In a way, I find this entire saga incredibly funny. There is so much hand wringing and pearl clutching at something that is supposedly in the shadows - this cabal of four or five people making decisions - that it makes the entire Rust "community" look juvenile. This is the kind of internecine conflict I should see in Anime discord servers, not about a language whose governance involves multiple major corporations!
Wish we had more role models these days who were willing to disagree with decisions and work to fix them rather than loudly resign or point fingers. Feels like there is a lot of pressure these days that if you are part of a "bad" system then _you_ are bad, even if you are trying to improve it from the inside. So it's understandable people quit instead of taking on the burden of having to prove their "goodness", it's just a shame our media/algorithms lazily spread outrage rather than spotlight diligence and compromise.
Golang has lots of good examples of design discussions without vitriol in their RFCs and proposals. There is the occasional bikeshedding and needless bickering granted, but it mostly stays civil and is the most mature language community I've ever had the pleasure of being a part of.
Almost all of the work the rust project does is like this too. The RFC process is pretty consistently lovely. People just go back and forth talking about different design approaches with respect and thoughtfulness. I wish decisions happened faster, but decisions certainly get made and everyone is listened to.
These conversations just don’t make the front page of HN.
I think there might be a connection between Go's pragmatism and the culture fostered around it and Rust's correctness and its culture.
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.
Similarly, in the C#/.NET community, most of the drama fits one of the following two archetypes:
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 know that Ian Lance Taylor created several versions of generics that got shot down, which must have been frustrating.
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.
So does Rust. And Golang also has good examples of bad design discussions with vitriol, such as the one about metrics collection. This is a silly comparison.
The drama around Go modules comes immediately to mind as a counterexample – and that one was a technical snafu that impacted many projects using Go. Pobody’s nerfect.
I took it as referring to the world in general, not Rust specifically. It happens every day in the news that someone loudly resigns to make their point. It's much less common that you see an article about how so-and-so spent five years of their life working hard to change a culture from the inside and finally is seeing results.
You can certainly try to view it that way, but I would submit that, at best, you're being overly charitable regarding interpretation when the very thread we're on is centered on discussing issues within the Rust ecosystem itself.
Oh, they're certainly meaning it to also refer to the situation at hand. I took it as "I wish we had more role models that would stay in and stand up, because the people loudly resigning in this case are copying others they've seen loudly resign."
lolinder is exactly right on what I meant to say (including what they said in the sibling post to this comment). But I hear your point, too, Klonoar. It's definitely worth pointing out that people can have good reasons for "going public" after realizing they couldn't fix things from the inside.
The "don't leave, stay and fix things from the inside" pitch is how the political schemers try to pull the tech talent back into an arena where they can be worn down into submission, so that their skills can be co-opted by those whose only real talent is to steal the productivity of others.
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".
Agree with you that in the case of entrenched rot there's not much that "stay and fix things from the inside" can do to help. I just don't think that the Rust community/leadership has gotten to that point. OP's blog seems to support that, too:
> 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.
“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"
I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"
>This is the kind of internecine conflict I should see in Anime discord servers
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.
This... isn't just a Rust thing, it's very common in Linux circles as well. Where do you think the UnixPorn aesthetic of a certain type of background comes from? ;P
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.
The Rust community I’m familiar with is basically like any other group of programming enthusiasts who want to talk about and work with a language.
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.
Considering two of the first commenters in this gist are Kirby and a Dall-E anime girl, sounds like a spot on assessment.
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.
It can also be pretty off-putting for women to be honest. When someone's avatar is an AI-generated "waifu" picture with deep cleavage, I don't think it looks welcoming for the average female programmer...
> female, adj.; feminine; woman(ly); womanlike; womanish;
effeminate. These adjectives all share the sense “of, relating to, or
involving women.” Female is a neutral term usually used to indicate the
sex of a person (or an animal or plant), in contrast with male <a female
cadet> <my female coworkers>. Feminine typically refers to what
are traditionally considered a woman’s favorable qualities <feminine
grace>. Womanly often carries these positive connotations as well
<womanly intuition>, but it’s also used to distinguish an adult female
from a girl <her womanly figure>. (Woman is sometimes used
attributively where female would be more natural <a woman lawyer>.
