C++ Standards Contributor Expelled for 'The Undefined Behavior Question'
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While I agree in principle that we can't allow the word question to be destroyed by hate speech, there are always assholes who ride up to some line to be dicks to someone using whatever the boundaries of the rules are. I want to know what happened here and if that was the case.
I think the article is written by the person that was removed. It is lacking any statement of the standard foundation who removed him. No such statement exists, even on the internal committee mailing list it is just an "fyi, that person is no longer on the committee" without any reasons.
I can piece something together from his previous behavior on the committee mailing list, but that information is not public and I'm not at liberty to share.
As far as I am concerned this whole thing might not have happened until I see another couple of sources.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gynl1v/commen...
So this person is infamous for submitting ChatGPT generated WG papers.
Then he was blamed for "question" title, he refuse to change the title, his sponsor cut the tie.
I don't know. I'm deeply worrying about brain drain on C++ standard committee.
I was a C++ committee member once. They failed to understand the importance of char8_t, thinking char is enough. Then, they depends on locale on std::format. I quit for I lost hope on C++.
You can't expel members from SC/WG but this is... what are they doing?
>It honestly makes me sad to watch a guy who went to Stanford and worked at Apple and Google get involved with drama like this.
So, these people are indoctrinated to cow in the face of censorship based on insanity. Got it.
>The rumors surrounding him appear to have originated from https://izzys.casa/2024/11/on-safe-cxx/
Not a word about the insanity expressed in that blog though, huh? Perhaps that is why the dude is being harassed over basic English words all of a sudden? It seems to me that this Andrew fellow is not the one starting drama, and he's refusing to be bullied by people who are dealing in rumors and inventing new thought crimes to charge him with. I wouldn't wish this level of censorship even on people who hate me.
Perhaps, but perhaps there are times where the "extreme ends of the political spectrum" are actually muckrakers who use feigned offense as a tool for eliminating people they just don't like for petty reasons. People can be offended for any number of reasons but somehow certain arbitrary causes of offense are deemed worthy of action.
Political correctness is like a cheat code in the minds of certain people. I don't think the blogger who posted the complaint is actually offended. Although he may appear to be quite neurotic, he fits the profile of an agitator. Such people often claim things are offensive on behalf of demographics that they do not even belong to. This is speculation on my part of course, but I have seen this play out so many times that I'm sick of it.
Only if you are insane.
Out towards the ends of the political spectrum, the prevailing "culture" uses such weird terminology that normal people can't let that affect their -- our (hopefully ) -- use of language. If we did, we couldn't say anything, because in some weird sect's nutjob language pretty much any word can mean something horrible. Which this kerfluffle illustrates perfectly. Giving in on this now sets a precedent that in the end will lead to language being wholly co-opted by rabid extremists on both ends of the spectrum.
> An international standards committee that wants to represent the interests of all groups needs to take this kind of thing seriously.
No. Or well, yes: It needs to seriously fight against bullshit like this, lest it soon will have to censor out every second word in the very standards it promulgates.
Eeh... Where did you get this from? Neither "foo" nor "bar" sound like slang for excrement in any Nordic language I know. And I'm native in one, near-native proficient in another, and the two largest remaining are very similar to the first. Are you talking about Icelandic, Saami, or Faroese?
> So, these people are indoctrinated to cow in the face of censorship based on insanity. Got it.
Well, apparently they are -- at least according to the GP -- supposed to be indoctrinated to cow in the face of censorship based on insanity.
A compiler can make assumptions that behavior is well defined, and it can also identify situations where it is confirmed undefined.
All of that reasoning happens before runtime.
For instance, and unreachable assertion works by invoking undefined behavior. What identified by the function-call-like syntax unreachable().
If we have:
S; unreachable();
And so we could naively argue that undefined behavior cannot travel backward in time. Of course S must successfully execute, and only then can things go haywire due to the undefined behavior of unreachable.
