consider this a gentle warning that bootlicking for fucking Anduril of all companies won’t end well. you techfash fucks.
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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one of those complicit dickheads that was highlighted in the open letter has, unfortunately, said words again
there’s nothing more non-political than destroying your own community because you want to get funding and a tiny amount of code from a right-wing defense contractor whose explicit mission is to use your and your contributors’ work to more efficiently kill people
It’s worth noting that the open letter received 232 signatures. However, 231 contributors have opted to keep contributing to nixpkgs, which makes me optimistic that things will work out.
christ almighty. there’s no number of signatures or amount of core maintainers quitting that’ll stop these fuckers from using bad math and statistics to make it look like a good thing. this is the mind-numbing banality of technofascism — you can always ass-pull some numbers to justify your ghastly fucking position no matter how many people tell you you’re a fucking ghoul.
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If NixOS shits itself and dies, don't say they weren't warned.
The great thing about fixed-point evaluation is that they will always have been warned.
The unfortunate bit about fixed-point evaluation is that infinite recursion encountered
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I have no bone in this infighting, nor am I interested in Nix per se (to me, it's one of those computing fads like Rust or Emacs that flare up once in a while then subside, either by becoming mainstream or irrelevant). But the fact that the resident fascists at lobste.rs reacted to this letter in strong terms tells me it's by the good guys.
(one commentator mentioned
The people who wrote this letter are left -progressives with politics seriously antithetical to my own and hostile to several demographic categories I belong to.
These categories being white-male-cis-straight-libertarian-American.
)
the resident fascists at lobste.rs
Never heard of it. is this a hackernews for chuds?
it's largely a bit more indie/non-VC-hypebros than HN, but it also has a standing problem of some fash presence that it hasn't quite yet accepted it needs to deal with
it deals with it occasionally, but the best i can say is they haven't gone full dang yet
Lobste.rs is an offshoot of HN, started mainly because HN accepts a lot of stuff that's not computing. So it's laser-focussed on that, but of course, open source governance drama is on-topic.
People have been banned for being both regular assholes and bigots - one of the features is an open modlog:
https://lobste.rs/moderations?moderator=%28All%29&what%5Busers%5D=users
But of course part of the memetic evolution is that fascists have become very good at being acceptable community members, by never giving the mods enough rope to hang them with.
Here's the discussion, btw. I've been a long-term member so I "know" where some people stand. See if you can detect them!
https://lobste.rs/s/0qvtim/open_letter_nixos_foundation
edit I can extend invites to those who wish one, but I'll do basic vetting first.
my biggest gripe with lobsters is that the mods pretend that software development happens in vacuum and is done by spherical avatars of an idea of a programmer, so any social issues should never be mentioned aloud or – worse yet – discussed.
Yeah, I thought the cake was quite sneerworthy. "I’m struggling to think of any organizations that I would refuse to accept money or contributions from out of principle," they say. I also rolled my eyes at the sock. "In my observations over the last few months," says a person who I'm relatively sure doesn't participate in FLOSS at all, let alone Nix/nixpkgs.
On a happier note, some folks revealed themselves as decent people, and I'm marking them too. It's good to know that some neighbors are respectable.
several demographic categories
Those are the same pictures.
There's a LWN piece that does a pretty good job with framing the specifics of this letter within some context. It gets some things wrong, such as stating that the arms manufacturer was rejected as a sponsor in both cases, but it has been corrected. The orange site is, of course, negging it with mod tools, showing that they're fine with mods pulling out the C-4 when it's their unelected mod team of choice.
Big Daddy happily reminds Anduril that this should have no impact on their murder bot deliverables.
wow I was expecting a nothing of a statement from Eelco, but that was worse than nothing. let’s look at some lowlights:
It is my opinion that it is not for us, as open source software developers, to decide whose views are valid and whose are not, and to allow or disallow project or conference participation as a result.
this is utterly wrong. one of the most important jobs an open source developer has is to evaluate contributors and their contributions to prevent bad actors from damaging the community — whether that’s through bad code or bad intent (and see the xz incident for when maintainers don’t do this).
also, in general, it’s part of our job as good people to actively enable marginalized folks to participate regardless of the type of project we run. that’s why this “non-political” horseshit from Eelco and co just (very intentionally) favors the rich defense contractor that spends a lot of money flooding Nix’s community platforms with trolls.
Throughout my career, I have consistently supported work towards creating a welcoming and inclusive environment for all individuals, regardless of their background. I continue to support initiatives to ensure that everyone feels valued and appreciated, and I have actively encouraged opportunities to amplify the voices of those who have been historically marginalized.
not one example, Eelco? Nix has been around for 20 years and you didn’t have one anecdote or example of an initiative to link? is it because the historically marginalized folks you say you’ve supported are now very loudly calling you out, and your stupid ass thinks that’s because they’re ungrateful for all the shitty initiatives you started to shut them up that didn’t actually address anyone’s concerns in a material way?
