up. I'm not sure how you can read what you wrote and not see that you're making claims about political extremists on one side. I'm not the one who brought that up, and in my post I mentioned both the burning business and the harassment that the left is doing that I disagree with. Lastly, it's not a game. People are oppressed. People are dying. The specific problem of wording in git repos may seem unimportant, but the conflation of that with the reality of what "extremist" means is what I take issue with.
I don't really care about what political side you're on (I'm an independent), I don't even really care about the git repo thing (people can choose whatever they want, it doesn't really affect me) but your claim of what is "extreme" is quite frankly not reasonable.
> it’s blatantly obvious why such terms are problematic
To me it's not even clear what "problematic" means. I understand problems, I understand solutions, I can understand explanations of how one relates to another, but problematic... Not obvious at all.
Eh. If I was managing a network with a ton of machines I needed to be able to turn off and on together (not that farfetched from what I'm currently doing), I'd probably label the scripts 'resurrection' and 'genocide'. Apt and descriptive.
I think the difference is you chose words more emotionally charged, which isn't the point here.
Genocide means destroying an ethnic group by killing all of its members - it is in no way generalizable to "kill them all." Surely you can see why that's a poor use of language (even discounting the potential to offend). Save yourself a character and just go with "killall."
The word genocide has a much more sinister import than 'kill all'. It literally means kill all of one race ('geno'). I wouldn't call terminating a child process 'infanticide' either.
I’m curious what you would do if a new hire/junior programmer joined your team and asked you to change the name of the script because their parents were killed in a genocide and they would prefer not to be reminded every time they had to run the script?
Would you be empathetic and spend three seconds renaming it or fight them tooth and nail on principle?
Why would people so strongly resist practicing some pre-emptive effortless empathy toward people who have gone through similar things related to a small handful of specific words?
I'm open to changing any problematic wording if it came from someone that was genuinely offended by it.
However I am opposed to blanket changes like the one in this article not because of the wording itself but because the change is coming from the PR department as opposed to any actual minorities that might be offended by these words.
1. People who speak up are often putting their jobs at stake, especially in the US where people can (and often are) fired for almost anything. We shouldn’t have to ask anyone; it’s so not a big deal to search and replace some text to a more neutral term.
2. I’ve met plenty of people who felt uncomfortable about specific jokes being made, words being used and did not feel comfortable for speaking out for various reasons. In at least one case the person explained that it took years before they were able to make the transition from feeling demeaned by a term and being able to understand and articulate exactly why it was demeaning.
We can be proactive and emphatic. There’s no good reason people have to be so insanely motivated to fight against something that barely has any effect on their life but that might improve things for others.
> asked you to change the name of the script because their parents were killed in a genocide
I'd change it. Why do you ask?
> pre-emptive effortless empathy
Because the world is filled with negativity, and our language changes to refect the world: if we kept dropping every word that gained a negative connotation, within a few generations we'd be left with nothing but a child's vocabulary - if that.
Senpai kohai would be the clear winner but unfortunately then we face problems of cultural appropriation.
I jest, but then what else is there to do other than that when children of color are being gunned down in the street by the only people supposed to be protecting them and the best that the white tech elite can come up with is some token renaming in their infrastructure documentation.
"but that's not all they're doing". Yes it is, if it wasn't things would have changed significantly before now and it hasn't and at this rate it won't this time either. It'll just allow white tech to keep attracting the types of white liberal employees they want to employ so everyone can go on avidly avoiding the truth.
Why are companies going out of their way in cost and effort to mass employ using visa schemes rather than work locally? Where are the grass roots campaigns to promote tech education in uber privileged areas / cities? Where are the paths to employment and leadership? Where are the programmes to promote tech hubs in said locations and create opportunities for people who can't move to the tech elite areas? The best answer to that so far is covid-19 forcing people to look at remote working options for employees. We didn't even manage that by choice.
What this hell is any of this achieving other than a few feel goods until the next horrific avoidable death?
> "but that's not all they're doing". Yes it is, if it wasn't things would have changed significantly before now and it hasn't and at this rate it won't this time either.
Of course, the problem is in the minds not in the words.
who benefits from the removal of the terms and in what way exactly?
