Rust: The wrong people are resigning(gist.github.com) |
Rust: The wrong people are resigning(gist.github.com) |
I totally understand that perhaps all of this is not that big of a deal at all considering that sites like Hacker News puts tens of thousands of eyeballs on you in a split second. But if there's something I've learned from these very sites is that Rust is a respected language and these kind of fallouts reek of issues that have nothing to do with the language itself but the people that are supposedly in positions of power.
I had very high hopes on Rust, but it seems that they have to find another tiny first world issue to complain about and magnify it into a giant nothing.
Admittedly, this whole saga is more entertaining than the average pantomime but even that has its limits of banana slip-ups. There is a time where this 'entertainment' just turns into pure incompetence of this so-called community and its governance, which becomes very boring blazingly fast.
As a casual Rust user, the message that I get from this is that I should not spend time with the Rust community.
We have given the Rust 'community' and governance plenty of time to grow up and be less infantile and it doesn't seem that they want to be taken seriously at all with this melodrama.
Golang is also becoming rather big, although doesn't make a big deal out of it imho, as the community is barely ever evangelizing about it. And so far, the only actual drama I am aware of, was the telemetry stuff, and that resolved itself nicely.
New languages will inevitably adopt the means of communication they grew up in. That's blogs and gists and tweets.
What I'm comparing Rust/Swift/Go to are languages like MoonScript/Objective-C/Lua, where there is a single BDFL (Leafo/Steve Jobs/Roberto). I feel like for programming languages there should only be 1 or 2 developers, that way there is no conflict of interest or "creative differences"
I haven't heard anyone suggest that actual development of the named languages has suffered due to drama.
Nobody wants to name the one guy who Secret Hitler'd the keynote, but man let's name call a streamer unaffiliated with the project as soon as we can because he read the original blog post on stream and said 'this is bad'.
Things have gotten better since, Prime and I have talked yesterday and we’re good.
Out of all the things that could own a person and ruin their judgement, a toxic programming language committee ought to rank at the bottom.
That voice in your head is you wanting to do the right thing.
Now working with Rust I have the same feelings as working with Java...
The document that they circulated was clearly a bunch of boilerplate. They assumed (wrongly) that the wider audience would have the same understanding and view of it that they did: that it was an early draft, subject to change. But the internet is not capable of such nuance.
Although I think this saga is a bit too dramatic, maybe that's why Rust is such a great language: people care a lot.
That's my best attempt
Thank god we have a benevolent dictator for Linux and supporting actors (long may they live), really can't imagine the mess Linux it would have become if we had a committee.
Why wouldn’t you generously assumed this is exactly what JT has done? Because from what I know, that’s exactly what JT has done.
In Sebastian, FL, former public officials have been convicted and sentenced to incarceration time for doing this.
Call it "Dust". Mascot could be a crab louse.
That left a bad bad taste in my mouth.
That makes zero sense. Drama does not simply stop because a language gets big enough. Some of Java's drama made it all the way to the Supreme Court.
I'm very skeptical of this based on what I hear of committee meetings. And committee members occasionally snipe at each other in public on /r/cpp.
edit: Yep, they announced their intentions and after consulting the community, they changed it to be opt-in instead. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/58894
Also in my original comment I meant C99, not C89. Everything after C99 is kind of irrelevant. That's what makes C so cool. It's frozen in time, essentially. Can't be corrupted.
as someone who's been part of the elixir community and built his whole startup in elixir, I say if you're interested in building distributed realtime systems, join us. I dont care about your politics. If you want to contribute to the tech, come join us.
The best way to create an environment that is actually unwelcoming is to openly invite people who don't care about others.
yes! it does!
we can't keep framing everything as race, gender, or orientation related. people have to have basic filters for what the most important issue is in a situation. stop falling back to "easy" outs or making sweeping statements about the "deeper systemic problem".
there are plenty of social problems which can't be solved by attaching every motive to every situation
One of those things people will speculate on is if this was one of the reasons. The fact that it is also part of the equation means it can’t be outright ignored and so will also need to be addressed. On top of that, this is already an underrepresented group, and regardless of if it was a primary motivating factor, it does not help show that group that they are welcome and in fact harms any effort to do so.
