Take a look at CIA&#x27;s &quot;The Simple Sabotage Field Manual&quot; from 1944 (declassified 2008). Under the section &quot;General Interference with Organizations and Production&quot; it recommends among other things:- &quot;Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible&quot;- &quot;Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.&quot;

It was amusing to see the GitLab ticket where they try to orchestrate the change. It’s still going on. At least 100 people involved and multiple tickets open for an entirely pointless change.

I wouldn&#x27;t say they are full of hate. Slavery has defined the country and has repercussions still.But I&#x27;m really worried about how we import everything American to Germany without thinking twice.Left newspapers have started to write BIPoC everywhere when it comes to domestic issues. What exactly are the indigenous people of Germany? Even blacks are relatively rare. It would make much more sense to coin an acronym that includes Jews, Sinti and Roma, given our sordid history. But we simply take what American culture has thought up.

Of course everyone would have a different feeling towards those words. Every country has their own history. I think it is a positive step in the US going through all these hurdles to address their past. US has the power and the economic leverage to really step to next level, it can afford it.Every country is different. Developing world wouldn&#x27;t care about rights, because they have to make cakes as fast as possible, and developed world can spend much time on being fair. It is something we should do.Is a name change really that difficult for everyone? I remember when I first saw &#x27;main&#x27; branch on Azure, yes, I have to slow down a bit, is it the end of world? It means something important for the US, and would be good for the future generation, I think I can afford the personal inconvenience. We, developers, are having the best job in this world, do we really need to get pissed off for this?

Germany is a really bad example though. The German way is to pretend racism just doesn&#x27;t exist - today is the aniversary of a racist, arson attack that happened in 1994 killing 7 people (one of them pregnant) where the official line is still &quot;the guy was just crazy what can you do ?!&quot;.If you want to transplant the &quot;master&quot;-example, look at all the discussions of how they name certain sauces,schnitzels and deserts as well as a weird insistance that offensively named streets, underground-stations and (for some reason) pharmacies &quot;must not need to be renamed, why would you even be offended&quot;.Germany is not the example to go with concerning offensive language.

The funny thing is, I don&#x27;t think very many people thought of &quot;bad stuff&quot; before this idiotic culture war planted it in everyone&#x27;s mind, even if in a negative light.I would bet that most people didn&#x27;t have any idea that words like &quot;grandfather&quot; or &quot;blacklist&quot; had (or didn&#x27;t have) any racist history.Wouldn&#x27;t it have been better to just let the words outgrow their history? These words were already dead or dying as racist terms. Not any more.

&quot;I&#x27;m in the USA. I think only in Germany are people so full of themselves that they over-generalize entire nations with their own ignorant assumptions.&quot;That would be a rather rude, dare I say hateful thing for me to say, wouldn&#x27;t it? In reality, I really enjoyed all the places in Germany I&#x27;ve visited, and most of my interactions with German folk that I&#x27;ve interacted with socially and professionally over the years. I especially enjoyed taking a technical and engineering German language course, so I can appreciate words like &quot;Kaftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung&quot; and &quot;benzinbetriebenes Motorsystem&quot;. I wouldn&#x27;t think to make such a comment about the German people, like you did about people in the USA.

Actually, my first association - as a German - with master is the craftsman title &quot;Meister&quot;.

In the Netherlands, which unlike Germany was significantly involved in the transatlantic slave trade, AFAIK the word meester never had any connotations of slavery, only of expertise and teaching ability (as in a guild master).It&#x27;s still used to refer to a male teacher, particularly in elementary schools, as well as being the title used by lawyers.A slave owner was simply a slavenhouder.

Same here in germany.
When we hear the word master, most people think of the master in karate kid or the master degree of a university.
I think only in the usa people are so full of hate that they directly think of bad stuff.

I know it&#x27;s anecdotal but I&#x27;ve asked my colleagues the same - in a country with a terrible history of this sort too. And turns out I can&#x27;t find a single person who agrees with Github&#x27;s decision.

When the woke mob hinders the very minority it&#x27;s supposed to care about, it starts a vicious circle and nothing changes for the best

They are the woke mob. Who else ever cared about this? It&#x27;s the doing of the toxic corporate diversity committees who pull this shit to appear like they&#x27;re doing something against discrimination without actually making any meaningful changes.

I read the parent comment to mean that by pro-actively making changes in an effort you avoid the woke buffoons, while completely ignoring the voices of those who ought matter most, you&#x27;re admitting defeat and in doing so granting the buffoons yet more power.I&#x27;d argue if someone is feigning offense we should call them out on it, not collectively fucking prostrate ourselves.This whole fiasco just makes me wonder what the hell is going on in the background while we&#x27;re being distracted by this... surströmming-level red herring.

&gt; on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.I&#x27;d love to see some demographics around this. When I lived in the bay area, most of my friends were part of this woke &#x2F; &quot;activist&quot; community. I had some friends who disagreed, but mostly they were terrified to say so for fear of the mob.Here in Australia, it seems like the demographics are the other way around. I know a few people who are part of the leftist woke &#x2F; &quot;activist&quot; tribe. But most people I interact with socially think that while racism is a problem, the twitter mobs are a bit silly, and the woke stuff is overblown.I don&#x27;t know how you&#x27;d measure, but I&#x27;d love to see stats on what percentage of the communities in different cities hold this political stance. Is it growing or shrinking? Is it widespread in the west, or is it mostly just a bay area &#x2F; portland &#x2F; NY phenomenon - with small satellite groups in other countries?

&gt; avoid being a target of a woke mobWhat are they going to do? Stop using GitHub? Good f ing riddance

They are doing it to avoid being a target of a woke mob feigning offense for their own ideological gain in the on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.Another example, Bezos recently banned books critical of transgender from being sold on Amazon. And just like that, everyone forgot about Amazon&#x27;s brutal suppression of union organising activity in their warehouses. Similarly the rest of Big Tech thinks it can toss out token gestures and placate those who are critical of its business practices.

I hate this “woke mob” branding, there isn’t one, there are people who care about social issues who are individuals. Some go too far, I agree, but we should aim to treat everyone, no matter what they believe (yes even if you think they are really wrong) with respect rather than pigeon holing all their views in with a group you don’t like.

This isn’t a real thing. It’s an artificial nonsense of social media. It’s nonsense for two reasons:1a. The number of valid participants is low. It is easy to feel powerful sitting comfortably hidden in your parent’s basement behind a keyboard craving attention and direction. Misery loves company and when such people band together their numbers can appear large compared to something like a real world gathering of persons in a physical space. But it’s not real people in a real space, because that takes considerably greater effort.1b. The numbers also appear artificially inflated because there is a low effort of repetition, which can appear as false participation, spam, trolling, denial of service.2. There isn’t any real investment in most of this. Most of the motivation are bored people looking for inspiration to be emotionally concerned. They will point where the carrot leads. That isn’t a movement. A real movement features numerous participants willing to make a personal investment like those criminals that stormed the capital.

&gt;We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.I suppose they are not doing it for your feeling&#x27;s sake. They are doing it to avoid being a target of a woke mob feigning offense for their own ideological gain in the on-going identity culture war which is happening in the west.

What if one black person feels discriminated? What if all black people feel discriminated? I think it&#x27;s clear that the term blacklist is not discriminatory in origin nor is it used in a discriminating way. If, hypothetically, all black people would feel discriminated then there would be a real gain from changing these words, even if they were never discriminatory to begin with. Still, even in that case, I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s a good idea to give in to &quot;feelings&quot;. Feeling discriminated is decidedly not the same as being discriminated and it&#x27;s a slippery slope when hurting other people&#x27;s feelings becomes a punishable offence.

The logic according to one Microsoft PM is that if one [white virtue signalling person on behalf of some person involuntary labelled as non privileged] person is offended it&#x27;s one person too much... It didn&#x27;t sound well thought out then or now...

