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Comment by hsbauauvhabzb | Hacker News Reader

This article needs a tldr, I’m not going to read 20 paragraphs to figure out if this article is even worth reading.

The author is a student. They were invited to talk on their work on reflection in Rust, which is something they began as a part of a midterm project. The author is not working on this area in an official (Rust Project) capacity. It's just their own thing.

The author's talk was promoted by surprise into a keynote talk by the conference organizers. The author tried to back out early or claim that this wasn't appropriate, but they continued to receive encouragement from the conference organizers.

Later, once the Rust Project realized the error, it was dropped back to a regular talk. The author was pretty confused by the ordeal.

It feels amateurish for the conference organizers to do this.

Not quite - the talk was always a keynote, and that was agreed on by all. The author was told he'd been nominated to give a keynote, and agreed to do so. He does say he had "attempted to weasel out".

Later, for very unclear reasons and in a poorly communicated way, it was downgraded to a regular talk. The author is incredibly offended by both the act and the lack of direct communication about it and wants nothing to do with the organizers or conference any more.

I still fail to see how that caused all that drama. That "poorly communicated" way must have been horribly bad? Sure that internal disorganization might seem unprofessional, but that's a thing to shrug off. I assume it was more about thephds ego and maybe perfectionism, which got hurt and triggered an irrational response.

Asked chatgpt "Summarize this post for me. <post text>" and the result was surprisingly useful:

The author of this post was invited to speak at RustConf 2023, but the organizers later changed their talk from a keynote to a regular presentation. The author was initially unsure why their talk was downgraded, but learned that RustConf didn't want to endorse the author's ideas for compile-time programming. The author argues that no one should have expected them to misrepresent the Rust Project's goals and says that they and their team were transparent in their work. The author believes that the degrading of their talk was a vindictive and unprofessional move by RustConf and has decided not to attend the conference.

The point is I shouldn’t need to do that.

would make a nice browser extension..

So now I need to install an extension to get to the point of an article because the writer wants to dance around the point in an effort to retain attention?

No.

The Bing assistant already summarizes pages automatically in MS Edge :).

Their talk was down graded from keynote to standard talk. The reasoning for why was off in their opinion. They didn’t want to signal that they think what the rust folks did was okay. Doing anything but not talking would suggest they were okay with this treatment.

> I was also told congratulations by a few close friends who saw it and were paying attention (again, thank you!). If I have to individually explain the reasoning and behavior that is going on here to each person, my fingers will quite literally fall off and I absolutely do not want to waste everyone’s time by giving partial retellings over and over and over and over again.

Sounds like this article is intended for people familiar with the matter and interested in the details.

Not a post intended for wide audience like HN?

That’s certainly the charitable interpretation. But it remains bizarre to engage in public denunciation without actually telling us the whole story. There’s a bit of a contradiction there, at least on the surface.

He just crave for attentions

I skimmed through the entire thing and still don’t understand what the actual offense was.

For very unclear reasons and in a poorly communicated way, his invited keynote talk was downgraded to a regular talk. The author is incredibly offended by both the act and the lack of direct communication about it and wants nothing to do with the organizers or conference any more.

Feels like a /r/IAmTheMainCharacter/ post.

Strong “jilted lover” vibes

What makes you think that?

ThePhD was asked to host a talk, wanted to refuse but got encouraged to proceed, then was told to downgrade talk.

That move ruins trust. Say Rust project was funding the trip? Would you agree after getting jerked around before?

I think the big problem is Rust project is operating in a WTF mode.

Everyone involved is a person, and we are all subject to making mistakes. The organizers probably should not have pushed this as a keynote presentation, and they eventually realized their mistake. JeanHeyd Meneide saw this as a slight, but it was clearly not intended as such.

It's probably a good thing that this post was flagged.

The different category of the talk literally changed nothing about his talk... except maybe the duration and time schedule. It's not like they called it off last second after he had already prepared everything.

you mean it needs some editing too. i agree!

Tl;dr op is a man child that throw a tantrum if things don’t go as he wish

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