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Seems so in my reading. I assume I must be incorrect though, since that interpretation seems absurd. Yet, not sure how else to interpret it… but I guess this is
by zzt123 5y ago
Seems so in my reading. I assume I must be incorrect though, since that interpretation seems absurd. Yet, not sure how else to interpret it… but I guess this isn’t much different from the master/slave stuff in code, or the removal of the master branch default in git.
- ogogmad 5y agoCan we not say cool-sounding words anymore like "colony", "supremacy" and "master"? I'll admit that "master vs slave" might perhaps be in bad taste (but not "master" on its own). But cancelling "blacklist", "colony" and "supremacy" is pretty incredible.
- 8note 5y agoI'm very favourable to getting rid of blacklist. It's random whether it's an allow list or a deny list, and there are domain specific words you can use instead to make it really clear what the list does
- ogogmad 5y agoPlease explain to me what you find wrong with blacklist. I'm dying to know.
- HumanReadable 5y agoit's less clear to non-native English speakers what the hell a blacklist is than what a deny-list is. EDIT: the replies I received to this comment are pretty shocking to me. I'm not arguing for the removal of anything, I am only listing one issue with blacklist that deny-list doesn't have. Anything you're reading into my comment beyond that is your tribal identity projecting its insecurity.
- ogogmad 5y ago1. By this logic, we should abandon most words in the English language, because non-native speakers might otherwise need to learn them. Somehow though, you've applied this logic only to the word "blacklist". And why should a language with its own literature and history abandon its own vocabulary? 2. The usual reason given for not saying "blacklist" is because of supposed racism. Your argument is a new one, and seems to have been produced post-facto. Your comment is sophistry. [edit] Removed some scathing remarks.
- rbanffy 5y agoEven if the readability argument was created after the fact, it still stands. It’s immediately clear what an “allow-list” means.
- ogogmad 5y agoBy that logic, we'll have to give up most words in English. This is entitled to the extreme. You have been arguing with me for the sake of arguing.
- rbanffy 5y agoNot really. English remains the most spoken language in our circles and it's immensely helpful because of that. What we can all do is to look for better names. Master/slave can be replaced by primary/replica, publisher/subscriber and a lot of others that offer narrower meanings and, therefore, are better names.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- major--neither 5y agodo you seriously not understand what you're doing?
- HumanReadable 5y ago
- IlliOnato 5y agoI'm a non-native English speaker, and I must say that you are wrong. Even forgetting that many languages have exactly the same construction ("black list") with the same meaning, the thing you do as a non-native speaker with an unfamiliar word is to look it up in a dictionary, or guess its meaning from the context, not try and run some inverse etimology on it. I mean, for years I understood what "paste" meant (as in "copy and paste") and used that word without having any idea about "paste" being some sort of glue. I still have no idea where the word "parkway" comes from, but understand the word and use it. (If I were to guess from its parts I would arrive to something like a "garden path":))
- HumanReadable 5y agoI didn't claim we should remove the world blacklist. The comment I was responding asked for things I find wrong with blacklist, I replied with one.
- esarbe 5y agoNot sure I buy that argument. In German they have the "Schwarze Liste" which essentially means. German is pretty close to English though, so I guess your argument could still hold for other non-related languages.
- maximus-decimus 5y agowhitelist = good allowed things blacklist = bad, forbidden things => white = good black = bad Associating something being black with it being bad/lesser/evil is problematic if you're trying to get rid of racism toward black people.
- ogogmad 5y agoWhite is good because it's the colour of natural light. Black is bad because it's the colour of darkness, which is dangerous because you can't see. Children are afraid of the dark. The fact that people's skin colour is sometimes described as white or black is a coincidence that doesn't relate to the origin of the word blacklist. If people are offended by coincidences like this, it means that we won't be able to speak Spanish, Russian or Chinese. The Russian word for black (as in a black person) is negr; but note that this is not considered offensive in Russian.
- rbanffy 5y ago> White is good because it's the colour of natural light. In a post about a world flag someone mentioned that, for the Chinese, white is associated with death.
- ogogmad 5y agoYou've fixated on a minor detail. The origin of the word "blacklist" is described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting#Origins_of_the_term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting#Origins_of_the_te... It has never had anything to do with race. If we can't say certain words because of linguistic coincidences, then we won't be able to speak Spanish. In all your responses to me, you have been arguing for the sake of arguing.
- rbanffy 5y agoThe origin is irrelevant if it's found offensive. If you tell me what I'm doing offends you, I'll try to change my behavior.
- Invictus0 5y agoIn what context does blacklist indicate an allow list? I've never heard of that. And is your issue with the word on the basis of race or on ambiguity?
- dcanelhas 5y agoAs in "Master of science"?
