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It sounds way less offensive to those who decry the original terminology's problematic roots but still keeps its meaning intact.

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[-] andrew_s@piefed.social 166 points 4 months ago

I've seen 'Active / Passive' used, that seems alright. There's plenty of alternative terms to use without borrowing terminology from sexual roleplay.

Anyway, the Sub is supposed to be the one that's actually in control for this kind of thing (otherwise you'd just be in an abusive relationship), so that confuses things when you start trying to applying it elsewhere.

[-] cdf12345@lemm.ee 46 points 4 months ago
[-] macaro 43 points 4 months ago

Power bottoms would like a word with you.

[-] Revan343@lemmy.ca 23 points 4 months ago

Hopefully more than a word

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[-] SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz 22 points 4 months ago

The issue is acronyms; there's millions of products, schematics, datasheets, and manuals that refer to them as MISO and MOSI with no further explanation. Any new standard that doesn't fit runs into the 15-competing-standards problem, and ought to be followed by an "AKA MISO" every time it's used.

[-] hidetaka@lemmy.mats.ooo 35 points 4 months ago

I've seen "Main" and "Secondary" be used exactly for this reason, as they keep the same first letter so don't require acronyms to be changed.

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[-] Fades@lemmy.world 148 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

No it doesn't sound bad, words don't need to be thrown away forever just because they've been used to describe unfair treatment. I'm so sick of having to relabel so many things that are so far divorced from the social issues they are used to describe. It's so pointless and has no impact, the code doesn't care which is master and which is the slave for they are simply descriptive labels.

Are we supposed to never use the words master or slave ever again?? What's next?

My dev friends, no matter their race, all say the exact same thing. We still use master over main, come at us I guess.

[-] Sinthesis@lemmy.world 42 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

unfair treatment.

We're talking about slavery here.

sick of having to relabel

It's not that hard....to be accommodating.

divorced from the social issues

from your point of view

the code doesn't care

You're right. Call it a controller and agent. I know naming is hard, but we're smart enough to apply our lexicon.

never use the words master or slave ever again? What's next??

Ah, the slippery slope fallacy.

We still use master over main

The default for new repositories on GitHub has been main for awhile now. You would have had to put in effort to change it to something else. You're a stick in the mud.

[-] Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 4 months ago

Fuck I don't get your downvotes, you're right. I get people want to vent but in the greater scheme of things having to use different words to be a smidge more inclusive isn't that big of a deal or effort considering what some of us do to help our friends be accepted.

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[-] Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 35 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The problem with these token activism is that it's hollow in content. The intent might be good, but the action is almost pure virtue signalling.

Slavoj Zizek pointed out in multiple interviews that there's a pervert self-reflectiveness in the self-censorship: privileged people "enjoy" being guilty of their privilege, so it's more about themselves rather than the people they claim to represent. "Sorry, but you were naive and unaware of people being racist when they use these words, so let me stop them and now you are protected (by me) in an inclusive atmosphere."

A related radical freedom situation as an inverse to the above is that when friends get really close, even using racist slurs is treated as a gesture of intimacy, rather than racism. In an ideal world, the context in the public discourse would be so strong that even racist words lose their racist meaning ("oh, so you are joking as well") rather than the opposite (assuming there's ubiquitous "hidden" racism in the use of a word, even when there's clearly none).

Another critique is that it presents itself as a substitute of real solutions. Instead of addressing real problems, it provides a simple "everyday" solution, very much similar to the recycling movement. Of course we need to recycle, but we should be aware that it's not a substitute of radical real actions (e.g. stopping the big oil).

[-] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 32 points 4 months ago

Right? I get that langauge evolves and things go in and out of fashion, but this self-censoring for things completely unrelated to the original or derogatory meanings is kind of a pointless exercise to me.

[-] SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 25 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

master over main

That one is the most stupid one too, because master in git doesn't even refer to a master/slave relationship. It refers to a different meaning of the word master, namely "an original from which copies can be made", as in master recording or master key. See 5b in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. And that's how it's used in git: any new branches are derived from master. Main just does not have the same nuance, because it does not imply a relationship between the branches, just that it's somehow more important than the others.

But of course, the real reason it was changed is because for companies like github it's easier to give in to the crazies who demand this than to fight them.

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[-] Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 89 points 4 months ago

I remember back in the late 90s being in college. I brought my girlfriend to class one day. She raised her hand after the professer was explaining Master/Slave roles. Keep in mind, I'm white. She's black. She's not enrolle

d in this class AT ALL.

So the professer sees this, and says "Yes, you there, girl I've never seen in 4 months of this class"

And all she said was "Master and Slave drives? That sounds sexy!"

