General > General Technical Chat
'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts
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Mastro Gippo:
Well, here's a petition:
https://www.change.org/p/oshwa-stop-whitewashing-in-engineering
bd139:
Well it’s change.org so that’s dead already.
Nominal Animal:
It's always a good idea to try and examine the idea from a completely different angle, but it is important to not get caught in the mental holes; to be analytical and rational about it.


--- Quote from: paulca on June 30, 2020, 06:47:20 pm ---Consider a protocol which referred to roles and relationships such as Pimp, Whore, Trick inappropriate?
--- End quote ---
As far as I understand, "pimp" is someone who controls prostitutes, "whore" is a prostitute, and "trick" is either a prostitute's client, a cunning or deceitful action, or one of a few other meanings; and a machine cannot prostitute itself, as it is just an "adult toy" when used for any such purpose.  Also, I believe the term is "bestiality" if animals are involved.

Control, on the other hand, is perfectly generic relationship, and is only objectionable when the controlled one is a sentient being or an animal suffering due to mistreatment.  In a technical context, without anything alive, there is nothing objectionable in master-slave relationship.

So, I do not see the analogy or connection between the two sets of terms: One set has technically-relevant meanings, while the other does not.

(As to "trick", I often describe a particularly important but not immediately obvious part in either software or hardware as "the trick is ...", so I guess I already use that one.)

A better comparison would be to ask if "bleeder" instead of charger and "leech" instead of chargee/charged device would be inappropriate.  (I think charger is better since it directly relates to the thing transferred – charge – but would not consider "bleeder" and "leech" inappropriate or offensive either.)
Nominal Animal:
That reminds me:  A lot of my programs utilize pools of worker threads.  Do you think they'll ban that, worker, too?

If "master" and "slave" are offensive in a technical context, having a "worker" do menial software tasks must be too, I guess.  :palm:
Mastro Gippo:
After blocking comments on the article, Hackaday also deleted almost all of the 200+ comments on the facebook thread: https://www.facebook.com/hackaday.io/posts/3518305734849345
It's interesting that of the 200+ comments that were there, only 16 are left. The community has spoken, but the hackaday fascists want to impose their way denying free speech. They have no respect for people, but want people to respect their ideology.
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