Submitted 2 months ago by Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com to showerthoughts@lemmy.world
It sounds way less offensive to those who decry the original terminology’s problematic roots but still keeps its meaning intact.
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 still use master over main, come at me.
Honestly, while the controversy is incredibly stupid, it’s not something to get worked up about. Not good for your heart 😜
You don’t have to relabel anything, just keep using old names for old stuff and maybe consider switching to main for your next GitHub project? It’s honestly not that big of a deal.
It’s all good and well until you start working in a repo that has both master and main branches for some reason, and it is not clear which is actually the master/main branch.
This
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 for 8 years we didn’t.
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.
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.
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.
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 “enjoyed” 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 representation 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 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).
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.
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. 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 it’s easier to give in to the crazies who demand this than to fight them.
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 creat a whole new repository? That’s not rhetorical I’m genuinely curious.
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.
for they are simply descriptive labels.
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.
I remember back in the late 90s being in college. I brought my girlfriend to class one day. She raised her hand after the professer was explaining Master/Slave roles. Keep in mind, I’m white. She’s black. She’s not enrolle
d in this class AT ALL.
So the professer sees this, and says “Yes, you there, girl I’ve never seen in 4 months of this class”
And all she said was “Master and Slave drives? That sounds sexy!”
The whole class facepalmed.
… sounds like she was fun.
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.
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
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.
The master in master branch is, I’d assume, from the idea of Master copy which refers to the original of something, eg a recording, drawing, etc. www.collinsdictionary.com/…/master-copy
I’m not hugely tied to the word and things change … So meh.
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.
So you are not passively working against progress, you are doing it actively.
Welcome to Orwell-ville.
PS: im most amused by those who think the USA incented slavery.
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.
we may not have invented it but we certainly invested in it and probably incested it as well.
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
most sociologists and some psychologists would refer to this as a subconscious, or subdued form of racism.
it is kind of silly a the end of the day. How a terminology originally referring to a power dynamic. Has been so excessively ingrained in relation to race (which isn’t very historically relevant) such that even using these terms in a generic capacity, not relating to in any form what would constitute this “negative slavery” concept, that it makes people feel uneasy, summarizes rather weirdly, the human condition.
maybe this is just my autism speaking, but i see so little resemblance contextually, and almost zero historical relevance that i see almost no connection between the words and the practices at hand. Like you could do a wikipedia speedrun from technology to slavery, but you could also do that from any topic, to slavery. Everything is so interconnected there is nothing pure anymore.
Whitelist and Blacklist is on that stack as well.
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
Or just use the existing terms. People will find issues with just abuut anything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 dent 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.
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”.
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”.
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.
There is real, actual, injustice in the world that we need to address. Computer terms are not one of them.
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
It was changed a while ago, it’s primary and secondary now. It’s been that way for a decade+ at this point.
Not every domain though. I still see master/slave in every relevant datasheets that I read, and I’ve never seen primary/secondary in newer datasheets.
I’d like it to be changed because I don’t like saying "is the slave working? Did you check? To my black employees.
Maybe its just the way you say it.
But you’re depriving the black employers of the chance to say it to their white employees!
To be honest I’d feel stupid saying that alout at anyone. They’re not called that in my native language - I think.
Any time spent on nonsense like this is valuable time lost on real issues.
too wordy just make it 😈 and 🥺
“main” is shorter than “master”. “sub” is shorter than “slave”. Why worry about social issues when you can just type less and move on? :)
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
I’m trying to imagine a world where this is a problem, oh, twitter
I’m a developer. I use main/release/dev for new projects, because it just sounds better and more intuitive to me honestly. Old projects don’t get relabeled, they stay master. That’s my two cents.
Dom drive: “Daddy”
Sub drive: “UwU”
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.
Yeeter/yoinker
Oh man, wait till they hear about how I riced both my master and slave servers. I threw so many RGB LEDs on them, they look like recipients of a Fukoshima clown bukkake.
I’ll keep using master/slave. Political correctness bullshit be damned.
