8 ms·

I feel like this topic has been discussed a lot already, but I think it's important to keep pushing back against useless wasted man-hours like this effort is.

I feel like this topic has been discussed a lot already, but I think it's important to keep pushing back against useless wasted man-hours like this effort is. I live in a country that was almost entirely enslaved by foreigners for ~700 years. I've discussed this rename with dozens of engineers in my country. Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago
It was amusing to see the GitLab ticket where they try to orchestrate the change. It’s still going on. At least 100 people involved and multiple tickets open for an entirely pointless change.
- jansan 6y ago
  Take a look at CIA's "The Simple Sabotage Field Manual" from 1944 (declassified 2008). Under the section "General Interference with Organizations and Production" it recommends among other things: - "Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible" - "Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions."
  - oefrha 6y ago
    This is actually worse. With bikeshedding, once the bored people have finally decided on the color of the bikeshed, everyone just goes on with their life unhindered. With this, once the bored people have decided to make the change, everyone and their mom has to waste time on following or actively resisting the change on their end.
  - J-dawg 6y ago
    This is amazing, I'm noting this down for future use. As someone said elsewhere in this thread, it makes you wonder what's really going on while we are distracted by this stuff. What I find interesting is that there (probably? maybe?) isn't a shadowy CIA-like organisation promoting this stuff, this "tactic" is a naturally emergent property of the woke belief system. I think I find this more frightening than if there actually were a shadowy organisation pulling the strings: here we have a philosophy, which many well-intended people subscribe to, that causes them to behave like a sophisticated intelligence agency deliberately trying to disrupt a foreign power.
    - eurocent 6y ago
      In fact, a lot of that woke stuff actually comes from the CIA. It's a tactic they first used in the 70s in Europe, when "real" left parties (i.e. the old-school socialist/communist parties, affiliated with the soviet union) started gaining ground. All of a sudden they started funding a lot of stuff like that, because it weakened/marginalized those parties. Why fight for workers rights when you can fight for LGBT, immigrant, women rights, etc. I.e. the right of fifteen distinct groups that have no power. Much more recently that tactic was used to destroy the Occupy Wall Street movement.
      - J-dawg 6y ago
        That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. I wonder what is different now. The woke movement doesn’t seem to get any weaker, even as it adopts more and more identity groups.
dsun180 6y ago
Same here in germany. When we hear the word master, most people think of the master in karate kid or the master degree of a university. I think only in the usa people are so full of hate that they directly think of bad stuff.
- Tomte 6y ago
  I wouldn't say they are full of hate. Slavery has defined the country and has repercussions still. But I'm really worried about how we import everything American to Germany without thinking twice. Left newspapers have started to write BIPoC everywhere when it comes to domestic issues. What exactly are the indigenous people of Germany? Even blacks are relatively rare. It would make much more sense to coin an acronym that includes Jews, Sinti and Roma, given our sordid history. But we simply take what American culture has thought up.
  - cabite 6y ago
    Same here in France. We've had our first trans kid on what would be the equivalent of Oprah's show audience-wise just a few days ago.
  - myspy 6y ago
    We have problems to integrate Turkish or Russian immigrants and their children as Germans, not as people from elsewhere. As well as the refugees from Syria.
    - fho 6y ago
      Having lived in a mostly Turkish neighborhood for five years (as a German, Turkish landlord, Turkish "housemates" (?)) I think some just don't want to be integrated... Landlord was pretty chill and I kind of miss being able to just ask anything and he would try to make it happen (including things like repairing car motors). Housemates were of the mildly radicalized religious kind, with daughters that did not attend the normal school system and are now being married of early. I don't know if the German "integration system" has failed for the later ... they have the freedom to chose and they chose a path that is different from what is considered "normal" in the "West".
CaptainJustin 6y ago
I know it's anecdotal but I've asked my colleagues the same - in a country with a terrible history of this sort too. And turns out I can't find a single person who agrees with Github's decision.
- pansa2 6y ago
  -
  - sergiotapia 6y ago
    But again these are all white people, you see?
    - scoutt 6y ago
      When you think about masters/slaves, do you think about black people only? If so, why? There are countless examples in the history of the world about slaves, including different ethnics, in every continent. May they have a word on this issue too?
    - cosmodisk 6y ago
      Throughout history, various races struggled from slavery, pretty much the entire spectrum is fully covered across the world. Nowadays there are more people in slavery than at any given time before.
      - nikanj 6y ago
        It's not a coincidence that "Slav" and "Slave" sound so similar. And Slavic people are quite white indeed.
        petr25102018 6y ago
        Exactly. Unfortunately for many Americans history stops in the last century and at the geographical borders of the USA.
thecopy 6y ago
>We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead. I suppose they are not doing it for your feeling's sake. They are doing it to avoid being a target of a woke mob feigning offense for their own ideological gain in the on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.
