Tech Organizations Back 'Inclusive Naming Initiative' (theregister.com) 264
New submitter LeeLynx shares a report from The Register: A new group called the "Inclusive Naming Initiative" has revealed its existence and mission "to help companies and projects remove all harmful and unclear language of any kind and replace it with an agreed-upon set of neutral terms." Akamai, Cisco, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, IBM, the Linux Foundation, Red Hat, and VMware are all participants. The group has already offered a Word replacement list that suggests alternatives to the terms whitelist, blacklist, slave, and master. There's also a framework for evaluating harmful language that offers guidance on how to make changes.
Red Hat's post announcing its participation in the Initiative links to a dashboard listing all instances of terms it wants changed and reports over 330,000 uses of "Master" and 105,000 uses of "Slave," plus tens of thousands and whitelists and blacklists. Changing them all will be a big job, wrote Red Hat's senior veep and CTO Chris Wright. "On a technical level, change has to be made in hundreds of discrete communities, representing thousands of different projects across as many code repositories," Wright wrote. "Care has to be taken to prevent application or API breakage, maintain backward compatibility, and communicate the changes to users and customers." The Initiative nonetheless hopes to move quickly, with its roadmap calling for best practices to be defined during Q1 2021, case studies to be available in Q3 2021 and a certification program delivered in Q4 2021.
Red Hat's post announcing its participation in the Initiative links to a dashboard listing all instances of terms it wants changed and reports over 330,000 uses of "Master" and 105,000 uses of "Slave," plus tens of thousands and whitelists and blacklists. Changing them all will be a big job, wrote Red Hat's senior veep and CTO Chris Wright. "On a technical level, change has to be made in hundreds of discrete communities, representing thousands of different projects across as many code repositories," Wright wrote. "Care has to be taken to prevent application or API breakage, maintain backward compatibility, and communicate the changes to users and customers." The Initiative nonetheless hopes to move quickly, with its roadmap calling for best practices to be defined during Q1 2021, case studies to be available in Q3 2021 and a certification program delivered in Q4 2021.
Maybe they can create a new department for that.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You build it, you name it (Score:3)
Simple as that.
Simple way to beat them (Score:5, Interesting)
Well there's a simple way to avoid that. Beat em to it.
I started doing firewalls about 25 years ago, the language I naturally use is the native terminology of the Linux firewall - accept and reject. Though for the last few years I've been hearing co-workers use the term "allow list", so I'll often use that term. It really doesn't matter to me if you call say accept, allow, or permit or whatever. Just, in a firewall, drop and reject are two different things. "Blacklist" has no clear meaning - it implies either you want to drop or you want to reject, but doesn't say which. So that would take a follow-up email to figure out wtf you're actually trying to do.
Heck, in a single day I'm likely to "grant" in SQL, "permit" on Cisco device, "exempt" on the mail filter, and "allow" on the web application firewall. You simply couldn't do this job of you were incapable of understanding that all those words mean the same thing. If you get confused by someone saying "permit" in order to allow something, you just aren't going to last a week in this job anyway.
Since we already need to use six different words like "allow", "permit", and "accept" anyway because those are the commands that actually do it, we could just make things easier for ourselves and not randomly add use the word "white" when we mean "allow". Actually saying wtf I mean sure doesn't hurt me any.
It sure as heck doesn't bother me any if my co-workers are actually specific in talking about what they want to do - exempt a certain address from the SPF check, for example. When somebody says "whitelist this email" that doesn't tell what the heck they want to do. They want that mail server to bypass malware scanning? Skip the spoofing check because it's an authorized server for our domains?
Anyway, yeah "blacklist" and "whitelist" are imprecise terminology anyway that requires me to follow up and figure out what's actually needed. There are half a dozen more specific terms. It sure doesn't hurt me any if people use proper, specific terms.
If they do use specific terms, not only is my job easier, but also the whiners then have nothing to blow out of proportion.
