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It's a good list, mostly. It's just nearly impossible to memorize. I also think sometimes about terms like whitelist and blacklist. The problem isn't that they

• codefined 6y ago
  Sometimes avoiding those connotations are exceptionally hard, verging on impossible. In comparison, it seems a documentation change from whitelist to allowlist might just be a single find & replace away for a project.
  • thefz 6y ago
    > Sometimes avoiding those connotations are exceptionally hard That is 100% an anglo-saxon world problem since most European languages either differentiate between words for skin color and color name, or using the color name to describe skin color isn't considered racist at all. I would stretch it even to mark it as an US-only problem.
    • falcolas 6y ago
      Instead, European languages have a tendency to gender everything. I imagine that’s an untapped “problem” in some folks’ eyes that will boil over sooner or later.
      • anon98356 6y ago
        I was recently in France and was told by a local this was actually an issue with the covid outbreak. There is a department that decides on the gender of new words and they determined covid (or some variant on that) to be feminine.
        • falcolas 6y ago
          > There is a department that decides on the gender of new words TIL. Fascinating. > covid (or some variant on that) to be feminine. And here I was hoping that I was being too pessamistic.
          • RugnirViking 6y ago
            Gramatical gender has very little to do with the words it describes. For example, in a particularly confusing twist: féminisme (feminism) is a masculine noun, wheras masculinité (masculinity) is feminine. It's mostly due to the pronunciation and spelling of the word ending. Although in this case, the Académie Française decided feminine because COVID is an acronym, and the last word of that acronym is disease, and disease is a feminine word (la Maladie) because of how it is spelled.
        • JNRowe 6y ago
          Presumably, the folk at the Académie Française¹. Every couple of years they release a statement that causes a flurry of changes in the documentation of a few projects I've worked on. Always in really curious ways too, exchanging words that are common to French people in our industry with words uncommon to everyone. I kind of appreciate the quirkiness of the whole thing. ¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_Française https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_Française
        • jobigoud 6y ago
          The issue with Covid is that we all started to say LE covid for a few months until June/July or so, maybe because we say LE coronavirus, and then they come and tell us we must say LA Covid.
      • thefz 6y ago
        It's not that we gender everything, I am Italian and my language does not have the neutral pronoun. Everything is either masculine or feminine.
  • bluecatswim 6y ago
    >Sometimes avoiding those connotations are exceptionally hard, verging on impossible. Is it? Two years ago if someone told me they think of certain races every time they hear about whitelists or black holes I'd find them a bit silly.
    • MaKey 6y ago
      To be honest, I still find people a bit silly that think of certain races when reading those terms.
  • goldsteinq 6y ago
    Single find & replace is exactly what this document tells you not to do, since that's how you get dumb^W suboptimal results like "denylisted" instead of sane^W more clear options like "denied".
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• josteink 6y ago
  > So IMHO the focus should be on dropping racial connotations from colors. If we're fine with not calling Asians "yellow" and Native Americans "red", we should be fine with that too. I think that sounds like a very good solution, but it's opposite of the solution being touted by the current progressive regime. They seem to think that to combat racial discrimination, to combat thinking in black and white, we first have to make everything black and white. They then assign different treatments/rights to the different segregations, to correct for some historical wrong-doing, to ensure everyone now gets treated, on overall, "equalish". From my understanding this principle is even being taught in schools, and also applied to other areas in society (gender-equality, LGBTQ)? If so, we do have quite some way to go. > Imagine if we couldn't have yellow and red traffic lights, because it'd be offensive to a race. All these terrible things starts with someone making a comment like this, and then someone for whatever reason taking it seriously. I'm not going to take it for granted that someone is not going to cause a hissy fit over this sometime in the future.