But that's not the way it works. The compiler is looking at this before runtime. The compiler is free to assume that behavior is well defined. That's what makes unreachable work: if the program's behavior is well defined, it must be that the unreachable statement is never reached. Which implies that S is never executed. If S is never executed, it can just be deleted.
If S and the unreachable statement are deleted, but control ends up there anyway, the program will go haywire. And it will go haywire without producing the effects of S. So in effect undefined behavior has gone backwards into S, so to speak in naive language.
Logical reasoning over code while translating it does not follow runtime chronology. It follows chains of inferences.
I agree the title of the paper is unfortunate. I do not believe the author was intentionally trying to send an antisemitic message, but I do not know him well (I corresponded with him about his other paper)
If statement S has observable behavior, then that may not be removed by an optimization.
But if S is declared as not being reached, does it still have observable behavior?
Is my example considered a case of UB affecting prior observable behavior? Why or why not?
A; // observable
B; // UB
If A is not reachable, the code will never be executed at run-time, so while there is no UB at run-time this is irrelevant as the code can simply be removed anyway because it is not reachable. For "unreachable()" the question is tricky and I think this might need to be clarified specifically.
(Because unreachable is meant to be used in certain ways, implementations can give it relevant diagnostic powers. But all it means "please make the spot in the program have no defined behavior").
If the implementation cannot remove A on grounds of B being undefined, then you need an awkward special case for when B is the unreachable gizmo.
Yeah, sure, quite possible (I have no idea). But then he needs to be kicked out explicitly for not being competent in the subject matter. Because kicking him out (at least ostensibly) for a ridiculous made-up language issue sets the precedent that people can -- should? -- be kicked out for ridiculous made-up language issues.
I mmean... Isn't that the point of this whole thing? Which makes your technical qu-- well, sure, perhaps your quite valid technical issues, but in the context of him being kicked out ostensibly for some totally different and definitely invalid "reason", a quibble -- isn't your point then rather irrelevant to the actual point of the discussion?
About 20 years ago, I suggested in comp.language.c++ on USENET that the committee's refusal to take memory safety seriously constituted material support of terrorism. That really got some people upset, and the posting was removed from USENET, which is hard to do.
Now, of course, C++ is frantically trying to become memory-safe, with heavy pressure from the cybersecurity parts of the US government.
Has anybody even read Marx's 1844 essay in recent years? When the USSR went down, the Stanford bookstore had a sale - "All Communism 80% off".
The 19th century was "The age of questions"[1], a book subtitled "Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond".
The Schleswig-Holstein question [2] was a border dispute between Denmark and Germany, and was a big deal from about 1806 to WWI. That's probably the most famous of the "questions" because there were several wars over it over a long period.
"On the slavery question" is a famous speech by Sen. John Calhoun (D-SC) made in 1850.[3] That's part of the run-up to the American Civil War. (Or the War of Northern Aggression, for those below the Mason-Dixon line.)
"On the bullion question" is a famous speech by Sir John Sinclair made in 1811.[4] It's about the gold standard for money.
Nobody has a unique claim for "On the (whatever) Question". It's historical, but once widely used, terminology.
[1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.23943/978140089021...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig%E2%80%93Holstein_que...
[3] https://www.milestonedocuments.com/images/content/handouts/J...
[4] https://archive.org/details/sirjohnsinclairs00sinciala/page/...
And their specific criticisms of the contributor this post is discussing, are very mild but full of personal attacks and expletives?
> Andrew Tomazos submitted P3403, a paper titled “The Undefined Behavior Question” (which HOOBOY man we’re just knocking it out of the fucking park with possible anti-semitic dog whistles today aren’t we?)
Riiiight. To be fair apart from that their criticism of Tomasoz seems relatively justifiable, if unnecessarily angry. Tomasoz has said that "almost noone" has ever written anything productive in Rust, which is a stupid thing to say. And he thinks ChatGPT is on par with humans now, which is also pretty obviously untrue.