Re:Simple way to beat them (Score:5, Insightful)
The word "blacklist" is only imprecise without context. All your alternatives are exactly as imprecise. What is "drop"? Do you want me to drop the cup of apple juice in the hall? Do I drag & drop the track onto the playlist? Or do I drop incoming packets on port 22 in iptables?
The phrase "whitelist this email" isn't any more specific than "allow this email." These words don't spontaneously materialize in a wisp of smoke, they're used in the context of discussing someone's email getting rejected by the spam filter, or caught by antivirus. That is where the precision comes from, for each and every one of these words.
Zoom out to the bigger picture. What is even the point of this exercise? Go out into a black community some time. (I used to live in one.) Spend an entire day asking them what needs to change in the world to be more inclusive and improve the quality of their life. Not one of them will complain about what the ends are labeled on their IDE ribbon cables.
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> Go out into a black community some time. (I used to live in one.) Spend an entire day asking them what needs to change in the world to be more inclusive and improve the quality of their life. Not one of them will complain about what the ends are labeled on their IDE ribbon cables.
Oh for sure.
*Every* word is meaningless until you put it into a sentence.
Fortunately, people speak in sentences. At least, the people I work with do.
In context, within a sentence, words have meaning. Some words are precise en
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Not one of them will complain about what the ends are labeled on their IDE ribbon cables.
Can we please let this one drop, eh? Even if you don't give a fuck about the inclusivity stuff, mater/slave is a terrible, terrible, awful, inaccurate and just plain crappy term for IDE ribbon cables. The "master" doesn't do any controlling, it's just the device with the first address on the bus, what you get with a straight cable.
Sensible terms are "primary" and "secondary", 0 and 1 or things like that. "master" and "
Re: Simple way to beat them (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course nobody in the black community cares about this stuff. This is an exercise by white people (on the left) that is used to pretend that theyâ(TM)re good people for fixing a perceived problem while avoiding fixing actual problems that would require far more effort. Itâ(TM)s the tech equivalent of knocking down a statue or removing a rock (look it up).
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Someone should correct Wikipedia:
"Blacklists can be applied at various points in a security architecture, such as a host, web proxy, DNS servers, email server, firewall, directory servers or application authentication gateways. "
Oh, and CISCO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:Simple way to beat them (Score:5, Informative)
Err, yes it does. "Blacklist" came from banking where customers who were debtors who defaulted on their loans were recorded on a list with a black border. A literal "black list". It has nothing to with skin colour. It's still used in the banking world today, albeit no longer in physical form. It is a means for accepting or rejecting future business with a particular person, and so it is quite natural to adopt the same naming conventions for dealing with network packets. After all, the "blacklist" terminology long escaped the banking world into the common vernacular and is use for all sorts of diverse purposes today.
It's stuff like this that makes it impossible to take virtue-signalling SJWs seriously. They disrupt our lives for things which make zero improvement to the world we inhabit. If "blacklists" were historical tools for racial oppression of people with black skin, they might have a point. But there is no basis in historical fact for making these changes. They achieve nothing and are utterly pointless.
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Does besides you insist on applying the term "blacklist" to firewall responses, or are you just being daft in an effort to make it seem like it's never a useful word?
Re:Simple way to beat them (Score:4, Informative)
You're speaking to the parent's point quite well, not arguing against it. We don't use blacklist for firewalls because it's ambiguous in the context of a firewall. That's the context. You and the GP are arguing semantics. You've found one specific example where it makes no sense to use the word blacklist and at the sametime missed the fact that this word isn't actually used for firewall configuration.
On the flip side there are many other areas in computer science where the words blacklist / whitelist / master / slave have far more and specific meaning, and as the parent said, no black person in the entire world gives a fuck nor is racism fixed by this pointless busywork.
Re:Simple way to beat them (Score:4, Insightful)
Blacklist and whitelist are in no way imprecise. To blacklist something is to deny it interaction with a system. To whitelist something is engage its services. If you actually have to look that up, your English is lacking.
