Social media corporations make millions and billions by catering to manipulate - and often darn right evil - advertiser needs, spying and tracking users for them. And then they want to be all moral by playing identity politics and excising inappropriate language.
This sounds like an attempt to divert the public attention during the Corona + police violence crises the US is currently undergoing.
... and all of this is not to say what I think about the use of these terms. I'm of two minds about that actually.
Our team had someone who's an orphan. We try to avoid using the term because a joke became a pretty sad lunchtime when they revealed the fact afterwards.
Words have different impact to different people. It doesn't cost us anything to use "isolated" node rather than an "orphan" node, but it made the dev feel less excluded.
I can get onboard with master/slave when used in conjunction.
But the etymology of "blacklist" so far as I know and can Google is not to do with race and it's use and understood meaning is not to do with race. How then can it be racist?
I have heard others argue that it's the implication that black is bad - but it's not as simple as that. "Whiteknighting" can be used negatively. "Bad" can literally mean "good". Come on.
This especially goes for "grandfathered" - what on earth is wrong with this?
"Grandfathered" comes from
from laws passed in the late 1800s and early 1900s to disenfranchise black people. States created new restrictions on voting but exempted descendants of people who had been allowed to vote before black people were allowed to vote. You could vote if your grandfather could, in other words. The exemptions came to be called grandfather clauses.
I used to think stuff like this was ridiculous. It's just a database, who even cares?
However, now I'm all for it.
What has changed? Over working in tech for a while, I noticed some patterns in my coworkers' behavior. I noticed that the same people who didn't switch over to saying "primary" and "replica" back in 2015-ish, and when it started becoming more common, and in fact, actively ridiculed it (just like I did) were the same people who would casually say things like “Oh those Indians screwed it up” while talking about problems with an overseas helpdesk. They didn't even consider that I, as someone of Indian descent who was apparently "all right" in their view would be offended by this (Note: when the screwup was, say, due to people from our TX helpdesk, they would never say “Oh, those Texans screwed it up”). Oh, and I never heard this kind of stuff from the few women or PoC in our office.
Now I can easily see how at least one black coworker would be offended by these people animatedly discussing how the "slave" is not correctly following the "master", and how it might affect their work day, week, or month in a really bad way.
In general I have seen that people who think more about the language they use and how it might affect others seem to make better, nicer coworkers. That's really the primary reason I support these changes now.
> Note: when the screwup was, say, due to people from our TX helpdesk, they would never say “Oh, those Texans screwed it up”
I can't speak for everyone everywhere, obviously - all teams are different and have their own attitudes - but I did some work in India with a tech support team and the phrase "the American's screwed it up" was used a reasonable amount in the cases we looked at.
For whatever it's worth - which, again, isn't much other than to say that any individual (you, me, etc.) experience isn't a set rule, at least one my U.S. team the women (including PoC) complained about the India team's work significantly more often than the men, though I think this was because some of the men happened to interact more with the India team and so got to know them a bit better (there were exceptions in all directions, but I'm just saying majorities here).
I think it has much less to do on both ends with any kind of actual bias and more with the ease to blame the team "over there" as opposed to people next to you - people blamed teams in other parts of their own building (U.S. and India alike) just as quickly/often as ones overseas.
Your observation is curious to me, perhaps it was worded confusingly.
"I noticed that the same people who ... actively ridiculed it (just like I did) were the same people who would casually say things like “Oh those Indians screwed it up”..."
So you are saying that you noticed that if someone actively ridiculed these things before, that they were casually racist. I assume that you were not casually racist when you actively ridiculed these things.
So this means 3 or 4 things to me:
Initially, my first thought is that you admit that you yourself were part of the first group but deny the label you assigned to the second group to yourself.
In other words, it seems to me that you are making a generalisation of people's characters which is inaccurate as you yourself admit that it's inaccurate.
Or perhaps its okay to generalise if most of the people you observed had this pattern of behaviour, because it doesn't mean that the exceptions (including you) prove it false?
Or... is it that you were part of both groups 5 years ago and you and most people in the first group have changed over time to both accept these new terms and stopped using casual racist talk?
Names change all the time. Leader / follower and primary / secondary are better for a lot of things, anyway. Even ignoring the social issue, master and slave are not great terms for how they are used. Frankly, I find it disturbing that so many developers are so attached to the master and slave terminology. It’s like the tech industry’s version of the confederate flag.