- weddpros 6y ago
  When the woke mob hinders the very minority it's supposed to care about, it starts a vicious circle and nothing changes for the best
  - HeckFeck 6y ago
    They've immense power over corporations. It's a flex. It doesn't have to make any sense or to be connected in any way to the people it is allegedly helping. Insisting to help people is quite insulting, actually. Empowerment means you voice your own grievances. It doesn't mean recruit an army of armchair activists to do it for you.
    - daptaq 6y ago
      One have to be careful to not generalize their power, since I hear this a lot. It is strictly restricted to the "cultural sphere", just like a lot of politics itself. It is all about managing affections, not actions. Woke is performative radicalism. Or to put it this way, if the "woke mob" decided to protest capitalism or even higher/stricter taxes, do you think that anything would change? Probably not, because production for profit it still at the core of every corp while at the same time the woke crowd has a limited understanding of capitalism to begin with (as can be seen by the claims that capitalism is by necessity based on racism). It is the worst of both worlds.
  - morlockabove 6y ago
    They're not supposed to care about minorities. If they actually made a positive difference- say, lowered the births out of wedlock/divorce rate among black US parents, thereby causing a slew of knock-on effects- if they actually solved the problems they complained about, they'd be out of a job. They're supposed to put on a good performance of caring and wanting to fix things, then make things worse. The best way for a foot soldier to do this is to fervently believe in the cause, and be swept up in the ideology that causes them to be incompetent and solving problems. Most people, of course, are just lying so they don't get fired.
mhm776 6y ago
The logic according to one Microsoft PM is that if one [white virtue signalling person on behalf of some person involuntary labelled as non privileged] person is offended it's one person too much... It didn't sound well thought out then or now...
- tsss 6y ago
  What if one black person feels discriminated? What if all black people feel discriminated? I think it's clear that the term blacklist is not discriminatory in origin nor is it used in a discriminating way. If, hypothetically, all black people would feel discriminated then there would be a real gain from changing these words, even if they were never discriminatory to begin with. Still, even in that case, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to give in to "feelings". Feeling discriminated is decidedly not the same as being discriminated and it's a slippery slope when hurting other people's feelings becomes a punishable offence.
  - Siira 6y ago
    So what? There are lots of people of "color" in this world, and most of us don't need our time wasted because some emotionally challenged persons have nothing more productive to do than obsess over how some APIs can conform better to their desires. The funny thing is that this whole tradeoff of breaking an API to make it better is nothing new; The woke is just bullying everyone by asking the tradeoff to be ignored completely in their favor.
tsbinz 6y ago
So you say spending time on this topic is wasted time, and your solution is to spend more time on pushing back?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rgoulter 6y ago
  I think this is kindof an important question. "If it's so insignificant, why do you care?". I don't think it's so hard to understand why some people might be irritated, though. The social attitude that motivates the change to switch away from the term 'master' is not widely held outside of a subset of Americans who are apparently vastly over represented in making these kinds of decisions. It's a bit grating to be saying "consider how others feel" while ignoring how most people feel about it, and making the change made you want anyway. It's a zeitgeist which results in things like someone complaining that VSCode including a candy cane icon is more offensive than the swastika, and the VSCode repository acceeding this complaint. - I feel if that's where you end up from wanting everyone to feel welcome and included, that you've gotten lost along the way.
- akvadrako 6y ago
  This is how the world works. If you don't fight back sometimes these things will continue to happen. Of course there is a balance – too much fighting back and the cure becomes worse than the initial problem.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  Allowing this faux diversity change will only lead to more calls for other faux diversity changes, so the time spent pointing out its vacuousness is well worth it. Just as security theater isn't real security, diversity theater isn't real diversity. We must stand up and denounce diversity theater and those who profit from it so that we can get focus on diversity efforts that have substance behind them.
mimikatz 6y ago
I am reminded of Catch-22 about how strong Italy is by not fighting these things, just go with it. Another side will come up and push some other agenda, then just go with that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVWupFBkA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVWupFBkA8 "“But of course I do,” exclaimed the old man cheerfully. “The Germans are being driven out, and we are still here. In a few years you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that’s what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying anymore. But American and German officers are. I call that doing extremely well. Yes, I am certain that Italy will survive this war and still be in existence long after your own country has been destroyed.”"
cabite 6y ago
