If "Master/Slave" terminology in computing sounds bad now, why not change it to "Dom/Sub"?

Top and bottom

The issue is acronyms; there's millions of products, schematics, datasheets, and manuals that refer to them as MISO and MOSI with no further explanation. Any new standard that doesn't fit runs into the 15-competing-standards problem, and ought to be followed by an "AKA MISO" every time it's used.

I’m the passive one in my relationship.

Anyway, the Sub is supposed to be the one that's actually in control for this kind of thing

I think there's a better way to put that. It's often called a power exchange. Both people involved can rescind consent at any time, and there's also negotiation that happens before scenes to set up expectations and limits, but I don't know too many subs that want to be in control of a scene. My experience is they want to give up control in a way that is safe.

I thought the connotation was chattel slavery, not BDSM.

I'll always like Primary/Secondary.

I’ve seen ‘Active / Passive’ used, that seems alright

That's not always an accurate description though.

Consider a redundant two node database system where the second node holds a mirrored copy of the first node. Typically, one node, let's call it node1, will accept reads and writes from clients and the other node, let's say node2, will only accept reads from clients but will also implement all writes it receives from node2. That's how they stay in sync.

In this scenario node2 is not "passive". It does perform work: it serves reads to clients, and it performs writes, but only the writes received from node1. You could say that node2 slavishly follows what node1 dictates and that node1 is authorative. Master/slave more accurately describes this than active/passive.

There’s plenty of alternative terms to use without borrowing terminology from sexual roleplay.

Do I have news for you ....

the Sub is supposed to be the one that's actually in control

This is a myth, presumably meant to be reassuring to subs that are new to BDSM, at the expense of risk awareness. In principle the sub is no more "in control" than the dom is, and in practice they are often significantly less so.

Active / passive means something different.

Master / slave means one thing tells the other thing what to do, and the other one does it without question. The slave is not passive in performing the task.

It's a relationship that should never occur between humans, but it does occur with machines. The terms describe what is happening accurately. Other synonyms are approximations and lead to confusion in a field where confusions cause bugs / failures and depending on what you're working on, that could put lives in danger. Do you really want such confusion around the systems of an airliner, where everything has redundancy, master/slave relationships are common and something being passive means "it's only monitoring what's going on"?

You want more Boeings? Shit like this is a good way of getting there.

Honestly, while the controversy is incredibly stupid, it's not something to get worked up about. Not good for your heart 😜

You don't have to relabel anything, just keep using old names for old stuff and maybe consider switching to main for your next GitHub project? It's honestly not that big of a deal.

The problem with these token activism is that it's hollow in content. The intent might be good, but the action is almost pure virtue signalling.

Slavoj Zizek pointed out in multiple interviews that there's a pervert self-reflectiveness in the self-censorship: privileged people "enjoy" being guilty of their privilege, so it's more about themselves rather than the people they claim to represent. "Sorry, but you were naive and unaware of people being racist when they use these words, so let me stop them and now you are protected (by me) in an inclusive atmosphere."

A related radical freedom situation as an inverse to the above is that when friends get really close, even using racist slurs is treated as a gesture of intimacy, rather than racism. In an ideal world, the context in the public discourse would be so strong that even racist words lose their racist meaning ("oh, so you are joking as well") rather than the opposite (assuming there's ubiquitous "hidden" racism in the use of a word, even when there's clearly none).

Another critique is that it presents itself as a substitute of real solutions. Instead of addressing real problems, it provides a simple "everyday" solution, very much similar to the recycling movement. Of course we need to recycle, but we should be aware that it's not a substitute of radical real actions (e.g. stopping the big oil).

Right? I get that langauge evolves and things go in and out of fashion, but this self-censoring for things completely unrelated to the original or derogatory meanings is kind of a pointless exercise to me.

master over main

That one is the most stupid one too, because master in git doesn't even refer to a master/slave relationship. It refers to a different meaning of the word master, namely "an original from which copies can be made", as in master recording or master key. See 5b in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. And that's how it's used in git: any new branches are derived from master. Main just does not have the same nuance, because it does not imply a relationship between the branches, just that it's somehow more important than the others.

But of course, the real reason it was changed is because for companies like github it's easier to give in to the crazies who demand this than to fight them.