Everyone, because we get to work in places where our colleagues don't have to use words that have extremely negative connotations from their history. In a lot of cases we also get to use words that make more sense - "master" and "slave" is a specific type of relationship that computers don't have with one another. "leader" and "follower" are a better analogy in most cases, especially in the typical case of server replication.
Thanks to the Windows kernel memory isolation and sandboxing they are literally locking the child processes in cages. Of course I’d expect nothing less of Microsoft, an evil company that works with ICE.
Though instead of a parent process “killing” a child we should just say “aborting.” That’s much less problematic.
For better or worse, killing doesn't have such bad associations. Many of us regularly play video games where you kill people, and if you turn on the TV you'll see a lot more depictions of killing than depictions of slavery.
No, the poster above genuinely hit upon something with respect to killing child processes. Speaking from experience with a past colleague, some women that have had miscarriages bear a silent emotional burden of grief.
To be fair, BDSM is typically so reviled in the public consciousness I would expect it to be cancelled long before anyone bothered to get around to examining any of its jargon.
>I would expect it to be cancelled long before anyone bothered to get around to examining any of its jargon.
I wouldn't since people attempting to control what consenting adults can do with each other in the privacy of their bedroom were the ones that were trying to keep gay marriage out and that's not really the winning side.
The issue is not neatly divided into one of puritanism vs sexual license. In just the same way that a segment of the lesbian and gay community is hostile toward transsexual and bisexual and asexual individuals, and certain feminists have issues or not with transsexuals, etc, the divisions are far more multifaceted. In this case, we're discoursing on the usage of words in or out of context, or, more accurately, that to some there is only a singular context. Under such strictures, it is impossible to succeed in asking for nuance around the idea (or image) of a woman being tied up and hit.
And going by the best barometer of these things (that of its portrayal in publicly broadcast material) transsexuals and gays and lesbians have a measure of the normative. Such a thing cannot be said for BDSM. Outside of specialized media, it is almost universally coded in the negative. Here, we should not confuse popularity with the non-negative. The prime example is 50 Shades of Grey, a piece of media that can exist because it is fundamentally founded upon the notion of the 'brokenness' of such a state and practices, the narrative thrust all leading to the eventual redemption and healing of the protagonist, allowing the audience the titillation of the 'naughty thing', all while safely packing it away as being 'wrong' and always having been so.
Absolutely not, Leader and Follower implies at least somewhat of a choice on the side of the Follower. Master and Slave exactly describe the way IT systems work, the Slave has no choice but to follow the instructions of the Master. Having the Slave not execute the exact instructions it was given would be a massive problem.
>"master" and "slave" is a specific type of relationship that computers don't have with one another. "leader" and "follower" are a better analogy in most cases
I don't understand how computers have a leader/follower relationship either.
Ehh, was Twitter or anybody else using it to mean ownership over someone?!!?!?!?! I mean in that case it is a crime we are talking about and just renaming actual enslaving of humans to something else won't fix it. so ... I mean ... what even are we doing here/
What a creative way to virtue signal. This way you don’t have to do anything that has any positive impact for any single person. But you can tell all your white friends about it.
People need to read a history book. ‘Master’ has nothing to do with ‘slavery.’ ‘Slavery’ has a long history going back thousands of years. No race has any particular right to be offended. Romans had slaves of every color.
And if you are a person who gets upset when you see the word “master” you need to seriously consider becoming an adult.
I think the problem here is that fighting these PC efforts just reinforces the egos of those who champion it because 1) it gives them more "enemies" to righteously battle against and 2) they're currently winning.
As an old school liberal with subversive tendencies, maybe the right way to throw a monkey wrench into these language policing efforts is by reductio ad absurdum or killing them with kindness. Push every possible thing that's offensive into these lists, particularly targeting terms common in business parlance. "double-blind testing"? Offensive to people with low vision. TTYs in Linux? Sounds like a NSFW word. "Pros and cons"? Offensive to inmates who have served their sentence. It's not even "in bad faith" (the ultimate modern thought-terminating cliché); do it fully and sincerely in line with their desire to eliminate all possible offense. Just totally fill up their PC dictionary with stuff until it becomes clear that it's impractical to eliminate all possible avenues of offense without being reduced to grunts and gestures.