It absolutely matters if it was or was not a factor in this decision, but without clear information about the decision making process, speculation will occur, and that in and of itself is harmful.
If the takeaway or speculation is that what went wrong here was only an issue because the speaker is black, it cheapens their experience. It tells other minorities that when they flag a problem, the root cause is their race/gender/orientation; that the solution is then a code of conduct refresh, maybe diversity training, "educating themselves", etc. But that is not, fundamentally, as far as we can see, what is wrong here. We are not respecting the deep issues that the OP actually did identify by projecting other speculative possibilities.
What happened here is a problem no matter who the speaker was. Let's address that. If other evidence comes to light on the backing motivations, we can address those to, but it's not helpful to voluntarily pull other bad behavior that there is no reason to suspect here. No one can disprove a negative, but it's on all of us to not fall for that bait.
People can always speculate whatever they want. And let's be honest, the kind of people who like making utterly baseless claims about racism will do so regardless of any official statements or explanations. Unless there's actual evidence of racial animus it's best to just ignore these silly people.
Occam's razor and salience come in to play here too.
At the same time this keynote is nowhere near as interesting as last year's async stabilization keynote, I think we can all agree on that.
No one is doing this, problem solved.
Any group who decides to fork Rust probably isn't in a position of power to turn the whole Rust Project and Rust Foundation into something less messy. Without knowing any of the specifics about this "crablang" fork, creating a well-resourced, thoughtfully governed fork is often a pretty good solution to stewardship issues, and sometimes, new governance structures and procedures can even be ported back into the original project (see node.js vs io.js). Writing it off as "an enormous waste of time" where the people involved should have "engaged in a constructive manner instead" seems disingenuous.
Not that this is a core part of the post, and this doesn't detract from the overall message.
Sometimes it's better to drop out and start something new. An unofficial convention would be fantastic.
I'm sick of the clout chasing in these niche tech areas, it always drowns out the real passion and all the fun. The passion that fosters a healthy community and technological success.
Sometimes I wish a personality test was common for these ad hoc governance type positions (not just rust but with any OSS software). Not to exclude people but to decide if things are balanced. The people who want nothing to do with these systems often should be the ones figuring it out, but the people leaving trails of bodies behind them to plant their flag should be nowhere near them.
Thanks for sticking up for the people resigning and framing the bullshit in a realistic way. Also thanks for staying positive and I hope you keep blogging!
One thing I really appreciate about Amos is that he spent a long time reflecting on the kind of person that he would like to be. If you look at his content from over 5 years ago, when he created his own programming language seemingly out of spite, you can see how much he has grown. It's very impressive and I wish him every success.
From the linked article, that probably makes it clear that they believe Rust Leadership screwed up, and probably represents why naming individuals might not be helpful, and could hurt the project even more than this episode already has.
The real question is what is the fix, and they need to implement it soon.
Which is really all to say: fuck your concept of a weekend, the Rust ecosystem should've cut a response Friday night or Saturday.
Nah. Bureaucracies don't even try to solve these issues if there isn't a public backlash.
I also don’t think it’s been anything too bad, he’s said his opinion, just like the rest. He reacts to it with energy (and in an entertaining way, imo), and it’s impossible for him to not address these things as a live streamer. Ignoring it would be weird.
The best solution would be to just reverse the downgrade, and have ThePHD deliver the keynote. Send a strong message that there would be a major fallout had the Rust Project committed to their internally-made decision, but give them a chance to actually do the right thing. But that's presumably not happening, because ThePHD already left the presentation without giving them a chance to respond.
I also think the "Rust logo" controversy was over-exaggerated, since they didn't actually implement the copyright but only proposed to. And the entire mod team resigning made the mod team look bad, at least initially, because they didn't even really explain why.