I think this is kindof an important question. &quot;If it&#x27;s so insignificant, why do you care?&quot;.I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s so hard to understand why some people might be irritated, though. The social attitude that motivates the change to switch away from the term &#x27;master&#x27; is not widely held outside of a subset of Americans who are apparently vastly over represented in making these kinds of decisions. It&#x27;s a bit grating to be saying &quot;consider how others feel&quot; while ignoring how most people feel about it, and making the change made you want anyway.It&#x27;s a zeitgeist which results in things like someone complaining that VSCode including a candy cane icon is more offensive than the swastika, and the VSCode repository acceeding this complaint. - I feel if that&#x27;s where you end up from wanting everyone to feel welcome and included, that you&#x27;ve gotten lost along the way.

This is how the world works. If you don&#x27;t fight back sometimes these things will continue to happen.Of course there is a balance – too much fighting back and the cure becomes worse than the initial problem.

Allowing this faux diversity change will only lead to more calls for other faux diversity changes, so the time spent pointing out its vacuousness is well worth it.Just as security theater isn&#x27;t real security, diversity theater isn&#x27;t real diversity. We must stand up and denounce diversity theater and those who profit from it so that we can get focus on diversity efforts that have substance behind them.

So you say spending time on this topic is wasted time, and your solution is to spend more time on pushing back?

I am reminded of Catch-22 about how strong Italy is by not fighting these things, just go with it. Another side will come up and push some other agenda, then just go with that. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WeVWupFBkA8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=WeVWupFBkA8</a> &quot;“But of course I do,” exclaimed the old man cheerfully. “The Germans are being driven out, and we are still here. In a few years you will be gone, too, and we will still be here. You see, Italy is really a very poor and weak country, and that’s what makes us so strong. Italian soldiers are not dying anymore. But American and German officers are. I call that doing extremely well. Yes, I am certain that Italy will survive this war and still be in existence long after your own country has been destroyed.”&quot;

Unfortunately I think it is more of a cultural problem than a matter of leadership. The widely used FactoryGirl Ruby gem (the vast majority of Rails setups embed it) was renamed FactoryBot a couple years ago. It&#x27;s not like my team had a say in this change but overall I was the only one against it but ended up implemented the change, which took about an hour (all our repos + the PRs). Note: technically I was in a situation of harassment.

Not only is your post unnecessarily offensive, you also did not read the OP&#x27;s post correctly. He did not write that the occupation ended 700 years ago, it lasted 700 years. If my guess for OP&#x27;s country is correct, it actually ended just 150 years ago.

Where is the cutoff for getting over it? 100, 200, 300 years?

You had 700 years to get over it. Harboring bad emotions is negative for all involved.

The issue with that is that those words (blacklist&#x2F;whitelist specifically) have no connotation to race.It&#x27;s not an issue. The etymology of the words have nothing to do with race.Trying to get people to change them _creates_ that link.There are real issues that could be focused on to bring about effective change. Not this.

None of this helps. All this worthless virtue signalling does is irk people, and make them start ignoring actual societal issues.Absolutely no one is using words like blacklist in association with black people, in the same way that (almost) no one uses lame in reference to a crippled person anymore.Do you even know any black people that give a damn about changing words just to appease American black people? Most of my family is black and so are most of my close friends. They would all find this absurd.Mind you, these are Trinidadian black people, and so we are all the descendents of slaves as well. This is all so condescending and borderline demeaning that white people think that we are so inept that we think such changes would affect literally anything in life.Stop it. Please.

Do you think there&#x27;s any relation between the naming of whitelist&#x2F;blacklist and skin color? I certainly don&#x27;t. Colors and their associations exist beyond racial identity.Also, what is the problem in calling the relationship between two processes (one fully controlling the other) master-slave? It&#x27;s a perfectly suitable analogy and does not have anything to do with any one person&#x27;s ethnicity or history. I&#x27;ll go a step further and say that looking at this whole thing entirely in the context of the mistreatment of african americans is unfair to people all over the world who have a history of slavery - as other posters have noted, there are plenty examples of that for people of all races. This is not exclusive to one group of people and no one can claim ownership of the word.

I&#x27;m generally not in favor of these changes. Blacklist&#x2F;whitelist I can kind of see, but then again, why make it about skin color? It&#x27;s natural that we&#x27;d have a connotation of bright things being good and dark things being bad (as in, our surroundings), because we like being able to see.Any resemblance to words used to describe skin color is coincidental, I think.

My own country has been occupied by foreign forces so hard that it stopped existing for 100 years. It nearly erased our culture and lots of people died. Should I now start telling people that using the word &quot;occupied&quot; in places like &quot;occupied toilet&quot; or &quot;occupation&quot; to mean employment is somehow offensive to me?Or maybe should I realize that as a literate adult, I have the ability to understand context around the words that are used?

I agree that master-&gt;main is pretty pointless.But what about getting rid of &quot;slave&quot;, &quot;blacklist&quot; and &quot;whitelist&quot;.The last two kind of opened my eyes to connotation of black and white, that may be problematic to some. Also I find &quot;allow&#x2F;denylist&quot; more descriptive, maybe that helps.

You&#x27;d think the rest of the world could come up with a centralized git repo.

The rest of the world is not forced to do business with an American company following American cultural standards.

&gt;dark part of it&#x27;s historyOh hey you offended me by implying my skin color means bad.

GitHubs decision is a form of cultural imperialism. That&#x27;s what it really is. Only because the US want&#x27;s to somehow deal with a dark part of it&#x27;s history, the rest of the world should not be foreced to adapt their views.

I think you&#x27;re too naive. This decision makers are not worried about anything but their PR. Your competitor is the Woke mob, although they&#x27;ll say they do it for you.Adressing real issues cost money. Making bullshit changes is free.The culture shock is particularly noticeable for non-anglo people.

I will never go along with that farce, especially when I learned that a bunch of people bullied Antirez for years in order to force him to change the language in Redis.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antirez.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;122" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;antirez.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;122</a>It serves absolutely no purpose, other than for a group of people to feel like they have an ideological hold on the IT industry. Some of these people are already coming with new lists of &quot;forbidden words&quot; they are trying to impose with the old same excuse of &quot;diversity and inclusiveness&quot;. Enough.

We&#x27;ve had a few months to turn off an option in Github to change this behavior. I believe there was even an email that went out and a thread on HN concerning this change. Any conversation at this point is just whinging to the void to farm engagement.

&gt; Without exception, every single one of them thinks it&#x27;s completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.So do we know where that decision actually came from?

We need to become the the decision-makers. And stop listening to the current ones.

It does rather smack of presentism, SV companies might be better doing a proper transparent pay &#x2F; promotion survay to identify discrimination amongst their employees - Based on my direct experience in the UK there will be Discrimination.Additionally properly identifying the impact of race on ai&#x2F;ml derived algorithms would be a better use of time.But of course these would have cost and other implications that companies would not want to do.

Slavery which didn&#x27;t happen in America doesn&#x27;t count.

In many cases it&#x27;s more than ridiculous, it
s completely non-sensical. What is the logic behind removing the word &quot;master&quot; even supposed to be?The problem with slavery is not that there is a word for it, it&#x27;s that it exists, and used to be very common. By using the word &quot;master&quot; we are not condoning slavery, nobody can believe that. Just like we are not condoning domestic violence by using the word &quot;hit&quot; in &quot;hit song&quot;.For the word blacklist I can see how misguided people could make a case, since the word black is used for something negative. Still ridiculous of course.Another absurd example: In my project they decided to change the name of a &quot;blackout tool&quot;. There is nothing negative about this tool, it doesn&#x27;t make things worse, it just colours them black.

I feel like this topic has been discussed a lot already, but I think it&#x27;s important to keep pushing back against useless wasted man-hours like this effort is.I live in a country that was almost entirely enslaved by foreigners for ~700 years. I&#x27;ve discussed this rename with dozens of engineers in my country. Without exception, every single one of them thinks it&#x27;s completely ridiculous. We need to keep voicing these thoughts so that decision-makers in large companies have a chance to hear us and realize that they should focus on more useful issues instead.

