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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Showerthoughts
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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. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/master-copy
I'm not hugely tied to the word, and things change ... So meh.
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.
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.
yeah they're both equally susceptible to the same problem. Ultimately though, one of the things we can best do to examine something like this is relate it to other similar concepts/problems. PTSD for example, hearing a certain word or phrase may make you deeply uncomfortable or uneasy. It's not recommended to simply cope with that, or stop hearing those terms. It's recommended to learn how to work with and against it, in order to become a more functional human. And you could argue a similar thing in regards to master/slave terminology being used.
You could also expand into the general normalization of a concept. For example curse words are only bad because we deem them to be. If a white guy explains the architecture of a piece of software using master/slave terminology to a group of people which includes black people, specifically in the country of america. It might be weird, but realistically, it probably shouldn't be. Why? It's simple, there's nothing that prevents this from being a presentation from a black person explaining an architecture using a master/slave architecture in the exact same manner as the white guy, to a room of people that includes white people. Is that weird? I see no reason for it to be weird there either.
The entire reason the master/slave terminology is frowned upon is because of the power balance in that specific situation, however if there is no power imbalance, it's debatable as to whether it matters or not. It's perfectly fine in the BDSM space even between white/black people because it's a consented accepted terminology in that specific context. So we could even extend the social acceptableness of it based on who consents to experiencing that dialog.
There are a lot of ways to look at and think about things, ultimately it's probably worth not thinking all too hard about most things as they don't lead to much.
definitely, but that's part of the fun, if you can't discuss things in a philosophical manner whats the point of even asking the question in the first place.
Whitelist and Blacklist is on that stack as well.
this is actually a terminology that i would be interested on seeing the historical context for actually. My assumption has always been light based "whitelist referring to a well lit room, where as blacklist refers to a completely dark room" making things easy/hard to find as a a result.
It could also literally just be a coincidence and it simply sounded better for the allow list to be whitelisted, and the deny list to be blacklisted, humans have weird connections to words like that.
Fucking thermodynamics is racist guys
Black absorbs, white reflects
Blackhole, sun
fuck these people
Are we back to the fetish-based terminology?
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”
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