9 ms·

The dire state of NixOS's moderation culture

66 points by srid 2y ago

hollow-moe 2y ago
OP is also the one that was banned from nix communities. How did such a childish ban appeal could reach top HN ???
- _cenw 2y ago
  I have no idea. Reddit seems to mostly be on this dude's side too, while most other places I frequent related to Nix do not. There's certainly a lot to break down, but I'll start with Jon calling the behavior of associating him with Anduril "doxing", when it's literally on his linkedin and his buddies are doing full-name callouts in this supplementary article to RFC 175, or how he starts a reddit thread that he says isn't meant to stir the pot, but then goes on in the comments about being a brave fascist-labeled throught-criminal, when he mostly got banned for being extremely abrasive / concern-trolling alongside injecting himself into every single conversation, including approving the PR that removed person with the 4. most commits leaving due to his employer.
teddyh 2y ago
There’s always Guix.
- lrvick 2y ago
  And they actually do full source bootstrapping and signing.
- SuperSandro2000 2y ago
  Guix focuses on free software, not on general usability.
  - teddyh 2y ago
    Free software ensures long-term usability.
- KingMob 2y ago
  I'd love to try it, but they're super-hostile to running on a Mac.
  - rekado 2y ago
    Not hostile. We just can't do it. There is no free toolchain for Mac. So we'd have to arbitrarily cut the trust graph and graft it on top of a huge blob of a proprietary toolchain and set of system libraries. That's like building a completely new distribution. Since I'm not using macos and have no interest in committing my own money to keep paying for freedom restricting software to provide a service that would earn the label "supported" there's no way I'm going to make that effort.
    - KingMob 2y ago
      That's really more of a "won't", than a "can't". Sure, it would be impure, and not top-to-bottom reproducible, and you don't personally have to do it. But it's a choice to avoid a compromise, not an impossibility precluded by the laws of math or anything. Regardless, I no longer really sympathize with Free software's concept of a "freedom" that results in either (1) obscure purity, or (2) benefits large corporations at the expense of the rest of us. RMS was economically naive, despite his counter-cultural leanings; I can't help but wonder what Free software would have looked like if he'd imagined the likes of MS/Amazon getting rich off it while creators get a pittance. We can't all have free-floating MIT jobs.
      - rekado 2y ago
        Well, there's nobody blocking the work. If not I then surely somebody would personally have to do it. And it's akin to building a completely separate distribution on top of a different foundation, so we could only superficially reuse existing infrastructure. I'm writing my comments in the first person, because I have actually made the effort to investigate this in the past, more than once. This is precious little to do with some kind of abstract purity. Hell, I've packaged Tensorflow and CUDA crap, which is as far removed from purity as it gets. It gets a little tiring to read about values that are projected onto Guix, that I can't find in my own work.
- rstarast 2y ago
  Last time I tried it was unusably slow
thrownawaysz 2y ago
I love how in these current years you can shutdown anything with just simply shouting fascism/nazis. Don’t like something? They are fascists444
- sourcegrift 2y ago
  On the same note, its hilarious that right now twitter of all the websites on earth has the best fake news detection mechanism in community notes but it's also the single website everyone wants down. I remember before Elon took over, there were daily hitjobs on facebook but just yesterday people were cheering threads having 150M MAU.
_dain_ 2y ago
This is exactly what the opponents of CoC-culture warned about: it's a clever rhetorical smokescreen to allow leftist freaks to do power grabs like this. Words like "harm", "inclusive", "community" etc have dual-meanings, one for the clique insiders and another for the outsiders. And lmao wow, one of the mods involved in this is also a mod at lobste.rs. No wonder the "discussion" there looked so uncanny.
- atemerev 2y ago
  "clever"
- raziel2p 2y ago
  without commenting on this specific case because TLDR: the same argument could be used in a situation where moderators allow harassment against certain groups in the name of freedom of speech, while moderating harassment against others. moderation is prone to power plays no matter which angle you approach it with.
- quadhome 2y ago
  wrt. Lobsters, check your facts. - Moderation actions are public on lobsters: https://lobste.rs/moderations https://lobste.rs/moderations - Irene wasn’t active in that discussion. - Some of the most upvoted comments were against the moderation clique.
  - pushcx 2y ago
