Threads for arp242
You misunderstand the primary ‘woke’ argument.
The primary argument is that encountering the word ‘master’ reminds people of the enslavement of their ancestors, the related stories of suffering and the discrimination and oppression they are still being subjected to. It’s what is called a micro-aggression: something that isn’t a problem in small doses, but that adds up when experienced over and over again. Death by a thousand cuts.
What this change, and others like it, intend to accomplish is not unnecessarily subjecting people to such reminders.
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Guess we gotta remove it from the dictionary too, lest they chance upon it and feel hurt.
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Confusion
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That would be the logical conclusion from the argument, save for the word ‘unnecessarily’.
The question is when it is appropriate to not be accommodating to those that claim being hurt, because the cost of accommodating them is too high. And it bears mentioning that the cost effectively, indirectly, causes others to suffer.
It’s not all or nothing. You don’t have to reject the argument to reject the conclusion, as it hinges on costs and thus trade offs. There should be a few Schelling points here and I agree that it seems unreasonably difficult to defend some of those points.
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Well, my homeland has suffered a communist dictatorship and invasion for decades. Reading the cultural marxism here and there reminds me of the terrors my people, and specifically my family has suffered from communism in the last hundred years.
What could be changed, to unnecessarily subject me to these micro-agressions?
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cultural marxism is a conspiracy theory invented by the american far right. Go complain to them.
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dark_grimoire
3 years ago
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Actually it’s reinforced by former USSR KGB agents ;).
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totally a reputable and unbiased source on this topic
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dark_grimoire
3 years ago
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Well, can’t deny that they actually had much experience with it (Stalin, Lenin), unlike USA
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sure, whatever different opinion appears it is fake news, conspiracy theory, or simply wrong, not worth consideration or discussion.
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When there is:
- kids being threatened
- jews in disguise
- any flavor of progressive agenda threatening the lifestyle of conservative or reactionary white people
- loose attacks on intellectuals
Yep, it’s probably a conspirancy theory. QAnon is the same, just more loud and with sweatpants instead of cheap fedoras.
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nah, you’re just wrong. the origins of cultural marxism
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That one group was lucky enough to get their cause taken up by a larger group of activists doesn’t entitle any other group to get their cause taken up as well. But the arbitrariness doesn’t imply anything about the reality and worthiness of the cause (neither in the positive nor in the negative direction).
You could start a movement to try and get your cause taken up by as many fellow activists as you can find to spread awareness so broadly that it leads to changes like the one we are discussing here. An outcome could be that promoting communism becomes something that is considered shameful.
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Frankly, comparing the suffering of the victims of Communism to having to make a minor change in a software workflow strikes me as wildly hyperbolic.
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kodfodrasz
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- If I was comparing the suffering of victims of communism to anything that would be the suffering of the victims of slavery in the USA in the context of my comment.
- What I was comparing is that the micro-agressions I am subjected to by some comments on the internet, are of the same category, as the micro-agressions one has to take when reads the master word while working with version control.
If you think I should not be reminded of that, and the above is a hyperbole (not what you said), that is an opinion some share about the case about the push to remove the word master.
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Thanks for clarifying your position.
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I think you can make this point without using such charged language.
I happen to agree with the change, but I don’t consider myself a “self-righteous woke”. I read your post and felt uneasy.
The obvious solution is to fork git, keep master as the default name, and give it a nice new name, like… Consolidated Source Association, or similar…
So in summary, you think that master in git is not offensive, and you think that people who do find it offensive are ridiculous. Curious, how many of your coworkers are black?
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tadzik
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Curious, how many of your coworkers are black?
This feels a bit like “what do you even know about being offended”. I share /u/y0ssar1an’s viewpoint, so let me tell you how it looks from my perspective. I have zero black coworkers as I live in a country that barely has any black people in it at all (Poland). The word “master” doesn’t hold have any negative meaning to people around here. But there is another: “Collaborator”. Used very widely in VCS-related software, in our cultural context it immediately reminds people of the old meaning: “the one who collaborated with the nazis during WW2”.
