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GitHub, fuck your name change

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381–390 of 1001 posts

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#381
Very well said! The systemic racism of law enforcement is just crazy in the UK but it is somewhat a taboo. It exists in statistics buried deep and never to be looked at. When I was out with some of my friends that happen to have darker skin they were stop and searched but I was told to just go, as if they thought they kidnapped me? Where are the stop and searched of the City coke heads? The tech industry really needs to pull their head out of their ar$$

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#382
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…

> For the record, I do recycle plastic.

You don't. Nobody does. The plastic you "recycle" gets turned into lower grade plastic and so on until it gets landfilled. For plastic, the only way is down.

Steel, aluminium and glass are examples of materials that are recyclable.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#383
> Yet at these same companies the majority of each grad scheme cohort tend to be from basically the same five colleges/universities. Are HBCUs one of these colleges??

The resistance of the software industry (and other elite professional industries) to recruit from HBCUs is an indictment of their DIE efforts. It’s not that reasonable name changes don’t matter, it’s that they don’t matter when you refuse to fix glaring pipeline problems like narrow recruiting strategy.

Food for thought: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/hbcus-blac...

> Yet more important than their famous alumni is the Black middle and upper-middle class, which HBCUs have almost single-handedly created. HBCUs have produced more than 80 percent of Black judges, 40 percent of Black Congress members, and roughly half of Black public-school teachers. More than 70 percent of Black doctors and dentists earn their bachelor’s degree at HBCUs.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#384

> I just don’t appreciate the idea that we as software engineers can now sit back and believe we’ve made some kind of positive change, coz we haven’t. I might have missed the GitHub communication there, but thats not at all what I think when thinking about changing the default branch name for new repos to a name thats, in my perception, at least as good as the old one, maybe better. If there is window dressing involv…

'master' is better than 'main' because it successfully conveys the mental picture of the branch from which others are typically cloned. 'main' doesn't carry that connotation.

You could of course have branches that evolve in parallel, even without common code if you want. But what people almost always do is have one primary branch from which exact copies are made, given other names, then continue to evolve either more slowly (stable releases) or faster (speculative work). You could call that primary branch "primary" or "main" or "premier" or "trunk" and they all work, but "master" conveys that expectation very successfully, and that's why people tend to like that name.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#385

Late to the party, but I have a relevant story: My last job did a bunch of faux diversity tactics starting around the same time this happened at google. Part of it was starting "support" groups for different groupings, for example one for Asian employees or another for LGBTQ. This is good. However, I had to work weirdly hard to also have one for us Jewish employees. Weirdly hard when you consider all that had to be d…

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Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#387
post #237

> “Meritocracy!”, I hear you cry. “They pick from the most talented students. The ones that worked the hardest to get into the most elite schools. The black students should have just worked harder” Crazy idea: if companies that do virtue signaling on inclusivity were paying their taxes, decent schools could be funded and we would not have so many of those issues. But instead, those companies are actively lobbying to…

This should get more attention (& upvotes).

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#388

I’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…

White guy here, just wanted to chime in and say HELL YES, you nailed it bro. There's more of an emphasis in "tech" toward appearing "woke" than ACTUALLY SOLVING THE FUCKING PROBLEM. You nailed it with "you/they don't see us as equals [...]".

The most important word in the term "African Americans", to me, is, "AMERICANS". You're in this with us. You're our friends, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters. We're in this TOGETHER. And this woke-ism bullshit is just that: bullshit.

Changing a primary branch name from "master" to "main" isn't solving the damn problem. Execs want to do this to earn PR points and wash their hands of the issue of a lack of representation and equality in the industry as a result. It's cheaper than actually giving a shit. But the reality is that socioeconomic barriers to entry into high paying STEM roles amongst our African AMERICAN friends/colleagues is a very real problem that needs to be addressed on both a cultural and economic level.

Ya'll are every damn bit as capable as the rest of us and I'm fucking tired of seeing you thrown under the bus in this industry, especially under the guise of "woke"-ism. It's time we start tearing down these PR stunts as the falsehoods that they are and insist on real, monetary, quantifiable and results-driven investments in black communities that are damn well deserved.

And to my colleagues in the industry that are non-black (especially white): it's time we stand up and "get their back" for our black friends, colleagues and family members. We're in this together, and it's well past time we stand up for our fellow Americans. This bullshit charade needs to stop and WE have the power to move things forward into an era of REAL representation and fairness, and as such we have a RESPONSIBILITY to do it. Enough talk - it's time to act.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#389

I’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…

Perhaps, in the spirit of sharing useful insight within these kinds of discussions, as a black American you could educate me about something? For context, I am neither black nor American, I have little time for woke virtue-signalling and fake outrage, but I do want to be properly respectful of others whose background and sensitivities aren't necessarily like my own. With that in mind, I often find socially acceptable…

> I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable

Scott Alexander explains this as a way for upper-class people to maintain their privileges: "The whole point is to make sure the working-class white guy whose best friends are black and who marries a black woman and has beautiful black children feels immeasurably inferior to the college-educated white guy who knows that saying "colored people" is horrendously offensive but saying "people of color" is the only way to dismantle white supremacy."[0]

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-...

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#390
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…

> 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

Came here to express similar opinion and your articulation has succinctly and perfectly captured it so I'll just add to it.

Over the years I've come to realise that effecting real change to address the root cause is hard. It almost certainly won't be done by private corporations; the changes need to be enforced by (and at) institutions that are answerable to communities e.g., right to quality education, a humane law enforcer. Not only is change going to be hard but slow as well. However with more and more institutions getting privatised (private jails, contracted police force etc.,) whose sole motive is to earn more profits I don't see how anything is going to improve in the near future. So what ends up happening is every atrocity against oppressed community gets hijacked by these private mega-corps as they sense PR opportunity.

To take another example; Diversity & Inclusion. We do all the song and dance at the workplace to make it more diverse. But when you actually see the process from the inside you see how optical and ridiculous it is. The entire program is a joke. No matter what one does the top of the funnel is so ridiculously non-diverse that it's excruciatingly difficult to hire a diverse person. The reasons are obvious, the entire education system (and society to an extent) is so rigged against oppressed community that it takes a miracle for one of their community to even make it to resume-writing stage. Instead of addressing the problem at the root cause (make it easier for them to get high quality education, lead a decent life) every corporation makes a big PR-noise around D&I while in reality the work place continues to be non-diverse. Net result is we end up having debates like "why should we reduce interview bar", "it's unfair to the deserving candidates" while completely being blind to the root cause of the problem.

/rant

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