  • busymom0 6y ago
    > They then assign different treatments/rights to the different segregations It's what Yuri Bezmenov refereed to as useful idiots. Divide and conquer has been used by those in power to rule over the constituents for centuries. They realized that the best way to prevent people from looking at the real enemy (establishment) was to keep them infighting and the best way to do that is to divide people into as many oppressor oppressed buckets as possible and let them fight each other. So now we have people not just fighting about rich vs poor, now it's based on race, sex, sexual preference, ethnicity etc. While we keep fighting each other, the corporations and establishment elites keep getting richer and more powerful, meanwhile our lives keep getting more and more miserable. This identity politics is also used by corporations and politicians to prevent and deflect blame. Want your $2000 stimulus? Want a minimum wage? Want wall Street, Robinhood accountability? Want universal health care? Want an end to forever wars? You won't get any of that and if you question it, you are being sexist for attacking the first secretary of the treasury (paid off by Wall Street and $800G by Robinhood hedge fund), first black secretary of defence (Raytheon board seat), first trans health minister (took out her own mother while forcing covid patients into nursing homes). It is evil yet genius identity politics and people are too afraid to speak up. "Racism is not dead. But it is on life-support, kept alive mainly by the people who use it for an excuse or to keep minority communities fearful or resentful enough to turn out as a voting bloc on election day." - Thomas Sowell Obligatory mention for relevant Ryan Long comedy skit: https://youtu.be/Ev373c7wSRg https://youtu.be/Ev373c7wSRg
• bongoman37 6y ago
  yea, maybe we could call people cream and chocolate. I'd be onboard with that.
  • josteink 6y ago
    We could call people ... people? Do they have to be black or white?
    • slver 6y ago
      "People are at higher risk of vitamin D deficiency compared to people." Race is not something to necessarily hide.
      • Mordisquitos 6y ago
        "People with darker skin are at higher risk of vitamin D deficiency compared to people with lighter skin." This sentence is more accurate and useful than the alternative based on the socially constructed ideas of "black" or "white" people. There is no need to "hide" race, as there is no such thing.
        • slver 6y ago
          "Darker" and "lighter" are relative terms said relative to no one, maybe some unknown average. Also people with darker skin due to lots of UV exposure are at LOWER risk of vitamin D deficiency than your average pale skinned person. So it comes down to genetics. Like it or not. Facts of life. To say there's "no such thing" as race is incredibly, you know, post-factual. Might as well decide there's "no such thing as sex", just half of humanity is inexplicably infertile. In medicine you don't get everyone's legs preventively amputated because maybe some people have problems with their legs. In the same way we can't just amputate our dictionary and minds of useful concepts and knowledge like the idea of race, just because some people have problematic interpretations of race.
          • Mordisquitos 6y ago
• thih9 6y ago
  > Imagine if we couldn't have yellow and red traffic lights, because it'd be offensive to a race. I don't think this is a good comparison; the controversy of the "blacklist" term is a complex and polarising topic that depends heavily on context; I don't think it makes sense to look for an analogy here. For anyone looking for a summary, I like how wikipedia [1] describes the context and the current state. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_(computing)#Controversy_over_use_of_the_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_(computing)#Controve...
  • slver 6y ago
    I'd be very curious to hear what are the objective reasons why "yellow" and "red" are considered offensive when they refer to race, and "white" and "black" are considered appropriate. If you dig into it... it's just happenstance and habit. Colors are just colors. They're not emotionally charged. We do that through cultural context and association.
    • skocznymroczny 6y ago
      I guess they are offensive, because they are not used by their respective races. You don't have Chinese people calling themselves "yellow" and you don't have Native Americans calling themselves "red". But you will have Europeans referring to them as "white" and Africans referring to them as "black".
      • andromeduck 6y ago
        Well there's terms like banana, egg and the like but yeah. Same with Oriental vs Caucasian/Asian/African/European etc.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • yorwba 6y ago
        > You don't have Chinese people calling themselves "yellow" Of course there are, e.g. the ones who wrote the Baidu Baike article on "yellow people": https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%BB%84%E8%89%B2%E4%BA%BA%E7%A7%8D/10954432 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%BB%84%E8%89%B2%E4%BA%BA%E7%... But a term that groups them with Japanese, Mongolians and Indonesians doesn't have much relevance for most Chinese people anyway.
• lallysingh 6y ago
  African American and Caucasian?