My ancestors fought in WW2. Am I now smearing their name because I have myself become a collaborator? Should I now feel uncomfortable because someone on the other end of the world came up with a word that makes me slightly uncomfortable? No, that’d be absolutely ridiculous. Every cultures has words that make some people uncomfortable, and trying to please everyone by making the subset of the language we use smaller and smaller is not just futile imo – it’s also pointless, and arguably a detriment to diversity by itself.
The implication that slavery is somehow inherently connected to racism is by itself an ameri-centric idea. This whole master->main “diversity theater” feels like a symptom of a particular culture being unable to deal with their past (or largely their present, afaict) and thus resorting to empty gestures rather than trying to deal with real problems – last I checked, Github, the champion of the “master bad” movement was still working with ICE who’s basically building concentration camps for minorities. But I guess it doesn’t bother people as much since it’s not so well entrenched in american culture.
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The implication that slavery is somehow inherently connected to racism is by itself an ameri-centric idea.
I could not imagine what exactly it is that make America, slavery, and racism so connected! Words have meaning which are inherently connected to history. Just because you want to pretend that they always mean what makes you feel best doesn’t mean everyone is going to harbor the same narrow viewpoint as you.
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Outside of the USA slavery has been a think before, and at some unlucky places after the abolition in the USA. It did not generally have a racist motivation: debtors could sell themselves as slaves, prisoners of war were sold as slaves, and in many feudal states serfs had so few rights and possessions, that they were basically slaves.
It is ironic, but in Tibet actually the invading communist chineese have abolished slavery, where it had no racist character.
In the USA, and the Americas generally slavery did have a racist character, as the slaves sold by the Netherlander, English and Arabic slavers were mostly of African origin.
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Totally correct. Historians very regularly caution against comparing the brutality and sheer scale of the transatlantic slave trade to earlier forms of slavery. A great way to understand why is to go back to the fall of the Songhai Empire for it is through the unfolding of that empire and the colonial fire that engulfed its ruins that the taking and trading of slaves exploded violently and grew to dispossess, dislocate, and traumatize millions of families.
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The use of the (American) English language can be seen as a form of cultural imperialism, but it also allows people like you (not native English speakers, but part of the global computing community) to reach markets previously unimaginable. I think putting up with the occasional linguistic disruption that emanates from the dominant market should be worth it.
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I wonder how many of them have MSc degrees. You know, Main of Sciences degree.
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The two definitions of the word “master” for “owner” and “teacher” are a doublet, they come from different etymological paths that converged. Git derives its use from the former.
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And where they keep the main copy of their diplomas.
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I like the notifications page, but the blue dickbar you get when clicking a notification is too tall and not very useful. I love “mark as unread” (and should investigate “save”), but “back to notifications” is silly (duplicates the bell — also who doesn’t open each notification in a new tab?!), “unsubscribe” duplicates the issue sidebar and “done” I do not understand at all — the notification is already marked read by visiting the issue…
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That, at least, can be easily removed. I’ve already added it to my remove-fixed-headers uBlock Origin list.
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Pressing done (or the tick on the notifications page) removes it from the list of notifications. Just visiting it only seems to grey it out.
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Yeah, I don’t like the fixed header either. They have a feedback link on the notifications page and I’d encourage you to send this.
I’m very skeptical of the numbers. A fully charged iPhone has a battery of 10-12 Wh (not kWh), depending on the model. You can download more than one GB without fully depleting the battery (in fact, way more than that). The 2.9 kWh per GB is totally crazy… Sure, there are towers and other elements to deliver the data to the phone. Still.
The referenced study doesn’t show those numbers, an even their estimation of 0.1 kWh/GB (page 6 of the study) is taking into account a lot of old infrastructure. In the same page they talk about numbers of 2010, but even then the consumption using broadband was estimated as 0.08 kWh/GB and only 2.9 kWh for 3G access. Again, in 2010.
Taking into account that consumption for 2020 is totally unrealistic to me… It’s probably a factor of at least 30 times less… Of course, this number will go down as well as more efficient transfers are rolled out, which seems to be happening already, at an exponential rate.
So don’t think that shaving a few kbytes here and there is going to make a significant change…
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I don’t know whether the numbers are right or wrong, but I’m very happy with the alternative direction here, and another take at the bloat that the web has become today.