The whole class facepalmed.

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[-] flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 84 points 4 months ago

I personally think the whole backlash against master/slave in the computing world is people looking for something in their sphere of knowledge to be offended about so they can feel like they are part of "a movement". Even if some mustache twirling racist was the first "computer guy" to come up with the term and meant it to be offensive, that is not how sane people view it today. So some of the advocates for changing it should stop trying to build it up into some Pizzagate-like conspiracy against black/brown people.

Having said that, I also don't have any strong attachments to the phrasing either. Phase it out in favor of something that makes everyone happy if that keeps the peace. It is just a term that made sense at the time to describe something. There is nothing stopping us from changing it to something else now if we so choose. It is not erasing heritage or some such nonsense. If anything, people having strong hangups about it if there are better or equally as good terms out there that doesn't make people uncomfortable is far weirder in my opinion.

The only thing I have somewhat strong opinions about is making it some high priority to go back and erase those terms from solutions that already exist. Change them as you update things, sure, but why create extra work to update something old that is currently working if the only change is not functional and just verbiage. Seems like wasted effort that could be better directed and solving functional issues to me.

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[-] okamiueru@lemmy.world 71 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Until proven otherwise, I assume either ignorance or malicious intentions by those who want to rename these "problematic" terms. It does nothing to improve the actual issues.

The false pretense of having done something, is worse than doing nothing. It's just noise.

To be clear: I don't mind the changing of terms. I'm too old to care about trivial stuff like main vs master. But if the reasoning for such a change is dumb and potentially harmful, you've lost my respect.

[-] cheddar@programming.dev 26 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Until proven otherwise, I assume either ignorance or malicious intentions by those who want to rename these “problematic” terms. It does nothing to improve the actual issues.

That's because the goal is not to solve the actual issue, but to feel better because they did something. Or to avoid noise generated by lunatics online.

[-] TheBananaKing@lemmy.world 25 points 4 months ago

Until a couple of years ago, we had a brand of cheese called 'Coon', here in Australia.

The word isn't used as a slur over here, and the brand was simply named after the founder about 150 years back.

But it was getting increasingly on the nose as cultural influences from the US and everywhere kept seeping in, and it reached a point where it pretty much needed an excuse or at least an explanation.

So they renamed it; now it's 'Cheer'.

And at the time, there was all kinds of pearl-clutching about the malicious / disingenuous / officious / vapidly-offended / white-knighting / attention-seeking / etc / etc 'woke crowd' stomping in and making them change everything when it was perfectly good and harmless and stuff.

Six months later, nobody gave a single shit any more. Nobody died as a result or was even mildly inconvenienced, no great cultural traditions were lost, and contrary to several predictionsm newly-empowered wokeocrats have not risen from the shadows to re-gender everyone or whatever. It's that cheese with the blue white and green label, nobody reads it anyway.

My point is that small token changes cost virtually nothing, and even if they achieve little in and of themselves, the mere fact of people being willing to make them is of benefit. Small courtesies, you know? Returning your shopping cart. Smiling at passing dogs. It models kindness and consideration, and promotes the idea that those things have value.

Which is not to suggest that we must avoid giving offense at all consts; far from it. I'm one of those stereotypicallly abrasive genX types raised on ideals of free speech, punk rock, uncomfortable truths and loudly pointing out the elephant in the room no matter how many toes get stepped on. But when there isn't some burning issue that needs to be addressed, niceties be damned... then yeah, small courtesies. Give people that extra bit of room even if they don't strictly needed. It's nice to be nice.

Look back a handful of decades at all those cultural relics that your grandparents considered harmless and invisible. Asking people to drop them may have attracted ridicule and suspicion at the time, but looking back at some of them... oh dear god, really?

Hell, I remember The Black And White Minstrel Show on TV, and if you don't remember it yourself, it's far worse than you're imagining.

I like the world better without things like that, even the little seemingly-trivial ones, and even if it seems like empy virtue-signalling while you're cleaning them up.

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[-] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 71 points 4 months ago

Or just use the existing terms. People will find issues with just abuut anything.

[-] osaerisxero@kbin.melroy.org 62 points 4 months ago

Leaving aside the problematic nature of the existing terms, the result was that people actually thought a little more about the relationships the things had and started using better/more precise terminology for the relationships: primary/secondary, active/hot/cold, parent/child, etc.

Net positive all round.

[-] Mellow12@lemmy.world 33 points 4 months ago

Woah there. You’re using about 25% more of your brain than the rest of the internet. We’re gonna need you to tone that reasonability down a bit.