These constructions are best avoided.)
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.
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?
Not sure if you are speaking out of knowledge of this particular individual but with respect to other cultures, a biological male presenting as female does not necessarily mean trans the way western cultures think of it.
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.
I'm not sure it's a widespread belief, but I did some quick searches and the circumstantial evidence[1][2] seems to lean toward that. Wow, this is pretty strange[3].
I suspect the person you are replying to is thinking of Alyssa Rosenzwig[0] who appears from the outside to be a major contributor to the work, and who's blog posts on the project were followed by the HN crowd.
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"?
Asahi Lina is who they identify as. It is likely a pseudonym but I see no source for any other name. So I have no reason to believe it's Hector. I would rather not make assumptions about someone beyond what they present themselves as, so as far as I'm concerned, they are Asahi Lina She/Her
In the culture of virtual youtubing, discussing anything past the character and their content is a faux pas.
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.
Cool, I guess. But I'm not in the (niche) culture of virtual youtubing, so I don't see why I should talk about a digital cartoon as if it was a real person :D
It's no different than trying to unearth the identity of a random twitter or HN user. It's not about regarding them as a standalone entity; it's about not upheaving the psuedonymity that can be granting them their free expression.
Wait, what? You're saying the guy's identity is an anime cartoon? Like, you think we should pretend he is a cartoon? You must be trolling... It's like saying that we should pretend the voice actor of Spongebob is really a cartoon sponge :D
I mean, I'm fine with people pretending that. But you can't expect or force me and others to play along... :D
It's not remotely the same as Spongebob. The point is that whoever is behind Asahi Lina wants the character to be separate to their "real" identity. No-one is claiming they really are a digital cartoon. The request is to respect the clear wishes of the creator. It doesn't take anything from us to do so, and for all we know, they may have serious reasons for asking us.
Sorry, I can't talk seriously about a cartoon as if it was a real being :D
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
the important thing is that it might not be a 'guy'. it would not be surprising that whoever is running the stream has serious internal gender identity conflicts/issues.
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.
Respecting a person's choice of gender is not the same as respecting their insistence of "identifying" with a non-existent virtual animale waifu character. One is a person born into the weong body, the other is a bunch of pixels. One is in reality, the other is not...
It's concerning that this needs to be spelled out.
it's existing on the screen, where you can see it, and where people can interact with it. it has a voice, mannerisms, etc.
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.)
I'm not interacting with him, I was talking about him in a HackerNews comment. And this is not an otaku/furry/animewaifu/whatever forum, where the pecularities of these subcultures are expected to be followed. End of discussion from me.
> This is the kind of internecine conflict I should see in Anime discord servers, not about a language whose governance involves multiple major corporations!
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.
There's a little bit of a "getting out at the right time so I can say I was there when it was good" vibe to it. As a total Rust outsider I can understand. Last time I tried to learn it, it seemed to prefer trading one set of problems ubiquitous to computing for a worse set unique to its niche. I don't know if people really like it or just want to be seen liking it, but I'd rather keep turning the wheel that makes Java code and have time for my other interests.
Rust is super amazing coming from C/C++/Python, but it's a bit meh coming from Scala. Of course no JVM, instant startup, small memory footprint, etc. etc. are nice, but also no JVM, no G1/Shenandoah/Z GC, no reflection, introspection, heapmap, etc. etc. :)
It doesn't seems hard to create a good one. Just post Akira pictures and Tetsuo memes, and that's it. What else would anyone ever want from an anime Discord? Okay, okay, a few threads about the NGE remakes/rebuilds from time to time. But no mention of Netflix disaster shenanigans, only Edgerunners. Well, okay, whatever the new GitS SAC thing was it was pretty good, so sometimes that too.
Most discords you can find on the discover tab are too big to be fun, so I’d suggest looking for communities around specific anime you like and branching from there.
Are you suggesting there’s a difference in how conflict is handled in major corps vs anime discords? I think you’re doing a disservice to anime discords everywhere…
As someone who loudly and frequently proclaimed that it was just kids being kids, I have serious regrets about that these days. I couldn't have been more wrong.