    Irene also wasn't involved in me removing srid's attempted brigading or it being the last straw for his ban. The author of this article doesn't seem particularly interested in checking facts, they implied some nasty stuff about my actions and motivation without bothering to read the publicly available info or contact me.
    - srid 2y ago
      > srid's attempted brigading Nowhere in the ban log you mentioned "attempted brigading"; rather what you mentioned, as reasons for the ban, was "lots of off-topic stories" & "[using] Lobsters to fight with the NixOS project". https://twitter.com/sridca/status/1751586246026313906 https://twitter.com/sridca/status/1751586246026313906 Neither of which is true, of course, nor can they be proven. To let the readers judge for themselves, here are my lobste.rs submissions & comments: https://lobste.rs/~srid/stories https://lobste.rs/~srid/stories https://lobste.rs/~srid/threads https://lobste.rs/~srid/threads And here's the submission that got me banned (after a NixOS moderator, Hexa, commented on it so as to derail the submission): https://archive.is/Z2BU3 https://archive.is/Z2BU3 https://archive.is/75A7j https://archive.is/75A7j
atemerev 2y ago
I wonder what will happen if one starts developing, say, a RTOS for cruise missiles in Rust. Will this be controversial enough to destroy the Rust community?
- Macha 2y ago
  Rust has had at times multiple members of its leadership team employed by Palantir and not imploded, so probably not.
  - Aerbil313 2y ago
    Sheesh. And you can't write a reproducible compiler for Rust either, because every version of rustc was compiled with the previous version. What are the chances there isn't a backdoor?
    - steveklabnik 2y ago
      > What are the chances there isn't a backdoor? mrustc, an independent implementation, has produced identical output. > rustc bootstrap tested and validated (1.19.0 isn't fully repeatable, but later versions are) https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc?tab=readme-ov-file#progress https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc?tab=readme-ov-file#p... This means you'd have to land the same attack in both mrustc and rustc, making the possibility infinitesimally small.
- lr1970 2y ago
  > I wonder what will happen if one starts developing, say, a RTOS for cruise missiles in Rust. It is already happening and with the help of some known personalities in the Rust community [0]. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonhoo/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonhoo/
AnonCoward42 2y ago
It's always good to see such statements with a poisoned well from the start. I have no investment in any of this, but this looks really like the authors of this are the root issue here. And I also agree with - what they call - the opponent, that politics should not be forced upon an open-source project. Proclaiming these are fascists, identitarians or otherwise using the Nazi stamp doesn't really help the author's position either. I'd say this document doesn't belong on HN.
- _dain_ 2y ago
  >Proclaiming these are fascists, identitarians or otherwise using the Nazi stamp doesn't really help the author's position either. The document isn't the one saying "fascists", it's criticizing the people throwing that term around.
  - AnonCoward42 2y ago
    I must assume that the quotes presented are the best they have on them and the word fascist comes from the author(s). It's just very involved and the author(s) look therefore very bad to be honest.
    - _dain_ 2y ago
      why must you assume that? there are examples linked, like here https://hachyderm.io/@leftpaddotpy/112248186696362113 https://hachyderm.io/@leftpaddotpy/112248186696362113 remember the so-called """fascists""" being denounced here are just a defense contractor, and by extension anyone who doesn't have a problem with them funding a nix conference.
slau 2y ago
I’ve been wanting to try NixOS because I really like the declarative approach, but all this drama is turning me away from the project.
- freemanon 2y ago
  I use Nix and NixOS and I didn't even know about this. Unless you want to become a maintainer I don't think it affects you.
jraph 2y ago
From this document, it appears something obviously wrong is happening in this community, but as an outsider new to all this, it's very hard to understand what's going on. The document is very long and I don't really get the structure. It's very hard to make anything of it really. It somewhat makes me suspicious, even. I would write exactly like this if I knew how to do this and had to sidestep an issue. Long, hard to follow stuff filled with words. Is there a clear summary, an easy-to-follow timeline? (of course these are always going to be presented from one side) Also, > Simultaneously, this group, still upset about the failure of RFC 98, is using the myth of fascism combined with an abusive extension of the paradox of tolerance - What is the myth of fascism? - What is the abusive extension of the paradox of tolerance? I get the paradox of tolerance is that you can't really tolerate intolerance or else you'll be eaten. [1] > The paradox of tolerance states that if a society's practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
