A Steve Jobs masterclass from a decade ago
blog.thinkst.com
blog.thinkst.com
He said PCs would still be there for work, but most consumers won't own one, just like all vehicles used to be trucks, until people moved to cities and switched to cars, and now some people use trucks but most people use cars.
The other really interesting part was when he talked about the need for paid journalism, and how he "doesn't want to live in a society that's just bloggers". Even a decade ago he could see the danger in most people getting their news from un-curated, un-vetted content.
And I'm thankful every day that he was so wrong. Even though there are bad faith actors encircling the world of electronics and software attempting to turn everything into a walled garden (and succeeding in many cases), the PC lives. Hurrah.
On top of that his analogy makes no sense. By no means were all early cars trucks. Automobiles in cities didn't even really exist in any considerable number until after WWII and the suburban housing boom enabled by exclusionary FHA housing subsidies.
Before cars we all rode the streetcar and train. Open systems that allowed mobility without placing a premium on using your own two feet.
I guess it didn't quite work out that way.
Price of progress I suppose.
And of course they're crap on PC (Electron).
People are doing all kinds of things on their phones, including applying for jobs and getting government services.
The only thing I think Jobs might have been wrong on is the mix. The smartphone has become so powerful that the mix of smartphones to tablets is probably not what be predicted.
I have two young kids at home, so I am doing stuff all the time on my phone. I can use my iPhone to check in on work while giving them a bath or watching them play outside and can give feedback to my team. Our mobile tools have become so powerful that you can get a lot done on them. I have a 5K iMac with 72 GB of ram, but I spend most of my days on a phone or a tablet.
There are now closing in to 4B Smartphone users, and about 1B Tablet users.
PC usage isn't really shrinking, Office, Gaming and Productivity are still holding up. But most "consumer" usage has definitely shifted to Post PC.
Years later, the same kind of slowdown happened with tablets (especially Android tablets which are basically dead, but iPad wasn't completely spared either), and will eventually happen with smartphones as well.
The "we are now in a post-PC era" hype of 2010 (after the iPad's release) has eventually led to many "tablets are dead" articles by 2016.
I don't know how long I'll be able to run that server for before needing to upgrade something, but I suspect its lifetime is until something catastrophically fails.
For Web browsing and office work it works flawlessly. One day I'll throw in a cheap SATA SSD that I'll find on sale as the OS drive and it'll be good for even more years.
The only exception that I can come up with right away is drawing, but even taking pictures, well my phone doesn't hold a candle to my DLSR.
Just take a look at countries like Africa or Cambodia: Most of the people (if not all) own a smartphone and there is a lot of places where you will have a hard time finding a computer.
I tried to use a tablet for work when traveling but it did not take long to spot the drawbacks and buy a real computer to do serious work.
The mobile ecosystems force us to do this because they stop us from unleashing the full potential of these tiny computers.
Imagine something like an iPad that would allow the user to just install any software that this tiny computer can run. Also you should be able to copy and access files from/to any other location on the filesystem. I could use it for most of my daily tasks at work if iOS/iPadOS would not prevent me from using the tablet in that way.
I feel this is also a problem with music. The last 10 years you can just dump whatever you want on Soundcloud or go private release on Spotify.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I do not celebrate the label system at all, and maybe that freedom of getting your music out there is worth the cultural cost we pay, but for example what East Coast Hip-Hop had with Stretch & Bobbito, that kind of curation is sorely needed. These days for curators it’s all about hype and whatever gets you a buck, but as was said in Stretch & Bobbito’s documentary “we’d play stuff that probably only appealed to like a hundred people out there. But it was dope, and dope deserves to be heard”.
I’ve discovered far more songs and bands through Spotify than I would have in the pre-Spotify era. And many of these songs are ones with just a few thousand views, as alluded to in your comment.
The modern music industry allows for the best of both worlds.
Scenes exist on social media, but they're much more diffuse and for some reason are more likely to tinged with irony and/or nostalgia. So they seem to be less effective and - ironically - less experimental and creatively diverse.
The vast majority of my music recommendations come from friends and acquaintances who share tracks in FB groups, chat, amateur Bluetooth speaker "DJing" at gatherings and so on.
"Hey man, you gotta hear this one" is alive and very well.
You'll see this same thing in so many different places. People will say "It's not the same now. Back then it was like X". Most commonly, it's more like X than it is different, but the person saying it has changed.
