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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3553 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 5, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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It's... had a lot of governance Issues for a long time, and there's the normal coastal politics (did you know NixCon had Anduril sponsorships, the sridhar ban). I don't grok the entire point of the Nix project, but from what I've seen via shlevy on twitter, the NixOS governance has been kinda the center of a turf war since ~2021 (with the first community team rfc, not enacted).

A lot of recent heat seems to be downstream of Eelco, the original dev, officially stepping down and handing control over to the Foundation Board. He's not been active much for a while, but the community was largely willing to overlook a lot of moderation and management decisions running very much by the seat of everyone's pants, under the auspices that he'd be kinda overlooking things. In theory, there's supposed to be constitutional convention and a foundation board meeting and a whole bunch of stuff about distribution of power and oversight, but in practice, there's not really much clear way for anything to happen beyond the Foundation writing whatever policies it thinks will be popular in California -- see the sponsorship policy snafu, and specifically how the forum auto-locked the discussion and moderators forbid opening new threads on it (and the thread OP was tempbanned for being a putz).

But the recent snafu is about more generally around the ethos that:

But I am exhausted to live in a world, in a society and to imagine that I live in a community where questions like “why should we introduce the political opinion to make empathy mandatory or inclusive language” can be read, this is seriously disturbing.

There's a code of conduct in place, people want it expanded significantly, and that people are allowed to question it are evidence that it should have been expanded years ago, if not evidence of governance failures or destructive to the reputation of the community; sprinkle in some mentions of sealioning and concern trolling, and you're done.

Even after looking at that, I still don't understand what the drama is about. People are "running for the fire exits" and abandoning usage of a piece of software because the author wrote a tone-deaf letter? A well-drafted and professional communication disqualifies someone from running a birthday party? Every time I see info about this drama I feel like I understand it even less. No one seems to want to actually accuse anyone of anything, except being "insensitive." And I don't know what that means, that's such a broad term it could include repeated and personal bullying or saying an unpopular belief. And whenever specific conduct is discussed, it sounds more like indifference than malice to me.

I still have no idea what's going on and I'm continually bemused at people who make such an identity out of their software that they'd abandon such a useful concept because a major author isn't maximally on their side. As someone who understands why people like Nix but has never cared for evangelists talking about the tech of the future, I'm slightly bemused that this was apparently all it took for some people to abandon The Future Of Linux. I mean, I love Linux too guys, but can everyone just get a life?

Yeah, it's strange. I got curious, so I decided to poke around in some of the links gattsuru provided. There's talk about toxic governance, but very few specifics. And I've seen stuff like that, and I know it can be hard to make a truthful list that would convince an outsider. But still, it feels weak, a lot of words talking around issues, from people who can't or won't come to a point.

One part, about banning one person (JR), seemed to be a controversy over whether a defense contractor (Anduril) should be allowed to sponsor the project, with the losing faction being "NATO defense contractors are what prevent Russia from conquering Ukraine and the rest of the world", and the winning faction being "defense contractors kill people and are icky and we don't want their name near us" (various positions were put forth, but I can't come up with a coherent charitable interpretation). One thing that jumped out was that the mere fact of his applying to become a Board observer was treated as a problem. And what really got my attention were the comments by people speaking in support of him that were "flagged by the community and temporarily hidden".

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/why-was-jon-ringer-banned-from-github/44114

That led back to this earlier thread (also linked to by gattsuru) where JR was opposed to reserving a board seat for a woman. The conversation went as expected, these days: he's out of step with the progressive majority.

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/objection-to-minority-representation-by-a-single-class-in-nixos-sponsorship-policy/42968

And those led to this Reddit post, where JR says goodbye in a fairly professional manner:

https://old.reddit.com/r/NixOS/comments/1cd5fod/in_case_im_unable_to_return_wish_you_all_the_best/

But the Reddit comments had links to a bunch of stuff, including this (somewhat overheated) explanation, which is solidly culture war, and which apparently got the authors banned immediately:

https://github.com/nrdxp/rfc-evidence/blob/master/rfc_evidences_experiences.md

And then this bit of aftermath, again mostly notable for the attitude of the moderators and the content of the flagged comments:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/delroths-muting-in-the-moderation-matrix-room/44090

I still can't figure out what side of the culture war the people fleeing the project are on, and that's probably intentional.

One part, about banning one person (JR), seemed to be a controversy over whether a defense contractor (Anduril) should be allowed to sponsor the project, with the losing faction being "NATO defense contractors are what prevent Russia from conquering Ukraine and the rest of the world", and the winning faction being "defense contractors kill people and are icky and we don't want their name near us" (various positions were put forth, but I can't come up with a coherent charitable interpretation)

The charitable steelman is that Anduril's products flirt increasingly closely with autonomous weapons, and the extent humans are in the loop (for autonomous weapons made by other people) has at best diffused responsibility regarding validity of target selection, and more practically put to a point where oversight and responsibility aren't enforceable. The... less charitable bit is that, like Palantir, the (surveillance) equipment and technology is also used by ICE and police, and a lot of Nix tech could be and/or could be driven to be very useful for that equipment and technology. The even less charitable one is that, while Palmer Luckey isn't as No Go politics-wise as Peter Thiel, it's known, in ways that kept people from supporting him.

And what really got my attention were the comments by people speaking in support of him that were "flagged by the community and temporarily hidden".

Yeah. On one hand, that's a Discourse (the forum software designed by CodingHorror's lead) default behavior, and one reason (among many) I'm glad that Zorba didn't base this forum off Discourse. On the other hand, the moderation team can override it, or allow successor threads, and didn't.

I still can't figure out what side of the culture war the people fleeing the project are on, and that's probably intentional.

Dunno. There's at least some text from big names in the github from the TotsNotBlueTriberJustUsingTheirAssumptions, and not much explicit red triber, but that doesn't exclude the porque no los dos.

There's at least some text from big names in the github from the TotsNotBlueTriberJustUsingTheirAssumptions, and not much explicit red triber, but that doesn't exclude the porque no los dos.

I was vaguely assuming that the Red tribe didn't want to paint targets on themselves, that this particular clan of the Blue tribe is addicted to their word-salad obfuscatory approach, and that the Grey tribe is genuinely upset about the corruption of the process. (For versions of R/B/G that are closer to conservative/leftist/liberal.)

For whatever reason, most of them seemed to feel it in their interests to frame the conflict as about moderation policies and formal structure. The quote about hypocrisy being "the tribute that vice pays to virtue" came to mind when forcing my way through some of the tortured language used by the mod team and their supporters. Also something Tolkien said about evil not being able to create, only twist.

I'm guessing this will mostly blow over, a relatively small number of contributors and slightly larger number of users will leave, whether publicly or silently. I suspect people on both the left and right will do this, thr left being louder and the right being quieter. Then the project will continue, but with less enthusiasm from evangelists.

The technology has a lot going for it (hence why Anduril wants to use it!) and it'll probably move more into a "used as a tool professionally" space rather than a "get excited about it personally and make it part of your identity" space. I'm not sure any side of their community, such as it is, trusts anyone else. The community will die but I'm guessing the technology will live on.

a defense contractor (Anduril)

Which is weird, because Anduril makes small drones that defensively destroy incoming attacking drones by flying into them. They make actual defensive drones. They don't make Predator or Reaper style drones that are full sized planed that "drone" people with missiles.

That is Anduril's current portfolio, but they were recently one of the companies selected to continue (along with General Atomics, the makers of Predator and Reaper) development of an aircraft for the CCA program, which is most certainly a more traditional defence product. https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3754980/air-force-exercises-two-collaborative-combat-aircraft-option-awards/

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