>Austerity? Monks in cells?

You're complaining about indulgence! You're saying that this change won't help people as much as something else. This is a fair criticism. Changing some technical term is probably not a optimally utilitarian use of resources.

However, while you may be trying to live an optimally utilitarian life, the rest of us aren't. I can only speak for myself of course, but evaluating all my life's actions on only that axis is too strict for me.

But, like I said, if you want to do that: props.

No, I'm saying that it won't help people at all. Its an indulgence to make the person doing feel like they are doing something. It will not materially improve lives.

It would be fine if it just made them feel good, but it substitutes for efforts that would help. Its a personal indulgence taking energy from a system when more is needed. It also is a distraction from actual issues. Nothing is often better than something.

> However, while you may be trying to live an optimally utilitarian life, the rest of us aren't. I can only speak for myself of course, but evaluating all my life's actions on only that axis is too strict for me.

Yeah, this is wordplay that has nothing to do with me.

You keep complaining about indulging! What's wrong with indulging in something every once in while?

If your indulging hurts others, then it is something worth complaining about.

I don't exactly understand how you're hurt by this, but fair enough.

Utilitarianism is a philosophical framework. It's not for me, but based on your comments you might be into it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

I am not.

I see no supporting argument for “replacing master with main at GitHub hurts others”; is it somewhere in this thread and I wasn’t able to see it unassisted? If not, we would benefit from you typing it up.

go to the top of this thread chain

I reviewed your initial post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500764 and I was unable to parse out of your objections why you think that this change hurts others. Could you summarize?

Ok, here is my objection. I'm saying that it won't help people at all. It is an indulgence to make Microsoft feel like they are doing something positive when it will not materially improve lives.

It would be fine if it just made them feel good as people's mental health is an important thing that too many ignore. But, this will suck attention away from people who are actually doing things that will help people. The world has only so much time to pay attention, and that time is valuable. Microsoft is just adding to the noise.

They are bringing homemade cupcakes to a food bank and making the national news.

Inconsistent naming standards hurts everyone. Now some repositories will have master branches while others will have them named something else, it makes things harder to work with. If every developer spends just a minute wondering where the main branch is before realizing the new naming standards, that is still a lifetimes worth of time lost due to this change.