It takes several seconds on my machine to load the website of my bank, a major national bank used by millions of folks in the US (Chase). I looked at the source code, and it’s some sort of encrypted (base64-style, not code minimisation style) JavaScript gibberish, which looks like it uses several seconds of my CPU time each time it runs, in addition to making the website and my whole browser unbearably slow, prompting the slow-site warning to come in and out, and often failing to work at all, requiring a reload of the whole page. (No, I haven’t restarted my browser in a while, and, yes, I do have a bunch of tabs open — but many other sites still work fine as-is, but not Chase.)
I’m kind of amazed how all these global warming people think it’s OK to waste so many of my CPU cycles on their useless fonts and megabytes of JavaScript on their websites to present a KB worth of text and an image or two. We need folks to start taking this seriously.
The biggest cost might not be the actual transmission, but rather the wasted cycles from having to rerender complex designs that don’t add anything to the user experience — far from it, make it slow for lots of people who don’t have the latest and greatest gadgets and don’t devote their whole machine to running a single website in a freshly-reloaded browser. This also has a side effect of people needing to upgrade their equipment on a regular basis, even if the amount of information you require accessing — just a list of a few dozen of transactions from your bank — hasn’t changed that much over the years.
Someone should do some math on how much a popular bank contributes to global warming with its megabyte-sized website that requires several seconds of CPU cycles to see a few dozen transactions or make a payment. I’m pretty sure the number would be rather significant. Add to that the amount of wasted man-hours of folks having to wait several seconds for the pages to load. But mah design and front-end skillz!
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Chase’s website was one of two reasons I closed my credit card with them after 12 years. I was traveling and needed to dispute a charge, and it took tens of minutes of waiting for various pages to load on my smartphone (Nexus 5x, was connected to a fast ISP via WiFi).
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The problem is that Chase, together with AmEx, effectively have a monopoly on premium credit cards and travel rewards. It’s very easy to avoid them as a bank otherwise, because credit unions often provide a much better product, and still have outdated-enough websites that simply do the job without whistling at you all the time, but if you’re into getting the best out of your travel, dealing with the subpar CPU-hungry websites of AmEx and Chase is often a requirement for getting certain things done.
(However, I did stop using Chase Ink for many of my actual business transactions, because the decline rate was unbearable, and Chase customer service leaves a lot to be desired.)
What’s upsetting is that with every single redesign, they make things worse, yet the majority of bloggers and reviewers only see the visual “improvements” in graphics, and completely ignore the functional and usability deficiencies and extra CPU requirements of each redesign.
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Sure, there are towers and other elements to deliver the data to the phone. Still.
Still what? If you’re trying to count the total amount of power required to deliver a GB, then it seems like you should count all the computers involved, not just the endpoint.
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“still, is too big of a difference”. Of course you’re right ;-)
The study estimates the consumption as 0.1 kWh in 2020. The 2.9 kWh is an estimation in 2010.
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I see these arguments all the time about “accuracy” of which study’s predictions are “correct” but it must be known that these studies are predictions of the average consumption for just transport, and very old equipment is still in service in many many places in the world; you could very easily be hitting some of that equipment on some requests depending on where your data hops around! We all know an average includes many outliers, and perhaps the average is far less common than the other cases. In any case, wireless is not the answer! We can start trusting numbers once someone develops the energy usage equivalent of
dig…
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Yes. Let’s count a couple.
I have a switch (an ordinary cheap switch) here that’ll receive and forward 8Gbps on 5W, so it can forward 3600000 gigabytes per kWh, or 0.0000028kWh/GB. That’s the power supply rating, so it’ll be higher than the peak power requirement, which is in turn will be higher than the sustained, and big switches tend to be more efficient than this small one, so the real number may have another zero. Routers are like switches wrt power (even big fast routers tend to have low-power 40MHz CPUs and do most routing in a switch-like way, since that’s how you get a long MTBF), so if you assume that the sender needs a third of that 0.1kWh/GB, the receiver a third, and the networking a third, then… dumdelidum… the average number of routers and switches between the sender and receiver must be at least 10000. This doesn’t make sense.
