In the case where it requires effort from other people, such as making breaking changes to an API, I'm less keen, but when it comes to future APIs I'll keep it in mind.

It reminds me a lot of the outrage over trans people wanting to use different pronouns. Just trying to use the pronouns they want you to requires basically zero effort and has a measurable benefit.

I think a lot of the upset around this issue - and I agree here - is that it takes energy away from more important topic. When people are being murdered in the streets, is master vs main the thing we should spend our time on?

While it's a clear false dichotomy, and we can do both, there's a real risk that people will just swap from master to main and feel like they've done their part, ignoring the more serious issues.

Ironically, that becomes a bigger problem the more we debate this. If using main instead of master is just a little thing, you feel the need to do more. If it's a big political stance, you feel like you've done enough.

The world is full of good causes, there are so many no one can probably list them all. Any person can really only care about so many, a small handful. Similarly, some causes we may actually think harmful and actively oppose. For the vast majority, sane people probably think, hmm dunno one way or the other.

By one-sidedly declaring something terms unacceptable, this is an intrusion on my right to not endorse a cause. Basically, I’m forced to stop using some terms, eg if I want to keep using GitHub etc. And I value my right to leave a cause be, neither for nor against, quite highly. Without it, the world descends into groupthink hell.

As others say, you don’t mind this cause, fine. But others may. I find it harmless but utterly pointless, though offensive to reason and history. Yet I feel an effort to shame me into supporting this cause and endorsing it.

Not to mention, at no point can I hear that this is something people of colour want (whatever that even means, it’s not like everyone who is not white thinks the same). It is patronising that a bunch of presumably white guys working in tech decide what is right and what is not, for the world and for PoC.

Not to mention that the whole debacle is essentially about a massive failure of US society, and yet the whole world is made to participate in this spectacle. Dear Americans, please fund schools for poor Black kids, do outreach programs, scholarships, internships, you know, things that will help underrepresented minorities get themselves out of poverty, before you go on an all-guns-blazing crusade to change English language. The clue is in the name, it is not American property, and certainly not the property of a bunch of unelected founders with egos inflated by VC valuations.

Ironically to me, these efforts are to be more inclusive but I can't see any of that. I can see that the purpose is to evoke these discussions, and in that sense the effort to change the language is not pointless: by having these changes adopted the movement can point at successes to show it was taken seriously at least once.

We are at the opposite pendulum swing now.

If I think of other major racial or ethnic conflicts of the recent times (Israel/Palestine, Rohingya in Asia, Balkan genocides, Hutu vs Tutsi, antisemitism, tensions between “original” and “migrant” societies in Europe), none of them are covered by the language being banished here.

Also, the immediate searching for racial undertones in any phrase seems to be a purely American thing.

This makes it also difficult for some people who don't speak English natively to navigate that linguistic minefield.

Would you be open to that request? I mean, whatever, right? Who cares? Just do it. It might help me and perhaps others because to us Java is very painful. Oh, also, if you need an additional reason, Java is sexist because its file header starts with 0xCAFEBABE, another reason to switch to C.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java#Colonial_periods

Saying that the two cases are not equivalent is a criticism of the level-of-effort comparison, not a criticism of a particular people-group's subjective suffering.

An interesting thinking angle to this often “why was it fine before ?”

Was it because nobody knew about that name/word in the first place ?

Was there always incoming requests for change but those were just ignored as baseless, and as the social context changed discarding them is not as easy anymore ?

Was it because the majority of users weren’t offended, but the user base changed enough that offended people’s voices go louder ?

I find a lot of seemingly frivolous or petty word changes have a wider context that are not as simple as it looks on the surface. [0] https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_bot/issues/1053

Renaming branches, streets and toppling statues are all cheap gestures that achieve nothing at all but allow those performing them to feel self-important and pose as defenders of the oppressed.

Meanwhile the oppressed would like to have at least their freedom, a roof over their head, a secure job that allows them to make a living and a modicum of respect from those around them. But no, too many people in the US (and elsewhere) can't have that because it actually requires effort, at least more than running some git command or posting a tweet.

This is such an empty and disrespectful gesture that it makes a mockery of what it means to fight against discrimination.

For one I meant that the gestures are literally cheap: it costs almost nothing to send a tweet or invent some guidelines.

They're also empty because they don't have any effect in the real world.

