Mastodawn

Alyssa the Kate Sep 4, 2023

Björkus "No time_t to Die" Dorkus

When someone decides to make up entire bungles of horse shit in their "explanation" and "apology" ( https://archive.ph/Utaz1 ) about the weird shit they did.

I want off this fucking ride.

"Postpone to 2024"? Present at a "tier 2 conference"? My reasoning is contained directly in my blog post ( https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023#-huh ). If you're going to fucking lie about me at least try and be fucking accurate about it:

“It is also deeply confusing and ultimately insulting for them not to contact me beforehand and simply ask me if I would disclaimer my work to make it clear that they did not explicitly endorse this direction. Multiple times before the RustConf schedule and program was released, I made it obscenely clear that there was not going going to be an RFC for the work I was talking about (“Pre-RFC” is the exact wording I used when talking to individuals involved with Rust Project Leadership), that this might bias folks, and whether or not it would be okay to do this. Individuals in contact with me both inside and outside RustConf leadership made it abundantly clearly that this topic was perfectly fine. Furthermore, they had already met to discuss my work before hand, so at no point should anyone be confused about what my intentions and goals are.”
That someone would try to use game-of-telephone bullshit to make it seem like I deserved to have my keynote outright removed (which was the ACTUAL SUGGESTION given to RustConf, and they changed it to a DOWNGRADE to prevent bigger fallout from Triplett and Tolnay's CLEAR oversteps and, apparently, outright lies here!), or that I was in agreement with such a removal, when I literally took the required time to make a proper assessment of the situation and respond like an ADULT, is some WILD nonsense!

Is this a common Rust Project occurrence? Do people just do this ALL THE TIME? WHAT IS GOING ON OVER THERE?!

Edit: added some fucking alt-text because I'm so fucking annoyed at this bullshit.

Björkus "No time_t to Die" Dorkus Sep 4, 2023

This isn't even a fast moving situation! It's been over 3 months since my blog post went up! How do you fuck this up!!

Björkus "No time_t to Die" Dorkus Sep 4, 2023

WE ARE ALREADY IN A FRAYED TRUST ZONE.

WHY MAKE SHIT UP?!?!

Björkus "No time_t to Die" Dorkus Sep 4, 2023

I have pretty bad self-doubt.

I pushed through that to accept that talk, and hold my head up high. And then this motherfucker just.... makes shit up. Wholesale! I don't fucking need this, I have my own imposter syndrome to fucking deal with, and this motherfucker just MAKES SHIT UP.

Björkus "No time_t to Die" Dorkus Sep 4, 2023

The rest of it, is of course, also bullshit. Trying to conflate Yoshua's struggles as a reason to paint over my work entirely and make it seem like it wasn't ready to present is a personal shortsight of his, and him projecting his inadequacy on me is absolutely bonkers. This is the best they could put together after 3 months of this absolute nonsense?

Björkus "No time_t to Die" Dorkus Sep 4, 2023

Infuriating that Yoshua catches strays in this statement for the struggle of trying to implement something truly difficult in the Rust ecosystem, but to use it as justification to attempt to bulldoze my work?

The sheer gaslighting in that statement!

But then again, given the background, I can't expect anything less.

Björkus "No time_t to Die" Dorkus Sep 4, 2023

The other fucked up part?

Imagine putting blood sweat and tears into your event and it's just casually dismissed as a "tier 2". You know, the place where things that aren't ready like my "not supposed to be a keynote" goes.

Holy moly donut shoppe!

Björkus "No time_t to Die" Dorkus Sep 4, 2023

If I pulled even a fraction of what this person is pulling right now I would have been roasted, toasted, and dropped from everything without so much as a whisper from these folks.

But we've got different standards when it comes to others, don't we now?

Sophia June Turner Sep 4, 2023

That's exactly what I hope the new Rust leadership deeply internalises. There were clearly different standards in play. It was obvious when it played out (and is still obvious).

People need to dig into why or it's just going to keep happening.

just adrienne Sep 5, 2023

@jntrnr @thephd JT: What's your feeling, in hindsight, about not naming names three months ago when you were one of the few people who could have?