Unfortunately I think it is more of a cultural problem than a matter of leadership. The widely used FactoryGirl Ruby gem (the vast majority of Rails setups embed it) was renamed FactoryBot a couple years ago. It's not like my team had a say in this change but overall I was the only one against it but ended up implemented the change, which took about an hour (all our repos + the PRs). Note: technically I was in a situation of harassment.
dkdk8283 6y ago
You had 700 years to get over it. Harboring bad emotions is negative for all involved.
- jansan 6y ago
  Not only is your post unnecessarily offensive, you also did not read the OP's post correctly. He did not write that the occupation ended 700 years ago, it lasted 700 years. If my guess for OP's country is correct, it actually ended just 150 years ago.
  - gvido 6y ago
    I think OP is from Estonia, in which case it ended around 30 years ago.
- veeti 6y ago
  Where is the cutoff for getting over it? 100, 200, 300 years?
cies 6y ago
I agree that master->main is pretty pointless. But what about getting rid of "slave", "blacklist" and "whitelist". The last two kind of opened my eyes to connotation of black and white, that may be problematic to some. Also I find "allow/denylist" more descriptive, maybe that helps.
- ccmcarey 6y ago
  The issue with that is that those words (blacklist/whitelist specifically) have no connotation to race. It's not an issue. The etymology of the words have nothing to do with race. Trying to get people to change them _creates_ that link. There are real issues that could be focused on to bring about effective change. Not this.
  - callmeal 6y ago
    >The issue with that is that those words (blacklist/whitelist specifically) have no connotation to race. Not directly no. But they enforce the unconscious belief that "black == bad" and "white == good". Read up a bit on unconscious/implicit bias [0]. There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening. Also consider how other industries have approached this problem[1] and how things have changed there. [0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/meet-psychologist-exploring-unconscious-bias-and-its-tragic-consequences-society https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/meet-psychologist-ex... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
    - xg15 6y ago
      > But they enforce the unconscious belief that... You can justify pretty much anything with that reasoning. If you follow through with that, you'd have to ban the words "black" and "white" from the language completely, except in a racial context. > There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening. This investigation was about seeing faces, not hearing words though.
jansan 6y ago
GitHubs decision is a form of cultural imperialism. That's what it really is. Only because the US want's to somehow deal with a dark part of it's history, the rest of the world should not be foreced to adapt their views.
- optimalsolver 6y ago
  You'd think the rest of the world could come up with a centralized git repo.
  - leshenka 6y ago
    Of course we couldn't, we're practically apes here
- oftenwrong 6y ago
  The rest of the world is not forced to do business with an American company following American cultural standards.
- jimmies 6y ago
  >dark part of it's history Oh hey you offended me by implying my skin color means bad.
iagovar 6y ago
I think you're too naive. This decision makers are not worried about anything but their PR. Your competitor is the Woke mob, although they'll say they do it for you. Adressing real issues cost money. Making bullshit changes is free. The culture shock is particularly noticeable for non-anglo people.
throw_m239339 6y ago
I will never go along with that farce, especially when I learned that a bunch of people bullied Antirez for years in order to force him to change the language in Redis. http://antirez.com/news/122 http://antirez.com/news/122 It serves absolutely no purpose, other than for a group of people to feel like they have an ideological hold on the IT industry. Some of these people are already coming with new lists of "forbidden words" they are trying to impose with the old same excuse of "diversity and inclusiveness". Enough.
ianleeclark 6y ago
We've had a few months to turn off an option in Github to change this behavior. I believe there was even an email that went out and a thread on HN concerning this change. Any conversation at this point is just whinging to the void to farm engagement.
xg15 6y ago
> Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead. So do we know where that decision actually came from?
meiraleal 6y ago
We need to become the the decision-makers. And stop listening to the current ones.
Mauricebranagh 6y ago
It does rather smack of presentism, SV companies might be better doing a proper transparent pay / promotion survay to identify discrimination amongst their employees - Based on my direct experience in the UK there will be Discrimination. Additionally properly identifying the impact of race on ai/ml derived algorithms would be a better use of time. But of course these would have cost and other implications that companies would not want to do.
dudeinjapan 6y ago
Slavery which didn't happen in America doesn't count.
Grustaf 6y ago
In many cases it's more than ridiculous, it s completely non-sensical. What is the logic behind removing the word "master" even supposed to be? The problem with slavery is not that there is a word for it, it's that it exists, and used to be very common. By using the word "master" we are not condoning slavery, nobody can believe that. Just like we are not condoning domestic violence by using the word "hit" in "hit song". For the word blacklist I can see how misguided people could make a case, since the word black is used for something negative. Still ridiculous of course. Another absurd example: In my project they decided to change the name of a "blackout tool". There is nothing negative about this tool, it doesn't make things worse, it just colours them black.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago

It was amusing to see the GitLab ticket where they try to orchestrate the change. It’s still going on. At least 100 people involved and multiple tickets open for an entirely pointless change.

jansan 6y ago
Take a look at CIA's "The Simple Sabotage Field Manual" from 1944 (declassified 2008). Under the section "General Interference with Organizations and Production" it recommends among other things: - "Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible" - "Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions."
- oefrha 6y ago
  This is actually worse. With bikeshedding, once the bored people have finally decided on the color of the bikeshed, everyone just goes on with their life unhindered. With this, once the bored people have decided to make the change, everyone and their mom has to waste time on following or actively resisting the change on their end.
- J-dawg 6y ago
  This is amazing, I'm noting this down for future use. As someone said elsewhere in this thread, it makes you wonder what's really going on while we are distracted by this stuff. What I find interesting is that there (probably? maybe?) isn't a shadowy CIA-like organisation promoting this stuff, this "tactic" is a naturally emergent property of the woke belief system. I think I find this more frightening than if there actually were a shadowy organisation pulling the strings: here we have a philosophy, which many well-intended people subscribe to, that causes them to behave like a sophisticated intelligence agency deliberately trying to disrupt a foreign power.
  - eurocent 6y ago
    In fact, a lot of that woke stuff actually comes from the CIA. It's a tactic they first used in the 70s in Europe, when "real" left parties (i.e. the old-school socialist/communist parties, affiliated with the soviet union) started gaining ground. All of a sudden they started funding a lot of stuff like that, because it weakened/marginalized those parties. Why fight for workers rights when you can fight for LGBT, immigrant, women rights, etc. I.e. the right of fifteen distinct groups that have no power. Much more recently that tactic was used to destroy the Occupy Wall Street movement.
    - J-dawg 6y ago
      That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. I wonder what is different now. The woke movement doesn’t seem to get any weaker, even as it adopts more and more identity groups.

dsun180 6y ago

Same here in germany. When we hear the word master, most people think of the master in karate kid or the master degree of a university. I think only in the usa people are so full of hate that they directly think of bad stuff.