&gt; Git itself uses main as recommendedThe default branch name in Git, as of v2.31 (released two days ago), is master.

The news is just a week old, I didn&#x27;t know about it. Maybe I&#x27;ll use something else than git, what are some modern alternatives?

But GitLab also implemented this change?Well, they gave admins the option to change the default branch name to whatever they like, and they&#x27;ve announced they&#x27;re changing from master to main by default in the next two months or so: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;10&#x2F;new-git-default-branch-name&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;10&#x2F;new-git-default-bra...</a>You may as well stop using Git completely then, since Git itself uses main as recommended.

&gt; It has been discussed to death on HN, what are you talking about?Not without getting downvoted to oblivion for the only reason which is having an opposing opinion.&gt; Gitlab has switched the name of the master branch tooYes I have been made aware of that now.&gt; The point is not that it is harmful or bad to do so, and anyone actually crusading against this change as if it was some kind of a slippery slope leading to the downfall of their subculture or even civilization may want to think about their priorities and sense of hyperbole.I don&#x27;t even understand this sentence.&gt; - This is not at all what the article complains about. The author argues that this is essentially a form of virtue signalling that allows essentially overpaid white engineers to pat themselves in the back without putting in actual work and money for diversity, inclusion, and equality; a symbolic change that is not rooted in materialism.So.. it&#x27;s exactly what the article complains about?

It has been discussed to death on HN, what are you talking about?Now for some notes on your comment:- Gitlab has switched the name of the master branch too- The point is not that it is harmful or bad to do so, and anyone actually crusading against this change as if it was some kind of a slippery slope leading to the downfall of their subculture or even civilization may want to think about their priorities and sense of hyperbole.- This is not at all what the article complains about. The author argues that this is essentially a form of virtue signalling that allows essentially overpaid white engineers to pat themselves in the back without putting in actual work and money for diversity, inclusion, and equality; a symbolic change that is not rooted in materialism.

Sigh, I wonder when smart people did become so unbelievable stupid?

&gt; I switched from Github to Gitlab after this changeAh ah. You didn&#x27;t believe you could run away, did you?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;10&#x2F;new-git-default-branch-name&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;10&#x2F;new-git-default-bra...</a>

Sounds like git itself will be changing too -- may as well plan for it and set your new repos to main instead.

GitLab made the change[1] as well unfortunately. I completely agree with everything written in the post as well. The problem with attacking words for cheap points is that it doesn&#x27;t make a difference to the actual problem and is mainly used to show &quot;aware&quot; and &quot;great&quot; people are.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;10&#x2F;new-git-default-branch-name&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;10&#x2F;new-git-default-bra...</a>

This is a topic I feel cannot be openly discussed on HN (and basically everywhere else), sadly.I switched from Github to Gitlab after this change. Political correctness is a great way to know that a company has the completely wrong focus and will be unable to innovate and create good products.

Even if there was one, as noted in the article, context people. Context.Master&#x2F;Slave nodes and ports are to be found in a lot of hardware.No one in their right mind ever would think of it in terms of horrible atrocities of the past. It’s a technical term. That’s where it ends.Humans are a shitty bunch.

Yes and no. Git took the terminology from BitKeeper, which did have master and slave repositories. So while there are no slave anythings in git, git uses the term because of the master-slave meaning.

Especially since there is no such thing as a slave branch.

That&#x27;s exactly what I think about that topic.
Master branch is the master record. Nothing more or less.

It’s shorter, but it’s a change. If it was main historically it’d be annoying to change it to master now.

But that&#x27;s just saying that a change that only has a small effect is almost never worthwhile. What are the real opportunity costs here?

Everything humans do is part of cultural change, because what humans do is change things.The post is about prioritisation. Moving the needle in a way that matters, not merely doing something so we can pat ourselves on the back for doing it.Just because you can change something it doesn&#x27;t mean you should or ought to. Opportunity cost....

Are you sure about that though? They didn&#x27;t publish anything about their internal decision making. It is an assumption that they didn&#x27;t talk to any person of color. The idea of using so called neutral terms is not new: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;2&#x2F;hi&#x2F;technology&#x2F;3243656.stm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;2&#x2F;hi&#x2F;technology&#x2F;3243656.stm</a>

No, he&#x27;s complaining that they didn&#x27;t ask him specifically. It really easy to find black developers who were consulted and agree with the change.Here we go (this took under 5 seconds for me to Google)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.to&#x2F;afrodevgirl&#x2F;replacing-master-with-main-in-github-2fjf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.to&#x2F;afrodevgirl&#x2F;replacing-master-with-main-in-git...</a>Now there&#x27;s duelling anecdata and the OP provides no suggestions on how to reconcile them.

As far as I know, most of the changes happening at large companies regarding this have been driven internally primarily by people of color - at MSFT, which owns GitHub, some of these changes were being driven by Employee Resource Groups (affinity groups) which are made up of those who would be affected by the language, for example

&gt; Since the author doesn&#x27;t find the language offensiveYou&#x27;re missing the point, the author concludes that the companies decide that the language is offensive without asking the people who are supposedly the offended party.

From the article, I don&#x27;t believe this is &quot;the opinion of a white guy&quot;:Being a highly paid software engineer, like most of you reading this, did not stop a bully van flying up the curb I was walking on and 7 City of London police officers pinning me against a wall with guns in my face. They wouldn’t believe it was possible for someone like me to work in central London till one of them searched me and found my work ID. All this because I fit a description. What was this description? I don’t know, black male between 4’11 and 7’4 probably.

Ok, that&#x27;s fair. Here&#x27;s an article from Wired where there are people of color on both sides of this issue: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech-confronts-use-labels-master-slave&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;tech-confronts-use-labels-master...</a>

Frankly this is the opinion of a white guy, why should latino and black people care about his perception of &quot;racially charged words&quot; like `master`?This is like some dude from Vermont telling me I should use latinx as it&#x27;s more inclusive -- linguistic colonization eh

This article doesn&#x27;t explain how &quot;main&quot; is more &quot;inclusive&quot; than &quot;master&quot;. I don&#x27;t agree that it is at all.

That article is garbage. He just takes it as given that the change is more inclusive.Oh course being inclusive is good. That&#x27;s not the argument here.

That article hurt to read.  I&#x27;m not surprised the author is from Melbourne too.

I just want to add a link to this[0] post here as a counterpoint for why changing language _can_ matter.The author seems to imply that the name change is all about being non-offensive to some people. Since the author doesn&#x27;t find the language offensive, they conclude that name change is only political correctness or virtue signalling and a hollow gesture. I do not agree with that. Language and words are very powerful in how we perceive the world. A changing vocabulary is part of cultural change.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mokacoding.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;main-vs-master-xcode-12&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mokacoding.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;main-vs-master-xcode-12&#x2F;</a>

&gt;someone flirting with someone who had a boyfriend who was at the conference and said she could do betterI don&#x27;t know what you think flirting is but that ain&#x27;t it. Your man was being a creep and while I&#x27;d agree violence isn&#x27;t the answer, I&#x27;m not at all surprised if he was threatened. (I also wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if he was just told to back off initially but then pushed the issue because that is what creeps do.)And if for some reason this still isn&#x27;t obvious to the reader, here&#x27;s a top tip for how to avoid getting into a fight: maybe don&#x27;t insult people.

That fast.ai post is insane. I feel really bad for him. I watched Lex Fridman&#x27;s interview with him and he seemed very nice and thoughtful.