The second one is if the name is already massively spread and a known brand which just can't be "renamed". Like in Rubocop case - you can't rewrite every mention on the internet. If you're going to kill the brand... it's just not worth it.

Otherwise, either do a quick change, or ask "if you care enough, please submit a PR" and just be done with it.

Proposal for removing "cop". TL;DR: Rejected by author because the name is so established as a brand it would take massive effort to change.

If it doesn't matter, it's low-effort, and the change results in an environment that's more comfortable for some people, it seems like a pretty straightforward equation. Anyone who wants me to oppose that kind of change is implicitly arguing that it does matter, and the current state is the better one… without bothering to make a case for it.

There is basically zero upsides I can see to this changes whereas it just makes terminology more difficult to learn for beginners. Coding is already a very difficult field, there's no need to make it harder.

Why is "blocklist" or "denylist" harder to learn for beginners than "blacklist"? If anything, the approved terminology seems easier to learn, if you ask me.

It sounds like your argument is not so much about beginners learning for the first time, but experienced people needing to learn a different word for a concept they already know. I'm fairly sure I can learn what "blocklist" means with minimal effort, but perhaps that's a difficult word for some people.

Is there some study about that? The concept of people being offended by these terms itself sounds ridiculous and I have a very hard time to believe it, having at least a beginning of a proof would maybe help here.

> It sounds like your argument is not so much about beginners learning for the first time, but experienced people needing to learn a different word for a concept they already know. I'm fairly sure I can learn what "blocklist" means with minimal effort, but perhaps that's a difficult word for some people.

It just creates a balkanization in IT, both terms will be used simultaneously.

I mean, really, I've asked a number of my friends who aren't too politically inclined and their reaction is a shrug. They don't really get it but they don't care to figure out why and they don't care either way because they've got stuff to do.

Is it really hard to say your prayer before the dinner?

Is it really hard to never ever eat pork?

Is it really hard to bow to every police officer you meet?

Will you now stop eating pork? If not, at which point do you decide you will alter behavior for someone else. How do you make that judgement?

> If someone were to open an issue "Please change master to main," and they were genuine about the request, I'd be like ... ok. And that would be the end of it. It's a s/master/main/g. Sure, whatever.

Not at all, it's just a question of who will pay to update all code and documentation to follow the new naming standards. That's not only the documentation of the project in question but also resolving issues when refering to external sources which also use master/slave terminology such as the MBus and related tooling.

> Why not let them?

Will they pay someone to make the changes or do they expect smaller places to shell out money to fix a non issue to avoid being associated with something they've never had any relation to? No? No change unless they either do the work themselves or pay for the cost of changing it.

> From my point of view, this is a big ball of "whatever, who cares, just do it." But my mind is open: can you convince me that it's important to resist this trend? Without invoking slippery-slope arguments?

There isn't really much of an argument for implementing it other than being pushed into exile by others if you don't. Resisting it would mostly come down to the cost of yet another cosmetic change that does nothing other than cost hours of work with no real reason than some being "offended" by well established terms.

In the end, this is a change where I just don't see the merit of. In the end it seems to be the practice of banning being easier than understanding what it's actually used for and comming up with a solid argument for change. It's not the burden of those sitting on `master` branches to explain why not but rather those suggesting this change to provide at least something which hints to the change being worth the effort.

At best it'll help some people feel respected and included, at worse it'll do... nothing at all.

I'm also happy to see some somewhat level-headed discussion on these topics on HN, lately every time that stuff was brought up the thread would descend into 4chan-lite immediately. Very embarrassing. Maybe it's because we're on a weekend and people are better rested.

For the first few weeks this resulted in a lot of fights, but after that the moderation load as a whole was much lower. In effect, they'd found a means for flushing out those who liked provoking others and a clear rule to ban them with. There isn't a large number of such people, they're a tiny but very loud minority.

Codes of conduct have a similar effect. Someone who complains about the mere existence of a code of conduct is pre-announcing that they like annoying or upsetting other people.

OR, everyone in power is a satirical HOA tyrant type character whose primary hobby is rule-making.

Either way, code of conduct is also generally code for grumpy and to be avoided, lest your time there be spent in moral lectures and petty arguments instead of on whatever the ostensible topic is.

I try to go places where people get along without a codified list of civil behaviors, because then I know I'm in the company of adults.

