1. This is removing actual content, not just changing internal naming. "Children/Families affected by systematic discrimination/bias/exclusion" will simply no longer be able to find grants targeted at them.

2. The amount of effort being put into this is much higher than GitHub changing their default for new repos to "main"

> The amount of effort being put into this is much higher than GitHub changing their default for new repos to "main"

Sorry but that's bullshit. This is just deleting a few words from static content. The whole `main` thing required:

* Github (and Gitlab etc.) to make `master` configurable - an entirely new feature.

* All tooling that previously could assume a default of `master` now can't have a sensible default. You have to specify every time.

* Users to remember which one to use for every repo.

This is still causing me pain. Repos I use are about 50:50 split between `main` and `master`. I sure do love having to retype `git switch master` half the time I do it.

This is dumb, but it definitely is less effort than the dumb `main` change.

Less effort on that repo? Sure. Less effort replicated over the entire US government? No, sorry, don't buy it.

... and the git changes were allowed to happen on a sane schedule.

Oh, and most of the people or projects affected by the git change got a choice.

It isn't though. This is the beginning of wiping LGBTQ from any federal government concerns, grants, programs, health data, etc. It's been pretty obvious for the past 2 weeks that Trump doesn't care about the law, nor do his acolytes or GOP Congress members who have failed to stand up for the very role of the Congress as a check to Presidential and Judicial power. They passed these laws, the President has to go through them to make changes to them, not do end runs around the law disguised as Musk and his minions

Why should people get grants because of who they choose to sleep with?

Why should people not get specific needs cared for, to exist for instance, because of who they choose to sleep with? I think that question precedes yours in priority.

Could you give me an example of someone whose sexual preferences mean they are unable to "exist" unless they have a government grant?

A friend of mine got a stone thrown to his head because he was holding hands with someone from the same sex.

He barely survived and today, I think 10 years later, he still suffers from severe migraines and doesn't have movement in half his body.

And I wouldn't blame you if you didn't believe me. I sometimes also don't believe this happened, that that was just a bad dream. That we actually need laws to prevent people from killing each other just because.

Iirc, lgbtq removal involved removing gender studies and pages regarding sexual and women's health. It hadn't to do with grants

Because they're a usefully distinct group from the point of view of epidemiological studies.

I deal with the main/master brouhaha by using a script I wrote that determines the name of the appropriate branch:

    #!/bin/bash
    
    git remote show origin | sed -n '/^ *HEAD branch: */s///p'

It's in my `$HOME/bin` as `git-master`, symlinked as `git-main`.

    git switch $(git master)

(`git foo` finds and executes a `git-foo` command anywhere in $PATH, a handy feature if you want to implement your own extensions.)

(This is of course irrelevant to the topic of the top-level post.)

Ah neat! Might have to steal that. Let's just hope nobody decides that "origin" is racist too...

Having to keep track of what branch has been arbitrarily tapped as the trunk in a repo is not reasonably comparable to stripping Americans of recognition and rights.

The former may annoy some folks until they standardize or figure out a way to tag the repos. The latter is actively aiming to be detrimental to people in a large way, and unless stopped, will very likely succeed in that goal.

You didn't have to do this, there was no EO.

Ah so is there a way I can magically get everyone to go back to `master`?

To get *everyone* to magically go back would require *forcing me* to go back. Very few of the places I worked kept the default name anyway, for entirely unrelated reasons. Call the default branch "A" for all I care. Or "Release". Or "Primary". Or "Root".

Sure, I know the etymology doesn't go to what it sounds like, but even without any culture war stuff — and this is very mild, I view "not using 'master'" in this context as "being polite" — even without culture war stuff, what you're whinging about was already something people had to handle.

So I am forced to deal with the main/master mess. That's what I thought. I don't know why you commented.

"Very few of the places I worked kept the default name anyway, for entirely unrelated reasons."

You already had the problem you're whinging about, even without any culture war.

And I really do mean it when I say you are 'whinging' here: of all the things people in software have to deal with, what something is called is among the more trivial.

