8 ms·

So they didn't remove it, they just renamed it? Reminds me of that time we fixed racism by renaming the master branch to main.

by rdiddly 6mo ago

claudiug 6mo ago
[flagged]
- rbanffy 6mo ago
  The BDSM community felt attacked.
  - tanseydavid 6mo ago
    If the pun was not intended, it should be.
Barbing 6mo ago
Maybe comparing <the sum total of annoyance from reading the old name> to <the current sum total of annoyance reading the current name>, it was a positive direction overall?
- lnenad 6mo ago
  I mean, if you were to do that, I'd wager more people are annoyed with the change than were annoyed with the original name. So no, it was a negative direction overall.
- stronglikedan 6mo ago
  nope. to this day, it's still fucks people up and causes mistakes. it was stupid then, and it's still just as stupid. virtue signalling is always fucking stupid, and sometimes, like in this case, is flat out egregious
  - smrtinsert 6mo ago
    At some point virtue signaling is fixing symptoms of the problem. Always had a problem with master slave terminology happy to see it gone.
    - anonymars 6mo ago
      You'll be happy to know in the context of a "master branch" it never had any connotation to slavery, except in the minds of people who see everything as a question of race* Anyway I'm off to listen to the 50th anniversary Dark Side of the Moon remaster. Wait, is "dark" an okay word? I didn't get a master's degree in English * Parallel ATA on the other hand, yeah, yikes
    - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
      > virtue signaling is fixing symptoms of the problem It diminishes the seriousness of the entire anti-racism movement by making it look petty, out of touch and more interested in creating nuisances than solving real problems. The San Francisco school board got fired for doing similar nonsense during COVID, renaming schools and thus showing they weren’t serious people.
      - zahlman 6mo ago
        > by making it look I have yet to see a good reason to believe that it isn't actually the case.
    - zahlman 6mo ago
      Can you, perhaps, cite your own pre-2020 writing attesting to the problem, and explaining why it should be considered a problem? Do you consider that using the name "master" for a branch tends to endorse or normalize slavery, or (even stochastically) increase the amount of slavery that occurs in the world? If so, how? If not, why is it actually a problem to reference the concept (even disregarding the evidence that it was not intended to do so)?
- rurp 6mo ago
  You need to add all of the real world breakage to scripts and tutorials on the right side of that ledger. Plus the negative effects of virtue signaling undermining efforts at substantive change. Also, are we supposed to ban the word master from all of it's dozens of normal English use-cases? I never got a clear answer on why git branch names were so much more harmful than someone mastering a skill or making a master record.
  - seanw444 6mo ago
    I suggest we all boycott Mastercard until they rename to Maincard. I simply cannot bring myself to generate revenue for a company so bigoted they'd use such an egregious name.
  - moduspol 6mo ago
    And somehow academia, the most enlightened among us, kept their master's degrees.
    - zahlman 6mo ago
      Somehow, "primary degree" really doesn't have the same ring to it.
  - Gagarin1917 6mo ago
    It’s just happened to be the intersection where an large amount of Internet crusaders exist AND where the non-crusaders are most likely to lay down and accept whatever the impassioned people want.
    - rurp 6mo ago
      This seems right to me. I thought the switch was dumb when my employer instituted it, but certainly didn't care enough to start a fight over such an emotional topic. I just burned the time to update some broken scripts and then moved on with my week.
- ecshafer 6mo ago
  I don’t believe that more than .0001% of people actually felt annoyance. Master branch was used referencing a master, as in the master copy of a record, not a slave master. No normal people were actually annoyed by that.
  - Gagarin1917 6mo ago
    My question is why normal people let the insane people have so much influence? We don’t actually have to be nice to people just because they’re slightly upset. Every time they get what they want, it emboldens them.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - Izkata 6mo ago
      It's a mix of a few things, the most important and easily missed nowadays is this particular thing happened when the extreme left was in near total control of the culture war. Some people didn't push back out of fear they'd be doxxed, their employers contacted, and lose their job (fear of being called racist or pro-slavery). Others thought it was so small it didn't matter. Others did it to just shut up the people piling on. Most normal people at this point hadn't even heard of the culture war, so trying to explain anything made you sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, so still others just didn't want the hit to their reputation.
- SkyeCA 6mo ago
  It was preformative nonsense that caused (and still causes!) more hassle than it was worth
- zahlman 6mo ago
  Can you name any person who publicly registered any form of annoyance reading the old name, prior to the movement to replace the name? Can you cite any person, before, during or after, who gave a valid, coherent argument as to why the old name should annoy anyone? (Or are you willing to attempt one yourself?) Note: the two arguments I am familiar with boil down to "it could be understood as describing a bad historical event, and ipso facto must not be uttered", and "if I am annoyed by something then that is inherently valid and you lack standing to question me, on account of my identity characteristics". I don't accept either of these as valid, for hopefully obvious reasons. (And in fact, I can't recall actually ever seeing the second argument deployed honestly. I can only recall seeing people not of the relevant identity characteristics presuming that they were defending people who would feel that way.)
eps 6mo ago
Slavery. It was meant to fix slavery. Rasism was fixed by not using black- and whitelists on firewalls. Separate endeavour.
Glant 6mo ago
At least Comcast isn't the company with the worst customer support now, we can give that honor to Xfinity
shye 6mo ago
People who claim the goal of changing the common terminology was to abolish or discourage racism are an example of why we are still having such prevalent racism all around.
- 8593376393 6mo ago
  [dead]
- abcd_f 6mo ago
  What was the goal then? Of those who demanded the change.
  - spartanatreyu 6mo ago
    There is a logical goal, but first one thing to address: There was a lot of dog-piling by culture-war peddlers. They try to ragebait people so they can pull you into their spheres of influence to sell you their supplements, placebos and political ads. They rely only on appeals to emotion (specifically knee-jerk reactions to any change). So they can be ignored. ----------------------------------- But now to the actual logical goal. The goal is to prevent mistraining. "Master" didn't really make sense. It was supposed to mean one thing that controls another thing (the slave), but nothing ever works out that way in reality. For example: - Written records/logs: A master record would sometimes be overridden by a slave record. Also, adding a third record for fault-tolerance to tie-break inconsistencies breaks the master/slave metaphor. - Storage media: "Master" records didn't make sense since you'd also have a "gold master", again breaking the metaphor. - Storage media devices: The master/slave pins in ATA/PATA devices (and similar) didn't actually do what they said on the tin. - Distributed Version Control Systems (e.g. git): It's distributed by design, there is no master. It didn't make sense in the git flow context, the trunk-based development context, the forked project context, the merged project context, the upstream/downstream context, etc... - ... and practically everywhere else you would run into a master/slave metaphor. Every system worked differently, and treated the metaphor differently too. ----------------------------------- The whole problem with a bad metaphor/analogy is that things don't work how the metaphor suggests they work. People are not sure where responsibility lies. Multiple people work under the same information and end up with incompatible understandings of how things actually work. If you're not familiar with ATA, you're going to come across the terms Secondary Master, and Primary Slave. Then you're going to run into questions like: How can there be more than one master? Does a primary master control a secondary master? What happens when they disagree? Does a primary slave control a secondary slave, or a secondary master? etc... Or worse, you're not going to ask the question and work under an assumption without realising it. Removing the possibility of that happening as much as possible makes everything better. It's always better to replace a confusing term with a less confusing term. That's why people stopped recommending "master" in git workflows. ----------------------------------- TL;DR: "main" reduces confusion in the git-flow context, "trunk" reduces confusion in the trunk-based development context.
Bender 6mo ago
People still list their master's degree on their CV.