  • applepple 6y ago
    Yes they should be called an "Africanamericanlist" and a "Caucasian list" that would be more politically correct. Also, 'Red-black trees' should be renamed 'Americanindian-africanamerican trees'.
  • GeneralTspoon 6y ago
    Ah yes, all those African American people in Kenya
    • InitialLastName 6y ago
      Not to mention all the French-Canadians of Azeri stock.
    • aikinai 6y ago
      I live in Japan and visiting Americans do this all the time. Many people just did a find-and-replace on their speech years ago and never consider what it actually means.
      • mc32 6y ago
        What’s funny is when you have people call foreigners “outside country people” (if you’re a foreigner in East Asia) but there is a funny transition where if they visit the US they still refer to ex. an American in the US as an “outside country people.” So, let me introduce you to my ‘waiguoren’ friend here in LA. Right, the local is the foreigner.
    • fakedang 6y ago
      Or you know, all those African people in Kenya? Africans refer to themselves as Africans, not as Black.
      • 6y ago
• fanf2 6y ago
  The problem with whitelist and blacklist is that they don’t say what they mean. If you use more descriptive terms then your writing will be easier to understand.
  • Mordisquitos 6y ago
    If the problem is descriptiveness and ease of understanding, the same can be said about the words "white" or "black" when referring to people. Neither of them say what they mean. In fact, I would argue that disagreements and ambiguities as to what makes a person "white" or "black" are astronomically more frequent than difficulties in understanding what is meant by the words "whitelist" or "blacklist".
    • foobiter 6y ago
      allowlist and blocklist are clearer regardless
      • Mordisquitos 6y ago
        Are they? Are the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist" used only in the context of "allowing" and "blocking"? Who or what is the subject that is implied to be "allowing" and "blocking" the elements of each list? Is the process involved in "allowing" and/or "blocking" passive or active? "Whitelist" and "blacklist" are abstract terms which are useful because they have general and non-specific meanings which can be adapted to many contexts. Artificially prescribed alternatives, introduced only to satisfy the current American cultural Zeitgeist, are not.
        • fanf2 6y ago
          If you aren't using the list for allowing or blocking, then give it a name that describes what you are using it for. It dismays me to see programmers arguing loudly and stubbornly for bad terminology, when a key skill for designing a good API is to choose good names.
• oxplot 6y ago
  > It's just nearly impossible to memorize. This can be trivially implemented in CI for code and docs and have links to this doc. No need to remember it.
  • jawns 6y ago
    Trivially? Have you ever tried to implement a text parser to enforce a style guide? The low-hanging fruit is when there is a banned word with a defined replacement. For instance, in this Google style guide, all instances of "auto-scaling" should be replaced with "autoscaling." But if you want to go much deeper than that, it gets very tricky very quickly. For instance, how would you programmatically detect and correct text so it conforms to this style guide's Anthropomorphism guidelines? https://developers.google.com/style/anthropomorphism https://developers.google.com/style/anthropomorphism
    • emteycz 6y ago
      I don't think they meant fully autonomous integration.
    • slver 6y ago
      "PC sees" vs. "PC detects" is just B.S. honestly. Both are equally anthropocentric, if at all. Computer communication protocols closely resemble other systems (including human and animal communication). Objects are literally modeled after how ecosystems and social structures work.
  • josefx 6y ago
    As trivial as cleaning up user names and in game chats without triggering a few million false positives. People have been working on this for decades, they have yet to succeed.
  • quickthrowman 6y ago
    The implementation is left as an exercise to the reader.
