It sounds way less offensive to those who decry the original terminology’s problematic roots but still keeps its meaning intact.
I’ve seen ‘Active / Passive’ used, that seems alright. There’s plenty of alternative terms to use without borrowing terminology from sexual roleplay.
Anyway, the Sub is supposed to be the one that’s actually in control for this kind of thing (otherwise you’d just be in an abusive relationship), so that confuses things when you start trying to applying it elsewhere.
The issue is acronyms; there’s millions of products, schematics, datasheets, and manuals that refer to them as MISO and MOSI with no further explanation. Any new standard that doesn’t fit runs into the 15-competing-standards problem, and ought to be followed by an “AKA MISO” every time it’s used.
I’ve seen “Main” and “Secondary” be used exactly for this reason, as they keep the same first letter so don’t require acronyms to be changed.
Just have to find synonyms that begin with the same letters, possibly in different languages.
Other countries all use the English terms.
Except for the French, probably.
Anyway, the Sub is supposed to be the one that’s actually in control for this kind of thing
I think there’s a better way to put that. It’s often called a power exchange. Both people involved can rescind consent at any time, and there’s also negotiation that happens before scenes to set up expectations and limits, but I don’t know too many subs that want to be in control of a scene. My experience is they want to give up control in a way that is safe.
Yeah, you’re right, that was a clumsy word choice. My experience is mostly from watching The Duke of Burgundy tbh
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 …
Active / passive means something different.
Master / slave means one thing tells the other thing what to do, and the other one does it without question. The slave is not passive in performing the task.
It’s a relationship that should never occur between humans, but it does occur with machines. The terms describe what is happening accurately. Other synonyms are approximations and lead to confusion in a field where confusions cause bugs / failures and depending on what you’re working on, that could put lives in danger. Do you really want such confusion around the systems of an airliner, where everything has redundancy, master/slave relationships are common and something being passive means “it’s only monitoring what’s going on”?
You want more Boeings? Shit like this is a good way of getting there.
I seem to have stumbled into an argument that people are more passionate about than me. I mentioned I’d seen ‘active/passive’ used (in computer networking), and in that context, it ‘seems alright’ (in the sense of actively giving demands, vs. passively accepting them [and doing what it’s told, of course])
If someone has made good-faith request not to use certain terminology (like Master/Slave), then I’m generally more interested in finding acceptable alternatives than I am in dismissing their concerns outright. If, at the end of a proper search for alternatives, nothing suitable can be found, then fair enough. I’d question the idea that it’s really impossible to find something else though, but - for now at least - I’m sure that Dom/Sub isn’t it.
Same here - I’m more interested in a suitable alternative than to argue whether they are justified in their concerns.
I don’t think there’s a single right answer though. This terminology is used in many scenarios, each a little different and each with a potentially different answer
- Most git distributions now default to “main” and some variation of branch. It was a trivial change and seems as meaningful.
- Jenkins changed from master-slave, to controller-agent (or node). I’m still getting used to it but no big deal.
- Many DB or service distributed systems changed from master-slave(s) to primary-replica(s) and that also works
Wait until you find out how many programmers don’t even speak English. They must not be able to understand any of this if it’s so confusing to native speakers, right?
The consequence of updating language is not plane crashes. You need to update the version of the human interaction API that you’re using.
