Thunderbird 91.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Thunderbird 91.0

#231

Post by handrous » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

fluidcruft wrote: post #190

BoxOfRain wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This kind of corporate "we need to be seen to be doing something rather than nothing" stuff does wind me up, it just makes people more annoyed (by breaking scripts and causing unnecessary UI changes etc) and less receptive to actual arguments for social change while at the same time producing no practical increase in social justice. It's just inauthentic tokenism designed to keep the baying beast that is Twitter away…

It could also have been that an end user filed a bug report or feature request and made a convincing case. Then someone just reads over the commit logs to write the version announcement. It does just seem to be an outgrowth of the whole "master" branch thing in git and low-hanging fruit for a contributor to tackle. Overall who cares, really. "Primary password" is better than "Main password" IMHO. I'm also not sure "M…

"Master password"'s advantage is the connection to the term, from the normal, non-computer world, "master key".

Re: Thunderbird 91.0

#232

Post by flippinburgers » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

Delk wrote: post #204

Geezus_42 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company made the change from blacklist/whitelist to blocklist/allow list over two years ago and people, mostly external, still get annoyed and I just can't understand why. The former is literally one letter different and the latter makes just as much, arguably more, sense than the term it replaced. I get that some people see it as just posturing but you have to start somewhere if you are going to change the cultur…

I have no trouble believing that the sentiment behind those changes is genuine. However, I'm also somewhat annoyed by these kinds of changes, mostly because I would never have associated the "black" in blacklist with the skin colour until someone started pointing it out as an issue. While some terminology might be actually problematic, from my point of view there was never any problem with the word blacklist until so…

I cannot see it as anything other than social conditioning to take something that was previously not an issue and make it into one that now must be "solved". I think that hyper-focus on "racism" only divides people from one another.

I really don't understand the endgame but I feel like a small group of people who would make wonderful evangelicals have grown up into the secular role of "solvers" of "racial issues".

Re: Thunderbird 91.0

#233

Post by callahad » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:40 PM UTC

hosteur wrote: post #142

callahad wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sustain had a good podcast with Ryan Sipes (Community and Biz Dev Manager for Thunderbird) back in Februrary: https://podcast.sustainoss.org/67

Will add that to my queue for later Do you have a TL;DL?

I did back in February, but I'm unlikely to be able to completely accurately recount that now.

One thing I do remember is Ryan explaining how just being willing to directly ask people for money has been surprisingly effective.

It's also worth putting Thunderbird's relationship to Mozilla in proper perspective: for all intents and purposes, Thunderbird is a completely independent project. Since 2017 (https://blog.thunderbird.net/2017/05/thunderbirds-future-hom...), the Mozilla Foundation has primarily acted as Thunderbird's fiscal home, providing support for donations / bookkeeping / taxes / legal matters much in the same way that the Software Freedom Conservancy hosts Git, Homebrew, Inkscape and others, or how Software in the Public Interest hosts PostgreSQL, systemd, Xorg, FFmpeg, 0 A.D, and more.

If I understand last year's MZLA Technologies announcement correctly (https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/), it sounds similar to the split between the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation, where the former is a legal non-profit and the latter entity is for-profit and able to enter into commercial, revenue-generating agreements, but still wholly owned by the non-profit Foundation.

...But you should really listen to the podcast, I could be getting all of this wildly wrong.

Re: Thunderbird 91.0

#234

Post by flippinburgers » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #167

Geezus_42 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My company made the change from blacklist/whitelist to blocklist/allow list over two years ago and people, mostly external, still get annoyed and I just can't understand why. The former is literally one letter different and the latter makes just as much, arguably more, sense than the term it replaced. I get that some people see it as just posturing but you have to start somewhere if you are going to change the cultur…

By this logic probably 1/3 of literature is going to have to be banned or edited. Using 'light' for 'good' which mostly derives from daylight, the sun, daytime etc. and darkness for 'bad' etc. might be the most ancient human metaphor, probably dating back to the time we could tell stories. Our first religion, in Egypt, the Sun was God and the God of the 'Dark Underworld' was the bad guy. Moreover, it doesn't really h…

Don't be surprised when text editing AI becomes savvy enough to do this sort of thing and then that is advocated for.

Re: Thunderbird 91.0

#235

Post by BoxOfRain » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:44 PM UTC

getlawgdon wrote: post #150

ekianjo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect employees want their work to make them feel good in terms of alignment with their bedrock principles. if it makes you feel good to play with words I am not sure if thats a good energy expenditure for your activism. it feels like a cheap way to value signal instead of doing something actually meaningful.

Words have meaning and power. How they are used literally changes the discourse. Your participation in this discussion is proof that the example under consideration has impact well beyond "playing with words."

I think lots of people are uncomfortable with language being changed in a top-down way by people who aren't particularly democratically accountable more than anything.