A reaction or evolution from that is that many who were curators or DJ's get into music production, which means that they hang out in music studios of some kind, forming different social connections (e.g. with musicians). It creates a social divide between the people who just consume from algorithms and those who create.
>You'll see this same thing in so many different places.
Because it's an inherent feat of technology. Groups also form because different people bring different things to the table. One might be into music, the other one into cooking etc.
But cooking isn't enough, it has to be keto & vegan. People move up one level which changes the composition of their social circle.
>People will say "It's not the same now. Back then it was like X". Most commonly, it's more like X than it is different, but the person saying it has changed.
I wish it were like that because I'm a tech geek myself, but thinking more deeply about the topic and the composition of groups has changed my mind. The divide created by technology is real imo because it isolates groups.
The divide is real when it's blindly applied without thinking about social disruption is what I wanted to say.
You can find such thing now as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23717756
The Day Steve Jobs Dissed Me In A Keynote https://sivers.org/itunes
A performer, no matter how more talented that person is, will deliver a worse performance if they are trying to aim more broadly.
Whereas with news the issue is that news died when they optimized for ads/engagement, but that is fundamentally why Facebook, Twitter etc are all terrible. The interests of the user and the interests of the creator are mismatched.
But then maybe that's actually for the best. A single unified consolidated news publishing platform could have awful consequences for diversity of representation.
Perhaps such a model could co-exist with a commercial element. Access to premium services, to keep my proposal vague and aspirational.
It's also a huge political football. It does lean slightly to the left but it doesn't matter which political party you ask they always complain it's biased against them. The current government has been waging was on the BBC for 10 years now. If they thought they could they would shut it down in an instance.
What we really need is something funded centrally but they don't have the option of interfering with.
There’s no voucher, it’s just a monthly fee, but I have no doubt that which paywalled stories you click on determine where your monthly fee goes.
Whenever someone touches on market failures, I'm reminded of how the USA government saved the domestic oil producers from themselves. TLDR: Govt imposed regulation and predictability onto the wildcatters, thereby protecting investors and insuring stable supply for consumers.
I don't yet know what future marketplaces for journalism will look like.
I do know that markets don't just magically appear. Efficient open markets require laws and regulations, to create and then protect those markets.
Right now it looks like MS has managed to steal a march on Apple in this area, but that Apple knows this and is working on it. Interesting times.
I wish Apple would actually natively support containers, rather than supporting containers via a linux VM.
> In contrast, Docker for linux runs using a native container mechanism without using a VM at all
Thanks for pointing this out. As I'm slowly getting familiar with container-based workflows and underlying technology, your statement helped clear up my confusion about the essential differences between containers and VMs.
I found an informative table in Microsoft's documentation for "Containers on Windows", that compares and contrasts the two approaches:
Containers vs. virtual machines - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowsconta...
This helped me understand how Docker for Mac using xHyve is different from Docker on Linux with native containers as a much thinner layer with a shared kernel.
---
According to this article:
Beating some performance into Docker for Mac - https://medium.com/homullus/beating-some-performance-into-do... (July 2020)
Aside from the container/VM architecture, a performance bottleneck of Docker for Mac is (apparently) how mounted volumes work, on the file system level.
---
> macOS doesn't support containers, but it could
According to a random Reddit thread (so, with a grain of salt) I found on this topic:
Docker on the new Mac Big Sur - https://www.reddit.com/r/docker/comments/he0v5c/docker_on_th...
> Using a shared kernel container (via cgroups, for example) isn't feasible with macOS because of licensing restrictions and because the Linux syscall interface isn't compatible with macOS.
Which seems to imply that there's some fundamental reason why Docker for Mac must rely on VMs, that macOS is not (yet?) capable of providing containers that are as native as on Linux.
They also mention how the file system on macOS has design limitations that make containers more difficult.
> The net result is that performance is probably going to be near-native for light workloads, but macOS depends on other fundamental technologies like APFS which aren't designed for datacenter type workloads.
---
EDIT: Aah, right, this is why a comment higher up mentioned:
> Apple said they were working with Docker to make sure MacOS on ARM is a first class host for Linux Docker containers.
WSL 1 chose the first approach so the container thought it was running against a Linux kernel but it was actually a windows kernel plus a syscall shim. That's all fine and dandy in theory, but not running against real Linux means there was always the risk of different behaviour on Windows versus on the Linux deployment host. In WSL 2 Microsoft switched to running a real linux kernel in a hypervisor, which is basically the same approach as on the Mac.