The bright side of this over-reaction is that it's going to get some response from the Rust Project. Because apparently strong words are the only way to get a closed-door organization to respond appropriately. They'll post some sort of apology, and maybe it won't just be words, but they will actually become more transparent in a way that guarantees this will never happen again. Like how they all but walked back the copyright proposal and re-structured the core team following mod team resignation (or did they?).
But that's not an excuse. This sort of drama is toxic, I honestly think more toxic than the original action. Like, I feel bad for whoever made the anonymous decision to downgrade ThePHD's keynote, because even though it was wrong and hurtful, it doesn't deserve this level of vitriol. There needs to be better a way to get change than over-reacting to every mistake.
I really do hope the Rust project becomes more transparent, not only to prevent the situation from happening in the future, but the response. If everything has community input, when bad decisions happen the community can only blame themselves.
Who would have suspected this was racially motivated?
Not to defend any actions by anyone, but a keynote is an unusual place to talk about experimental feature a language is considering (unless it's a small component of a bigger update/forecast). That said once the decision was made they should have gone through with it.
...
And it’s not like they’re really bad people, it’s more like they tend to… use back channels rather than follow process? Or they have too many responsibilities, and are unable to fulfill all of them properly? Or maybe they don’t listen enough?
Or maybe it’s not individuals, but pairs of individuals who have a feud for some reason or other (sometimes completely valid). Maybe one party feels slighted by something that happened years ago, maybe they have irreconcilable goals or technical views, or differing opinions on what belongs where."
The complaint has not been that they are bad people, it's that they are incompetent. This seems to confirm that some of the people involved are indeed incompetent.
This seems way more cut and dry than the author is portraying.
Kinda crazy that this was supposed to be a clean slate for Rust governance.
Isn't public controversy the exact atmosphere these blog posts and resignations, for lack of a better word -- drama, is meant to foment?
FTR I think Prime is just as wrong about this as anyone. The real issue was the issue re: trademark, etc. The real issue here is a failure of leadership. When you're in leadership and someone does something bad, why resign? Why not request an apology? When it's not given, why not build support for an apology? When an apology is again not forthcoming, you can publicly resign, but when you do, maybe some others will too, and you can say "10 of us signed a letter requesting an apology, including 3 members of his/her own team, and it was refused"?
Some technical people are unsurprisingly bad at leadership duties, and sometimes tactless, because these are difficult things, and we need to stop pretending they aren't.
There is no quick fix, but someone needs to do something other than just resign, because it's not leadership, and so far it's proven to do very little other than create more drama.
> It’s really more like those 4 or 5 persons. And it’s not like they’re really bad people, it’s more like they tend to… use back channels rather than follow process? Or they have too many responsibilities, and are unable to fulfill all of them properly? Or maybe they don’t listen enough?
If it's 4-5 people, it sounds more like there is a cultural problem that needs to be fixed, and if I were to guess that cultural problem is -- there perhaps need to be soft-technical PM-like, senior statesmen tracks. There needs to be someone not involved in the day to day who can listen, help settle disputes, smooth things over, and direct/focus teams, because it doesn't sound like these technical people are acting like leaders. And jerky behavior should have consequences.
who actually perceives this situation this way? why would anyone perceive this situation this way, by default? this statement is needlessly inflammatory to a ridiculous degree—why would anyone assume overt anti-black bigotry as being the cause for any decision in any professional circle, in this year of our Lord Twenty Twenty-Three? why pour fuel on the fire like this?
this is yet another major red flag that indicates that I should stay far away from this "community"—there's clearly motivations and frames of thought at play here that don't mirror my perception of the real world in a very concerning way.
* Someone was invited to give a keynote; this was voted on at some point
* After the invitation was made and everything was done, some concerns were raised about the content of the talk -- apparently about whether the keynote slot would be seen as an endorsement of the technical contents by the Rust leadership.
