GitHub, fuck your name change

We need to become the the decision-makers. And stop listening to the current ones.

This isn’t a real thing. It’s an artificial nonsense of social media. It’s nonsense for two reasons:

1a. The number of valid participants is low. It is easy to feel powerful sitting comfortably hidden in your parent’s basement behind a keyboard craving attention and direction. Misery loves company and when such people band together their numbers can appear large compared to something like a real world gathering of persons in a physical space. But it’s not real people in a real space, because that takes considerably greater effort.

1b. The numbers also appear artificially inflated because there is a low effort of repetition, which can appear as false participation, spam, trolling, denial of service.

2. There isn’t any real investment in most of this. Most of the motivation are bored people looking for inspiration to be emotionally concerned. They will point where the carrot leads. That isn’t a movement. A real movement features numerous participants willing to make a personal investment like those criminals that stormed the capital.

I doubt there are very many people seriously offended by "master", "whitelist", and so on. However, I think we should probably stop using them anyways. The reason is that many people who are introduced to these terms for the first time are likely to have a negative reaction of some sort. Like "is it okay to say that?" or "eww" or "that's not aging well" or whatever. Maybe I reacted that way, or maybe not. The point is, it was long enough ago for me to forget and my tendency is to use them without thinking about their possible connotations to someone (often children) who encounter them for the first time. Until recently when people pointed out that maybe we should use other terms.

This is a small change, but a good one. There are bigger things that need to be changed as well, and we shouldn't use this one thing to pat ourselves on the back for being especially enlightened.

(Regarding those other things: at my employer, some guidance came down to transition away from these terms in our code and documentation, and there was the kind of debate you'd expect in any tech company. I made a comment something along the lines of: "not using master/slave in our technical documents isn't silencing speech. It doesn't mean we can't use the word 'slave' when talking about the real issues of forced labor, it just means we should stop using it in a case where that language is unhelpful and confusing." Fast forward a month or two and we had an opportunity to share questions we had for our CEO during his quarterly business update. I submitted a question about our manufacturing facilities in China and whether we should continue doing business there given the bad things the government is doing to Uighurs. This was removed by a moderator and I got a sternly-worded email about not trolling and complying with (internal) social media guidelines and so on. So, I guess it turns out you can't talk about slavery after all. I don't think there's any correlation between avoiding master/slave in technical communication and corporate hesitancy to allow internal communication about doing business in a country that's causing a major humanitarian crisis. But still, it seems like even companies that are in some ways committed to doing the right thing still behave erratically when it comes to some moral questions.)

Slavery which didn't happen in America doesn't count.