4 ms·

The article explicitly says that Master on its own is not a problem. So, for example, creating a CD master, or remastering, is fine. The issue is with the mas

by kibibu 6y ago

The article explicitly says that Master on its own is not a problem. So, for example, creating a CD master, or remastering, is fine. The issue is with the master/slave pairing.

tartoran 6y ago
Yeah, I always wondered who came up with this master/slave terminology and what they had in mind. Was it a joke?
- notajoke 6y ago
  No, I don’t think so anyway. It’s a very literal, very accurate abstraction for reasoning about the way two components in a system interact. Consider devices connected on an i2c communication bus. One device is literally acting as the master and dictating to the slaves, who have no choice in the matter. To argue that the terms should be changed is to deny the reality of the situation - some of those devices are enslaved. Not followers, slaves!
  - arielserafini 6y ago
    "very accurate"? so a "master" hard drive issues commands to a "slave" drive?
    - notajoke 6y ago
      Yes, exactly. Take IDE drives for example. To use two drives with a single cable, one is set to be the master, the other to be the slave. From that point onwards, the slave cannot write to the bus until the master gives permission.
      - arielserafini 6y ago
        I was referring to newer ATA drives. Nevertheless, in your example no orders (or ownership!) are implied.
  - tartoran 6y ago
    No, the abstraction is not literal and not very acurate either but was catchy and implied the control/controlled. You and all of us picked it up without issues. For black people, it may not have gone that well because of the implied meaning and the black history around slavery. Im fine dropping it for a different term
    - asjw 6y ago
      There were slaves before the black people My grandmother from my father's side was enslaved by Nazis not long ago Master/slave has nothing to do with black people, it was picked up because it was the right terminology for the job. Master-slave was already in use in Mesopotamia (3.000 b.c.) in religious texts to express the relation between Gods and men. BTW there have been slaves long after black people were freed in US, for example in Zarist Russia it was abolished in 1861 when half of the population were serves, but it kinda went on the same In 1915 Nikolai Berdayev (a russian philosopher) wrote > “Russia is a country of unbelievable servility and terrible humility, a country lacking any consciousness of the rights of the individual, and which fails to stand up for the dignity of the individual…” There have been slaves in USSR There were slaves during Franco dictatorship, that lasted until 1975 There are slaves in many third World countries right now in the form of forced labour, forced sexual exploitation, forced marriage and forced relocation Thinking that slavery is a monopoly of black people from US is a form of cultural appropriation itself.
      - jjeaff 6y ago
        Seeing as all humanity comes out of africa (i.e. we were all black), there weren't slaves before there were black people. But if you mean there were slaves before the american system of chattel slavery, sure. But what's your point? Are you trying to explain to the descendants of slaves that they shouldn't be offended or at least bothered by the popular use of slavery terms because they weren't the first?
        asjw 6y ago
        First of all, I meant black people in USA Secondly, we must set some basic rules when discussing about complex topics such is this one. The first rule is that if you are not a descendant of African slaves, you can't speak in their name. And even if you are, I doubt you can speak for all of them. Just like I don't speak on behalf of every Italian, living or dead. The second is that I descend from Romans, but I can't teach Roman history better than a scholar who studied it in Australia. My grandfather was a tailor, I know nothing about tailoring, so "are you trying to explain X to the descendants of Y" 200 years later doesn't qualify as an argument. I could well be a descendant from Africans more than any American who's been living there for