I’ve switched over to using primary/replica for database stuff because it’s more accurate. The replicas don’t always behave themselves so calling them “slaves” implies a level of obedience to the “master” that they don’t have.
With PCBs it’s mother/daughter
I’ve seen publisher/subscriber out in the wild.
Big spoon/Little spoon
If it’s referring to something like a mother/daughter circuitboard, I’ll use that. If it’s a host/client connection, I’ll use that. If it’s a primary/backup redundancy situation, I’ll use that. And those are just a few examples. There is rarely a good reason to use master/slave nowadays, since most situations already have better descriptors to begin with.
But why master and slave would be a problem to begin with. I’m still using it in git. I think people that have problem with it must have serious issues. It’s a US American thing. Makes no sense.
Remember when we thought being overly politically correct to absurd levels was a bad thing?
daddy/kitten
A post-doc that occasionally taught one of my electrical engineering classes in the mid-90s liked to call master-slave flip-flops professor-graduate student flip-flops. I later learned he was not making a joke.
My user name on all my PC’s(non root) is literally Master, my PC’s are all Slave, slave1, slave2. I will fight to keep them that way. I am also extremely anti slavery for sentient creatures. Words matter in the context of their intent. Dumbing down of the language by forcing alternate uses of a word to mean something other than its obvious intended use is evidence of dilusional minds. Pure and simple, they don’t deserve a seat at the table.
Primary/secondary?
andrew_s@piefed.social 2 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.
cdf12345@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Top and bottom
macaro@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Power bottoms would like a word with you.
SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz 2 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.
CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.work 2 months ago
Just have to find synonyms that begin with the same letters, possibly in different languages.
SatansMaggotyCumFart@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m the passive one in my relationship.
zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev 2 months ago
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_s@piefed.social 2 months ago
Yeah, you're right, that was a clumsy word choice. My experience is mostly from watching The Duke of Burgundy tbh
Chocrates@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I thought the connotation was chattel slavery, not BDSM.
orrk@lemmy.world 2 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
Revan343@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I’ll always like Primary/Secondary.
JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Agreed.
Also active/passive gets confusing crossing over into electronics where they already mean something.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 2 months ago
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.
Do I have news for you …
cacheson@piefed.social 2 months ago
This is a myth, presumably meant to be reassuring to subs that are new to BDSM, at the expense of risk awareness. In principle the sub is no more "in control" than the dom is, and in practice they are often significantly less so.
wewbull@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Active / passive means something different.
Master / slave means one thing tells the other thing what to do, and the other one does it without question. The slave is not passive in performing the task.
It’s a relationship that should never occur between humans, but it does occur with machines. The terms describe what is happening accurately. Other synonyms are approximations and lead to confusion in a field where confusions cause bugs / failures and depending on what you’re working on, that could put lives in danger. Do you really want such confusion around the systems of an airliner, where everything has redundancy, master/slave relationships are common and something being passive means “it’s only monitoring what’s going on”?
You want more Boeings? Shit like this is a good way of getting there.
andrew_s@piefed.social 2 months ago
I seem to have stumbled into an argument that people are more passionate about than me. I mentioned I'd seen 'active/passive' used (in computer networking), and in that context, it 'seems alright' (in the sense of actively giving demands, vs. passively accepting them [and doing what it's told, of course])
If someone has made good-faith request not to use certain terminology (like Master/Slave), then I'm generally more interested in finding acceptable alternatives than I am in dismissing their concerns outright. If, at the end of a proper search for alternatives, nothing suitable can be found, then fair enough. I'd question the idea that it's really impossible to find something else though, but - for now at least - I'm sure that Dom/Sub isn't it.
zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev 2 months ago
Wait until you find out how many programmers don’t even speak English. They must not be able to understand any of this if it’s so confusing to native speakers, right?
The consequence of updating language is not plane crashes. You need to update the version of the human interaction API that you’re using.
copd@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Also pub/sub is already estsblished and used as common computing abbreviations