* Someone in Rust leadership unilaterally asked for the talk to be downgraded from a keynote to a "normal talk", without telling anyone else or calling for another vote
* The invited speaker, recognizing something political going on, decided to "not play the game" and decided not to speak at all.
* One of the people who voted to invite said speaker to give a keynote, but never heard about the request to "downgrade", decided to resign.
As someone who is also involved in an open-source project with procedures and bylaws and such -- it seems like part of the issue has been certain people in the Rust leadership not being conscientious about following the process. I do believe that back-channel communication and coordination is necessary in real life. However, I also believe that confidence in the process itself is important. Having determined that something was necessary to be done, the person in question should have raised an official vote (perhaps talking to people individually beforehand); and having broken official procedures, that person should at very least apologize publicly for doing so, and perhaps be removed from a leadership role (at least for some period of time, maybe a year).
The author of this piece says people were "trying to do the right thing"; I mean, sure, we're all trying to do the right thing -- but when you screw up, you need to own it.
I'm not sure what the solution is, or if there is one, but the prospect of forking a major project and being met with positivity seems to be pretty unproven.
It is ridiculous that ThePrimeagen has been called out (without whom I wouldn't have taken interest in learning Rust). He has been an avid supporter of Rust until the trademark fiasco broke out. No where did he "rile up the masses" or "added fuel to the fire". The trademark draft was really bad. End of story.
> Except, it’s never just that one person, you know? Otherwise I could burn myself by outing them, and do the whole community a favor. It’s really more like those 4 or 5 persons.
This is why I find it hypocritical. In the entire document there is no mention of even one person (or these group of insiders) who are creating these issues in the community. However, the one outsider who has been vocally supporting Rust (even made an entire Rust course on Frontend Masters) is being targeted.
Should tell you everything there is to tell about how the community has devolved.
Python is the main example I can think of after graduating from governance via BDFL, but is there any other new language which has achieved the same level of popularity as Rust?
So far, most of the drama seems to have been tangential to actual language features, so they at least deserve some credit for keeping technical aspects of development mostly on track.
The original sin of C was to release an informal [under]specification. Kernighan and Ritchie failed, catastrophically, to foresee the phenomenon of management pressure to release/productionize software written by people who only half-knew the language. K&R C (or each of its de facto, platform-bound reference implementations) was at least simple enough to learn. None of its successors have been. Verifiable or maintainable software cannot be written in any language that is too complex to understand (or that is in any way underspecified). Verifiable or maintainable software cannot be written in any language that its developer has only half learned. And software that is not both verifiable and maintainable is worse than no software at all.
Start naming and shaming people, let the internet have its field day and let's all go home. We all know people will reconverge at one point anyway. We all also know that nobody will get harmed regardless of all the drama.
I expect much more from adult people. Go drink some tea and have a 3-hour walk with your dog or partner or a friend, deliberately don't touch the computer for 24h and let's see how differently you'll react.
Also, injecting identity politics in a programming language foundation has been a mistake from the get go. Sounds like opportunism.
My code of conduct would be "don't be an a-hole no matter what race or sexual orientation somebody has -- and anyone being a d-bag will get shown the door, no exceptions". That's plenty enough and most people out there have enough common sense to know what you mean when you say it.
Also can we recognize that forks of popular programming languages NEVER truly take off.
So yeah, take a few deep breaths, disengage for a while and you might be surprised of the different thoughts that come to you after.
Let's tone down the drama already, this already became super embarrassing for all parties.
It's easy to say this when one is not the target. I imagine it would be difficult to ignore doxing, death threats, swatting, and/or harassing of family and friends.
I get it, it can be extremely scary, I just don't think most internet warriors have what it takes to be actual criminals.
But I can also stand behind the idea that we shouldn't risk it, yeah.
Just like with the trademark policy fiasco just a month ago (which was also not the first Rust Drama), every community member - from speakers to organizers and regular language users - is confused, frustrated, feeling unappreciated with very slow official response and clarification.
