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On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

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Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first comment on the page is important to pay attention to: http://antirez.com/news/122#comment-4084872912

The one that gets its cachet from its ostensibly having been written by a Black man but is associated with an avatar which is a stock photo of a Black man? I’m less sure than you are.

You're right, I found the stock photo: https://pixabay.com/photos/fashion-afro-american-black-peopl...

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#92
post #6

I've read about a bunch of these renaming efforts in the past weeks and I think some of these are very justified while some of them seem to take it further than necessary. The master/slave naming seems clearly outdated to me and this one is a direct reference to slavery. A better word like replica exists so I'm using that instead. This makes a lot of sense. On the other hand there's efforts to rename white/black list…

Because the entire point is to be permanently offended. The people pushing for these changes hold political power based entirely on pushing for change. The push for political correctness can never end for them, because then they will lose power.

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#93

It doesn't matter if YOU don't think it's offensive. It's about how others think and feel about it. Are people really so self-centered that they can't understand that? And the slippery slope argument doesn't hold water because it's very obvious when a good number of people have a problem with it vs one or two people who are trying to be provocative. People are reasonable and if they are telling you something bothers…

> It doesn't matter if YOU don't think it's offensive. It's about how others think and feel about it. Your premise actually means no feelings matter and it doesn't matter what anybody thinks. It's self-collapsing and reveals the contradiction in what you're proposing.

No it doesn't. It just means you can't rely on a single (your) viewpoint when it comes to a large community-involved open source project. It's the equivalent of "works on my machine".

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#94
post #13

I suspect this is one of those topics that at some point, everyone will have just switched terms because it's not worth the hassle to fight these fights over and over again. Kind of a "I'm not wrong, but is it a good use of 20 hours a year to argue about this?"

Looks like that's the very point the author is trying to make. We can't give in to the dictatorship of the Small Minority specially when the most intolerant people seem to scream the loudest.

It's a bit unclear if you are just trying to express the authors views or your own, but if those are your own views I felt that it warranted a reply.

The concept of "dictatorship of small minority" implies that the only governing principle should be the vote of the majority. But that is a deeply flawed system, if there wasn't any other rule than "majority wins" then all oppression of minorities becomes valid and all abuse where the perpetrators outnumber the victims.

For a system to be fair there must exist more rules than that, for example "respect bodily autonomy" and "no oppression of minorities" and so on. Many of those rules are more fundamental than the "majority wins" rule and more important to uphold.

If those are not your own views: Sorry for the rant.

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#96
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah? I don't see evidence that every two years a new word gets brigaded in source code. Do you have examples of projects this has been happening to? If not, this seems like a slippery slope fallacy.

You're right, master/slave and the new blacklist/whitelist demands did not have two years between them, not even this post is two years old.

Both of those have been discussions for much longer than two years. There's at least a decade of discussions around those two examples.

Edit: closer to two decades - in 2003 LA asked electronics manufacturers not to use the language. Presumably this was first discussed by the community. In the mid aughts, Microsoft was using allowlist/deny list.

So, hardly a recent phenomena, and certainly not every two years. Yes, some projects have been faster or slower to adopt replacements for these terms, which is why you have seen a few discussions in the past few weeks on HN.

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#97
post #18

Note that this is from 2018. I personally totally agree with the author. Anyone who chooses to be offended by words used in a totally different context is doing exactly that - choosing to be offended. If we keep going down this path of endless meaningless virtue signalling, where will we stop? Is the term "black hole" racist too? What about blackout? Etc, etc. No one really cares about these terms and it they do thei…

Agreed. There is widespread discrimination in the media against politically incorrect people. Political incorrectness is part of my personal identity. I didn't choose to be born careless, it's a natural tendency that I have. I'm sorry I wasn't born as an easily offended person.

I don't get offended by other people's words and I don't expect other people to be offended by my words either. Does that make me a bad person? Should we just get rid of people like me from society? Replace me with more offended people who take everything seriously?

I thought that division and extremism was a problem of our modern society? I guess I must be wrong there too. Opinionated, offended people often tell me that I'm wrong. They say it so aggressively, I guess they must be right.

Usually, when people feel strongly about something, it's a good indication that they're right.

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#98
post #9

In the meantime, the Slave terminology is on its way out in Redis too. Here are a few commits: https://github.com/antirez/redis/search?q=%22slave+removal%2... Here's the issue where some of the discussion happened: https://github.com/antirez/redis/issues/5335

Interesting – looks like he made those commits a handful of days after this article came out (written Sep 7 2018, commits were Sep 10~13 2018).

It seems they weren't released in GA until 6.0.0, which came out in April 2020.

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#99
post #37
post #18

Note that this is from 2018. I personally totally agree with the author. Anyone who chooses to be offended by words used in a totally different context is doing exactly that - choosing to be offended. If we keep going down this path of endless meaningless virtue signalling, where will we stop? Is the term "black hole" racist too? What about blackout? Etc, etc. No one really cares about these terms and it they do thei…

> Is the term "black hole" racist too? That has been objected to [1][2][3]. A white county commissioner described a slow office as a black hole for paperwork, a black county commissioner said that was racist and it should be called a white hole, and a black judge asked the first commissioner to apologize for his racist remark. Also, "angel food cake" and "devil's food cake" were also declared racist, apparently, in t…

Perhaps not racist but the origin is quite horrifying

According to Hong-Yee Chiu, an astrophysicist at NASA, the Black Hole of Calcutta was the inspiration for the term black hole referring to regions of space-time resulting from the gravitational collapse of very heavy stars. He recalled hearing physicist Robert Dicke in the early 1960s compare such gravitationally collapsed objects to the prison

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_of_Calcutta

Re: On Redis master-slave terminology (2018)

#100
(I have no opposition to replacing master-slave, this is not intended as bait - I'm curious what others think).

How about "robot?" From "Broken Metaphor: The Master-Slave Analogy in Technical Literature" [1]:

> a new term meaning "slave" was entering the English language to describe an autonomous device meant to obey its master: "robot," from the 1923 translation of Karel Cˇapek's 1921 play R.U.R. (the word robot having been derived from a Czech word for slave, "robotnik").

If 'robot' isn't problematic, why is that? Is it because because the word is more decoupled from its origin than 'slave,' or because the origin of the word is less well known? Or is the negative-ness lost in translation?

[1] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/215390

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