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I think you're being obtuse. It is very obvious what whitelisting an email means. It is your job then to create the security hole that makes sure whenever emails from the sender of this whitelisted email is being delivered, they are always delivered, no matter what.
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> Clearly you've never configured a single firewall ever.
Except I've been configuring them since they first entered the Linux kernel, and am currently quite happy with top end Palo Altos these days in an enterprise context (that's one small part of what I do).
Why on earth are you moving the goal posts to "Oh, context on a firewall says (x) therefore everything must be (x)"? That's just flat out a logical fallacy and completely inconsequential.
Only 8 or 10 checks? Well.. That's not that many really. A
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Any sysadmin knows that when someone asks to "whitelist this email", it means you need to make sure that next time email from that sender to that user enters the system, it is delivered, no matter what.
Stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
We are living in the age of stupidity, where otherwise intelligent people have become slaves to their politically correct masters. On the bright side, I've already blacklisted IBM and Redhat, and I don't see them ever making it back onto my whitelist.
Re:Stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when PC stood for Personal Computer. Now, we have Orwellian changes to our language.
Politically Correct speech is double plus ungood.
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When did computers get so personal, anyway? It's a microcomputer, dammit!
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People who claim something is Orwellian usually don't know what that actually means, and you are no exception.
Orwell was Antifa. He went to Spain specifically to fight fascists. When he wrote Nineteen Eighty Four he did it as a warning about the techniques that fascists use, and against politically correct speech.
Newspeak was an attempt to limit people's ability to think and understand. Removing words was just one small part of it though, the main way this was accomplished was by being vague and imprecise a
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His context may have been anti-fascist, but he was also anti-authoritarian of any stripe. He was making the political rhetoric of all authoritarians clear.
The meaning and application of his writings are far more applicable in a human context that his particular political or activist leanings. You're reducing him and by example you would have to reduce the writings of Solzhenitsyn, Voltaire, Hume, Bacon, Camus, Sartre, Plato, Babeuf, Nietzsche etc etc to their various political leanings which is ridiculous.
1
Re:Stupidity (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, sweetie. Now you've done it, you used the s-word.
You can't call people 'st*p#d', the correct term is 'wisdom-diverse'.
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The "inclusive" term is "neuro-diverse".
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I used to think stupidity like this flourished in times of economic prosperity but this last year has defied reality. I don't understand how so many have fell for the diversion and focused on something so meaningless when we have trash in the whitehouse, a pandemic running amok, DLC taking over the world and now google is showing more youtube ads on videos than ever. I won't stop using blacklist / whitelist in my daily terminology, naming conventions and conversations. My employer will have to fire me and e
Monty Python's (Score:2)
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Fuck no (Score:3, Interesting)
I surmise that in some codebases, the now-taboo names in the API and headers are mirrored in other places for clarity. Doing a blind search-and-replace operation would leave the code less readable and/or more bug-prone if names that matched now don't.
Some of that code may run systems which handle people's money, people's medical information, and perhaps may even exist in safety-critical applications, and there is a nonzero chance that the downstream effects of this initiative may cost dollars and lives, both directly and indirectly.
While that cost and number of lives may indeed be small, I guarantee it will be larger than the cost of leaving words like "master" and "slave" right where they are...ie zero.
This mass renaming scheme is a terrible and nigh-immoral course of action. I find it hard to separate this from Lysenkoism in kind. Perhaps even in degree.
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Hi, you called this "partisan politics". It may be political (although it's not what I would call political.) It is not partisan. Partisan means done for the advantage of one political party or another. This isn't.
It is stupid. I don't understand why either set of terms is offensive. I get why if you were starting a new project that you would choose different terms, cause it costs nothing.
Also, if you do documentation right, search and replace should be simple and sufficient.
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Identity politics is extreme left. This gains political advantage to the extreme left. So it's highly partisan..
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I recommend looking up what words mean. Cause you are wrong on the Internet.
