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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Showerthoughts
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The origin of the terms have nothing to do with it, and they historically apply to a broad range of races and peoples, but I guarantee when the average person hears "master/slave" their first thought is likely "American south" and not "IDE Drive configuration" or "hydraulic system", so unless I've misinterpreted you by mistake, I'm not sure how you could seriously claim "the terms master and slave have nothing to do with [the historical systemic dehumanization of PoC]"
I understand it's more syllables to say "primary/secondary", but you can also use:
Active/Standby
Parent/Child
Main/Secondary
Initiator/Target
and far more
Changing our habits is annoying and takes effort, but I dont know why people are so enthusiastic to hang onto a term that refers to a historically dehumanizing relationship that people are still unwillingly subjected to in the modern day.
This seems like projection... How do you even begin to have this much certainty about what goes on in any head beside your own?
I also think it's weird to hear the word slave in this context (or in the automotive industry where it is also used) and immediately think of black people. What does that say about you and your thought process?
I think its weird to even use such a term in a different context to begin with. Its also generally pretty inaccurate. Many such primary/secondary or parent/child relationships in tech exist either for redundancy or for determining priority/sort order, which isn't what a master/slave relationship would do in a slavery scenerio. About the closest equivalent is a manager/worker relationship, which again is more accurate to say manager/worker because it is not a hostile relationship between the worker nodes and the manager node.
So in short:
Some places I've worked...
"Uh, I'm child free thank you very much, don't tell me how to think." /s
people aren't enthusiastic about handing onto a derelict term, people just don't care because they don't see a significant enough relation between the two for it to matter, and they know that any given reasonable person will also recognize it as well.
And for that matter, if we're getting rid of master/slave because it's so bad, we should get rid of killing processes, and especially killing child processes. Because those are arguably worse.
As a parent I have zero qualms about the term "killing child processes" also there's far more actions involved in parent/child relationships in tech than just killing processes.
i suppose that's true, but i think that's unfair as the term master/slave itself wouldn't constitute more than the literal power dynamic between A and B as is the intended point of the terminology. It's not meant to be broadly applicable in a generic sense. Though if we were to argue that it would be equally as easy to argue that architecture designs constitute far more than a master/slave style, such that it would remove the significance of the term in a similar manner.