Is changing blacklist/whitelist to something more neutral a controversial change? Like the article mentions, that seems pretty clear, since it's on the evil/good axis.
You're pointing out that some of the changes seem malicious or like pranks. But do you realize that this is essentially how some... or dare I say a lot of people feel about all of them? Blacklist...
You're pointing out that some of the changes seem malicious or like pranks. But do you realize that this is essentially how some... or dare I say a lot of people feel about all of them?
Blacklist as far as I can google has no root in racism. I could maybe take that change more seriously if it did. AskHistorians post. To elaborate on @sand's answer, the colors black and white will always exist. You're not fixing racism by not using the colors, you're making it worse.
Master in git has nothing to do with slavery. Male/Female connectors don't feel hurt being called that, and I challenge you to find me someone legitimately hurt by that terminology.
Master/slave is the only one I've changed my mind ob, because I really got to like the alternative primary/replica. It's a lot more descriptive and communicates better. But no, I won't take people seriously if they tell me that they, personally, feel hurt by the master/slave term being used in computer science, as if removing that term will improve their lives or somehow undo the atrocities of slavery.
I think you might be overselling the common-ness of connectors that don't make intuitive sense. I took port identification quiz a few days ago, and of the 16 ports and connectors shown, zero of...
I think you might be overselling the common-ness of connectors that don't make intuitive sense. I took port identification quiz a few days ago, and of the 16 ports and connectors shown, zero of them are counter-intuitive. RP-SMA is an exception.
I'm completely fine renaming things when the renaming makes sense, see my comment on master-slave vs primary-replica. When I say "hurt", I don't mean "confused".
I'm completely fine renaming things when the renaming makes sense, see my comment on master-slave vs primary-replica. When I say "hurt", I don't mean "confused".
Mostly it comes down to whether we want to expend energy and work updating all the code that will now need to be updated to work with the new terminology. The change will not fix racism, it will...
Mostly it comes down to whether we want to expend energy and work updating all the code that will now need to be updated to work with the new terminology. The change will not fix racism, it will not fix low representation of minorities in coding professions. It is purely feel good gesture that accomplishes nothing.
I don't see how that is the case. Mastery is typically used as a way to define comprehensive, high level knowledge or performance. Even in human to human relationships, I don't really see the need...
It follows that the word master itself seems problematic no matter how or where it's used
I don't see how that is the case. Mastery is typically used as a way to define comprehensive, high level knowledge or performance. Even in human to human relationships, I don't really see the need to make the change because one subset of those human relationships were abominable.
FWIW, The only person I've ever called master with any frequency earned that title over 20 years. He was a master Judoka, so called because he mastered his art and could yeet students twice his size as if they were children.
That's basically why I haven't said anything about this topic so far. There's literally nothing I can say that won't upset someone. Should I mention that context is how we figure out what words...
Will doing anything other than going with the flow result in positive interactions? No.
That's basically why I haven't said anything about this topic so far. There's literally nothing I can say that won't upset someone. Should I mention that context is how we figure out what words mean? Someone else will have brought it up, and even then it's something so simple I don't think it needs to be explicit.
What I have been doing so far is just ignoring the whole situation because I think that the push to change this word is reactionary and is more likely to fade away than to make too much difference. If they succeed, that's fine too; I'll just change the word I use like everyone else does. While I think the reasoning behind the change isn't great, I really don't think that it's worth arguing over.
Why can't we just let the definitions of terms evolve naturally, rather than judging people who use them based on definitions that have been out of date since before living memory. I seriously...
Exemplary
Why can't we just let the definitions of terms evolve naturally, rather than judging people who use them based on definitions that have been out of date since before living memory.
I seriously doubt anyone other than linguists and etymologists are even familiar with the allegedly misogynistic history of "Master Bedroom". Can a word really be offensive if none of the people saying or hearing it are familiar with it's usage 150 years ago?