- raziel2p 2y ago
  Similar impression here. I think we're not the target audience of this document.
  - jraph 2y ago
    Yeah, the post just got flagged, maybe for the best.
- traverseda 2y ago
  It appears the bulk of the actual requested changes are here: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/175 https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/175 When there's stuff like this going on, I don't think it's helpful to try and do a full review of who did what wrong, or what the hypothetical motivations of any of these groups of people are, but instead to just review the actual proposed policy changes.
  - jraph 2y ago
traverseda 2y ago
> This is a GitHub web page for the repository "rfc-evidence" owned by user "nrdxp". The page contains the file "rfc_evidences_experiences.md" which is part of the repository's master branch. The page includes various HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that are used to render the GitHub user interface. The page provides metadata about the repository, such as the description, analytics, and social media sharing information. Overall, this appears to be a standard GitHub repository page for a project called "rfc-evidence". Time saved: 171 minutes. Thanks Kagi-search summarizer....
- jraph 2y ago
  Did you notice your AI didn't speak at all about the content and only provided obvious info that you get at a glance when loading the page? For the tiny relevant part of the summary anyway. But I suspect no AI will be able to provide correct understanding of this, we are sorely lacking context here. Also, you guys providing LLM generated stuff in HN comment keep convincing me I should not invest time in this stuff. "this page provides HTML and CSS to render GitHub's UI", no joke. (edit: fixed IA -> AI)
  - traverseda 2y ago
    The punchline to that was "178 minutes saved", and that the "IA" wasn't able to provide any useful information out of it. If you're not familiar with these tools, that is very abnormal output for one of them. Normally they'd be able to provide a reasonable summary for all of this. So taken in that context, the subtext is "is this worth any of our time"? I did link directly to the RFC in another comment, which I think is more worth people's time.
    - jraph 2y ago
      Ok, so you just meant you believe there's nothing interesting in there? Because I believe it would be easier to understand phrased this way instead of putting a LLM-generated summary in the middle, and maybe would somewhat invite you to say why you think this. Many people first degree post clueless LLM-generated stuff indistinguishable from your comment as-is.
blueflow 2y ago
People for whom gender is part of their identity are covertly hostile towards people who don't care. The people that are expelled are never those who have pronouns in their bio's. Respecting (=affirming) gender identity is part of every CoC. Just a feeling. I have no proof.
- jraph 2y ago
  While I believe one should not put their gender into their identity, the vast majority does, and is also not hostile towards those who don't care, and you can't really ignore gender-related issues and discrimination of current society right now because, while I think it ought not be, gender is a big deal and you can't ignore this. And, It should go without saying, respecting one's identity is the least we can do, including the gender since it's in there. Except, of course, for horrible stuff, but surely gender is no such thing. Actually, while I don't care about my gender, if you are not ready to respect my fellow human beings and their identity, I don't really want to have to interact with you. When you say "not caring", do you mean "Can't be bothered to use pronouns people wish to be referred to" or "don't mind being called with whatever pronoun?" Because the phrasing is ambiguous and two of the possible meanings are radically different things.
  - blueflow 2y ago
    Actually they are hostile if you are non-conforming (not all but many enough that its a problem). This results in the discrimination you speak of. At this point im not sure if socially constructing your identity is that common outside of your teenage years.
    - jraph 2y ago
      So to clarify, you mean cis people caring too much about their gender being hostile towards LGBTQIA+ people / people not caring about their gender and causing discrimination? then I'm with you, a part of the problem is there. Actually this doesn't match your first sentence, trans people pretty much care about their gender. I believe only a part of the non conforming people don't care about their gender. Anecdote but as a cis male not caring about his gender, I never quite felt hostility against me in particular (against the male gender, sure, but I understand this hostility)