I'm a dev, and I'm the opposite. At my work, we use main over master. I thought it was a little silly when we first switched, but now I'm used to it. It's an arbitrary label anyway -- could easily use trunk/branch from SVN or release/develop or any number of other labels to keep track of code.

Hell, we got a new dev on the team a month or two ago, and he tends to name things 'feat/do-the-thing' instead of 'feature/make-it-go'.

It's not as big a deal as people online make it out to be.

No one told you to throw away anything. If it works for you then go wild. No one else cares what you do in private or a with your "dev friends".

I for one love shorts words to get meaning across. "main" was just sweet, the social issue thing was a good to have.

... sounds like she was fun!

I don't have issues with the original terminology either, and wouldn't really care if it was changed. But if it were changed to Dom/Sun then it would reinforce the meme of the stockings wearing femboy programmer. XD

I use 'main' on git instead of 'master' now (forced to change at work) and its shorter and snappier IMO.

But yeah there are more important problems out there.

people looking for something in their sphere of knowledge to be offended about so they can feel like they are part of “a movement”

I always thought it was just people looking for something in their sphere of influence that they could do to make a difference, no matter how small.

The computing world is known for being hostile toward most out-groups, and I’ll welcome any effort to change that, no matter how small and how silly it seems. The real change needs to be in the people but perhaps being cognizant of such details will help remind us all to be more open and welcoming

while in some ways I can see your point, I would just have a hard time saying this in a work meeting here in the deep south with black colleagues present

Leaving aside the problematic nature of the existing terms, the result was that people actually thought a little more about the relationships the things had and started using better/more precise terminology for the relationships: primary/secondary, active/hot/cold, parent/child, etc.

Net positive all round.

Until a couple of years ago, we had a brand of cheese called 'Coon', here in Australia.

The word isn't used as a slur over here, and the brand was simply named after the founder about 150 years back.

But it was getting increasingly on the nose as cultural influences from the US and everywhere kept seeping in, and it reached a point where it pretty much needed an excuse or at least an explanation.

So they renamed it; now it's 'Cheer'.

And at the time, there was all kinds of pearl-clutching about the malicious / disingenuous / officious / vapidly-offended / white-knighting / attention-seeking / etc / etc 'woke crowd' stomping in and making them change everything when it was perfectly good and harmless and stuff.

Six months later, nobody gave a single shit any more. Nobody died as a result or was even mildly inconvenienced, no great cultural traditions were lost, and contrary to several predictionsm newly-empowered wokeocrats have not risen from the shadows to re-gender everyone or whatever. It's that cheese with the blue white and green label, nobody reads it anyway.

My point is that small token changes cost virtually nothing, and even if they achieve little in and of themselves, the mere fact of people being willing to make them is of benefit. Small courtesies, you know? Returning your shopping cart. Smiling at passing dogs. It models kindness and consideration, and promotes the idea that those things have value.

Which is not to suggest that we must avoid giving offense at all consts; far from it. I'm one of those stereotypicallly abrasive genX types raised on ideals of free speech, punk rock, uncomfortable truths and loudly pointing out the elephant in the room no matter how many toes get stepped on. But when there isn't some burning issue that needs to be addressed, niceties be damned... then yeah, small courtesies. Give people that extra bit of room even if they don't strictly needed. It's nice to be nice.

Look back a handful of decades at all those cultural relics that your grandparents considered harmless and invisible. Asking people to drop them may have attracted ridicule and suspicion at the time, but looking back at some of them... oh dear god, really?

Hell, I remember The Black And White Minstrel Show on TV, and if you don't remember it yourself, it's far worse than you're imagining.

I like the world better without things like that, even the little seemingly-trivial ones, and even if it seems like empy virtue-signalling while you're cleaning them up.

Until proven otherwise, I assume either ignorance or malicious intentions by those who want to rename these “problematic” terms. It does nothing to improve the actual issues.

That's because the goal is not to solve the actual issue, but to feel better because they did something. Or to avoid noise generated by lunatics online.

There is stuff that was bad, white/blacklist doesn't make much sense, when the universal "code" for allow/disallow are green and red. Allow and deny list are much better name.

Master main, is fine by me, doesnt make much sense to call it master, its only the main branch nothing else.