The numbers don’t make sense for servers either. Netflix recently announced getting ~200Gbps out of its new hardware. At 0.03kWh/GB, that would require 22kW sustained, so probably a 50kW power supply. Have you ever seen such a thing? A single rack of servers would would need 1MW of power.
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There was a study that laid out the numbers, but the link seems to have died recently. It stated that about 50% the energy cost for data transfer was datacenter costs, the rest was spread out thinly over the network to get to its destination. Note that datacenter costs does not just involve the power supply for the server itself, but also all related power consumption like cooling, etc.
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ACEEE, 2012… I seem to remember reading that study… I think I read it when it was new, and when I multiplied the numbers in that with Google’s size and with a local ISP’s size, I found that both of them should have electricity bills far above 100% of their total revenue.
Anyway, if you change the composition that way, then at least 7000 routers/switches on the way, or else some of the switches must use vastly more energy than the ones I’ve dealt with.
And on the server side, >95% of the power must go towards auxiliary services. AIUI cooling isn’t the major auxiliary service, preparing data to transfer costs more than cooling. Netflix needs to encode films, Google needs to run Googlebot, et cetera. Everyone who transfers a lot must prepare data to transfer.
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I ran a server at Coloclue for a few years, and the pricing is based on power usage.
I stopped in 2013, but I checked my old invoices and monthly power usage fluctuated between 23.58kWh and 18.3kWh, with one outlier at 14kWh. That’s quite a difference! This is all on the same machine (little Supermicro Intel Atom 330) with the same system (FreeBSD).
This is from 2009-2014, and I can’t go back and correlate this with what the machine was doing, but fluctuating activity seems the most logical response? Would be interesting if I had better numbers on this.
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With you on the skeptic train: would love to see where this estimate:
Let’s assume the average website receives about 10.000 unique visitors per month
it seems way high. We probably will be looking to a pareto distribution, and I don’t know if my intuition is wrong, but I’ve the feeling that your average wordpress site sees way way lower visitors than that.
Very curious about this now, totally worth some more digging
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This is the second time you’ve attacked a person on here for blocking you on GitHub. It’s petty and disrespectful as hell. This is not a place for you to air your personal grievances with people, especially when it’s completely irrelevant to the actual topic, especially especially when they asked you to leave them alone.
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I originally wrote a lengthy reply to this to set the record straight and telling “my side of the story”, but this is not the place. Dragging out a very minor incident here like this is incredibly inappropriate and misplaced. This is also not the first time I’ve seen you badger people on Lobsters for blocking you on GitHub. Just … stop.
If anyone is truly concerned about this then feel free to contact me in private to ask for details.
@pushcx do we really want to have people air grudges on unrelated stories like this?
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Does Discourse have an aversion to the term Free Software even though it’s licensed under GPLv2?
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Not really, but the company never strictly favored one ideology over the other.
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I really don’t like this response, it’s not a preference, it’s a different ideology. It means different things.
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It was a genuine question to someone who worked with the company for four years, I think it’s somewhat related. I just thought it was a little weird is all.
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I’m generally in favor of developers being able to pay rent.
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Wait, are you telling me that people aren’t building houses for free in their spare time after their day job?!
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Some people are and they could definitely use our help, but your point definitely stands. :)
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…Their spare time is exactly what individual volunteers use.
Some organizations (businesses) will give a group of their employees time off the job to go volunteer for Habitat for Humanity together. Commonly each member of the group will receive a T-shirt emblazoned with the company logo and the Habitat for Humanity logo.
Does anyone know if the employees commonly receive their regular wage during those events?
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Does anyone know if the employees commonly receive their regular wage during those events?
Salesforce (and by extension Heroku) provides some amount of VTO (volunteer time off) that is paid in full. It used to be 40 hours, and is now 56 hours as of a year or two ago. VTO is highly encouraged, and it doesn’t have to be done in teams, or through co-sponsored events. We are required to track the hours, and our company OKRs for the year always have a target for staff completing X number of VTO hours.
It’s pretty great!
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They could preserve their current business model and go open source. Don’t release builds, make people pay for them!