Trust until broken and gratitude for upholding good values is the path to a better community along with giving a chance to do better. Quick punishment only leaves a sour taste for everyone.

Also, a good rule is to wait 5-10 minutes or more and see if what you've written aligns with what and how you want to say it or at least expanding on your point a bit further to avoid being misinterpreted.

It reminds me a bit of the many discussions I've had with far-right buddies of mine about IQ. The topic would be IQ in relation to 'ethnic groups' or 'geographic regions', sub-saharan africa being a popular topic for them. Also Ashkenazi Jews and their (apparently?) higher IQ. They really found those interesting, without making judgments, of course.

And while for the past decade or so I've been happy to talk about IQ, it's meaning, it's implications, ethical or otherwise, there was something about these conversations that felt off to me.

Then at some point I realized that what bothered me was the focus and specific complaints, the 'meta' aspect of these discussions. Stuff like "we hide IQ research because it might expose ethnic differences and the leftie researchers don't like that", more explicitly, but generally it was just the fact that these friends seemed obsessed with IQ in relation to ethnicity.

I realized that, having studied psychology but also always having had an interesting in the topic of IQ, until recently there were SO many other interesting questions to discuss. What 'is' IQ? How does it relate to what we consider 'intelligence'? Why the Flynn effect? Why are people with high IQ just as susceptible, or even more, to manipulation and marketing? How does IQ correlate to empathy, and how does that correlate with how our moral compass works? etc.

IQ in relation to race, no wait, ethnic group, was just one of those interesting questions. it felt like a more sensitive topic to discuss, especially in its implications, but it was just one of many.

I realized that the fact that these friends focused on this ONE topic at the expense of all the other ones (and often complete lack of knowledge) was in itself signifying something (and in my opinion not always racism, but inevitably racism if you followed them to their sources).

I would argue that the increasing trend to eliminate objective admittance criteria to schools are an example of this. (I think standardized testing is a huge boon to socio-economically disadvantaged kids; it certainly was for me.)

I will say as a general statement that I do think there are systemic biases against various minorities (or women in some cases, who aren't really minorities in the counting sense at least), and that some 'solutions' definitely don't help.

But my main point was that elevating this complex problem, which, again, is well worth having nuances discussions about, and which, to my knowledge is generally very much discussed in 'intellectual circles'. well, it's raised to red-scare totalitarianism-is-right-around-the-corner levels of discussion that I believe cause more harm than good.

For me the debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Szizek confirmed and illustrated this view. if you haven't seen it, watch it and observe the dynamic. The expectations that in particular Peterson had of this 'Marxist' he was finally going to talk to. It's fascinating how often they agree, but also how bad his hyperbole-pretending-to-be-intellectual shit falls apart.

Righting a horrible wrong? I'm not aware of gay parades re Alan Turing but I sure as hell commend any efforts to right that particular wrong! or even just make people aware of it.

EDIT: So I guess you're saying flamboyant gays ruin it for those who pretend to be straight in all the right ways well enough?

Who are you to make a judgement about that? How do you make that judgement? Or would it only happen if it is about links to racism. If I say I'm offended about you having a Christmas hat as icon during Christmas, who are you to say no?

And this is actually happened at the VS Code repo - someone felt offended about a Christmas hat. I think they eventually decided he was a troll - but what if he was actually genuine?

Sure, I don't have issues with Christmas hats and probably I'd wait to hear from at least more than one single person. But changing the icon knowing that it made one of my users happy would be trivial. Sure, refusing to would be my right, and perhaps it would only 'lose' me this one user. But deciding to change the icon would make me feel warm and fuzzy because I removed an obstacle to probably a few users. Because if I squint I can sorta see their point.

Of course there are limits and of course these are fuzzy. But I can totally see how multiple people might find a Christmas hat offensive, even if I personally think it's really silly. Anything else than making a call that doesn't cost much and alleviates others' concerns feels to me like being petty for political sakes. I don't like that.

In short there is no harm in the change itself, but rather in the perception by others of where people choose to waste their time rather than productively address root causes.

The harm is that changes like these don't actually help, and they are perceived negatively by people at large. This increases the divide and is a net negative.

And if you think I'm wrong you need only look at the comments here.

Because in the end, actual progressive left thinkers could end up in a rice paddy with a tyre iron in the neck.

