Yeah well you just suggested “final” which makes as much sense as master to me.
Puppeteer of puppets I’m pulling your strings
I like the popping in the consonance.
Austria had a centuries-long conflict with the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Army included blacks:
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A common theme in these comment sections is the assertion that the dark=bad, light=good dichotomy is the result of racism. Somebody always asserts that it predates racism (in the American black race vs white race sense) and is shot down. It’s often suggested that the association of darkness or the color black with evil is a particularly white thing.
Two interesting (to me) questions: (1) do non-white cultures have the same preference for light over dark in their own languages? (2) do they have a corresponding preference for dark over white?
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And one more question…
(3) did this preference change upon contact with lighter or darker-skinned people?
Indeed, and in fact the “Austro-Turkish War” (1716-1718) mentioned in that article is more properly referred to as the Fifth Austro-Turkish War. But that was long after Constantinople fell in 1453, and people have been seeing themselves as Defenders of the Light against the Forces of Darkness long before that. Also, why bother with propaganda that only applies to 15% of the enemy troops if you can instead describe all of them as a “horde of unbelievers” without reference to their various skin colors?
Well yeah…that would certainly make a difference in the budget, if you don’t have to pay out severance. 
Oblivious prejudice and inclinations don’t mean you are purposely bigot or a terrible individual - it implies you have some instilled practices that you don’t know about that might be destructive to other people.
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In some asian cultures (chinese, japanese, but not so sure about indian) this dichotomy is associated with a class component and colorism.
If you have/had to work in the fields, you’ll get a darker skin, but if you are rich enough to have people who work for you, or have a bureaucratic job, you stay out of the sun and keep a lighter skin.
And, since you are just trying to reduce the idea of what kind of work (and how much them value) to the color of their skin, you also get the opposite effect of assuming that people with lighter (darker) skin are better (worse).
I think this explains why some cultures with a late contact with black people already have a racist framework prepared to deal with them.
I’m not so sure about it, but i think that even in europe this was present, but the class component was shadowed by the more visible racial component.
Terms and recommended replacements include:
Whitelist becomes allowlist.
Blacklist becomes denylist.
Master/slave becomes leader/follower, primary/replica or primary/standby.
Grandfathered becomes legacy status.
Gendered pronouns (for example "guys") become folks, people, you all, y'all.
Gendered pronouns (for example "he" or "his") become they or their.
Man hours becomes person hours or engineer hours.
Sanity check becomes quick check, confidence check or coherence check.
Dummy value becomes placeholder value or sample value.
Recommendations here make sense to me. While seemingly small and unimportant, this is mostly about being mindful of others. If something bothers people, it takes very little effort to rename variables or try and change how we speak with each other.
For example, would folks like the company leadership to call your team “resources” or “people”? It’s easy to miss at first glance, but this sort of thing can add up.
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I work in tech. I’ve long since stopped using terms like master/slave, and in general I don’t use white/blacklist anymore (although sometimes I slip back into the old terminology). I often struggle with ableist terms like sanity check and dummy, though. It’s a challenge when you spend years using this deeply ingrained jargon, but in an effort to foster inclusiveness i think it’s worth doing.
(And I don’t let the angry mostly white men complaining about “political correctness” and “where does it stop‽” get me down. Fuck ‘em.)
I have long used guys/dude as a gender neutral term but I understand that can be misconstrued so I am trying to break that habit.
tl;dr, just make an effort, people. It’s not that hard. And if you mess up, try to do better next time.
ETA I’ve always been a fan of the very meatspace analogy of “smoke test” instead of “sanity check”.
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Aren’t smoke tests and sanity checks different things? IME, a smoke test is a battery of checks that, given expected input, the system returns expected output and is run on a schedule to determine that the system is in a good state. A sanity check usually is specifically done after a change to determine that system response is within normal bounds… they tend to be customized for the change that has been made.
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For me the smoke test was 1) build or repair a device; 2) apply power; 3) if it smokes, it fails. Voltage regulators on one circuit board actually exploded when mis-powered. Massive failure. I recall a moped engine that did that too.
For sanity test, substitute reality test.
Not at all.
What makes someone “a bad person” is when that unconscious racism and bias is pointed out to them, and the person/people in question not only refuse to course correct, they double down on being selfish assholes.
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They never made any sense to me, and it’s not like I’m exactly a noob.
Even in the old days, was the primary drive controlling the secondary one, or was it just passing signals along because it was a convenient way to connect the cables together?
AFAICT it was always misleading and wrong. “Default drive” and “alternate drive” or even “near drive” and “far drive” would have been better.
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Pedantically, yes, but the terms are often used interchangeably.
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There is a discussion of colour terms in old english here.
Folk-taxonomies in Early English
Latin has a bunch of synonymous terms for black (nigr-,acr-) and white (candid-, alb-). The distinction is hard to reconstruct, because post classical latin speakers tended to systemize all the subtleties out, but one interpretaion is that acr- and alb- are dull, and the others are glossier, So ebony might be described differently than a charnel house.
[The wikipedia article on such things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology) notes that some have chosen to use “primary/secondary”, mysql has chosen to use “primary/replica”, and salt has chosen to use “master/minion”-- perhaps the last will face the issue again-- python had an intermediate “fix” that referenced “pliant_children” which then became “helpers.”
So some libraries were using “master” in the sense of a process that controls other processes, and some were using it the sense of an “original” that is copied, or replicated. The latter usage suggests that “master and slave” were copied out of habit-- Orwell refers to this as a dying metaphor..
Definitely used to be the case in Europe.
It does seem to have flipped around with the invention of “going to the sea for vacation”, and with the decline of the agricultural sector.
Until 1900, aristocrats prized the “noble” paleness of their skin, and the “peasants” had to work outdoors in the fields. Since then, a smaller percentage of people actually works on farms, and there are plenty of low-prestige jobs that are done indoors. And suddenly the rich people are the ones who can afford spending significant time on beaches.
Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: ‘Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale’
Of the anticipated backlash, Williams stated: “Of course it is around this point someone jumps in with an etymological argument about why people should not be offended. Etymological arguments do not scale. The scope and pace of Linux to reach new developers exceeds the ability of historical terminology defenders to describe ‘no, not that connotation’.”
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Even in Asia, especially in Japan, having a lighter skin was a mark of superiority - of being in the upper class so you didn’t have to labor in the sun.