&gt; around the time CoC (Code of Conduct) was being introduced.The things about the CoCs that really annoyed me:1. People would literally go around projects and send pull requests just to change the code of conduct to improve the wording even tho no one had made any complaints or anything. Anytime a CoC get added you would see more people mess around with the CoC than the code. It was like people just wanted to look like they were improving things while not actually doing anything.2. The only blog posts I&#x27;ve seen about CoCs at conferences and stuff have sounded nuts. One was for SunshinePHP[0] where one of the infractions was someone flirting with someone who had a boyfriend who was at the conference and said she could do better. They wrote that they told the offender to go to his room to prevent him from being assaulted. But mentions nothing happening about a guy threatening violence for flirting. I would understand if they were threatening violence in response to violence but flirting, nah. Then there was the whole fast.ai[1] thing where the infraction was basically someone was offended on the behalf of someone else who wasn&#x27;t offended.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geekyboy.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;1179" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;geekyboy.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;1179</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fast.ai&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;code-of-conduct&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fast.ai&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;code-of-conduct&#x2F;</a>

&gt; We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people.Is this mutually exclusive to stopping people doing bad things and being bad people though?

I know this is controversial, but I still love SQLite&#x27;s old code of conduct (now &#x27;code of ethics&#x27;[1]). Its based on some old religious text. If you skip the religious bits, the rest is extremely wholesome. I much prefer it over most projects&#x27; CoCs - I&#x27;ve never seen much benefit in spending a lot of words to say &quot;please be civil&quot;.&gt; Be a help in times of trouble.&gt; Do not return evil for evil.I will try, for you SQLite! :D[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sqlite.org&#x2F;codeofethics.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sqlite.org&#x2F;codeofethics.html</a>

Reading CoCs they are usually full of language that you would expect people would have already learned in Kindergarden. Unfortunately there are too many grown-ups around that seem to not have internalized these things, so while I don&#x27;t like the patronizing myself, I see some value in writing down a set of &quot;if you wanna collaborate here, please respect these rules&quot;.And while you are right, the code itself doesn&#x27;t care, there are lot&#x27;s of interactions around producing that code that are between humans, where behaviour is important.It&#x27;s not much different from the guidelines that exist for this very site: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>I mean, that is a kind of code of condcut, too.

CoC is such a strange document. All I’ve seen it do is sit in a repo as a flag post. When I see a license document it gets me thinking about what intentions the project is released with, but when I see a CoC document all I do is mentally filter it out and go about my day..One would think it could leave some sense about the maintainer(s) being decent in some way. Instead I’m just left with a feeling of coercion if anything.It just shouldn’t be necessary to “present” yourself as a decent person as the author of some code.Some document in a project folder online doesn’t make you or me better people. It seems to me more of a futile (and stupid) gesture if anything.We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people. Putting a document in our projects telling others that we are doesn’t really change that.A standardized way of telling others you are a certain way, doesn’t make you so. It relieves us of putting in the effort if anything.&#x2F;idealistic early morning rant over

&gt; Last summer an(other) unarmed black man was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [...] So, what was tech’s big song and dance? Let’s remove offensive terminology from our collective lexicon. There were several casualties, white&#x2F;blacklist are examples of words deemed to be too offensive to use.In my memory this started way before the recent BLM protests - around the time CoC (Code of Conduct) was being introduced.

It should be noted that of all of the ways master is used in this thread, master bedroom is pretty high up there in bad history and connotation. The etymology derives from the &#x27;master of the house&#x27;, a term which historically served to diminish the agency of wives, servants, and slaves. I don&#x27;t know about master&#x2F;main, but I could definitely get behind renaming master bedrooms.

&#x27;Master bedroom&#x27; is going out of real estate descriptions, being replaced by &#x27;main bedroom&#x27;. E.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.housebeautiful.com&#x2F;lifestyle&#x2F;fun-at-home&#x2F;a1087&#x2F;master-bedroom-politically-incorrect&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.housebeautiful.com&#x2F;lifestyle&#x2F;fun-at-home&#x2F;a1087&#x2F;m...</a> but that&#x27;s just the first google hit, there&#x27;s plenty out there.In Dutch (both in .nl and .be), the English term &#x27;master bedroom&#x27; was fashionable for a few years, until the stigma of that term carried over from the Anglosphere and it&#x27;s now being replaced (in the woke areas of the country) with &#x27;ouderslaapkamer&#x27;, which is literally translated &#x27;parent bedroom&#x27;. Although now that term itself is &#x27;controversial&#x27; (not mainstream controversial, more in small hardcore circles, so I&#x27;m not sure if this will actually become an issue) because (to the best of my understanding of this objection) &#x27;parent bedroom&#x27; implies that the 2-parents-with-children family form is normative (you can&#x27;t make this up if you tried to), which it shouldn&#x27;t be.Not sure what my point is, maybe that using &#x27;master&#x27; for &#x27;main&#x27; is no longer outright commonly accepted usage?

In Ye Olde Dayes it referred to someone who had control or authority over a place, object, craft, etc -- a teacher would be a master for example. It&#x27;s a common word across European languages, and certainly predated the atlantic slave trade.Probably descended from the Latin word &quot;magister&quot;, which (despite Rome having plenty of slaves) didn&#x27;t neccersarilly refer to a slaveowner -- indeed many Roman slaves were Ludi Magister -- educated slaves that were teachers at Roman schoolsEtymology of &quot;master bedroom&quot; seems to come from &quot;Master&#x27;s bedroom&quot; in boarding schools, where it was the bedroom that the school master occupied (with Master having descended from Roman times)

Master bedroom, master record, master copy. The word master is just a synonym for main.

The English word “master” comes from the Latin “magister,” which is freighted with thousands of years of meanings and history. The meaning of slaveowner was not one of those meanings until probably the seventeenth or eighteenth century. In Latin, “magister,” never meant the master of slaves (a “herus” most properly, or a “dominus,” an owner of anything with legal title to that thing). Instead, the “magister” was a leader of a group: the “magister equitum” was a cavalry commander, and a “ludi magister” a schoolmaster or classroom teacher. It is from the latter that we have “master” in the sense of an MA (magister artium) degree, which, like the PhD, was originally a teaching license. The use of the English “master” to refer to slavery is comparatively recent and might well not predate the eighteenth century.

Why not use gimp for slave? Master and gimp.Edit: No! You see Ivan, it should be master and margarita!

I&#x27;d be really interested to hear from any black people here - does the idea of having a device or piece of software being called a &#x27;slave&#x27; really actually offend anybody?I&#x27;d never subconsciously linked the term with human slaves, only ever really thinking of it as an abstract concept, until people started complaining about it... Part of it may be coming from a different cultural context, not being from the US though...

That’s my impression too. “Slave” should be replaced with some other more neutral term, but “master” shouldn’t be a problem. There are multiple uses of it in different contexts, but the shared implication is of a definitive source:Master copy; Remastered (music); Master of Arts&#x2F;Sciences; MasteryEtc. None of that implies a master-slave relationship.

Let&#x27;s say you had a database based application and a feature to remove a subset of records. You wouldn&#x27;t call that feature any variant of &quot;ethnic clensing&quot;, &quot;genocide&quot; or &quot;Holocaust&quot;, no matter how descriptive those terms were for your specific function.Slavery was really bad, and for that reason shouln&#x27;t be used as a description.There are always alternatives, like &quot;leader and follower&quot;

I don&#x27;t think anyone is arguing that it&#x27;s always a bad metaphor, just that it&#x27;s an unnecessarily violent one.

&gt; I would agree &quot;slave&quot; seems a weird choice of a wordCan you clarify this? If one machine&#x2F;repo&#x2F;system acts only on the orders of another, wouldn&#x27;t &quot;master&quot; and &quot;slave&quot; be clear, descriptive choices of words?