I honestly can't think of another tech CEO that could have pulled off this performance. Maybe Bill Gates? I get the sense that the reality distortion field was very real because he was so clear and eloquent about his mission, it never needed to be scripted or rehearsed, it just came out of him at all times.
It’s interesting how many of the things he said were correct in hindsight, but may just be because he made it so.
[1] https://www.quora.com/History-of-Apple-Inc-Whos-the-guy-who-...
Mac OSX has been living a secret double life for the past 5 years. - Cant believe it has been 15 years since those words. Apple is about to make another transition. And Mac will reach new height, taking even more market shares.
It is sad Steve never gets to see this. Apple now has 1B iPhone user, 100M Mac Users, 200M+ iPad users, and a fast growing Apple Watch user base.
I know this may sound wired, but I miss him.
While I'm sure he thought Tim Cook was the best choice to take over, he's just not a product person, and it shows. I wouldn't say Tim Cook is sales either, just operations. He is very good at that, and he's done a decent job at leaving the product with product people.
But after 10-15 years it starts to show. Apple to me clearly isn't what is used to be. The UX issues are creeping in. The products aren't that innovative. There's no industry disruption any more.
Here's the video if anyone hasn't seen it [1], think it rings so true to Tim Cook's Apple. The purity of the product vision just isn't there anymore and things are actively made worse for the user just to scrape back a few measly dollars: e.g no longer shipping a short power cable with $2000 laptops.
Think it's sad that a lot of the fans of Apple who used to say believe that it doesn't matter if Windows sells more, Mac OS is the better product.
Now if you say anything negative about Tim Cook's Apple you just get told how successful it is as if thats a metric for a good product. Just because something is successful and profitable doesn't mean it's good by following that logic there is literally no reason for the Macintosh to exist, everything before it was already successful and it was actually less successful for decades.
> We do a lot of things like that to ensure that people understand what these apps are doing
> Privacy means people know what they are signing up for in plain English and repeatedly.
His answer to buiness school students (some of whom were in consulting business) is quite revealing of his personality. Doesn't hesitate to talk straight in a very calm way. And very clear in his mind about the views he expresses. Also, very eloquent in putting his views forward.
“Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs, WWDC ‘97
As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to “put a bullet in OpenDoc’s head”.
Jobs explained (and performed) his side of the story in this fascinating and classic WWDC’97 video: “Focusing is about saying no.”
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying-no-s...
I don't really think the Flash decision had anything to do with "better products," and simply ecosystem control. Apple had always wanted to keep a very tight control of any ecosystem they inhabited. From their decision to stick with PowerPC as long as they did, to their zoo of Apple-specific dongles, to the Apple Store and beyond. Steve Jobs was a genius in understanding that an ecosystem is orders of magnitudes more valuable if you, as an entity, control it. Valve is another company that did the same thing.
> It takes courage to look at a feature that lots of people “want” and make the call to exclude it.
This is a lot easier to do when you control the ecosystem. It's not like someone could migrate to using a Samsung-made iPad or something.
> In a moment of self-deprecation/levity he quips “We never saw ourselves as in a platform war with Microsoft and maybe that’s why we lost”. It’s a quick flash of him taking himself less-seriously and it’s disarming.
This is absolutely untrue, and Jobs is playing the crowd. Not only did Apple definitely see themselves in a platform war, they doubled-down on this with the iPhone. It was always about platforms. Jobs just happened to lose the first time, but he decidedly won the second.
> Jobs: We are about making better products, and what I love about the consumer market that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that: we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it and every person votes for themselves. They go yes or no, and if enough of them say yes, we get to come to work tomorrow. You know that’s how it works. It’s really simple. Whereas with the enterprise market, it’s not so simple, the people that use the products don’t decide for themselves, the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for ppl and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we’re on track or not.
Not sure exactly how forthright Jobs is here, but -- honest or not -- man, I just want to say this is an incredible answer and motivates me to get off my ass and go build something :)
When you look at Android, it has similarities to the Mac vs PC dichotomy except much worse, where the OS provider doesn't care what happens, the OEM manufacturer doesn't care what happens, and a few other players don't care what happens either (ISP, open source community). Only Google and Samsung attempt at caring, and even then it is a disaster as there is no way to getHuman().
It was also a pretty shitty user experience, forcing inflexible web-optimized flash into the phone form factor.
