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GitHub, fuck your name change

mooseyanon.medium.com

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Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#891

Post by bloody-crow »

> They forgot to talk to people who are actually members of the black community. The very people they are trying to not offend.

I don't get what makes the author think that any such change should only happen with an explicit approval from "black community". TBH I don't see how community's opinion on this topic is relevant at all.

This is a change by people who felt uneasy about the old name for people who felt the same. If you're not in this category, it's a no-op for you. Existing repos still have master, new repos can have main branch renamed to master trivially.

Don't attach so much meaning to something so fucking insignificant. It makes zero difference for some, it makes some difference to others. Who gives a shit?

My only problem with the rename is that I apparently have muscle memory of typing `gco master` and `git rebase master` without thinking so I now lose a few seconds of productivity on newer repos until I learn to adapt to it. I can live with that.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#892

Post by kergonath »

mola wrote: post #816
jssmith wrote: post #538

I want to share my own reactions to the name change since this is a really interesting topic. For context, I'm an African American, so many of my ancestors were slaves. - The first time it occurred to me that "master" in this context could offend anyone was when GitHub changed the name (and broke my workflow). - My immediate reaction was, "this change is by white people for white people," where "white" means anyone w…

Just a slight perspective, I'm not from the US, I'm from israel. We have a black jewish population here, they yearned their return to Zion(israel) for thousands of years. The state of israel, invested money and effort in organizing their return. Non of their ancestors were slaves. We have social issues, mostly because the huge differences in culture and exposure to technological and educational advances. And the fact…

Racism is not uniquely American, and does not require slavery.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#893

Post by PhilosAccnting »

As a trend-resistant individual, this entire discussion is ridiculous. While I'm white as the plowed snow, my wife is distinctly black.

Whatever injustices that happened have, for the most part, been committed by long-dead people. The concept of "ancestral guilt" is mostly a social fashion for people to maintain their lifestyles without their status quo being disrupted.

I believe this is a fashion that's moving to pivot back again, based on my metamodel of trends[1]. This may take months or years, depending on the culture, but at some point the practical use cases of judging others by what's in their minds will outpace even bothering what skin color someone is.

Though, I must concede, this fashion of demanding reparation-driven political action has gone on for decades in many black communities, so it'll probably only change when their community leaders start forgiving stuff and moving on[2] without getting ostracized by their community[3].

[1]https://gainedin.site/trends/

[2]https://adequate.life/happiness-2/

[3]https://gainedin.site/taboos/

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#894

Post by MockObject »

For context, I'm an African American, so many of my ancestors were slaves.

I don't want more people thinking about my race. I also don't want my presence to constitute a burden on my coworkers. I want white people to be colorblind around me.

Unfortunately, white people don't care what I want.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#895

Post by robocat »

Ceezy wrote: post #475
alimbada wrote: post #473

Black people make up 3% of the UK population according to a quick Google search. If there are 7 black people in his company of ~250, that's almost 3%. This is just one data point but it's the one he's using in his post and getting upset over the lack of black representation, when it's proportionate with the overall ratio of ethnicities in the wider population.

44% of London is black.

Incorrect. 44% of Greater London is minority ethnicity or black. Minority ethnicities included Chinese, Indian, Arab, Caribbean etcetera.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London#2011_C...

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#896

Post by 1337shadow »

Freak_NL wrote: post #155
vmception wrote: post #47

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…

Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates? This specific instance seems like an overreaction of some in both corporate and social media culture. One poster already pointed out that this is likely more about corporate fear o…

> Aren't you worried that by applying political labels like 'left' (or equally often seen in the US context: 'liberal') for something that does not really represent that political ideology, you are at risk of further polarizing such debates?

That's missing polsci 101, left/right exist, that's why they have names, not the opposite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#898

Post by cforrester »

ivanche wrote: post #425
tda wrote: 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…

> Though I initially sympathized with the name change from master to main (cause I don't care what it is called) It seems you don't have any bash/zsh/fish scripts which assume that the most important branch is named "master"...

For smaller scripts, this is trivially resolved. For larger scripts, this is a bug, and the script should be updated with a more flexible solution that doesn't rely on hardcoded branch names.

Re: GitHub, fuck your name change

#899

Post by trevor-e »

While I agree with some of the points made, this article is mostly a rant filled with generalizations and untruths.

>They forgot to talk to people who are actually members of the black community.

>Regardless, did anyone try to reach out to black software engineers or developers

>Yet at these same companies the majority of each grad scheme cohort tend to be from basically the same five colleges/universities.

>I guess mummy and daddy paying $20 mil for a new library to get me a seat at an ‘elite’ school is still meritocracy eh?

How does the author know any of this? From the original discussions around this topic ~9 months ago I remember several instances of companies asking their employees.

>We’re going to change the branch name to be more inclusive of minorities but we’re going to carry on selling software to ICE. Get the fuck outta here.

If this is referring to Microsoft, since they own Github, they explicitly banned law enforcement from using their facial recognition technology.

>It signals to other privileged white boys, “hey, come work for us, we pretend to care more than all our competitors xoxo”. This shit aint for us, it never was.

This is a good point.

>I’m pissed off because they pretended to be doing good and wanted me to congratulate them for it.

I don't think Github asked for any pats on the back for their change, but I can see how it's implied. Also, master/slave can be offensive to a lot of communities, not just the black community.

I do totally agree that major tech companies need to sponsor way more outreach within black communities. It's way too easy to blame diversity problems on the "pipeline" and then do nothing to improve why the pipeline is like that in the first place.

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