Linux 5.8 Formally Adds the Inclusive Terminology Guidelines
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
its far more descriptive.
Personally I'd like master/apprentice to be more popular.
but all of this is pointless if we don't actually remove some barriers to entry for IT. I doubt people are put off by the use of master/slave, Its the barrage of abuse one gets for being different[1].
[1]no this isn't from most people, but the minority is vocal and toxic, and the majority don't really do enough to keep a lid on the tedious pricks who insist on making IT creepy for anyone who isn't a young bloke.
Suspectlist?
Not sure I like either of those options, just the first things that came to mind.
I think I'm in favor of changing these terms, because the proposed replacements are clearer about what happens with the list's contents, and the original phrases are rooted in some analogies that are definitely problematic.
No, they don't really have those meanings any more, but changing them sends a signal to the people who could be hurt or offended by the terms that we want them to be welcome.
For example I gave a talk where I was critical about the networking schemes of kubernetes. Had I been a woman I would have had a barrage of hostile questions. I know because my more experienced female co-worker raised the same points in her talk.
Another example is that person who did the visualisation for the black hole. She was abused simply for being a young woman. Those little shits who combed through the git repor to work out exactly which line she had touched. _Its just not healthy_
It wasn't until I worked at a place where the gender ratios were almost 50:50 that I saw the problems up close. _Every_ woman has a story where they were creeped on in the most toecurling way. These were people who'd only been in the industry for less than two years.
I have a daughter, and I want her to follow in my foot steps, but I don't want her to deal with the horrid shit the small but very vocal minority shart out.
I'm a man and have been told that countless times. Are you sure it is a sex-specific issue? Some people just need to gatekeep their precious fields and feel attacked when a newcomer works on them. I would not go as far as calling that "abuse", I even find it mildly amusing when I'm on the receiving end of ridiculous critique.
> I have a daughter, and I want her to follow in my foot steps, but I don't want her to deal with the horrid shit the small but very vocal minority shart out.
I also have a daughter and a son, and I'm trying to teach both of them that the world is a horrible, hostile place, and that they are out to have an epic fight for survival. Petty creepers will be the least of their problems. There's also a few beautiful things in the world, and I'm also teaching them to appreciate them when these are found, but never to expect or somehow think that they are entitled to them.
How is apprentice a good analogy, the slave computing system is directed what to do, or works for the master; it's not training to be a master.
No-one is black nor white: anyone who thinks colour-named lists relates to skin colour is a moron. Presumably such people think night-time is racist.
I can see the upside though: after the former slaves have been rescued from their "decades of abuse" which they lost an immense chunk of their life to and almost certainly left them mentally and physically scarred for the rest of their life, they'll take solace in the fact that some people somewhere on Earth have renamed their virtual thingamabobs. Then they will finally know peace.
No one's claiming that.
In much the same way that the n-word is most definitely not a term for people with my ethnic background to use, given it's history.
I’m now amusing myself by imagining someone requesting that Das Keyboard rename their product…
I suppose we should get rid of Pastor/Father then. Abuse. Parent/Sibling. Abuse Superior/Inferior. Abuse.
The number of atrocities one may experience in life undermines the practicality of avoiding terminology for the sake of minute populations of people. Setting the precedent once opens the door to having to do it for everyone.
Hope you have enough words to not offend the rest of the class. And if you hide behind "well, there's just so many more of X than Y", then shame on you for cheating on your ideals so quickly, one, and welcome back to where everyone else was at in the first place, two.
Naming matters, and if you wouldn't use a racial epiphet, a term for sexual assaults or slang for genitalia to name something, then you at least have enough of an idea that it's worth not using a term which defines an active and devastating practice, as well as a historical reality that's 3 human lifetimes old and defines an entire community of people, as just another term that's totally okay.
No, I'm arguing if you're going to use the excuse that it is a form of abuse therefore the word should be verboten, then you have a lot of other words you need to add to your list of being insensitive to those who have suffered X or Y trauma, then I provided several examples thereof.
If you're really behind what people say they are, EVERY term that represents some potential source of physical or emotional harm at some point in their life should be on that list. People can be abused by siblings, parents, or authority figures; therefore these terms exist in the same slots that Master/Slave did. Yet there is no outcry over that when it comes to avoiding those words when there may be people who suffer from those words. I see no one clamoring for renaming the sibling axis of XML, or Child/Parent axes despite the child abuse association. Instead, those words sit entirely unmolested as they are not a shallow easy to achieve virtue signal in the current political environment, despite meeting the same hypothetical criteria of being a possible trigger of disclusion due to the emotional pain they might stir up in a hypothetical victim.
So what about those the hypothetically harmed people that won't win you political brownie points right now? Where is their inclusiveness tax going to be added? Or could it be that none of this was really about that at all and represented a desperate attempt to virtue signal in any way imaginable at any cost, even if it means having to completely rewrite decades of literature under the auspices of inclusiveness and pseudo-equality, and the firm insert of a wedge into a set of communities by a very vocal minority where there was previously no division?
I've no problem with conviction and dedication to a cause, however, if what you say you're about doesn't damn well line up with what you're actually doing prepare to be called out.