And now I am imagining some video where they go down into sulfur mine and tell one of the miners &quot;We bring great news for you! Github changed the default name of master code branches to something else! Gitlab too! It was kind of a little bit annoying a little but they&#x27;re doing it anyway!&quot;

Same here, until this debate surfaced I never thought about slavery when I saw these terms.What made me think more about slavery was the materials that go into computers like cobalt and sulfur. Someone has to go down into the sulfur mine and get that for us. That&#x27;s an actual master&#x2F;slave relationship that is going on right now to power all our fantastic infrastructure.But so much industry has depended on sulfur for so many years that this debate is much deeper and more complex. The ugly truth is that someone far away has to be enslaved for us to live comfortably.Bring that debate to the front instead and we might find a technical solution to it.But it&#x27;s always cheaper to find a desperate person than to maintain a robot that is being attacked by gas and sulfur daily.

Both gitlab and github make heavy use of the term owner and ownership. Someone should let them know they have more renaming to do.

The word &quot;master&quot; when applied to slavery is itself a euphemism for owner, which is the truly abhorrent type of interpersonal relationship.

Note how master is not even the main term used to describe people who had slaves. The term typically used is owner, as in &quot;so and so was a slaveowner.&quot;A Marxist would chuckle at the notion that Microsoft would be removing the word &quot;owner&quot; for being offensive.

&gt; It is the most descriptive single word describing this mode of working.It often isn&#x27;t. It&#x27;s not uncommon that &quot;replica&quot; or &quot;secondary&quot; actually make more sense.

I don&#x27;t know of any meaning of the &quot;slave&quot; word besides a person doing involuntary labor.BTW I remember Russians translating master&#x2F;slave (in the IT context, e.g. primary&#x2F;secondary master&#x2F;slave for IDE PATA drives) as the the leading and the led.

&gt;I would agree &quot;slave&quot; seems a weird choice of a wordI disagree, however I&#x27;m not a native English speaker. It is the most descriptive single word describing this mode of working. We can&#x27;t ban master&#x2F;slave as a word or we will loose understanding of what it means. Another poster already mentioned that there are actual human slaves in existence today. I once heard in our time there are more human slaves than ever (mostly due to there being more people overall). It is sad that large companies like Microsoft(Github) choose to waste energy on such pointless activities instead of actually doing something about modern slavery.Microsoft is still in unique position of being able to pressure hardware makers. Why don&#x27;t they pressure them into at least trying to improve conditions of actual slaves that mine cobalt and other rare materials at the bottom of their supply chain?

And MasterCard. Everyone must switch to Visa now.

Once you agree that one word is apt for removal then you agree with the agenda that the article author roundly rejects.By going down the road of agreeing to some words to be removed you&#x27;re then imposing a presumption of guilt on anyone who refuses to remove said words. If I maintain some software that uses the word slave or blacklist and I don&#x27;t accede to making the changes to remove it, or agree to approve a PR that does the same, then it&#x27;s presumed I am stubborn or worse still, racist. Despite the usage of the word being completely innocent.Of course, context is everything, which only proves the point. You cannot systematically ban certain words.

With the NBA right now, there is debate about teams having &quot;owners.&quot;

The important thing to know here is that it is not how you interpret the words that matter. Social justice isn’t asking how github or existing developers feel because it isn’t a change that takes their feelings into account.I’m playing devil’s advocate. I don’t have strong feelings on this specific change, but I can see my line of thinking surprisingly absent in this entire thread.

I would agree &quot;slave&quot; seems a weird choice of a word but I can see nothing wrong in &quot;master&quot;. Not a single moment in my life I thought about slavery when hearing&#x2F;seeing the word &quot;master&quot;. Should we also rename master degrees perhaps?

At the risk of being cpt obvious: &lt;= 10% of plastic has ever been recycled + AFAIK there’s a pretty low limit on how many times you can recycle.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;text.npr.org&#x2F;897692090" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;text.npr.org&#x2F;897692090</a>&gt; Plastic also degrades each time it is reused, meaning it can&#x27;t be reused more than once or twice.

It’s more about creating a new enemy in the people who still use master branch. Some people always need someone to hate on.

True, it generated awareness - but also hate, possibly much more than not.

But it is good awarness? The major awarness people get from this cases is not about actual problems, but about very questionable wording-problems and behaviour of certain people. Not sure whether this at the end not creates more hate&amp;blind eyes than important awarness.

I think such a change generates awareness. A lot of problems linger in the tech sector I&#x27;m not really aware of. The write up of the article author sheds light again on biased recruitment in the tech sector. Something that appears to be a fundamental problem with the education sector in the US being broken.

The majority of plastics aren&#x27;t even accepted by my town&#x27;s recycling program.

I have to separate my plastics for them to be recycled. It has actually made me realize how much plastic a small family throws away every single week.

&gt; If we can do both, why do we never do both?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freddiedeboer.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;perhaps-we-cannot-do-both" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freddiedeboer.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;perhaps-we-cannot-do-bo...</a>

&gt; This would imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a timeNo, but it certainly makes you care less. Human attention is not linear.

&gt; I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought &quot;yep, I don&#x27;t have to think about slavery now&quot;.Surprisingly, human minds do seem to work that way. After doing a &quot;good&quot; deed, we&#x27;re liable to believe that we&#x27;ve done our part, and owe society no further action. Even if our good deed didn&#x27;t actually change anything.This effect is often called &quot;moral licensing&quot;.

&gt; imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time and, potentially, that they&#x27;re only capable of doing one thing full stopA lazy and overused argument. No one said only one thing can be done. Fact is time and attention are resources and by doing some thing you allocate less of them to other things.

There is a chasm between “doing something like this distracts from more effective options for change” and “people can only do one thing at a time”, and arguing the latter when someone says the former feels disingenuous.For example, in California, due to long term drought, urban water usage legislation was enacted. Urban water usage in California accounts for less than 10% of the state’s total usage, so a 20% reduction, at significant personal impact to urban residents, has a sub 2% impact on total use. However, it also gives the appearance that the legislature is actively engaged in addressing the problem of water conservation to under-informed voters without compelling those legislators to address agricultural and manufacturing uses (and their organized lobbying efforts).The problem with “every little bit helps” mentalities is that they enable perverse outcomes when coupled with limited information decision making, finite resources, and multiple concerns to balance. All of this leads to the politically optimal (and thus career sustaining) option set being deeply suboptimal application of resources.

&gt; I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought &quot;yep, I don&#x27;t have to think about slavery now&quot;.This is exactly what people do. WAY too many people do &quot;feel-good&quot; charity work. They just pick something that&#x27;s visible, easily partaken and then decide they&#x27;re &quot;helping&quot; and go about their lives feeling better.Like donating clothes to Africa, which actually harms the local economy[1][2]. As does dumping tons and tons of food without proper end to end oversight.Or having a demonstration in a public location, bothering the end-users or workers of a business. Because it&#x27;s easy and good publicity. They don&#x27;t attack the people on top who actually make the decisions, because it&#x27;s hard and boring work.[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;content.time.com&#x2F;time&#x2F;world&#x2F;article&#x2F;0,8599,1987628,00.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;content.time.com&#x2F;time&#x2F;world&#x2F;article&#x2F;0,8599,1987628,00...</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.ca&#x2F;mariah-griffinangus&#x2F;africa-charity_b_1623561.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.ca&#x2F;mariah-griffinangus&#x2F;africa-cha...</a>

Americans at large are heavily invested in ignoring the repercussions of slavery.Our President still lives in a house built by enslaved peoples. Our Congress still legislates in a Capitol built by enslaved peoples.That fact remains true, and is the prima facie evidence that all Americans have profited from our legacy of slavery, and that we aren&#x27;t all that concerned with tearing down that legacy and eliminating the harms to folks that those monuments contain... instead a plaque or statue explaining the role of the enslaved peoples is enough.Meh.

&gt; as it distracts from addressing the root cause.This would imply that people are capable only of doing one thing at a time and, potentially, that they&#x27;re only capable of doing one thing full stop. I would honestly be amazed if a single person, anywhere[1], looked at this change and thought &quot;yep, I don&#x27;t have to think about slavery now&quot;.&gt; think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.Well, I guess they&#x27;re more environmentally responsible than if they weren&#x27;t recycling plastic. It&#x27;s better to do something, however small, than nothing, surely? (And I doubt their environmental footprint even registers in the grand scheme of things - it&#x27;s industry we need to shame, not individuals for the moment.)[1] Who wasn&#x27;t already heavily invested in ignoring the repercussions of slavery, etc., I suppose.