Shit that didnt make sense was stuff like removing community episodes from netflix, because or "blackface" without any consideration of why its there or whether it has value, just blanket ban, it was stupid af.

No we need to replace all industry standard terminology and acronyms every few years or so to keep datasheets unintelligible. Shop teachers need to be able to call their students stupid for not knowing that "tension" used to mean "voltage" 90 years ago.

I understand, but we can also gradually transition to friendlier terms so that our very white very male tech bro culture can include some diversith.

I'm going to try to make new git branches with "main" instead of "master", now, and just not worry about it where I can't change it.

Ah yes we must be sure to continue making time for all our meetings and reports everyone!!

There is real, actual, injustice in the world that we need to address. Computer terms are not one of them.

It was changed a while ago, it's primary and secondary now. It's been that way for a decade+ at this point.

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

Updated the terms "master/slave" to "controller/target" throughout to align with MIPI I3C specification and NXP's Inclusive Language Project

Yes, this has gotten real traction.

I'd like it to be changed because I don't like saying "is the slave working? Did you check? To my black employees.

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.

The place I’m at changed all of its documentation to student/teacher instead of master/slave.

Nya

OwO and UwU drives. That's perfect.

A long time ago, in a job not so far away, I worked on a computer project where we were using Apache Jackrabbit.

I quickly learned that I needed to search for Apache Jackrabbit and not just Jackrabbit -- vibrators weren't relevant to the project.

Agreed lol. this opinion also works for the god-awfully named “gimp”

Stop discriminating then, see the sexiness in the servers, the horniness in the harddrive.

I look at “master” in our repo like you would refer to a master recording or a remaster, or similarly the gold master for when you could say a video game has gone gold.

Same for databases, master / slave does not really describe the relationship anymore. It's a primary, secondary, control node, read only or something else.

That's where you should use something more like top / bottom /s

I think in this sense, master is more akin to the 'recording' master - The best version of the recording to which others are generated, and all parts merged; no 'slaves' necessarily just the 'master'.

I think that's because in computer science most master/slave nomenclature comes from hardware with a command/control structure (still notable in things like Spark where the namenode/master node controls the data nodes).

GIT just took naming conventions from other existing design patterns (although I should probably look up sources to verify that assumption).

We renamed everything to keep shared pipelines working with one branch.

Yeeter/Yeetee

Is there a Lemmy equivalent of /r/brandnewsentence?

Master and slave racks might sound better

Ask Haiti about the level of obedience that is implied there :-D

For a distributed database there is also fragmentation/sharing though. In this case calling the nodes replicas is not accurate. I guess you would call these “shard” or “dsta” nodes.

You are right about the “slaves” not behaving, in fact they jump on the chance to become the “master” themselves once the current “master” goes down. Then there is the split-brain problem.

It's really more like a worker boss relationship, but I would hesitate to call database nodes “workers” because this one is usually used for a processing engine like Spark.

Gotta be careful with that one when talking data streams though.

A pub/sub pattern implemented for message queue flow is available in most cloud (and on prem) solutions.

Also not great when you’re trying to explain something to a client.

I'm white and I don't feel comfortable saying it/typing it. It's antiquated and weird.

But POC are not the only ones that have been enslaved.

Pretty much all races and people have been enslaved in history.

Slave does not equal North American POC slave and the term in this context has absolutely nothing to do with them. The only time it refers specifically to them is when discussing North American history (and maybe current history due to the fact that USA still enslaves people in prison)

One might argue that the term is outdated because slaves are less common these days, but it has nothing to do with POC (or human slaves at all). But I won't argue that because the term is very easy to understand and thus not outdated.

It's a weird phrase to begin with.

In law, the phrase "master / servant" has been around forever. It's the foundation of the law of agency.

Some tech bro picked slave instead of servant.

Not just that, it's bad and makes no sense in its technical context.

Server client is far better.

Daddy/princess and Owner/kitten. Keep it straight!

Master of puppets! And his puppets.

i like this one, though i think we should probably go with the properly terminology and use ventriloquist instead of master. We should go full silly.

That doesn't make sense depending on the context. New I2C standard switched to controller/target for example. This conveys that one device is controlling the other devices.

I have my primary, and my secondary, and my secondary secondary.

