Mastodawn

Tobi Lütke y'all. CEO of Shopify y'all. 🤡

The good news is all their blustering and peacocking is in fact a sign that the critics are getting under their skin. They simply are unable to ignore us, so they mock and jeer us.

Keep it up folks! Nothing bothers them more than the truth.

Sure got some high-caliber smarts over there on the former birdsite. IroncladDev, firing guns by day, posting DHH memes by night, and making fun of "angry slum-dwelling indians" along the way.

Stay classy!

https://github.com/Plan-Vert/open-letter

The “Plan Vert” open letter to request that #Ruby on #Rails disassociate from DHH is only 7 signatures away from reaching 100.

It includes a former Rails core member, Eugen Rochko creator of Mastodon, Aaron Sumner of Everyday Rails, Ryan Bigg author of many Rails books, Lucas Dohmen author of “The Rails Way” series, Peter Boling maintainer of OAuth gems, Denis Defreyne creator of nanoc, and many others.

This is a significant milestone!

Have you signed the letter yet?

GitHub - Plan-Vert/open-letter: An open letter calling for a hard fork of Rails to remove DHH's influence

An open letter calling for a hard fork of Rails to remove DHH's influence - Plan-Vert/open-letter

GitHub

#Ruby #Rails #RubyCentralTakeover

Imagine being such a small-minded, petty individual that you proudly advertise that the *main branch of your repository* isn't named "main". Because calling it "master" will really own the libs…zomg we're all quaking in our boots at his gigachad demonstration of superiority.

It's as dumb as dumb can get.

Do YOU want this person maintaining YOUR #OpenSource code repositories??

Evan Light

@jaredwhite I'm a progressive. Reading his post on it, yes, he rankled at "main" but went with it. https://it.uw.edu/guides/identity-diversity-inclusion/inclusive-language-guide/ seem to push his buttons.

Many of those phrases resonate with me as problematic whereas others seem relatively innocent.

This is also part of how we progressives lose the rest of the population: introducing new ideas and jargon so quickly that we lose the non-progressives—not conservatives so much as everyone else.

For example, a neologism I recently heard of was "stochastic terrorism". This one doesn't even make sense! It reads as something totally different than the intended meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_terrorism

"Master", yep, I get it. It took me a couple beats when I first heard but yep. But we are going too fast for our own good. That's me thinking pragmatically versus "conservatively".

IT Inclusive Language Guide

A UW-IT reference for software and other information technology content

Information Technology

@elight I don't wish to sound combative, but I think it's a pretty measured approach to examine the origins of terms we regularly use in technology. master/slave, male/female, whitelist/blacklist…finding alternatives and in some cases truly improved descriptive terms helps move the industry forward. "main" for the main branch makes much more sense than "master"…how are source branches “slaves” anyway? And allowlist/denylist is self-explanatory.

What's your objection to “stochastic terrorism”?

@jaredwhite I agree with you. I'm sorry if I caused defensiveness. Not my intent.

I'm speaking not to the content but how we Progressives tend to introduce so many neologisms so quickly that it is a way that we reliably fall out of touch with the rest of society.

"Stochastic" implies a random distribution. How that relates to the intended meaning of "stochastic terrorism" seems unclear to me at best and this is with my level of education.

I don't see us doing a good job of connecting with people who have less education. I don't react well when I feel condescended to. And it is damn hard, when attempting to inform, not to come off as pedantic and holier than thou. I struggle here, now, to do just that.

I very much believe that is where the initial pushback begins for non-Progressives.

If I may be so bold, for example, your attempt not to read as combative could be read as a righteousness that brooks no disagreement. And I'm saying this as a progressive who has been struggling not to speak in that very same way—which is likely true for me as it is not uncommon feature of autistics which I am.

@jaredwhite Is my response any clearer for you than my initial? If not, very open to engaging further.

@elight I agree that it's hard to have nuanced conversations about complex topics on social media. And I think a lot of the smoke out there around “woke scolds” does come from a certain sector of Terminally Online discourse where accounts—even well-meaning—post nothing but screeds 24/7. It can be a lot. I try not to be that way. My natural demeanor is happy-go-lucky, believe it or not!

I don't agree terminology has changed too quickly. People harmed by bad speech have a right to expect change.

