Mastodawn

KFears& 🏳️‍⚧️Dec 13

Today, I once again wake up worrying about #Rust 's future.

Why is a shitbag such as #dtolnay still allowed to single-handedly maintain fundamental libraries for the ecosystem? Why is he part of Library API team? How is he not permabanned for single-handedly permanently damaging Rust by killing off comptime reflection over his racism? How is he not permabanned for the power play he attempted to pull with his "RFC" after pushing pre-compiled binary to serde without notice? Why are MIC companies routinely tolerated at Rust conventions? Why does no one talk about it, despite the problems not being solved? Has #Ruby takeover taught people nothing? Will Rust survive another year without turning into #fashtech?

So many questions. I think about them every time I use Rust, which is often.

Apropos of nothing.

#RustLang #serde #FOSS #OSS #OpenSource

flaggenderfluid

@KFears wait dtolnay is racist? where can i read more about that?

also why the hell lately all the tech is becoming fascist, as a trans jewish individual this shit is worrying as fuck

KFears& 🏳️‍⚧️Dec 13

@vavakado Sophia, one of the people who resigned over it, put it in no uncertain terms that racism is one of the reasons: https://www.sophiajt.com/why-i-left-rust/

The summary by Amos is very centrist, but it provides a good overview into all the statements made (you can notice how toothless they are, but at least they are corporately apologetic): https://fasterthanli.me/articles/the-rustconf-keynote-fiasco-explained

Then, dtolnay wrote his own perspective, 3 months after the fact, in which he gave a non-apology and suggested that ThePhdDev wanted to do the talk much later and was "pressured" into doing it early. This is utter bullshit, ThePhdDev had regular nervousness and was encouraged many times, he wanted to give that talk.

ThePhdDev rightfully exploded on Fedi for this fucker, being one of the most vocal enemies of that talk, saying this gross lie and half-assing a non-apology. You'll have to forgive me; I don't have a link to it handy. I hope it should still be available.

#Rust #RustLang #dtolnay

Why I left Rust

Sophia June Turner

@vavakado @KFears this is referring to a situation a couple years ago where a chain of actions from several well intentioned people caused a keynote for RustConf to be canceled which was kicked off by dtolnay which people quickly assumed was driven by racism before the facts were known which was compounded by at least one well known Rust community member (but outside the project) making a racist comment that the speaker was only chosen for diversity (they were not). The weight of blame put on dtolnay was made worse by them taking limited responsibility for their part including delaying an apology until they were outed and then doing a poor one.

It also has not killed off comptime reflection, just that approach from that contributor. There is on going work in that area by a compiler team member that I am much more hopeful about the design of.

This isn't that I'm a dtolnay apologist. Its just that to work to solve problems you need to make sure you know what the problems are.

KFears& 🏳️‍⚧️Dec 13

@epage @vavakado Work by ThePhdDev was never "definitive design"; it was a very early preview by an extremely enthusiastic and competent person who volunteered to drive the work. I am cautiously optimistic that had this situation not happened, we'd already have good and working comptime reflection today.

And I profoundly disagree that the people were "well-intentioned", for most of them have kept their power and haven't contributed to the solution, only apologized instead of doing something with the elephant in the room.

@KFears @vavakado Maybe. We can't know what would have happened and that is disappointing. And to be clear, the harm to that person is the greatest disappointment.

From my understanding of the chain of events, I have a hard time saying what more or less should have been done. Several people are no longer in the roles they were in that were related to critical failures in the process. One of those people is still involved with the project and I see them to today living up to their promised actions.

KFears& 🏳️‍⚧️Dec 13

@epage @vavakado With the political context surrounding today, I expect better of people than to not fuck up in the positions of power as much as they already did. And to be very blunt, I don't see dtolnay making strides towards being something other than a liability, waiting to explode the next time something happens.

Michał Fita Dec 13

@epage @vavakado @KFears Wouldn't be fair to call person the discussion is about to the whiteboard? @dtolnay seem to be on the fediverse.