I feel like there has be at least a pragmatic thought when doing this. If you dig hard enough, you can find etymological roots to all kinds of words that link to troublesome topics. Like the word...
I feel like there has be at least a pragmatic thought when doing this. If you dig hard enough, you can find etymological roots to all kinds of words that link to troublesome topics.
Like the word Robot is legitimately kinda insulting to the Czech people, when you really think about it.
And to the question of "well, why not, no harm really", like I said in the earlier thread I really think people have a limited amount of proactive change they can support before slinking back to their other duties. And all the useless debating when the Github master thing came up is just exhausting. Ffs I got tired of hearing about it.
It can cause people paint the whole movement in the stereotype of pettyness.
Like paying off debt, I think you should pick the fights that have the best cost-to-effectiveness ratio.
Changing names is a medium cost. A lot of "normal" people just find it annoying. You can push it, but when you push it, you should make it count. So clearly troublesome phrases (I saw "open the kimono" as a phrase at Cisco), including perhaps the master slave paradigms, sure, but be xaredul
Anecdotal knowledge from someone who has spend a lot of time in the Czech Republic: It's not. Robot comes from a czech word meaning drudgery, servitude. It in no way describes the Czech people or...
Like the word Robot is legitimately kinda insulting to the Czech people, when you really think about it.
Anecdotal knowledge from someone who has spend a lot of time in the Czech Republic: It's not. Robot comes from a czech word meaning drudgery, servitude. It in no way describes the Czech people or demeans them, it's just a word that means unpleasant things and the only historical connection is from the 1921 Czech play about robots where the term was first coined and later adopted into the English language without change.
Game Master or GM is a common term for the same role of "Dungeon Master" that organically evolved because DM was trademarked but also to draw emphasis away from dungeons and to be more applicable...
Game Master or GM is a common term for the same role of "Dungeon Master" that organically evolved because DM was trademarked but also to draw emphasis away from dungeons and to be more applicable to other games which have a similar role.
I think you bring up an interesting point, however, when it comes to the collaborative nature of DnD and other tabletop games. I'm going to have to think about this for a little while. A conductor still feels a bit 'strong' for lack of a better word to me, but it is definitely less authoritarian than master.
I have other problems with Storyteller that come from disliking the idea of the GM being the only one telling the story. I prefer games where the storytelling is done collaboratively. I think some...
I have other problems with Storyteller that come from disliking the idea of the GM being the only one telling the story. I prefer games where the storytelling is done collaboratively. I think some GMs have the problem of thinking of themselves as writing the story that the players are playing in, which I think results in boring roleplaying. I like the term MC from Apocalypse World and other PbtA games, but that still has the problem of having the word "Master", if that's what we're trying to get away from.
Dungeon Conductor paints a picture of somebody wearing a train conductor's hat and driving a train, which does sound hilarious and whimsical and appeals to me, but would probably bother folks who...
Dungeon Conductor paints a picture of somebody wearing a train conductor's hat and driving a train, which does sound hilarious and whimsical and appeals to me, but would probably bother folks who take their roleplay more seriously. It's also got associations with rails, which is a good way to immediately trigger the online RPG crowd.
In Swedish the common term for a GM is "spelledare" which would translate to game leader or maybe leader of the game is a better translation... Game/Dungeon Conductor, as has been suggested, has a...
In Swedish the common term for a GM is "spelledare" which would translate to game leader or maybe leader of the game is a better translation... Game/Dungeon Conductor, as has been suggested, has a nice imagery to it IMO. Alternatives:
This article is about the pairing of "master-slave" and that one in particular has bugged me for a long time. I think it's a good place to start, since "leader-follower" is easily used instead....
This article is about the pairing of "master-slave" and that one in particular has bugged me for a long time. I think it's a good place to start, since "leader-follower" is easily used instead.