This terminology platform seems to be very much pushed by those who feel they should be leftist intellectuals, but who don't quite cut it in the thinking department so instead they just grab the microphone and make up in volume what they lack in depth, labelling anyone, regardless of political view, who speaks out against them as the enemy of progress.

Long term such actions are detrimental to the development of an actually better and fairer society.

Short term it's just grating to see the very real plight of certain minorities being abused by opportunists for their own selfish ends, again.

I might sound over cynical in the following but, in as much good faith as I can muster, let me explain why I find this annoying:

> What's the downside? Is it really so hard to type "main" instead of "master"?

This might be a bit specific to GitHub but consider that it's not so much about _typing_ "main" vs master but more about all the automation scripts that will break just so some company can signal their virtue.

Maybe invoking a bogey man here but I would really HATE it if that recovery script that's been known to work for ages suddenly fails to work in one of those 2AM emergencies that always happen just because `NODE_ASSIGN_SLAVE` has been renamed to `NODE_ASSIGN_SECONDARY` without backwards compatibility.

> why not just say ok and be done with it?

This is put succinctly by another (sarcastic) comment here: "I guess we'll call this a win and continue to ignore the root of the problem". I would argue that people who legitimately care about the social issues changes like these claim to address should also be wary about this over-political correctness, else they risk failing to achieve the actual changes they clamor for inn exchange for all the low-hanging fruit.

The problem with shallow CSR lip-service like this is that it is distracting and cheapens the conversation on the issue. And by embracing cheap talk we are letting entities (not necessarily pointing at anyone) get away from taking actual and meaningful action to address the problem. These virtue-signalling changes allow these companies to have something to show for in terms of social responsibility without actually doing the difficult bits that would actually matter.

Because I realize GitHub is now part of Microsoft, let me point out that it costs them next to nothing to change the terminology used in their products but meanwhile, they make money off "innocuous" product offerings like bleeding-edge facial recognition without second thought. Who cares that it is invasive to privacy or can be used to exacerbate discrimination against at-risk social groups, so long as it does not use the term "master" right? (Correct me if I'm wrong and being over-cynical and that Microsoft has dropped these contracts. One of the few times I would really love to be proven wrong.)

Acknowledging that this thread is about Linux, specifically, which is non-profit. The points above might not apply to them.

> ultimately it's a big bikeshed that people want to paint. Why not let them?

In conclusion, as you've invoked the bike shed imagery anyway, the problem with this is the same as any other bikeshedding argument: we can paint the bike sheds but meanwhile the police who are supposed to protect the village are held to no accountability which is actually the reason why we called this homeowner's meeting in the first place isn't it?

How about we paint the bike sheds once we've held the police accountable? Those bike sheds aren't killing anyone, aren't discriminating, and I'm just wary that the conversation will stop because we've appeased the reward centers of our brains because we've already "achieved something" through the bike sheds. It would be absurd that in the minutes of the meeting on police brutality the resolution would be "We painted bike sheds!".

Besides all that time we leisurely spend painting those damn bike sheds can actually be used for more productive things, not necessarily on the social activism front.

In fact, why don't people for these populist changes express some arguments that aren't based on using "misrepresented" people as shields and scapegoats? In fact, using minorities to perpetuate your personal cause is misrepresenting them as weak and powerless.

All this talk about just accepting it is defeatism. You're promoting defeatism. Are you so scared to bounce back that you wish to ostrich your way out of any pressure?

Why, yes, it is too hard and unnecessary to write main instead of master, or any of the hundreds of completely arbitrary changes made with, I repeat, zero net measurable gain.

That feels like a sad, thin way of living life.

I've had a ton of discussions with friends who are more right-wing, some of them probably 'alt-right' (one of them overtly racist).

and one of the things that I've found hard to discuss is the 'meta' observation that they're all up in arms, outsizedly outraged, about particular, and somewhat peculiar things.

In this case it's BLM (which, sure, I am totally fine with discussing the Marxist aspects of some of this movement! It's probably true, but hey look up the history of women's and civil right's movements!), but previously it was #metoo and I forget whatever came before that. I think it was being able to point out the higher incidence of crime among minority <x>. Which was sort of taboo before that (70s or 60s, over here? but not really of course.)

