5 ms·

I remember how "master" and "slave" were banned a few years back in information technology context and people cheered that ban. And surprise surprise, the same

by Yizahi 2y ago

I remember how "master" and "slave" were banned a few years back in information technology context and people cheered that ban. And surprise surprise, the same mechanism of arbitrary bans can be turned 180 degrees. And it appears that if the only criteria is a superficial offense at the established word unrelated to the imaginary offense, then many different people can use that same mechanism to ban or attack whatever they want. From all sides of the political spectrum. Who knew, right?:) PS: I'm against any word bans with a very few extreme exceptions. Blanket bans for whatever random person deems offensive inevitably led to this^. Like clockwork, every single time.

whatshisface 2y ago
Since what we're looking for is a peace that eliminates collateral damage, perhaps the best course would be to reassure both sides that they can have security without having control.
- Yizahi 2y ago
  In my opinion government focus should be on the education of young people, and not on trying to force and bend adults to behave in the narrow "correct" way. Again, with some exceptions. If we want more female representation in STEM - focus on education. If we want people not to use some slur or derogatory term - teach people in the school. And so on. The problem is that across the world education is a third tier activity for the government and is largely neglected. No big profits there.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    Some people will choose to antagonize men or women even after being made aware of the facts. That's why people who are unwilling to tolerate a low level of bad behavior and the after-the-fact nature of punishment wind up demanding absolute and preemptive control over everybody else.
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    > If we want more female representation in STEM - focus on education. You also have to introduce rules for hiring – unless you want your interventions to have an 80-year delay on them. (Or we could make unqualified 18-year-olds responsible for hiring decisions, I suppose.) If you're training children up for careers they're going to be kept out of, you're doing everyone a disservice.
    - Yizahi 2y ago
      Removing reasonable discriminating items from hiring is good idea, like mandating no photos for example. But we can't remove all of it and people will still be discriminated, even just by name and surname. Then we decide to force the issue and add diversity quotas, but those are both neither enough nor are truly enforced. Then we start creating DEI departments, thought police and... well. It doesn't work very well. Also in practice these quotas are often put at the lower rank jobs, where there is little discrimination anyway. E.g. IT industry will eat up any good candidate, usually. The problem with quotas is that we can't implement them where they are really needed - in the higher castes of social hierarchy. There are no quotas for CEOs or Senators, or top politicians etc. And really won't be. So considering that, I tend to think that quotas is a losing game, and only education is the solution. And I mean real efforts there, not some token programs for 30 girls per nation or something. And yeah, unfortunately we will need to wait a lot.
      - wizzwizz4 2y ago
        I also think quotas are a poor solution. Pretty much all of the surface-level DEI stuff in the US is – or, I suppose, was – absurd. (Mandatory corporate training where a voice reads out a list of slurs… What problem is that meant to solve?) However, my experience of DEI specialists is overwhelmingly positive, even those in the US. Maybe I've got lucky, and have only interacted with competent ones: who knows? But if they say a system involving quotas is the best solution currently-feasible – which iirc I have been told – then that won't convince me that quotas are good, but it will convince me that the other options are worse. > The problem with quotas is that we can't implement them where they are really needed - in the higher castes of social hierarchy. This isn't a problem with quotas. It being a problem presupposes that quotas work, surely?
techbananas 2y ago
I wasn’t crazy about moving away from master, but this isn’t a word ban, it’s a concept ban. They’re not really banning the word diversity, they’re banning the study of diversity by any name. Renaming master to main, doesn’t mean that you can’t do trunk based development, it just means you’re using a different term.
- Yizahi 2y ago
  Yes. That ban (sorry, I still think that's what it was in reality) was a mild one and inconsequential. I personally have no problem with that specific episode. The real problem is that and other such minor episodes normalized word bans as a general principle. So as soon as more radical people come in power, they have used it to ban what THEY want. Just like normalizing talks about occupation of Greenland today, will inevitably lead to the real occupation in 20-30 years in the future, by some Mango v2.0.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  If there was any value at all in renaming it to main, it was preventing people from being reminded of the unhappy concept of slavery. I don't think one ban is more conceptual than the other, if there's a difference it's that scrubbing an unhappy concept from research is more pragmatically damaging than scrubbing it from nomenclature - not because one's morally better, but because the former is more difficult to evade.
  - zzo38computer 2y ago
    I disagree. If people want to call it "main" that is OK and I do not have an objection, although slavery and racism is not a part of it. Using different words does not solve slavery or racism or anything like that. There are some minor advantages of "main", but many of the previous objections to the change are invalid and based on ignorance of the working of git; once I figured out how it works, I do not have an objection, since you can call the branches whatever you want to do anyways, and the names "master" is not something special anyways except for what it is called if you do not otherwise specify a name. Furthermore, existing repositories on GitHub are not automatically changed, and they added function for renaming branches (which can be useful for other reasons too), so for these reasons I think what they did is good. Some minor benefits of "main" is that it is shorter than "master" and starts with the same two letters as "master" (which might sometimes matter, e.g. if the branch names are listed in alphabetical order and you want to find them in the list). These benefits seems like only minor benefits to me, though. However, my opinion about the change in SQLite, changing a table name from SQLITE_MASTER to SQLITE_SCHEMA, is different. I think that the new name better describes what it is for (it is the table for the schema of the database), but I would not have made that change, since it can cause problems. They did consider some of them (such as authorizer callbacks, which is something that I had thought of too before I knew what they did about it), and work around them, but that just makes it more messy, so I still think it was a bad idea, but now it is done and it would not be good to undo this change, either. If I was in charge of it I would have deferred the change until SQLite4, rather than changing SQLite3. (There is also the issue of the SQLITE_SCHEMA error code.)