I don't want witch hunting, I understand some of the people involved are volunteers, but if there is a drama every month, someone is doing something wrong and all we see from the outside is that someone acts shady and there is no consequences.
I'm not saying they are evil people, I don't hate anyone, I just think that they should do something else with their precious volunteer time.
It's not a witch hunt to show someone the door.
I think those are different. Rust trademark policy is more a case of miscommunication, while this seems more deliberate.
Rust Foundation iirc made a draft statement but rather than saying "We'll take community feedback into consideration" went with a much more vague "We'll might take this into consideration". At least that's my impressions.
It was fairly bad trademark policy forbidding crates from using rust and cargo. `cargo x` 99% of the time was some cargo plugin.
The error they made was assuming people would understand that process.
https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-March/235124.html
The Rust situation seems to be instance the woke purging each other, Soviet style.
His cancellation has as much to do with pissing off so many of the people around him as anything else.
Is there a concise roadmap that's easy to share?
Come back tomorrow. Nothing has happened. Please!
Don't post a bunch of emotional, vague, unclear semi-accusations against people you won't even name. This is just adding to a bunch of drama with no possibility of any positive outcome.
You're kind of stating this as if nobody in the Rust ecosystem tries that approach first.
The only way to free a project from such entrenched rot is an ultimatum; "You can have the builders or the schemers, but not both".
Anime/furry culture has a significant overlap with the Rust community as far as I can tell as an outsider. E.g. there was that guy developing a Linux GPU driver for M1 Macs, narrating it with an anime "waifu" avatar and a speech plugin that makes you sound like a little girl from a Japanese cartoon.
Note I'm not weighing in on the culture itself, because I don't care - I'm just noting it because it's kind of ridiculous to try and use it to dogpile onto the Rust ecosystem and what it's going through.
Whatever is going on in Twitter land and with the drama around conferences and boards is a different world, but they aren’t necessarily one and the same.
Not that people should be shamed for their personal interests! Everyone should imbue some of their personal style in their work, that's how we generate creativity and so forth.
That being said, I think the problem is when personal style overlaps too much in what needs more professional separation and distancing. It seems like that can be a recipe for too much ego that creates rifts.
There is a risk that we start turning a serious endeavor into a personal project / hobby, or worse just treating it as a joke; leading to situations like:
Up until recently, I was part of two private online discussion spaces where a bunch of Rust people hung out.I guess if your passion is reverse engineering M1 macs and porting Linux to it, for free, there is a decent chance you are highly introverted and perhaps even a savant.
If you ask an average software engineer, or even a talented one to do it, most of them won't be able to crack the problem.
Just look at the official and unofficial Rust servers on Discord.
If not, can you explain to me like I'm extremely stupid and need a very clear step by step connecting of the dots, why it even remotely matters in the slightest?
I love this.
On one hand this is an indicator for our expectations. Adult stuff should be handled by adults, with wisdom and maturity.
On the other hand it is a sample of reality as it is (distinct from the shoulds we project) - no, corporations and adult organizations are not led/ruled by mature people, and not everyone acts wisely all of the time. This is the reality.
I like to believe that acknowledging that and creating organizations to be resilient in the context of immaturity, pettiness, confusion… humanity(!) is the way.
We do have some examples of nature leadership but these are the exceptions to the rule. People are people, let’s figure in their humanity.
So what I’m interested in are org structures supporting and correcting for fairness, wisdom, maturity.
They are outraged by the fork because having a fork reach thousand stars so quickly made it harder to ignore the reality that people who love the language were fed up with the leadership.
Forking is the essence of open source software. Don't like something somebody else is doing with a software? It's open source, so you do it your way.
Also, please allow the crablang people to waste their time the way they want to. Some people watch Netflix, some people will create a fork and learn more about the project. They don't need anyone's permission or approval.
Is crablang a fork of Rust? Is Rust a plant fungus?
Edit: yes and apparently yes.