steinuil 2y ago
I coincidentally started lurking and responding to some support threads the NixOS discourse a few weeks ago, because I appreciate the project and I wanted to get more involved in it. In the past couple days I've seen this train wreck play out in real time, both on discourse and on github discussions. From what I could gather, the main factor that led the community to this point is Anduril's involvement in the community. Anduril is a miltech company and a contractor of the USA DoD. It looks like they use Nix extensively to train ML models and deploy combat drones, and several of their employees have very close ties to the Nix community; Jon Ringer (an Anduril employee, who is mentioned several times in this document) has recently been a release manager for three versions of NixOS, and was nominated to become a release manager for the upcoming 24.05 release. Anduril wanted to sponsor NixCon last year because of this deep involvement in the community. I was not there to see it, but from what I've seen lately, many members of the community were not happy about it. The sponsorship was eventually pulled, because the on-site video team for the conference (https://c3voc.de/ https://c3voc.de/) threatened to pull out on their own over this sponsorship. From my understanding there has been no official decision taken over Anduril's sponsorship since last year's debacle. Many people in the community think that this is because Eelco Dolstra, the creator and de-facto BDFL of Nix, is currently employed by Determinate Systems, which is rumored to have a contract with Anduril. Edit: I just want to make it clear that I don't agree with what is presented in this document. I just wanted to present an overview of what, from my perspective, happened up to this point.
- traverseda 2y ago
  As someone with decision making power in a small Canadian robotics firm that occasionally does military work (mostly environmental monitoring), this does make nixos a lot less attractive. The reproducible builds make it very attractive for reliable robotics, but if the nix community is that against me taking money from the military, well that's going to present a whole other set of challenges. Even for the 90% of our work that doesn't involve any potential military use.
  - steinuil 2y ago
    I personally hope some sort of reasonable policy will come from this whole situation and that the community will be stronger for it. I've seen some discussions over this on Discourse, but the community doesn't seem to be in any state to agree on something like this currently.
forgotpwd16 2y ago
The entire thing seems like a takeover attempt partially because of dislike towards Eelco partially due to some peeps being power hungry. First RFC98, now the open letter. Kinda reminds me the ffmpeg/libav situation.
matanyall 2y ago
Damn, y'all ok over there in Nixland?
- Aerbil313 2y ago
  I think I'll just rewrite Nix in Rust.
anotherhue 2y ago
These documents always seem so desperate, as if the authors are fighting to defend their families. I wonder how much of it is because they have over invested in this community versus their local ones.
srid 2y ago
This submission link concretely and factually documents the various malfeasances of the NixOS moderation team in the last few months, and is linked from NixOS RFC 175 as supporting evidence: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/175 https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/175 The two authors of this RFC, shortly after they opened the PR, got banned by the NixOS moderators. You may join the following Matrix room to discuss the RFC openly, https://app.element.io/#/room/#rfc-175-all-together:matrix.org https://app.element.io/#/room/#rfc-175-all-together:matrix.o...
- adhamsalama 2y ago
  Good. I can't believe some people are upset because other people don't want to take money from a company that specializes in killing people.
  - astrange 2y ago
    That's who sponsors safe programming systems. It's why we have Ada. America is very naturally safe because we're on another continent than everyone else, but eventually if you don't build weapons someone else will and fire them at you.
kpcyrd 2y ago
"far-left identitarian" - what's that even supposed to mean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identitarian_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identitarian_movement is defined as "far-right ethno-nationalism". "left-wing ethno-nationalism" is an oxymoron.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  On the subject of nonsense re-definitions, you might enjoy this comic: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/289 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/289
- ParetoOptimal 2y ago
  They are trying to "both sides" alt-right extremism in order to make it look more palatable to shift the Overton window further right.