&gt; this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root causeThe root cause can&#x27;t be addressed by the same people who reap the benefits of this system, because it&#x27;s so deep in its core that it would require substantial change, possibly breaking the system itself.

You are correct, let me rephrase that:I separate plastic so it can be either burnt together with my other trash, or shipped to Turkey where god knows what environmental crime is committed with it. An extremely small percentage might be melted into some low grade park bench. Absolutely zero plastic will be turned into high quality plastic pellets for industrial as a substitute for new plastic. It does not make me feel good, but not doing it makes me feel worse.I just voted today for real change. Voting matters, plastic &quot;recycling&quot; doesn&#x27;t** if you live in a place where you have meaningfully different options, not just two flavors of the same

&gt; For the record, I do recycle plastic.You don&#x27;t. Nobody does. The plastic you &quot;recycle&quot; gets turned into lower grade plastic and so on until it gets landfilled. For plastic, the only way is down.Steel, aluminium and glass are examples of materials that are recyclable.

D&amp;I is a coverage against lawsuits for discrimination. It’s a dog and pony show.

&gt; But when you actually see the process from the inside you see how optical and ridiculous it is. The entire program is a joke. No matter what one does the top of the funnel is so ridiculously non-diverse that it&#x27;s excruciatingly difficult to hire a diverse person.I agree based on my personal experiences.One of the concrete suggestions by the author of the blog post really strikes me as a step that we could implement, but we don’t: drawing from non-traditional backgrounds. And it’s because it’s an uphill battle. Much easier to do some low hanging fruit.I’m not a minority in tech, but coming into my current job I had a semi-traditional background. Even getting first rounds was a struggle, only ameliorated by having a professional network of tech people, which is very much not something that you can expect a non-traditional candidate to have.Seriously, my “get to phone screen” rate without network referrals was around 2-3%. With referrals was about 60%. That’s how bad it gets. So now when it’s in my direct control I go out of my way to look for non-traditional backgrounds in the pipeline and give them the benefit of the doubt during resume screening, paid for in hours I spend interviewing instead of programming

&gt; I am now more of the opinion that this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root causeCame here to express similar opinion and your articulation has succinctly and perfectly captured it so I&#x27;ll just add to it.Over the years I&#x27;ve come to realise that effecting real change to address the root cause is hard. It almost certainly won&#x27;t be done by private corporations; the changes need to be enforced by (and at) institutions that are answerable to communities e.g., right to quality education, a humane law enforcer. Not only is change going to be hard but slow as well. However with more and more institutions getting privatised (private jails, contracted police force etc.,) whose sole motive is to earn more profits I don&#x27;t see how anything is going to improve in the near future. So what ends up happening is every atrocity against oppressed community gets hijacked by these private mega-corps as they sense PR opportunity.To take another example; Diversity &amp; Inclusion. We do all the song and dance at the workplace to make it more diverse. But when you actually see the process from the inside you see how optical and ridiculous it is. The entire program is a joke. No matter what one does the top of the funnel is so ridiculously non-diverse that it&#x27;s excruciatingly difficult to hire a diverse person. The reasons are obvious, the entire education system (and society to an extent) is so rigged against oppressed community that it takes a miracle for one of their community to even make it to resume-writing stage. Instead of addressing the problem at the root cause (make it easier for them to get high quality education, lead a decent life) every corporation makes a big PR-noise around D&amp;I while in reality the work place continues to be non-diverse. Net result is we end up having debates like &quot;why should we reduce interview bar&quot;, &quot;it&#x27;s unfair to the deserving candidates&quot; while completely being blind to the root cause of the problem.&#x2F;rant

It doesn’t matter where you shop, plastic and food are constantly used together.

Off-topic, but I really enjoy products whose packaging I can dispose of well because it&#x27;s all paper and&#x2F;or metal. I buy Celestial Seasonings tea because there&#x27;s no foil, and I can compost the tea bags. But there are still plenty of products that I only find in plastic, like frozen fish. I mainly shop at Wal-Mart because I&#x27;m poor. Does anyone have any tips for someone on a low budget?

For smaller scripts, this is trivially resolved. For larger scripts, this is a bug, and the script should be updated with a more flexible solution that doesn&#x27;t rely on hardcoded branch names.

&gt; Though I initially sympathized with the name change from master to main (cause I don&#x27;t care what it is called)It seems you don&#x27;t have any bash&#x2F;zsh&#x2F;fish scripts which assume that the most important branch is named &quot;master&quot;...

Though I initially sympathized with the name change from master to main (cause I don&#x27;t care what it is called), I am now more of the opinion that this kind of window-dressing might actually be harmful as it distracts from addressing the root cause. It is a bit complicated as the name change in itself is not bad, but given the context, and that it distracts from addressing real issues it actually is.Same thing with plastic recycling, in and of itself it is better than landfill, but as it allows us to feel good and look away from the real problem (plastic is cheap because most impacts are externalized) the recycling of plastic contributes more to the problem than to the solution. I know people who traveled around the world about once a year, own a big house and altogether have a pretty big impact that could easily be reduced, but they do recycle plastic and think of themselves as somewhat environmentally responsible.For the record, I do recycle plastic.

Would scripts not already have broken on repos using non-default names?

Sure. We got a set of CI&#x2F;CD tools which, applied to a new repo started by a colleague, did not work.

Anyone else here whose script actually broke due to this change?

If your funnel isn’t catching certain groups then you need to do something as you’re missing the opportunity to hire talented people from those groups. Why shouldn’t that be another funnel?

I’m not the OP but am “non-traditional” - didn’t do CS at university, worked in sales before moving to programming.I don’t want a separate funnel thank you very much. I know some companies will reject my CV because of my education - that’s fair enough. I know some interviews will be harder for me. I prefer the risk of being filtered out early or having tough interviews over the lingering suspicion that I am a non-traditional hire.

&gt;Every summer countless tech companies of all sizes run internship programs, would it be a stretch to run an apprenticeship program of the same length for non traditional applicants?Specifically how would you define non-traditional, and in your opinion why should this non-traditional segment of people get a separate funnel?

I get this on version 2.30.1 so presumably a 2.30 change. I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re planning to move to main for definite, just that they&#x27;re preparing people to stop treating `master` as always the default branch

&gt; init: provide useful advice about init.defaultBranch&gt; To give ample warning for users wishing to override Git&#x27;s the fall-back for an unconfigured `init.defaultBranch` (in case we decide to change it in a future Git version), let&#x27;s introduce some advice that is shown upon `git init` when that value is not set.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;git&#x2F;git&#x2F;commit&#x2F;675704c74dd4476f455bfa91e72eb9e163317c10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;git&#x2F;git&#x2F;commit&#x2F;675704c74dd4476f455bfa91e7...</a><pre><code> git tag --contains 675704c74dd4476f455bfa91e72eb9e163317c10 | grep -v rc
 v2.30.0
 v2.30.1
 v2.30.2
 v2.31.0</code></pre>

I just tested this and don&#x27;t get any message.What version are you using?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;git&#x2F;xmqqwnu8z03c.fsf@gitster.g&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;git&#x2F;xmqqwnu8z03c.fsf@gitster.g&#x2F;</a>Based on this it does appear to be deprecated, the current favourite is &#x27;main&#x27;There are references in code to `PREPARE_FOR_MAIN_BRANCH`.You can see some commentary on the mailling lists: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;git&#x2F;CAMP44s3DExJ-F=MKhKyupr5M0RDvr8kJzxXbWeNzNjUN1bzXUA@mail.gmail.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lore.kernel.org&#x2F;git&#x2F;CAMP44s3DExJ-F=MKhKyupr5M0RDvr8k...</a>

I wouldn&#x27;t say it&#x27;s in the process of deprecating &quot;master&quot;. It&#x27;s just reminding user that they shouldn&#x27;t plainly assume that the default initial branch is, or will always be, named &quot;master&quot;.