Issues of this type aren't handled by someone swearing off I.T. They are handled by acting like an adult and realizing that the only one responsible for buffering your emotional triggers is you. I remember during a Diwali celebration a couple of Hindi coworkers giving out swastikas as a good luck gift to everyone in the office; including a Jewish coworker. Did that coworker go running off to H.R. to have the Diwali celebration canceled? No. After a bit of awkward explanation between the Hindi coworkers and the Jewish coworker, it was smoothed over and life went on. That event made for some heartfelt conversation, and a great deal of empathy was traded between that coworker that day, but everyone left the encounter satisfied it was for the best that the issue was just dropped. Everyone still went back to work. Everyone still had their celebration, everyone was just a bit more mindful to run interference for that coworker afterward even if the Hindi folks just couldn't understand why someone wouldn't want their good luck charm. People coexist in spite of pain. In fact to do so is considered a virtuous act and a sign of growth, in that to do so is to transcend your history and circumstances and to become much more by inflicting the most terrible vengeance on an adversity filled origin: the vengeance of living happily and well in spite having come from those origins.
Everyone has the right to their pain. And it absolutely is not okay to willingly make pain worse once you know of it. However, it's not okay to completely turn the world upside down either because someone might get hurt; especially if in doing so you inflict pain on others. Arbitrarily deciding Terms-of-Art are suddenly verboten is just that. In a profession, the progression of language and culture surrounding the practice are just as near and dear to actual practitioner's as the day of the passing of the 14th Amendment may be to the previously disenfranchised. Hell, one of the first fixes I ended up doing when I was a teen with a freshly minted A+ cert was troubleshooting a set of miscofigured IDE drives. Understanding the importance of how the jumpers had to be, and that the term was meant to communicate that by way of analogy was one of the earliest times I felt like a computer person. To me, that knowledge and experience tied up in that Term-of-Art is intensely personal. To have someone come around and piss all over the term, ascribing to it meanings that were never more than a convenient illustrative analog and ascribing to those who dare use or value it for it's usefulness as a pedagogical tool over the years is painful, like it or not. It's painting with a broad, indiscriminate brush on the intentions and characters of a hell of a lot of decent people who at the time were just trying to be understood amongst each other. Equality states no one's pain takes primacy over anyone else's. It is not okay to inflict pain on one to assuage the pain of another. It is fine to take on that pain voluntarily, but that is a personal choice, and social pressure has no business being leveraged to force it to happen. In the name of just keeping drama to a minimum, it is generally considered the way to go when a Term-of-Art is being retired to not make a gigantic stink about it and assume the good-will of all involved. That characteristic has been notably absent from this entire movement, on both sides, but particularly on the side pushing for change. At no point has any consistency been shown or embraced with regards to the application of social pressure thereupon the rest of the community, who reflexively stay silent, just hoping the drama goes away. Now in the back of everyone's head is a censor wondering whether that phrasing is too risque. Whether that is too controversial to put into code.
You set out to right a wrong; to make a corner of humanity a "more welcoming place"; and yet all around I see nothing but contracts, codes of conduct trying to push ideals where before there was the implied understanding of "Don't break stuff, write code someone else won't unduly suffer to maintain, and leave it better for you having been there."
Where before, the only threat was having a patch rejected, is now the risk of being hunted down and having your character assassinated at the mere risk of someone taking a line of code expressed whimsically the wrong way. I've frankly never seen the online community less "free" than it has become in the last few years.
Maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe I've lost the piss and vinegar of my youth, but the beautiful thing I once felt myself a part of looks far less friendly and welcoming to me than it was before. Which makes me quite sad, because I looked forward to contributing to it in a meaningful way once I felt confident in my skills, but the entire way it's morphed from "the faceless bunch that keep the bits flowing over the net" to Cult of Personnality: Developer Edition... I just don't want to anymore. Not for a community where it's more important to cause drama and unmake or make things harder, or to rewrite history in stead of preserving it. Not where you have to have a bloody document thrust in your face to tell you how to act because you're assumed to be a barbarian. A part of me I really liked has died after the last few years... That part honestly believed that the world was all about real equality, and not about brutal half-measures. Where people just trying to make something that works can be left in peace to do so. But that isn't how it works at all. Instead words are tortured and treated like instruments of mass destruction, stereotypes and prejudices run so deep I don't even know as I feel comfortable having really deep controversial discussions with other people I don't know anymore. This coming from someone who has previously entertained the counterposition that the State of Israel was founded in poor form given that it was previously promised to another group in WWII with someone who has more than enough reason to be offended at the mere thought, but still managed to engage in what to me was one of the most fulfilling, rewarding, and mutually enrichinching conversations of my life.
Anyway... This post kind of meandered into some places I did not at all set out to wander, but I'll leave it for posterity anyway. Take from it what you will. I just know I seem to be mourning and I can't figure out why no one else seems to be.
So in short. No, I'm not some evil insensitive racist fragile white bigot. I've been around the block more than once, and worked with all kinds and manner of folks, going out of my way to learn the of the value that even the most humble occupations provide, and the wisdom that underlies understanding before prescribing malice to every controversial term, and the skills that are learned by coexisting with, learning from, and teaching others the art of standing in another's shoes. In spite of all of that; there's still something that fundamentally rubs me wrong about how this entire chain of sentiment and events over the last 4 or so years have gone down. Because all of that I just mentionedseems to be completely absent now, and I don't know why.
First, you probably mean emotional capacity.
Second, very easily, especially if they have other lucrative and rewarding alternatives, which people with the mental capacity for software development probably do.
Having the capacity to deal with necessary unpleasantness to improve one’s quality of work doesn’t imply the lack of self-respect necessary to voluntary put up with completely unnecessary unpleasantness just to work in one of the very many fields one has the facilities to successfully perform in.
But thanks for bringing out the classic hazing defense.
