Great PR for Redhat, but will it stop police brutality in the USA?
Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
91–100 of 104 posts
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
The downside is this is pretty meaningless. The words "master" and "slave" are not cause of pain and suffering and even erasing them from the vocabulary is not going to change anything. Never in my life even for a second I had any connotation between words master and slave used in IT and any derogatory meaning for anybody. I don't remember a single instance in the past 20 years when I could possibly link any utteranc…
The big companies could instead pay their engineers to tutor underprivileged kids or let the do shadowing. But no, let’s rename everything, and do a press release.
Lots of big companies do pay their engineers to tutor underprivileged kids. This isn’t an either/or case.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the pushback were against corporate shallowness, you'd expect at least one comment would include a suggestion of what they could do instead. But the comments here so far don't seem to do that, they seem to just be against this, with no alternative.
Okay, then I'll give some: outreach/mentorship/internships of PoC who might never be aware of coding or have a hard time breaking down the early barriers to getting involved. Top comment from an earlier discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23501861
You act like this type of mentoring isn’t being done. It is. I work for a Fortune 200 company in a city having several Fortune 500 companies and they all do this.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you do that when you have an established word an entire industry understands? Words only have the meaning we convey to them and as soon as you put more words in the mix that dilutes any clarity. We're back to the xkcd on standards.
I am not an english speaker, for example "black list" is a concept that translates worse then "blocked list" , the first requires you have some local or historical context the last one is just clear as day.
Bingo! You’re not the first non-native English speaker who I’ve heard say that they don’t understand blacklist but immediately understand blocklist. This is language change for the better.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Random thought: Who will adopt faster, the younger programers, or older?
In my day we'd feed the Spinning Jenny punch cards all day long. We should also stop using ROBOT which means "forced labor" (slave) in Czech.
Not sure if the word robot offends some groups but if you can use a less confusing word then use that, like if you want to talk about a robot that has a human like you can be more clear by using the word android or synth.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#96Wow, this community is terrible. It's good to see that the people who matter are more advanced: Wikipedia is also (finally) doing this, as I noticed today. And so is Github. It's a renaming of mostly internal identifiers, a somewhat minor change for those implementing it, and a complete non-issue for anyone else. It doesn't matter if you are offended by the terms or not. Your opinion is somewhat irrelevant for once.…
> The logic of why people may feel offended by master/slave or white/blacklist is trivially obvious. One can have doubts about the intensity of it, but not the basic mechanism. My companies black systems architect just finished a whitelist feature and delivered it this morning. Should I, as a dutiful white frontend dev, inform him: a) that this was in fact a racist decision and he may be a racist or rationally motiva…
This is the I-have-a-black-friend excuse that tends to elicit slightly shameful laughter from the audience these days. I didn't know people still used it.
In any case: it: your college does not single-handedly represent all Black people. Assuming that he does is the same basic mechanism as pointing at one red-haired criminal to support your theory of higher criminality among redheads.
The disadvantaged group of any discrimination also isn't itself exempt from actively perpetuating that structure. It's almost a cliché, for example, that female leaders sometimes act extremely aggressive, especially with female employees, in an overzealous effort to fit in, or to dispel any notions of nepotism.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The logic of why people may feel offended by master/slave or white/blacklist is trivially obvious. One can have doubts about the intensity of it, but not the basic mechanism. My companies black systems architect just finished a whitelist feature and delivered it this morning. Should I, as a dutiful white frontend dev, inform him: a) that this was in fact a racist decision and he may be a racist or rationally motiva…
This is the I-have-a-black-friend excuse that tends to elicit slightly shameful laughter from the audience these days. I didn't know people still used it. In any case: it: your college does not single-handedly represent all Black people. Assuming that he does is the same basic mechanism as pointing at one red-haired criminal to support your theory of higher criminality among redheads. The disadvantaged group of any d…
> This is the I-have-a-black-friend excuse that tends to elicit slightly shameful laughter from the audience these days. I didn't know people still used it.
No, it's actually nothing like that at all but I can see how tempting it was for you to make a false equivalency in order to support the point you wanted to make anyway.
In actuality, it's a very real and current example of how my colleague, the guy who directs all the devs at our organization and happens to be black doesn't give a shit.
> The disadvantaged group of any discrimination also isn't itself exempt from actively perpetuating that structure.
I see, so option b then. A balsy choice to be sure, I have to wonder if you'd have the stones to mansplain to your black supervisor that he or she is perpetuating a racial system. Based on your choice I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you're also perpetuating a stereotype, that of the white guilt avenger. Please do correct me and explain why I'm wrong and a bigot though.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#98Why not owner or subject? Are accountants not to refer to master records? Do we have to stop killing child processes?
From what I've seen you can play the racism, gender or (in a lesser extend) religion card. That is because in that case you're clearly part of a group - and often a minority. It is however unclear if the ones who feel offended are also a minority within that group (but does that matter?).
In other cases that is less clear, but I've also not seen many people offended for other reasons than the three I mentioned.
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, then I'll give some: outreach/mentorship/internships of PoC who might never be aware of coding or have a hard time breaking down the early barriers to getting involved. Top comment from an earlier discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23501861
You act like this type of mentoring isn’t being done. It is. I work for a Fortune 200 company in a city having several Fortune 500 companies and they all do this.
Nice, who are the mentors it created that are opening further doors for PoC?
Re: Red Hat to remove contentious terms like master and slave from its source code
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
You act like this type of mentoring isn’t being done. It is. I work for a Fortune 200 company in a city having several Fortune 500 companies and they all do this.
Nice, who are the mentors it created that are opening further doors for PoC?
I only see the start of the pipeline. You're right though, it'd be nice to see it all the way through in order to better understand what overall impact we're having, if any.