Idiots all round.
No. Absolutely not. No reasonable person would consider the title to be that.
Do you have some information that would lead to doubt on Arthur's conviction?
Can you elaborate on what "sort of person" means exactly? Is that just to refer to people who point out that someone in a community has raped a child, been convicted of raping a child and is on a sex offenders register? Or some other category?
I think it's troubling that so many people in the replies are seemingly more offended over some swear words than the literal rape of a child.
It argues that C++WG made various mistakes and full of incompetent members by presenting various seemingly technical topics but it's so random and unorganized it's hard to follow.
It doesn't make sense at all.
as a sibling comment said: "idiots all around".
or perhaps simply extremely bad at interpreting and handling social skills and emotions.
It started out interesting, but was simply a long rambling text where there seems to be no point
edit: After going on a banning spree, foonathan nuked the thread with "I am not going to deal with this on a Sunday". Nice
(And for the record, we barely removed any comments, just the ones that directly insulted people.)
And would you be so kind to actually link to the comment you banned me for? This is it, for everyone to see and judge:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1gyiwwc/c_standards_co...
Interesting that you did not choose to voice your opinions using your main accounts on that community then.
> And would you be so kind to actually link to the comment you banned me for? This is it, for everyone to see and judge:
Nah, that was just the comment I used to get to your profile. I banned you for insulting someone.
I'd love to, but reddit and cpp keep banning/suspending accounts - so I can't! Funny how that works isn't it?
> Nah, that was just the comment I used to get to your profile. I banned you for insulting someone.
That is not true. Here is the message:
> Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/cpp because your comment violates this community's rules. You won't be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.
With the link being to https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1gyiwwc/c_standards_co...
I banned you, so I like to think I'm an authority on why you were banned. Here's a step by step timeline of what happened.
1. This comment of yours received a high number of reports and was automatically filtered: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1gyiwwc/comment/lyp3jl...
2. I agreed with the reports and removed your comments.
3. I read the rest of the comments in your thread, and noticed your username repeatedly. I wasn't familar with you, so when I reached https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1gyiwwc/c_standards_co... I clicked on your profile.
4. After noticing your lack of contributions to r/cpp, I decided you are just someone who causes moderation trouble without contributing useful technical insights, so I decided to ban you. That's why the above comment is listed in your ban reason. If you had posted the slur on an account with actual history in r/cpp and no previous removed comments, I would not have banned you.
Edit: 5. Reddit administrators have now removed your comment as well.
yes of course they have, they banned my entire account. Because that's what reddit does. See my points above
Seems logical... (But when you think about it, it presupposes that you know and admit to yourself your actual motivations.)
FWIW, as a rather occasional redditor and having read through several pages linked from here (including much of that ultra-weird "HOOBY... dogwhistle!" blog post where the whole thing may have originated), to me you're coming off as more of a censorious ban-happy "PC SJW woke" gatekeeper than bun_terminator as a ban-worthy AH. (FWIW, every cent you paid for it.)
Yes, it's interesting that someone opted to use an alternate account to discuss a contentious issue on a platform rife with censorship and deplatforming.
Why is it so often someone's right to complain and make problems for others but never concern about people's right to be tolerated when they're being decent humans?
Either people need to be banned who insult others and use slurs and those who maliciously push right up against the rules, or they will bully people out. Look at modern X/Twitter allowing hate speech has pushed out advertisers and something like half of the users?
This is basic Paradox of Tolerance stuff, decent people aren't Banning anyone for pointing out actual arguments like discussing if "question" is okay, asking for extra context if this guy did something else or if this is council overreach. But people complaining about wokeness, DEI, diversity hires, or other technically allowable but obviously hostile nonsense are clearly just trying to attack other people and often in ways that are racist dog whistles. If people insist on being hostile up to the amount allowable by the rules instead of just trying to get along then the rules need to keep changing and adjusting and of course the people who are willfully choosing to be assholes will scream "censorship". Before teaming up with someone complaining about censorship be sure they're actually at risk of censorship and not just trying to use Free Speech as a shield to hurt others.