If you can't sit down and do a good job instead of having inequality living rent-free in your head [1], who would prefer you over someone who can? Remember, there's a reason these people are a minority. Companies turn down applicants all the time so this special case isn't that influential.
[1] The girl who started the cancel movement of Dr. Stallman was admittedly too frustrated to do her job.
such a wholistic view.
My female colleagues would love to sit down and do a good job, but they have to put up with men stalking them because they had the brass bollocks to give a speech at a conference without possession of a penis
Almost no one cares about the terminology. Its the constant dick pics, the "oh you're clever for an x". Those picky little shits who have to prove the point because they simply can't be wrong in front of that <<insert person type>> its the constant cutting across someone simply because they are different.
Constructive criticism is precisely that, constructive. Annotating _every single_ line of a pull request with nitpicks is being a top class dick.
> blacklist/whitelist
Thanks for bringing race into something that has absolutely nothing to do with it.
As a person of color I also don't see how this is "inclusive" at all, like yeah, the only reason I don't commit to the Linux kernel is because of the presence of words such as master/slave...
Maybe I'm wrong but why do we have to shame everyone into changing things when there isn't proof that those things were actually harmful to minorities.
But oh well, I guess we'll call this a win and continue to ignore the root of the problem.
</rant>
There is a rationale for different terminology here, other than race-related. Tor is encouraging more 'regular folks' to become users, rather than mostly usual suspects such as journalists, activists, opsec etc. But the connotation of dark web is too much related to sinister / criminal / illegal / dangerous (and yes there is a lot of that too).
It never has to do with race until il does.
The same way slave/master wasn’t about race in different contexts, being free or not would just a lineage or economic status.
But the moment it takes a specific cultural context, you can’t argue it’s wrong because it was different originally. Things change.
The etymology of slave suggests otherwise. Ethnicity usually played a role.
As a racial and religious minority myself I would find totally laughable if a local political party were to use the persecution of people of the same religion and the killings of people of my ethnicity centuries before to justify changing the language, especially the speciality language of a narrow field.
Yet we have so many people today celebrating the ideas, symbols and folks that were involved in a war to keep owning slaves. Many of the statues have been erected closer to today than the war.
I had in mind greek/roman slaves while writing the comment, while as you say the word slave itself comes from a later period, when slavs where conquered and traded as goods.
Goes to show how different a word can look depending on the person’s knowledge and/or what they’re the most aware of.
Master/slave seems like perfect metaphor. Enslaving a thing is not racist of offensive concept. It's offensive practice among humans. Not in computing.
I'm not certain about this but personally I don't think this is the intent.
I see two big benefits of these big language changes:
1. Much of anti-black racism in history has been accompanied by associations of skin colour to other unrelated elements based on their "illumination". Negative associations have been highlighted by virtue of the darkness and unilluminated things in general being traditionally considered negative.
So the original meaning or intent of blacklist/whitelist doesn't need to have been race-related for it to reinforce the idea of black=negative & white=positive. This is an association that's as natural as kids being afraid of the dark, but an association that is helpful for us to subvert and overcome as adults (for a plethora of reasons, one of those being to do with race)
Having discussions about language and naming things helps with that subversion.
2. In my case, as I work for a company that is bringing in these name changes internally, I've found this a curious and positive rare opportunity to discuss & hear team members' views on this issue. It's not the type of topic that would normally be easy to bring up in a corporate environment and this makes it natural and "safe" to do so in a not-combative way.
This idea that dark is negative is kind of silly. Things that are done in the shadows tend to be referred to as black, such as a black market. You want to call it a shadow market? (And don't get me wrong that sounds cool as hell, but also, wtf)
Look at the positives instead, unless the color is the problem in which case your accountants I'm sure will be overjoyed to hear that they should no longer say the company is "in the black" either.
I don't mean this to sound combative but rather simply make you think about what it is that time is being spent on.
Remember that whenever this particular change is brought up, whenever people talk about it, all the energy being expended on it etc. It all draws away from much more important business such as the George Floyd protests.
Black lives matter. This doesn't.
- left/sinister is negative compared to right
- low is negative compared to high (“moral highground”)
- south is negative compared to north (“things going south lately”)
Regardless of neutral usages of these words, or their factual meaning, we should acknowledge the more connotated meaning are not completely separate, and bleed on the other uses of the words.
It doesn’t mean they can’t be used with their actual meaning, but I think we should be open to the risk we’d need to stop using them in context where the connotations bleed too strong.
And I guess we reached that point for white/black/dark.
A CS analogy: Using a linter is good, but it doesn't fix bugs in your code. Pretending it does keeps you from fixing them.
Of course naming is easier busywork than for example being transparent about wages etc. that have real effect.
It really depends where you go. Contrary to popular belief, America is not the center of the universe...
Your argument associates Black = Bad = Black people. But as an example, they don't do this in Russia. Yes, they do associate Black = Bad to an extent, but black people do not come into the picture at all!
I'm fairly sure that when I say they're not racist towards black people, I say it for every Slavic country out there.
So it really does matter where you go when making that kind of claim about ethnically motivated interpretations behind words. We might need to go as far as to appreciate if/when the complete opposite of Black = Bad may be true.
This action on the whole though needs to be careful about whether it is doing anybody any favors, by trying to force the speaker's /intent/ about what was said, where none was necessarily had to begin with.
On the whole, you can't just change people by changing words. You have to show them a reason to WANT to change. The bigger the change, the more powerful reason you have to give them. Telling people what they /meant/ though, is not quite the same as trying to fix a racism problem.
Contrary to popular assumption, not everyone commenting on this website is American. I'm not; I'm European and have never lived in the States.
