'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts

[maginnovision]

For crime, as an example, they usually show a sketch or a picture as well as describing the person. Black male, white male, hispanic male, facial hair, height, weight, eye color, hair color, distinguishing marks etc... If someone is wanted for questioning it really is a matter of being as descriptive as possible otherwise you're going to get a lot of useless info or absolutely none because nobody could be sure. In typical conversation it's the same, if you want to give someone a sense of the person to whom you're referring you don't just say my friend some guy. Especially when more description helps the story... I won't give any real examples of this because I'm sure someone would be offended. If you think mentioning details like race breeds racism then I don't know what to tell you. Every race commits crime so you're either going to be against every race or you're just going to consider it one of many details of the incident.

[Kjelt]

Yes but I was talking about the media and the people watching or reading the media are not people who are going to look for a perputrator and even when they do it has not much added value of narrowing the fitting group of people from 16 million to 0,8 million, still a needle in an haystack.
And if they do they should do it for everyone, they never say white native dutch person, then it is not mentioned.

Tv shows that ask the audience to look out for somene and show their picture or drawing is indeed another case where it is usefull to provide as much information.

[wilfred]

The truly sad thing here is that all this crap is creating divisions where there used to be none.

I remarked earlier on the renaming (in Australia) of a lolly (candy) called a Redskin. Perhaps I thought it fairly innocent because to me it was just a red lolly I would ask for as part of a bag of mixed lollies at the corner shop way back when I was a kid.

But today I found this as part of an editorial in a newspaper written in a newspaper in South Dakota in 1890. It shows that the term Redskin is more weighty than just a name a child uses to buy 10cent of lollies.

"The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are."

So the divisions are not always recent inventions.

I saw it here https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2010/10/27/130862391/l-frank-baum-advocated-extermination-of-native-americans

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

[...] The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.[..]

Except that the indians were first class citizens in the rest of the (hispanic) American continent, and had been so since the beginning.

Whoever wrote that had no idea?

[nuclearcat]

And hi again https://www.zdnet.com/article/mysql-drops-master-slave-and-blacklist-whitelist-terminology/

[daqq]

I just had an epiphany! Red light generally means something bad! Code red, Red fault/error diodes, Red alert... That's clearly racist against redheads and Native Americans. The solution, all visual indications must henceforth be of the same color.

[EEVblog]

And hi again https://www.zdnet.com/article/mysql-drops-master-slave-and-blacklist-whitelist-terminology/

From that link:

According to the company, Twitter's engineers plan to remove nine insensitive terms, including whitelist, blacklist, master/slave, grandfathered, various gendered pronouns, and terms like man hours, sanity check, and dummy value. Each will be replaced with the following new terms, Twitter said.

Told you it never ends. Hope everyone enjoys the future they are creating.

[bd139]

Indeed. Ushering in an age of newspeak.

Misguided good intentions can do more harm than anything.

Edit: oh and fuck “y’all” as a replacement for anything. Idiocracy here we come.

[tom66]

Wait, DUMMY value now?  Children suck on dummies.  Are we saying they now suck on placeholders?

[tggzzz]

"Grandfathered" != "legacy", in many walks of life.

Example: people that were driving cars in 1935 (when the driving test was introduced) never had to take the test; they had "grandfather rights". Indeed my grandfather never did take a test, despite driving into the 1980s when he was in his 80s. There are other examples in aviation.

As for "y'all" or "folks", no. Just no.

Having said that, I think "allow list" is better than "white list"; the meaning is explicit rather than having to be inferred.

[Zero999]

Yes but I was talking about the media and the people watching or reading the media are not people who are going to look for a perputrator and even when they do it has not much added value of narrowing the fitting group of people from 16 million to 0,8 million, still a needle in an haystack.
And if they do they should do it for everyone, they never say white native dutch person, then it is not mentioned.

Tv shows that ask the audience to look out for somene and show their picture or drawing is indeed another case where it is usefull to provide as much information.