glitchc 2y ago
That should never have been banned. It was a stupid ban then and is a stupid ban now.
fzeroracer 2y ago
Can you point me when Biden or Obama issued a word ban around the words master and slave in an IT context? Thank you.
- foxglacier 2y ago
  Can you point to where Trump issued a word ban for grant funded research? Not this post, because it's not describing a word ban and it doesn't even seem to have a source.
  - fzeroracer 2y ago
    I can in fact. Trump literally just issued a mass retraction and censorship of research publication depending on a set of keywords [1]. That is, by definition, a word ban for CDC-funded research. In fact you posted in that thread on HN, so you should already be very well aware of it. [1] https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orders-mass-retraction https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orde...
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  This was DC city government not Obama and Biden.
philipov 2y ago
There was never a ban like this on the master-slave terminology. A lot of places started moving away from those terms, but plenty of others just kept the old naming. There was no top-down directive from the federal government like there is here - I don't think it's fair to compare them as if they are equivalent situations. This is heavy-handed in a way that makes peer pressure look completely benign in comparison.
- deleted 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- Yizahi 2y ago
  The same issue as with some other terms in 21st century. For example monopoly by the 19th century definition would be almost impossible today, because "look, that company has a whopping 0.1% of the market, hence we with 99.9% are not a monopoly". So yeah, it wasn't banned everywhere, but that reached momentum wide enough for me to consider it essentially a ban. And as a I said below, even if call it not a ban but idk "popular advisory", the point is that it set a precedent. And now right wingers would really ban words they don't like. Also they may argue that they did not ban their words either. Can you apply for grant elsewhere? Yes you can, technically. "So what the problem"(c) they will ask.
  - philipov 2y ago
    It's different because it's the federal government. You can't compare it to a bunch of companies deciding to do the same thing because of popular opinion. While both processes have their own mechanism for driving conformity, one is essentially democratic, while the other is strongly autocratic.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- belorn 2y ago
freejazz 2y ago
"banned"? Like there's some singular entity in charge of all of IT that gets to ban things?
- Dig1t 2y ago
  Yes, we have mandatory linter rules which won’t let us check in code that contains the word “whitelist” or “blacklist” or “master” because they are somehow racist. I work at the biggest tech company, which employs hundreds of thousands of people and these rules are applied across all codebases. This stuff is widespread across big companies and the government.
  - freejazz 2y ago
    That's just your organization, I meant "all of IT" when I said "all of IT". There are posters here acting as if there is a singular entity in charge of IT, that forces this rule on everyone. I don't see what consequence it is that your particular organization prefers to do things its own way. It's a completely different proposition from pretending like the word is banned outright for everyone, by someone.
  - rurp 2y ago
    There's a pretty big difference between a private company pandering to progressives by banning a few words versus the federal government suddenly declaring that many different words and concepts are banned. These NSF flags are just one case out of many, similar changes are being rushed out across every federal department. I agree that the word bans at your company are stupid, but the govt changes are a whole other level of bad.
Febra33 2y ago
That ban is imaginary. It never existed. Many people decided to use other terms at their free will and others didn't. Both terms can be still found in plenty of projects.
- freejazz 2y ago
  Master. Slave. Look at me go!
  - Febra33 2y ago
    Oh no! You're banned now! Look, the international word police has put a warrant out for you. And other problems that do not exist.
Dig1t 2y ago
Absolutely correct. We’re still not allowed to use “whitelist” and “blacklist” because it’s somehow racism. We have linters which bar us from checking in code with these words and a bot which scolds us publicly in chats. Now the same people who applauded that policing of speech suddenly are offended when their explicit political speech is being removed. It’s just simply hypocrisy.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  Way to 'what about' speech policing. Yay to normalizing less freedoms because 'someone else did something too'.
  - Dig1t 2y ago
    I’m not trying to what about anything, I’m actually a fairly extreme free speech absolutist. I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy, the people complaining the loudest are the same people who exuberantly censor people they disagree with. These type of people have lost moral authority.
- nom 2y ago
  > and a bot which scolds us publicly in chats. that is quite disturbing to me
- yibg 2y ago
  That's ridiculous. I use whitelist and blacklist just fine and have for the last decade plus. No one in the government told me it wasn't allowed.
- EdwardDiego 2y ago
  You're really offended by these linters huh.
  - Dig1t 2y ago
    I resent others trying to police my language, especially when the language is not offensive. People who do this obviously get joy out of bossing other people around and pretending they are being virtuous.
burkaman 2y ago
When you say they were "banned", do you mean a handful of companies voluntarily decided to stop using those words internally and published blog posts about it? I don't recall it going any further than that.
immibis 2y ago
These were not banned. I still call master-slave systems master-slave, and I haven't gotten banned from anywhere because of that. Some people don't like it, and other people don't like that some people don't like it, and some people ban its usage from their platforms, and other people enforce its usage on their platforms, which sounds like a free marketplace of ideas to me!
JeremyNT 2y ago
Nothing was banned, culture changed. This happens as you age. The world and customs you grew up with, despite how they may feel too you, are not the natural state of the world. Accept that new customs may replace them.
throwfgtpwd234 2y ago
Agreed. It's groups in multiple camps that want to force everyone to change how they do things. Superficial, performative "action" and causes don't change anything. Let's just be sensible and try not to harm or discriminate against anyone for any of their attributes. How is this so difficult? I think it's that there are too many people who have firmly married their identities to hate of their socially-acceptable (in their hermetically-sealed echo chamber of team red or team blue) scapegoats.