Tomte 6y ago
I wouldn't say they are full of hate. Slavery has defined the country and has repercussions still. But I'm really worried about how we import everything American to Germany without thinking twice. Left newspapers have started to write BIPoC everywhere when it comes to domestic issues. What exactly are the indigenous people of Germany? Even blacks are relatively rare. It would make much more sense to coin an acronym that includes Jews, Sinti and Roma, given our sordid history. But we simply take what American culture has thought up.
- cabite 6y ago
  Same here in France. We've had our first trans kid on what would be the equivalent of Oprah's show audience-wise just a few days ago.
- myspy 6y ago
  We have problems to integrate Turkish or Russian immigrants and their children as Germans, not as people from elsewhere. As well as the refugees from Syria.
  - fho 6y ago
    Having lived in a mostly Turkish neighborhood for five years (as a German, Turkish landlord, Turkish "housemates" (?)) I think some just don't want to be integrated... Landlord was pretty chill and I kind of miss being able to just ask anything and he would try to make it happen (including things like repairing car motors). Housemates were of the mildly radicalized religious kind, with daughters that did not attend the normal school system and are now being married of early. I don't know if the German "integration system" has failed for the later ... they have the freedom to chose and they chose a path that is different from what is considered "normal" in the "West".

CaptainJustin 6y ago

I know it's anecdotal but I've asked my colleagues the same - in a country with a terrible history of this sort too. And turns out I can't find a single person who agrees with Github's decision.

pansa2 6y ago
-
- sergiotapia 6y ago
  But again these are all white people, you see?
  - scoutt 6y ago
    When you think about masters/slaves, do you think about black people only? If so, why? There are countless examples in the history of the world about slaves, including different ethnics, in every continent. May they have a word on this issue too?
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    Throughout history, various races struggled from slavery, pretty much the entire spectrum is fully covered across the world. Nowadays there are more people in slavery than at any given time before.
    - nikanj 6y ago
      It's not a coincidence that "Slav" and "Slave" sound so similar. And Slavic people are quite white indeed.
      - petr25102018 6y ago
        Exactly. Unfortunately for many Americans history stops in the last century and at the geographical borders of the USA.

thecopy 6y ago

>We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead. I suppose they are not doing it for your feeling's sake. They are doing it to avoid being a target of a woke mob feigning offense for their own ideological gain in the on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.

weddpros 6y ago
When the woke mob hinders the very minority it's supposed to care about, it starts a vicious circle and nothing changes for the best
- HeckFeck 6y ago
  They've immense power over corporations. It's a flex. It doesn't have to make any sense or to be connected in any way to the people it is allegedly helping. Insisting to help people is quite insulting, actually. Empowerment means you voice your own grievances. It doesn't mean recruit an army of armchair activists to do it for you.
  - daptaq 6y ago
    One have to be careful to not generalize their power, since I hear this a lot. It is strictly restricted to the "cultural sphere", just like a lot of politics itself. It is all about managing affections, not actions. Woke is performative radicalism. Or to put it this way, if the "woke mob" decided to protest capitalism or even higher/stricter taxes, do you think that anything would change? Probably not, because production for profit it still at the core of every corp while at the same time the woke crowd has a limited understanding of capitalism to begin with (as can be seen by the claims that capitalism is by necessity based on racism). It is the worst of both worlds.
- morlockabove 6y ago
  They're not supposed to care about minorities. If they actually made a positive difference- say, lowered the births out of wedlock/divorce rate among black US parents, thereby causing a slew of knock-on effects- if they actually solved the problems they complained about, they'd be out of a job. They're supposed to put on a good performance of caring and wanting to fix things, then make things worse. The best way for a foot soldier to do this is to fervently believe in the cause, and be swept up in the ideology that causes them to be incompetent and solving problems. Most people, of course, are just lying so they don't get fired.