> I'm fairly sure that when I say they're not racist towards black people, I say it for every Slavic country out there.
Not Slavic, but my SO is. This sentence is mindnumbingly naïve. There is no country on this planet where racism does not exist.
The change itself is often interpreted as finger waggling, implying something was done wrong. In technical fields, one expects technical answers for why changes should be adopted, and engineers are largely not equipped to have this intently non technical discussion. And many feel that the Linux kernel is not the right place for these discussions, but it's hard to argue that because... shame.
Or maybe not.
It reminds me of the Harry Potter series where they always try to avoid saying the name of Voldemort. Don't be like that. I think we should all be like Harry Potter himself and not be afraid of using words, not even the ones that remind us of something bad (which I don't even think these words do).
I think we should get used to the idea of just letting stuff like this happen. What's the downside? Is it really so hard to type "main" instead of "master"?
I get the argument that historically, language has been used to control populations, and therefore it's good to resist attempts to control language. But every time someone complains about master vs main, I can't help but think thoughts that would be rude to repeat.
I recently made a tool for managing TPUs, called tpunicorn (tpudiepie was "clever, but risks legal issues"): https://github.com/shawwn/tpudiepie
The tool lists a bunch of info about the TPUs, including their master IP address. It's the IP of host 0, in charge of TPU configuration.
If someone were to open an issue "Please change master to main," and they were genuine about the request, I'd be like ... ok. And that would be the end of it. It's a s/master/main/g. Sure, whatever.
So, my question for you, dear readers: why not just say ok and be done with it? Is the spirit of rebellion really so ingrained in everyone that this is the battle we want to fight? You can mock it, ridicule it, fight it, but ultimately it's a big bikeshed that people want to paint. Why not let them?
And, you know, maybe it might help. A female dev I know recently expressed frustration about being called a "guy" constnatly. "Hey guys, ..." It's why I say ya'll. She also feels bad about mentioning it, because she doesn't want to be an imposition.
From my point of view, this is a big ball of "whatever, who cares, just do it." But my mind is open: can you convince me that it's important to resist this trend? Without invoking slippery-slope arguments?
There is basically zero upsides I can see to this changes whereas it just makes terminology more difficult to learn for beginners. Coding is already a very difficult field, there's no need to make it harder.
Why is "blocklist" or "denylist" harder to learn for beginners than "blacklist"? If anything, the approved terminology seems easier to learn, if you ask me.
It sounds like your argument is not so much about beginners learning for the first time, but experienced people needing to learn a different word for a concept they already know. I'm fairly sure I can learn what "blocklist" means with minimal effort, but perhaps that's a difficult word for some people.
I mean, really, I've asked a number of my friends who aren't too politically inclined and their reaction is a shrug. They don't really get it but they don't care to figure out why and they don't care either way because they've got stuff to do.
Is there some study about that? The concept of people being offended by these terms itself sounds ridiculous and I have a very hard time to believe it, having at least a beginning of a proof would maybe help here.
> It sounds like your argument is not so much about beginners learning for the first time, but experienced people needing to learn a different word for a concept they already know. I'm fairly sure I can learn what "blocklist" means with minimal effort, but perhaps that's a difficult word for some people.
It just creates a balkanization in IT, both terms will be used simultaneously.
In short there is no harm in the change itself, but rather in the perception by others of where people choose to waste their time rather than productively address root causes.
The harm is that changes like these don't actually help, and they are perceived negatively by people at large. This increases the divide and is a net negative.
And if you think I'm wrong you need only look at the comments here.
Would you be open to that request? I mean, whatever, right? Who cares? Just do it. It might help me and perhaps others because to us Java is very painful. Oh, also, if you need an additional reason, Java is sexist because its file header starts with 0xCAFEBABE, another reason to switch to C.
An interesting thinking angle to this often “why was it fine before ?”
Was it because nobody knew about that name/word in the first place ?
Was there always incoming requests for change but those were just ignored as baseless, and as the social context changed discarding them is not as easy anymore ?
Was it because the majority of users weren’t offended, but the user base changed enough that offended people’s voices go louder ?
I find a lot of seemingly frivolous or petty word changes have a wider context that are not as simple as it looks on the surface. [0] https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_bot/issues/1053
Saying that the two cases are not equivalent is a criticism of the level-of-effort comparison, not a criticism of a particular people-group's subjective suffering.
In the case where it requires effort from other people, such as making breaking changes to an API, I'm less keen, but when it comes to future APIs I'll keep it in mind.
It reminds me a lot of the outrage over trans people wanting to use different pronouns. Just trying to use the pronouns they want you to requires basically zero effort and has a measurable benefit.
I think a lot of the upset around this issue - and I agree here - is that it takes energy away from more important topic. When people are being murdered in the streets, is master vs main the thing we should spend our time on?
While it's a clear false dichotomy, and we can do both, there's a real risk that people will just swap from master to main and feel like they've done their part, ignoring the more serious issues.
Ironically, that becomes a bigger problem the more we debate this. If using main instead of master is just a little thing, you feel the need to do more. If it's a big political stance, you feel like you've done enough.
The second one is if the name is already massively spread and a known brand which just can't be "renamed". Like in Rubocop case - you can't rewrite every mention on the internet. If you're going to kill the brand... it's just not worth it.
Otherwise, either do a quick change, or ask "if you care enough, please submit a PR" and just be done with it.
Proposal for removing "cop". TL;DR: Rejected by author because the name is so established as a brand it would take massive effort to change.