To be honest I'm not sure where I stand on prescriptivism as a concept. If there's a genuine organic demand (as opposed to corporate PR people playing tokenism) for it in the context of tackling racism then fair enough I can get behind that, but I don't really like the idea of language itself being used as a political cudgel to beat your opponents with. The word Orwellian is relentlessly misused these days but I think if we are going to forcefully change language it needs to be something done with great consideration and democratic oversight to avoid this tool being wielded abusively. For example, I'd love to abolish all Americanisms from British English which is exactly why I'd be grossly unfit for such a language-defining duty!

Re: Thunderbird 91.0

#236

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

getlawgdon wrote: post #150

ekianjo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect employees want their work to make them feel good in terms of alignment with their bedrock principles. if it makes you feel good to play with words I am not sure if thats a good energy expenditure for your activism. it feels like a cheap way to value signal instead of doing something actually meaningful.

Words have meaning and power. How they are used literally changes the discourse. Your participation in this discussion is proof that the example under consideration has impact well beyond "playing with words."

[deleted]

Re: Thunderbird 91.0

#237

Post by slantyyz » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:50 PM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #225

542458 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word fa***t predates it’s use as a slur for homosexuals, but I don’t think anybody reasonable would argue that it’s not commonly perceived as an offensive term. These are obviously different degrees of subjective “offensiveness”, but my point is that people don’t sit down and work out the etymology before deciding if something makes them feel bad.

Snowflake is an insulting term for overly sensitive SJWs... but it's also a word for an actual snowflake. No matter how offensive it is to someone, we still need a word for literal snowflakes falling from the clouds.

It's also used to describe a shape. For example, a "snowflake" schema.

Re: Thunderbird 91.0

#238

Post by skytreader » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

el_oni wrote: post #227

skytreader wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the analogy had been "master-apprentice" instead there probably wouldnt be as much pushback everywhere else Except, you know, apprentices eventually become masters themselves. And the space isn't zero-sum; "Master Verrochio taught Master Leonardo" is semantically valid. It doesn't illustrate the semantics of, say, data replication where there is only one master at a time and the slaves are not supposed to be pro…

>only one master at a time and the slaves are not meant to be promoted. So not like a historical master-slave relationship. Master-slave may capture the relationship, but humans still have to read, write and interact with those systems. Some of those humans still suffer from the legacy of slavery, jim crow and voter suppression. We can come up with analogies and metaphors which arent so evocative and make working wit…

This might be a difference in values but to describe the metaphor as "flippant" is rather puritan don't you think? It's not as if the metaphor is reducing the gravitas of the issue. It does not even make a value judgment on whether or not slavery is wrong. It is a neutral metaphor at best.

If we as a society move to a state where a metaphor like so is verboten just because it is less pleasant or already considered "evocative" then how can we have deep and nuanced discussions on this period itself? You know the ones where we explicitly acknowledge the horrors of slave dehumanization, the terrible working conditions in the plantations, the violence stemming from these racist beliefs, among others.

Those issues are too heavy to be evoked by the metaphor (and frankly irrelevant to its purpose) and yet our current trajectory would want people to do away with it when it only serves to illustrates the relationship between computing resources. It's not even a comment on social history.

Re: Thunderbird 91.0

#239

Post by raffraffraff » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 3:02 PM UTC

dotancohen wrote: post #26

> "Master Password" renamed to "Primary Password" How does the term "Primary Password" describe the password which enables access to the list of credentials better than "Master Password"? Are they just entertained by the alliteration?

No, it's the whole "the word 'master' is somehow racist" crap.

Re: Thunderbird 91.0

#240

Post by brnt » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 3:09 PM UTC

mdp2021 wrote: post #191

brnt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, and I agree. However, languages live and the people of the USA are an important determinant of where the English language is headed. They have a particular history involving this word, and that history has not been fully reckoned with. It makes sense that the same word, although in other contexts with a slightly different meaning, would be redefined or removed this way, in order to deal with that histo…

I am not sure if I will be able to convey the point as well as I wish, but: don't you think this way the enemy wins a battle ? Terrorists attempt bending politics through terrorizing: if one is terrorized, is that one not playing their game? We greet in some sensible way, say, and somebody comes and promotes the greeting as now meaning "short people should stick to accounting": that somebody should not be nobilitated…

> «Languages live», but uprooted they go astray.

That is nonsensical. There is no such thing as a line language should not stray too far from. Languages are what they are, plain and simple. The fact that you speak English, is already a horrible affront to the French, the Celts, Angles, Saxons, both in their current day form and that of yesteryear, and any precursors to those languages in turn. English shouldn't even have the Latin-derived 'master' in the first place, if we're going that way.

I am absolutely sensitive to the argument that 'master' originally, or in some other context, is not opposed by 'slave', but 'inferior' or somesuch. And it is how I've used the word, and how it and its native equivalent is used in my native tongue. But that is no argument for fixing a particular meaning or context as more important or 'native' than any other.

Language is fundamentally, deeply promiscuous, and English may be the most promiscuous of them all. If this is a problem for you, your best bet is a dead language, or one you create yourself. You can fork anything you wish after all, that's how languages work :)