66 points by srid 2y ago

hollow-moe 2y ago

OP is also the one that was banned from nix communities. How did such a childish ban appeal could reach top HN ???

_cenw 2y ago
I have no idea. Reddit seems to mostly be on this dude's side too, while most other places I frequent related to Nix do not. There's certainly a lot to break down, but I'll start with Jon calling the behavior of associating him with Anduril "doxing", when it's literally on his linkedin and his buddies are doing full-name callouts in this supplementary article to RFC 175, or how he starts a reddit thread that he says isn't meant to stir the pot, but then goes on in the comments about being a brave fascist-labeled throught-criminal, when he mostly got banned for being extremely abrasive / concern-trolling alongside injecting himself into every single conversation, including approving the PR that removed person with the 4. most commits leaving due to his employer.

teddyh 2y ago

There’s always Guix.

lrvick 2y ago
And they actually do full source bootstrapping and signing.
SuperSandro2000 2y ago
Guix focuses on free software, not on general usability.
- teddyh 2y ago
  Free software ensures long-term usability.
KingMob 2y ago
I'd love to try it, but they're super-hostile to running on a Mac.
- rekado 2y ago
  Not hostile. We just can't do it. There is no free toolchain for Mac. So we'd have to arbitrarily cut the trust graph and graft it on top of a huge blob of a proprietary toolchain and set of system libraries. That's like building a completely new distribution. Since I'm not using macos and have no interest in committing my own money to keep paying for freedom restricting software to provide a service that would earn the label "supported" there's no way I'm going to make that effort.
  - KingMob 2y ago
    That's really more of a "won't", than a "can't". Sure, it would be impure, and not top-to-bottom reproducible, and you don't personally have to do it. But it's a choice to avoid a compromise, not an impossibility precluded by the laws of math or anything. Regardless, I no longer really sympathize with Free software's concept of a "freedom" that results in either (1) obscure purity, or (2) benefits large corporations at the expense of the rest of us. RMS was economically naive, despite his counter-cultural leanings; I can't help but wonder what Free software would have looked like if he'd imagined the likes of MS/Amazon getting rich off it while creators get a pittance. We can't all have free-floating MIT jobs.
    - rekado 2y ago
      Well, there's nobody blocking the work. If not I then surely somebody would personally have to do it. And it's akin to building a completely separate distribution on top of a different foundation, so we could only superficially reuse existing infrastructure. I'm writing my comments in the first person, because I have actually made the effort to investigate this in the past, more than once. This is precious little to do with some kind of abstract purity. Hell, I've packaged Tensorflow and CUDA crap, which is as far removed from purity as it gets. It gets a little tiring to read about values that are projected onto Guix, that I can't find in my own work.
rstarast 2y ago
Last time I tried it was unusably slow

thrownawaysz 2y ago

I love how in these current years you can shutdown anything with just simply shouting fascism/nazis. Don’t like something? They are fascists444

sourcegrift 2y ago
On the same note, its hilarious that right now twitter of all the websites on earth has the best fake news detection mechanism in community notes but it's also the single website everyone wants down. I remember before Elon took over, there were daily hitjobs on facebook but just yesterday people were cheering threads having 150M MAU.

_dain_ 2y ago

This is exactly what the opponents of CoC-culture warned about: it's a clever rhetorical smokescreen to allow leftist freaks to do power grabs like this. Words like "harm", "inclusive", "community" etc have dual-meanings, one for the clique insiders and another for the outsiders. And lmao wow, one of the mods involved in this is also a mod at lobste.rs. No wonder the "discussion" there looked so uncanny.