But "major initiative" could end up as a bit of an exaggeration for whatever Github is doing. The ZDNet article is based on a one-sentence reply on Twitter by the CEO of Github. There are no further details yet.
I also think that getting rid of a few usages that particularly bug some people, as a goodwill gesture, doesn't mean that all usages need to be purged right away. It's likely that a lot of old repos and old documentation will still use "master" and after a while that will seem dated.
Although people opposing such moves focus on the inconvenience, there is also an argument to be made for agility. Names do sometimes change (for example, street names) and we should be able to deal with that.
The term 'referee' is popular in the OSR scene, and it's what I use when writing material. I'm trying to make it my default term for the role, which had been 'Game Master'.
I'd really like to hear thoughts on tabletop gaming too, since I've referred to myself as a game master in the past. Is game conductor preferable? What should I use instead?
The term 'referee' is popular in the OSR scene, and it's what I use when writing material. I'm trying to make it my default term for the role, which had been 'Game Master'.
A game master and a referee are very, very different concepts. A referee is an arbitrator (that's even the french term for it, "arbitre"). "Game Host" is a better term if you're really looking to...
A game master and a referee are very, very different concepts. A referee is an arbitrator (that's even the french term for it, "arbitre").
"Game Host" is a better term if you're really looking to replace "Game Master". Referee would just be confusing.
Why, though? "White people" have enslaved "white people" in the past (though, the idea of a "white" person as an identity group didn't exist then), and in the current.
As a white kinkster, I must say that seeing white people playing out a "slavery" scene with each other (at, e.g., a play party or whatever) is... a little off, to say the least.
Why, though? "White people" have enslaved "white people" in the past (though, the idea of a "white" person as an identity group didn't exist then), and in the current.
even if they hadn't, are you only allowed to roleplay enslaving groups of people that have actually been enslaved? that sounds so much worse. let's allow the concept of sexual slavery to stand on...
even if they hadn't, are you only allowed to roleplay enslaving groups of people that have actually been enslaved? that sounds so much worse.
let's allow the concept of sexual slavery to stand on its own, aside from historical human slavery. one stands without the other, and doesn't need to reference it in any way. you're as much entitled to play out whatever submissive or dominant fantasy you have, regardless of your race.
"race play" is an entirely different niche kink, that specifically calls out people's race, and fetishizes it. that's an entirely different can of worms, that has many people feeling strongly one way or another about it. that can't be extricated from the issues of historical human slavery, as it's that history that's being fetishised.
This is something that always kind of annoys me. I think that US centric discourse and assumptions have caused huge amounts of problems in the world. People assume all parts of American culture...
This is something that always kind of annoys me. I think that US centric discourse and assumptions have caused huge amounts of problems in the world. People assume all parts of American culture and perspectives when really it's caused more harm than good in my opinion.
There's a lot more of the world outside of America, and with the US being the mess that it is, I feel it's time to consider dropping the US-centric focus to everyday conversation.
This isn't an attack on you whatsoever. Just something that frustrates me a little any time I see it.
Yeah, but we're not talking about legal slavery, we're talking about a fetish. In fact, I'd argue Americans are willfully ignorant of the many cases of sexual abuse in US chattel slavery. In fact,...
For people who live in the US, the relevant historical system of legal slavery is the Atlantic slave trade.
Yeah, but we're not talking about legal slavery, we're talking about a fetish. In fact, I'd argue Americans are willfully ignorant of the many cases of sexual abuse in US chattel slavery.
In fact, I'd also argue that European sources like the Story of O are the primary foundation for that fetish.
Honestly I don't even get the premise. What could possibly be weirder about white people doing slave fetish stuff? I'm pretty sure that desire predates 1700 to begin with.
In the Third Reich, Hitler bestowed himself the title of Führer (in english: leader) and for obvious reasons, the word has been historically tainted ever since. However, it is still part of other...