Re: Fuck no (Score:2)
He/She/It's got a point, though...
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Much more than that. No longer will client/server be allowed. All development must immediately change to peer to peer.
And what's going to happen to Disney's Pluto? The dog Goofy is Micky's peer, the dog Pluto is his slave.
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I'll bet you also say "performant."
Re: Fuck no (Score:2)
What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Physicists rename quarks: Top, Bottom and Strange?
I can easily get behind things like "Allowlist" and "Blocklist" or "Denylist" as they're actually more accurate/descriptive than "Whitelist" and "Blacklist" and don't contain any potential racial implications, but "Master" and "Slave" are actually pretty accurate/descriptive of the function and, although they're perhaps charged words in some (many?) cultures, especially in the U.S., they don't universally denote fixed race/class assignments -- those relationships have existed in many cultures throughout history with the masters and slaves being of many races and classes and are more an indication of a relationship than anything else.
But okay, sanitize away. I'm just sayin' that no matter the phrasing, someone will always be offended or find an offensive meaning, especially if they go looking for it. Can't wait to hear what physicists come up with ...
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
My opinion is that if your brain can't handle the context shift to programming, and automatically jumps to racial slavery when you see the terms master / slave, you probably shouldn't be in IT.
Many words have more than one meaning, and it's all about context.
It would be one thing if any of these "triggered" individuals actually had been a slave, or was born to parents who had been in slavery-- but it's an institution that died over a century ago. Further, this movement completely ignores context, and wishes, to borrow a phrase, to whitewash history. Eliminating descriptive words will not heal, diminish or otherwise eliminate the racial divides in this country. Pretending something didn't happen, is not the way forward.
I've already had users complaining that git is broken, because when they try to push their 'master' branch to github, it creates a 'main' branch as well.
There are so many other actual IMPORTANT issues facing us. This is just annoying people for the sake of being annoying.
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Informative)
I've already had users complaining that git is broken, because when they try to push their 'master' branch to github, it creates a 'main' branch as well.
And that's a case where this approach has probably gone too far. The term "master" does not necessarily imply the existence of a slave, or a master/slave relationship. In Git, as an example, non-master branches are not called slave branches.
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We should call them Master and Pet. Everyone likes puppies right?
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This is an incorrect understanding of what "master" means. A "master copy" does not mean immutable. It means it's the primary and authoritative source of record, from which all other copies and versions are derived. It does not, and never has, meant an immutable and final form. It might be used to mean that in the audio world, but that's not what the rest of the world uses the term to mean. The way it is used in git is perfectly standard, and has been used in this context in business terminology the wo
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Interestingly, the people who have actually been enslaved are far less likely to be triggered by the use. They have FAR more important things to concentrate on.. And even when their lives are in order, they have a perspective that life is about far more than the slacktivism that is just trying to virtue signal (like actually getting involved with getting people out of slavery, and actually improving the world, rather than just pronouncing something and sitting in a chair clicking likes on some other virtue signal).
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To: ufgraf
From: The Department of Political Correctness
Subject: Use of banned word detected.
You have used the word "whitewash". Change this word immediately. Some possible suggestions: cover-up, suppress, conceal, screen, vale.
Thank you for your cooperation citizen.
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> but it's an institution that died over a century ago.
I wish that were true, but it's alive and well in many parts of the world, for example, the Uighyr are being used as slave labor.
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I'm specifically referring to the institutionalized use of Africans as slave labor in the United States.
I'm aware that slavery is still being practiced in many forms-- for that matter, the United States has a tendency to use inmates in correctional facilities as "indentured servants". Get busted smoking a joint, spend three years in prison building heavy machinery. Is that slavery? Not in the traditional sense, but it's certainly exploitation, and may explain why privatizing prisons is such a booming bus
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How offensive! (Score:5, Funny)
Disparaging the terms "master" and "slave" is hurtful to members of the D&S community. Is this the new idea of "inclusion"?