atemerev 2y ago
"clever"
raziel2p 2y ago
without commenting on this specific case because TLDR: the same argument could be used in a situation where moderators allow harassment against certain groups in the name of freedom of speech, while moderating harassment against others. moderation is prone to power plays no matter which angle you approach it with.
quadhome 2y ago
wrt. Lobsters, check your facts. - Moderation actions are public on lobsters: https://lobste.rs/moderations https://lobste.rs/moderations - Irene wasn’t active in that discussion. - Some of the most upvoted comments were against the moderation clique.
- pushcx 2y ago
  Irene also wasn't involved in me removing srid's attempted brigading or it being the last straw for his ban. The author of this article doesn't seem particularly interested in checking facts, they implied some nasty stuff about my actions and motivation without bothering to read the publicly available info or contact me.
  - srid 2y ago
    > srid's attempted brigading Nowhere in the ban log you mentioned "attempted brigading"; rather what you mentioned, as reasons for the ban, was "lots of off-topic stories" & "[using] Lobsters to fight with the NixOS project". https://twitter.com/sridca/status/1751586246026313906 https://twitter.com/sridca/status/1751586246026313906 Neither of which is true, of course, nor can they be proven. To let the readers judge for themselves, here are my lobste.rs submissions & comments: https://lobste.rs/~srid/stories https://lobste.rs/~srid/stories https://lobste.rs/~srid/threads https://lobste.rs/~srid/threads And here's the submission that got me banned (after a NixOS moderator, Hexa, commented on it so as to derail the submission): https://archive.is/Z2BU3 https://archive.is/Z2BU3 https://archive.is/75A7j https://archive.is/75A7j

atemerev 2y ago

I wonder what will happen if one starts developing, say, a RTOS for cruise missiles in Rust. Will this be controversial enough to destroy the Rust community?

Macha 2y ago
Rust has had at times multiple members of its leadership team employed by Palantir and not imploded, so probably not.
- Aerbil313 2y ago
  Sheesh. And you can't write a reproducible compiler for Rust either, because every version of rustc was compiled with the previous version. What are the chances there isn't a backdoor?
  - steveklabnik 2y ago
    > What are the chances there isn't a backdoor? mrustc, an independent implementation, has produced identical output. > rustc bootstrap tested and validated (1.19.0 isn't fully repeatable, but later versions are) https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc?tab=readme-ov-file#progress https://github.com/thepowersgang/mrustc?tab=readme-ov-file#p... This means you'd have to land the same attack in both mrustc and rustc, making the possibility infinitesimally small.
lr1970 2y ago
> I wonder what will happen if one starts developing, say, a RTOS for cruise missiles in Rust. It is already happening and with the help of some known personalities in the Rust community [0]. [0] https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonhoo/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonhoo/

AnonCoward42 2y ago

It's always good to see such statements with a poisoned well from the start. I have no investment in any of this, but this looks really like the authors of this are the root issue here. And I also agree with - what they call - the opponent, that politics should not be forced upon an open-source project. Proclaiming these are fascists, identitarians or otherwise using the Nazi stamp doesn't really help the author's position either. I'd say this document doesn't belong on HN.

_dain_ 2y ago
>Proclaiming these are fascists, identitarians or otherwise using the Nazi stamp doesn't really help the author's position either. The document isn't the one saying "fascists", it's criticizing the people throwing that term around.
- AnonCoward42 2y ago
  I must assume that the quotes presented are the best they have on them and the word fascist comes from the author(s). It's just very involved and the author(s) look therefore very bad to be honest.
  - _dain_ 2y ago
    why must you assume that? there are examples linked, like here https://hachyderm.io/@leftpaddotpy/112248186696362113 https://hachyderm.io/@leftpaddotpy/112248186696362113 remember the so-called """fascists""" being denounced here are just a defense contractor, and by extension anyone who doesn't have a problem with them funding a nix conference.

slau 2y ago

I’ve been wanting to try NixOS because I really like the declarative approach, but all this drama is turning me away from the project.

freemanon 2y ago
I use Nix and NixOS and I didn't even know about this. Unless you want to become a maintainer I don't think it affects you.