I look forward to setting up my next polyamorous network connection. I can wait for the commands nmcli con choke me daddy ens1 thrupple0

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[-] madcaesar@lemmy.world 58 points 4 months ago

Any time spent on nonsense like this is valuable time lost on real issues.

[-] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 29 points 4 months ago

No we need to replace all industry standard terminology and acronyms every few years or so to keep datasheets unintelligible. Shop teachers need to be able to call their students stupid for not knowing that "tension" used to mean "voltage" 90 years ago.

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[-] cupcakezealot 49 points 4 months ago

too wordy just make it 😈 and 🥺

[-] bad_alloc@lemmy.dbzer0.com 44 points 4 months ago

"main" is shorter than "master". "sub" is shorter than "slave". Why worry about social issues when you can just type less and move on? :)

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[-] shneancy@lemmy.world 41 points 4 months ago

no please stop, i'm so tired of googling kinky stuff, seeing a spicy looking result and opening it just to see some computer server stuff pick something else idk maybe capitalist & worker, bonus points for political commentary

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[-] febra@lemmy.world 40 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I'm a developer. I use main/release/dev for new projects, because it just sounds better and is more intuitive to me honestly. "Master" doesn't make much sense. Like what's so "master" about a "master branch"? It's just the main branch everything gets merged into. It doesn't "control" branches. There's no "master/slave" relationship there. So again, "master" was never really intuitive to me.

Old projects don't get relabeled, they stay master, cause relabeling the main branch could cause potential problems. That's my two cents.

[-] Zink@programming.dev 24 points 4 months ago

I look at “master” in our repo like you would refer to a master recording or a remaster, or similarly the gold master for when you could say a video game has gone gold.

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[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 39 points 4 months ago

Dom drive: "Daddy"

Sub drive: "UwU"

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[-] 10_0@lemmy.ml 38 points 4 months ago

I'm trying to imagine a world where this is a problem, oh, twitter

[-] clickyello@lemmy.world 36 points 4 months ago

y'all I understand there are larger issues in the world but please let's not pretend that POC working in tech feel awesome about typing master/slave in the terminal, it's outdated and should be changed.

[-] lud@lemm.ee 24 points 4 months ago

But POC are not the only ones that have been enslaved.

Pretty much all races and people have been enslaved in history.

Slave does not equal North American POC slave and the term in this context has absolutely nothing to do with them. The only time it refers specifically to them is when discussing North American history (and maybe current history due to the fact that USA still enslaves people in prison)

One might argue that the term is outdated because slaves are less common these days, but it has nothing to do with POC (or human slaves at all). But I won't argue that because the term is very easy to understand and thus not outdated.

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[-] yrmp@lemmy.world 22 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I'm white and I don't feel comfortable saying it/typing it. It's antiquated and weird.

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[-] IzzyScissor@lemmy.world 35 points 4 months ago
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[-] Zozano@lemy.lol 32 points 4 months ago

Oh man, wait till they hear about how I riced both my master and slave servers. I threw so many RGB LEDs on them, they look like recipients of a Fukoshima clown bukkake.

[-] univers3man@lemmy.world 22 points 4 months ago

Is there a Lemmy equivalent of /r/brandnewsentence?

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[-] Cap@kbin.melroy.org 31 points 4 months ago

We've been using Master/Bater down at the church.

[-] Teddy@programming.dev 30 points 4 months ago

I've seen publisher/subscriber out in the wild.

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[-] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 28 points 4 months ago

I've switched over to using primary/replica for database stuff because it's more accurate. The replicas don't always behave themselves so calling them "slaves" implies a level of obedience to the "master" that they don't have.

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[-] HootinNHollerin@lemmy.world 28 points 4 months ago

With PCBs it’s mother/daughter

[-] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 24 points 4 months ago

If it’s referring to something like a mother/daughter circuitboard, I’ll use that. If it’s a host/client connection, I’ll use that. If it’s a primary/backup redundancy situation, I’ll use that. And those are just a few examples. There is rarely a good reason to use master/slave nowadays, since most situations already have better descriptors to begin with.

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[-] HawlSera@lemm.ee 21 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Remember when we thought being overly politically correct to absurd levels was a bad thing? That said, Dom/Sub, I'd be down for that. Same meaning, different wording, and now it's also a sex reference.

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[-] match@pawb.social 21 points 4 months ago
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[-] collapse_already@lemmy.ml 20 points 4 months ago

A post-doc that occasionally taught one of my electrical engineering classes in the mid-90s liked to call master-slave flip-flops professor-graduate student flip-flops. I later learned he was not making a joke.

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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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