mhm776 6y ago

The logic according to one Microsoft PM is that if one [white virtue signalling person on behalf of some person involuntary labelled as non privileged] person is offended it's one person too much... It didn't sound well thought out then or now...

tsss 6y ago
What if one black person feels discriminated? What if all black people feel discriminated? I think it's clear that the term blacklist is not discriminatory in origin nor is it used in a discriminating way. If, hypothetically, all black people would feel discriminated then there would be a real gain from changing these words, even if they were never discriminatory to begin with. Still, even in that case, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to give in to "feelings". Feeling discriminated is decidedly not the same as being discriminated and it's a slippery slope when hurting other people's feelings becomes a punishable offence.
- Siira 6y ago
  So what? There are lots of people of "color" in this world, and most of us don't need our time wasted because some emotionally challenged persons have nothing more productive to do than obsess over how some APIs can conform better to their desires. The funny thing is that this whole tradeoff of breaking an API to make it better is nothing new; The woke is just bullying everyone by asking the tradeoff to be ignored completely in their favor.

tsbinz 6y ago

So you say spending time on this topic is wasted time, and your solution is to spend more time on pushing back?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rgoulter 6y ago
I think this is kindof an important question. "If it's so insignificant, why do you care?". I don't think it's so hard to understand why some people might be irritated, though. The social attitude that motivates the change to switch away from the term 'master' is not widely held outside of a subset of Americans who are apparently vastly over represented in making these kinds of decisions. It's a bit grating to be saying "consider how others feel" while ignoring how most people feel about it, and making the change made you want anyway. It's a zeitgeist which results in things like someone complaining that VSCode including a candy cane icon is more offensive than the swastika, and the VSCode repository acceeding this complaint. - I feel if that's where you end up from wanting everyone to feel welcome and included, that you've gotten lost along the way.
akvadrako 6y ago
This is how the world works. If you don't fight back sometimes these things will continue to happen. Of course there is a balance – too much fighting back and the cure becomes worse than the initial problem.
ThrowawayR2 6y ago
Allowing this faux diversity change will only lead to more calls for other faux diversity changes, so the time spent pointing out its vacuousness is well worth it. Just as security theater isn't real security, diversity theater isn't real diversity. We must stand up and denounce diversity theater and those who profit from it so that we can get focus on diversity efforts that have substance behind them.

mimikatz 6y ago

I am reminded of Catch-22 about how strong Italy is by not fighting these things, just go with it. Another side will come up and push some other agenda, then just go with that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVWupFBkA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeVWupFBkA8 "“But of course I do,” exclaimed the old man cheerfully. “The Germans are being driven out, and we are still here. In a few years you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that’s what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying anymore. But American and German officers are. I call that doing extremely well. Yes, I am certain that Italy will survive this war and still be in existence long after your own country has been destroyed.”"

cabite 6y ago

Unfortunately I think it is more of a cultural problem than a matter of leadership. The widely used FactoryGirl Ruby gem (the vast majority of Rails setups embed it) was renamed FactoryBot a couple years ago. It's not like my team had a say in this change but overall I was the only one against it but ended up implemented the change, which took about an hour (all our repos + the PRs). Note: technically I was in a situation of harassment.

dkdk8283 6y ago

You had 700 years to get over it. Harboring bad emotions is negative for all involved.

jansan 6y ago
Not only is your post unnecessarily offensive, you also did not read the OP's post correctly. He did not write that the occupation ended 700 years ago, it lasted 700 years. If my guess for OP's country is correct, it actually ended just 150 years ago.
- gvido 6y ago
  I think OP is from Estonia, in which case it ended around 30 years ago.
veeti 6y ago
Where is the cutoff for getting over it? 100, 200, 300 years?

