Threads for y0ssar1an
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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- IINA is the best Mac media player. Prefer it to VLC.
- Install AppCleaner and enable SmartDelete in the preferences. This will find and delete leftover files when you uninstall apps.
- Rectangle is the best window manager
by god, we’ve done it! we’ve fixed racism.
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Not all changes are positive in the fight against racism. I think you’re being sarcastic, but I think superficial things like this sometimes make racism worse by celebrating non-victories and removing motivation for real change.
Kind of like how joining a gym and paying money is worse than working out because it creates the mental perception of positive action. If everyone who joined a gym and didn’t go would just walk 2 hours a week they would be much better off. Of course, if they went to the gym they’d be better off as well.
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If you don’t even believe in incremental change you probably aren’t using git, so no problem for you either way, right?
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I think the disagreement is more whether or not this is even a “racism” question in the first place, rather than whether or not we should do anything about racism (something pretty more or less everyone agrees on, anyone not on the fringes of the right anyway).
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In my experience whether it was one in the first place is irrelevant, it’s whether it is one now. You can generalize this to bikeshedding moments well known to us developers. Something comes up which is easy to have an opinion about. Either everybody has their say, a decision is made and it gets forgotten. Or it gets tied into office politics and the discussion keeps coming back, but by the 3rd time you realize that it’s not really about whether the button should be in a menu or not, it’s about should we listen more to the UX designer who has a degree or the project managers who’re with customers every day? A decision has to be made which means there will be a “winner”.
It’s not about whether this is racism in the first place, all racists have banded together behind resisting this change. Lobste.rs is pretty civilized but you should see the garbage being spouted on some sites against those who want to give you the tools to maybe make this change for your own project. The fringes of the right like to turn everything into culture wars and I’m glad they’re losing this one.
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whether it was one in the first place is irrelevant, it’s whether it is one now
This is an interesting point! It also puts people whose opinion on the entire matter is a mere “meh” – probably the vast majority of people – in an extremely uncomfortable position, as:
- you either have to invest time and effort in to what you see as a pointless meaningless change that’s completely ineffective at fighting racism, or;
- you give in to the right-wing toxic trolls ranting about Cultural Marxist SJW Nazis, or whatever the lingo these days is.
The only reason I’d be tempted to rename any branch is as a big “fuck you” to the people from item 2, but at the same time I think the entire thing is also completely meaningless beyond that.
I don’t think it’s just the “fringes of the right” turning everything in to culture wars. I feel this is a good example of a “culture war” instigated by the left based on some extremely tenuous arm-chair psychology, and the ensuing conflict has left most people in a very awkward position :-/
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It’s not about whether this is racism in the first place, all racists have banded together behind resisting this change
I buy the explanation that the term “master branch” is more appropriate in the sense of “master copy”, and ambiguity is arguably the defining characteristic of the English language (we’re still fighting about free vs. open vs. libre after 60 years).
This makes me a racist. Go figure.
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As a programmer you should understand logic. All ducks are birds. Not all birds are ducks. All racists resist the change. Not all who resit the change are racists.
Why pretend that you do not understand it in this case? What other reason could you have other than to add fuel to a racial fire?
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My purpose is to make sure overly dramatic posts like yours don’t go unchallenged.
It’s not about whether this is racism in the first place, all racists have banded together behind resisting this change.
Your initial statement is heavy with connotation that resisting the change and racism go hand in hand. You left no room for non-racist resisting of the change.
You’ll notice arp242’s reply interprets your message the same way I did, and the same way you intended. Don’t try to weasel your way out of this one.
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Why are you doing this? Speaking for others, twisting words and reading the worst into it, getting defensive about it… I expect more from Lobsters discussions.
Don’t let yourself be gaslighted. I really just meant what I said. Remember that nobody is forcing anything upon you. It is about being given the tools to do what you want with your own repo.
The linked article just gives you tools, it only vaguely references the controversy. “In three steps you have renamed a git branch without making a big deal out of it, all while avoiding the wrath of internet reactionaries.” Yet there was wrath. Because, as I was saying, changing the name of the master branch will never ever again be about just that.
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Even better, we should stop making arguments out of authority and stop talking about universal truths in Tech and in dev practices. God doesn’t write code, so there are just opinions, not truths. Framing you own opinion as truth is just a good way to enter an echo-chamber of like-minded machos and kill any dialogue.
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“Code proven to function correctly is better than equivalently fast and well-written code not proven to function correctly”. You want to tell me this isn’t true but just an opinion?
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The definitions of “functionally correct”, “proven” and “better” are all relatives to a context or a system of reference (be it a value system or a formal system). They are not absolutes. Not everybody evaluates that statement in the same context and in the same system and it might lead to people considering that statement imprecise, false or meaningless.
A lot of code “not proven to function correctly” can easily generate more profit than a correct code, if the malfunction doesn’t hit the user too hard and the cost of being proven correct is much bigger than the (monetary) losses. Most CEOs that want to turn a quick profit and sell their startups would deem that statement incorrect, because they have a very different definition of “better”, often incompatible with the one of workers.
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Happily! Techniques like cleanroom get can you very high confidence in correctness for a lot cheaper than proving the code correct. Most people would trade “absolute certainty” for “near absolute certainty at 10% the total cost”
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I thought it was clear that the example would have the same total costs to make the comparison equivalent and have meaning, guess not
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What is a good source to start learning about cleanroom techniques?
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Stavely’s page is best for a quick intro. His book was good. I also think his section backing semi-formal verification is the best I’ve seen on justifying its cost-benefit ratio.
One other thing to note. There’s automated tools now that can handle some of the techniques. Anyone trying Cleanroom might want to build on it by using one or more of those tools.
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I ordered a copy!
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Wouldn’t it be less complicated and more secure to just disable password auth for all users?