By going proprietary, what they think they have achieved is prevention of others setting up build servers. What they have actually achieved is prevention of community contributions. I cannot fork, make changes and distribute it.
I don’t get why people think it is difficult for devs to earn from open source or free (as in freedom) software. There are quite a few (tried and tested) business models. Jitsi, lib-jitsi-meet, elementary os to name a few.
I’ve seen this more and more lately, accounts where all posts and comments they submit are about their own content and I’m not sure what the general stance is here, but even if they are kinda relevant topics I’m not comfortable with people interacting with the community only for self-promotion. Apart from this, it seems like a very low-effort post where there is a typo in a 5 word title, I don’t think we should allow this here.
As a really, really long-time Linux user I find this a little amusing. I remember BSD users telling me earnestly in the late 90s, early 00s how Linux was doomed b/c the BSDs are soooo much better. Not so much, I guess.
The author complains about similar things here, such as “GNU/Linux does prepare to move to new tech all the time in a never ending treadmill of trying to fix by replacement instead of actually confronting the underlying issues” but at the same time “we have no BSD-native answer to say, GNOME, QT, Firefox etc.”
On the one hand you have a large community that is continually trying to re-invent itself. On the other you have a community that seems to be largely looking backwards and trying to define itself by what it isn’t. (e.g., not Linux.)
I’m also skeptical when people start carping about CoC issues, especially somebody who acknowledges being banned for “conduct issues.” Typically it’s not easy to actually get thrown out of a project for conduct issues, and if you have I’m inclined to think you’re not a peach to work with.
“Can we trust the GNU/Linux community to be better to us than it has?”
I mean… the real thing here is that the author seems to want the Linux community to cater to the BSDs in their effort to… not be part of the Linux community. I am happy for people to use whatever OS makes them happy, and I’ve always hoped that the BSDs would survive and thrive because variety is good.
But the request (if I can tease it out of the author’s post) is to make Linux less… Linux-y. They seem to have gripes with D-BUS, systemd, etc. and other dependencies that are common with Linux. It’s not the Linux community’s responsibility to make things less useful / interdependent so that the BSDs can consume them.
If the BSD community doesn’t have the critical mass to be self-sufficient it’s poor form to complain that the community they’re trying to avoid being part of isn’t responding to their needs sufficiently.
But, that’s not new to me. As I alluded to earlier, I was told point-blank more than 20 years ago that Linux was doomed by a NetBSD contributor who was staffing a BSD booth in a .org pavilion paid for by a Linux vendor, at a Linux event.
I’m not sure I like the Linux bubble reinventing themselves. All backwards-incompatible changes I remember in the last years haven’t been good.
Also I hate to be one going “everything was better years ago” - but I’ve been using Linux as a desktop OS (and daily driver for work) for so many years, I’ve always been happy (but only because I don’t need 3d performance). The BSDs are missing the “hard things”, support for a wide range of software and (graphics) drivers. There’s a reason why my main private computer still runs Windows and not even Linux. The things I want to use work (at all) and the things I don’t need daily (software development) I can still do via SSH or other remote tools.
Care to give examples? FreeBSD’s GPU support isn’t that far off Linux’ and shares a lot of the code (and for proprietary drivers, is supported officially by nVidia, including . I believe CUDA support is included in the drivers, but the toolchain is Linux-only and so you need to run it in the Linux compat layer.
The biggest obstacle on the software side is Google’s resistance to taking *BSD patches in Chrome. The patches to support Capsicum in the sandboxing logic were about 100 lines of code, at least one order of magnitude smaller than any other platform, but Google refused to take them. This has a huge knock-on effect on anything that uses Electron (though as of a few months ago, there is now a version of Electron in ports).
Maybe I was overly vague when I shouldn’t have been. Games, simple as that. If I buy an RTX 3700 or equally fast ATI card I want the same performance (maybe -5%) as on Windows. And that’s usually not the case, or at least not in the first 6 months after the cards are releases. And it completely ignores the fact that there has to be a linux version or working wine version of the game in the first place.
Call this a one-sided approach, but if it wasn’t for games my main computer at home would’ve been running Linux or BSD for the last 10 years, probably longer.