Those problems could've been overcome, but it's definitely not like Flash on day 1 would've been good for any users.
And yeah: so imagine how bad it would've been then, if it still sucked that bad on 2010 smartphones.
If anything, it was much crappier, without 4 years of any kind of optimization for mobile use.
How would they get it running on a 2007 era iPhone that had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB RAM?
(Reminds me of the iOS 1.0 jokes that Nokias run iOS apps faster, which was true - back when all "apps" were HTML boondoggles)
Take that as a data point that Flash on day 1 would have been good at least for one user. :)
Apple's decision probably still benefited the ecosystem as a whole because it drove the adoption of flash replacements.
Chrome similarly replaced Adobe's buggy Flash plugin with a new implementation baked into the browser, to address these concerns.
I think iOS did the right thing for users here.
The original iPhone was super resource constrained (battery, ram, cpu) which required rethinking how apps were handled, including that they could be killed anytime. This was very much against conventional wisdom at the time. Apps (and websites) also needed significant redesign to fit within the touch UX paradigm.
Flash's fate was likely first and foremost a byproduct of these constraints and the changes they necessitated. While I agree control always mattered to Jobs & Apple, so too did user expectations, which at the time meant flash on web. My strong suspicion is engineering realities (resources) and user experience practicalities (need for flash to adapt to mobile UX) drove the decision, which was then easier to justify from the perspective of control.
This is doubtful. From what I recall of that era, Flash was a memory hog, and sometimes a CPU hog. Why is my tab/browser hanging? Flash. Also, at the time of the Flash ban, Jobs pushed HTML5, H.264, and native as alternatives (only the latter really gives control).
It was also a complete and total mess from a security perspective.
When Adobe did finally get it to run on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM. An iPhone didn’t come out with those specs until 2011.
The original iPad only had 256MB of RAM and couldn’t even run Safari without crashing by 2011 with iOS 5. It would have never run Flash.
I remember the "Android Flash" demos, they were atrocious
Anyone who worked with him will tell you that all of the statements you've quoted are forthright.
Control is a byproduct.
No, but they could always not get an iPad. There's no control there, and most "walled garden" talk preventing users to switch is BS.
With so many fundamental apps being subscription (Office, Creative suite, etc), so many others free (Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Zoom, etc.) and tons of them on the web (from Gmail to Basecamp), plus lots of FOSS for us geeks, there's little thing keeping someone to one platform if they'd rather be on another.
Even music and video consumption is now subscription based for the big majority, and their accounts work in all Apple/Google's/PC ecosystems.
It sounds like you weren’t following tech news around that time. The decision about Flash may have had some elements about control, but it was largely about avoiding an unreliable, crashing, battery sucking and insecure piece of software.
When Steve Jobs wrote his open letter “Thoughts on Flash”, [1] there was a lot of criticism on Apple’s decision and predictions of Android wiping out Apple completely because Android still supported Flash. But people did come around to see that Apple was right about Flash and that it wasn’t something that was good enough to be included on mobile.
Eventually, Adobe was forced to stop development on it (to the extent it was spending time but still not making it better on stability, security and energy consumption).
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200430094807/https://www.apple...
They've been forced to relent on that hard line a few times, but Apple still won't allow Firefox on iOS for this reason, and they probably never will.
The fact that flash was absolute crap helped, but didn't change anything.
A different way of phrasing it: Apple didn't realize they were in a platform war with the Mac, which is why they lost, and Jobs made sure they didn't repeat that mistake with the iPhone.
Amazon itself proud themselves in claiming they're "the most customer obsessive company". Or Facebook's and its mission to connect the world.
So, I wouldn't say it's bizarre to see that today, but it's bizarre to believe their leaders today.
Neither of those are really a product focus though.
[0]: https://youtu.be/wvhW8cp15tk [1]: https://youtu.be/sM9RyZT0Rrg
Your site doesn’t have a responsive mobile layout on iOS. All I see is a weird version with large fonts that I either have to pan around to read or a “web version” that provides the desktop layout with tiny fonts. You may want to test your site with don’t blockers and ad blockers (I use both).
It is probably possible to survive in good health and shape and reach your 80s while continuously burning the midnight oil, I’ve just never seen it personally.
Sure, "burning the midnight oil" is something that can (and IMHO should) be done sometimes. But is that the only (and main) key to success? I doubt it. The lesson about focus is far more valuable.
edit: I’m genuinely curious about this, and don’t have a position on the “master” thing. Not trying to start a flame war.