Why are people failing to grasp that languages have context? Twitter, GitHub and others are clearly lacking some "mastery" of language semantics, such as homonyms.
Perhaps we should be lobbying for better English education? Nah screw that, let's adopt a simplified version of the English language that removes any emotion or chance of ambiguity... I'm sure an author came up with a candidate language in the late 40s
How much of this sort of thing (including the hiding/removing of "problematic" TV/films) is being done/encouraged to draw attention away from the defund the police/better social services message?
Making BLM seem asinine looks like a fairly easy/standard psyop move.
More important than this change of terminology, I think it's good that Twitter decided to donate ten million dollars to NGOs fighting slavery around the world (it's still prevalent, especially in Africa and Asia)
When I read defenses of these moves online, usually it is acknowledged that these terms, when used in the context of engineering, do not have a relationship to human subjugation. However, the arguments offered at that juncture are:
a) Every little bit helps: If we can help eradicate injustice even in a tiny way, such as by using more inclusive language, and it's not unreasonable to implement, why not?
b) We need to cut ties with a problematic past to improve: If we want a world with equity for all, we must voluntarily let go of heritage that binds us to a world without equity.
I have many problems with these arguments. (If I have not steelmanned them sufficiently, please suggest improvements).
First, it is not true that the current strategy is reasonable to implement. A solution is reasonable if the effort needed to implement it does not outweigh the impact of the problem. A reasonable solution is to use "leader / follower" yourself and gradually encourage people away over time at their own discretion: a low-effort solution for a low-impact problem. An unreasonable solution is to risk production impact and breaking changes (as in third-party tooling that relies on the `master` convention in git), creating more work for everyone - all so slightly different language can be used. Doc changes are a great low-effort solution if you really want to do this.
Second, the claim that improvement cannot occur without cutting ties is a bit of a switch-and-bait. People will defend "improvement is not possible without change", and then morph that into "improvement is not possible without disassociation". There is some merit to this latter claim in some contexts - for example, in cases of domestic abuse - but that does not make it universal. We can keep the past around, but eliminate its ability to impact the present, which is "improvement with change". I think the "master / slave" convention and its history have done this adequately, since everyone agrees that no reasonable person would associate the term now with an endorsement of slavery or oppression.
These two points put me firmly in the camp of "necessary changes are good, but this particular change is unnecessary".
I don't understand why there's so much pushback against the moves to remove terminology like master/slave from IT.
It makes people uncomfortable and it's such a small change.
And it's just software, go use sed or whatever to rename it.
Why be disingenuous and say stuff like "oh I guess racism is solved now!" Or "GitHub changing the default branch name for new projects is going to break everyone's CI-CD pipelines!"?
Many reasons, including a very (distorted) US centric view of the world, going overboard with emotions instead of rationality (words are generally tied to context), and now people have to walk on eggshells or they'll lose their jobs if they speak the "wrong" word.
People are concerned, correctly, that it's not such a small change and won't be limited to only terms as offensive as "master/slave". Twitter announced that it's also avoiding the phrases "guys", "sanity check", and "dummy value".
I don't understand why it offends people. I understand that anything linguistically tied to America's race issues is becoming taboo and this is now A New Rule, but I still don't get the mental process that's going on inside the minds of the offended, or feel the emotional response that they feel.
That's quite a scary thing, not because I have a problem with renaming words that make other people feel bad, but because I don't understand why they feel bad in the first place. That means I can't predict what's going to happen next or whether I'm doing something wrong that I don't know about but will get me fired. The whole thing is confusing and strange and unpredictable, and I can't tell whether it's going to end in civil rights, civil war, or just be a storm in a teacup.
I'm guessing people who are dismissive of e.g. Github renaming master branches are feeling the same way and lashing out.
When I was a teacher, there was a distinct group of kids who always pushed the boundaries to see how far they could. They presented endless reasons for why they wanted to do what they wanted to do, with no regard for how ridiculous they sounded. They were smart and creative, and knew what they were doing was unwelcomed. They just wanted to see how far they could push the teacher. That's exactly what this feels like. It doesn't stop, until we put our foot down. It doesn't have to be nasty, but it doesn't require we entertain weak arguments about people's psychological comfort demanding we change behavior either on the defensive about how we are not oppressive.
The terms are gross and by no means necessary, but changing them also does not do anything to improve anyone's life. It's an empty, performative gesture unless accompanied by a lot of bigger structural and organizational changes at Twitter. You can't just "tada, we fixed racism."
These terms are actually quite precise describing a relationship between two technical systems.
