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You kid but i've received 2 pull-requests on my open-source project, which only goal was to replace "Blacklist" with "Blocklist" in the app preferences. I don'

• jaimex2 6y ago
  I just block people from the project who submit PRs like that.
• whatshisface 6y ago
  Funny thing is, since nobody ever submits PRs to change it in the opposite direction, even one person going around on GitHub would be virtually guaranteed to eventually change all of them.
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    even one person going around on GitHub would be virtually guaranteed to eventually change all of them It only took one complaint from someone in Canada to get Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" cut in half on SiriusXM for an entire continent. (Though you can still hear the full version on the deep tracks channel).)
    • metalliqaz 6y ago
      they cut it in half rather than just bleep the "F" word?
      • reaperducer 6y ago
        Yep. Dropped the entire verse and a chorus.
    • bch 6y ago
      > It only took one complaint from someone in Canada to get Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" cut in half on SiriusXM for an entire continent Even after the decision was reversed[0]? [0] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/canada-lifts-ban-on-dire-straits-money-for-nothing-178222/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/canada-lifts-b...
      • reaperducer 6y ago
        Yes. As recently as last month.
    • Mountain_Skies 6y ago
      I don't know how radio stations handle "Alice's Restaurant" since I listen to my own copy but I did see Arlo Guthrie sing it live at a concert when he was in town a few years back. When the song got near the slur, he stopped playing for bit and went off on a short tangent before picking the song up after the slur. It's his song so I doubt anyone minded him changing how he performs it. The change felt a lot more natural than simply bleeping or cutting the audio.
  • userbinator 6y ago
    since nobody ever submits PRs to change it in the opposite direction Then perhaps that's something the "opposition activists" should start doing... Personally, if I had a GH account (which I don't), I might be inclined to change the "master" branch to "slave" just to fuck with the PC police.
• vecplane 6y ago
  Political correctness run amok! My company has now official guidelines that discourage 'whitelist' and 'blacklist' in new features, but I wonder how long before they make everyone go back and refactor these names. Git 'master' branch derangement is another example of this BS.
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    See also: Master and slave in device controllers.
    • azernik 6y ago
      That one's a bit more understandable in that it's actually referencing a master/slave relationship. "Master" as in "master copy" is... not that.
      • Fogest 6y ago
        Yes, a master/slave relationship in technology. Don't drop the context to support policing words. Context very much matters when dealing with words yet for some reason the context is dropped in order to make it seem like a word is being used in an offensive way. Except it's not, you're just forgetting the context to make it that way. If a process is directly commanding and telling another process what to do I don't see how calling it a master is wrong? It is one of it's definitions.
        • deanCommie 6y ago
          There is an open source tool that randomly terminates EC2 instances in the interest of chaos engineering called "chaos monkey". What would you think if the tool was called "concentration camp executioner"? You might think I'm making an extreme example to make a point, and I am - you would have a viscerally emotional reaction and recognize that the accuracy of a word does not offset the negative connotations associated with it. I use the word "gypped" in my vocabulary. It never occurred to me that it is a derogatory term towards gypsies. Until very recently, "jewed" was a perfectly appropriate term to use in professional contexts with the same meaning. The definition of a word is not relevant to the reasons why people are asking for terms like master/slave to exit our ubiquitous technical vocabulary.
• ben509 6y ago
  A lot of language-fixing slacktivism easily becomes a trend because it's highly visible and requires no genuine effort. It's complete bullshit, though. This particular bullshit is awful since it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association. There's no point arguing, though, just drag your heels until they get bored and go off on some other crusade.
  • god_hates_fags 6y ago
    I had 3 of these people show up in repos I maintain which is surprising since none of those is much popual;r, it would be strange for 1 to appear and is very much not in ordinary for 3. I just vlosed the issues and didn't reply like i would do for any other troll. Because it is basically just low effort troll. There only 1 return more time with more repeat issue but i am simple her block.
  • nemo44x 6y ago
    It’s tokenism and if anything it is detrimental to actual, concrete, transformative improvement. Malcolm X spoke at length about this going back to the early 1960’s. And it hasn’t changed. Condescending tokenizing is a way to avoid anything that would take effort or energy while comforting the narcissist in a warm blanket of moral righteousness. If you look around you’ll see endless tokenism but not much in terms of effective improvements. I don’t doubt these hall monitors think they’re doing the “right thing” or being a “good person”. But really they’re only exploiting people for their own benefit.