They take great lengths not to name rust which is interesting for a fork.
"now with 100% less bureaucracy!"
not sure they are trying to create a "well-resourced, thoughtfully governed fork"?
I feel like the fork was exploitative, but I also feel like there isn’t a lot else they could’ve done, even if they wanted to. It’s sadness all around, right now.
FWIW, the trademark policy was incredibly clear in that it wanted to disallow any use of the word "rust" in reference to the language in project or domain names. I don't know if that would've been the legal effect or not, but that's what the policy stated, clear as day. That was the issue. But that's a separate discussion, I didn't actually intend to argue in favour of crablang itself being a productive use of time.
One person should not have been able to reverse the decision that was made by a collective leadership vote. The fact that was allowed to happen is a failure of governance.
One of the people who left was the one who initially nominated ThePHD for the keynote. To have your nomination approved by a vote and then unilaterally overturned by someone working through backchannels would make me angry, too. If I was volunteering a bunch of time to a project that did that to me I might consider stepping down over it.
When big bugs happen, we evaluate why, and improve the system so it performs better next time. We don't blame people, we focus on what allowed people to make bad decisions. In this case, it sounds like a bad decision making process that needs a patch.
Sometimes it's much better to just assign someone responsibility for something. Then if they screw up, they can learn from it, or you give the job to someone else.
I think a lot of the issue here is due to the fact that there was seemingly a one week period between the decision being made and it actually being communicated.
And then, because no one has been given authority to make decisions and actually be a leader, then everything they say has to be in this weird passive voice like "It's been decided that.." which makes it sound like a conspiracy when it's really just a fear of delegation.
The ruling committee should nominate someone to do things, and then let them do it. They should never try to actually run things themselves, it's always a disaster.
If your language isn't intending to just remain stuck forever in its current state, a conference is a reasonable place to explain a proposed direction so that other people know where you think it should go. Not every talk has to be speculative, but a speculative keynote seems fine to me so long as it's obvious that we're not in an alternate dimension where this works in Rust already, which I see no sign JeanHyde was intending.
My general feeling is that keynotes are for "setting the tone" of the conference/conference day.
Then you look at the data, and in this case come to the conclusion, "no, it was not a factor."
That seems healthy and normal, it's not outrage bait to acknowledge that yes, sometimes minorities are at a disadvantage or are under represented.
It's just as fallacious to say "of course race was a factor" as it is to say "of course race was not a factor". Much better to ask openly, evaluate the data, and make an informed conclusion.
What does “under represented” mean, in a small, hopefully merit based, org?
Quite the opposite, I believe. Since a keynote is seen by a dramatically larger slice of the audience, it's a good slot for talks meant to provoke thoughts and discussion, even if that discussion isn't necessarily one you agree with.
Rust is a great language with a good macro system that gets used more than it needs to than if it had a stronger type system.
To succeed at improving the language, contributors must strike a balance between approaching the PL research frontier while remaining a practical language.
ThePHD’s talk is a take on that trajectory that appears Pareto-optimal. It’s a really good subject for a keynote, I think.
For the last several years, there are many people and groups who have gotten tremendous positive feedback from being a victim. So, many people would jump to this conclusion for outrage, sympathy, and signaling their virtue.
Thankfully, it seems it may be coming to an end now since it’s disruptive and at odds with reality.
I hope you are right. I'm less optimistic.
Just making shit up to get mad about.
I personally listened to paid guest lecturers tell me all white people are racist, and those who deny it are proving their racism. In my workplace.
People are brainwashed to believe and see this stuff at this point, and there is an industry monetizing it.
If the only tool you have is a hammer…
the idea that any contemporary professional organization—but especially an overtly progressive-minded organization like the Rust Foundation—could even have the possibility of hiding secret undercover racist bigots deep within its leadership such as to make the above highlighted statement a necessary disclaimer (as opposed to a superfluous virtue-signal) is so far beyond insane that I don't even know where to begin.