I have yet to hear other words having the same precision.
Btw.: Imho no ethnic group has a sole claim to the victimhood role as historical slavery. To name a few examples of that:
* My (white, European) ancestors were slaves of the Romans.
* My (white, European) ancestors were slaves of the same (white, European) (here noble) ancestors.
* My (white, European) ancestors were holders of (Jewish) slaves.
So should I ask for the removal of this word from regular, technical use? I do not feel that way.
Do you have the source for this? I'd be very surprised if this was the meaning of the word at the time Karel Capek used it. The world robot comes from slavic word robota which means work or hard work.
I just sold an internet product I built that contains both “Whitelist” and “Blacklist” rules.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I added the names a few years ago.
However I also grew up in the 80s and Dukes of Hazard was still a popular enough television show that I was specifically not allowed to watch it by my mom for reasons I did not understand at the time. [1]
As far as changing language of the rules in the product I built, or would build I have no problem using something neutral.
Software developers are used to deprecated language. Function and class names are changed for any number of reasons, sometimes just because they are inconvenient to spell.
If some people feel that Master Slave, or Blacklist Whitelist constitute micro aggressions, then why put up a fight to switch to neutral language?
Just deprecate the syntax and return the narrative and focus to problems developers can overwhelmingly agree are getting in the way of establishing a more inclusive developer community.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-dukes-of-hazzard-reall_b_7...
This master - slave debate is at least 10 years old. And I have the same questions now:
- ofc master slave relationship between human beings is wrong, but are we not allowed to "abuse" and "subjugate" IT systems? I mean that's kind of their purpose if you ask me. It's wrong to beat somebody but it's not wrong to beat a carpet.
- what is the purpose of removing those words? Is it like pretending these relationships don't exist?
- who benefits from the removal of the terms and in what way exactly? How is the world getting better by doing this?
> What is the purpose of removing those words? Is it like pretending these relationships don't exist?
I wonder about this too. Slavery still exists in various forms. Does removing the word from software make us feel like we're making progress towards removing slavery, while there are better ways to use our time/money to fight it?
Last time I was in this discussion, I ended up donating to antislavery.org, so who knows; maybe it brings focus to the cause.
I'm pretty neutral about removing the word from software, though. I don't really think it changes the dial much in any direction.
IMO if you take your own argument to its logical conclusion, you can see that it falls apart easily. If someone launched a project in 2020 where you “lynch” a process to remove it and engage in “gassing” a connection pool to close all connections, then it’s blatantly obvious why such terms are problematic, despite the terms only being slightly removed from master/slave.
who benefits from the removal of the terms and in what way exactly?
Everyone, because we get to work in places where our colleagues don't have to use words that have extremely negative connotations from their history. In a lot of cases we also get to use words that make more sense - "master" and "slave" is a specific type of relationship that computers don't have with one another. "leader" and "follower" are a better analogy in most cases, especially in the typical case of server replication.
[+] [-] einpoklum|5 years ago|reply
This sounds like an attempt to divert the public attention during the Corona + police violence crises the US is currently undergoing.
... and all of this is not to say what I think about the use of these terms. I'm of two minds about that actually.
[+] [-] moritonal|5 years ago|reply
Words have different impact to different people. It doesn't cost us anything to use "isolated" node rather than an "orphan" node, but it made the dev feel less excluded.
[+] [-] 3saryHg6LP2e|5 years ago|reply
But the etymology of "blacklist" so far as I know and can Google is not to do with race and it's use and understood meaning is not to do with race. How then can it be racist?
I have heard others argue that it's the implication that black is bad - but it's not as simple as that. "Whiteknighting" can be used negatively. "Bad" can literally mean "good". Come on.
This especially goes for "grandfathered" - what on earth is wrong with this?
[+] [-] pseudalopex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadrifoliate|5 years ago|reply
However, now I'm all for it.
What has changed? Over working in tech for a while, I noticed some patterns in my coworkers' behavior. I noticed that the same people who didn't switch over to saying "primary" and "replica" back in 2015-ish, and when it started becoming more common, and in fact, actively ridiculed it (just like I did) were the same people who would casually say things like “Oh those Indians screwed it up” while talking about problems with an overseas helpdesk. They didn't even consider that I, as someone of Indian descent who was apparently "all right" in their view would be offended by this (Note: when the screwup was, say, due to people from our TX helpdesk, they would never say “Oh, those Texans screwed it up”). Oh, and I never heard this kind of stuff from the few women or PoC in our office.