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How about Master & Servant [youtube.com]? It's a lot like life...
Incredibly stupid. & Great trolling opportunit (Score:3, Insightful)
As if it was the words, ... and not *the intention*...
Also, statements about actions are not the same as actions.
Meanwhile, those sleazebags can say and do all the most evil things, by juust putting it in the right newspeak words and preferably acting like they are the victims.
Somebody should write one of those auto-translators, to turn the most vile speech in human history into fuzzy-flowery tree-hugging good-luck-bear Disney speech that still MEANS THE EXACT SAME THING. Call it DeepLove (because deep-learning-based), and put a big brown hairy bear gay in Blue Oyster clothes as the background image for extra hilarity. :)
Do the reverse too. Something that translates everything back. Let's see what those motherfuckers are really saying!
Meanwhile, have fun with that euphemism treadmill, you complete retards^Wdifferently-abled people!
Cool (Score:3, Insightful)
This doesn't adversly affect me (assuming they do a good job of the transition strategy - which they sound like they're going to focus on).
Culture changes, language changes, code changes too - the world will keep spinning.
Those who don't like language changing can still have a gay old time I guess.
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How about they spend the time fucking fixing bugs instead?
What a fucking waste of time (Score:3, Insightful)
So now, we need to make sure any term used is agreeable to the entire planet and every single vocal group? What happens when a word that is considered appropriate today offends some unknown group in six months? Does this just become a permanent job for consultants to reap money constantly changing things?
They are words. They only have power if you give it to them. They actually lose power when they're mostly used for benign purposes and that usage becomes the norm.
Is this a good use of resoures to reduce disparity (Score:4, Insightful)
Not saying it has zero value, but this seems like it will both require effort and anger people who have do do that effort. I'm not convince its a net win when you consider the backlash.
Wouldn't providing more opportunities to learn software for children from disadvantaged groups be a better use of effort?
Its fine to make people aware of this, so that they can avoid these terms where practical. (I'm currently using Sheriff and Deputy because fits this particular program structure). For older code though "master" is so deeply embedded in so many places.
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Wouldn't providing more opportunities to learn software for children from disadvantaged groups be a better use of effort?
In many cases it's not even about a lack of opportunity, it's the culture perpetuated by the kids themselves which result in kids who display interest in such things being called "geeks" and other such terms, and subsequently bullied by their peers.
Because of the fear of bullying and being rejected by their peers, many kids reject opportunities that are available to them.
Negative value (Score:2)
Going in to purge language explicitly? It applies racialization and political BS where none existed in the first place. The correct way is to disempower these terms by letting new meanings for them take prece
How one black professional feels (Score:4, Interesting)
Read this, changed my mind about it.
Here's an essay that reports the feelings of a black professional: https://www.adexchanger.com/data-driven-thinking/no-more-inflammatory-jargon-change-blacklist-to-blocklist/
Re:How one black professional feels (Score:4, Interesting)
Changing blacklist/whitelist to blocklist/allowlist makes a ton of sense. It actually makes the words more technically accurate.
It's changing master and slave that I have a problem with. What are we going to replace those with. Parent/child? In this latter example, we're actually moving from the more accurate to the less accurate.
Re:How one black professional feels (Score:5, Insightful)
"He explained that it didn’t matter that the etymology of the terms had nothing to do with racism."
It does. It really does matter, because if we are going to start censoring words because of things they remind us of rather than what they actually mean then communication is basically fucked.
The person in question needs to grow up and face reality, not demand that reality is changed to suit their hangups.
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That's one opinion. I'd like to remind you that 2 weeks ago 70million people had a very different opinion to 65million other people and voiced it. Forgive me for not throwing etymology out of the window because one soft guy got offended.
Replace hot words with Klingon translations (Score:3)
"Master" becomes "loDHom". "Slave" becomes "straav’".
Problem solved - it's very unlikely we'll encounter anybody who has bad personal/family/cultural/historical feelings about these words.