Saddens me that you got downvoted for asking an earnest question, I guess people are scared of what this topic will devolve into.
I don't mind renaming those to main in fact I started looking into automating the conversion but at the same time it does seem like mission creep. main doesn't actually have the same meaning. In pressing CDs/DVDs/Blu-rays we have "gold masters" which are used to create the molds for the presses for the discs. A master key opens all locks. Those usages all seem unrelated and arguably so does the git usage.
Removing master/slave from tech seems 100% correct. Removing all uses of the word "master" like Darth Vader "I was but a learner but now I am the master" seems wrong and if we aren't going to remove all of them then why are we remove it from git since like those others usages it and zero relation to the problem?
p4/piper is MAIN
SVN is 'trunk'
mercurial is 'default'
--
I'd be upset if we were changing commonly held terminology or if it had more meaning.. but it's completely arbitrary and all it costs is the minor reeducation of all github/git users and the invalidation of all prior documentation.
The piety of those who wish everyone to be re-educated and the corpus of documentation to be rendered invalid would be sickening. At least in this instance it brings concepts more in line.
We need less confusing and diverse verbiage in the industry generally speaking, when we refer to the same concepts (server/instance/machine/node being examples), so I think the change is welcome on those merits alone, and if it happens to make people feel better, though there's no evidence of that, then great.
However it's important to understand that if the motivation is purely political, then this can be classified as political correctness, which has proven time and time again to be ineffective and actually /harmful/ to the left; as the right are clever to use it as a recruiting tool- often openly pissing off the left and making them hypersensitive to anyone not towing the line. This was true in the early 90's and it's true again today.
To quote Stephen Fry on political correctness: "if someone wants to shout faggot at me, I don't care, as a gay man. I know I'm supposed to, but I'm supposed to care on behalf of people who are, supposedly weaker than me. and I think it's the most patronising thing in the world. It's exactly the same political correctness that I grew up with which was then, the kind of religious political correctness; which is people complaining about television programmes, about swearing and nudity and violence: 'I am not shocked myself, it's just the vulnerable young minds, you see!'; well, fuck that, that's just not good enough. It really isn't. and that's my objection. it's.. denouncing from the pulpit.. I mean, Russia has political correctness, but in Russia the political correctness is that you can't say Tchaikovsky was gay."[0]
These comments were given before a debate (which unfortunately was derailed frequently) on the efficacy of political correctness; and he made detailed points about words being immediately co-opted to mean hateful things, if there is hateful intent, and largely intent is the most important factor to control for, certainly not language.
I will link to the full debate below;[1]
So, typically I'm against these kinds of measures, and that's the foundation on what this change was about.
If a change can stand by other merits, then sure, but to assume that this will help even a little, with no evidence provided- and to attribute such little weight to the human time in reconfiguring and reeducating is not just patronising in of itself, it's a little dehumanising to those it supposedly supports and forces re-education and labour on the entire development world.
I believe that to be immoral; unless, of course, the change can stand on other merits.
[0]: https://youtu.be/vsR6LP7Scg0?t=422 (13m)
Given that GitHub and git-scm approved of removing this somewhat "problematic" terminology despite the original context being unrelated to master/slave, etc. Where would you draw the line on replacing these terms?
Slave master is just a subcategory of uses of the word master. Here's the etymology, as per the dictionary:
master: from late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher"
The corresponding word for slaves was in turn explicit about "someone who can't refuse order".
Or at least... I hope that the word "master" is not completely verboten now.
Does Mastercard apply to this change? Perhaps being a blacksmith is 'offensive' as well. Maybe having a 'Masters' degree from Yale is just as bad as saying Headmaster or 'Dark mode' and the list goes on. As soon as you remove the context and start racializing everything, it doesn't make any sense to immediately associate it as 'racist'.
It will get to the point where someone will eventually reject such changes and will risk of being called a racist for not supporting it.
[reply to me, after I suggested the word "master" is not a bad one but the act is]
>> I agree that the word isn't necessarily bad itself, but the issue is that humans don't operate on dictionary definitions; we operate on connotations. Master/slave terminology is kind of vague alongside it referencing/being a product of immoral history, so why not make our terminology more accurate and stop normalizing the old terminology?
