I’d learned about this last week, and this stuff is a bunch of Wikipedia searches so forgive me if I miss anything :]
Similar to git master and whitelist/blacklist having addressed racist origins, I’ve just learned that “ricing” – i.e. way-far-from-default, colorfully souped-up *nix customizations – came from a derogatory word for Asian “riced out” cars.
(click to enlarge spot where I came to learn about this)
Example in the lemmy.ml/c/linux community.
The linked Wikipedia article doesn’t list *nix ricing specifically, but it’s probably not a far reach – for example, tech’s master-slave came from cars too.
Now I’m not here to start a debate on whether the term itself is bad. The arguments are done to death and predictable (old threadhope I can link here). Rather, I posit that we could probably invent a new term if we forced it hard enough.
For example, 4chan forcibly invented the use of the ok hand for “white power”, as a collective prank (Wikipedia).
Further, Tumblr invented 'then beg' as an insult response to 'I beg your pardon/to differ'. (click to enlarge)
Based on Pukicho.
So why can’t Lemmy invent something too?
Here are some earlier takes. (click to enlarge for source, but they are listed below anyway)
I surmise it has to be (1) somewhat unique and (2) short and nounable/verbable.
- Customization doesn’t fit – it’s too broad. Changing the wallpaper is a customization – diagonalizing your screen is a rice (term to be replaced…).
- Bespoke doesn’t fit either. That’s for a duct-tape script you hack together.
- Pimping out… is not a good alternative. It preexists(citation needed?) and has inertia but it’s not any better.
- Souping up… doesn’t roll off the tongue so much. But it’s food-related (and thus not far from “rice”). Though I can’t see myself saying “Yo, check out this epic soup.”
Brainstorming welcome :P
We need to make it offensive to white people instead. So colonising.
I’ve always used decked regarding to it.
Maybe we shouldn’t invent new terms for races?
Pixel polishing. A term we use for frontend code at work (all backend developers).
Can’t people refer to it as their personalized setups? Or is that too hard to write?
Ricing isn’t exactly the same as personalized though.
Ricing when it comes to cars is putting on a giant wing and a huge muffler on a Honda Civic.
Ricing in the Gentoo community is turning on every compiler optimization flag for the main portage config file without knowing what they’re doing, potentially actually de-optimizing your setup.
There’s an element of “overdone” involved usually whenever someone is called a ricer.
Yeah but that’s missing the flair required by people who spend their evenings adjusting the radial blur on the window borders.
Noodles - it’s a mess of dotfiles
I assume you’re joking - this is just a different food/culture/race association.
The idea of suggesting the word “noodles” doesn’t come from a racial point-of-view. I’m using “noodles” to describe the mess of dotfiles, which is like saying “spaghetti code” for poorly written code.
I guess you can argue it has a race association as the only reason we are coming up with a new word is because the old word is racist.
Pocking
Pocked up
I.e. peacocking, making it awesome and flashy and sharing with others
Quick reach a consensus before the yungins start posting rizzed out setups
Isn’t it the same as tuning?
Although it’s unclear what tuning is because it depends on who says it:
- It does mean doing modifications to a vehicle for actual performance improvements
- It’s used extensively by ricers to describe themselves and their hobby and they think it’s a positive term
- It’s used extensively by people who dislike ricing and most definitely as a derogatory term
Yet for all its faults, I believe that’s the closest word to ricing you’ll find that is universally understood, neutral and isn’t rendered hopelessly bland and meaningless by the process of political correctness newspeak.
I removed this because it has nothing to do with linux specifically, and as expected, it brought out a lot of people defending the use of this historically racist term, and /asablackman’ing it.
I’ve reinstated it and removed the offending comments for now.
Also I don’t know why this needs a discussion at all. There’s hundreds of words in english for something that looks good, and you can be more specific about it : snazzy, sleek, cool, streamlined, nifty, retro
Yeah but it doesn’t affect me and I’m fine with using a racist term because I choose not to think about it. That should make it fine for everyone.
I’m not racist I’m just so tired of all this anti-racist stuff @john89@lemmy.ca
removed the offending comments
In one of which an Asian dude literally says it’s not used as a derogatory anymore. Talk about being offended for others
An stranger on the internet just gave you license to say a historically racist term, how convenient for you. Next they’ll be some /r/asablackman posters saying its okay for you to use the n-word, because it doesn’t bother them.
Should they’ve included a selfie or an id pic? Because when black ppl use that n-word you’re trying to draw parallels with (which, BTW, is still a derogatory towards a person and has no other meanings, as far as I’m aware) nobody gets offended. And, aside from the use of the “r-word”, their comment was a valid opinion on topic asking for that opinion
It’s not like black people using the N-word, it’s like white people using the n-word because a stranger on the internet said it’s ok.
aside from the use of the “r-word”
You don’t think them casually dropping a slur might invalidate their opinion on whether a different word is a slur? Fucking LLM-ass logic right there.
Interface tailoring, desktop tapestry, jamming all up in my pazaaz.
Decked out? Cranked?
I thought about “decked out”, though then people would say “look at my deck”, potentially creating ambiguity between card games and spiffy desktops.
And extra ambiguity with people talking about polishing their deck while also pronouncing it as dick
I mean there is an overlap between Linux users and those who play card games
I’d like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as card games, is in fact, GNU/card games, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus card games. 😉
Customizing the shit out of
I like this one.
Zhush/zhoosh could work - I don’t think the word is commonly used enough that it would get confusing.
I’m shreking up my arch install rn
Sometimes, I Miles Edward O’Brien my VM GPU passthrough.
I’ve Farquaad my network stack!
You’re compensating for something with your network stack?
I just shreked my opensuse
Ebbin my neezerinstall until it scrooges
Personally I’d put a higher priority on stamping out that use of “porn”.
Agreed. This term “unixporn” bugs me. I cannot recommend those platforms to anyone, because of the direct use of “porn” term. Its like kiddies made up the term unixporn or something…
LOL yeah that’s a nice thing to put in the company search history