I encourage everyone reading this who feels that they have not been heard or feels displaced to join the Determinate Systems community as we continue working to make Nix as easy to use and as impactful as possible. Our code of conduct is available here, and you can join our Discord at https://determinate.systems/discord.
oh finally, the classics! Determinate Systems doesn’t control Nix, but if you’ve got issues with how we control Nix you should join our Discord where we can more effectively shout down anyone who complains too much. the classic cryptobro move, now in a project I give a damn about!
Eelco can fuck all the way off
I've been fairly surprised by how poorly they've handled community engagement since they were "founded". If there's one good thing that can come of all this, it will be to make DetSys sufficiently toxic that they lose purchase in the larger enterprise and end up the first ones to blink with a fork. Some have suggested that they've all but done that already, and while there's no conclusive evidence, I'm looking forward to breaking out the popcorn if they end up trying to speedrun Hashicorp.
the fascists in the community proposed to finally moderate nixos properly, and this is their body of evidence of terrible leftist harrasment.
Kind of fascinating that last link leads with references to lobste.rs, and Srid, a terrible person who was banned from the site 3 months ago: https://lobste.rs/~srid
(Irenes is a mod and a good one too.)
oh wow, somehow I called that Standard is a fascist land-grab for control over the Flakes standard library (and it also just really fucking sucks to use)
they really are doing their damndest to reframe all of this as minor drama, aren’t they? it’s kind of amazing how limited the techfash project takeover toolbox is — cause it doesn’t take much variation in methodology to succeed, unfortunately. for better or worse, what’s going on in Nix is probably going to be worth writing about in the end.
I tipped Liam from el Reg about it, he could do a decent summary maybe
“popular Linux distro gets taken over by nazis” does have a ring to it as an article title
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Defenders of the first Anduril sponsorship at the Europeans NixCon 2023 who participated in the discussion on Discourse have been termed "murder machine apologists" by
Jin the NixOS foundation Matrix room, likening them linguistically to people who defend actual murder. We believe that such rhetoric is inappropriate in a professional setting.
“Defending murder professionals isn’t defending actual murder guys. MODS!”
I really feel bad for poo-pooing my undergrad software ethics class. I could be a murder-machine builder right now if I hadn't accidentally found certain spaces online and had the right friends.
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a fork has appeared, courtesy of Jake Hamilton. the site seems a bit unstable for right now, but it looks like it’s starting on the right foot otherwise.
an orange site thread about the fork that as of now is mostly jon ringer refusing to log off
There's a vast difference between "working to solve it" and "forking it"!
The younger generations do not get the concept of "respect"! They need to respect those who've done the most work and not feel entitled that a small contribution to something makes them equal rights owners!
holy shit this is it, this is what forking hostility gets you. just straight up racist uncle at thanksgiving level takes
Who wants to take bets on this person having edited the sentence “spare the rod, spoil the child” out of their post purely on the grounds of ~~decency~~ thinking “it won’t sit well on Hacker news”?
“the people complaining about nix just want drama”, I said, while exploding into such a large cloud of crybaby piss that I’m posting on every tech news site and Reddit simultaneously about how the wokes temporarily banned me for being an absolute shithead
he really can't STFU, can he? After reading his earlier posts I wouldn't even have blinked, he just seemed like the garden variety "marginalized people don't exist" type. Now he's taken the mask off and gone full narcissist assclown. what an idiot.
all of the bad actors in the Nix community have a remarkable gift for SBF levels of self-defeating explanation. funny things happen when folks who’ve self-appointed to positions of power (especially positions that shouldn’t have power, like with Jon, or shouldn’t exist at all, like with Eelco) suddenly face accountability from folks who’re absolutely onto their bullshit and done fucking around
- Use of social media to target individuals [3]
Ah yes, the good old projection, never fails to be completely transparent.
here’s a depressing but informative post from one of the people who tried to fix things before everything boiled over
kinda good to know Xe isn't a garbage person. I've been 🤨 watching some of their takes/engagement on ML shit. hoped that maybe it was explained by youth/lack of exposure to certain kinds of things, and part of this post confirms the direction of that hypothesis
I’m currently watching some old gnu hacker and his buddies tie themselves into furious knots defending Anduril against the ravages of… ah… not being allowed full control over an open source project
check the stream of piss-warm takes coming from that account for a long list of reasons why guix isn’t a viable path forward for nix users
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the anduril dude has run crying to reddit. Since anyone who actually has a miniscule amount of technical ability and emotional maturity has left reddit, the results are predictable.
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