more than 3 generations. During WW2 where my family comes from, the "Marocchinate" ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marocchinate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marocchinate ), there's even a movie about it it's called Two Women in English, La Ciociara in Italian, Sophia Loren was in it and won the academy award as best actress. I look like a North African, which is not a typical trait of my family's, so who knows what really happened. I don't hate Moroccan people, I don't hate black people, it's in the past, Moroccans I know are not responsible for it and when I go to a bar to have breakfast and someone orders a Moroccan coffee I don't feel offended because 80 years ago a lot of women were killed and raped in my home region. The popular word slave is a problem only for a small fraction of the world population, when I was a kid and learnt about slaves in Egypt that built the pyramids I dreamt about being one, so I got to build pyramids. Our history books are full of stories about slavery, dating back thousands years before our lord and saviour Jesus. The world slave applied to tools is quite common and it never bothered me nor did it make me a racist, the contrary is in fact true, I was usually bullied when I was younger by US military personnel stationed in my country (we have been somewhat colonized by US, you know...) because my family was communist. I say was because the Italian communist party doesn't exist anymore, but my family is still communist. It's ok in Italy, we don't eat kids, we don't pray to Stalin, we don't send people to Gulags. We have a millenarian history, we don't pretend everybody shares it, please don't pretend your sensitivity is global, because it is not. The point is that you can't link US slavery and today's racism in US with master/slave applied to inanimated things, because it's wrong, Sumerian already used it 4 thousands years ago. Everyday I kill orphans which are made orphans by killing their parent on my computer, that didn't make me a serial killer.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  "slaving" or "(being) slaved" as an intransitive verb has a history that predates modern computing meaning a mechanical or electromechanical system that takes its control inputs from another (master) source. Examples: https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-slave-engine-on-on-a-locomotive https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-slave-engine-on-on-a-locomot... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_situation_indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_situation_indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propeller_synchronization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propeller_synchronization
- asjw 6y ago
  It appeared in religious literature many centuries ago, probably in Mesopotamia (we don't have written testimonies before them) to express god-man relation. Many religions nowadays are still based on the concept of a master God and a slave human follower The Bible is the most simple example were slavery is accepted and considered normal (slaves, concubines, that became domesti workers but we're still slaves) Another example is God that asks Abraham to kill his child, and Abraham obeys, because he's an "humble servant" There are still many prayers that refer to God as The Lord (master) and the believers are servants to God (slaves to God, sometimes literally) * “Amen, amen, I say to you, no slave is greater than his master nor any messenger greater than the one who sent him.” * Said Jesus to his disciples in John 13:16 That's where it was born And that's why it stayed It really wasn't a joke, it was all very serious.
bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago
The social incentives involved aren't constrained by the good intentions of this article's author or anyone else. There are some places where renaming master/slave would, if anything, be a syntactic enhancement. But the incentive at work is for corporate and professional virtue-signaling / clout-chasing, hence GitHub's decision to rename default branch from "master" to "main", which just muddles its purpose.