Of course your example is the government, and because you have to chip in for the many services it provides people that makes it slavery in your mind. Eesh privilege.
At least cite low paid workers forced to keep working at the same low paid job because they can’t afford to take time off to look elsewhere let alone upskill to get a better job. Or prisoners who are essentially forced to work for pennies and then charged up the nose when their families go to call them. Or the many literal slaves that still exist and often prep your shrimp if you eat any.
Taxation is slavery because it is forced ultimately at gunpoint. The government basically claims ownership of a significant part of (the fruits of) your labor. You cannot refuse, which makes you their slave, having to do what they dictate. A 'citizen' is essentially another word for property of the state, i.e. a slave. In the future they'll probably also object to the use of that word like they do for master/slave, not realizing the names change but the result stays the same.
I'm not saying I agree with it - but metaphors matter. It's easy to imagine certain design patterns being associated with offensive stereotypes. How much do we have to extend 'master' and 'slave' before the metaphor crosses a line? The introduction of a 'boat' class or a 'chain' class? Of course the underlying technology isn't offensive but we're attaching our human social context to it.
At least no one has a problem with the underlying patterns themselves! That would be a doozy.
Why go through the hard effort of making real change happen, when the masses are appeased by token gestures that solve 0 problems people actually face?
I never saw the reference until people started pointing it out, so it says nothing about me. But if others do, then I'm not so attached to the terminology that I'd put up a fight to defend it.
What I don't really understand is why people are so outraged by renaming a bunch of stuff. It's a trivial change, who cares?
Have you ever heard of "give an inch, take a mile"?
Today is a trivial thing. Tomorrow could be something more serious but then, it would be too late to complain about it (and today social media is the best example, you can see how peoples' lives are ruined by things taken out of context or exaggerating them).
The list of changes already includes innocuous terms like "sanity check", "grandfathered", and "dummy value" so, frankly, it's pretty hard to make the case that the "take a mile" isn't already happening.
Humanity has been killing and enslaving each other for time immemorial, so I'd wager at some point, most civilizations were enslaved to some extent. Maybe recency plays into this, but it's been abolished in the US for a fair few generations now...
What's next? Ban "atomic operation", because some developers may be Japanese? Maybe ban Germans altogather, because what do you know, maybe someone's grandad got killed in the WWII?
These virtue signaling actions are absurd and, what's worse, scary. So happily inching towrads thoughtcrime.
What would your response be if someone came along and said "binary" is not an appropriate word for compiled artefacts because some people do not identify as a man or a woman?
What would your response be if someone came along and said we should rename the HTML <div> element because "div" is a schoolyard insult implying low intelligence?
What would your response be if someone came along and said we should stop referring to mobile phones as "cells" because people are unjustly confined to prison cells due to structural racism?
I do not believe I am, or others who agree with me are, arguing that we should not change language where it is problematic the issue is we do not agree that the use of these words in context are an issue at all.
To the cynics: how would you feel about this change if your great grand parents were slaves, lived in shackles and got whipped regularly and called the person whipping them “master”?
I'm a minority. My culture has had slavery as an institution for millennia, likely including some of my own ancestors. It also didn't legally abolish slavery until decades after the end of the Civil War in the US, so there's more claim to recency. And, honestly, I couldn't care less. I have better things to do than to try to collect imagined debts from more than a century ago for wrongs that were never done to me.
Words have different meanings in different contexts, to "floss" could be a dental hygiene procedure or it could be performing a particular dance. It is simply not the same to refer to a "master branch" as it is to a "slave master".
I am indifferent. My ancestors were slaves. Other ancestors were slavers. Most people only need to go back far enough to find both in their line of ancestry.
I'd be indifferent since I care very little about my ancestry. I've never bothered to actually look up how my ancestors lived. I assume they were peasants that got by by eating tree bark.
As somebody who is a descendant of slaves I feel like it's 1918 again and communist commissars are back with changing the language to support their delusions.
This sounds like an attempt to divert the public attention during the Corona + police violence crises the US is currently undergoing.
... and all of this is not to say what I think about the use of these terms. I'm of two minds about that actually.