For the first few weeks this resulted in a lot of fights, but after that the moderation load as a whole was much lower. In effect, they'd found a means for flushing out those who liked provoking others and a clear rule to ban them with. There isn't a large number of such people, they're a tiny but very loud minority.
Codes of conduct have a similar effect. Someone who complains about the mere existence of a code of conduct is pre-announcing that they like annoying or upsetting other people.
OR, everyone in power is a satirical HOA tyrant type character whose primary hobby is rule-making.
Either way, code of conduct is also generally code for grumpy and to be avoided, lest your time there be spent in moral lectures and petty arguments instead of on whatever the ostensible topic is.
I try to go places where people get along without a codified list of civil behaviors, because then I know I'm in the company of adults.
Trust until broken and gratitude for upholding good values is the path to a better community along with giving a chance to do better. Quick punishment only leaves a sour taste for everyone.
Also, a good rule is to wait 5-10 minutes or more and see if what you've written aligns with what and how you want to say it or at least expanding on your point a bit further to avoid being misinterpreted.
Righting a horrible wrong? I'm not aware of gay parades re Alan Turing but I sure as hell commend any efforts to right that particular wrong! or even just make people aware of it.
EDIT: So I guess you're saying flamboyant gays ruin it for those who pretend to be straight in all the right ways well enough?
It reminds me a bit of the many discussions I've had with far-right buddies of mine about IQ. The topic would be IQ in relation to 'ethnic groups' or 'geographic regions', sub-saharan africa being a popular topic for them. Also Ashkenazi Jews and their (apparently?) higher IQ. They really found those interesting, without making judgments, of course.
And while for the past decade or so I've been happy to talk about IQ, it's meaning, it's implications, ethical or otherwise, there was something about these conversations that felt off to me.
Then at some point I realized that what bothered me was the focus and specific complaints, the 'meta' aspect of these discussions. Stuff like "we hide IQ research because it might expose ethnic differences and the leftie researchers don't like that", more explicitly, but generally it was just the fact that these friends seemed obsessed with IQ in relation to ethnicity.
I realized that, having studied psychology but also always having had an interesting in the topic of IQ, until recently there were SO many other interesting questions to discuss. What 'is' IQ? How does it relate to what we consider 'intelligence'? Why the Flynn effect? Why are people with high IQ just as susceptible, or even more, to manipulation and marketing? How does IQ correlate to empathy, and how does that correlate with how our moral compass works? etc.
IQ in relation to race, no wait, ethnic group, was just one of those interesting questions. it felt like a more sensitive topic to discuss, especially in its implications, but it was just one of many.
I realized that the fact that these friends focused on this ONE topic at the expense of all the other ones (and often complete lack of knowledge) was in itself signifying something (and in my opinion not always racism, but inevitably racism if you followed them to their sources).
I would argue that the increasing trend to eliminate objective admittance criteria to schools are an example of this. (I think standardized testing is a huge boon to socio-economically disadvantaged kids; it certainly was for me.)
I will say as a general statement that I do think there are systemic biases against various minorities (or women in some cases, who aren't really minorities in the counting sense at least), and that some 'solutions' definitely don't help.
But my main point was that elevating this complex problem, which, again, is well worth having nuances discussions about, and which, to my knowledge is generally very much discussed in 'intellectual circles'. well, it's raised to red-scare totalitarianism-is-right-around-the-corner levels of discussion that I believe cause more harm than good.
For me the debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Szizek confirmed and illustrated this view. if you haven't seen it, watch it and observe the dynamic. The expectations that in particular Peterson had of this 'Marxist' he was finally going to talk to. It's fascinating how often they agree, but also how bad his hyperbole-pretending-to-be-intellectual shit falls apart.
At best it'll help some people feel respected and included, at worse it'll do... nothing at all.
I'm also happy to see some somewhat level-headed discussion on these topics on HN, lately every time that stuff was brought up the thread would descend into 4chan-lite immediately. Very embarrassing. Maybe it's because we're on a weekend and people are better rested.
Is it really hard to say your prayer before the dinner?
Is it really hard to never ever eat pork?
Is it really hard to bow to every police officer you meet?
Will you now stop eating pork? If not, at which point do you decide you will alter behavior for someone else. How do you make that judgement?
I might sound over cynical in the following but, in as much good faith as I can muster, let me explain why I find this annoying:
> What's the downside? Is it really so hard to type "main" instead of "master"?
This might be a bit specific to GitHub but consider that it's not so much about _typing_ "main" vs master but more about all the automation scripts that will break just so some company can signal their virtue.
Maybe invoking a bogey man here but I would really HATE it if that recovery script that's been known to work for ages suddenly fails to work in one of those 2AM emergencies that always happen just because `NODE_ASSIGN_SLAVE` has been renamed to `NODE_ASSIGN_SECONDARY` without backwards compatibility.
> why not just say ok and be done with it?
This is put succinctly by another (sarcastic) comment here: "I guess we'll call this a win and continue to ignore the root of the problem". I would argue that people who legitimately care about the social issues changes like these claim to address should also be wary about this over-political correctness, else they risk failing to achieve the actual changes they clamor for inn exchange for all the low-hanging fruit.
The problem with shallow CSR lip-service like this is that it is distracting and cheapens the conversation on the issue. And by embracing cheap talk we are letting entities (not necessarily pointing at anyone) get away from taking actual and meaningful action to address the problem. These virtue-signalling changes allow these companies to have something to show for in terms of social responsibility without actually doing the difficult bits that would actually matter.
