7 ms·

Example: We cannot use master/slave in code.

by 1-6 4y ago

yieldcrv 4y ago
speaking of which, my git client on my computer makes master branches, while github wants to use main branch. its a little annoying, I would be open to switching my git client to do main by default, how do I do that? I'll look it up now that I've typed it out edit: the answer https://superuser.com/a/1572156 https://superuser.com/a/1572156 git config --global init.defaultBranch main
- a2800276 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, how did this affect you? This is only an issue the very first time you set up a repo, no? As soon as you push 'master' to an empty GitHub project, that becomes the default branch. And if you clone a repo there is no expectation from the local git that a branch with any particular name exists. What am I missing?
  - smcl 4y ago
    You're missing nothing, it's a non-issue. You can use master or main and neither git nor GitHub care, employers might have some guidelines but they generally have a bunch of things like coding conventions, codes of conduct or other office policies designed to make workplaces somewhere you can actually work without, for example, worrying about colleagues saying or doing hateful, racist or sexist shit
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    Affect? I just like congruence. I often use the push instructions that a new empty github project prompts, and do it frequently enough that I want my system defaults to match those instructions. Its not important to me to know that my system could overwrite those instructions successfully because "master" or whatever my local branch is called can be written into the command line. Its not important to me that "main" is a contrived replacement for "master".
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  Ironically, stuff like this only makes tech less inclusive to marginalized newcomers. Some impoverished kid trying to teach themself git won’t be able to follow as easily any git tutorial out there that refers to the “master” branch.
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    That's the short term view, assuming it's even true. What about in 10 years where the git tutorials all say "main"?
    - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
      I’ve actually worked with a couple tech newcomers who encountered this very issue, one of whom happened to be black. They took no offense at the term “master,” but were extremely frustrated by how copying and pasting commands from git tutorials would often not work. As a simple example, $ git clone git@github.com:username/test.git Cloning into 'test'... remote: Enumerating objects: 3, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done. remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0 Receiving objects: 100% (3/3), done. $ cd test $ touch foo $ git add foo $ git commit -m "my commit" [main f00f00d] my commit 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) create mode 100644 foo $ git push origin master # as a tutorial might advise error: src refspec master does not match any error: failed to push some refs to 'github.com:username/test.git' That person absolutely despised using git because of its complexity. Git is indeed extremely complicated, and microannoyances like this do not make things any easier. In 10 years, it’s likely that there will still be some repos with the principal branch called “master” and some with it called “main,” so confusion will still exist. But even if all repos and tutorials were magically switched over to “main” in 10 years’ time, the net result would be several years’ worth of newbie developers experiencing a slew of microannoyances, with zero upside. There is no evidence that a branch called “master” caused widespread harm, but there is plenty of evidence that further complicating an already complex system was harmful to some degree.
      - a2800276 4y ago
a2800276 4y ago
Example of what? Is this being mandated by your organization's administration? Count yourself lucky working with an administration that gives a shit about version control.
smcl 4y ago
Most organizations have some document describing acceptable coding standards that cover things like whitespace/indentation, brackets, idioms and naming conventions. It is so bizarre how many people draw the line at master/slave - it's just another convention, why on earth are they desperate to write these two specific words above all else? Why is "don't use verbs in your REST routes" ok but "don't use master/slave" a cause to get on your soapbox and cry about human rights being impeded?
- noduerme 4y ago
  For me personally it's offensive because master and slave don't, never did, and never will, specifically refer to a single culture's experience - and that the idiocy of identifying the technical use of those terms with racism could itself only come from a racist mind. [edit] while you downvote this, consider that my grandparents family were literal slave workers prior to being shot, and no, I don't think we should BAN THE TERM. Only insufferable racist snobs think that calling a computer a "master" or a "slave" makes normal people think of HUMAN SLAVES AND MASTERS. And even if they do think of human slaves and masters, then hopefully no normal person would think of some racist thing after that. And if they did, then that is a racist problem, not the words. Do you understand? Do you understand that my grandparents didn't survive to live in a world where words are banned because some idiot draws a connotation from them and assumes that other people will as well, or just to exercise power over other individuals? Like, fuck you!
- poszlem 4y ago
  It it bizarre? If I told you that your use of the word "most" is racists, would you agree and stop using it? What if I told you that your use of the word "things" is racist? Obviously my overreaction to those words is my problem not yours and you should not stop using them. The reason people draw the line here is because to many people these words CLEARLY have nothing to do with race and "oppression". They never have. And yet now somehow YOU made them "dirty". It is a common occurrence where a group of activists deem something as forbidden, create a commotion around it that intimidates those who comply solely out of fear, ultimately leading to that something being considered "bad" because only those who don't mind disregarding social norms continue to use it. This is not a natural process but a hostile takeover.
ParetoOptimal 4y ago
[flagged]
- noduerme 4y ago
  >> instead of the inferior blacklist Words do have power, but this sort of thing misunderstands the type of power they have. Words have power when used for persuasion. Banning the words does nothing to change the persuasive power of people who would use language to convince other people to do evil things. It only takes away the power of ordinary people to transmit the truths they see and hear. Stripping language is, in itself, evil; and juxtaposing words like "inferior blacklist" - a phrase that never existed - as if it were a brilliant example proving the racism of the second word in the phrase, shows only a misunderstanding of both the nature of racism and the nature of language.
  - ParetoOptimal 4y ago
    > Words have power when used for persuasion. Words used for persuasion on a large enough scale become imbued with a default associated meaning. > Banning the words does nothing to change the persuasive power of people who would use language to convince other people to do evil things. Do you really believe there is no power in words being repeated? Do you not believe that the real racists are bothered by not being able to espouse their usual rhetoric freely? Much more annoyed than the free- speech advocates in this thread whose group definitely has no overlap with the real racists.
    - noduerme 4y ago
      > real racists are bothered by not being able to espouse their usual rhetoric freely I don't think they're particularly bothered; they espouse their rhetoric either way. And if you take away some words, they quickly find others. I haven't seen the changing of the language in the past 40 years to be particularly effective at stemming their racism or their ability to persuade. If anything, the US has become more racist in my lifetime, despite the many many iterations of politically correct revisionist speech. Again, it's a form of hubris and foolishness to believe that you can change thoughts by changing words. > Words used for persuasion on a large enough scale become imbued with a default associated meaning. This is the definition of a racist way of thinking. If you watched Hitler's speeches and heard him say that Jews are dirty enough times, would you believe it? Would you associate "Jew" with "dirt"? Because many people heard those words thousands of times and didn't believe it. If you're afraid you would believe it, then you are the problem, not the word "Jew" or the word "dirt".
hotpotamus 4y ago
I remember as a kid learning to install IDE drives and hearing master/slave was pretty weird to me. I suppose I more or less got used to it.