Based on my comment here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26488240" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26488240</a>The &#x27;hint&#x27; is nicely worded, but there is sufficient evidence of a pending name change (likely to `main`) for the default.

Why do you think this means that git is deprecating master?Similarly, GitHub claims that git is making similar changes, and links to a &quot;Statement&quot; that actually says the opposite, and a code change that also does not include anything like making that change (both are from June 2020). Since GitHub&#x27;s claim is obviously in error, I wonder if it&#x27;s malice or incompetence.Is there some other evidence that git is going to deprecate master?

it should be noted that git (the binary) is also in the process of deprecating `master`.This is the message I get on my machine when running git init:<pre><code> hint: Using &#x27;master&#x27; as the name for the initial branch. This default branch name
 hint: is subject to change. To configure the initial branch name to use in all
 hint: of your new repositories, which will suppress this warning, call:
 hint: 
 hint: git config --global init.defaultBranch &lt;name&gt;
 hint: 
 hint: Names commonly chosen instead of &#x27;master&#x27; are &#x27;main&#x27;, &#x27;trunk&#x27; and
 hint: &#x27;development&#x27;. The just-created branch can be renamed via this command:
 hint: 
 hint: git branch -m &lt;name&gt;
 Initialized empty Git repository in &#x2F;tmp&#x2F;test</code></pre>

People will always find negative conotations for any word. Have you see UrbanDict recently?Words are not he problem, attitudes are.

I get the feeling sometimes that language is unstable in the absence of outside forcing.Stupid, moron, retard. People start using them as a pejorative and so a new neutral term is required.Lavatory, toilet, water closet, bathroom. People don&#x27;t like talking about poo so they keep using euphemisms to describe the room where it happens. This one is a favourite of mine as some people find &#x27;toilet&#x27; distasteful despite it being the furtherest from the actual action taking place.Very, literally. Not sure where this one is headed, but if it&#x27;s happened at least twice, it&#x27;ll shift again some time.Are we doomed to keep shifting language to keep up taboos and keep the meaning of words which naturally will shift?

American is not going to start the slave trade again because we stopped using the word &quot;master&quot; in software engineering

Everything changes, language changes, but I wonder if erasing negative words might make us forget their meaning and repeat the history behind them.

Oh I absolutely did. No reason for me to repeat the entire article in my own response to it, so I referenced newspeak instead.The map is not the territory, and you may simply be noticing the differences between your map and mine.

The argument of the author is that he feels like tech is ONLY doing the name changes and is congratulating themselves about being inclusive afterwards.I agree with this observation. For reasons that the author has articulated far better than I would in this comment, so please read the whole thing.

Eliminating the usage of words with offensive connotations from the English language is double plus good.edit:
Downvotes and the wording of some responses make me concerned that some folks may be unaware of the reference. Doubleplusgood is a newspeak word used in the book 1984. Newspeak is a language that is used to eliminate the ability for people to express unapproved thoughts because there are no words with which to express the concepts to others.

git config --global init.defaultBranch dom

As a bonus it&#x27;s even shorter than &quot;main&quot; and probably whatever the new terminology is for subservient processes.

We already claimed it during the sub prime lending fiasco.

Dom&#x2F;sub actually have negative history regarding women&#x27;s rights.

Maybe we can start using dom&#x2F;sub instead of master&#x2F;slave in tech.

Maybe it&#x27;s just me but, outside of tech contexts, I associate &quot;master&quot; and &quot;slave&quot; much more with bdsm than I do with actual slave ownership.

It’s the politician’s syllogism -with the added benefit of the ‘something’ being effectively free (no new headcount), though all the more visible by virtue of it being an annoying find and replace exercise all the line engineers get to participate in.Read to the end, and the author suggests SWE apprenticeships - I support the idea, but by contrast, it isn’t free, and would require some actual effort by line managers, so...

On the other hand, for the non&#x2F;new developers I’ve interacted with [non-US], “master” was a confusingly jargonistic name that has raised eyebrows for years. Being the “main” branch seems a much plainer, obvious name, and I think it’s an improvement entirely separate from any social reasons.Is it an empty gesture? Maybe? Does it cost more than a couple of seconds for making things clearer and making a minority of people people happy? No.It probably wasted more integrated time across all the people reading this article than just shrugging and changing it does.

Yeah. For my own projects, and&#x2F;or on my own command-line, I don&#x27;t care what &quot;ma&lt;tab&gt;&quot; resolves to. &quot;main&quot; is not a terrible choice.But as a teacher, the way this makes all the existing guides and tutorials wrong means I have to waste 15 minutes of my semester (about 1%) explaining this.In short, the main effect of this change is to very slightly raise the barrier to entry for new developers.

This explains my WTF moment when teaching a class full of students to push to the github classroom using push -u origin master and it being rejected and having to use main!

It is a politically correct term, yes. For now.

It&#x27;s a strange thing, I&#x27;ve been having to do training sessions explaining that instead of saying &quot;blind people&quot; you have to say &quot;people who are blind&quot; because the former apparently projects more about their identity when it&#x27;s important to underline that this attribute does not define themBasically there&#x27;s a movement to shift from inheritance to entity component, wanting to implement people with has-a descriptions instead of is-a descriptions. This enables data oriented optimizations so that society executes more efficiently &amp; can be more easily extended as new requirements are submitted by the mob<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acedisability.org.au&#x2F;information-for-providers&#x2F;language-disability.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acedisability.org.au&#x2F;information-for-providers&#x2F;l...</a>

It is the currently accepted term on the Euphemism Treadmill.  In my lifetime alone I have seen it go through colored people (perhaps the original source of your discomfort? and the &quot;CP&quot; in &quot;NAACP&quot;), Negro, black, Afro-American (which was brief but it doesn&#x27;t mean I didn&#x27;t have to rename a lot of anchor texts when the academic departments changed names to ...), African-American, then back to black, people of color, now finally capital B Black, with &quot;people of color&quot; apparently now a broader term of usage.

&gt; Is “person of color” an okay thing to say in US?I&#x27;m not English native so that could be the wrong term, not trying to offend anyone. In this context, I mean &quot;discriminated persons&#x2F;peoples&quot;.IIRC, I saw this on the rules of r&#x2F;publicfreakout (stating that videos representing &quot;POC&quot; would be moderated). For me &quot;POC&quot; means &quot;Proof Of Concept&quot;, so I asked and discover it was about &quot;Person Of Color&quot; and so I use this on English spoken Internet.But I agree, it&#x27;s a weird term and I never use this in my native language. Each country have different way to talk about racism and discrimination because each country have it&#x27;s own racism and discrimination problems.

Yes. Just think of it as a formalism - it&#x27;s the currently culturally accepted term if that&#x27;s the group you&#x27;re trying to reference.Lots of languages have a fuzzy formal&#x2F;casual split where usage is both context-based and a matter of respect, though I think the US is more unique in (1) the degree of energy focused towards coming up with formal names for demographic groups and (2) making them out of words that are also used casually.

It’s been a self label for some time. Given the fact that there is a lot of horizontal aggression built into The System, getting everyone to pull in more or less the same direction is progress in its own right.The terminology seems to be shifting to BIPOC, to include Indigenous peoples. I haven’t heard an a explanation for why Black is also split out.