Exemplary
In the Third Reich, Hitler bestowed himself the title of Führer (in english: leader) and for obvious reasons, the word has been historically tainted ever since. However, it is still part of other words disconnected from national socialism which are still used broadly today, like Anführer (also means leader), or the ironically named Führerschein (drivers license) which does not actually give you the license to found the Fourth Reich (that would be illegal in Germany). There are a number of other terms in German that incorporate the word, all usually based on either leading someone (like dogs -> Hundeführer) or wielding something (the wield a gun -> Eine Waffe führen).
The author probably doesn't speak German, as you can directly translate leader to Anführer and no German-speaking person will bat an eye.
What the author means with follower though, I don't quite get. You can translate it to Mitläufer, which has negative connotations which are not related to Nazism at all, as it implies someone who is part of group, but has no part in the decision-making process. It is often used when a group does something bad; everyone who participates and defends themselves with "I was just following orders" is a Mitläufer. This means of course that historically, a lot of people in the Third Reich were Mitläufer, but it is not directly related to history and can be used in other relations as well.
The word itself is built from two other German words (a frequent concept in the language): Mit (with) and laufen (to run) so directly translated it would mean something like (to run with). However, no one in their right mind would translate follower to Mitläufer. The direct translation folgen has no negative association which I know of.
"meister" on the other hand has much more benign usage. i was on a teamfortress clan called kreigmeister before i even learned it's german for warmaster. the connotation is entirely about the...
"meister" on the other hand has much more benign usage. i was on a teamfortress clan called kreigmeister before i even learned it's german for warmaster. the connotation is entirely about the mastery of the art of war, nothing to do with slavery.
The color black ≠ black people
You're pointing out that some of the changes seem malicious or like pranks. But do you realize that this is essentially how some... or dare I say a lot of people feel about all of them?
Blacklist as far as I can google has no root in racism. I could maybe take that change more seriously if it did. AskHistorians post. To elaborate on @sand's answer, the colors black and white will always exist. You're not fixing racism by not using the colors, you're making it worse.
Master in git has nothing to do with slavery. Male/Female connectors don't feel hurt being called that, and I challenge you to find me someone legitimately hurt by that terminology.
Master/slave is the only one I've changed my mind ob, because I really got to like the alternative primary/replica. It's a lot more descriptive and communicates better. But no, I won't take people seriously if they tell me that they, personally, feel hurt by the master/slave term being used in computer science, as if removing that term will improve their lives or somehow undo the atrocities of slavery.
And it's really important to focus on what actually hurts people. The boy who cried wolf is a fable warning of the dangers of crying wolf at every occasion, for you won't be taken seriously when it matters the most. More about this elsewhere in the thread: https://tildes.net/~comp/pra/replacing_potentially_insensitive_terminology_in_programming#comment-57ol
I think you might be overselling the common-ness of connectors that don't make intuitive sense. I took port identification quiz a few days ago, and of the 16 ports and connectors shown, zero of them are counter-intuitive. RP-SMA is an exception.
Here's the quiz, if you are interested: https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php?title=test_5458
I'm completely fine renaming things when the renaming makes sense, see my comment on master-slave vs primary-replica. When I say "hurt", I don't mean "confused".
I have no idea what your point is.
Mostly it comes down to whether we want to expend energy and work updating all the code that will now need to be updated to work with the new terminology. The change will not fix racism, it will not fix low representation of minorities in coding professions. It is purely feel good gesture that accomplishes nothing.
I don't see how that is the case. Mastery is typically used as a way to define comprehensive, high level knowledge or performance. Even in human to human relationships, I don't really see the need to make the change because one subset of those human relationships were abominable.
FWIW, The only person I've ever called master with any frequency earned that title over 20 years. He was a master Judoka, so called because he mastered his art and could yeet students twice his size as if they were children.
That's basically why I haven't said anything about this topic so far. There's literally nothing I can say that won't upset someone. Should I mention that context is how we figure out what words mean? Someone else will have brought it up, and even then it's something so simple I don't think it needs to be explicit.