  • tp3 6y ago
    I think you're right, there are far too many people trying to do good and being led astray by the self-righteousness of a few. Not in the sense of being brainwashed or being influenced by some external force - like the religious right - but simply by the fact that they can't see through the nonsense the rest of us are talking about.
    • aksss 6y ago
      > Not in the sense of being brainwashed or being influenced by some external force - like the religious right Oh I don’t know about that. The “religious left” of today looks, acts, and smells a lot like the religious right of the ‘80’s to me. It’s the same instinct that’s being leveraged in people, just righteousness wrapped in a polka-dot cloth rather than a plaid one. Institutions clearly promote “right-thinking” whether it’s banning the use of words, doing mandatory internal critical race theory sessions, coordinated deplatforming, and let’s not even get started on the soft sciences in schooling and the state of what’s called “news”. The other day I skimmed a headline about a librarian burning their copies of books by Trump and Rush Limbaugh. In some ways the sheer weight of secular institutional support for today’s self-righteousness makes the American church of the eighties look like amateur hour.
• __turbobrew__ 6y ago
  don't forget about moving away from "master" git branches
• Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  "Contributed to [x] open source projects, having 95% of my [y] pull requests accepted" is becoming common on resumes at the younger end of the labor market. This kind of PR is easy to automate and serves to boost those numbers on the resume. They don't even have to care about the issue at all, it can simply be a way to market themselves with little effort.
  • pushrax 6y ago
    I’ve also had people spam “approvals” on some projects I maintain to pad their stats. Incredibly annoying to get 100+ notifications for that. I reported one particularly bad offender to GH and they were banned for a day, at least. Their profile readme still brags about how active they are.
• js2 6y ago
  Black list and its opposite, white list, associate black with bad and white with good. The usage of black in “black box” means opaque, not bad. So these aren’t the same. I had never thought about the connotations of blacklist and whitelist before it was pointed out to me. In retrospect, blacklist and whitelist are unnatural meanings of the words black and white, and blocklist and allowlist make much more sense. Consequently, I changed the code I’m responsible for at my company to use block and allow.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • jariel 6y ago
    Blacklist and Whitelist are not 'unnatural' just the opposite, that's why we use terms, because they are natural. 'Darkness' is after all 'opaque', at night we can't see, 'light' is one of the most ancient metaphors for knowledge etc.. It just so happens that it might not map to skin colour very well, but I don't think it's appropriate to change them because there is no connotation. I buy that in some cases, there is language that can affect people and perception, just not in this case.
    • jobigoud 6y ago
      > It just so happens that it might not map to skin colour very well Personally I think it's the skintone names that are weird. White to mean a certain shade of pinkish beige... Black to mean a whole range from beige to brown to dark blueish brown. Our brains are very good at differenciating skintones, unlike shades of cyan for example. But for some reason the skin tones names are caricatures.
  • gedy 6y ago
    That's true but the good/bad association is (Western) cultural, not racial.
    • aksss 6y ago
      In China, the color white represents death. Policing language like this is insane. Maybe just stop using colors to refer to people. I don’t see Asians standing up for the color yellow or asking for yellow traffic lights to be changed because of negative connotations with driving (that’s probably going to end up in a comedian’s routine by EOY - I release it under GPL ;). Point being, what’s easier to fix?? Color associations with people or overturning thousands of timeless metaphors across many cultures?
• lathiat 6y ago
  There's a distinct difference between trying to make things less accidentally discriminatory or exclusionary.. and banning an entire channel in an often un-appealable way (which can in many cases end up disabling peoples personal google accounts etc as well).
  • newacct583 6y ago
    It wasn't un-appealable. They restored it within 24 hours per the article. Please don't hyperbolize about this stuff. If you want people to take you seriously about real censorship you need to not fly off the handle with accidents (which have ALWAYS been with us, c.f. buttbuttination).
    • ttt0 6y ago
      I don't know the details of this particular case, but it's not a hyperbole. Another commenter here pointed out the Markiplier case. They banned entire Google accounts for spamming emotes in YouTube chat and those bans were un-appealable. They unbanned the accounts only after the public outrage on Twitter. Besides, people don't take it seriously anyway, because they actually agree with real censorship and they dismiss it with the "private company" argument.