>> If you were a person whose ancestors were systematically enslaved getting started in tech, would you say "oh those aren't bad words, they're just words" or would you be a little off put that the field glorifies historically racist terminology by using it everywhere that it's vaguely related?
[my reply]
> If you were a person whose ancestors were systematically enslaved
I am such a person.
> would you be a little off put that the field glorifies historically racist terminology
I think this is the distinction, there's no glorification being given, the words we tend to use in computer science and operating system design are relatively clinical.
There are many points here to argue; you could say that people without parents may be put off by 'orphan', or people who have had siblings or loved ones killed as children could be put of by the terms "kill" and "child" especially as they're often used in conjunction.
In fact that last one also applies to me as one of my childhood friends was murdered.
There's other, potentially less harmful terms, like "class-based" programming, if you know anything about Britain and especially the British Raj you know that this is a very touchy subject. In fact it has far reaching implications in India today.
The application of a word should not be marred by the history of a word, especially words that near-universally apply.
> so why not make our terminology more accurate and stop normalizing the old terminology?
This is a well meaning intention, and you know what they [say about the path to hell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_road_to_hell_is_paved_with...).
I can think of three arguments against, and they are weakly held so don't think I'm being absolutist or combative or that I can't see reason:
1) There exists a concept called the euphemism treadmill: simply stated it says that the words we typically use to refer to "bad things" is co-opted and abused until it becomes a bad word itself. If we cannot refer to slavery, then we will likely use other words which are loosely related and then those will become bad words also. It is better to simply state that we're not referring to the /human/ slavery, merely the relationship of components.
2) There is a large corpus of work and workers in the world; it might be meaningless to change a few words universally, but you're implicitly asking that potentially hundreds of thousands of people use new language (where english may not be their primary language and so attach to key-words) AND potentially making breaking changes between software revisions AND invalidating any existing documentation/blogspam that refers to these words.
3) There's no actual end to these kinds of changes. As soon as you draw a line you exclude people. My examples above about orphans and people who have been affected by child murder may seem absurd, but why are they less important? Twitter already announced that they would avoid using 'dummy value' because dummy can affect people.
reason 3 is not an application 'the slippery slope fallacy', it's the fact that you _must_ exclude some subset of people if you chase this way of thinking, there must be a line drawn at some point as it's fractal and the human brain is exceptional at finding reasons to be upset. It is infinite.
Think, even momentarily how a woman must feel upon persistently hearing the word ABORT.
And, I'm mostly for changing these terms in new software; but changing existing software in this manner makes it political and not technical; the truth will always be that there was no racist intent when people chose master/slave to refer to the relationship between worker objects and controller objects- it was the clearest term to denote the relationship (and, continues to be if you didn't already know this relationship, try it each way with a few nontechnical friends).
You may disagree but I think this conversation with Stephen Fry is telling (directly in relation to this topic, and not generally): https://youtu.be/vsR6LP7Scg0?t=420
That said, language definitely changes viewpoints. Things don’t always map 1-to-1 between languages, and a lot of cultures have different ideas about when and how to make these kinds of corrections. Sometimes language is set centrally, sometimes slang and memes propagate new terminology or reference current events. Words change the way culture changes, or so it’s been my experience...
For example, it makes sense to say "she mastered her fears" but not that "she mistressed her fears". Similarly, "she mastered fer field" works but "she mistressed her field" does not.
Really, it's just the usage as a noun that's problematic from a logical standpoint, as I see it. If the usage relates to "control" as master denotes as a noun, then it might be problematic (even if the historical use of controlling slaves is not the only use). If it refers to proficiency, or overcoming a hurdle, then it's not really related to the control aspect of the word, and the problematic history that comes along with it.
Now, whether society, or parts of it, are able to distinguish those usages from each other or whether that causes contention that is better avoided, I don't know.
I think you're on something though. There will be no end.
To use the word to make light of the history of slavery is vulgar and socially unacceptable. The myriad other perfectly innocent uses of it are just fine. Personally, I have no intention of obeying any of the new rules of the new Cultural Revolution.
We've never "determined" that. It's merely that some obsessive bossy people suggested it. And mainly people from just one country with particular issues -- whereas English is spoken in just about everywhere in the world.
Not to mention the word master has a history beyond slavery, and was used in all kinds of contexts historically with absolutely no reference to slavery.
The etymology itself has nothing to do with slave masters (any more than "owner" implies "slave owner").
master: from late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher"
oh never mind.