Or ctrl+w to close the fucking site and never come back.

It’s apparently a hobby and to be competitive, you need to be able to spew bullshit at amazing rates. Personally I’ve maxed out at 140 wpm

I’m limited by the rate at which I can think of bullshit.

yet all I needed is a “this side up” symbol …

Platforms like reddit and Tumblr benefit from a friction-free sign up system.

Even on Reddit new accounts are often barred from participating in discussion, or even shadowbanned in some subs, until they’ve grinded enough karma elsewhere (and consequently, that’s why you have karmafarming bots).

Is this a problem here?

Not yet, but it most certainly will be once Lemmy grows big enough.

If your average Windows user calls tech support, they’ll get a simple answer

They’ll get a simple answer alright. In fact, they’ll be lucky if they get any answer at all that is not reboot, retry, reinstall or some other cargo cult nonsense from some on-paper “MCSA” in a third world country.

And sorry for going on a rant here, but Windows tech support forums are truly the shit tier of all tech support forums, because very few people actually have the skill to properly diagnose problems in Windows when something outside of the realm of expected behavior occurs. It’s all learned behaviorisms instead of understanding: reinstall your drivers! defrag your hard drive! run ipconfig /renew! clean your cache folder! delete your cookies! Never: “look in the system eventlog for an error event coming from this source, and tell me what the error code says”

What is the problem with “jargon” anyway? You can’t discuss technical things without using technical language.

If you take a bunch of Windows nerds (yes they exist), and get them talking about group policies and registry edits and powershell cmdlets, you get the same thing.

But people whose life or personality doesn’t revolve around their computer should also be protected from user hostile and privacy invading practices.

people not knowing shit about tech is not their fault

I don’t agree with much else of what you are saying, but you are quite right here. We should indeed not throw people under the bus because they’re not tech savvy and only know how to use Windows. They need to be defended from all those horrible anti-human and privacy invading practices by Microsoft and other Big Tech companies as well, and we should keep fighting and pushing back on those companies pushing their anti-human features, regardless of whether an alternative exists.

BUT, ultimately Linux is the answer, and people are not wrong for pointing that out. It’s the only viable alternative that is user respecting by design. It’s the only way to free yourself from the abusive relationship between you and Microsoft, because much like an abusive partner, Microsoft will never change. So if you’re tech savvy, and you would be able to switch to Linux but for some reason you don’t, I have little sympathy for your Windows problems.

Ah crap, was replying on an old tab that I hadn’t refreshed.

Ah crap, was replying on an old tab that I hadn’t refreshed.

deleted by creator

It was much easier to “hide” sit back then unless you were in the know in the industry.

It wasn’t hidden. Everybody knew back in the day what an evil piece of shit he was.

It has just been forgotten about and many current adults weren’t old enough, or even around, in the heyday of his evil empire, so he has been able to whitewash his image. My 50 year old ass remembers though. Fuck Bill Gates.

Take a breath dude

Can you not please with the condescending language? Maybe you’re the one who should take a breath and read my post calmly. Anyway, the guy above me asked, I gave an answer to cover all the bases.

The default branch name of git isn’t that important to me either, I’ll manage with main or master. But at the same time it does irk me especially since this kind of language policing has become an industry wide trend, and it’s just a stupid thing done for stupid reasons. Am I still allowed to express why I find it stupid?

it’s trivial to change

It isn’t as trivial as you make it out. I’ve already encountered repos where there was both a main and a master branch, both with different commits, because some developer got confused, and it was a nice mess to untangle. But hey, let’s change some more stuff around for no good reason.

If there’s any chance it helps maintain a hostile workplace/industry

I can think of a lot of things that contribute to a hostile workplace, but the default branch name of git? Seriously? Even the people who pushed for this don’t actually believe that themselves.

Why care about Master at all?

I’ve already explained all my reasons, but I’ll reiterate. To summarize I basically have five main issues with it

1. The change was done in response to attempts at language policing and bullying by a vocal and militant minority. Giving into it is a form of appeasement towards an unreasonable demand.

2. The change retroactively modifies a terminology that was already agreed upon. Like, if git sprung into existence today, not many people would have an issue with it if they would call it main or trunk or primary from the get go. But that’s not what happened. Git was released in 2005 and it used master terminology. As a consequence, many existing repositories also use master. Now when someone is working with branches, like doing merges or pull requests, they suddenly have to remember: oh in this repository it is main, but in that repository it is still master. Or they have go out of their way to modify decade old repositories, potentially breaking all kinds of behind the scenes CICD stuff. Or they have to go out of their way to revert the default on all systems that they’re working on back to master. In any case, this change is a source of errors and wasted effort for zero net good.

3. It does no good in the real world other than making do-gooders feel good about themselves, and giving a capitalist entity some PR to appear more progressive than they are. We all still have masters, existing slaves are not freed, no historical wrongs of slavery or inequality are righted.

4. It’s a misguided change in this case because the word master in this context doesn’t even have a relationship to slavery. Just like a master degree you may hold, or a master key or a master recording of your favorite album have no bearing on slavery. Note that there are no “slave” branches in git.

5. Finally, in the case of git, master is simply more accurate than main because it carries a nuance (derivativeness) that main does not.

There’s no need for master terminology there

Nobody said there is a need, you could call it foo or bar and it would still work. It just that master more accurately describes what it is. Main for example does not describe a derivative relationship, master does.

Also, master in this context is totally unrelated to slavery so I could also just as easily say that there was no need to replace the existing terminology either. It doesn’t solve any real world problems of historic or currently existing slavery, and it doesn’t make anyone’s life better. The only reasons why it was done were appeasement and virtue signalling.

Is it not the main working branch

No it is not. On large distributed projects for which git was designed, you typically don’t directly work on main/master but you create a working branch to do your changes, and when they are ready you merge them to main/master.

There are many types of git workflows, but main/master usually contains the code that is deployed to production or the latest stable release and not some work in progress.

When you start a new project, do you open a new branch or create a whole new repository?

You have to define “project” for that.

• Is your project a change to existing code -> new branch, merge to main/master when done
• Is your project something new that stands entirely on its own? -> new repository

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 …

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.

No 7 sucked too. It just came off the back of Vista which was a real hot mess, so 7 appeared better.

The thing is, Microsoft has always had an adversarial (or abusive) relationship with its customers, forcing things on them that most of them don’t want. Like active desktop and IE integration in Windows 9x, “activation” and Fisher Price UI in XP, bloated (for the time) Aero UI that required a 3D capable GPU in Vista, UAC in Vista, forced automatic updates in 7, abandoning the start menu in favor of that awful tile UI in 8.x, telemetry you can’t disable in 10, a start menu that acts more like an app store and advertising place in 10, forced TPM and Microsoft accounts in 11 … the list is endless. And then when they back down on one thing, people are like: “Hurray, the czar heard us! Windows is actually good now!” … forgetting all the other things they have been forced to swallow in the past.