Now I can easily see how at least one black coworker would be offended by these people animatedly discussing how the "slave" is not correctly following the "master", and how it might affect their work day, week, or month in a really bad way.
In general I have seen that people who think more about the language they use and how it might affect others seem to make better, nicer coworkers. That's really the primary reason I support these changes now.
[+] [-] frettchen|5 years ago|reply
I can't speak for everyone everywhere, obviously - all teams are different and have their own attitudes - but I did some work in India with a tech support team and the phrase "the American's screwed it up" was used a reasonable amount in the cases we looked at.
For whatever it's worth - which, again, isn't much other than to say that any individual (you, me, etc.) experience isn't a set rule, at least one my U.S. team the women (including PoC) complained about the India team's work significantly more often than the men, though I think this was because some of the men happened to interact more with the India team and so got to know them a bit better (there were exceptions in all directions, but I'm just saying majorities here).
I think it has much less to do on both ends with any kind of actual bias and more with the ease to blame the team "over there" as opposed to people next to you - people blamed teams in other parts of their own building (U.S. and India alike) just as quickly/often as ones overseas.
[+] [-] endisukaj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkingemote|5 years ago|reply
"I noticed that the same people who ... actively ridiculed it (just like I did) were the same people who would casually say things like “Oh those Indians screwed it up”..."
So you are saying that you noticed that if someone actively ridiculed these things before, that they were casually racist. I assume that you were not casually racist when you actively ridiculed these things.
So this means 3 or 4 things to me:
Initially, my first thought is that you admit that you yourself were part of the first group but deny the label you assigned to the second group to yourself.
In other words, it seems to me that you are making a generalisation of people's characters which is inaccurate as you yourself admit that it's inaccurate.
Or perhaps its okay to generalise if most of the people you observed had this pattern of behaviour, because it doesn't mean that the exceptions (including you) prove it false?
Or... is it that you were part of both groups 5 years ago and you and most people in the first group have changed over time to both accept these new terms and stopped using casual racist talk?
[+] [-] bb123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] adtac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyadesu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ulisesrmzroche|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] there_the_and|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duckmysick|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ojhughes|5 years ago|reply
Perhaps we should be lobbying for better English education? Nah screw that, let's adopt a simplified version of the English language that removes any emotion or chance of ambiguity... I'm sure an author came up with a candidate language in the late 40s
[+] [-] nan0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tehbeard|5 years ago|reply
Making BLM seem asinine looks like a fairly easy/standard psyop move.
[+] [-] pnako|5 years ago|reply
https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/maps/#prevalenc...
[+] [-] AkshatM|5 years ago|reply
a) Every little bit helps: If we can help eradicate injustice even in a tiny way, such as by using more inclusive language, and it's not unreasonable to implement, why not?
b) We need to cut ties with a problematic past to improve: If we want a world with equity for all, we must voluntarily let go of heritage that binds us to a world without equity.
I have many problems with these arguments. (If I have not steelmanned them sufficiently, please suggest improvements).
First, it is not true that the current strategy is reasonable to implement. A solution is reasonable if the effort needed to implement it does not outweigh the impact of the problem. A reasonable solution is to use "leader / follower" yourself and gradually encourage people away over time at their own discretion: a low-effort solution for a low-impact problem. An unreasonable solution is to risk production impact and breaking changes (as in third-party tooling that relies on the `master` convention in git), creating more work for everyone - all so slightly different language can be used. Doc changes are a great low-effort solution if you really want to do this.
Second, the claim that improvement cannot occur without cutting ties is a bit of a switch-and-bait. People will defend "improvement is not possible without change", and then morph that into "improvement is not possible without disassociation". There is some merit to this latter claim in some contexts - for example, in cases of domestic abuse - but that does not make it universal. We can keep the past around, but eliminate its ability to impact the present, which is "improvement with change". I think the "master / slave" convention and its history have done this adequately, since everyone agrees that no reasonable person would associate the term now with an endorsement of slavery or oppression.
These two points put me firmly in the camp of "necessary changes are good, but this particular change is unnecessary".
[+] [-] Jonnax|5 years ago|reply
It makes people uncomfortable and it's such a small change.
And it's just software, go use sed or whatever to rename it.
Why be disingenuous and say stuff like "oh I guess racism is solved now!" Or "GitHub changing the default branch name for new projects is going to break everyone's CI-CD pipelines!"?