by Yizahi 2y ago

whatshisface 2y ago

Since what we're looking for is a peace that eliminates collateral damage, perhaps the best course would be to reassure both sides that they can have security without having control.

Yizahi 2y ago
In my opinion government focus should be on the education of young people, and not on trying to force and bend adults to behave in the narrow "correct" way. Again, with some exceptions. If we want more female representation in STEM - focus on education. If we want people not to use some slur or derogatory term - teach people in the school. And so on. The problem is that across the world education is a third tier activity for the government and is largely neglected. No big profits there.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  Some people will choose to antagonize men or women even after being made aware of the facts. That's why people who are unwilling to tolerate a low level of bad behavior and the after-the-fact nature of punishment wind up demanding absolute and preemptive control over everybody else.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  > If we want more female representation in STEM - focus on education. You also have to introduce rules for hiring – unless you want your interventions to have an 80-year delay on them. (Or we could make unqualified 18-year-olds responsible for hiring decisions, I suppose.) If you're training children up for careers they're going to be kept out of, you're doing everyone a disservice.
  - Yizahi 2y ago
    Removing reasonable discriminating items from hiring is good idea, like mandating no photos for example. But we can't remove all of it and people will still be discriminated, even just by name and surname. Then we decide to force the issue and add diversity quotas, but those are both neither enough nor are truly enforced. Then we start creating DEI departments, thought police and... well. It doesn't work very well. Also in practice these quotas are often put at the lower rank jobs, where there is little discrimination anyway. E.g. IT industry will eat up any good candidate, usually. The problem with quotas is that we can't implement them where they are really needed - in the higher castes of social hierarchy. There are no quotas for CEOs or Senators, or top politicians etc. And really won't be. So considering that, I tend to think that quotas is a losing game, and only education is the solution. And I mean real efforts there, not some token programs for 30 girls per nation or something. And yeah, unfortunately we will need to wait a lot.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      I also think quotas are a poor solution. Pretty much all of the surface-level DEI stuff in the US is – or, I suppose, was – absurd. (Mandatory corporate training where a voice reads out a list of slurs… What problem is that meant to solve?) However, my experience of DEI specialists is overwhelmingly positive, even those in the US. Maybe I've got lucky, and have only interacted with competent ones: who knows? But if they say a system involving quotas is the best solution currently-feasible – which iirc I have been told – then that won't convince me that quotas are good, but it will convince me that the other options are worse. > The problem with quotas is that we can't implement them where they are really needed - in the higher castes of social hierarchy. This isn't a problem with quotas. It being a problem presupposes that quotas work, surely?

