this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
17 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

1385 readers
117 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (5 children)

oh my god, that weird fash fucker is absolutely pulling a NixOS and trying to burn down the Python community over a well-deserved 3 month suspension

and the only reason I know about this shit even though I’m barely involved with Python in any regard is because one of his fans/alts was spamming mastodon with a blog post defending him, and fully half of it by scroll bar position was just fluffing the fucker’s previous achievements, then at almost exactly the halfway point it started describing all the shit he did and hoo boy does he deserve a lot more than a 3 month suspension

it’s fascinating how this is almost exactly the same situation as with what’s-his-face getting suspended from Nix and the project’s older maintainers pulling ranks to get the toxic fucker back

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yup I refused to even post that nonsense because I did the exact same scroll through it and was nonplussed by the amount of preamble this dude absolutely did not merit in defense of his terminal poaster syndrome.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

preamble

more like preramble, eh?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

stealing that for the next time I make a naughty lorawan module

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

There certainly is a pattern of people who used to be helpful and productive in the past who then turn into edgelords in the community later, and nobody dares to go after them because past achievements pattern.

Lol, of course the edgelords (I think there were 2, not really clear to me atm) have Dutch names. Typisch. Anyway, we tech people really need to learn that being good in tech, and getting tech changes approved is different from being good at modern community management and avoiding the pitfalls of those.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Anyway, we tech people really need to learn that being good in tech, and getting tech changes approved is different from being good at modern community management and avoiding the pitfalls of those.

That'd require them to be decent human beings, but from what I've seen I'm not counting on it

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Dang it, am I going to have to learn a new programming language after 24 years of getting things done in Python because the edgelords are indulging in a fit of pique?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

god I hope Python of all things has enough eyes on it that this throw yourself on the ground in agonizing pain and flood the community with a bunch of fash assholes because you got a 3-month suspension shit won’t work, but I’m still astonished it works at all given how obvious it is when it happens

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

what's really lol is how this whole arc is developing

at the start, the announcement about peters being canned for 3 months was really rather obtuse, not even naming the person or pointing at specific threads (just enumerating repeat problems). why, i have no idea

so now mcdipshit et co are doing their utter best to publicise themselves as crybabies who just got told "no, bad, don't do that" and did not like it one bit. but the friends they're choosing... oi.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I mean, this is why I left during the Python 3 arguments. It was obvious that the core development team only functions to the extent that it can improve the (economic) exploitability of CPython by the consortium which has captured it, and that we'd become so technically dysfunctional that we were no longer able to implement forward-compatible syntax, something we'd had as recently as Python 2.5 but had lost by Python 2.7. The inability of the various "authority" groups like PyCA or PyPA to get things done once-and-for-all is another symptom; there is still no single holistic solution for cryptography or packaging in Python 3.

Like, I recall having dinner with Guido and Barry (and others; like ten of us at a Chinese restaurant) in Montreal. It was very obvious that Guido not only didn't grok concepts like pure functions or capabilities or asynchrony, but fundamentally not interested in how they could improve the state of software engineering; he is forever in the mindset of making a teaching language, not a professional language. I also recall discussing with him years earlier (Portland?) about how libraries like Twisted or Django fundamentally only justify their existence by pointing to deficiencies in the standard library, and he didn't understand that a bad standard-library package can be worse than not having one at all. At least he's a nice person; at no point was there any yelling or tenseness, and I appreciate that.

