After much checking it was realised that this was because the checksum literally was 0xBAD....
Another example is GitHub changing the default branch name from master to main due to their perception that the existence of a master implies the existence of slaves.
People got grumpy about master/slave being replaced with server/client, superior/subordinate, leader/follower, and similar terms but that actually largely benefits as well in that it makes things clearer. Anyone who has dealt with bus protocols that support the more complex "multi-leader" setups or peer-to-peer setups knows how the master/slave terminology can be confusing and potentially limiting in accurately describing the parts of the system.
And the git master/main thing also is more a matter of just making things easier to pick up. Master can be confusing there for the same reasons it's confusing in bus topologies. Main instead is obvious. It's the main/mainline branch of the project. And that also helps set the divide for main vs feature vs maintenance branches (and release tags).
So yeah some of it was done under the guise of politics but that's generally been more about getting an excuse to make the change without people dismissing it rather than the underlying reason for the change to happen.
So, putting politics aside, I don't really care as long as it isn't breaking existing stuff. My only point of contention has been the politics behind some of the pushes.
Reads almost like a haiku
struct Simba {
- mother: u32,
- father: u32,
+ parent: u32,
+ parent: u32,
}
"I don't think this will compile" // trust that the user knows what s/he's doing.
// trust that the user knows what s/they's doing.I actually agree with some of the other commentators that "blocklist" is probably a better term but it’s not easy to start using a new term instead of one I’ve been used to for decades.
My first encounter with this was as a young developer at an electronics manufacturing company. When discussing a request from a customer to change a particular undesirable behavior of the device, I referred to this as a "bug" in an e-mail to them.
I was quickly reprimanded / corrected, with the explanation that -- while "bug" is a somewhat innocuous term to engineers, to non-engineer types it brings to mind a whole host of bad images, fears, and can lead to canceled contracts under the premise that we've delivered bad-faith product. I was initially very resistant to this idea, but I've seen the wisdom in this as I've matured as an engineer over the past 20 years since this run-in.
For a related example, it reminds me of this issue that was opened on llama.cpp by a user who was concerned that the software had been "hacked":
https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/33#issuecommen...
> Hey, I was reading your Readme.md and I saw that your repo was hacked. I want to ask what this means and wanted to check if the users like me also get the impact of hacking. Or, this is not the thing I should worry about?
Of course, the repo was not hacked -- but the founder of the project mentioned that it had been "hacked together" (as a term of humility / self-deprecation) and some users got the wrong idea of what he meant by that.
So I don't think this is about censorship, so much as good public relations. "Don't spook the horses" -- not all words mean the same things to engineers as people whose perceptions of technology are shaped more by movies and headlines.
Sometimes this leads to embarrassing issues. I remember one case where a Chinese guy named Hui was unable to make a blog post on his team's official public blog. Turned out that his name was on the list of banned words because of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%85%D1%83%D0%B9#Russian
I was trying to explain to my wife where something was. In the [profane word for vagina] section. The B section.