by kibibu 6y ago

The article explicitly says that Master on its own is not a problem. So, for example, creating a CD master, or remastering, is fine. The issue is with the master/slave pairing.

tartoran 6y ago

Yeah, I always wondered who came up with this master/slave terminology and what they had in mind. Was it a joke?

notajoke 6y ago
No, I don’t think so anyway. It’s a very literal, very accurate abstraction for reasoning about the way two components in a system interact. Consider devices connected on an i2c communication bus. One device is literally acting as the master and dictating to the slaves, who have no choice in the matter. To argue that the terms should be changed is to deny the reality of the situation - some of those devices are enslaved. Not followers, slaves!
- arielserafini 6y ago
  "very accurate"? so a "master" hard drive issues commands to a "slave" drive?
  - notajoke 6y ago
    Yes, exactly. Take IDE drives for example. To use two drives with a single cable, one is set to be the master, the other to be the slave. From that point onwards, the slave cannot write to the bus until the master gives permission.
    - arielserafini 6y ago
      I was referring to newer ATA drives. Nevertheless, in your example no orders (or ownership!) are implied.
- tartoran 6y ago
  No, the abstraction is not literal and not very acurate either but was catchy and implied the control/controlled. You and all of us picked it up without issues. For black people, it may not have gone that well because of the implied meaning and the black history around slavery. Im fine dropping it for a different term
  - asjw 6y ago
    There were slaves before the black people My grandmother from my father's side was enslaved by Nazis not long ago Master/slave has nothing to do with black people, it was picked up because it was the right terminology for the job. Master-slave was already in use in Mesopotamia (3.000 b.c.) in religious texts to express the relation between Gods and men. BTW there have been slaves long after black people were freed in US, for example in Zarist Russia it was abolished in 1861 when half of the population were serves, but it kinda went on the same In 1915 Nikolai Berdayev (a russian philosopher) wrote > “Russia is a country of unbelievable servility and terrible humility, a country lacking any consciousness of the rights of the individual, and which fails to stand up for the dignity of the individual…” There have been slaves in USSR There were slaves during Franco dictatorship, that lasted until 1975 There are slaves in many third World countries right now in the form of forced labour, forced sexual exploitation, forced marriage and forced relocation Thinking that slavery is a monopoly of black people from US is a form of cultural appropriation itself.
    - jjeaff 6y ago
      Seeing as all humanity comes out of africa (i.e. we were all black), there weren't slaves before there were black people. But if you mean there were slaves before the american system of chattel slavery, sure. But what's your point? Are you trying to explain to the descendants of slaves that they shouldn't be offended or at least bothered by the popular use of slavery terms because they weren't the first?
      - asjw 6y ago
        First of all, I meant black people in USA Secondly, we must set some basic rules when discussing about complex topics such is this one. The first rule is that if you are not a descendant of African slaves, you can't speak in their name. And even if you are, I doubt you can speak for all of them. Just like I don't speak on behalf of every Italian, living or dead. The second is that I descend from Romans, but I can't teach Roman history better than a scholar who studied it in Australia. My grandfather was a tailor, I know nothing about tailoring, so "are you trying to explain X to the descendants of Y" 200 years later doesn't qualify as an argument. I could well be a descendant from Africans more than any American who's been living there for more than 3 generations. During WW2 where my family comes from, the "Marocchinate" ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marocchinate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marocchinate ), there's even a movie about it it's called Two Women in English, La Ciociara in Italian, Sophia Loren was in it and won the academy award as best actress. I look like a North African, which is not a typical trait of my family's, so who knows what really happened. I don't hate Moroccan people, I don't hate black people, it's in the past, Moroccans I know are not responsible for it and when I go to a bar to have breakfast and someone orders a Moroccan coffee I don't feel offended because 80 years ago a lot of women were killed and raped in my home region. The popular word slave is a problem only for a small fraction of the world population, when I was a kid and learnt about slaves in Egypt that built the pyramids I dreamt about being one, so I got to build pyramids. Our history books are full of stories about slavery, dating back thousands years before our lord and saviour Jesus. The world slave applied to tools is quite common and it never bothered me nor did it make me a racist, the contrary is in fact true, I was usually bullied when I was younger by US military personnel stationed in my country (we have been somewhat colonized by US, you know...) because my family was communist. I say was because the Italian communist party doesn't exist anymore, but my family is still communist. It's ok in Italy, we don't eat kids, we don't pray to Stalin, we don't send people to Gulags. We have a millenarian history, we don't pretend everybody shares it, please don't pretend your sensitivity is global, because it is not. The point is that you can't link US slavery and today's racism in US with master/slave applied to inanimated things, because it's wrong, Sumerian already used it 4 thousands years ago. Everyday I kill orphans which are made orphans by killing their parent on my computer, that didn't make me a serial killer.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
"slaving" or "(being) slaved" as an intransitive verb has a history that predates modern computing meaning a mechanical or electromechanical system that takes its control inputs from another (master) source. Examples: https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-slave-engine-on-on-a-locomotive https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-slave-engine-on-on-a-locomot... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_situation_indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_situation_indicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propeller_synchronization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propeller_synchronization
asjw 6y ago
It appeared in religious literature many centuries ago, probably in Mesopotamia (we don't have written testimonies before them) to express god-man relation. Many religions nowadays are still based on the concept of a master God and a slave human follower The Bible is the most simple example were slavery is accepted and considered normal (slaves, concubines, that became domesti workers but we're still slaves) Another example is God that asks Abraham to kill his child, and Abraham obeys, because he's an "humble servant" There are still many prayers that refer to God as The Lord (master) and the believers are servants to God (slaves to God, sometimes literally) * “Amen, amen, I say to you, no slave is greater than his master nor any messenger greater than the one who sent him.” * Said Jesus to his disciples in John 13:16 That's where it was born And that's why it stayed It really wasn't a joke, it was all very serious.

bJGVygG7MQVF8c 6y ago

The social incentives involved aren't constrained by the good intentions of this article's author or anyone else. There are some places where renaming master/slave would, if anything, be a syntactic enhancement. But the incentive at work is for corporate and professional virtue-signaling / clout-chasing, hence GitHub's decision to rename default branch from "master" to "main", which just muddles its purpose.