cies 6y ago

I agree that master->main is pretty pointless. But what about getting rid of "slave", "blacklist" and "whitelist". The last two kind of opened my eyes to connotation of black and white, that may be problematic to some. Also I find "allow/denylist" more descriptive, maybe that helps.

ccmcarey 6y ago
The issue with that is that those words (blacklist/whitelist specifically) have no connotation to race. It's not an issue. The etymology of the words have nothing to do with race. Trying to get people to change them _creates_ that link. There are real issues that could be focused on to bring about effective change. Not this.
- callmeal 6y ago
  >The issue with that is that those words (blacklist/whitelist specifically) have no connotation to race. Not directly no. But they enforce the unconscious belief that "black == bad" and "white == good". Read up a bit on unconscious/implicit bias [0]. There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening. Also consider how other industries have approached this problem[1] and how things have changed there. [0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/meet-psychologist-exploring-unconscious-bias-and-its-tragic-consequences-society https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/meet-psychologist-ex... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/blind-auditions-orchestras-gender-bias https://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/...
  - xg15 6y ago
    > But they enforce the unconscious belief that... You can justify pretty much anything with that reasoning. If you follow through with that, you'd have to ban the words "black" and "white" from the language completely, except in a racial context. > There was an online test floating around that measured your response rate to a white face or a black face and those results were eye-opening. This investigation was about seeing faces, not hearing words though.

jansan 6y ago

GitHubs decision is a form of cultural imperialism. That's what it really is. Only because the US want's to somehow deal with a dark part of it's history, the rest of the world should not be foreced to adapt their views.

optimalsolver 6y ago
You'd think the rest of the world could come up with a centralized git repo.
- leshenka 6y ago
  Of course we couldn't, we're practically apes here
oftenwrong 6y ago
The rest of the world is not forced to do business with an American company following American cultural standards.
jimmies 6y ago
>dark part of it's history Oh hey you offended me by implying my skin color means bad.

iagovar 6y ago

I think you're too naive. This decision makers are not worried about anything but their PR. Your competitor is the Woke mob, although they'll say they do it for you. Adressing real issues cost money. Making bullshit changes is free. The culture shock is particularly noticeable for non-anglo people.

throw_m239339 6y ago

I will never go along with that farce, especially when I learned that a bunch of people bullied Antirez for years in order to force him to change the language in Redis. http://antirez.com/news/122 http://antirez.com/news/122 It serves absolutely no purpose, other than for a group of people to feel like they have an ideological hold on the IT industry. Some of these people are already coming with new lists of "forbidden words" they are trying to impose with the old same excuse of "diversity and inclusiveness". Enough.

ianleeclark 6y ago

We've had a few months to turn off an option in Github to change this behavior. I believe there was even an email that went out and a thread on HN concerning this change. Any conversation at this point is just whinging to the void to farm engagement.

xg15 6y ago

> Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead. So do we know where that decision actually came from?

meiraleal 6y ago

We need to become the the decision-makers. And stop listening to the current ones.

Mauricebranagh 6y ago

It does rather smack of presentism, SV companies might be better doing a proper transparent pay / promotion survay to identify discrimination amongst their employees - Based on my direct experience in the UK there will be Discrimination. Additionally properly identifying the impact of race on ai/ml derived algorithms would be a better use of time. But of course these would have cost and other implications that companies would not want to do.

dudeinjapan 6y ago

Slavery which didn't happen in America doesn't count.

Grustaf 6y ago

In many cases it's more than ridiculous, it s completely non-sensical. What is the logic behind removing the word "master" even supposed to be? The problem with slavery is not that there is a word for it, it's that it exists, and used to be very common. By using the word "master" we are not condoning slavery, nobody can believe that. Just like we are not condoning domestic violence by using the word "hit" in "hit song". For the word blacklist I can see how misguided people could make a case, since the word black is used for something negative. Still ridiculous of course. Another absurd example: In my project they decided to change the name of a "blackout tool". There is nothing negative about this tool, it doesn't make things worse, it just colours them black.