That said, I use Python 3 all the time. I just keep in mind that I shouldn't prefer it, and I only choose it when there's a clear developer-time tradeoff, because I know that its maintainers are contemptuous of me merely for using Python 2.7 and PyPy.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

and he didn’t understand that a bad standard-library package can be worse than not having one at all

screams in mime, datetime, yaml, The Long Road To Py3.7+, and more

That said, I use Python 3 all the time. I just keep in mind that I shouldn’t prefer it, and I only choose it when there’s a clear developer-time tradeoff

not a week goes by that I am not still awestruck by still how many places there are to stub one's toe with py3-cluster things

samesies on still using python in some places. god I wish I could find something else that filled the same first-reach gaps as nicely.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

My conspiracy theory is that they're all deep cover agents for MathWorks.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So it's entirely unclear from that HN thread, but where did this dumbassery start?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

it probably isn’t exactly where it started as the entire thing’s in bad faith, but I’ve found the blog post being spammed absolutely everywhere at the time that went into excruciating detail on tim’s history with python then tried its best (and absolutely failed) to paper over and misrepresent the shit Tim did that got him temporarily ejected

e: my strong personal impression is that Tim’s just been like this for 30 years, and nobody managed to call him out before cause he’s the Timsort guy and open source projects always seem to think technical achievement should absolve you of all the other shit you do, regardless of how much that shit damages the project technically

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Defending “reverse racism” and “reverse sexism”,

lol yeah this was the line at which the post revealed its entire ass

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

it’s remarkable that the post spends so many paragraphs priming the reader into thinking Tim’s an irreplaceable part of the Python community and should never have been suspended, and now at least two people have gotten to that exact sentence and gone “no actually fuck Tim”

if memory serves, it gets much more mask off from there, but I remember I didn’t finish the entire thing before I closed the tab and started blocking Tim’s fans

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

this guy was IIRC also furiously defending the totally not nazis at Nix

still this post is a glorious example of a defense brief that would work even better for the prosecution

i did stumble over a worse one just now: a guy banned from the Mesa community for being a Nazi defends himself by saying he only said that:

if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views. which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn't care, as long as they don't post about gassing people on my server

that is inclusivity

and writing a prosecution brief about himself in his defense

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, you unfortunately are seeing right. A person (name of whom I will censor even though you can find their name easily by going to the issue page) went onto the Hyprland bug tracker, to call me, a Nazi.

ah, this is the part of the Wayland community that’s now notorious for being a Nazi bar, specifically because their discord and every other community space did in fact have a gigantic number of nazis (some of whom were moderators) “joking” about, among other things, gassing people

e: (and also just a fuckton of outright bigotry, see Drew’s posts on this for a sample of what I mean)

here’s Drew Devault’s take on that blog post and also his first blog post that covered the ways in which Hyprland is a Nazi bar

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Imagine being so bad Drew Devault of all people rightly calls you out on your toxic behavior.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

To be fair Drew has tried to be a better person lately.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Good on him. All that drama can't be healthy in the long run.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

a guy banned from the Mesa community for being a Nazi

lol I learned about this the other day when marcan posted about it, and I had a good giggle

iirc: poor l'il fashbaby has some kind of problems with his thing, but he can't turn anywhere because the linux graphics community is kinda small and enough people went "lol get fucked" that it effectively closed doors everywhere

the world's smallest violin, etc etc

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

wayland, right, but it's for urbit

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Actually reading the python discussion boards, what's striking is the immense volume of chatter produced by Tim, always in couched in:

  • "Hypothetically"
  • "Everyone tells me they are terrified of inclusivity, you wouldn't know because they are terrified of admitting it to YOU"
  • "I'm not saying that you are an awful person 😉" (YMMV: But I find his use of the winking face emoji truly egregious)
  • "Hey I'm liberal like you, let me explain everything wrong with it"
  • "Hey we were inclusive before any of this PC bullshit" proceeds to use unpleasant descriptors of marginalized individuals, and how very welcome they were, despite what he seems to see as "shortcomings"

In his heart he must understand how bad he his, or he wouldn't couch his discourse in so much bad faith, and he wouldn't make so much of a stink out of making removing Python Fellow status more easy to remove.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

Tim defended neither of these, only engaging in a conversation with someone who had, noting that in globally diverse communities that the required narrative may be more complex than oppressor-oppressed by simple binary color of skin.

With no link to any additional context