Because I realize GitHub is now part of Microsoft, let me point out that it costs them next to nothing to change the terminology used in their products but meanwhile, they make money off "innocuous" product offerings like bleeding-edge facial recognition without second thought. Who cares that it is invasive to privacy or can be used to exacerbate discrimination against at-risk social groups, so long as it does not use the term "master" right? (Correct me if I'm wrong and being over-cynical and that Microsoft has dropped these contracts. One of the few times I would really love to be proven wrong.)
Acknowledging that this thread is about Linux, specifically, which is non-profit. The points above might not apply to them.
> ultimately it's a big bikeshed that people want to paint. Why not let them?
In conclusion, as you've invoked the bike shed imagery anyway, the problem with this is the same as any other bikeshedding argument: we can paint the bike sheds but meanwhile the police who are supposed to protect the village are held to no accountability which is actually the reason why we called this homeowner's meeting in the first place isn't it?
How about we paint the bike sheds once we've held the police accountable? Those bike sheds aren't killing anyone, aren't discriminating, and I'm just wary that the conversation will stop because we've appeased the reward centers of our brains because we've already "achieved something" through the bike sheds. It would be absurd that in the minutes of the meeting on police brutality the resolution would be "We painted bike sheds!".
Besides all that time we leisurely spend painting those damn bike sheds can actually be used for more productive things, not necessarily on the social activism front.
Renaming branches, streets and toppling statues are all cheap gestures that achieve nothing at all but allow those performing them to feel self-important and pose as defenders of the oppressed.
Meanwhile the oppressed would like to have at least their freedom, a roof over their head, a secure job that allows them to make a living and a modicum of respect from those around them. But no, too many people in the US (and elsewhere) can't have that because it actually requires effort, at least more than running some git command or posting a tweet.
This is such an empty and disrespectful gesture that it makes a mockery of what it means to fight against discrimination.
For one I meant that the gestures are literally cheap: it costs almost nothing to send a tweet or invent some guidelines.
They're also empty because they don't have any effect in the real world.
The world is full of good causes, there are so many no one can probably list them all. Any person can really only care about so many, a small handful. Similarly, some causes we may actually think harmful and actively oppose. For the vast majority, sane people probably think, hmm dunno one way or the other.
By one-sidedly declaring something terms unacceptable, this is an intrusion on my right to not endorse a cause. Basically, I’m forced to stop using some terms, eg if I want to keep using GitHub etc. And I value my right to leave a cause be, neither for nor against, quite highly. Without it, the world descends into groupthink hell.
As others say, you don’t mind this cause, fine. But others may. I find it harmless but utterly pointless, though offensive to reason and history. Yet I feel an effort to shame me into supporting this cause and endorsing it.
Not to mention, at no point can I hear that this is something people of colour want (whatever that even means, it’s not like everyone who is not white thinks the same). It is patronising that a bunch of presumably white guys working in tech decide what is right and what is not, for the world and for PoC.
Not to mention that the whole debacle is essentially about a massive failure of US society, and yet the whole world is made to participate in this spectacle. Dear Americans, please fund schools for poor Black kids, do outreach programs, scholarships, internships, you know, things that will help underrepresented minorities get themselves out of poverty, before you go on an all-guns-blazing crusade to change English language. The clue is in the name, it is not American property, and certainly not the property of a bunch of unelected founders with egos inflated by VC valuations.
Ironically to me, these efforts are to be more inclusive but I can't see any of that. I can see that the purpose is to evoke these discussions, and in that sense the effort to change the language is not pointless: by having these changes adopted the movement can point at successes to show it was taken seriously at least once.
We are at the opposite pendulum swing now.
If I think of other major racial or ethnic conflicts of the recent times (Israel/Palestine, Rohingya in Asia, Balkan genocides, Hutu vs Tutsi, antisemitism, tensions between “original” and “migrant” societies in Europe), none of them are covered by the language being banished here.
Also, the immediate searching for racial undertones in any phrase seems to be a purely American thing.
This makes it also difficult for some people who don't speak English natively to navigate that linguistic minefield.
Because in the end, actual progressive left thinkers could end up in a rice paddy with a tyre iron in the neck.
This terminology platform seems to be very much pushed by those who feel they should be leftist intellectuals, but who don't quite cut it in the thinking department so instead they just grab the microphone and make up in volume what they lack in depth, labelling anyone, regardless of political view, who speaks out against them as the enemy of progress.
Long term such actions are detrimental to the development of an actually better and fairer society.
Short term it's just grating to see the very real plight of certain minorities being abused by opportunists for their own selfish ends, again.
> If someone were to open an issue "Please change master to main," and they were genuine about the request, I'd be like ... ok. And that would be the end of it. It's a s/master/main/g. Sure, whatever.
Not at all, it's just a question of who will pay to update all code and documentation to follow the new naming standards. That's not only the documentation of the project in question but also resolving issues when refering to external sources which also use master/slave terminology such as the MBus and related tooling.
> Why not let them?
Will they pay someone to make the changes or do they expect smaller places to shell out money to fix a non issue to avoid being associated with something they've never had any relation to? No? No change unless they either do the work themselves or pay for the cost of changing it.
> From my point of view, this is a big ball of "whatever, who cares, just do it." But my mind is open: can you convince me that it's important to resist this trend? Without invoking slippery-slope arguments?
There isn't really much of an argument for implementing it other than being pushed into exile by others if you don't. Resisting it would mostly come down to the cost of yet another cosmetic change that does nothing other than cost hours of work with no real reason than some being "offended" by well established terms.