I agree. When the authorities are looking for a perpetrator, it's important to give a compehensive description: sex, skin/hair/eye colour, ethnicity, accent etc. but once they're found them, that all becomes irrelevant. The only exception is if the crime is believed to be motivated by racism/religion/xenaphobia.

[madires]

Wait, DUMMY value now?  Children suck on dummies.  Are we saying they now suck on placeholders?

Car manufacturers use crash test placeholders to test the safety of their cars, and bookshops are selling new editions of "HTML for Placeholders" and "C for Placeholders" while hams need to replace their dummy loads with placeholder loads for compliance reasons.

[Kjelt]

Told you it never ends. Hope everyone enjoys the future they are creating.

Wait what?
Replace Master/Slave with primary/standby uhhhhhhhh how does that ever going to work?
When a primary device gets no answer from one of its standby devices this standby device is probably in standby mode.

[SilverSolder]

Told you it never ends. Hope everyone enjoys the future they are creating.

Wait what?
Replace Master/Slave with primary/standby uhhhhhhhh how does that ever going to work?
When a primary device gets no answer from one of its standby devices this standby device is probably in standby mode.

Main/Secondary is the only one I've seen so far that makes any sense to me!  (so we can keep MOSI/MISO etc intact)

[TimFox]

"Primary/standby" is not a correct replacement for "Master/slave" in its normal technical usage.

[tom66]

Master/Servant makes more sense.  But probably too close to history too, after all at some point black people have probably been underpaid servants.

[madires]

If your preferred beverage is black coffee or black tea you'll will be in trouble soon.

[TimFox]

In New York City, they drink "regular coffee", which there means "with cream and sugar".  Elsewhere, "regular" is the opposite of "decaf".  See what happens to precision when technical terms mutate randomly?

[0culus]

Indeed. Ushering in an age of newspeak.

Misguided good intentions can do more harm than anything.

Edit: oh and fuck “y’all” as a replacement for anything. Idiocracy here we come.

Clearly, you aren't from Texas.  All y'all are gonna be converging. 

[coppice]

oh and fuck “y’all” as a replacement for anything. Idiocracy here we come.

Mocking Texans like that is deeply offensive. Cancel the perpetrator for life.

Actually, most of the suggested substitutes just trade one kind of offence for another, while reducing clarity. Maybe the reduction in clarity is the real goal here.

[maginnovision]

My only issue with y'all is that even before the newspeak regulations it was EVERYWHERE on twitter. I hate twitter so I have to hate y'all. Nothing is more annoying (to me) than some random new yorker saying y'all.

[james_s]

Apparently now the "OK" hand signal signifies white suppremacy? 

https://komonews.com/news/local/osp-says-troopers-hand-signal-at-salem-protest-wasnt-racist

You can't make this stuff up. Do people have any idea how ridiculous it all sounds to any rational person? I'm afraid I will never understand how so many people cannot comprehend that words simply convey a message and trying to ban words will never have the effect they seek. A new word or symbol can be assigned to the offensive message almost instantly while everyone else is still scrambling to come up with a new politically correct term for the last word that the twitter mob suddenly decided was offensive.

[bd139]

I’m at the point where I’m going to buy some popcorn for when people have had enough of this shit and smack it back to reality.

[0culus]

It's clear that all this nonsense is doing is accomplishing nothing but dividing people further from each other, no matter how much touchy-feely 'inclusiveness' is preached. The people pushing this are acting like a bunch of toddlers who aren't getting their way. Whatever happened to just being an adult? 

[daqq]

"Grandfathered" != "legacy", in many walks of life.

That's just one example. Another example - blacklist. A summary term for entities/places/people/devices/brands that should be denied/avoided/checked with extra care/blocked... Not half of the use cases are covered by the word denylist. There's a restaurant blacklist. What's the newterm for that? Avoidlist? Great, instead of one summary term we get 10 terms. Whooptydoo. Finally we have defeated racism.

Did anyone complain? How does being triggered by a generic industry term even work? Do the affected parties just drop in the middle of a meeting because someone said 'blacklist' and start crying? I'm having a tough time visualizing a person who would actually have these sorts of issues in real life.