A policy that strips people of money, even with good reason, is much more disruptive than "what's this called?", that you call this "bullshit" and *this* is your comparison? It's like a posh person in WW1 saying that their caviar being rationed is more important than the troops getting winter jackets.

I use "git switch -"

Usually you're switching from a feature branch back to main or master anyway.

> 2. The amount of effort being put into this is much higher than GitHub changing their default for new repos to "main"

The buck didn't stop with that useless piece of wokeism that, oh so curiously, didn't go after master degrees.

The funniest thing when red is in power instead of blue is how all the blue people pretend their crap was good and the crap of red is bad and how it's not about the action but about who does it.

Except that replacing "master" with "main" probably didn't affect the lives of people subject to systemic discrimination. This might do

I agree with the parent comment, but believe you have the more correct and important perspective in the current context.

They are both probably forms of overcorrection, this too far in the wrong direction where the former could have been too far in the more ideal direction.

Pandering is not as bad as discrimination, as you’ve pointed out.

It does not seem fair to me to exclude or include people in financial aid programs based on the colour of their skin. Individual circumstances seems like a much fairer and much less divisive system.

I hope that this was valued in accordance to other values. Eg. A rich black kid in Washington probably wouldn't be eligible to receive this grants, while a poor white kid in Kentucky would. I also hope that "systemic discrimination" would take into account more than just skin color

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2686895-equality-equity-just... , hopefully this is still visible to the people in oppressed regimes..

This comments section seem to be full of the "Fuck Woke DEI" Maganazis and mentioning "systemic racism" will trigger them, but if you're still reading, look at George Floyd, in an alternate world, he'd be a wealthy person descendant of landowners, but in this reality, his grandparents' land was stolen, he grew up poor (and black) and ended up being yet another black-murdered-by-cop figure: https://dwkcommentaries.com/2020/10/08/a-moving-biography-of... . But snowflakes get triggered if there's an idea of better treatment for descendants of victims of systemic racism (another snowflake trigger word).

To the snowflakes: Hey, why care about all that, your continued violence has won you the ethno-supremacy fascism you wanted, where being white and incompetent doesn't matter, because you'll get that cushy job anyway!

No. This is the idiocy that continues to undermine any argument from free speech or forced speech. You cannot just agree with the language you like. You have to be able to live with horrible, horrid language that you detest and then, maybe, we can have some semblance of sense come back. Words don't hurt people. People do. Case in point, it is not words that are deleting those words. It is actions.

You are part of the problem. Yes. You.

I'm not sure if I am understanding your message. You are trying to say that I should live without dei messages? If so, I live in a country where I basically lived half of my (pretty short yet, tbh) life without those kind of messages. I was too young to be offended by the lack of messages, I'm now grateful that there is a consideration for different backgrounds.

An example might be jobs postings, in computer science the tone used for the post might discourage more women to apply than man. Having a process to ensure this doesn't happen results in more women applying, but more men as well, the increase is just less than woman in %

I also not see an issue with changing a word that has a bleak history with one that hasn't, it doesn't remove anything from people

<< I also not see an issue with changing a word that has a bleak history with one that hasn't, it doesn't remove anything from people

I will be very blunt. You are simply wrong. Not just inaccurate, but wrong. Not technically wrong, but wrong. If it removes word, it removes something. And since "something" is far, far removed from 'not anything'. You are factually wrong. As in, you cannot get more wrong than you just did. Fucking QED.

It is changed, not removed. This time is removed. Honestly, I don't get your point. Mind your words jesus

Friend, if the word is 'changed' from X to Y, then word X ceased to be used in favor of word Y. In other words, word X is removed. I mind my words fairly carefully. The point is what I wrote in previous paragraph. I have only mentioned it thrice..

No, those are identifiers that appear only in code. It's an IDE or git rename with no impact on the product.

In this case, the engineers are changing the functionality of the product, not just changing code identifiers.