Example: We cannot use master/slave in code.

by 1-6 4y ago

Example: We cannot use master/slave in code.

speaking of which, my git client on my computer makes master branches, while github wants to use main branch. its a little annoying, I would be open to switching my git client to do main by default, how do I do that? I'll look it up now that I've typed it out edit: the answer https://superuser.com/a/1572156 https://superuser.com/a/1572156 git config --global init.defaultBranch main

a2800276 4y ago
Out of curiosity, how did this affect you? This is only an issue the very first time you set up a repo, no? As soon as you push 'master' to an empty GitHub project, that becomes the default branch. And if you clone a repo there is no expectation from the local git that a branch with any particular name exists. What am I missing?
- smcl 4y ago
  You're missing nothing, it's a non-issue. You can use master or main and neither git nor GitHub care, employers might have some guidelines but they generally have a bunch of things like coding conventions, codes of conduct or other office policies designed to make workplaces somewhere you can actually work without, for example, worrying about colleagues saying or doing hateful, racist or sexist shit
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  Affect? I just like congruence. I often use the push instructions that a new empty github project prompts, and do it frequently enough that I want my system defaults to match those instructions. Its not important to me to know that my system could overwrite those instructions successfully because "master" or whatever my local branch is called can be written into the command line. Its not important to me that "main" is a contrived replacement for "master".
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
Ironically, stuff like this only makes tech less inclusive to marginalized newcomers. Some impoverished kid trying to teach themself git won’t be able to follow as easily any git tutorial out there that refers to the “master” branch.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  That's the short term view, assuming it's even true. What about in 10 years where the git tutorials all say "main"?
  - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    I’ve actually worked with a couple tech newcomers who encountered this very issue, one of whom happened to be black. They took no offense at the term “master,” but were extremely frustrated by how copying and pasting commands from git tutorials would often not work. As a simple example, $ git clone git@github.com:username/test.git Cloning into 'test'... remote: Enumerating objects: 3, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done. remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0 Receiving objects: 100% (3/3), done. $ cd test $ touch foo $ git add foo $ git commit -m "my commit" [main f00f00d] my commit 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-) create mode 100644 foo $ git push origin master # as a tutorial might advise error: src refspec master does not match any error: failed to push some refs to 'github.com:username/test.git' That person absolutely despised using git because of its complexity. Git is indeed extremely complicated, and microannoyances like this do not make things any easier. In 10 years, it’s likely that there will still be some repos with the principal branch called “master” and some with it called “main,” so confusion will still exist. But even if all repos and tutorials were magically switched over to “main” in 10 years’ time, the net result would be several years’ worth of newbie developers experiencing a slew of microannoyances, with zero upside. There is no evidence that a branch called “master” caused widespread harm, but there is plenty of evidence that further complicating an already complex system was harmful to some degree.
    - a2800276 4y ago

