this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2024
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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It sounds way less offensive to those who decry the original terminology's problematic roots but still keeps its meaning intact.

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[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If it’s referring to something like a mother/daughter circuitboard, I’ll use that. If it’s a host/client connection, I’ll use that. If it’s a primary/backup redundancy situation, I’ll use that. And those are just a few examples. There is rarely a good reason to use master/slave nowadays, since most situations already have better descriptors to begin with.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Can't we just change "slave" to "servant" and carry on?

[–] mlg 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You could but he has a point. The last time I used master/slave was for IDE drives which was 15+ years ago, and even then only because I happened upon a really old system using IDE drives.

The only thing I see left is "Master" by itself, like master branch. But that makes me think of like a jujitsu master which sounds really cool lol.

[–] pingveno 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, that definition of "master" is different than master/slave from what I can tell. Think the master copy of an audio recording. There are plenty of perfectly legit uses of "master," but there's no reason to use master/slave in this day and age. It was stupid to start doing so to begin with.

[–] dual_sport_dork 2 points 2 months ago

There are plenty of perfectly legit uses of “master,”

Like the Digmaster™.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Especially with how we say releases are "cut" from the master branch, it makes a ton of sense.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Why retcon something that hasn't been used in over a decade? ATA is dead.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

you could, but the connotations of master/slave have been integrated heavily over the years, and changing it willy nilly doesn't really accomplish much since we're talking about moving electrons through wires, or light through glass. So i don't think anybody really cares about it at the end of the day.

Realistically though, very little designed architectures these days operate on a master slave meta. At best there's one "primary" and several "secondary" or "follower" nodes behind it. Or some kind of democratically elected process for handling that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Sure, but if you're gonna change it at all you might as well pick a better metaphor.