In all those cases it was borderline-violent outrage that was their first go-to, is what stood out to me.

I'll never forget sitting in a car with a friend of mine, heading to my first-ever Jordan Peterson talk (which I have to admit in hindsight, was much less bad than I expected because he seemed to realize that he was a speaker at a crypto-white-supremacist forum and really seemed to try to counter that).

This was at the height of the #metoo 'craze'. I think Weinstein's transgressions had just gotten out. I didn't bring it up, because I knew what would happen, but somehow the topic came up.

His first reaction, almost reflexively, was to be negative about all of it. Strongly and emotionally. He expressed concerns of a future where men would be jailed just because they were accused of something without due process (shades of 'outrage culture' being just one step removed from gulags, which is popular on HN now?). how he had a female friend who described a situation as 'forceful' toward her and how it implicated the dude in the situation and /that/ was the bad thing. Never mind that this one particular friend was notoriously unstable and had been diagnosed with some serious mental health issues.

And I just sat there stunned, at first, because what had been on my mind was the many close female friends who had, for the first time, probably emboldened by the #metoo thing, told me avalanches of stories of harassment, and an avalanche per individual woman: overt sexual abuse, constant harassment, and the like, that I thought I was aware of but never realized was so common to them, to the point where they'd stopped mentioning it and just made dark jokes about it. overt rape was not rare in these stories.

To be clear, I think there are many issues in current-day male-female relationships that also raise concerns that might warrant empathy for said males. I mean, even if we don't care let's not it's particularly fertile ground for fascism.

I also think that some of the stories I've heard are more a sign of communication issue or projected trauma than what they claim about the males that were 'perpetrator' in these situations.

I also believe that there are aspect of current-day society where the quintessentially privileged 'young white male' pulled the short end of the stick and I think this is a real problem. I know men who have been raped and I've had my own experience that I'd describe as 'difficult' and 'not really voluntary' and that mirrors experiences that have been describes as rape. And the fact that I can't say I've been raped is problematic.

I know a shockingly large number of 'privileged white males in their early thirties' who have withdrawn from the world to stay at home and game and be basically incels. and that's not just their own stupid privileged fault, I believe, and their life is shit. I regularly wonder which one might commit suicide. That's not good!

I guess my point, peppered with perhaps incindiary or distracting stuff, is that it truly shocked me that the reaction to some particular group expressing their particular problems, and finally having an audience, whether #metoo or BLM, was met by such a virulent counter-attack. I think that's not right, and I think pointing out how that in itself means something is important.

To pull this into what seems to be the outrage of the day on HN: I think much of this whole 'cancel culture' thing is stupid, I think a lot of it is virtue signalling, and I agree with many here who describe it as such.

but I am a bit more worried about the backlash to it than I am about the disingenuous hyper-social-media people flaming it. I'm more worried by how when I click on the profile of the outraged, they show a pattern of outrage at anything that has a whiff of 'sjw'.

I'll join them in their worry when the US president is a 'sjw' and not very much in their camp. I mean, jesus fucking christ it's not like these Twitter woke people have power that truly compares to that of the president and his cronies, and it's not like a fired SV not-woke-enough dude won't find a ridiculously well-paying job somewhere else.

I'm about to but trying not to go off on the "oh but the real problem is polarization" (self-proclaimed centrist) crowd, which in our current climate strikes me as akin (but no, not quite the same) as someone arguing that perhaps we shouldn't be so mean to Hitler because his anti-semitism is just a political game. or someone arguing that somehow a US mainstream democrat is anything but right-of-center by most measures.

Well okay I did anyways and while I'd prefer no responses to this so the ramble can just be something I've wanted to ramble about and I'm not reminded of how I didn't make a concise or proper argument, here it is anyways because it feels like there might be something in there that's worth not just pasting in my personal journal like I usually do. Feel free to disregard the focal point(s) and ant-fuck the details though, that's fair game. I love y'all here and if nothing else I'll agree that being able to converse about things is well worth protecting!

EDIT: ugh holy shit is this longer than it looked in the <textarea>. if you actually read the whole thing my apologies and please keep in mind I was rambling and this does no represent my well-considered views. also, go read better stuff! if you just scrolled down to this part, keep scrolling. I said some stuff and it's probably sort of okay, by my estimation, but too long to be worth what you'd get out of it. scroll on maybe.