So they didn't remove it, they just renamed it? Reminds me of that time we fixed racism by renaming the master branch to main.

by rdiddly 6mo ago

So they didn't remove it, they just renamed it? Reminds me of that time we fixed racism by renaming the master branch to main.

claudiug 6mo ago

[flagged]

rbanffy 6mo ago
The BDSM community felt attacked.
- tanseydavid 6mo ago
  If the pun was not intended, it should be.

Barbing 6mo ago

Maybe comparing <the sum total of annoyance from reading the old name> to <the current sum total of annoyance reading the current name>, it was a positive direction overall?

lnenad 6mo ago
I mean, if you were to do that, I'd wager more people are annoyed with the change than were annoyed with the original name. So no, it was a negative direction overall.
stronglikedan 6mo ago
nope. to this day, it's still fucks people up and causes mistakes. it was stupid then, and it's still just as stupid. virtue signalling is always fucking stupid, and sometimes, like in this case, is flat out egregious
- smrtinsert 6mo ago
  At some point virtue signaling is fixing symptoms of the problem. Always had a problem with master slave terminology happy to see it gone.
  - anonymars 6mo ago
    You'll be happy to know in the context of a "master branch" it never had any connotation to slavery, except in the minds of people who see everything as a question of race* Anyway I'm off to listen to the 50th anniversary Dark Side of the Moon remaster. Wait, is "dark" an okay word? I didn't get a master's degree in English * Parallel ATA on the other hand, yeah, yikes
  - JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > virtue signaling is fixing symptoms of the problem It diminishes the seriousness of the entire anti-racism movement by making it look petty, out of touch and more interested in creating nuisances than solving real problems. The San Francisco school board got fired for doing similar nonsense during COVID, renaming schools and thus showing they weren’t serious people.
    - zahlman 6mo ago
      > by making it look I have yet to see a good reason to believe that it isn't actually the case.
  - zahlman 6mo ago
    Can you, perhaps, cite your own pre-2020 writing attesting to the problem, and explaining why it should be considered a problem? Do you consider that using the name "master" for a branch tends to endorse or normalize slavery, or (even stochastically) increase the amount of slavery that occurs in the world? If so, how? If not, why is it actually a problem to reference the concept (even disregarding the evidence that it was not intended to do so)?
rurp 6mo ago
You need to add all of the real world breakage to scripts and tutorials on the right side of that ledger. Plus the negative effects of virtue signaling undermining efforts at substantive change. Also, are we supposed to ban the word master from all of it's dozens of normal English use-cases? I never got a clear answer on why git branch names were so much more harmful than someone mastering a skill or making a master record.
- seanw444 6mo ago
  I suggest we all boycott Mastercard until they rename to Maincard. I simply cannot bring myself to generate revenue for a company so bigoted they'd use such an egregious name.
- moduspol 6mo ago
  And somehow academia, the most enlightened among us, kept their master's degrees.
  - zahlman 6mo ago
    Somehow, "primary degree" really doesn't have the same ring to it.
- Gagarin1917 6mo ago
  It’s just happened to be the intersection where an large amount of Internet crusaders exist AND where the non-crusaders are most likely to lay down and accept whatever the impassioned people want.
  - rurp 6mo ago
    This seems right to me. I thought the switch was dumb when my employer instituted it, but certainly didn't care enough to start a fight over such an emotional topic. I just burned the time to update some broken scripts and then moved on with my week.
ecshafer 6mo ago
I don’t believe that more than .0001% of people actually felt annoyance. Master branch was used referencing a master, as in the master copy of a record, not a slave master. No normal people were actually annoyed by that.
- Gagarin1917 6mo ago
  My question is why normal people let the insane people have so much influence? We don’t actually have to be nice to people just because they’re slightly upset. Every time they get what they want, it emboldens them.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Izkata 6mo ago
