Remove my name from the [Rust] project | Hacker News Reader

Remove my name from the [Rust] project

github.com

32 pointsvector_spaces41 comments

> The only way to permanently resolve these issues is to oust the people that are responsible for them, or defending those that are, from the Rust project entirely.

I mean, once again we have the "there are people who are bad" and no names. What do you expect to happen? I don't get it. If you have a problem with some people, please name them and explain the issue. This whole "we're resigning in protest, no, don't ask us why" thing has been going on for years and it's obviously not a good strategy.

I agree, who are these people? What did they do? The author asks for them to be ousted but ironically offers no names or actions with which to confront them. I get that it's likely to prevent harassment, but understanding at least what was done is crucial to fixing said mistakes.

> I get that it's likely to prevent harassment

I guess? But it's not working lol you can't have "I want to exert pressure on these people" and also "I will not tell you who these people are". These two things are fundamentally at odds with one another.

yea lol.

reminds me of steve yegges article where he was ranting about serge, brin, and dread pirate bezos. that one is better.

I think he has given up on change so he's just moving on. I'd bet he has named the names elsewhere and repeatedly for some time before it came to this.

Well, I don't know what the point of this is then. The Github issue is obviously a resignation in protest and a call to action - they explicitly state that people need to be removed. And yet this call to action is impossible to pursue.

I am sure that some people know who's at fault. But this Github issue wasn't a private message to those people, it was a public one. This is a public call to action where the public has no information.

I always wonder who these "problematic individuals" are, through the Rust drama of the past few years, I always hear about these people but it never comes to light exactly who they are or what they've done, ironically enough.

At least one former associate wrote about the dealings of a few maintainers of Rust, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28633113. More reports likely don't emerge because of fear.

Potential witnesses are afraid of the friendly, high-status faces in the community who play nice in public, and then stab in private. Elites can hurt a whistleblower's career, long before the community accepts an uncomfortable truth.

However, there's more to this fear than just a few bad apples and internet drama. Rust's problems are much, much deeper.

I don't know any details other that it was about some trademark (maybe). Where can I read more about this?

The trademark drama is separate to the drama that caused this resignation. The primary issue that the author of the github issue is citing was due to a speaker being removed from a keynote speech at rustconf because of (depending on who you ask) internal communications breakdown/competing project politics/outright racism.

> I always wonder who these "problematic individuals" are

By my present estimate, mainly, twits that have a hissy fit whereupon they insist that you rewrite tends of thousands of public git commits to remove their name.

Are they still going on about that "issue" at the keynote? For fucks sake can people stop being babies!? Als what is that for a nonsense request? No, some project will not bother to literally rewrite history for you.

Why does Rust attract this drama, pettiness, and immaturity? It's hard to take it seriously when these public tantrums are so frequent, I can't help speculating about the potential psychological disorders of those involved, and wonder how/why Rust, in particular, is a magnet for such people.

I think it’s because the project has pitched itself as one that appeals to strong ideals. Technical ideals like safety and cultural ideals like inclusion and community driven.

Because it strives to those ideals, many of the people who flock to it hold them dearly as well. So when those tenets are broken, no matter how small or big, it sows distrust.

Other languages don’t wear those ideals on their sleeves. The closest ones are zig (which categorically says that some technical aspects are non-goals) or Swift (which has the same ideals but is more restricted in scope and appears corporate led).

The problem with community led is that you have your community issues aired in public.

I’d therefore argue rust isn’t any more or less dramatic than other language projects. It’s just more public and vocal when those happen, and when it happens it goes against ideals it states which makes it worse

I think it stems from Rust's emphasis on safety. The logic is, memory errors in other languages lead to people's passwords being stolen, bank accounts compromised, etc. Those are Bad Things. Ergo, programming in anything but Rust is morally wrong and makes you a bad person.

A similar thing happened in the Ruby community, I think. Ruby was advertised as a language that would "make you happy". Its fans talked about how much fun it was to program in Ruby. Thus, anyone suggesting programming in any other language was actively trying to make you unhappy and thus a bad person.

That kind of moralizing about a choice of programming language is naturally going to attract people who think in moral terms, so every conflict becomes a battle between Right and Wrong.

Rust's pitch is that something is wrong with how other people choose to make computers do things, and we will single-handedly fix it.

That's the perfect setup to attract those who are born to be perpetually dissatisfied with everything in their surroundings.

Take a mentally balanced, low-drama individual such as, oh, random example, ... myself. I can make the machine stand on its hind legs and beg for a milk bone using nothing but C. I don't have a problem. I have nothing to run from. I don't blame any of my tools for anything. If I did, what would that be?