I’d argue that in the late 90s/early 00s it really was. By this time FreeBSD was already a solid well-documented and consistent system (well, as consistent as Unix gets anyway), whereas Linux was … not so much. At this time I found getting started on FreeBSD a lot easier than getting started on Linux for example.
Since then, a lot has changed though and today I find there is little difference except various details and various fairly specific use cases (i.e. the TCP/IP stack is supposedly better on FreeBSD, or at least was, I don’t know if this is still the case).
We need a postmortem on how a small group of wokes were able to force millions of hours of toil on the entire software industry. Think of all the repos and scripts that have to be updated… my god.
The connection between
masterbranches and slavery is suuuuuch a stretch:githas no concept of slave branches, but BitKeeper, the version control systemgitwas based on did. In woke logic, being descended from something offensive makes you offensive, thereforegitis offensive.As crazy as this is, there’s no way I’m going to fight this one. The mobs of self-righteous wokes that police the software industry are too strong, so I will update my repos and double-check my scripts like a good little worker bee.
Here’s your postmortem: the “small group” of “wokes” appears to be the majority of our industry, just people trying to be kinder to one another. Personally I find the change heartening.
I agree that this is true for a lot of things but I find this one a bit of a stretch. For example, I fully support avoiding the terms ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitelist’ because they provide a narrative that white == good, black == bad, which is not something I want to perpetuate in a society where ‘black’ and ‘white’ are adjectives applied to people independent of any personal choice on their part.
The discussions I’ve seen around renaming the branch name have had white Americans leading the charge for this change and black people either saying nothing or that they don’t personally feel a negative connection with the word ‘master’ and they’d rather white folks spent more time addressing structural racism and less time addressing words with a tenuous connection to some awful bits of history. The word ‘master’ in the absence of ‘slave’ crops up in so many other contexts (in degree titles, master of martial arts, master chef, and so on) and, if anything, this narrative is pushing the idea that black people can’t (or shouldn’t) self-identify with the word ‘master’ in any context, which is pretty harmful.
That said, on a personal level, I recently followed some advice in another article to put the current Git branch name in my command prompt and main gives me two extra characters of space before I wrap lines than master, so I do see a small concrete benefit to this.
My own anecdata tells me that the number of black people who are uncomfortable with master/slave terminology in tech isn’t zero. I’m with you 100% on this not being the most important thing to tackle, but I fail to see why we shouldn’t do this as well as address the larger systemic problems.
The default branch in git seems like such a silly thing for people to object to changing (to me, at least) as branch names have no special meaning. All these scripts that need changing have the same bug: they hard-coded a value which was never guaranteed to be static.
This isn’t directed at you, but I read through threads like these and find myself wondering about the folks who argue strongly that this change, of all things, is simply too much to bear.
It was never guaranteed, no, but it was the de-facto default for the overwhelming majority; probably above 99%. I’m a big fan of “convention over configuration”, and that has now been kind of lost. I also have 70 git repos or some such I now need to rename (or stick to “master” which might be misconstrued as making some political point) and probably a script or three.
At my last job we had even more repos, and a bunch of scripts floating left and right on people’s machines. Changing all of this for a group of ~100 devs and making sure everyone is up to date would be quite a task. Life is short; and there are real problems everyone agrees on. It just seems to me it would be much better if all that time and money was spent on more important issues.
At any rate, I think why people object so strongly is a resentment over being told what to do. No one really likes that, and a lot of people have the feeling this change is being imposed upon them. Hell, I feel this change is being imposed on me, because I now need to spend time on something I don’t see the point of. It’s not a “passive change” like a project renaming some terminology which doesn’t affect much outside of some documentation or popup.
Personally I think all of this is wasting a lot of political capital on something that’s … just nowhere near the top of the priority list, even if you agree it’s a problem in the first place. This seems to be a pattern I’ve seen over the last few years; this lack of focus, prioritisation, stubbornness, and tendency to divide people in camps is why I find American liberals so incredibly frustrating to deal with 🤷♂️
My expectation is that when/if this change lands we’ll all be even more bored with it. It’s just a change to the default, I don’t see why much at my work or in my personal projects would need to change. Either we’re using 3rd-party generic tooling which definitely has the ability to specify branches and better not have hardcoded assumptions by the time this actually happens, or it’s just some in-house tooling which only needs to work on our own repos.
