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"can we please work to discontinue using 'master' and 'slave' to describe things in computer science and electronics"

This is not an argument, thus it does not require a counter argument. This is a silly request, with no justification. Nothing more.

It’s not a silly request. “Slave” is a very specific term that is highly emotionally charged. There are plenty of alternatives which convey the intended meaning just as clearly without the offensive connotation.

Imagine if one were to insist on referring to “male” and “female” connectors as “cocks” and “fuckholes”.

This is not a hill worth dying on.

Yes slave is derived from the word slav as they were the victims of the brutal ottoman slave trade for hundreds of years. We should be nicer to our slavic bretheren.

That emotional charge is pretty specific to a single culture, while English is used by a large part of the world as second language. It's ok to try to right the wrongs you are guilty of, but please stop trying to project that guilt to other cultures. Where I live there were no slaves or slavery after ca. 1600 - and even before that it was foreign institution imported from the Mongols. That's enough time for emotions to settle down, really.

I choose not to use the term “gypped” in technical contexts even though I live in the US.

I wouldn’t use “genocide” to describe a technical concept even though it’s been over a century since the US has taken part in one.

Why not error on the side of decency?

Sure, why not? If you name the default branch of your repository "main", I will happily submit PRs against it. I won't be doing that in my repos any time soon though, thank you very much. Why? Because that would suggest that I have a reason to do that, while I don't. It's your cross to carry, not mine.

I have my own set of words that I need to be careful with if I want to err on the side of decency. You almost assuredly use some of them as if there was nothing offensive about them. To you, there isn't. I accept that. I'd be grateful if you reciprocated, instead of trying to impose your own cultural norms on me, thank you in advance.

What are some examples of these words? I’d like to know for my own edification, this is not a challenge.

If you actually want to be decent, then that means taking global perspectives into account if your communication is to a global audience.

If I posted a tweet saying that my company is looking for “refugees from big tech”, that would be insensitive even though there aren’t refugees fleeing the US. Saying that the issue of refugees is not sensitive in my local cultural scope is not an excuse if the audience for my communication was larger than that.

I don't even know how the phrase "refugees from big tech" could be offensive or insensitive. It isn't at all.

Given the burnout rate and the pace of the tech world, it's an apt (and even meaningful) description of the state of working in that industry.

To presume/take offence at every single word is absolutely silly.

Did you know "server" is derived from Latin "servus", which literally means "slave"?

and "slave" apparently comes from "Slav", due to the vast amounts of Slavs that were sold into slavery back in the day. ack!

"servus" historically meant servant as well as slave though, iirc. imo etymology is less important than the current emotional valence of words, though. nobody's thinking of Slavic people being slurred by the word "slave" unless they dive into Merriam-Webster.

> nobody's thinking of Slavic people being slurred

Yet! Nobody thought about "master" being offensive either. But with enough activism, anything is possible. I eagerly await people trying to cancel "Masters" degree because it implies less credentialed people should be slaves to more credentialed ones.

How far do you want to take this?

Would you get behind a movement to remove the term 'beat' from our lexicon?

As in 'Tampa beats Kansas 31-9'

Slave is just a USA thing, like many others. Let the rest of the world be please!

https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/o4h1fq/using_go...

And the holocaust was just a Europe thing, but I’d still choose not to use that word to describe a technical concept to an American audience.

What if the package name contained some kind of blasphemy, should that be allowed? Because this could be very offensive in many places.

What irks people is the presumption that the entire world (or at least the entire Anglosphere) should learn American history and then alter their use of language to conform to it. And that it ends up being a kind of linguistic annexation of the Internet where everybody has to make an effort to not offend Americans but Americans make little effort to not offend the rest of the world.

> There really isn't a legitimate counter-argument to "can we please work to discontinue using 'master' and 'slave' to describe things in computer science and electronics" so people just run to "THIS IS ABSURD!"

But there is! The BDSM community has a right not to be discriminated against! If we're going to be inclusive, we should hear them out, too...

I don't know now what we can't just refer to components in systems as dominant or submissive partners, so that we can dispense with the distracting and problematic language.

> people who clearly have no idea what the actual majority of people pushing for inclusive language are typically suggesting and shy.

It does not seem to matter what any majority wants. I have never seen a request to rename something because a majority of black/trans/female/... people considered a term offensive, or the majority of staff, or - as you say - the majority of people who are pushing for inclusive language. (Who gets to define this group? Do I count if I make sure to use singular they, but don't care about master branches?)

The way it works is that a person or institution high up declares a term offensive, and then it takes only one or two people to suggest a change in a company Slack or other public space. Nobody wants to be racist/sexist, so the path of least resistance is to go along and make the change. That's why it feels like power games - if things were decided by anonymous polls instead, then I think acceptance of either outcome would be much higher.

agreed. it tends to just be bikeshedding that costs companies nothing to implement but makes them look as though they're woke or inclusive.

personally, as a trans woman, all I do is use "she" instead of "he" when giving examples about users. I don't mind when people say "he." I don't have anything against "they," I just like using "she" so that's what I do.

Perhaps your argument for inclusiveness shouldn't be based on blatant ageism.

> I think it's more likely to be the project of a near-retirement-age programmer who is outraged at all the "social justice warriors running amock" and created the project to mock people working on inclusiveness, generate blowback at them, and misrepresent their movement to de-legitimize them. Sort of like how in the 50's and 60's everyone ran around screaming about how feminists were "kill all men" commie baby-stealers.

Let's just be clear: that's pure speculation on your part, and not facts.

And to entertain your speculation, it's also possible that the disruptive bot is instead the genuine work of a coloured/female/young social justice warrior who was trying to police the language of professional repos on the internet, right? Since you are speculating, that's just as much a legitimate speculation as well, if we go by the actual user history of the profile.

> Sort of like how in the 50's and 60's everyone ran around screaming about how feminists were "kill all men" commie baby-stealers.

Well, about that ... Sep 2020:

https://www.distractify.com/p/kill-all-men-tiktok

or, Feb 14th 2022:

https://srhsoffleash.org/2171/showcase/kill-all-men-is-only-...

Which has some useful history:

"SCUM, or the Society for Cutting Up Men was an idea based on the manifesto of the same name that was released in 1967. At the time, it had been described as satire or parody, until the author attempted to murder Andy Warhol a year later"

Maybe that's they were running around saying that about feminists in the 60s?