a2800276 4y ago

Example of what? Is this being mandated by your organization's administration? Count yourself lucky working with an administration that gives a shit about version control.

smcl 4y ago

Most organizations have some document describing acceptable coding standards that cover things like whitespace/indentation, brackets, idioms and naming conventions. It is so bizarre how many people draw the line at master/slave - it's just another convention, why on earth are they desperate to write these two specific words above all else? Why is "don't use verbs in your REST routes" ok but "don't use master/slave" a cause to get on your soapbox and cry about human rights being impeded?

noduerme 4y ago
For me personally it's offensive because master and slave don't, never did, and never will, specifically refer to a single culture's experience - and that the idiocy of identifying the technical use of those terms with racism could itself only come from a racist mind. [edit] while you downvote this, consider that my grandparents family were literal slave workers prior to being shot, and no, I don't think we should BAN THE TERM. Only insufferable racist snobs think that calling a computer a "master" or a "slave" makes normal people think of HUMAN SLAVES AND MASTERS. And even if they do think of human slaves and masters, then hopefully no normal person would think of some racist thing after that. And if they did, then that is a racist problem, not the words. Do you understand? Do you understand that my grandparents didn't survive to live in a world where words are banned because some idiot draws a connotation from them and assumes that other people will as well, or just to exercise power over other individuals? Like, fuck you!
poszlem 4y ago
It it bizarre? If I told you that your use of the word "most" is racists, would you agree and stop using it? What if I told you that your use of the word "things" is racist? Obviously my overreaction to those words is my problem not yours and you should not stop using them. The reason people draw the line here is because to many people these words CLEARLY have nothing to do with race and "oppression". They never have. And yet now somehow YOU made them "dirty". It is a common occurrence where a group of activists deem something as forbidden, create a commotion around it that intimidates those who comply solely out of fear, ultimately leading to that something being considered "bad" because only those who don't mind disregarding social norms continue to use it. This is not a natural process but a hostile takeover.

ParetoOptimal 4y ago

[flagged]

noduerme 4y ago
>> instead of the inferior blacklist Words do have power, but this sort of thing misunderstands the type of power they have. Words have power when used for persuasion. Banning the words does nothing to change the persuasive power of people who would use language to convince other people to do evil things. It only takes away the power of ordinary people to transmit the truths they see and hear. Stripping language is, in itself, evil; and juxtaposing words like "inferior blacklist" - a phrase that never existed - as if it were a brilliant example proving the racism of the second word in the phrase, shows only a misunderstanding of both the nature of racism and the nature of language.
- ParetoOptimal 4y ago
  > Words have power when used for persuasion. Words used for persuasion on a large enough scale become imbued with a default associated meaning. > Banning the words does nothing to change the persuasive power of people who would use language to convince other people to do evil things. Do you really believe there is no power in words being repeated? Do you not believe that the real racists are bothered by not being able to espouse their usual rhetoric freely? Much more annoyed than the free- speech advocates in this thread whose group definitely has no overlap with the real racists.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    > real racists are bothered by not being able to espouse their usual rhetoric freely I don't think they're particularly bothered; they espouse their rhetoric either way. And if you take away some words, they quickly find others. I haven't seen the changing of the language in the past 40 years to be particularly effective at stemming their racism or their ability to persuade. If anything, the US has become more racist in my lifetime, despite the many many iterations of politically correct revisionist speech. Again, it's a form of hubris and foolishness to believe that you can change thoughts by changing words. > Words used for persuasion on a large enough scale become imbued with a default associated meaning. This is the definition of a racist way of thinking. If you watched Hitler's speeches and heard him say that Jews are dirty enough times, would you believe it? Would you associate "Jew" with "dirt"? Because many people heard those words thousands of times and didn't believe it. If you're afraid you would believe it, then you are the problem, not the word "Jew" or the word "dirt".

hotpotamus 4y ago

I remember as a kid learning to install IDE drives and hearing master/slave was pretty weird to me. I suppose I more or less got used to it.