I think you’re spot on when you say folks are mostly objecting to being told what to do. I think our perception of the people who (we believe) are telling us what to do is also at play here.
I’m not sure I deal with American liberals much (I honestly don’t know the political leanings of the few American colleagues I have), so I defer to you here. My staggeringly obvious observation is that lately there’s a whole lot more dividing people into camps going on, by seemingly everyone.
Thank you, sincerely, for taking the time to reply to me. What started as an off-the-cuff comment while I ate my sandwich has snowballed into quite the thread (by Lobsters standards anyway). I’ve spent more time thinking about this topic in the last 24h than I ever have before, that’s for sure :-) I think I’m done with this thread; my guess is most folks reading this, regardless of their thoughts on git’s default branch name, think it’s a garbage fire.
This reads to me as emblematic of a certain paranoia in the id of this community that I really think we ought to call attention to (not you specifically, but this fear more broadly). This type of fear is a counter productive projection that we need to let go of because it prevents us from making real progress.
I guarantee you that nobody is going to come across one of your git repos and call you out as a racist/colonizer/white supremacist/you name it. The vast majority of people calling for a better default branch name are reasonable and morally centered people who simply want to speak to their terminal without unnecessarily charged metaphors. They themselves almost certainly have git repos that will continue to use the branch
master. People are not the personification of the “wokes” that the OP feels the need to fabricate.People all over this thread are afraid of the scary “woke mob” bogeyman, but if they were to get off of twitter and have an actual conversation with real antiracist people, they’d probably realize they’re normal people with strong moral values who spend energy on constructing a more just world. What’s funny to me about this whole “master” debate is that I think the folks making the most noise are the ones fighting against the change. Those pushing for it have bigger fish to fry.
In this particular case I don’t expect people to come in and start accusing me of anything, but they might see “master” and misconstrue that to mean something even though it doesn’t. Of course, if I do change it then other people might also misconstrue it to mean something. I kind of feel a bit stuck here; as this politicisation of a bloody branch name is forcing me to take a position where I don’t really feel comfterable with either side (you can’t really inject nuance in a branch name). Although I obviously feel significantly less comfterable with all the “SJW cultural marxists!!!” idiocy, that doesn’t automatically mean I feel comfterable with the other side.
I also don’t think that the “woke mob bogeyman” is quite as paranoid as you make it out to be; I’ve definitely seen quite a few incidents first-hand – and even been subjected to some – where people were beleaguered over a triviality, which sometimes resulted in some downright bullying. I know this isn’t the majority of people, but as the same time there definitely is a subgroup of what we might call “toxic SJWs”, for lack of a better term, which reflects really badly on the entire cause.
I think that’s kind of a strange sentiment; do you expect people to just accept anything uncritically? And if there are bigger fish to fry, then why not fry them instead of wasting all this goodwill and political capital on this?
Of course not. Critical thinking is required to reflect on the value of language in this context. It’s precisely a lack of critical thinking that leads to knee-jerk reactions, projections, straw men, overemphasis of the technical implications and these wacky slippery slope arguments I am seeing up and down the thread.
Because people who care about social progress are pretty good at walking and chewing gum at the same time. You can go to the local DSA meeting, take part in a protest, read books from the library, and also send emails about git. You yourself mentioned having 70 git repos. Is it hard to imagine that a large group of people are capable of multitasking?
A day still has 24 hours, so there really is a hard limit on things, and more importantly, because you’re asking other people to change with you, you also need to factor in that not everyone is willing to spend the same amount of time on this kind of stuff. This is what I meant with “wasting all this goodwill and political capital”.
There are also plenty of far bigger issues that see hardly any attention, often because there is far too much focus on much less important matters. I’ll avoid naming examples so this doesn’t turn too political, but the whole “walking and chewing gum” multitask theory is a bit misguided IMHO. It annoys (even angers) me because all of this is standing in the way of actual progress.