techbananas 2y ago

I wasn’t crazy about moving away from master, but this isn’t a word ban, it’s a concept ban. They’re not really banning the word diversity, they’re banning the study of diversity by any name. Renaming master to main, doesn’t mean that you can’t do trunk based development, it just means you’re using a different term.

Yizahi 2y ago
Yes. That ban (sorry, I still think that's what it was in reality) was a mild one and inconsequential. I personally have no problem with that specific episode. The real problem is that and other such minor episodes normalized word bans as a general principle. So as soon as more radical people come in power, they have used it to ban what THEY want. Just like normalizing talks about occupation of Greenland today, will inevitably lead to the real occupation in 20-30 years in the future, by some Mango v2.0.
whatshisface 2y ago
If there was any value at all in renaming it to main, it was preventing people from being reminded of the unhappy concept of slavery. I don't think one ban is more conceptual than the other, if there's a difference it's that scrubbing an unhappy concept from research is more pragmatically damaging than scrubbing it from nomenclature - not because one's morally better, but because the former is more difficult to evade.
- zzo38computer 2y ago
  I disagree. If people want to call it "main" that is OK and I do not have an objection, although slavery and racism is not a part of it. Using different words does not solve slavery or racism or anything like that. There are some minor advantages of "main", but many of the previous objections to the change are invalid and based on ignorance of the working of git; once I figured out how it works, I do not have an objection, since you can call the branches whatever you want to do anyways, and the names "master" is not something special anyways except for what it is called if you do not otherwise specify a name. Furthermore, existing repositories on GitHub are not automatically changed, and they added function for renaming branches (which can be useful for other reasons too), so for these reasons I think what they did is good. Some minor benefits of "main" is that it is shorter than "master" and starts with the same two letters as "master" (which might sometimes matter, e.g. if the branch names are listed in alphabetical order and you want to find them in the list). These benefits seems like only minor benefits to me, though. However, my opinion about the change in SQLite, changing a table name from SQLITE_MASTER to SQLITE_SCHEMA, is different. I think that the new name better describes what it is for (it is the table for the schema of the database), but I would not have made that change, since it can cause problems. They did consider some of them (such as authorizer callbacks, which is something that I had thought of too before I knew what they did about it), and work around them, but that just makes it more messy, so I still think it was a bad idea, but now it is done and it would not be good to undo this change, either. If I was in charge of it I would have deferred the change until SQLite4, rather than changing SQLite3. (There is also the issue of the SQLITE_SCHEMA error code.)

glitchc 2y ago

That should never have been banned. It was a stupid ban then and is a stupid ban now.

fzeroracer 2y ago

Can you point me when Biden or Obama issued a word ban around the words master and slave in an IT context? Thank you.

foxglacier 2y ago
Can you point to where Trump issued a word ban for grant funded research? Not this post, because it's not describing a word ban and it doesn't even seem to have a source.
- fzeroracer 2y ago
  I can in fact. Trump literally just issued a mass retraction and censorship of research publication depending on a set of keywords [1]. That is, by definition, a word ban for CDC-funded research. In fact you posted in that thread on HN, so you should already be very well aware of it. [1] https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orders-mass-retraction https://insidemedicine.substack.com/p/breaking-news-cdc-orde...
selimthegrim 2y ago
This was DC city government not Obama and Biden.

