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GitHub, fuck your name change

mooseyanon.medium.com

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Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#171

Post by elsjaako »

tomtomtom777 wrote: post #82
qwerty456127 wrote: post #11

I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word but I can see nothing wrong in "master". Not a single moment in my life I thought about slavery when hearing/seeing the word "master". Should we also rename master degrees perhaps?

> I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word Can you clarify this? If one machine/repo/system acts only on the orders of another, wouldn't "master" and "slave" be clear, descriptive choices of words?

Let's say you had a database based application and a feature to remove a subset of records. You wouldn't call that feature any variant of "ethnic clensing", "genocide" or "Holocaust", no matter how descriptive those terms were for your specific function.

Slavery was really bad, and for that reason shouln't be used as a description.

There are always alternatives, like "leader and follower"

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#172

Post by skytreader »

rvnx wrote: post #52

Wasn't it GitLab actually ? Otherwise, about the article, it's unfair to say that we need to correct the AI/ML to a more "neutral" perspective. I'm always worried about artificial "neutrality", as neutrality often ends up just adding more weight to the perspective that you consider more socially and politically acceptable. In Australia for example, French people have a bad reputation because they tend to steal from s…

The current problem surrounding using AI/ML in this area is that it can't distinguish between Jean Pierre and John Paul, Luc and Luke and authorities rely on it with no nuance or discernment.

You worry about artificial neutrality creeping in to the algorithms, but the algorithms already reflect human bias. We can't even reliably tell where someone is from yet we expect our AI to do it close to flawlessly.

I'm from East Asia and I think I can distinguish an East Asian's country of origin maybe 70% of the time. But 70% is nowhere near good enough if a person's life literally depends on the decision. And I bet you'd be hard-pressed to find someone even in around 90% accuracy. Migration and shared culture, among other things, make this difficult.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#173

Post by willhinsa »

dkdbejwi383 wrote: post #153

Digressing here, but I really dislike Medium. I wanted to look up HBCUs which is an acronym in this article I was not familiar with (I am not American), but Medium's crappy UI displays a "quote on Twitter" popup thing when you select any text, and then deselects the text. This means I can't use the "look up" feature but into the OS, like I can on almost every other web page.

Agreed. For anyone's reference, here's what the acronym HBCU means:

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

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#174

Post by rgoulter »

tsbinz wrote: post #34
sunaurus wrote: post #4

I feel like this topic has been discussed a lot already, but I think it's important to keep pushing back against useless wasted man-hours like this effort is. I live in a country that was almost entirely enslaved by foreigners for ~700 years. I've discussed this rename with dozens of engineers in my country. Without exception, every single one of them thinks it's completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these t…

So you say spending time on this topic is wasted time, and your solution is to spend more time on pushing back?

I think this is kindof an important question. "If it's so insignificant, why do you care?".

I don't think it's so hard to understand why some people might be irritated, though. The social attitude that motivates the change to switch away from the term 'master' is not widely held outside of a subset of Americans who are apparently vastly over represented in making these kinds of decisions. It's a bit grating to be saying "consider how others feel" while ignoring how most people feel about it, and making the change made you want anyway.

It's a zeitgeist which results in things like someone complaining that VSCode including a candy cane icon is more offensive than the swastika, and the VSCode repository acceeding this complaint. - I feel if that's where you end up from wanting everyone to feel welcome and included, that you've gotten lost along the way.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#175

Post by KaiserPro »

Now I know this post is going to be jumped on by a whole bunch of tech bro going "I TOLD YOU, ITS POINTLESS TO CHANGE THE NAME" and yes, yes it is, for the reasons described so clearly by OP.

However what the tech bros then get upset by is increasing participation in IT in general. muttering things like "lowering standards" and "they'll get promotion before me". No darlings, they are doing a better job, because they are not snowflakes who throw their toys out of the pram for being asked to actually document their shit, or not replace good code with an entirely new language because they were bored.

I work for a FAANG in london, and what pisses me off is that despite having >4,000 staff in london alone, we only had 10, yes fucking 10 apprentices in 2019.

For those that don't know, its essentially a free pipeline of eager, cheap and clever teenagers. You get them for 3 days a week at below minimum wage, and they spend two days a week getting academic education. Whats more, because they are local to central london they are actually representative of the local demographics.

And they have the brass bollocks to complain about how difficult it is to recruit.

We had a juneteenth thing, where lots of our leadership took that as a sign to get a new headshot done so they could put the tiniest ring of text saying how they will work tirelessly to increase D&I.

almost a year later, and with a huge glut of 18-25s out of work, have we increased the apprentice count? nope.

fucking sort it out, and no, a butterfly rule is not going to fix it.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#177

Post by dna_polymerase »

I think that measures like renaming stuff creates a bunch of problems that ultimately make things harder than they already are.

Once people understand that there is a changing nomenclature that has to be used they will completely shut up about a topic in fear of repercussions from a hate mob. This in turn will eventually lead to the unconscious but very real behavior of distancing from minority groups. It worsens things. People need to understand that by forcing language change they will further divide people.

Geroge Floyd isn't dead because Linus called the git branch master. He is dead because of police misconduct. And GitHub won't be able to change that, the government needs to send police officers to academy for longer and train them right. They also need to introduce an environment in which this behavior is not tolerated and officers will lose their jobs if they behave this way.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#178

Post by wraptile »

zimpenfish wrote: post #134
tda wrote: post #12

Though I initially sympathized with the name change from master to main (cause I don't care what it is called), I am now more of the opinion that this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause. It is a bit complicated as the name change in itself is not bad, but given the context, and that it distracts from addressing real issues it actually is. Same thing with p…

> as it distracts from addressing the root cause. This would imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time and, potentially, that they're only capable of doing one thing full stop. I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought "yep, I don't have to think about slavery now". > think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible. Well, I guess th…

> This would imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time

No, but it certainly makes you care less. Human attention is not linear.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#180

Post by himinlomax »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #11

I would agree "slave" seems a weird choice of a word but I can see nothing wrong in "master". Not a single moment in my life I thought about slavery when hearing/seeing the word "master". Should we also rename master degrees perhaps?

Note how master is not even the main term used to describe people who had slaves. The term typically used is owner, as in "so and so was a slaveowner."

A Marxist would chuckle at the notion that Microsoft would be removing the word "owner" for being offensive.

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