As an "activist language" born in an "activist organisation" (Mozilla) Rust seems to attract "activist developers" who are intent on "creating a better world". Since it is close to impossible to define "better" in an objective way - every activist knows where the world should go but they all have slightly different views on where that should be - and since many of these people have built their identity around their activism and are convinced they are right and often are somewhat lacking in interpersonal skills this is a recipe for (to use a phrase often bandied about in these circles) a toxic environment. The introduction of codes of conduct was supposed to improve on these problems but in practice they have made things worse by amplifying small 'missteps' into 'serious issues'. Combine this with the presence of a number of seemingly ever-offended individuals claiming to be 'oppressed' or 'disadvantaged', some 'toxic femin(ism)inity' [1] claiming things about 'white toxic masculinity' and you quickly end up in a mire.

[1] https://archive.ph/f10KK

This is rough, no? Sort of a ticking time bomb in any large repo. If someone wants to have zero association you've got to remove their PII, but if you do that you rewrite the commit graph and no past commit will work.

That's really placing people in a tough situation. Oof.

There’s nothing at all that forces the Rust organization to remove their name and email address.

Personally, I don’t think that people should even ask to be removed like that. Sure, if someone wants to leave then the project should avoid implying that they are still an active member, but asking them to make it look like you never _were_ a member is going too far.

You don't actually have to remove it if it's not technically feasible. It's not like it was illegally collected there.

I really hate how metadata of git commits is immutable though. I've often wanted to make a small change like fix a typo in a description, only to find out it's impossible.

Of course it's technically feasible. You do the filter-branch thing and then you force-push.

Sure, it would be very inconvenient for everybody who has a clone of the repo, but I don't think that's a convincing argument to a nation state trying to enforce regulations.

I think that doesn't actually remove you from the GitHub contributors list. I had used the wrong identity for a commit and tried all manners of git manipulation and force push, but GitHub kept me on the list. In the end I just nuked that account.

Edit: Apparently renaming branches and reverting that works: https://stackoverflow.com/a/69294044

Ah, I didn't think of it at all, I was only thinking about a hypothetical responsibility of whoever is in charge of the git repository, not the extra github flavoring.

If it's GDPR you're referring to, I think these bits of Article 17 (right to be forgotten) are relevant:

""" Paragraphs 1 and 2 shall not apply to the extent that processing is necessary:

...

(d) for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes in accordance with Article 89(1) in so far as the right referred to in paragraph 1 is likely to render impossible or seriously impair the achievement of the objectives of that processing; or

(e) for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims.

"""

Aren't there legal reasons you need to keep some information for copyright?

Are there legal reason the information has to be kept in the Github repo? Maybe the Rust foundation could keep it in a PDF on some office computer somewhere.

Yes, even if a project does copyright assignment they still need to keep a record of who assigned their copyright and for what.

This is the one thing that makes me worried about the long term health of Rust.

There seems to be so much drama, relative to the other languages.

For some reason, you don’t hear about this much drama from languages that have far larger user bases.

Nah. Look up the drama with Larry Wall and Perl 6. Von Rossum and the Python 3 mess.

It goes back a long way. Wirth was against getting past Standard Pascal, which had no error handling or separate compilation. There was a huge feud between the Interlisp LISP people and the Symbolics LISP people, both of whom had way overdesigned the language, in incompatible ways. Scheme was a reaction to that.

Wow, the Scheme people had also invented time travel when they invented Scheme in 1975. They anticipated the Symbolics people "overdesiging" the LISP language when they started the company in 1980.

Then the Scheme people started to overdesign their language in reaction to the LISP people, since Scheme lacked even simple things like error handling.

See https://srfi.schemers.org , https://www.r6rs.org , https://racket-lang.org

Yes, I had the early history of LISP wrong. There were at least three major LISP factions in the 1980s, as LISP use expanded outside of the tiny AI community of the 1970s. Much controversy. All over now-dead issues.

Most languages don't go from having a major, centralized corporate sponsor, to having everyone from that sponsor let go over night. I think that has led to a lot of these problems, or at least seriously exacerbated them. Mozilla really fucked things up here.

I bet the early C and C++ iso committee meetings were just as bad if not worse. Worse cause it would be corporate entities having tamper tantrums about which pet language feature should get implemented.

But are most larger languages community driven like Rust is? Python and?

Are the political issues impacting the quality of the decisions being made with respect to the language? If so, at what point would it be better for those who have already left or those who would like to leave to fork Rust and continue development without the toxic people?

We've had FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD for a while now, and lots of good has come from these different forks being available in the world.

Apparently, RustConf withdrew an offer to let someone give a talk. So ragequit I guess? This isn't an airport, you don't need to announce your departure.

Is this related to the conference keynote issue?[1]

[1] https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023

From the PR body...

> The cowardly handling of the recent RustConf keynote fiasko...

... is merely the most recent example of this, and it is unlikely to be the last, even if the de-jure leadership structure was changed to incorporate the new Leadership Council.

Only in Rust that this language community pours more gasoline as the solution to such petty problems like this.

How this programming language maintains so much constant drama is both fascinating and concerning.

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