Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Last week's thread
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more "master copy" or "master recording" than "master of a slave". This isn't IDE. Who names their VCS branch "slave"?
Well, I guess that guy does.
the thing is that the git branch naming was only one of the places among many where this was changed, and in many databases (and often other server-subsystem architectures) master/slave terminology was quite present. iirc there are still some that stick by it today (mostly out of direct choice by project maintainers)
it’s the same thing as whitelist/blacklist, vs allowlist/denylist (or others) - when there’s bad shit linked in baggage, and the cost of changing it (by habit and choice) isn’t all that much, there’s not really any reason to hold by the the old loaded shit
harm reduction comes in many forms
Yeah. I remember when the company I used to work for switched our style guide to allowlist/denylist and apart from That One Guy the overall reaction was a big "eh? sure, whatever". Nobody is out here pretending that this kind of change is going to completely end racism or even that it's going to have a major impact, but past a certain point continuing to casually throw the memory of chattel slavery around is just cringe.
Note that I was specifically talking about branch names in Git, where it's debatable if the default name "master" even originated from the master/slave nomenclature.
The problematic nature of the term is a lot more evident in other contexts where a counterpart of the "master" is in fact called a "slave". Whether that's reason enough to change the names in any particular instance is not something I'll comment on.
In a better world, this would've probably been a solid argument for letting the master/slave naming convention stick around. We don't live in a better world.