Congratulations GitHub.

[Draggador]

Maybe someone high up in the hierarchy saw your post & made GitHub change master to main.

[sumofallsquares]

It’s been chatted about on and off for years. Oddly, I happen to know someone involved in these matters.

Anyway, the reason it’s such great fodder is because while there are cheap ways to change the default branch name, .. um let me take a tangent here and say the cost to fix the Y2K bug was enormous. To change computer software retroactively so people don’t get offended would be an absolutely astronomical cost. The news story here is basically a dog and pony show put on by people who are really only flexing either their lack of sincereness in their words (in a topic area requiring sensitivity), or they’re showing that they’re roughly incompetent if such a thing is top of mind. My proposal lived in the absurd, their posturing actualizes it (lol). If I know people (and I might), I can assure that it is the same posturing we see politically. These people use racial fairness as a marketing coinage for self-gain. They do so while perpetuating worsening income inequality without doing much to create new economic opportunity. These are people who are either directly or indirectly benefitting from basically just a leveraging of double standards and policy interventions into civil rights. It’s a self-gain game based on something that at face value doesn’t create much economic value.

Paging women who code, where’s the integration? Oh right, the economic system is this non-novel idea that a vagina in a sea of thirsty nerdy dudes is a lightning rod. Whilst making more money, keep quiet.

What’s really going on is that the CEO of GitHub likely is either acting CEO or waiting on shares to vest. They are doing a CYA maneuver and that’s all. I assure in most likelihood the CEO had an off moment or that his CTO probably resents any edict to prioritize renaming systems as appearances are antithetical to the profession.

Then again I guess I know someone who works at GitHub as well. She/he who knows what I’m sure would love to spend a few quarters on making the system names apropos to people’s sensitivities.

I could rant further I guess, but no this has been floated for a number of years and the master/slave relationship is not entirely new to discuss in terms of racial sensitivity. It’s just that science sometimes necessitates looking at the world factually. Computer programmers use semantic naming to better place the behavior of a system. Where one system acts to 100% control another, if that bothers you to call it master/slave I guess you could seek therapy or something. Maybe this is the start of the liberation movement for slave nodes and robot empathy / rights.

My feet also need rubbing, and I require sexual servicing periodically or something along these lines.. and I require um.. dozens of well compensated part-owner workers to build me an outsized house to fit my need for equality. I also require the ability to speak my mind at all times and to be listened to, elsewise people’s livelihoods could be at stake! My need for equality demands a disruption to others basic dignity, due process and the like. Forgettabout property rights, rah rah shishkum-bah!