Easily rename your Git default branch from master to main

https://github.com/search?q=head%3Aslave

There are people offended about many things in life, but that doesn't mean we should try to accommodate every single person offended over every little thing (especially when you use the wrong definition to perpetuate it).

Git is software that provides a level playing field for developers of all creeds, and had zero bad intentions when naming elements of the software. "Master" isn't even a slavery reference at all. To say that it is is to claim that words cannot have multiple meanings, something which is patently false.

Master (the definition invoked by Git) has no negative history, and no negative connotations.

But hey who am I to judge what is a good or bad use of people's time and political capital?

I'll stick with calling my main branches master and if someone doesn't like it they can fork it and keep their own special version just for themselves. Freedom!

By the way did you know that the etymology of robot? Wikipedia has this to say

> The word robot was introduced to the public by the Czech interwar writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), published in 1920.[79] The play begins in a factory that uses a chemical substitute for protoplasm to manufacture living, simplified people called robots. The play does not focus in detail on the technology behind the creation of these living creatures, but in their appearance they prefigure modern ideas of androids, creatures who can be mistaken for humans. These mass-produced workers are depicted as efficient but emotionless, incapable of original thinking and indifferent to self-preservation. At issue is whether the robots are being exploited and the consequences of human dependence upon commodified labor (especially after a number of specially-formulated robots achieve self-awareness and incite robots all around the world to rise up against the humans).

> Karel Čapek himself did not coin the word. He wrote a short letter in reference to an etymology in the Oxford English Dictionary in which he named his brother, the painter and writer Josef Čapek, as its actual originator.[79]

> In an article in the Czech journal Lidové noviny in 1933, he explained that he had originally wanted to call the creatures laboři ("workers", from Latin labor). However, he did not like the word, and sought advice from his brother Josef, who suggested "roboti". The word robota means literally "corvée", "serf labor"

If anything, the article affirms my gut feeling when I first started using version control back in the day. It didn't occur to me someone else might feel similarly.

When creating a new repo using Mercurial, the default branch is called default, which always made more sense to me.

Interestingly enough, both Mercurial and Git were created by Linux kernel hackers to handle the Linux kernel source code after the Linux project could no longer use Bitkeeper. They were released 12 days apart in April 2005.

Just pointing out that certain things, even seemingly small things, are often assumed to be okay. And especially in team settings, people don't always feel comfortable speaking up or being that person.

Reminds me of the aphorism: There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

3. Advocacy that mainly serves to make the advocate sound virtuous rather than substantively address the difficult aspects of a difficult tradeoff or help to wisely deploy resources in a way that will make progress on a problem.

It's distinct from your 1 in that it accepts that people can exist who legitimately care about improving the world.

It's distinct from your 2 in that it doesn't assert the person's advocacy is dishonest (or otherwise not heartfelt), only that their specific contributions are unhelpful or present a bad framing.

Example of a useful difference that 3 highlights:

Virtue signaling: "I just think we should help everyone wherever we can." -> suggests that the speaker is particularly noble while also setting a herculean standard for how to live one's life. (Really? Every single moment?)

Not virtue signaling: "As a rule of thumb, you should give about 10% of your net income to charitable causes, since this is historically feasible, and mainly would force you to cut back in ways that have disproportionately high utility for others. Any more than that is nice, but is more than I can legitimately ask." -> recognizes upper bounds in what they expect out of others, and what might be feasible or excessive.

Naturally, most advocacy lasts more than two sentences, but that gives the general idea.

*The term virtue signaling seems to be used differently by different people, so not sure if that was a fair substitution of definition.

1. If someone genuinely believes something absurd to be right and reasonable, why are they above criticism? Ridicule is a very valuable and effective tool in maintaining social cohesion and resisting subversive methods that use absurd arguments that are unworthy of or incapable of being reasoned against.

2. This is far more straight forward. If we genuinely believe someone to be disingenuous in their advocacy of the absurd, should they not be called out on it? What responsibility do we have to earnestly engage with deliberate subversion? Identifying it and raising awareness of bad actors and trolls is a valid defence, potentially saving good people a lot of time, money, and heartache.

I'll conclude by saying that I believe your attempt to dissuade people from using "virtue signalling" to identify these behaviours is, itself, virtue signalling. I'm quite sure it would serve your sociopolitical objectives very well if all these people 'in the way' would stop noticing such behaviours.

Do you have any examples of such conversations, specifically regarding to the naming of the "master" branch?

Fixed that for you.

If people start jumping on the bandwagon of renaming "master" (or any such term) en masse because of it being "potentially offensive", that makes people think the usage of the word is offensive, and the potential offensiveness and having to explain that it's not becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And then we'll all need to change what we call this or that, just because people can't remember that words have multiple meanings.

Let's not turn meanings that are not problems into ones that are.

I don't believe a single person feels the impact of this change.

Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...

' a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” '

And no, "Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness, and race isn’t either."

Yes, the dislike is lowest among African Americans, but still at a whopping 75%.

So who supports PC? The only group is progressive activists. What do they look like, demographically? Rich, white, educated.

The author additionally ran a twitter poll: "Nearly all of my followers underestimated the extent to which most Americans reject political correctness. Only 6 percent gave the right answer. (When I asked them how people of color regard political correctness, their guesses were, unsurprisingly, even more wildly off.)"