• CharlesW 6y ago
  > It's just nearly impossible to memorize. I think the idea is that you test your documentation just like you do your code. I found a couple linters for this: https://github.com/errata-ai/Google https://github.com/errata-ai/Google https://github.com/gaurav-nelson/linter-google-styleguide https://github.com/gaurav-nelson/linter-google-styleguide
• bobthechef 6y ago
  > So IMHO the focus should be on dropping racial connotations from colors. Color identifies are generally bullshit. For example, what the heck is a white person? Are the Irish white? A 19th century WASP wouldn't think so. In fact, most Europeans who lived in their own ethnic communities in the US weren't white until about the mid-20th century. Incidentally, this is when the Great Migration began and these communities began to disintegrate. The WASPs began to feel threatened (though this is hardly unique to WASPs; cf. the Soviets, the Nazis, the CCP, etc), and so they engaged in bit of social engineering, identity theft, and deracinization. You were no longer Irish or German or Polish or Swedish or Lithuanian or whatever. You were now bland old generic "white". But wait a second. What is "white identity" and "white culture"? Do the Whites speak White? Of course not. This is what identity theft and imposed artificial identities are about. You are robbed of your identity and then told what your identity is by a ruling class that controls that identity. So you need to look to the ruling class to "know" who you are because they're no way to know or determine what whiteness is beyond what they make it mean. If you want to know what "whiteness" means, look no further than the organs and estates of power in this country. This is social engineering and control. > Imagine if we couldn't have yellow and red traffic lights, because it'd be offensive to a race. Exactly. Frankly, I don't think people associate "whitelist" with whiteness and "blacklist" with blackness. I don't, and people aren't monomaniacally stupid like that and that's not how we work. We can speak of the gorgeous black ebony of a piano or a raven-haired or a doe-eyed/black eyed beauty, or how handsome a shiny black tuxedo looks or how sleek a black Ferrari might look. Black tie formals appreciate the elegance that stark contrasts can have. We can also speak of someone looking pale as a ghost and sickly, whitewashing the truth, and so on. So it is patent nonsense that people think in these term. Maybe those people who believe this is the case are guilty of some kind of truly bizarre obsession where everything is racialized. Poor them. We judge things according to some normative understanding of what something ought or can be, not in abstraction. (Some may allude to the historical use of dark colors to depict evil and white to depict good. This is, again, a highly selective reading and betrays the same inability to contextualize. The night is dark, darkness means inability to see, obscurity, concealment. Light reveals, makes things known. Is nature therefore racist? Should we accuse the sun, or light itself, of being racist? How parochial. Again, nobody of sound mind thinks this way and it is nothing less than the paranoia of insane academic bubble chamber ideologues.)
• eli 6y ago
  The AP Style Guide is 600+ pages. They're usually more of a reference guide than something you're supposed to have memorized on day 1.
• chalst 6y ago
  A start is whenever you have the urge to make use of a race-based concept, ask yourself if an ethnic-based concept would not serve better. Personal opinion of a copy-editor of 15 years: the popular understanding of race is so pervaded by racism that it is difficult to use race-based terms without either reinforcing some racist idea or another on the one hand or risk being seen as "too PC" on the other. Social scientists do need race-based concepts, but outside contexts with scholarly norms, they have many foot-gun affordances.
  • jobigoud 6y ago
    > Social scientists do need race-based concepts Do they? There are places like France where the whole concept of race doesn't apply to humans. Race terminology is for things like dog breeds. Humans don't really have races in that sense. This is exemplified by the fact that someone with a black and a white parents is said to be black, because of their skin color. Even if you are for example 1/8th black descent you are said to be of "race" black because of the resulting skin color. It doesn't make any sense as a scientific concept. Other countries have different classification, like South Africa. We are one species with various ethnicities, usually mixed.
    • chalst 6y ago
      According to David Graeber, the concept of race conveniently appeared when would-be slavers in Europe were looking for justifications for enslaving Africans when the medieval Catholic church consistently held that slavery was wrong. The concept of race was helpful in arguing the position that while God's law applied to the peoples that the medieval church knew of, there might be human-seeming creatures to whom it doesn't. The effects of race-justified practices were so far reaching that they can be said to shape our societies, just as decades after the abolition of Apartheid, most South Africans know exactly how they would have been classified. At this point, for social scientists to abandon race would mean we would live in a society with features that neo-fascists have ready explanations for and no systematic standard of evidence against which their claims could be exposed for the fantasies they really are. You need to have the concept of race before you can see why the reality does not support the claims of the racists.