this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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FreeAssembly

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this is FreeAssembly, a non-toxic design, programming, and art collective. post your share-alike (CC SA, GPL, BSD, or similar) projects here! collaboration is welcome, and mutual education is too.

in brief, this community is the awful.systems answer to Hacker News. read this article for a solid summary of why having a less toxic collaborative community is important from a technical standpoint in addition to a social one.

some posting guidelines apply in addition to the typical awful.systems stuff:

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an open letter to the NixOS foundation (save-nix-together.org)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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this thread fucking sucks for me to have to post, but the linked open letter is an important read. none of the systemic issues pertaining to marginalized folks and commercial/military-industrial interests in the Nix community I’ve previously written about on TechTakes have been solved; in fact, they’ve gotten worse to the point where the Nix community moderation team is essentially in the process of quitting. that’s the beginning to an awful end for a project I like a whole lot.

even if you don’t give a fuck about Nix, the open letter is an important read because the toxicity, conflicts of interest, and underhanded tactics detailed in it are incredibly common in the open source space. this letter could have been written about a multitude of infamously toxic open source projects; Nix is lucky that it has marginalized folks involved who care about the direction of the project and want to make things better, but those people are actively leaving, after being burnt out by the toxic people and structures entrenched in Nix’s community. that’s a fucking tragedy.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Eelco posted another non-apology and stepped down from the NixOS Foundation board. here’s the Aux take on it which I think has a bit more value than the original post alone did.

in essence: this is a good step, but it’s important to remember that Eelco and friends have made concessions like this in the past, and it hasn’t mattered to their (informal but very real) entrenched positions of power. specifically, Eelco hasn’t stepped down from the Nix evaluator team or promised he’d change any of his behavior there (and the evaluator is key to Nix, and to commercializing the project against the community’s wishes), and there’s no clarity on how the Nix governance changes will impact bad actors (which specifically includes Anduril). there’s still a very good place for Aux and any other Nix fork to exist as long as Eelco and company haven’t committed to taking actions that will remedy the most crucially broken parts of the Nix community.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There's some bitter irony to the fact that I've been getting nonstop notices about commits to the infamous "lazy trees" branch, the thing that is supposed to make flakes usable with monorepos (but in practice has yet to do so). Watching those notifications the last couple of days has told me all I needed to know.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

oops all eelco and he really ain’t doing much in these commits, is he? between that and the recent commits to the Nix evaluator it’s pretty obvious he’s keeping near-exclusive control over what gets into the evaluator and how it’s developed

it’s very likely that Eelco and Determinate Systems have employed an old strikebreaking technique: they’ve agreed to concessions that don’t inconvenience them and weren’t really what was demanded. Eelco has lost a board position he didn’t want, but maintains a position that’ll ensure he and his friends can commercialize improvements to Nix by controlling what goes into the evaluator, ensuring that only Determinate Systems can implement an improved version of Nix with a working version of flakes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

In positive News, there is now a zulip (yep, the chat system with the threads) instance where nix governance gets discussed, with a faiiiirly reasonable and toothsome code of conduct. I don’t want to hope too much but maybe there is a way this project can heal, I’d certainly appreciate not having to spend person-months migrating all my personal computing to some much worse platform.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

oh the nix community thread is going fucking great:

Can we not use controversial, handwavy and subjective terms such as sealioning without strong evidence? Surely we can phrase them as something more concrete and objective such as xxx did yyy which implies zzz (you get the point)?

[…]

I contest the notion that sealioning is objective. Objective by definition means that the standard is independent of any specific person’s judgment, and as such should be able to be judged by a machine. Can you give men such a definition?

the deepest pit of hell is just sealions sealioning about sealioning

I’m not trying to get banned so I will tread carefully.

I’m a black guy from the USA, I love using NixOS, want it to be the #1 Linux distro.

I don’t think anyone would use N-word here, it’s universal in any forum I’ve been a part of that derogatory language is an instant ban.

So my question about the particular use of the word “Protection” is sincere here. What am I being protected from here. Again I haven’t seen any threads where any verbal assaults occurred.

I don’t don’t want anybody to be afraid to debate me personally because they’re afraid that I’m a “protected class” or something.

this post in the exact tone and style of republican twitter is presented without further comment

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The fascists have been incredibly effective at diverting people to all the conversations that don't matter. It's the same strategy as always -- "be loudly wrong about an insignificant issue and watch the leftists jump to correct you."

Anduril is mentioned once in the NixOS thread and zero times in the aux.computer thread. So let's say I'm not hopeful.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

“be loudly wrong about an insignificant issue and watch the leftists jump to correct you.”

It's taken me way too long to learn how to avoid falling for weaponized nerd sniping, and it still gets me sometimes.

NSFW Edit: This is why we sneer, innit? Be laconic, be witty, and deprive fashy bullshit the dignity of an effortful reply.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

absolutely! there’s a clear pattern to how fascists take over FOSS projects and the commons in general. what’s interesting is how visible it all is in Nix’s case; they aren’t even bothering to hide what they’re doing, other than the typical distortions from the fash weirdos flooding Nix’s discussion forums. in this case it’s such an obvious bait and switch, and it sucks to see people fall for it yet again.

I really should start writing about technofascism again. it’s becoming increasingly important that FOSS projects learn about and are ruggedized against the pathways fascists use to take over the commons, because if this obvious shit keeps working, we’ll have nothing of value left.