jraph 2y ago

From this document, it appears something obviously wrong is happening in this community, but as an outsider new to all this, it's very hard to understand what's going on. The document is very long and I don't really get the structure. It's very hard to make anything of it really. It somewhat makes me suspicious, even. I would write exactly like this if I knew how to do this and had to sidestep an issue. Long, hard to follow stuff filled with words. Is there a clear summary, an easy-to-follow timeline? (of course these are always going to be presented from one side) Also, > Simultaneously, this group, still upset about the failure of RFC 98, is using the myth of fascism combined with an abusive extension of the paradox of tolerance - What is the myth of fascism? - What is the abusive extension of the paradox of tolerance? I get the paradox of tolerance is that you can't really tolerate intolerance or else you'll be eaten. [1] > The paradox of tolerance states that if a society's practice of tolerance is inclusive of the intolerant, intolerance will ultimately dominate, eliminating the tolerant and the practice of tolerance with them [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

raziel2p 2y ago
Similar impression here. I think we're not the target audience of this document.
- jraph 2y ago
  Yeah, the post just got flagged, maybe for the best.
traverseda 2y ago
It appears the bulk of the actual requested changes are here: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/175 https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/175 When there's stuff like this going on, I don't think it's helpful to try and do a full review of who did what wrong, or what the hypothetical motivations of any of these groups of people are, but instead to just review the actual proposed policy changes.
- jraph 2y ago

traverseda 2y ago

> This is a GitHub web page for the repository "rfc-evidence" owned by user "nrdxp". The page contains the file "rfc_evidences_experiences.md" which is part of the repository's master branch. The page includes various HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files that are used to render the GitHub user interface. The page provides metadata about the repository, such as the description, analytics, and social media sharing information. Overall, this appears to be a standard GitHub repository page for a project called "rfc-evidence". Time saved: 171 minutes. Thanks Kagi-search summarizer....

jraph 2y ago
Did you notice your AI didn't speak at all about the content and only provided obvious info that you get at a glance when loading the page? For the tiny relevant part of the summary anyway. But I suspect no AI will be able to provide correct understanding of this, we are sorely lacking context here. Also, you guys providing LLM generated stuff in HN comment keep convincing me I should not invest time in this stuff. "this page provides HTML and CSS to render GitHub's UI", no joke. (edit: fixed IA -> AI)
- traverseda 2y ago
  The punchline to that was "178 minutes saved", and that the "IA" wasn't able to provide any useful information out of it. If you're not familiar with these tools, that is very abnormal output for one of them. Normally they'd be able to provide a reasonable summary for all of this. So taken in that context, the subtext is "is this worth any of our time"? I did link directly to the RFC in another comment, which I think is more worth people's time.
  - jraph 2y ago
    Ok, so you just meant you believe there's nothing interesting in there? Because I believe it would be easier to understand phrased this way instead of putting a LLM-generated summary in the middle, and maybe would somewhat invite you to say why you think this. Many people first degree post clueless LLM-generated stuff indistinguishable from your comment as-is.

blueflow 2y ago

People for whom gender is part of their identity are covertly hostile towards people who don't care. The people that are expelled are never those who have pronouns in their bio's. Respecting (=affirming) gender identity is part of every CoC. Just a feeling. I have no proof.

jraph 2y ago
While I believe one should not put their gender into their identity, the vast majority does, and is also not hostile towards those who don't care, and you can't really ignore gender-related issues and discrimination of current society right now because, while I think it ought not be, gender is a big deal and you can't ignore this. And, It should go without saying, respecting one's identity is the least we can do, including the gender since it's in there. Except, of course, for horrible stuff, but surely gender is no such thing. Actually, while I don't care about my gender, if you are not ready to respect my fellow human beings and their identity, I don't really want to have to interact with you. When you say "not caring", do you mean "Can't be bothered to use pronouns people wish to be referred to" or "don't mind being called with whatever pronoun?" Because the phrasing is ambiguous and two of the possible meanings are radically different things.
- blueflow 2y ago
  Actually they are hostile if you are non-conforming (not all but many enough that its a problem). This results in the discrimination you speak of. At this point im not sure if socially constructing your identity is that common outside of your teenage years.
  - jraph 2y ago
    So to clarify, you mean cis people caring too much about their gender being hostile towards LGBTQIA+ people / people not caring about their gender and causing discrimination? then I'm with you, a part of the problem is there. Actually this doesn't match your first sentence, trans people pretty much care about their gender. I believe only a part of the non conforming people don't care about their gender. Anecdote but as a cis male not caring about his gender, I never quite felt hostility against me in particular (against the male gender, sure, but I understand this hostility)