And in the absence of a democratic process for decision-making, the only recourse we have, as people who depend on the projects governed by these groups, is to shout loudly enough to be noticed. If "throwing fuel at the fire" is what's needed to get enough people to engage to stop a really bad policy from going through, it's the right thing to do.
I've seen Taliban media with slightly more integrity than rust leadership.
in fact this whole rust fiasco is an even greater and more blindingly obvious example of causing massive organizational rupture over a minor accidental personal slight.
should there be more process in place for rust leadership? maybe, probably. But I will skip rust and learn zigg if I need to do something low level due to this disproportionate response. It's not appropriate.
Don't tolerate the intolerant, ironically.
I watch a lot of conference videos, but I don't attend many conferences, I don't get value out of the so-called "Hallway track" and I dislike commercial air travel which limits where I could go anyway. I like where I live, that's why I bought it, so remaining here is great.
These conversations just don’t make the front page of HN.
On the other hand, it could be that Google owning Go makes the bigger difference. I know that Ian Lance Taylor created several versions of generics that got shot down, which must have been frustrating. However, I don't remember hearing the slightest bit of internal conflict from the core team. (I pick on generics because it was the largest and longest "conflict" in Go's history.)
The primary language developers/owners work at the same company, so presumably they have more bandwidth (behind closed doors) and more financial incentive to provide a united front. Or, they're just a pragmatic group of engineers with drama turned to -11.
1) MS taking control of something the community doesn't want them taking control of
2) Important open source third party library switching to a proprietary license
Rarely do you see drama centered around specific individuals like you see in the Rust or JavaScript communities. So I think that lends some further credence to your theory that the design goals of the language help foster specific cultures around them.
I always felt like he wrote down those non-final designs more as an effort to discover & document why exactly each one wasn't good enough, so they might guide the future design(s). I think he was well aware of the various flaws and unwanted trade-offs, and wanted them to serve as a guide to the conversation.
But on twitter, it’s all tribalism and attacking other languages and other people. Gives a distorted figure of what the community really is.
I don't see the rust situation as a massive rupture -- they did several things wrong and their process for handling it was clearly broken, and they will choose a new team who will have process and policy to the forefront of their considerations. Refusing to use rust because of some (so far, short term) management issues is an excessive response.
> I was able to reassure myself, by checking these private discussion places, that there were good people, fighting for the right thing to be done. That things weren’t irremediably broken. That there was hope for improvement in the near future.
I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"
To shrug.”
If the community does not agree with the leadership's actions (or failure to act) then a fork might be a possible road ahead.
Compare:
OpenOffice - LibreOffice
Jenkins - Hudson
MySQL - MariaDB
and many others.
Anyway, "it's a protest" is pretty much sufficient in itself to answer the original question of why people might get angry about it. :P
There might be reasonable reasons! The existence of an under represented group isn't wrong, it's just a time to ask, "why is it this way?"
To be clear, I'm not saying there should be no under represented groups. But if there are, we should just be deliberate about understanding why. Are there systemic reasons where merit isn't being considered?
What gives you the impression I would want that? I said, quite clearly, that deviations from the norm are worth asking questions about, but those deviations can be fine.
Do you think they should be forced?
She's more of a "loli" character as far as I can tell. (Which can also be disturbing, but for different reasons.)
Garner's Modern English Usage
Some things you do have to step away from.
When it happens to bullies, they consider themselves smugly successful and coast onwards to the next fiasco.
So, while others may have thought the same as me, I am not reading a lot of comments that are in the tone of, "we're here now, how do we make the machine resilient so we never get here again."
The fact that it’s open to speculation is the exact reason they need to address it. Just ignoring it at this point doesn’t seem like a good idea, does it?
So you must assume either that the decision makers knew through other channels, or that without knowing, they’re out-crowding him via subconscious selectors.
If you think this is a race thing, you probably think everything is a race thing.