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"Master" becomes "loDHom". "Slave" becomes "straav’".
toy'wI''a'
naDHa'ghachlIj
Re:Replace hot words with Klingon translations (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Replace hot words with Klingon translations (Score:2)
Having to shift between caps and lowercase is far worse. Maybe we should just switch everything to emojis.
Adding your name to my whatlist? (Score:2)
Can you at least find a one syllable synonym for "deny?"
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This also reminds me of the hazards of careless find/replace...
https://selinker.livejournal.c... [livejournal.com]
+1 for Whitelist/Blacklist to AllowList/DenyList (Score:3)
Allow / Deny has been used in firewall rules for a long time. It is more descriptive than whitelist/blacklist. This is a good change. Otherwise, this seems like politically correct nonsense.
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It suits the purpose, whereas blacklisting blacklisting in other contexts may fit better. It's a case of the tail wagging the dog.
idiotic. (Score:5, Insightful)
The terms blacklist and whitelist are fine and have nothing to do with race. The terms master and slave are fine as slavery has existed for eons and is not race specific (just ask the Romans). Anyone offended by this language should be pointed to wiktionary for its entomology. If they still have a problem with it then they should be told to fuck off because their problem is neurological.
How about we fix police training so cops stop murdering black people instead of fucking around with words and pretending that it's helpful?
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So if it's something that exists, it's automatically ok to use the common word for it.
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If it's a concept that doesn't intrinsically have specific connotations then it would almost certainly be considered to be an acceptable metaphor by the vast majority of people. I'm sure you could dream up an exception to the rule though.
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Anyone offended by this language should be pointed to wiktionary for its entomology
Obligatory XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/1012/ [xkcd.com]
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In many countries people do exactly that. To them it's a religious symbol. Context is what matters.
Here we go again... (Score:2)
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Not a new controversy (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
A poor replacement (Score:3, Insightful)
The only problem I have with this is if the new terms are confusing, inaccurate, or poorly defined.
For example, proposed alternatives for master/slave include:
primary/secondary
main/replica or subordinate
initiator/target
requester/responder
controller/device
host/worker or proxy
leader/follower
director/performer
What is the use case for master/slave? It's usually when one 'thing' tells other 'things' what to do. The second 'things' are not allowed to disagree in any way, and the first 'thing' has absolute authority.
The replacement words proposed don't match this use case.
The replacement for 'master' doesn't properly express its complete control, and each of the replacement words for 'slave' still indicate a certain autonomy: a follower can still add flourishes while dancing, and even a subordinate in the military is expected to not follow orders if they're illegal. Should a 'worker node' not follow issued commands just because they're disruptive, or inefficient, or counter to a predefined behavior? Possibly; but that's not how most of them have been programmed today.
So we're replacing the "bad words" (by the way, there is no such thing as a bad word, only bad context) with words that aren't accurate. Just because people find it icky to be reminded that humanity often sucks.
I for one think we should fight the idea that change should happen any time people are uncomfortable. If you feel uncomfortable, it's probably a good thing. But you need to learn to deal with uncomfortable things, not "full-spectrum-color wash" them.
I'm totally fine with replacing words when they make no sense or have a better replacement. If there were a command like "rapectl" and it destroyed a hard drive against it's will, then, yeah, that command needs to be renamed asap to something more like "destroyctl". But master/slave is just *accurate*.
Re:A poor replacement (Score:5, Insightful)
It's usually when one 'thing' tells other 'things' what to do. The second 'things' are not allowed to disagree in any way, and the first 'thing' has absolute authority.
Of course! It's so obvious when you put it that way.
It's settled -- Wife/Husband is the new terminology.
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How about "source" and "sink"? Probably not, too much confusion about sync sinks (at least in video land)... this styncs! I mean stinks!
"MC" and "Performer"?
"truck" and "trailer"?
"alpha" and "pack member"?
