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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Recently I've tried to stay away from the culture war topics just for my personal sanity. It is a part of me not trying to be 'Terminally Online' so I've even given up on using Reddit(killed my user after bulk deleting all my comments) too so I wasn't aware that they had an outage recently. So they posted a post-mortem of the outage. As it turns out it is a casualty of the Culture War.

The nodeSelector and peerSelector for the route reflectors target the label node-role.kubernetes.io/master. In the 1.20 series, Kubernetes changed its terminology from “master” to “control-plane.” And in 1.24, they removed references to “master,” even from running clusters. This is the cause of our outage. Kubernetes node labels.

The "master eradication activism" is the cause not Kubernetes node labels.

I CTRL-F'd that post with the word "Master" to see how many people were talking about it, and only one person it seemed made a joke about how "so Reddit going woke was the cause of the outrage", but made sure to put a /S tag a the end of it...As one deleted replier put it, I mean, yeah wokeism literally broke reddit.

Surely Reddit were informed of this? Surely they updated kubernetes on an internal server.

I linked to their public post-mortem. Reddit is the den of scum and villainy alongside to Twitter when it comes to Social Justice Slacktivism. Chances on getting the company to publicly admit that the cause is an otiose language change that had a bigger impact on their lives than the actual change has on purported victims of that particular word, are nil, null, zilch, nada...

Well they did mention it. That’s how you know. It was buried in a long winded explanation.

it comes to Social Justice Slacktivism

Is it still Slacktivism if they paid a substantial price due to the beliefs they advocated for?

It is Slacktivism because they gloss over the fact that they have suffered for their beliefs, that the replacement of words does something for inclusivity. It is reified in their existence. It is being treated as if it is a thing, but the reason for it is forgotten if it is not admitted why they do it. And thus the action has no reason to exist if it is a ritual without cause.

This is beautiful. I was only just wondering whether there was anything resembling a religious take on programming, and "holistic" is close enough. Thanks!

You might like the Codeless Code

I think opening the floodgates of software developers to bootcampers hailing from non-technical backgrounds, and bereft of technical expertise, was a mistake. It is refocusing discourse in the profession away from technical discussions towards chatter of a religious, tribal nature.

I don't think it's bootcampers. Plenty of very-well-credentialed people argue for the elimination of "master" (and "whitelist/blacklist", and Lena, and all the other supposed bugaboos of computer science). Equally, plenty of people completely uncredentialed in computer science (who never went to a bootcamp, but are perhaps credentialed in some other field) attack these things. The bootcampers are more likely among those stuck cleaning up the mess.

I mostly agree with this description with a note that the largest exception I've seen is a complete lack of motion from universities and graduate degree holders to rename the masters degree. Even from institutions and people that I've seen replace the name elsewhere.

That's par for the course too though - changing masters degree would directly affect their social standing so it's a non starter, but anywhere else it's up for grabs.

No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert.

I have occasionally thought that the Culture War is really just bike shedding at a much larger scale, with which this description seems to agree.

they knew it would break people's setups but they did it anyway. https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/sig-cluster-lifecycle/kubeadm/2067-rename-master-label-taint/README.md one good thing about this linus philosophy of not breaking userspace is this happens less often. its very difficult not to break your users because they end up relying on behaviour you are not even aware of but breaking your users in order to fix 'offensive' naming seems to be a bad trade off.

Control-plane is a terrible name.

At least 'main' communicates something. Control-plane reminds me of the old Euphimisms bit by Carlin. A word so neutered, that it loses all semantic value.

In kubernetes, the cluster nodes that run everything are already called the control plane, and have been for some time.

My point still stands, it is a terrible term. Up there with dynamic programming for phrases that do more to mislead than provide clarity.

I resent the lack of creativity in choosing new terms, more than I do the deprecation of old ones.

edit: I have been overruled. The limited yet overwhelming majority on here seems to find control_plane to be perfectly descriptive of its task. I won't concede on the terribleness of the term dynamic programming though.

Having worked with kubernetes for years now, I have never found the term unclear or misleading. To each their own I suppose.

Lol I love this, super happy to hear about consequences from this ctrl+h stupidity. I built all the devops pipelines in my company and am so fucking ready for someone to tell me to rename the branches so they can fix every variable that references it across the enterprise.

On a side note, I hope you used a plugin to overwrite your comments with something else before deletion, I believe most scrapers and internal archives keep deleted comments.

On a side note, I hope you used a plugin to overwrite your comments with something else before deletion, I believe most scrapers and internal archives keep deleted comments.

I really don't care that there is a record still available. I just wanted to make it unavailable for myself so I don't get sucked back in. I tried to quit Reddit before but I ended up coming back, so I did the nuclear option of destroying all of it to have no reason to return. There is nothing in those comments that would come back and haunt me from an archive.

Recently I've tried to stay away from the culture war topics just for my personal sanity.

Rookie mistake. You will never maintain your sanity by running from the culture war because, as has happened to you, it will just follow you.

"Imagine it's culture war and nobody goes there. Then the culture war will come to you!"

Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? When you are terminally online and submerged into Culture War, you will perceive all Culture War related things more acutely.

Until some service you depend on goes down as a result of this crap. Or your employer and others in your industry start talking about how they're concentrating on hiring and promoting people who don't look like you. Or making you declare your pronouns. Or the grants you were applying for make it clear you don't have a chance unless you're in a minority group and doing work about that minority group. Or there's BLM riots in your city. Or the media you used to like for entertainment goes woke and is much less entertaining as a result.

The culture war is real, widespread, and has significant consequences.

Well it is not driving me insane if I occasionally see things like this. I know how futile it is to argue with people that don't have to take the consequences of their activism that they aren't changing a word but an interface. It will have downstream consequences and possibly with bigger impact than knocking Reddit offline for a period. They are simply impervious for such arguments.