Sophia June Turner Sep 6, 2023

@adrienne @thephd

Unsure - there's a world where naming the individuals puts so much of the spotlight on them that the org isn't pressured to change. From my perspective, the spotlight needed to be on both the org and the individuals.

just adrienne Sep 6, 2023

@jntrnr @thephd Okay but as it turned out, one of the individuals most responsible very nearly escaped any spotlight whatsoever?

Björkus "No time_t to Die" Dorkus Sep 6, 2023

@adrienne @jntrnr JT immediately resigned and it is was only because of them this the whole process started, otherwise it would have been me vs. the world.

JT put material weight behind their convictions; this is not the person to be aiming incisive inquiry at.

just adrienne Sep 6, 2023

@thephd @jntrnr Fair enough. I know they immediately resigned and i praised them for that at the time! I just also strongly feel that the people who knew this name should have spoken it earlier.

just adrienne Sep 6, 2023

@thephd @jntrnr (Edited for wrong pronoun; sorry about that!)

Kensan Sep 4, 2023

@thephd IMHO, these events and the statement reinforces that you absolutely made the right decision in not playing along and calling out the whole charade. To bad it came with such a high price for you personally :(

@thephd indeed.

soc Sep 6, 2023

@thephd Yep. Reasons why I don't waste my time their anymore.

Rust's in-group vs. out-group standards are completely bonkers.

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)Sep 4, 2023

@thephd ah, we love The Rust Community :)

Jonas Schievink Sep 4, 2023

@thephd ah yes, Tier 2 conferences, run by Tier 2 people, in Tier 2 countries, presumably

kouhai, of the health issues Sep 4, 2023

@thephd oh, to have the confidence of a (presumably) whitemasc cishet palantir employee

radiish Sep 4, 2023

@thephd oh my god. did they ever even decide on a speaker for the keynote now that you’re not doing it?

radiish Sep 4, 2023

@thephd also, “i apologise for how this played out” isn’t even a fucking apology????? it’s the same as “i’m sorry you did that”.. or even giving him the contextual benefit of the doubt: “i’m sorry we let that happen to you”???

💀

Graydon Hoare Sep 5, 2023

@thephd Besides echoing many people's disappointment at how you've been treated here, which I very much feel, I also wanted to speak to this self-doubt issue. If at all possible, I encourage you not to internalize any of this. It shouldn't reflect at all on your work, which was excellent.

🍀Sep 4, 2023

@thephd my guess is that he's not talking to you, but trying to win over the rust community, ignoring you, which incenses me so much

🍀Sep 4, 2023

@thephd "its only become relevant now"

Oh I dare to guess why, then, because now suddenly the spotlight is thrown on you?

nop Sep 4, 2023

@thephd I want off Mr Bones Wild Ride.

matt.clarke Sep 4, 2023

@thephd For what it is worth, I think you are great ❤️

nomilkinmytea Sep 4, 2023

@mattclarke @thephd seconded

nobodyxu Sep 4, 2023

@thephd I have posted on zulip to demand dtolnay to step down or be removed from rust team https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/122651-general/topic/dtolnay.20should.20step.20down.20from.20rust-lang.20teams

Public view of rust-lang | Zulip team chat

Browse the publicly accessible channels in rust-lang without logging in.

Zulip

Aks Sep 4, 2023

@thephd sounds like rust is just not worth contributing on, in any form. Who knows if the ecosystem implodes on itself in next few years.

I am really sorry you had to go through all that.

(Lets make our own lang with scalies and furries

)

Setzer 🥕Sep 4, 2023

@thephd This is all so sad to hear... Just wanted to let you know that some members of the Rust community (in which I include myself, but not only!) deeply appreciated the reflection feature you were working on...

I fully support your decision to nope out of this toxic shithole. Nobody deserves to be treated like this. This whole situation also has been making me reconsider my contributions (as little as those may be) to the Rust community.

[MOVED TO HACHYDERM] Erik Ž Sep 4, 2023

@thephd you rule. My greatest hope is that compile time reflection wins, and that the palantir-dtolnay crates are relegated to footnotes in the history of Rust.

Luna D Dragon Sep 4, 2023

@thephd in case someone hasn't said it yet, the gist was updated and Tolnay claims that he just "forgot" or "misremembered"

Björkus "No time_t to Die" Dorkus Sep 4, 2023

@lunarequest Forgot or misremembered a conversation he wasn't there for, consulted no existing resources, and then just tooootally dropped that in his footnotes without linking to the very public information around the subject?