@jaredwhite I'm 52. I became an alleged adult only just as "political correctness" became a thing—and before I had decided for myself which party, if any, I subscribed to more.

So take this anecdotally: I agree with every point except for your penultimate. I say all that I have as someone who has been one of those people who initial resisted. I just cared enough to invest a LOT of energy listening. And I had a few people who were willing to step back from their justifiable rage to teach me. Most people are not so fortunate to have both of those.

@elight I do understand where you’re coming from! I'm in my early 40s, and I spent a good portion of my younger days knee-deep in conservative evangelical Christian Nationalism. I understand that movement better than many who are in it understand it themselves.

And OK, I can't claim I ejected out of there because of a few well-placed scathing tweets which shocked me.

At the same time…

Folks in harm's way were not obligated to placate my sensitivities. My ignorance is not their problem.

@jaredwhite As autistic, I feel that way too: their ignorance is not my problem.

And, as I read your words, no, it's wrong. Their ignorance is exactly my problem. Much of the reason that I've suffered so much throughout my life is that no one could tell me what I was or that I needed different support than other people.

Ignorance.

And people *still* don't understand that. They're still ignorant. And it is my problem. But it is also so exhausting to attempt to teach people only to be shutdown time and again.

@jaredwhite Being one of those outside groups is exhausting and terrible. It means living in a subculture on, at best, a fringe of society. That's always been me—I just didn't know why until ~6 months ago.

So, yeah, that's where allies come in. But someone has to educate the people who become the allies. I don't see how we marginalized people don't have to at some point educate. And we shouldn't have to. And that applies for all marginalized people.

@elight Regarding stochastic terrorism as a phrase, I think the idea there is someone is spouting such incendiary rhetoric on a regular basis that it statistically increases the likelihood of violent attack against their perceived enemies. In other words, that person is engaging in terrorism in the sense that they're seeding a population with hateful ideology and the inevitable outcome is that “at random” there will be a perpetrator(s) of violence directly acting on that hatred.

@jaredwhite Now *that* definition resonates. Their speech moved the Overton window (another term I've heard conservatives complain about) so far that violence became inevitable as violent language became acceptable.

I blame Trump for almost all of this. Before him, we had troglodytes like Richard Spencer. We folks in the DMV knew how to deal with him. When it becomes normalized for Nazis to live among us, I don't know how we don't respond like ol' Cap did back in the '40s.

@jaredwhite And maybe *I* am still part of the problem—because I felt so damn proud of my city on the day when Spencer was punched in the face.

Florent Bécart Sep 26

@jaredwhite @elight I was told that, in the context of version control, "master" refers to a master record, in opposition to copies. Therefore, the meaning is not related to slavery.

"Master" and "slave" have been widely used together for file systems and databases though. I agree that switching to more appropriate wording is a no-brainer.

𝘌𝘥𝘪𝘵: 𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 @mathew 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘭𝘺. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 “𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳” 𝘪𝘯 𝘎𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 “𝘮𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 / 𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦” 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘉𝘪𝘵𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘦𝘳.

@fbecart @jaredwhite Exactly. I've seen it the same way. However, I adapted. But, then, I'm a Progressive. I want to respect others and adapt accordingly. Many are not so flexible. They see the rate of change as troublesome. And they haven't felt so misunderstood until we came along and told them that so much of what they take for granted is inherently wrong and even evil. I don't see how that doesn't create an us versus them dichotomy.

Part of being Progressive is a certain impatience for change. And that's understandable. Much of that change took too long before and much needed change (to us) still has yet to occur. For example, we still need to codify into law, preferably Amendment, that all people, LGBTQ and otherwise, are entitled to the same legal protections as are currently held by cisgender folks (although "cisgender" appears to be another trigger word for many non-Progressives).

@fbecart @jaredwhite And yet this is part of the problem, yes? That these terms have become used for so long that they have become engrained in us as normal.

Yet when we look at the meanings and histories of these words, their established place in a relatively new field (as, in the grand scheme of things, our field is relatively new) only reaffirms a normalcy that should not be.

That's to say, perhaps we should be viewing the words "master" and "slave" as the equivalent of four-letter words because of how they've been used—as verbotten as a certain "n" or "c" word, in American culture.

Antwan van Houdt Sep 27

@fbecart @jaredwhite @elight Even though I agree with all of that I often find one argument missing. Who cares about master, main is less to type. woop!