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GitHub, fuck your name change

mooseyanon.medium.com

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Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#221

Post by skrebbel »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #144
skrebbel wrote: post #133

I teach 2 git classes each year. I used to use GitHub for the pull/push section of the class, but last autumn half the class got stuck with branch name mismatches. I switched to GitLab in the next class. Surely this is just anecdata, but it seems to me that there can be real commercial consequences to letting your business get hijacked by the thought police.

Sounds like you should just update your teaching material to match how GitHub works.

Wait, I need to explain details of remotes and named branches before a basic collaboration exercise because some angry lefties in California got offended? Come on. Git can be very overwhelming to new users. Any concept I can leave undiscussed before people can get their hands dirty is a win. GitHub forces me to add a concept for political reasons.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#222

Post by Symbiote »

> Out of curiosity I asked my manager, who is like 20 yrs older than me, if he had ever been stopped and searched, he said not once in his life.

I had a similar conversation when a black colleague was late for work, having been stopped and searched by the police in London.

The other 10 (white) developers were all shocked, but he said it as casually as someone might report they'd missed the train, or had a puncture on a bicycle. He was stopped regularly, nothing to be done about it.

No one else had ever been stopped.

(A few months later, one of these white developers and I were walking away from the office when the other guy was stopped by the police. They searched his backpack on suspicion of theft. They told us the description was "white youth, short black hair, red football shirt, riding a blue mountain bike with a black backpack", which exactly matched my colleague.)

The government figures say, from April 2019 to March 2020:

> there were 6 stop and searches for every 1,000 White people, compared with 54 for every 1,000 Black people

and this is an improvement!

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/crime-jus...

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#223

Post by joseluisq »

Copied and pasted from the article:

> So what would our tech bro saviors have found out if they had actually bothered to talk to anyone black? Well, at least this black person would have told them that calling the branch master is not offensive. Furthermore, black people as a collective are not triggered by words like master wherever they appear in the wild. Context people, context. Banning a word because you think it’s offensive is basically telling us what we should and should not be offended by. There are bigger problems around inclusivity that deserve our time, let us put this drive for change into those.

It speaks by itself. I agree.

--

Honestly trying to connect vaguely the calamity of racism or the master/slave human abuse and then bringing them forcibly into the context of a software term "master" used as a naming convention to describe the root (default) repository's branch is just stupid and insane.

Simply because both contexts are completely different. So try to mix them is big mistake and confusion-prone. Even it can fracture your community (if maybe it's already).

It's sad see how devs/companies are supporting this stupid idea of the change or even worse they encourage you to do it so.

Fortunately there are humans (devs) who really understand the matter and don't buy this nonsense.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#224

Post by KaiserPro »

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…

> Otherwise, about the article, it's unfair to say that we need to correct the AI/ML to a more "neutral" perspective.

I work in ML. its not neutrality, its representation.

if you use your own staff to train a face detector, a detector to detect small faces in CCTV, it'll only work on your staff. It won't pick up children, anybody who is slightly brown, anyone with big hair, or people who wear hats.

thats rubbish if you expect your models to work in the wider world.

don't think of is as political, think of it as trying to release a word processor to the world that only support ANSII, and wondering why its not selling overseas.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#225

Post by 4140tm »

cies wrote: post #99
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…

I agree that master->main is pretty pointless. But what about getting rid of "slave", "blacklist" and "whitelist". The last two kind of opened my eyes to connotation of black and white, that may be problematic to some. Also I find "allow/denylist" more descriptive, maybe that helps.

Do you think there's any relation between the naming of whitelist/blacklist and skin color? I certainly don't. Colors and their associations exist beyond racial identity.

Also, what is the problem in calling the relationship between two processes (one fully controlling the other) master-slave? It's a perfectly suitable analogy and does not have anything to do with any one person's ethnicity or history. I'll go a step further and say that looking at this whole thing entirely in the context of the mistreatment of african americans is unfair to people all over the world who have a history of slavery - as other posters have noted, there are plenty examples of that for people of all races. This is not exclusive to one group of people and no one can claim ownership of the word.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#226

Post by sennight »

benrbray wrote: post #167
sennight wrote: post #41

...and nobody in the valley seems to be aware of the etymology for "slave" :)

For the lazy, here [1,2] are some wiktionary links. Assuming these are correct, wow, this makes the whole main vs master thing seem even more silly. > SLAVE: From Middle English, from Old French sclave, from Medieval Latin sclāvus (“slave”), from Late Latin Sclāvus (“Slav”), because Slavs were often forced into slavery in the Middle Ages.[1][2][3][4][5] The Latin word is from Byzantine Greek Σκλάβος (Sklábos), see th…

Well that ruins the fun of the surprise a little... but I guess people can still look forward to real plot twist: who the "masters" were. Hint: it wasn't the Moops!

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#228

Post by ecmascript »

Jiejeing wrote: post #39
ecmascript wrote: post #5

This is a topic I feel cannot be openly discussed on HN (and basically everywhere else), sadly. I switched from Github to Gitlab after this change. Political correctness is a great way to know that a company has the completely wrong focus and will be unable to innovate and create good products.

It has been discussed to death on HN, what are you talking about? Now for some notes on your comment: - Gitlab has switched the name of the master branch too - The point is not that it is harmful or bad to do so, and anyone actually crusading against this change as if it was some kind of a slippery slope leading to the downfall of their subculture or even civilization may want to think about their priorities and sens…

> It has been discussed to death on HN, what are you talking about?

Not without getting downvoted to oblivion for the only reason which is having an opposing opinion.

> Gitlab has switched the name of the master branch too

Yes I have been made aware of that now.

> The point is not that it is harmful or bad to do so, and anyone actually crusading against this change as if it was some kind of a slippery slope leading to the downfall of their subculture or even civilization may want to think about their priorities and sense of hyperbole.

I don't even understand this sentence.

> - This is not at all what the article complains about. The author argues that this is essentially a form of virtue signalling that allows essentially overpaid white engineers to pat themselves in the back without putting in actual work and money for diversity, inclusion, and equality; a symbolic change that is not rooted in materialism.

So.. it's exactly what the article complains about?

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#229

Post by kajaktum »

This name change only gives the satisfaction/feeling of doing something but actually not having any impact (and possibly negative) on the world.

As a person of color, the LAST thing I want is attention. Granted I am SEA in Canada, but when someone talks about minorities i just cringe. In my country, my race is the majority and I myself feel bad/awful about my own ra

Honestly, if your company is such a moral pillar that you oh care so much about minorities and the poor people then why the *ck do you have billions of dollar stashed in some foreign company? Fix that first you dipshit.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#230

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

I guess OP didn’t realize the default branch name is configurable in repo settings, and that organizations can set it at an account level (which is an easy fix to not have to retool all the ci/cd pipelines). Much more effective then a blog post that nobody is going to see. Have we learned nothing from Rick and Morty?
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