Yeah.

I'm buying it, for sure.

Luna D Dragon Sep 4, 2023

@thephd I'm very much in the camp that he should be removed from working on rust lang. if possible even from projects like serde as well. Wish i could do more than saying this.

☃️karolherbst☃️Sep 4, 2023

@lunarequest @thephd From a Mesa developer/maintainer point of view, I'm thinking about depending on projects like serde and syn, but if the way those projects are maintained are dubious at best, it's a kinda hard sell to rely on such projects.

actioninja Sep 4, 2023

@lunarequest @thephd
Serde is effectively owned by dtolnay, he is the top dog maintainer and direct commits to master. I don't see ousting him from lang happening, but getting him out of serde is practically impossible.
You would need to make a new serialization library, but it's currently impossible to provide what Serde does without taking the same approach of requiring the types to implement it because no remote derives and the orphan rule. It would suck to split the ecosystem, and Serde already has the network effect.
And of course, the project that would have allowed this to change was cancelled after a controversy involving pressure from backchannels to kneecap their work.
What a coincidence.
🫠

scunneen (he/him) 🚋Sep 4, 2023

@actioninja @lunarequest @thephd Can't someone just fork Serde? It is open source, isn't it?

@scunneen and fork all the projects that use it… it’s not so simple.

scunneen (he/him) 🚋Sep 4, 2023

@blinkygal Well considering that this guy apparently pushed changes to it which broke stuff without any warning, I'd think everyone using it would be looking for an alternative

@scunneen Folks were starting to, but he removed those changes since it was just a ploy to motivate an rfc he was about to publish, apparently. I am not saying it’s not possible, just that forking a library is far from a complete solution.

scunneen (he/him) 🚋Sep 4, 2023

@blinkygal Yeah, you'd need to convince a huge number of people to go along with it and some people would have to take on the burden of maintaining the fork. I'm just a college student so I'm sure there are even more challenges I don't understand. I don't know much about Rust and it does seem this guy made some valuable contributions. But based on the crap he pulled on @ThePHD and willingness to temporarily break stuff as a stunt, he sounds like he could become a millstone around Rust's neck.

RAOF Sep 4, 2023

@blinkygal @scunneen there is actually a third option: remove his upload rights to crates.io for serde, and give them to someone else (or, frankly, to a team; serde is core enough).

No action required from the downstreams, and the team can organise their fork however they choose.

RAOF Sep 4, 2023

@blinkygal @scunneen this actually seems like a not-unreasonable solution to me. It seems dtolnay has scuppered both an excellent, significantly advanced, compile-time reflection project the foundation(?) was paying for and now driven off an extremely qualified candidate for the Rust specification work.

RAOF Sep 4, 2023

@blinkygal @scunneen “individuals do not own significant pieces of community infrastructure” seems like a worthwhile norm to begin enforcing.

scunneen (he/him) 🚋Sep 5, 2023

@RAOF @blinkygal Yeah, the whole idea of open source is to give users more control over their computers. If one guy can unilaterally decide to install unvetted binary blobs on your PC, break working stuff, or torpedo a promising idea for a new feature in a way that screws over a very talented developer, that kinda goes against that idea.

Sebastian Lauwers Sep 5, 2023

@scunneen @RAOF @blinkygal this seems rife for abuse. “Individuals can’t be trusted, therefore the iron crate will henceforth be maintained by Amazon.” is not an email I ever want to receive.

scunneen (he/him) 🚋Sep 5, 2023

@teotwaki @RAOF @blinkygal Well personally if I were the Rust Foundation I wouldn't just grab control of the repository, but I would tell him that serde has become too big and too important to be controlled by him alone, or to let anyone post code to it's repository without review, and that he should either transfer final control to a team or have the Foundation create an officially blessed fork named RustSerialize or something.

RAOF Sep 6, 2023

@scunneen @teotwaki @blinkygal Right, the goal is “core infrastructure has, and continues to have, community-acceptable governance and development practices”.

There's lots of moving parts to that - what does “core infrastructure” mean¹, what does “community acceptable governance” mean, and none of these have rigid distinctions. A process to handle this would involve regularly identifying core infrastructure, providing help organising maintenance/governance teams for said infrastructure, and so on.

And, as a last resort, a process for a team to take over publishing of a core infrastructure crate.