The main selling point of
gofmt, for me, is not that it formats my code perfectly (I don’t care. I really really don’t care. I’ve worked with code bases that had half the functions completely squished onto line, from declaration to closing brace. I work with code bases that have multiple indentation levels in the same file. Nothing about formatting has ever prevented me from doing my job. I don’t get why people get so worked up over it).It’s that it makes sure time and energy isn’t wasted discussing meaningless subjective differences in opinion about formatting. It’s the joy of knowing that if I’ve run
gofmt, whoever reviews it can’t be lazy and just point out a few formatting mistakes; they have to come up with something meatier.gofumptmight be made with the best possible intentions, it does re-open the can of worms thatgofmtclosed.I’ve liked the formatting gofumpt has enforced, but this has been my experience too. It creates diffs when I’m working across projects because not all are using it and I feel like I’ve gone back in time on this issue.
Setting this key in your repo’s
.vscode/settings.jsonfile will get all the VS Code people using it.Computing a solution to the dependency graph (i.e. generating the lock file) is an NP-hard problem. It gets much slower with every package that you add. In a large project, it will take a long time, especially since poetry is written in Python. The slowness is usually not a big deal, because you only have to compute a new lock file when you want to add/remove/update dependencies.
It sounds like the author is computing a new lock file every time their build script is run. If so, that’s a misuse of poetry. You should generate it once, check it in to the repo, and then you can run
poetry installto fetch the packages after that.tl;dr I think the author has unrealistic expectations for a Python package manager and also is probably misusing
poetry. IMOpoetryis the best Python package manager and we should be encouraging its use, not spreading FUD about it.If I recall correctly, the slowness of python dependency resolution comes from the fact that
setup.pyhas to be executed to get the list of dependencies. Repeating that invocation for all candidate versions really quickly adds up.While NP-hard problems are in principle extremely slow, in practice we’re really good at quickly solving even very large problems, as long as they’re not pathological. “Very large” in this case is millions of clauses — something well beyond the size of the typical dependency graph
On the other hand, if Poetry wasn’t offloading the problem to a dedicated SAT solver, that’s a pretty big design failure.
The slowness is due in part to the fact that calculating the full dependency set requires downloading and inspecting the packages. Even ones that use static metadata declaration, so that the
setup.pyscript doesn’t exist/doesn’t have to be executed, because even the static package metadata is still inside the package itself. There’s work ongoing to expose more package metadata directly through the API of the Python Package Index, which would allow fetching the dependency list for a package without needing to obtain a copy of the full package, but it’s not 100% there yet.The same issue also affects
pipand its dependency solver, and any other tools which try to calculate dependency trees for Python packages.I wouldn’t say so: based on experience with Cargo, I think reasonable design choices are:
Most of complexity in Cargo’s implementation seems to come from domain modeling (a lot of various kinds of dependencies) and desire to provide good error messages. Performance is also important, but I wouldn’t say it’s an overriding concern.
Maybe for Python with more historically baroque dep graphs and low performance reaching for off-the shelf solver makes more sense. But then, I’d assume that for Python packaging tools being “pure Python” is a hard requirement (you don’t want installing the installing tool to be harder than actually installing stuff!), and I’d assume good SAT solvers are not pure Python?
Turns out almost no package managers use SAT! I was totes wrong.
In my defense, I was most definitely not computing
poetry.lockevery time. I generated it once, committed it, ran the relevant commands (e.g. ‘add’), and observed obscene amounts of slowness that I didn’t feel was justified. Maybe it was to be expected given the inherent difficulty in dependency resolution and I should have adjusted my expectations accordingly, but when I was able to switch to thepip-toolsworkflow I no longer had to contend with such annoyances given the already low amount of value Poetry was providing.If Poetry works for you, then I am genuinely glad for you as I am a strong believer in having tools around that remove unnecessary friction from our lives. Poetry just didn’t fit the bill for me and made me be more wary of introducing such tools (and any dependencies, to be honest) in the future.
It’s not necessary NP-hard. If you only allowed one-sided constraints (eg, bounding semver ranges from below, and allowing duplicating major versions), greedy algorithm works. This probably doesn’t work for Python, which has to work with existing conventions, instead of designing something easily solvable.
This is a straightforward security vs. convenience tradeoff.
Pros of storing TOTP in password manager:
Cons:
I would argue that the convenience is worth it for most people. Most people have horrible digital security practices and struggle with login. They’re not going to use password managers or MFA unless you make it very convenient.
I was just thinking what the author might think of when they hear about Twilio Authy where my two step codes are protected just by a text message, my encryption password, and a prayer.
I tried using bitwarden but as far as I can tell, you can save but not use two step codes in bitwarden without paying for it.
If you are looking for Google Authenticator alternatives then I will highly recommend Aegis for Android. It is fully open-source and allows you to export/import keys.
with all the billions that Silicon Valley is investing in garbage companies, i hope there’s a few dollars left to invest in NanoVMs. the unikernel dream deserves a chance to come true. complexity is the root of all vulns and unikernels attack that complexity at its source. they remove 99 bajillion lines of code from the application stack. you end up with a tiny, fast-starting artifact containing just what the application needs and nothing more.
it’s such a damn beautiful vision that it will probably be ignored by our dumb industry. all the money will flow to companies making familiar, worse-is-better tech that put little band-aids on gaping security holes.
use 1Password to store your passwords and TOTP codes together. this isn’t 2FA, since the passwords and TOTP codes are stored in the same place. it’s more like 1.5FA. nevertheless, the convenience is worth it IMO.
for bonus points, store critical passwords in a shared vault with friends or family so you can gain access to your 1Password through them in the event of a catastrophe.
This article is a classic. People will still be referencing it 10 years from now.
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.