      • newacct583 6y ago
        > I don't know the details of this particular case, but it's not a hyperbole. The details of this particular case were in the linked article. And they show that this wasn't unfixable or unappealable or otherwise beyond relief. It was a fuckup and they fixed it. Characterizing it "un-appealable" is hyperbolic by definition. It's not helpful. And it happens almost every time something like this comes up, and people like you end up redirecting to something else, like that emote spam thing. And per your text it seems like that was resolved via appeal too! It's just very tiresome to see everyone screaming so loud about something that doesn't seem like a big deal. I mean, if they really wanted to be censoring you, don't you think they'd come after threads like this first?
• trhway 6y ago
  Following the example of trend-setting hip SV companies like Twitter ( https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/twitter-drops-words-like-slave-master-blacklist-from-programming-to-make-vocabulary-more-inclusive-1696633-2020-07-03 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/twitter-drop...) our BigCo has recently issued a policy, and those terms have been quicky replaced everywhere accordingly. It isn't a trend, it is already happened reality.
• calvinmorrison 6y ago
  The English dramatist Philip Massinger used the phrase "black list" in his 1639 tragedy The Unnatural Combat.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• ttt0 6y ago
  Maybe using lowercase "whitelist" and capitalized "Blacklist" would be enough to appease them? https://apnews.com/article/7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f https://apnews.com/article/7e36c00c5af0436abc09e051261fff1f
• grawprog 6y ago
  What I really have to wonder about specifically this instance of political correctness was, how many people were honestly and truly offended by the term 'blacklist' or 'whitelist' before some lignustics, sociology, whatever professer sat down and figured out it should be offensive and told people to be offended? I feel like this about many attempts to make language politically correct, but I really do wonder, was there actually anyone out there sitting there being offended by this usage of those words before someone told them they should be? Like was there actually someone sitting there, using an app, seen the term blacklist and immediately started thinking it was an insult to them?
  • __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    > Like was there actually someone sitting there, using an app, seen the term blacklist and immediately started thinking it was an insult to them? My belief is absolutely not. It comes from an ideology that ascribes simple moralistic explanations to things. “This word has man in it so it must mean it excludes women”. “The word ‘master’ reminds people of slavery”, etc. Good luck speaking out “publicly” about it in the modern corporate environment. You have to not just accept it as true but actively parrot its talking points. Everyone has to be a believer. That’s how the whole thing works.
    • grawprog 6y ago
      I don't want to go on too much, I know this topic can be rather divisive and people get sort of heated about it but I really think in many cases things like the black/white list changes are counterproductive. There are actual race issues genuinely affecting people every day. Making a big deal out of what are essentially non-issues i'd be willing to bet 99% of people never think about or genuinely care about is just going to make the average person roll their eyes and not bother caring. Which again, is counterproductive. If you want the average person to care about the actual systemic issues, violence and actual racial oppression, forcing them to adjust their language and take time to address issues like the gp's comment is not the way to do it. Policing every word people say and making them feel guilty for using the wrong ones will not make them care, if anything it's going to make people who are otherwise neutral, who would maybe care, turn hostile. It pushes people to extremes and leads to places like 8chan or Parler, where people take their language to utter extremes and the opposite extreme where people are finding offense in nearly every little thing. Both are unreasonable.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• tptacek 6y ago
  Just make a call. Is "blacklist" worth keeping? I've spent 25 years working in security, "blacklist" is a pretty core part of the lingo, and: fuck it; "blocklist" is just as good. But other people will answer for more-inclusive alternatives to "MITM", and I'm probably not going to change that. At least 50% of the drama about these language shifts comes from people who can't handle making decisions that make people unhappy. Just put your big kid pants on, make a decision, and deal with the response, without hyperventilating about "cancellation".
  • jobigoud 6y ago
    > But other people will answer for more-inclusive alternatives to "MITM", and I'm probably not going to change that. Ha! Never thought about that one. Imagine if it had been Woman In The Middle though, the outrage!
• ekianjo 6y ago
  > I don't receive many PRs. This is a real trend. Is this from actual developers or just activists spamming people wherever they find them?
• aero-glide2 6y ago
  They just want more commits under their belt haha