[+] [-] apta|5 years ago|reply
Many reasons, including a very (distorted) US centric view of the world, going overboard with emotions instead of rationality (words are generally tied to context), and now people have to walk on eggshells or they'll lose their jobs if they speak the "wrong" word.
[+] [-] 3saryHg6LP2e|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strken|5 years ago|reply
That's quite a scary thing, not because I have a problem with renaming words that make other people feel bad, but because I don't understand why they feel bad in the first place. That means I can't predict what's going to happen next or whether I'm doing something wrong that I don't know about but will get me fired. The whole thing is confusing and strange and unpredictable, and I can't tell whether it's going to end in civil rights, civil war, or just be a storm in a teacup.
I'm guessing people who are dismissive of e.g. Github renaming master branches are feeling the same way and lashing out.
[+] [-] jaekash|5 years ago|reply
Not a small change, and gay people also make some people uncomfortable, does not follow we should remove them ... so ... what?
[+] [-] mnm1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lr4444lr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chadlavi|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdoering|5 years ago|reply
I have yet to hear other words having the same precision.
Btw.: Imho no ethnic group has a sole claim to the victimhood role as historical slavery. To name a few examples of that:
* My (white, European) ancestors were slaves of the Romans. * My (white, European) ancestors were slaves of the same (white, European) (here noble) ancestors. * My (white, European) ancestors were holders of (Jewish) slaves.
So should I ask for the removal of this word from regular, technical use? I do not feel that way.
[+] [-] jaekash|5 years ago|reply
No they are not. Slavery is gross, a master git repo is not gross - because it has nothing to do with actual slavery.
[+] [-] Hamuko|5 years ago|reply
It's a bit hard to take Twitter's stance seriously after they have tried so hard not to intervene with @realDonaldTrump.
[+] [-] sandstrom|5 years ago|reply
How about payment providers supporting Mastercard? Maybe we ought to stop accepting Mastercard payment, unless they rebrand to Equalitycard.
[+] [-] omega3|5 years ago|reply
Do you have the source for this? I'd be very surprised if this was the meaning of the word at the time Karel Capek used it. The world robot comes from slavic word robota which means work or hard work.
[+] [-] bredren|5 years ago|reply
I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I added the names a few years ago.
However I also grew up in the 80s and Dukes of Hazard was still a popular enough television show that I was specifically not allowed to watch it by my mom for reasons I did not understand at the time. [1]
As far as changing language of the rules in the product I built, or would build I have no problem using something neutral.
Software developers are used to deprecated language. Function and class names are changed for any number of reasons, sometimes just because they are inconvenient to spell.
If some people feel that Master Slave, or Blacklist Whitelist constitute micro aggressions, then why put up a fight to switch to neutral language?
Just deprecate the syntax and return the narrative and focus to problems developers can overwhelmingly agree are getting in the way of establishing a more inclusive developer community. [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/is-dukes-of-hazzard-reall_b_7...
[+] [-] jaekash|5 years ago|reply
Fuckit, lets be done with language all together ...
[+] [-] trabant00|5 years ago|reply
- ofc master slave relationship between human beings is wrong, but are we not allowed to "abuse" and "subjugate" IT systems? I mean that's kind of their purpose if you ask me. It's wrong to beat somebody but it's not wrong to beat a carpet.
- what is the purpose of removing those words? Is it like pretending these relationships don't exist?
- who benefits from the removal of the terms and in what way exactly? How is the world getting better by doing this?
[+] [-] bajsejohannes|5 years ago|reply
I wonder about this too. Slavery still exists in various forms. Does removing the word from software make us feel like we're making progress towards removing slavery, while there are better ways to use our time/money to fight it?
Last time I was in this discussion, I ended up donating to antislavery.org, so who knows; maybe it brings focus to the cause.
I'm pretty neutral about removing the word from software, though. I don't really think it changes the dial much in any direction.
[+] [-] p49k|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brighton36|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sova|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onion2k|5 years ago|reply
Everyone, because we get to work in places where our colleagues don't have to use words that have extremely negative connotations from their history. In a lot of cases we also get to use words that make more sense - "master" and "slave" is a specific type of relationship that computers don't have with one another. "leader" and "follower" are a better analogy in most cases, especially in the typical case of server replication.
[+] [-] morninglight|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fernandopj|5 years ago|reply
Someone, somewhere, is drafting this, prototyping a new logo desing.
Just waiting to happen.
[+] [-] jaekash|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haunter|5 years ago|reply