So whether you agree with the policy aims or not, wouldn't that mean this is actually productive work while trawling through git histories changing "master" to "main" is just a nonproductive waste of time.

"Whether or not you agree with the policy aims, wouldn't this mean that the death camps are actually doing productive work?"

You can't ignore the policy aims when determining what is "productive" as productivity is directly to the end result. It's WORSE that this is productive vs non-productive.

You're "Tired of nazi comparisons" when... Musk did two Nazi Salutes! He brought the comparison on by doing a Nazi salute! Twice! You're the one who refuses to see a salute for what it is.

Are you trying to hit a record for flagged comments in a single thread or something?

If I keep having to roll my eyes over all these idiotic Nazi comments because people are tired of far-left culture war issues I'm going to have to go to the doctor for RSI.

Curious as to how the Nazi salute thing is seen by you? Just a little forgivable misstep?

Probably looks like a good opportunity for a high five!!!

Yes the case against death camps is not that they are a waste of time symbolic measure with no real world effects.

Did you tax money fund any master->main branch renamings?

This could be seen as technical debt, inherited by the current administration. These changes should have never taken place.

I imagine some government agencies do use git so the answer is likely yes.

1) Were employees ordered to implement PRs to go through all code and auto-remove all mentions of "master" and "whitelist" from public facing code (not just internal identifiers).

2) False equivalency.

> Were employees ordered to implement PRs to go through all code and auto-remove all mentions of "master" and "whitelist" from public facing code (not just internal identifiers)

Uhm, yes. Yes they were.

Here's one example:

https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/09/renaming-whi...

We're talking about gov employees here

Ah so the morality of censorship depends on exactly who your employer is. Got it.

Nope; the OP's argument was that the previous administration did the same thing. Stay on track with the discussion.

I am on track. You've misread. They never said that the previous administration was responsible for the whole `master` thing.

> This seems just as ridiculous and frustrating as a few years ago, dropping whatever they're doing to remove "master" and "whitelisting" from the code. Different team, same silliness.

They're both changes ordered by decree for purely political reasons with disproportionate negative technical impact.

Please don't admonish people with a 1-hour old throwaway account, especially if you're not even going to say what you think "this" is.

Most places only changed that terminology on external viewable materials and the requests for removing terms from the code were just dumped in the backlog for some intern to maybe get to one day.

I could go pull my company's JIRA ticket and I guarantee you it hasn't been touched since 2020.

These companies were only going to do enough work for a PR win and nothing more.

It's Microsoft. If they were serious they would have, say, refused to sell Office licenses to the worst-offending police departments. Instead they renamed master to main. If it was me (it's not, I'm a pasty white guy) I'd find it condescending. But it's also harmless, and shorter to type. It's not a hill I'm going to die on, and the false equivalency smacks of bad faith.

I agree. There is no way people being annoying about some possibly inconsiderate naming conventions is the same as malicious actors going out of their way to delete information.

I was just pointing out that the companies that changed terminology due to “wokeness” only did it for a PR. It was never an actual endorsement of progressive politics or whatever these dorks try to sell it as.

Sorry if it came off like I wasn't agreeing. Whatever the progressive equivalent of greenwashing is. That.

Removing racistly coded language isn’t ridiculous. There’s a reason we don’t use words like “negro” anymore, too.

You're completely right. It's a shame that instead of doing that people were worried about terms like "whitelist."

that was really stupid but mostly harmless, this will cause a lot of people to actually suffer

Oh sure, this is 100% the same..

In addition to what others have said about the very real effects on the people using these programs, one was mandated by the government, the other was companies being performative. There is a vast difference.

One is about a set of words which have no practical effect on function, the other is about an unelected apparatchik with questionable foreign links deliberately destroying the administrative and constitutional integrity of a superpower.

It really isn't a both sides situation.

Welcome to the era of the Conservative Justice Warrior. They're deploying all of the same annoying and repressive tactics that got progressives booted from power with breakneck speed.

So in your world, rm and mv accomplish the same thing?