Leader/follower works though.

I don't get it

Too ambiguous- bottoms are kings.

Primary and secondary are usually peers, where the secondary takes over when the primary isn't functioning. Which isn't the same relationship, as the master/slave terminology indicates that if the master fails, the slave will also fail.

Parent/child is probably a better way to describe this kind of relationship.

This is the best thing I've ever seen

Why does this have but plug support lmao.

I mentally replaced cars with boats recently and it's been inducing nautical terminology everywhere I speak. Cap'n and Crew sounds great for this usage, it feels honest without the shock of great grandpa's heavyweight authoritarianism. I usually wind up stepping down to Spongebob or Pirates to filter out seriousness too, as long as the packet arrives and the replicas are jolly.

That’s the one I naturally came up with too.

Not quite the same meaning, as master/slave is forced, whereas dom/sub there's implied consent.

Also, pretty sure most companies would not be OK with the sex reference, which is just a bonus!

Slavery is a world wide problem.

*Clears throat in Bristolian

Does IEEE have a term for switch or am i about to get intimate with five ethernet cables?

In git the default branch was changed from master to main.

It wasn't. GitHub changed.

In high availability we use primary and secondary, or many other versions of the same idea (main/secondary, etc).

Which is fine because in HA it's about failover, not "who's in control".

There are areas where the master/slave terminology is used because the slave does what the master says. It's "the master has authority" not "if the master dies the slave takes over".

Different words mean different things.

top/bottom, clearly.

Redis, rabbitmq. There are infrastructure where all nodes work but only one node is responsible for properly and timely synchronizing changes, which is a hard problem to solve in a distributed fashion.

"Girlboss/Tier3"

Power bottom/service top erasure!

Weird hill to die on. Language changes. Some people think it's how new ideas are not only shared but how they're formed. You might be interested in Latin.

*delusional

I will fight to keep them that way.

No one gives a shit what you call your PCs. They're not rounding up a posse to come and forcefully rename them. Just take a breath.

And while you're unbarricading the door the rest of the world will be moving on.

Embedded systems run into this a lot, especially on low level communication busses. It's pretty common to have a comm bus architecture where there is just one device that is supposed to be in control of both the communication happening on the bus and what the other devices are actually doing. SPI and I2C are both examples of this, but both of those busses have architectures where there isn't one single controller or that the devices have some other way to arbitrate who is talking on the bus. It's functionally useful to have a term to differentiate between the two.

I've seen Master/Servant used before which in my experience just trips people up and doesn't really address the cultural reason for not using the terms.

Personally I'm a fan of MIL-STD-1553 terminology, Bus Controller and Remote Terminal, but the letters M and S are heavily baked into so much literature and designs at this point (eg MISO and MOSI) that entirely swapping them out will be costly and so few people will do it, so it sticks around

FINALLY, a comment about IDE drives! Master/Slave is correct in terminology and function for IDE drives.

There’s the “master” branch in git, often named “main” now. In distributed systems, there’s often “master” and “slave” nodes, often named “primary” and “follower”/“replica” now

We don’t share multiple devices on a single channel anymore - SATA, PCI-E, these techs have only one device per channel (or only a certain number of channels dedicated per device).

Right... This desire to change verbiage on a dead technological concept is kind of stupid. I taught in an R1 institution. This topic DOES come up. And nearly verbatim it was "While it's unfortunate naming convention existed... we simply don't operate that way anymore." It was never a problem.

All this other shit people keep bringing up like git branching... "Master" was a shit name for the main branch, and "slave" doesn't appear at all. So that's not even relevant and I simply don't understand this aversion to words just for the sake of manufactured "hurt".

Others are saying HA... Except that Master/Slave doesn't describe any HA I've worked with. Nor the terms were used in any of them.

systemd-subd

all I read is "ukulele semen"

Kill process or sacrifice child

ಠ_ಠ

We use this terminology in the warehouse I worked at to describe smaller orders that were part of a larger order. So you build all the child orders first, then assemble them into the larger parent order.

I wondered if it was ever used in other contexts.

Icinga2 uses it

Databses used to and switched to primary secondary

Code releses use master, develop...

Its all over software still but transitioning

Bluetooth used it as well, but have now switched to central/peripheral.