philipov 2y ago

There was never a ban like this on the master-slave terminology. A lot of places started moving away from those terms, but plenty of others just kept the old naming. There was no top-down directive from the federal government like there is here - I don't think it's fair to compare them as if they are equivalent situations. This is heavy-handed in a way that makes peer pressure look completely benign in comparison.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Yizahi 2y ago
The same issue as with some other terms in 21st century. For example monopoly by the 19th century definition would be almost impossible today, because "look, that company has a whopping 0.1% of the market, hence we with 99.9% are not a monopoly". So yeah, it wasn't banned everywhere, but that reached momentum wide enough for me to consider it essentially a ban. And as a I said below, even if call it not a ban but idk "popular advisory", the point is that it set a precedent. And now right wingers would really ban words they don't like. Also they may argue that they did not ban their words either. Can you apply for grant elsewhere? Yes you can, technically. "So what the problem"(c) they will ask.
- philipov 2y ago
  It's different because it's the federal government. You can't compare it to a bunch of companies deciding to do the same thing because of popular opinion. While both processes have their own mechanism for driving conformity, one is essentially democratic, while the other is strongly autocratic.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
belorn 2y ago

freejazz 2y ago

"banned"? Like there's some singular entity in charge of all of IT that gets to ban things?

Dig1t 2y ago
Yes, we have mandatory linter rules which won’t let us check in code that contains the word “whitelist” or “blacklist” or “master” because they are somehow racist. I work at the biggest tech company, which employs hundreds of thousands of people and these rules are applied across all codebases. This stuff is widespread across big companies and the government.
- freejazz 2y ago
  That's just your organization, I meant "all of IT" when I said "all of IT". There are posters here acting as if there is a singular entity in charge of IT, that forces this rule on everyone. I don't see what consequence it is that your particular organization prefers to do things its own way. It's a completely different proposition from pretending like the word is banned outright for everyone, by someone.
- rurp 2y ago
  There's a pretty big difference between a private company pandering to progressives by banning a few words versus the federal government suddenly declaring that many different words and concepts are banned. These NSF flags are just one case out of many, similar changes are being rushed out across every federal department. I agree that the word bans at your company are stupid, but the govt changes are a whole other level of bad.

Febra33 2y ago

That ban is imaginary. It never existed. Many people decided to use other terms at their free will and others didn't. Both terms can be still found in plenty of projects.

freejazz 2y ago
Master. Slave. Look at me go!
- Febra33 2y ago
  Oh no! You're banned now! Look, the international word police has put a warrant out for you. And other problems that do not exist.

Dig1t 2y ago

Absolutely correct. We’re still not allowed to use “whitelist” and “blacklist” because it’s somehow racism. We have linters which bar us from checking in code with these words and a bot which scolds us publicly in chats. Now the same people who applauded that policing of speech suddenly are offended when their explicit political speech is being removed. It’s just simply hypocrisy.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago
Way to 'what about' speech policing. Yay to normalizing less freedoms because 'someone else did something too'.
- Dig1t 2y ago
  I’m not trying to what about anything, I’m actually a fairly extreme free speech absolutist. I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy, the people complaining the loudest are the same people who exuberantly censor people they disagree with. These type of people have lost moral authority.
nom 2y ago
> and a bot which scolds us publicly in chats. that is quite disturbing to me
yibg 2y ago
That's ridiculous. I use whitelist and blacklist just fine and have for the last decade plus. No one in the government told me it wasn't allowed.
EdwardDiego 2y ago
You're really offended by these linters huh.
- Dig1t 2y ago
  I resent others trying to police my language, especially when the language is not offensive. People who do this obviously get joy out of bossing other people around and pretending they are being virtuous.

burkaman 2y ago

When you say they were "banned", do you mean a handful of companies voluntarily decided to stop using those words internally and published blog posts about it? I don't recall it going any further than that.

immibis 2y ago

These were not banned. I still call master-slave systems master-slave, and I haven't gotten banned from anywhere because of that. Some people don't like it, and other people don't like that some people don't like it, and some people ban its usage from their platforms, and other people enforce its usage on their platforms, which sounds like a free marketplace of ideas to me!

JeremyNT 2y ago

Nothing was banned, culture changed. This happens as you age. The world and customs you grew up with, despite how they may feel too you, are not the natural state of the world. Accept that new customs may replace them.

throwfgtpwd234 2y ago

Agreed. It's groups in multiple camps that want to force everyone to change how they do things. Superficial, performative "action" and causes don't change anything. Let's just be sensible and try not to harm or discriminate against anyone for any of their attributes. How is this so difficult? I think it's that there are too many people who have firmly married their identities to hate of their socially-acceptable (in their hermetically-sealed echo chamber of team red or team blue) scapegoats.