In the end, this is a change where I just don't see the merit of. In the end it seems to be the practice of banning being easier than understanding what it's actually used for and comming up with a solid argument for change. It's not the burden of those sitting on `master` branches to explain why not but rather those suggesting this change to provide at least something which hints to the change being worth the effort.
Who are you to make a judgement about that? How do you make that judgement? Or would it only happen if it is about links to racism. If I say I'm offended about you having a Christmas hat as icon during Christmas, who are you to say no?
And this is actually happened at the VS Code repo - someone felt offended about a Christmas hat. I think they eventually decided he was a troll - but what if he was actually genuine?
Sure, I don't have issues with Christmas hats and probably I'd wait to hear from at least more than one single person. But changing the icon knowing that it made one of my users happy would be trivial. Sure, refusing to would be my right, and perhaps it would only 'lose' me this one user. But deciding to change the icon would make me feel warm and fuzzy because I removed an obstacle to probably a few users. Because if I squint I can sorta see their point.
Of course there are limits and of course these are fuzzy. But I can totally see how multiple people might find a Christmas hat offensive, even if I personally think it's really silly. Anything else than making a call that doesn't cost much and alleviates others' concerns feels to me like being petty for political sakes. I don't like that.
In fact, why don't people for these populist changes express some arguments that aren't based on using "misrepresented" people as shields and scapegoats? In fact, using minorities to perpetuate your personal cause is misrepresenting them as weak and powerless.
All this talk about just accepting it is defeatism. You're promoting defeatism. Are you so scared to bounce back that you wish to ostrich your way out of any pressure?
Why, yes, it is too hard and unnecessary to write main instead of master, or any of the hundreds of completely arbitrary changes made with, I repeat, zero net measurable gain.
That feels like a sad, thin way of living life.
If it doesn't matter, it's low-effort, and the change results in an environment that's more comfortable for some people, it seems like a pretty straightforward equation. Anyone who wants me to oppose that kind of change is implicitly arguing that it does matter, and the current state is the better one… without bothering to make a case for it.
I've had a ton of discussions with friends who are more right-wing, some of them probably 'alt-right' (one of them overtly racist).
and one of the things that I've found hard to discuss is the 'meta' observation that they're all up in arms, outsizedly outraged, about particular, and somewhat peculiar things.
In this case it's BLM (which, sure, I am totally fine with discussing the Marxist aspects of some of this movement! It's probably true, but hey look up the history of women's and civil right's movements!), but previously it was #metoo and I forget whatever came before that. I think it was being able to point out the higher incidence of crime among minority <x>. Which was sort of taboo before that (70s or 60s, over here? but not really of course.)
In all those cases it was borderline-violent outrage that was their first go-to, is what stood out to me.
I'll never forget sitting in a car with a friend of mine, heading to my first-ever Jordan Peterson talk (which I have to admit in hindsight, was much less bad than I expected because he seemed to realize that he was a speaker at a crypto-white-supremacist forum and really seemed to try to counter that).
This was at the height of the #metoo 'craze'. I think Weinstein's transgressions had just gotten out. I didn't bring it up, because I knew what would happen, but somehow the topic came up.
His first reaction, almost reflexively, was to be negative about all of it. Strongly and emotionally. He expressed concerns of a future where men would be jailed just because they were accused of something without due process (shades of 'outrage culture' being just one step removed from gulags, which is popular on HN now?). how he had a female friend who described a situation as 'forceful' toward her and how it implicated the dude in the situation and /that/ was the bad thing. Never mind that this one particular friend was notoriously unstable and had been diagnosed with some serious mental health issues.
And I just sat there stunned, at first, because what had been on my mind was the many close female friends who had, for the first time, probably emboldened by the #metoo thing, told me avalanches of stories of harassment, and an avalanche per individual woman: overt sexual abuse, constant harassment, and the like, that I thought I was aware of but never realized was so common to them, to the point where they'd stopped mentioning it and just made dark jokes about it. overt rape was not rare in these stories.
To be clear, I think there are many issues in current-day male-female relationships that also raise concerns that might warrant empathy for said males. I mean, even if we don't care let's not it's particularly fertile ground for fascism.
I also think that some of the stories I've heard are more a sign of communication issue or projected trauma than what they claim about the males that were 'perpetrator' in these situations.
I also believe that there are aspect of current-day society where the quintessentially privileged 'young white male' pulled the short end of the stick and I think this is a real problem. I know men who have been raped and I've had my own experience that I'd describe as 'difficult' and 'not really voluntary' and that mirrors experiences that have been describes as rape. And the fact that I can't say I've been raped is problematic.
I know a shockingly large number of 'privileged white males in their early thirties' who have withdrawn from the world to stay at home and game and be basically incels. and that's not just their own stupid privileged fault, I believe, and their life is shit. I regularly wonder which one might commit suicide. That's not good!
I guess my point, peppered with perhaps incindiary or distracting stuff, is that it truly shocked me that the reaction to some particular group expressing their particular problems, and finally having an audience, whether #metoo or BLM, was met by such a virulent counter-attack. I think that's not right, and I think pointing out how that in itself means something is important.
To pull this into what seems to be the outrage of the day on HN: I think much of this whole 'cancel culture' thing is stupid, I think a lot of it is virtue signalling, and I agree with many here who describe it as such.
but I am a bit more worried about the backlash to it than I am about the disingenuous hyper-social-media people flaming it. I'm more worried by how when I click on the profile of the outraged, they show a pattern of outrage at anything that has a whiff of 'sjw'.