What I have been doing so far is just ignoring the whole situation because I think that the push to change this word is reactionary and is more likely to fade away than to make too much difference. If they succeed, that's fine too; I'll just change the word I use like everyone else does. While I think the reasoning behind the change isn't great, I really don't think that it's worth arguing over.
Why can't we just let the definitions of terms evolve naturally, rather than judging people who use them based on definitions that have been out of date since before living memory.
I seriously doubt anyone other than linguists and etymologists are even familiar with the allegedly misogynistic history of "Master Bedroom". Can a word really be offensive if none of the people saying or hearing it are familiar with it's usage 150 years ago?
I feel like there has be at least a pragmatic thought when doing this. If you dig hard enough, you can find etymological roots to all kinds of words that link to troublesome topics.
Like the word Robot is legitimately kinda insulting to the Czech people, when you really think about it.
And to the question of "well, why not, no harm really", like I said in the earlier thread I really think people have a limited amount of proactive change they can support before slinking back to their other duties. And all the useless debating when the Github master thing came up is just exhausting. Ffs I got tired of hearing about it.
It can cause people paint the whole movement in the stereotype of pettyness.
Like paying off debt, I think you should pick the fights that have the best cost-to-effectiveness ratio.
Changing names is a medium cost. A lot of "normal" people just find it annoying. You can push it, but when you push it, you should make it count. So clearly troublesome phrases (I saw "open the kimono" as a phrase at Cisco), including perhaps the master slave paradigms, sure, but be xaredul
Anecdotal knowledge from someone who has spend a lot of time in the Czech Republic: It's not. Robot comes from a czech word meaning drudgery, servitude. It in no way describes the Czech people or demeans them, it's just a word that means unpleasant things and the only historical connection is from the 1921 Czech play about robots where the term was first coined and later adopted into the English language without change.
Never have I heard it being a topic.
Game Master or GM is a common term for the same role of "Dungeon Master" that organically evolved because DM was trademarked but also to draw emphasis away from dungeons and to be more applicable to other games which have a similar role.
I think you bring up an interesting point, however, when it comes to the collaborative nature of DnD and other tabletop games. I'm going to have to think about this for a little while. A conductor still feels a bit 'strong' for lack of a better word to me, but it is definitely less authoritarian than master.
We have Game Host, maybe Game Runner or Game Director to borrow some media terms?
White Wolf systems call the person who runs the game the Storyteller which feels like a good term for at least some games/systems to me.
I have other problems with Storyteller that come from disliking the idea of the GM being the only one telling the story. I prefer games where the storytelling is done collaboratively. I think some GMs have the problem of thinking of themselves as writing the story that the players are playing in, which I think results in boring roleplaying. I like the term MC from Apocalypse World and other PbtA games, but that still has the problem of having the word "Master", if that's what we're trying to get away from.
That's fair. It really is group storytelling.
Dungeon Conductor paints a picture of somebody wearing a train conductor's hat and driving a train, which does sound hilarious and whimsical and appeals to me, but would probably bother folks who take their roleplay more seriously. It's also got associations with rails, which is a good way to immediately trigger the online RPG crowd.
In Swedish the common term for a GM is "spelledare" which would translate to game leader or maybe leader of the game is a better translation... Game/Dungeon Conductor, as has been suggested, has a nice imagery to it IMO. Alternatives:
Lots of possible choices with different flavouts
This article is about the pairing of "master-slave" and that one in particular has bugged me for a long time. I think it's a good place to start, since "leader-follower" is easily used instead.
But "major initiative" could end up as a bit of an exaggeration for whatever Github is doing. The ZDNet article is based on a one-sentence reply on Twitter by the CEO of Github. There are no further details yet.
I also think that getting rid of a few usages that particularly bug some people, as a goodwill gesture, doesn't mean that all usages need to be purged right away. It's likely that a lot of old repos and old documentation will still use "master" and after a while that will seem dated.