RAOF Sep 6, 2023

@scunneen @teotwaki @blinkygal I think this sounds more aggressive now than it would be in practice, because it's come up as a response to something of a crisis where a sole maintainer of core infrastructure has burnt significant trust in both their development practices and their governance practices.

I think it's likely that having a process for core infrastructure would avoid future crises. OSS maintainers, by and large, are not known for turning down help maintaining their libraries!

scunneen (he/him) 🚋Sep 6, 2023

@RAOF @teotwaki @blinkygal Yeah. I think taking away some power from him isn't just a matter of him being punished for his actions, its also a matter of the fact that no person, no matter who or how good they are, should have so much power over a core part of a programming language with millions of users.

Sebastian Lauwers Sep 6, 2023

@scunneen @RAOF @blinkygal I don’t think taking away people’s work from them is something I could ever support, regardless of what that person may have done, or how critical the work may be to anyone.

If they ask or invite the conversation, sure. If you offer the idea and they embrace it fully, sure.

Stripping people of their work because of the success of said work is unacceptable and would lead to infighting and forks up the wazoo. This is how we end with Rust forks, or dead #Rust

Sebastian Lauwers Sep 6, 2023

@scunneen @RAOF @blinkygal the reason why this feels so icky to me is that it occurs to me that this would be real piracy in the digital world. “You are no longer the owner of this work because committee XYZ has deemed it too critical for the greater good”. There might even be a similar line in Animal Farm. “Just be happy you get to keep a plaque as the original author. Maybe in the next release we remove your name from the README.md”.

I’m exaggerating, however I hope my point comes across.

RAOF Sep 6, 2023

@teotwaki @scunneen @blinkygal Wheras I think this actually happens all the time in the wider world - property becomes progressively more regulated - progressively less yours - the more publicly critical it is.

You can do what you want in your own kitchen, but if you want to employ people to work in it and sell food to the public it's now constrained to meet various standards. If you build a big kitchen and make lots of food you're even less free to run your property as you wish, and so on.

I'd also dispute that this is "stripping them of their work"; they still have their work, and at worst could publish it under a different name. What they don't have is the technical lock-in.

Sebastian Lauwers Sep 6, 2023

@RAOF @scunneen @blinkygal But… FOSS is not a commercial venture where I sell food to patrons of my establishment. I decided to start a project to scratch my own itch, or because I felt passionate about it. I decided to share my work openly as I feel this is best for innovation—or whatever other reason. Now others start using my work, and all of a sudden I have to give up the name of the project I created because it was successful? How is that fair in any sense?

Sebastian Lauwers Sep 6, 2023

@RAOF @scunneen @blinkygal Forcing people to republish their own work under a different name is a complete violation of the spirit of every copyleft licence I can think of.

Just because I use a specific _programming language_ does not mean I opted into a specific project structure or organisation. If I want to commit to master without unit tests, so be it; it is my code and my project. If I want to make future contributions proprietary, I can.

If you don’t like it, don’t use my code.

scunneen (he/him) 🚋Sep 6, 2023

@teotwaki @RAOF @blinkygal Well, I wouldn't be proposing stripping people completely of control of their work, only that they shouldn't have absolute power over it, so they can't push out new features that break important stuff without warning. I want to prevent things like node.js 's LeftPad debacle, when a single disgruntled contributor was able to break the build processes of tons of libraries that depended on his package.

scunneen (he/him) 🚋Sep 6, 2023

@teotwaki @RAOF @blinkygal I think Perhaps you could define "core" packages as packages that Rust Project's own packages depend on. Then you could simply say that the Rust Project won't use any package as a dependancy if there is a person who has the power to make arbitrary changes to the code without running them by anyone else. This would require the Rust Project to either convince serde to change its governance structure, or fork serde

Sebastian Lauwers Sep 6, 2023

@scunneen @RAOF @blinkygal Yes! This is a much more reasonable approach. Propose a project gets “adopted” into Rust, with all the governance and procedures that entails to safeguard quality.

If the project refuses, which is their right, then a decision can be made to fork it in order to bring it under the Rust project umbrella. Or an alternative can be developed.

RAOF Sep 6, 2023

@teotwaki @scunneen @blinkygal This is basically my proposal, but without the additional, technical, step to prevent the fork being a break-the-world event for the ecosystem.