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Comment by CodeGlitch | Hacker News Reader

> master

Careful there - this word is now criminal. /s

Of course it’s not criminal and you know it. It’s just bad taste to keep using it in the context of slavery, segregation and ongoing institutionalized oppression.

And, you can keep using it. All that changed was the default on GitHub.

“main” is a better term for a main branch anyway.

Inconvenience is not criminalization.

I don't think that guy had any reason to point out the "master" thing, but now that we're down here, I don't think that version control has any context of slavery, segregation, or ongoing institutionalized oppression. Glad to be proven wrong though.

I get abandoning master/slave terminology, but on its own the word "master" has nothing to do with slavery.

In general, I get being sensitive towoard ongoing social injustice, but on the other hand I want to be careful not to fall victim to a 4chan psyop baiting people into irrational levels of "wokeness".

My workplace recently recommended against using the terms "tipping point" and "chop chop" without giving any context. I had to google them to find out why they were problematic. Turns out that "chop chop" and "chopstick" have the same (possibly insensitive) origin. But I don't know what else to call a chopstick! Luckily they didn't ban it...for now...

I'm not saying this whole "master" thing was "masterminded" by anyone, but if I were a troll with nothing better to do but "own the libs", I would spend my time coming up with ways to cancel random things by linking them to racist pasts. Which would be pretty easy because, turns out, everything that existed 100+ years ago probably had a run-in with overt racism.

I did a deep dive on the origin of "master" in git a while ago when it came up on HN. In that thread, it was often argued that "master" is taken from the recording industry (i.e. a master recording), where there are no connections to slavery. Unfortunately, the use of the word "master" recording in the recording industry is usually paired with a "slave" recording, so there does in fact does seem to have a direct origin referencing the history of chattel slavery in the United States if the origin of the term is from the recording industry. Here's that thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26497027

While it's still a mystery to me exactly the origin of master in git, what I do know is that the term carries enough weight that my students appreciated me renaming our course repositories from master to main, so I will keep doing it no matter what the origin, as it's really not much of an ask at all, and the result is it makes people feel better.

May I recommend this wonderful podcast on Cancel Culture? Basically the term is so distorted that it’s meaningless. The podcast is very well researched and if you haven’t heard “You’re Wrong About” you’re in for a treat.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cancel-culture/id13800...

As for “master” - nothing wrong with the word. It’s the context that shifts. No one lives in isolation and acknowledging the context shifts sometimes makes sense.

Insinuating that people sensitive to the context are somehow criminalizing the ones who deny it’s existence is absurd.

Don't forget that there were people like Rich Salz who took their ball and ran home crying[0] because of a freaking word. Was this just a fit of temporary 2020-insanity that was going around? Nope - apparently 1 year on, it's still intolerably reeecist to have a "master key" in cryptography.[1]

[0] https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/1279190119703085057 [1] https://twitter.com/RichSalz/status/1435327330335997952

This is all very intentionally a clown world word-play.

We could just hope that universities would abolish Master's degrees for the same reason. /s

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