Although people opposing such moves focus on the inconvenience, there is also an argument to be made for agility. Names do sometimes change (for example, street names) and we should be able to deal with that.
The term 'referee' is popular in the OSR scene, and it's what I use when writing material. I'm trying to make it my default term for the role, which had been 'Game Master'.
A game master and a referee are very, very different concepts. A referee is an arbitrator (that's even the french term for it, "arbitre").
"Game Host" is a better term if you're really looking to replace "Game Master". Referee would just be confusing.
Why, though? "White people" have enslaved "white people" in the past (though, the idea of a "white" person as an identity group didn't exist then), and in the current.
even if they hadn't, are you only allowed to roleplay enslaving groups of people that have actually been enslaved? that sounds so much worse.
let's allow the concept of sexual slavery to stand on its own, aside from historical human slavery. one stands without the other, and doesn't need to reference it in any way. you're as much entitled to play out whatever submissive or dominant fantasy you have, regardless of your race.
"race play" is an entirely different niche kink, that specifically calls out people's race, and fetishizes it. that's an entirely different can of worms, that has many people feeling strongly one way or another about it. that can't be extricated from the issues of historical human slavery, as it's that history that's being fetishised.
This is something that always kind of annoys me. I think that US centric discourse and assumptions have caused huge amounts of problems in the world. People assume all parts of American culture and perspectives when really it's caused more harm than good in my opinion.
There's a lot more of the world outside of America, and with the US being the mess that it is, I feel it's time to consider dropping the US-centric focus to everyday conversation.
This isn't an attack on you whatsoever. Just something that frustrates me a little any time I see it.
Yeah, but we're not talking about legal slavery, we're talking about a fetish. In fact, I'd argue Americans are willfully ignorant of the many cases of sexual abuse in US chattel slavery.
In fact, I'd also argue that European sources like the Story of O are the primary foundation for that fetish.
Honestly I don't even get the premise. What could possibly be weirder about white people doing slave fetish stuff? I'm pretty sure that desire predates 1700 to begin with.
This was discussed recently: https://tildes.net/~comp/pra/replacing_potentially_insensitive_terminology_in_programming#comments
I assume this has something to do with Germany's history with Nazism, but can someone clarify further?
In the Third Reich, Hitler bestowed himself the title of Führer (in english: leader) and for obvious reasons, the word has been historically tainted ever since. However, it is still part of other words disconnected from national socialism which are still used broadly today, like Anführer (also means leader), or the ironically named Führerschein (drivers license) which does not actually give you the license to found the Fourth Reich (that would be illegal in Germany). There are a number of other terms in German that incorporate the word, all usually based on either leading someone (like dogs -> Hundeführer) or wielding something (the wield a gun -> Eine Waffe führen).
The author probably doesn't speak German, as you can directly translate leader to Anführer and no German-speaking person will bat an eye.
What the author means with follower though, I don't quite get. You can translate it to Mitläufer, which has negative connotations which are not related to Nazism at all, as it implies someone who is part of group, but has no part in the decision-making process. It is often used when a group does something bad; everyone who participates and defends themselves with "I was just following orders" is a Mitläufer. This means of course that historically, a lot of people in the Third Reich were Mitläufer, but it is not directly related to history and can be used in other relations as well.
The word itself is built from two other German words (a frequent concept in the language): Mit (with) and laufen (to run) so directly translated it would mean something like (to run with). However, no one in their right mind would translate follower to Mitläufer. The direct translation folgen has no negative association which I know of.
Source: Am Austrian.
I think leader is "führer" in German, which is a word associated with Hitler.
"meister" on the other hand has much more benign usage. i was on a teamfortress clan called kreigmeister before i even learned it's german for warmaster. the connotation is entirely about the mastery of the art of war, nothing to do with slavery.