Seeing this gave me the warm fuzzies. Finally some push back against the pointless posturing that makes people feel good about themselves while helping no one.
This made it to the top of HN. I'm filled with hope.
GitHub, fuck your name change
241–250 of 1001 posts
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#242It's all about symbolic actions.
In principle, symbolic actions are meant to show the intention. (E.g. pointing to an object instead of grabbing it.) In many cases, it is impossible to act quickly, or at all, yet - someone wants to point to the direction where they head.
In practice, everywhere when PR is involved (by people, companies, or government), symbolic actions are usually used instead of actual actions. They are orders of magnitude cheaper and offer an easy way to fool people with a false sense of care and engagement.
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#243As a white person, the difference this change will make to my life is so negligible that if it makes one PoC feel more included then it's fine by me. I totally take on board the point that a lot of man hours have been consumed debating how and when to execute this change. Possibly to the exclusion of doing something potentially more meaningful. However, the glee with which the authors opinion is accepted as the opini…
I was expecting the article to list some technical problems coming from switching `remote/master` to `remote/main`. There aren't any, and reading this article took more time than trying to remember which one to use for this project.
Is there a name for anti-political correctness, where people go into long rants about how changes that have zero effect in their lives are a sign of the collapse of society? They are pretty popular in social media and specially on this site.
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#244I’m a black American and agree with everything that this person in London wrote. It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate. For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, wat…
Lol, as another black guy, even before opening the thread I knew I'd find one of these grovelling comments from a house-type here. I, at least, completely support GitHub's actions. Btw, we're not "walking away from the Left", as is indicated in the recent election results. You might be confusing your own people for Hispanics.
hi, for anyone looking for something to vicariously offended about, this is a racially insensitive comment to be offended by, colloquially (but not academically) called a "racist" comment.
this person is referring to a dichotomy in the black American slave caste, where people that worked in the fields were considered different than people that worked inside the house. the adjectives being "house negro/n**r".
It is used to invalidate the opinions of someone proclaimed as "black" that doesn't have consensus with a community that is pretending to be amorphous.
There have always been black Americans privileged enough to choose causes like any other American, while being lumped into the identity politics from all factions of the country. Even Martin Luther King's letter from Birmingham Jail (1953) references this.
I don't speak for anyone, and I am aware of black American people in my life that did bring up the "master/slave" terminology in computing as problematic and offputting and insensitive. The people in my life are of an older generation than me. The github issue, as this article points out, does not have a "slave" context only a master. To some that doesn't make a difference.
I am speaking for myself and like I said I agree with what the person in London wrote.
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#245Eliminating the usage of words with offensive connotations from the English language is double plus good. edit: Downvotes and the wording of some responses make me concerned that some folks may be unaware of the reference. Doubleplusgood is a newspeak word used in the book 1984. Newspeak is a language that is used to eliminate the ability for people to express unapproved thoughts because there are no words with which…
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Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#246I 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?
That’s my impression too. “Slave” should be replaced with some other more neutral term, but “master” shouldn’t be a problem. There are multiple uses of it in different contexts, but the shared implication is of a definitive source: Master copy; Remastered (music); Master of Arts/Sciences; Mastery Etc. None of that implies a master-slave relationship.
The English word “master” comes from the Latin “magister,” which is freighted with thousands of years of meanings and history. The meaning of slaveowner was not one of those meanings until probably the seventeenth or eighteenth century. In Latin, “magister,” never meant the master of slaves (a “herus” most properly, or a “dominus,” an owner of anything with legal title to that thing). Instead, the “magister” was a leader of a group: the “magister equitum” was a cavalry commander, and a “ludi magister” a schoolmaster or classroom teacher. It is from the latter that we have “master” in the sense of an MA (magister artium) degree, which, like the PhD, was originally a teaching license. The use of the English “master” to refer to slavery is comparatively recent and might well not predate the eighteenth century.
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#247I 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?
I don't think anyone is arguing that it's always a bad metaphor, just that it's an unnecessarily violent one.
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#248I just want to add a link to this[0] post here as a counterpoint for why changing language _can_ matter. The author seems to imply that the name change is all about being non-offensive to some people. Since the author doesn't find the language offensive, they conclude that name change is only political correctness or virtue signalling and a hollow gesture. I do not agree with that. Language and words are very powerfu…
> Since the author doesn't find the language offensive You're missing the point, the author concludes that the companies decide that the language is offensive without asking the people who are supposedly the offended party.
As far as I know, most of the changes happening at large companies regarding this have been driven internally primarily by people of color - at MSFT, which owns GitHub, some of these changes were being driven by Employee Resource Groups (affinity groups) which are made up of those who would be affected by the language, for example
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#249Well 'main' is a more intuitive & UX friendly name than 'master' which new devs are going to intuitively relate to as it's commonly used to refer to the 'main thing', e.g. main road, main course, etc. I can't recall the last time I used 'Master' as a synonym to 'main' outside of technology (as a Redis Client author I still deal with Master nomenclature a bit). Can only think of 'Masters degree' but that has to do wit…
I disagree. "Master" is a pre-existing term closer to the actual meaning of that branch in a repository the way most developers work.
Cambridge https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/maste...: an original version of something from which copies can be made
Merriam Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/master:
being a device or mechanism that controls the operation of another mechanism or that establishes a standard (such as a dimension or weight)
being or relating to a master from which duplicates are made
In the realm of version control, the master branch tends to have special conceptual status as the branch you fork from and merge back to. It's not "main" like the main room of your house or main street in your city, it's the canonical branch which others are understood in relation to. It has nothing to do with slavery and renaming it to "main" obscures and confuses what was being communicated with the original name.
Re: GitHub, fuck your name change
#250I’m a black American and agree with everything that this person in London wrote. It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate. For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you/they don't see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, wat…
> the American “left”
I like that you quote it there.
I don't understand why aren't there more real left (no quotes) organizations or parties gaining traction in the US. It seems as if it should have happened "naturally" one or two generations ago.