@jakehamilton I'm going to preface this by saying I obviously hate the MIC and Anduril. In fact, I've spent most of my adult life so far (and a bit before that) dealing with shitty defense companies constantly advertising and influencing the area I grew up in, and being very close with the schools I attended. It's gross, and I am thankful to have been in a position where I didn't ever even really need to entertain the idea of interning or working with them to put food on the table. And it really does suck to see that same sort of thing wiggle its way into a community I love

With that said, I very much feel this post is a bit misguided? Sensational?

I'm genuinely asking here: how is Anduril "control[ling] the direction of the whole Nix ecosystem?" through Tom's place in the SC?

I mean yeah, he started working for them in the last few weeks...but what kind of impact does that have? Do you assume Tom has now become only a mouthpiece for his employer in that time? Is the rest of the SC simply letting him have free reign over all decisions?

@jakehamilton These are absolutely atrocious optics, and I think we can all agree the communication of this (especially given Anduril's past...) could've been done a lot better

But practically, I'm really not sure this has the impact you are claiming here

As @roberth said above (and other members of the SC have pointed out) there are proper procedures in policies in place if an employe{e,r} has a conflict of interest or oversteps the bounds of their role. They are precisely there for these kinds of situations; to avoid companies from infecting these institutions and compromising those who are duly elected. Is there any evidence of this not working?

And If we're consistent with this kind of logic, why not say a company like Mercury is also controlling the direction of the ecosystem? After all, they have employees leading both the Foundation side of the community, as well as Lix! If we're going to assume people are simply the mouthpieces of their employers, why isn't this also a problem?

@getchoo @jakehamilton Yeah, bad optics for sure. We learned that, and y'all didn't deserve the drama.

SC is hard work, but the people have been great and IME honest. No mouthpiecing or anything like that, no attempts to exert undue influence, no political horse trading or whatever. I don't know if any SC members have been pushed to achieve something by their employers, but if they have I don't think that's been successful at all.
We're more of a codependent small community and we'll be working together after this, so it makes no sense to try and pull anything like that. Some "revolving door" shit or whatever might work in a large inattentive kind of community maybe, but not here.

@getchoo @roberth
Honesty, I think the CoI is beside the point. Anduril's mission is to produce AI powered killer robots for a fascist regime. Those robots will, given all current developments, more likely be deployed to Chicago or San Francisco then to fend of the Great Russian Invasion. They are not defensive weapons, if such a thing even exists.

1/

@jakehamilton

#nix #nixos