this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Showerthoughts

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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 169 points 3 months ago (17 children)

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 47 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] macaro@lemmy.blahaj.zone 45 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Power bottoms would like a word with you.

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 23 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Hopefully more than a word

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[–] SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz 21 points 3 months ago (7 children)

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 3 months ago (1 children)

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 127 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (25 children)

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.

[–] Phoenix3875@lemmy.world 34 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 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 3 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 21 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (16 children)

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 88 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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 76 points 3 months ago (71 children)

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.

[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 20 points 3 months ago

I don't have issues with the original terminology either, and wouldn't really care if it was changed. But if it were changed to Dom/Sun then it would reinforce the meme of the stockings wearing femboy programmer. XD

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[–] okamiueru@lemmy.world 62 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (19 children)

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.

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[–] BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 61 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] osaerisxero@kbin.melroy.org 50 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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 30 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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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[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 48 points 3 months ago

too wordy just make it 😈 and 🥺

[–] madcaesar@lemmy.world 46 points 3 months ago (5 children)

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

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 26 points 3 months ago (4 children)

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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[–] bad_alloc@lemmy.dbzer0.com 45 points 3 months ago (5 children)

"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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[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 42 points 3 months ago (19 children)

It only sounds bad to the fringest of the fringe that's deceivingly loud on twitter. Good luck trying to find even one real person thinking those terms should be changed. This kind of stuff is why people vote for Trump.

[–] AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee 38 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There is real, actual, injustice in the world that we need to address. Computer terms are not one of them.

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[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 40 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Dom drive: "Daddy"

Sub drive: "UwU"

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[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 39 points 3 months ago (6 children)

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 38 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (15 children)

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 3 months ago (3 children)

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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[–] IzzyScissor@lemmy.world 35 points 3 months ago (1 children)
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[–] Cap@kbin.melroy.org 34 points 3 months ago

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

[–] wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 30 points 3 months ago (1 children)
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[–] HootinNHollerin@lemmy.world 29 points 3 months ago

With PCBs it’s mother/daughter

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 28 points 3 months ago (7 children)

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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[–] Zozano@lemy.lol 28 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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 23 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Is there a Lemmy equivalent of /r/brandnewsentence?

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[–] Teddy@programming.dev 27 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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

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[–] clickyello@lemmy.world 22 points 3 months ago (29 children)

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.

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[–] match@pawb.social 22 points 3 months ago (3 children)
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[–] Siegfried@lemmy.world 20 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I would go for master and puppets

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[–] snooggums@midwest.social 19 points 3 months ago

Boss/Minion

[–] Brkdncr@lemmy.world 19 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Im not having much luck getting top/bottom accepted at my job.

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[–] s38b35M5@lemmy.world 19 points 3 months ago (2 children)
[–] usrtrv@lemmy.ml 29 points 3 months ago (3 children)

That doesn't make sense depending on the context. New I2C standard switched to controller/target for example. This conveys that one device is controlling the other devices.

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