    It's a mix of a few things, the most important and easily missed nowadays is this particular thing happened when the extreme left was in near total control of the culture war. Some people didn't push back out of fear they'd be doxxed, their employers contacted, and lose their job (fear of being called racist or pro-slavery). Others thought it was so small it didn't matter. Others did it to just shut up the people piling on. Most normal people at this point hadn't even heard of the culture war, so trying to explain anything made you sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, so still others just didn't want the hit to their reputation.
SkyeCA 6mo ago
It was preformative nonsense that caused (and still causes!) more hassle than it was worth
zahlman 6mo ago
Can you name any person who publicly registered any form of annoyance reading the old name, prior to the movement to replace the name? Can you cite any person, before, during or after, who gave a valid, coherent argument as to why the old name should annoy anyone? (Or are you willing to attempt one yourself?) Note: the two arguments I am familiar with boil down to "it could be understood as describing a bad historical event, and ipso facto must not be uttered", and "if I am annoyed by something then that is inherently valid and you lack standing to question me, on account of my identity characteristics". I don't accept either of these as valid, for hopefully obvious reasons. (And in fact, I can't recall actually ever seeing the second argument deployed honestly. I can only recall seeing people not of the relevant identity characteristics presuming that they were defending people who would feel that way.)

eps 6mo ago

Slavery. It was meant to fix slavery. Rasism was fixed by not using black- and whitelists on firewalls. Separate endeavour.

Glant 6mo ago

At least Comcast isn't the company with the worst customer support now, we can give that honor to Xfinity

shye 6mo ago

People who claim the goal of changing the common terminology was to abolish or discourage racism are an example of why we are still having such prevalent racism all around.

8593376393 6mo ago
[dead]
abcd_f 6mo ago
What was the goal then? Of those who demanded the change.
- spartanatreyu 6mo ago
  There is a logical goal, but first one thing to address: There was a lot of dog-piling by culture-war peddlers. They try to ragebait people so they can pull you into their spheres of influence to sell you their supplements, placebos and political ads. They rely only on appeals to emotion (specifically knee-jerk reactions to any change). So they can be ignored. ----------------------------------- But now to the actual logical goal. The goal is to prevent mistraining. "Master" didn't really make sense. It was supposed to mean one thing that controls another thing (the slave), but nothing ever works out that way in reality. For example: - Written records/logs: A master record would sometimes be overridden by a slave record. Also, adding a third record for fault-tolerance to tie-break inconsistencies breaks the master/slave metaphor. - Storage media: "Master" records didn't make sense since you'd also have a "gold master", again breaking the metaphor. - Storage media devices: The master/slave pins in ATA/PATA devices (and similar) didn't actually do what they said on the tin. - Distributed Version Control Systems (e.g. git): It's distributed by design, there is no master. It didn't make sense in the git flow context, the trunk-based development context, the forked project context, the merged project context, the upstream/downstream context, etc... - ... and practically everywhere else you would run into a master/slave metaphor. Every system worked differently, and treated the metaphor differently too. ----------------------------------- The whole problem with a bad metaphor/analogy is that things don't work how the metaphor suggests they work. People are not sure where responsibility lies. Multiple people work under the same information and end up with incompatible understandings of how things actually work. If you're not familiar with ATA, you're going to come across the terms Secondary Master, and Primary Slave. Then you're going to run into questions like: How can there be more than one master? Does a primary master control a secondary master? What happens when they disagree? Does a primary slave control a secondary slave, or a secondary master? etc... Or worse, you're not going to ask the question and work under an assumption without realising it. Removing the possibility of that happening as much as possible makes everything better. It's always better to replace a confusing term with a less confusing term. That's why people stopped recommending "master" in git workflows. ----------------------------------- TL;DR: "main" reduces confusion in the git-flow context, "trunk" reduces confusion in the trunk-based development context.

Bender 6mo ago

People still list their master's degree on their CV.