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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Showerthoughts
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It only sounds bad to the fringest of the fringe that's deceivingly loud on twitter. Good luck trying to find even one real person thinking those terms should be changed. This kind of stuff is why people vote for Trump.
There is real, actual, injustice in the world that we need to address. Computer terms are not one of them.
But if I have the power to make a small change at work to both be more accurate and correct a minor injustice, why the heck not?! I can't fix world hunger, but I can at least start a discussion about changing some internal terminology
It was changed a while ago, it's primary and secondary now. It's been that way for a decade+ at this point.
Not every domain though. I still see master/slave in every relevant datasheets that I read, and I've never seen primary/secondary in newer datasheets.
That's interesting, because everything I run into now has primary/secondary or main and secondary. I've not seen master and slave for a good 5 years now, sure older stuff still carries it but most that new has swapped over.
I should recheck newer datasheets, but I still see master/slave nomenclature in STM32 doc and tools for example.
I'd like it to be changed because I don't like saying "is the slave working? Did you check? To my black employees.
But you're depriving the black employers of the chance to say it to their white employees!
Maybe its just the way you say it.
I say it with a hard R
Harder R if you want the SlaveR to whip the SlaveE :'D
Also just kidding. I really really dont understand a lot of the sensitivity and sentiment against words. Words are NOT Violence as long as you agree to be civil and not militant.
It's not obvious to realize this, but the luxury of thinking words are neutral is a privilege.
Think of it this way. If 5% of the time, when a person said "howdy", they punched you in the face. You would be very wary of anyone saying howdy. Just in case. Now imagine having to live on edge like that 24/7. It wears you down. It's exhausting.
Well, it costs me nothing to choose a different word besides howdy. And for that cost of $0 I can make someone else's life less anxious. I know how much anxiety sucks because I'm basically made out of it. So I'm going to do what I can to put other people at ease.
Now obviously black people know that the IT term master and slave are not about them. But they are also conditioned by society that, some small % of the time when those words come up, things go very poorly for them. So yeah, I would be twitchy about it too. Even if my rational mind knew it was silly.
To be honest I'd feel stupid saying that alout at anyone. They're not called that in my native language - I think.
The i2c spec--which is officially controlled by NXP--explicitly made the change in 2021:
https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/user-guide/UM10204.pdf
Yes, this has gotten real traction.
I think very few people mind changing it, and a few people want it changed, so it's slowly shifting across various use cases. I've only discussed the change from master/slave terminology with one person that affirmatively supported the change, and they didn't know that there's still slavery in the world today.
I don't know what to make of that, other than to say ending human slavery ought to be a higher priority than ending references to it.
I doubt that. Do you know how many system configurations depend on these keywords? Do you have any idea how many hours of work and system outages this would cause?
I've seen a few projects rename during major version upgrades, when everyone has to read the release notes and make changes, anyways.
Plenty of old deployed systems may continue using master/slave terminology, and of course some projects will stick to that language even decades in the future, but it was once more prevalent than it is now, and that declining trend looks like it will continue.
The place I’m at changed all of its documentation to student/teacher instead of master/slave.
... I question their relationship with their teachers of they think those are equivalent.
We had one guy at work like this. He was laughed out of the meeting.