Great question about the term &quot;people of color&quot;. Reminds me of when Apple posted on their home page, &quot;Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. For equitable education. For a more just justice system. And for Black and Brown businesses.&quot;. The part that particularly rubs me the wrong way is the term &quot;Brown&quot; people. And it’s uppercase. Who wants to be called a &quot;Brown&quot; person? I’ve never heard anyone called that before in my life. It’s incredibly degrading and reductionary. If I am Mexican or Indian, the last thing I want to be labeled is &quot;Brown&quot;. Thanks for reducing me down to a single divisive term. What is perplexing is that somehow this term is ok and so is &quot;black&quot; and &quot;white&quot;. But saying &quot;yellow&quot; or &quot;red&quot; is offensive. This inconsistency is absurd. Those that are pushing this language somehow think they are morally superior to those of the past. But in reality, they have stepped right into their way of thinking — seeing people by &quot;color&quot; and categorizing society based on it.

Is “person of color” an okay thing to say in US? It really rubs me the wrong way (as a non-native English speaker).To me it’s kinda like calling people with long noses “people of nose size”.

Big tech better make sure that they don&#x27;t fly too close to the sun. The sun being socialist takeover of the U.S. (i.e. true progressives, whose links to socialism are undeniable, taking over the democratic party). Because most of them would not came out of that transformation unscathed.

POC means people of color, aka non-white, yes? There&#x27;s a lot of Indian and east Asian representation in the tech workforce. You should be more specific about what you mean.

&gt; So while the tech community was rushing around, trying to do their best impression of a black square post on Insta I remember thinking, “oh for fucks sake, they’ve completely missed the point”. Why? They forgot to talk to people who are actually members of the black community.In practice, big techs don&#x27;t care about POC, they care about mobs.&quot;Inclusive&quot; words is just what make mobs happy and it&#x27;s cheaper to do than being accused of discrimination for real reason: POC representation in big tech.Changing a default branch name is cheaper than try to fix the real world.That&#x27;s the point, and that, unfortunately, the reason why the situation will never change: Because we act only on the exposed representation; movies, text on web site, etc.

Somehow I think I skim read and didn&#x27;t retain that paragraph! Thanks. I&#x27;m sure that says something about me...

He answered before you asked,&gt;Inevitably there will be some of you in the audience asking, “Well what do you want them to do? They’re trying their hardest, help them with some solutions!!”.&gt;I don’t want this post to be about The Solutions™ but here’s one for your noggin; there is this a significant intersection between career changers&#x2F;developers coming from non traditional backgrounds (i.e. people with no CS degree) and minorities. Put your money where your fucking mouths are and hire these people. Every summer countless tech companies of all sizes run internship programs, would it be a stretch to run an apprenticeship program of the same length for non traditional applicants?

&gt; I just don’t appreciate the idea that we as software engineers can now sit back and believe we’ve made some kind of positive change, coz we haven’t.Boom.So I&#x27;m indirectly asking a black software engineer by virtue of reading the blog: What are the things that should be done instead? Not a lot we can do it about stop and search. How do we actively bust bias? He slams the &#x27;meritocracy&#x27; meme: I know that is widely backed here. So what can be done instead?&gt; Personally, I have no attachment to any of these words.Sadly, I think a large proportion of people absolutely have a very strong attachment to not changing anything. Who will agree with you on this front but be against anything more substantial? I&#x27;ve been told on this board that the only racism is antiwhite.

Well I think heavy industry will do better weathering the wave of tech articles helpfully suggesting laughable solutions to non-problems. They don&#x27;t share the same weakness to slacktivist pull-requests.

Or &quot;robot&quot;&#x2F;&quot;bot&quot;.

Well that ruins the fun of the surprise a little... but I guess people can still look forward to real plot twist: who the &quot;masters&quot; were. Hint: it wasn&#x27;t the Moops!

For the lazy, here [1,2] are some wiktionary links. Assuming these are correct, wow, this makes the whole main vs master thing seem even more silly.&gt; SLAVE: From Middle English, from Old French sclave, from Medieval Latin sclāvus (“slave”), from Late Latin Sclāvus (“Slav”), because Slavs were often forced into slavery in the Middle Ages.[1][2][3][4][5] The Latin word is from Byzantine Greek Σκλάβος (Sklábos), see that entry and Slav for more.&gt; ROBOT: Borrowed from Czech robot, from robota (“drudgery, servitude”). Coined in the 1921 science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum&#x27;s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek after having been suggested to him by his brother Josef, and taken into English without change.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;slave#Etymology" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;slave#Etymology</a>
[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;robot#Etymology" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;robot#Etymology</a>

What, so now words don&#x27;t matter? Funny how that works, if only somebody pointed this out in the very beginning...

Because it doesn&#x27;t matter. Slavery isn&#x27;t an just an old concept.

...and nobody in the valley seems to be aware of the etymology for &quot;slave&quot; :)

I look at it the other way. The recruiters may not be inclusive by default. By explicitly informing the recruiters to be inclusive we remove the bias they have as well.

Doesn&#x27;t telling the recruiters that suggests they should take a skin color or gender when making their decisions? That sounds pretty bad to me and would be illegal in my country.

Lots of good points made in this. We have eradicated the usage of the exclusive terms in our team not recently but well before 2014. It&#x27;s a cultural change to be precise. We are very conscious of the biases that could arise. In fact, during hiring we specifically ask the recruiters to look for diverse pool of engineers.Still I concur with the OP&#x27;s statement that the percentage of African American in the tech industry is marginal (in the US, not sure elsewhere). I don&#x27;t know what we can do about this. But we have to change as a society and as individuals.

the point is that it was identified as an area of change at all, when given the reasons for doing so it is completely vacuous and existing in the absence of other change, but being used to satisfy a checkmark of change and self-congratulate.

It&#x27;s not that big of a deal really. Just a small name change

Isn&#x27;t this the exact sentiment that is causing the issues in the first place?

Why would you be ashamed because of your skin color?

Yes, flog yourself!  Repent for your sins!  If you draw enough blood on your back, the plague will stop!

I appreciate the empathy, I hope that my thoughts can help people direct energy in more productive ways.

As a white dude, I feel extremely proud because my ancestors abolished slavery.Oh wait no I don&#x27;t, because feeling shame or accomplishment for something your ancestors did hundreds of years ago that you had zero control over is a completely ridiculous concept.

As an independent who has both democratic party and liberalism as my part of my makeup I have to say this overcompensation from the far left is nuts. It&#x27;s some kind of white man&#x27;s guilt complex. I believe everyone is created equal and we have to always be diligent about keeping that at the forefront, but the terms master&#x2F;slave and their ilk (in english) were around looooong before the whole white&#x2F;black slave travesty happened. The same with white&#x2F;black list. Until I hear some prominent black leaders sayign the community at large has an issue with it then I don&#x27;t really care what some blogger or guilt stricken white people say. It&#x27;s overcompensation and cancel culture all rolled into one.

As a white dude, I feel really ashamed for this even though I&#x27;m not involved in this at all. Sorry man, you deserve a better world.

This is some technocrat fiction that has failed time and time again. There are towns in the US right now which actively reject help if it&#x27;s not coming in the form of &quot;more coal jobs&quot; (which aren&#x27;t coming back regardless of how much coal mining is actually on).Economic incentives don&#x27;t change people&#x27;s minds, they motivate them to double-down on their biases.

In all fairness, this sort of silly business is more representative of the &quot;Twitter left&quot;, comprised of cogs in a perpetual rage-inducing machine, than it is of &quot;leftists&quot; whose main objective is to address the limitations of capitalism, at varying degrees of willingness to work within the system vs burn it down.Of course, our media is run by billionaires so they capitalize on the identity politics to divide everyone and avoid having any real debate about economic policy, which is the only thing that really matters.I would so much rather be debating about the best way to roll out UBI than whether to call something &quot;main&quot; or &quot;master&quot;.

I’m a black American and agree with everything that this person in London wrote.It is also a common criticism of the American “left”, and is entirely accurate.For everyone perplexed about black Americans and other people of color walking away from the left, its because you&#x2F;they don&#x27;t see us as equals that can be bothered by the exact same things that other Americans can be bothered by: being told what to think, watching people be vicariously offended without asking if context in question is offensive, and the obsession with signaling instead of meaningful action.

GitHub, fuck your name change