I'll join them in their worry when the US president is a 'sjw' and not very much in their camp. I mean, jesus fucking christ it's not like these Twitter woke people have power that truly compares to that of the president and his cronies, and it's not like a fired SV not-woke-enough dude won't find a ridiculously well-paying job somewhere else.
I'm about to but trying not to go off on the "oh but the real problem is polarization" (self-proclaimed centrist) crowd, which in our current climate strikes me as akin (but no, not quite the same) as someone arguing that perhaps we shouldn't be so mean to Hitler because his anti-semitism is just a political game. or someone arguing that somehow a US mainstream democrat is anything but right-of-center by most measures.
Well okay I did anyways and while I'd prefer no responses to this so the ramble can just be something I've wanted to ramble about and I'm not reminded of how I didn't make a concise or proper argument, here it is anyways because it feels like there might be something in there that's worth not just pasting in my personal journal like I usually do. Feel free to disregard the focal point(s) and ant-fuck the details though, that's fair game. I love y'all here and if nothing else I'll agree that being able to converse about things is well worth protecting!
EDIT: ugh holy shit is this longer than it looked in the <textarea>. if you actually read the whole thing my apologies and please keep in mind I was rambling and this does no represent my well-considered views. also, go read better stuff! if you just scrolled down to this part, keep scrolling. I said some stuff and it's probably sort of okay, by my estimation, but too long to be worth what you'd get out of it. scroll on maybe.
Out of memory: Kill process 12345 (chromium) score 678 or sacrifice child
I, for one, would defend to the death the right to kill child processes or rail against at the very least anything beyond parent-child OO relationships, because I hate children and grandparents! forward slash "s".
In fact, it shows the controlling infinite demands of the PC crowd in the Linux kernel and the wider ecosystem. Remember Outreachy anyone?
> At this stage these guidelines, which are part of the Linux kernel's coding style, are about avoiding new usage of the words "master" and "slave" within the kernel code as well as avoiding "blacklist" and "whitelist".
They will still say "it's not enough" and will demand to remove all master / slave references and terminology in the kernel, which the maintainers know it isn't practical. You can ask yourself if this is realistic. I think you know the answer.
This doesn't attack the problem and only airbrushes and ignores the root of it. There is no winning with moves like this.
Now we've bulkanized terminology all in the name of progress, ironically making it even harder for newcomers to learn.
Overall, it's just a disgusting ineffective move by crusaders determined to police, rewrite and erase language. I can't fathom how anyone decides this is what we should be doing to promote inclusivity.
> ironically making it even harder for newcomers to learn.
This isn't over-cynicism. Consider all the otherwise-still-working books and tutorials that would be obsolete just for this change. Some kids still get their start from dead leaves and it would just be unnecessary mental tax on them to keep in mind that "master" is now "primary" because reasons. Not to mention that whatever they might be reading might've already used "primary" for a different context.
Extremely superficial.
And we can’t stop changing because we can’t change everything.
Do yourself a favor, lookup the origin of the word "slave". Now consider your emotional response in that light, and how these changes could only be motivated by a deeply held predjudice with regard to the alleged beneficiaries of this farce.
I don’t understand why some people are still so skeptical about this change.
Some argue that we should instead fix bigger problems. Well let’s do that too. But it doesn’t mean that we can't or shouldn’t take small steps. Every small step can contribute. And we shouldn’t stop there.
All our lists should be inclusive.
Great, now everyone can pat themselves on the back and relax now we've fully embraced cancel culture and find instances of these very naughty words to be outraged about.
Oh, and I find subordinate offensive, just because.
Congratulations to the Linux kernel for fixing a systemic issue by changing some words, now we can pretend the issue doesn't exist at all! :-)
Maybe we should just replace Linus Torvalds whilst we're at it with someone black, just like they did over at Reddit, which clearly fixed all the problems when a white man retired in protest.
(How can I flag my own post before anyone else does? By tomorrow I'm expecting to come back and see this text replaced with [flagged] as you can't post anything controversial anymore. I see as of this edit I'm on 12 points, that'll be -10 I am sure when the dust settles. Feel free to cancel me and my account if you want HN crowd, I'll just make another).
Is this cancel culture? No. No one is being canceled here.
> Oh, and I find subordinate offensive, just because.
Not good enough.
> Congratulations to the Linux kernel for fixing a systemic issue by changing some words,
No one claimed that.
> you can't post anything controversial anymore.
This isn't "controversial." It's snide and deliberately obtuse.
No need for tinfoil. Posts with high comments-to-points ratio are automatically nerfed as noisy / low quality. Regardless of topic.
There are actual concentration camps in China TODAY.
So sad.
"That sounds far-fetched to me but I can vaguely imagine that these terminologies aren't helpful in these times, lemme search-and-replace, done"
Such ineffectual liberalism. So much effort that fixes nothing.
I completely forgot all of that until recently, the farms around our city were opened to the general public. My kid wanted to go, and while they were enjoying themselves looking at the animals, I struck up a chat with the owner of the farm and asked on a whim if the "knecht" was still called that. No, he answered, that position is now called "medewerker" (operator? colleague? contributor? I dunno.)
I think the time for words like master/slave and blacklist/whitelist is simply past. This is just an observance, I don't have an opinion either way.
They're really going to eliminate racism then!
This is racist.
Do you have a plan to change that already?
(In case you don't see the Google box: Old English (denoting religious devotion or a form of liturgy), from Old French servise or Latin servitium ‘slavery’, from servus ‘slave’. The early sense of the verb (mid 19th century) was ‘be of service to, provide with a service’.)