There are myriad possible motives. Looking at them all without evidence is not productive. I would say that all credible motives and reasons should be examined. But speculating about every or any possible motive without evidence or meaning is a waste of time at best.
I didn’t know that ThePHD was black. I think you paint “the community” as more homogenous and informed than it is. But I understand that the involved parties are aware of each other’s races.
I understand, then, a need to speculate on racism. But how do you advance from speculating about racism to inferring that it is or isn’t?
I mean that’s why the original “btw this didn’t have to do with his race” statement existed. If you’re (hypothetical you) giving special, opaque treatment to the sole black person in the group, then it’s on you to clear up any speculation the opaque treatment had to do with being black, because it was only happening to the sole black person.
So the leadership did an opaque thing to the sole black guy and then clarified the weird thing had nothing to do with his blackness, just their poor communication or whatever.
Japanese Okama culture, for instance, is an entirely different animal. I don't know this specific person just thought I'd share that misgendering isn't as black and white as even a lot of trans people think it is.
Lol. I just stated what's already out there. It's like "blowing the cover" on the voice actor of Spongebob Squarepants...
As far as I can tell, this "Asahi Lina" is a cartoon figure, that's used for lip-syncing with a voice effect. Are you saying the real person behind the cartoon is also called "Asahi Lina"?
upon what basis could you possibly make this claim?
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35251905#35252948
2. Bunches of other threads on HN/Reddit/Twitter.
3. I don't mean this disparagingly.
On 4chan's /vt/ the euphemism for this is "roommate" discussion, and any posting of details about "roommates" is a bannable offense.
Of course being 4chan some users will eat bans (primarily when they're upset and want to spite other users), so some details of some known roommates do inevitably surface from time to time; but ultimately casual discussion of it is taboo.
Thus someone might assume something of that sort is at play here, though it might be an unreasonable assumption for reasons x, y, and z.
I am not racist. I wouldn't wager that this was race related. But I wouldn't say that someone seeing the situation, and then making the assumption that is it is race related, is out of the realm of possibility.
I would think that would be an unfortunate, but frequent, take away if the average person evaluated things at surface level.
You can disagree with me here, maybe with a Gallup poll for example, without insulting me.
Just because this is a sensitive topic doesn't mean you get to throw around insults and look down on another person.
Hope you understand!
I mean, I'm fine with people pretending that. But you can't expect or force me and others to play along... :D
That is why this thread even exists in the first place.
That was my whole point.
You calling me "shamefully delusional" is definitely an ad hominem no matter how many words you try to stuff in my mouth.
If the creator wants to stay anonymous (for which the cat is out of the bag in this case, I'm afraid) we may refer to him as "the guy behind the cartoon", but I can't pretend that the cartoon is the real person... That's just stupid...
Like, let's say you're playing Dungeons & Dragons with your friend over the weekend, where you're an elven warrior or whatever. But you can't compel your colleagues or the Starbucks clerk to treat you as an elven warrior next Monday when you go to work :D
I have a friend who is going through this.
also, ironically, Starbucks makes it a point to ask for your name, or however you want to be called. you can tell them to call you Dark Moon or whatever. and workplace inclusion protips are also exactly about this topic, how to accommodate those who are different. small changes mean a lot to a lot of people. of course asking a whole team to WoW night elf cosplay with you every workday from 9 to 5 is not an easy ask, and it's reasonable to say no. where the line is unsurprisingly not an easy topic, but there are some usual minimum effort, like remembering the names of coworkers.
It's concerning that this needs to be spelled out.
it's not that big of a mystery that the new possibilities that have been opened up by this new medium might lead some people to feel they belong more there than in meatspace.
it's seems like the virtual version of putting on a fursuit and going to a con. no one is forced to watch/listen/interact with her, but if they do it seems evident to use the requested pronouns, etc.
(and I'm not talking about this meta-discussion of whether Lina is animated by Marcan, but even in this case, to me it seems common sense courtesy to treat Lina as her; like a character in a book, who might have different intentions than the author.)