I really can't think of anything decent without getting cheesy or overly wordy... I've got no skin in the game, but my irreverent opinion is that the whole thing is overblown,
"MASTER" is NOT a "dangerous" word! (Score:3, Insightful)
Can you master a subject? Having mastery of a skill? What about a masters degree?
Seriously STOP TRYING TO FIND WAYS TO BE OFFENDED!
I refuse to stop using master simply because somebody chooses to find offense at it, buy making it MORE than it is.
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Some people have found no purpose in life except to be offended. Abject, counter-productive stupidity like this is the result. IMO those that cannot contribute meaningfully should at least shut up.
So I don't suppose we'll master anything anymore (Score:2)
THAT"LL make everyone feel better instead of learning them things -- isn't after all, isn't that the point?
Oh, you meant harmful language (sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me) such as Master or Dominant vs Submissive. Well I'm sure the Sub will be fine with it while the Master will do just whatever they want, like usual.
Oh, you meant Master / Slave, where the master te
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OK easy to deal with (Score:2)
That way the lefty progressives in their PC Correct world will never see anything offensive to their fragile egos.
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Words do not have inherent meanings. (Score:2)
Words do have common usages.
And all of the other linguistic elements matter as well. A person uses words with intent to convey a meaning and they may have success or failure at that for many reasons.
In and of themselves without all the linguistic elements and a person with intent to convey a meaning, a word is nearly meaningless.
So for example Whitelist and Blacklist, Master /Slave are not some magic thing where the meaning is proposed by some new Priestess of the Woke, it has an intent by the author for
So when do they stop using English? (Score:2)
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Poor snowflakes (Score:2)
And the practical result of all this work (Score:2)
I never thought of it as an issue until... (Score:2)
Sticks and stones... (Score:2)
How offensive! (Score:3)
So they're saying "black" should be rephrased as "reject". Why is blackness automatically associated with rejection? That's horribly offensive and unimaginably racist!
What we should be doing is change to an equal outcome policy, whereby a "blacklist" has an equal opportunity to reject and accept as a "whitelist". This is the only way fairness in computing can be assured.
All of our (big) problems have been solved (Score:2)
It appears that humanity has solved all the great problems of society to the point that we have to create new problems from nothing. Poverty, disease, famine, homelessness, and on and on have all been so thoroughly disposed of that we are now spending our time worried about hurting someone's feelings because of the words we use to describe electronic devices and software constructs.
Good job everyone! We have essentially created heaven on Earth.
Because our brains can't accept such a paradise we have to fin
"Inclusive"? (Score:3)
How the hell did a hokey initiative to tell us which words we CANNOT use get called "Inclusive"?
Did the marketing guys and spin doctors from the lunatic asylum escape again?
Fuck you PC Motherfuckers (Score:4, Insightful)
If you find the subject offensive, then good, it was meant for you. The entire PC movement is offensive to those of us who had zero intention of offending people with our common language, and we might occasionally use it in ways that might tip the chip off your snowflake shoulder. When you take offense where it isn't intended, that's your fucking problem. When someone intends to offend you, it's normally pretty fucking clear, and that's the ONLY time you should actually give a fuck, because I guaranfuckingtee you that if we spent the day together, I could easily point out things you say/do that others might find offensive, but know you don't mean it that way. You're not perfect, nobody is, learn to accept it, and stop telling others how to live.
Dictating language does not work (Score:4, Insightful)
Allow me to digress. Once, many years ago, I read an article about the history of words used to describe people with physical disabilities.
Which brings us to TFA, and the snowflake-driven idiocy to be found in the Evaluation Framework [inclusivenaming.org]. Let's start with the most obvious terms:
Let me close with an article I was convinced came from the Onion, but sadly, is very real: University of Wisconsin declares large rock to be racist [breitbart.com].
These people definitely need to find something actually useful to do...
Re: How have you not noticed by now (Score:2)
Re: How have you not noticed by now (Score:2)
You might have missed the memo, but White is to be capitalized now when referring to White people.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, the "I don't like what you say" troll struck again!