Is it even possible to have a conversation with these Enlightened Ones, whose moral values are so much stronger than the rest of us?
You’re not black and represent exactly zero black people in tech.
Very true.
Or, perhaps, they are the majority of people who care. Most people don’t care too much about what to call the default branch. For the average person, this is probably a small bit of trivia. The people who care (in either direction) are probably the minority. Of course, the people are care are the people who choose.
I suspect you’re correct; I’m looking at discussions like this and mistakenly assuming most people are “in the room”, but of course it’s only the people who care either way who bother to chime in. Thanks for reminding me of that :-)
You you mean the majority of the leaders of large, influential entities in the industry.
It’s kind of a difficult conversation to have; I think that all things considered, there are very few people who want to be unwelcome, much less (subtly) racist, but once you argue “this is a pointless change” it’s very easy to have the optics of that. This is made even worse by all the “zomg, another example of cultural marxist feminazi SJWs destroying civilisation!!!!111” idiots.
Most people that I know respond to this with “sigh 🙄”, but don’t really say much about it, and a very small amount of people I know are in favour of this. This is not a very scientific opinion poll of course, but as far as I can see it’s really quite a small minority.
As I argued last time, I’d personally rather not comment too much on this to give people who are actually affected by this a chance to speak without being drowned out, and in the 5 months since I placed that comment I still see mostly white people (including myself) discus issues that don’t affect them, which makes me kind of uncomfortable.
How is the
masterbranch unkind? Do you think everyone usinggitwas being unkind until this change?It’s not, and I certainly don’t think everyone using git is being unkind either.
I think that changing the default branch name to not reference master/slave terminology (a common thing in IT which I know has made at least one of my friends uncomfortable) shows kindness and empathy. It is a tiny, minuscule such act, to be sure.
Not making this change is not an act of unkindness. Using the branch name “master” in your repos is not an act of unkindness. An unkind act would be renaming the default branch to a racial slur. That’s my view on it, at least: not being kind isn’t the same as being unkind.
I regret my pretty barbed initial reply to you, and I apologise. Reading it back, I made distinctly unkind assumptions :-)
Worth to read: The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
It explains the logic behind it. The funniest part of this is that master as a word predates slavery in the US.
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
UPDATE: tadzik’s was correcting me on the missing qualifier for which slavery i am talking about
I’m pretty sure slavery existed long before the 1200s ;) Did you mean “american slavery”?
Yes, sorry, I mean the slavery why the mob is upset now. Slavery outside of the context of USA is irrelevant to them because it does not fit their narrative. Thomas Sowell writes a lot about this.
No worries, thanks for clarifying – and for the reading links :)
This was an entertaining read, thanks. This should actually be the top comment, since it gives more insight on what’s going on than any ideological comment in this thread (on lobsters, but on other sites as well).
Not only you can’t fight this one, but not actively participating in woke’s narration makes you their enemy. Even expressing dislike about this patch risks being taken as a person who is pro-slavery, which is an obvious BS. But indeed, you can’t fight with angry mob alone.
Better for who?
But it’s not only about this change. Generally it’s about introduction of the newspeak.
It’s more like intolerant minorities want to impose rules for tolerant majorities. I disagree with minority in this case and I don’t think the majority should be controlled by a few offended individuals. It’s anti-democratic. I think it would be perfectly valid to leave the default as master, and if someone is offended, he or she could change the branch name in the configuration, that’s all.
Let me be the judge of what affects me, or what doesn’t, thank you.
Well that was offensive. I’m not that old, I’m not angry at all, we’re talking about just 1 issue, not many, and even that I’m just defending my point of view, that’s all. You, on the other hand, seem to be pretty intolerant of other people’s point of view.
Just read this. If you still think I’m childlish, and of course you’re free to think this way, then there’s no point in continuing this thread.
But I’m also people, and I don’t feel it’s a change for the better.
Okay but you do realize that you’re describing our situation here? You’re trying to impose your point of view on me, only because I don’t like the idea. Yet also somehow you think this is a wrong thing to do. Doublethink?
Maybe collective endeavors like open source projects aren’t a good fit for you.