KFears& 🏳️‍⚧️Dec 13

@michalfita @epage @vavakado @dtolnay To be blunt, it is not his opinion I care about, but whatever rocks your boat, I guess.

beepster Dec 13

@michalfita the only thing anyone needs to hear from him is his being proud of his time at palintir.

d@nny disc@ mc² Dec 16

@epage @vavakado @KFears i haven't ever heard an apology and you haven't linked to one, or indeed to anything at all despite assuming the authoritative tone of knowing what the problems are we need to solve. i think tolnay can speak for himself rather than having the entire leadership continuing to cover for him and attempting to memory hole the incident.

d@nny disc@ mc² Dec 16

@epage @vavakado @KFears the only response i've seen from tolnay was not an apology and was a deleted github gist. i've contributed to his crates before in order to allow libsignal to depend on him. i am now taking whatever means are necessary to avoid introducing a dependency on a racist into my dependency graph, since they believe absurdities and are therefore quite dangerous in a supply chain.

d@nny disc@ mc² Dec 16

@epage @vavakado @KFears perhaps steve klabnik would prefer to go on the oxide podcast again to describe tolnay's most objectionable episode as the time he worked around cargo's lack of a precompiled binary distribution mechanism, caching system straight from the 1900s, and complete failure to represent generalized build products generated by scripts in an auditable and overridable way by precompiling a macro in serde on x86. i believe the term "untrustworthy" was used to describe tolnay—not for fucking up rust's image indefinitely in a very public way, but for veering even slightly outside the chain of command.

d@nny disc@ mc² Dec 16

@epage @vavakado @KFears one additional benefit of the rustc build system i'm working to prototype right now which replaces cargo and bootstrap entirely is that it also loses the 9000 transitive deps on the david tolnay cinematic universe. this would avoid blocking on the long tail of gccrs compat while overcoming the two main reasons potential new rust users outside the weapons and surveillance industry (radical queers much like the ones who built rust into what it is now) can't allow themselves to invest long-term into rust as a platform for new heights of safety and empathy.

d@nny disc@ mc² Dec 16

@epage @vavakado @KFears this statement was worse than saying nothing. please understand that we are now facing the prospect of a stallman-like figure who risks losing an entire generation of talent from rust. please try harder. i need you to try harder because i've invested so much into this language with so little to show at the end

KFears& 🏳️‍⚧️Dec 13

@vavakado About the tech becoming fascist, all I can say is: "always has been". I hope to write about it in depth one day, but most of our present-day infrastructure has been built by people, structures and companies who can't be trusted with anything. They are the ones who'll gladly cooperate with fascists if they ever come to power. And coming to power fascists have been doing over the past years, so yeah. The entire tech field has been built in a way that is vulnerable to fascism. The days we had prior to that have been a historical accident, that is now successfully corrected away.

@KFears I'll add that engineers love making stuff because it's fun or technically interesting, but often disregard politics or think that they're doing science so they're neutral. Problem, they need money to work. Who has money? Big corps, who put their interests before ideology, so they will become fascist if it helps growing in the current political context. That's how well-intentioned engineers or scientists can be driven by fascism without knowing it.

@KFears For example in my lab (in a public research institution), nobody is fascist, but most people are working on fun and interesting things (like autonomous drone flocks driven by AI) for which I can't imagine any other realistic application that the military (the usual apology is "saving people in earthquakes" but firefighters are not as rich as armies). All that is because of how budgets are allocated and how we're force to collaborate with private sector for funding.

KFears& 🏳️‍⚧️Dec 14

@tuxmain Sigh, yeah, that happens a lot. Ultimately, it is a systematic problem: with how resources are allocated and how people are forced to work to not starve, the game is rigged.

Still, though, not thinking of what your labor and effort is used for is a privilege - and a choice. There's a comparison made by someone during Framework fallout, and it was stuck with me since. It compared the excitement and energy many engineers display without thinking about the application to wanting to build the best possible trains in 1940s.

Admiral Snackbär Dec 13

@vavakado @KFears

It's because we (as in, the society) told tech bros for decades that they are very special boys and acted like it was true. So these people were brought thinking they were Übermenschen, and now they act like it was true.

Also, if you think neoliberal ideology to the end, it's social darwinism.