- ogogmad 5y agoI said "master", when it's not in opposition to "slave", should not be deemed offensive. Your example helps make my point. To clarify my view on master/slave terminology, I do understand how an overt analogy to slavery could be offensive. But the word "master" doesn't usually imply that there's a slave.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoNo way to blame the patriarchy on that one though. Maybe worker exploitation is a possible angle.
- bschne 5y agoWith the GIT thing my usual stance is that there's no need to make this a hill to die on. Some people feel better about it, it's next to zero effort, so it's no big deal wether I personally think it's absolutely necessary or not. I don't think it's a high priority or high leverage thing to do against racism or for inclusion, but I don't mind when GitHub goes "you know what, main is nicer for some people, let's switch". But the ant colony thing in the SA piece sounds a bit like saying software engineering is a "problematic" field that should be critiqued because it often uses a VCS that at some point in the past opted for a very common set of terms that some may now consider offensive. I could try to rack my brain for all the more or less charitable interpretations of what she is actually trying to get at with that sentence, but viewing it in the context of the whole piece, I think there's not much of a there, there.
- janto 5y ago"no need to make this a hill to die on" is what you say to someone to take away their ability to say "no". Don't make it your usual stance.
- tomp 5y agoThe problem with git master->main is, that if you don’t say “no”, there’s always gonna be the next thing. Like “ant colony”. Ironically Scott Aarson has himself written about this, after having realised he was, like you, wrong for not saying “no”. (Too late.) You have to say “no”.
- gspr 5y agoI don't buy that logic. I have absolutely no problem with the word "master" for e.g. a main branch, or for something that controls something else for that matter, but why wouldn't it be OK to let someone do all the work of changing a fine word into an equally fine one? How does that force you to do non-neutral, negative, changes in the future?
- tomp 5y agoIn your mind, it’s “fine work” but in their minds, it’s winning a political battle, and they’re just empowered for the next battle. Bad politics (exclusionary, racist, destructive, forcefully equalising, speech controlling, bullying, anti-meritocratic - i.e. wokeism) need to be opposed. If the change was proposed & made on technical merit, I wouldn’t oppose it. But it wasn’t - it was based on ideological bullying
- paganel 5y agoWhich is absurd because the Romans had used this term first [1] (I mean, compared to the Europeans that set up colonies in the 1500s-1700s), with pretty tame connotations, for crying out loud, there's an entire German city which got its name from it, Köln. > however, the term came to denote the highest status of a Roman city. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_(Roman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonia_(Roman)
- marcan_42 5y agoThe master/slave stuff is just terrible terminology. Seriously, it means about a dozen different things depending on context. Sometimes the "slave" is a clone of the master, sometimes it's an alternative of the master, sometimes it merely has the role of a responder in a protocol, and rarely is it actually under the full control of the master (funny enough, the technology closest to "total and absolute control" I can think of - JTAG - calls that the "target", not the "slave"... :-) ). That particular set of terms has been so thoroughly abused and overused so as to lose all nuanced meaning, and we'd do much better to drop it just out of sheer uselessness and switch to more accurate, varied terms that properly fit the context (like primary/secondary, primary/replica, initiator/responder, host/device, leader/follower, etc.). This isn't out of wokeness; quoting the previous version of the I²C specification: "Some devices are masters – they generate bus clock and initiate communication on the bus, other devices are slaves and respond to the commands on the bus." ... if you're going to have to define what your terms mean in other terms because your original terms are unclear, why not just use the other terms directly? Initiator/responder would've been perfectly appropriate here (that terminology is used by IPSec, FWIW). Initiator/target would've also worked (iSCSI calls them that). Interestingly, just a couple months ago the spec was updated to replace the terms with "controller/target" instead, which is actually worse; "controller" is already a widely used term to mean the hardware that implements I²C inside any given chip, and which can work in either "controller" or "target" mode, which is very confusing. So yeah, I'm all for replacing master/slave since it's terribly ambiguous, just please pick something that doesn't make things worse. As for git master vs main, that has less of a technical argument to it... but it doesn't hurt anyone, it's easy to change the default branch name, "main" is just as descriptive as "master", and "main" is shorter anyway, so "main" it is. There's absolutely no reason to die on that hill even if you reject the (tenuous) argument of a master -> master/slave -> slavery association (in my mind "master" here is in the sense of "master record" or "master bus" and there is no "slave" counterpart, so I never had a problem with this one, but I still find "main" perfectly fine and it saves typing). This thing about ant colonies... yeah, that's pretty different and clearly utterly illogical.
- mongol 5y agoMaster in git I assumed is the same as tape master, master copy etc. I never heard about slave in git context. Which makes it even more absurd.
- dang 5y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29778461.