steinuil 2y ago

I coincidentally started lurking and responding to some support threads the NixOS discourse a few weeks ago, because I appreciate the project and I wanted to get more involved in it. In the past couple days I've seen this train wreck play out in real time, both on discourse and on github discussions. From what I could gather, the main factor that led the community to this point is Anduril's involvement in the community. Anduril is a miltech company and a contractor of the USA DoD. It looks like they use Nix extensively to train ML models and deploy combat drones, and several of their employees have very close ties to the Nix community; Jon Ringer (an Anduril employee, who is mentioned several times in this document) has recently been a release manager for three versions of NixOS, and was nominated to become a release manager for the upcoming 24.05 release. Anduril wanted to sponsor NixCon last year because of this deep involvement in the community. I was not there to see it, but from what I've seen lately, many members of the community were not happy about it. The sponsorship was eventually pulled, because the on-site video team for the conference (https://c3voc.de/ https://c3voc.de/) threatened to pull out on their own over this sponsorship. From my understanding there has been no official decision taken over Anduril's sponsorship since last year's debacle. Many people in the community think that this is because Eelco Dolstra, the creator and de-facto BDFL of Nix, is currently employed by Determinate Systems, which is rumored to have a contract with Anduril. Edit: I just want to make it clear that I don't agree with what is presented in this document. I just wanted to present an overview of what, from my perspective, happened up to this point.

traverseda 2y ago
As someone with decision making power in a small Canadian robotics firm that occasionally does military work (mostly environmental monitoring), this does make nixos a lot less attractive. The reproducible builds make it very attractive for reliable robotics, but if the nix community is that against me taking money from the military, well that's going to present a whole other set of challenges. Even for the 90% of our work that doesn't involve any potential military use.
- steinuil 2y ago
  I personally hope some sort of reasonable policy will come from this whole situation and that the community will be stronger for it. I've seen some discussions over this on Discourse, but the community doesn't seem to be in any state to agree on something like this currently.

forgotpwd16 2y ago

The entire thing seems like a takeover attempt partially because of dislike towards Eelco partially due to some peeps being power hungry. First RFC98, now the open letter. Kinda reminds me the ffmpeg/libav situation.

matanyall 2y ago

Damn, y'all ok over there in Nixland?

Aerbil313 2y ago
I think I'll just rewrite Nix in Rust.

anotherhue 2y ago

These documents always seem so desperate, as if the authors are fighting to defend their families. I wonder how much of it is because they have over invested in this community versus their local ones.

srid 2y ago

This submission link concretely and factually documents the various malfeasances of the NixOS moderation team in the last few months, and is linked from NixOS RFC 175 as supporting evidence: https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/175 https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/175 The two authors of this RFC, shortly after they opened the PR, got banned by the NixOS moderators. You may join the following Matrix room to discuss the RFC openly, https://app.element.io/#/room/#rfc-175-all-together:matrix.org https://app.element.io/#/room/#rfc-175-all-together:matrix.o...

adhamsalama 2y ago
Good. I can't believe some people are upset because other people don't want to take money from a company that specializes in killing people.
- astrange 2y ago
  That's who sponsors safe programming systems. It's why we have Ada. America is very naturally safe because we're on another continent than everyone else, but eventually if you don't build weapons someone else will and fire them at you.

kpcyrd 2y ago

"far-left identitarian" - what's that even supposed to mean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identitarian_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identitarian_movement is defined as "far-right ethno-nationalism". "left-wing ethno-nationalism" is an oxymoron.

Terr_ 2y ago
On the subject of nonsense re-definitions, you might enjoy this comic: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/289 https://existentialcomics.com/comic/289
ParetoOptimal 2y ago
They are trying to "both sides" alt-right extremism in order to make it look more palatable to shift the Overton window further right.