EDIT: Just saw your "woke bullshit" comment. And you're the one talking about toxicity? Lol. Lmao, even.
You mean, pushing down and saying people should be banned... like you? [Either people need to be banned who insult others and use slurs and those who maliciously push right up against the rules, or they will bully people out. Look at modern X/Twitter allowing hate speech has pushed out advertisers and something like half of the users?]
The fact is that you are just using the notion of 'paradox of tolerance' as a tool for defending your prefered kind of censorship, in the same mischievous way you say people use the notion of free speech "as a shield to hurt others". Is this or you are not being mischievious, so I think it would be polite to also admit the very probable possibility that those people claiming that their free speech is being violated may also have something to say on the topic, instead of just assuming they are being malicious and that they are "punching down" on others (or similar things).
Don't you think doing that would be more productive?
This is not "interesting", this is common sense.
eg in linux, git exists because of the Larry McEvoy Bitkeeper drama, there was the Eric S Raymond kernel build config drama, there were numerous Reiserfs and devfs dramas, etc etc etc. In the gnu/fsf world we have had the recent guy leaves because he doesn't like the fact that treesitter is the standard c++ mode drama, you had the emacs vs xemacs dramas, numerous "RMS intervenes to prevent people having an intermediate representation in the GCC compiler" dramas, etc etc. The list is incredibly long. People fight and lose political battles. They leave some committee that most people don't care about. Nothing really important is affected in any way.
Here as someone who was not involved it seems both sides are a bit unreasonable, and some guy has left the standards committee as a result. Really doesn't seem like you complaining about how reddit mods have responded to your posting there has any relevance here.
It word in the other comment was also not a slur, but - surprise surprise - the objective truth, again.
It looks like C++ is finally succumbing to entryism, meaning it will no longer serve as a sane alternative to Rust.
https://www.ywcamv.org/blog-newsroom/blog/2023/12/13/ywca-mv... (And this is from a reputable organization, not an individual.)
The fact that people associate such unrelated phrases with one another on the basis of their grammatical similarity just speaks of them, not of the author.
The paper[1] doesn't appear to have any other connections to the book/response/memes. A clear distinction is that the UB paper very directly and prominently states the question, rather than cloaking it in allusion or having a lengthy preface trying to contextualize it.
[1] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2024/p34...
1. Person publishes a thing with a title including the word “Question”
2. People say this title has some resonance to do with the Nazi genocide and ask him to change it
3. He refuses to change it
5. He gets expelled from the committee
You see the missing piece? Unlike the title, the body text doesn’t say he was expelled for the title or even for refusing to change it. It says he refused to change the title and then later was expelled. I could see a hypothetical situation in which he was totally in the right to refuse to change the title but acted like such a jerk in the ensuing debate that they fired him from the committee. We just don’t know. Imagine I publish a thing, my employer ask me to change the title, I say no, then the next time I go to work I steal all the furniture and they fire me. It would have the same pattern as the facts in the article.
Personally it seems very strange to fire him for using the word “Question” (if that’s what they did) but it also seems very strange for him to choose to die on that hill and not change the word if people find it really provocative (if that is what he did). “On the effects of undefined behaviour” seems a much better title than the one he chose for example. So it seems we’re lacking context here.
I think what GP was getting at is that is something along the lines of if you were accused of misconduct, and in being called into your manager's office for them to ask you about it you behaved unprofessionally enough they no longer thought you were a good fit for the company regardless of whether the accusation was true, they are entirely justified in wanting to end employment. A falsehood can reveal a separate truth about someone.
E.g. Someone falsely says you are always late to group meetings for a group project, and in being questioned you start throwing out racial slurs. Whether you were late is now a lesser issue, and while you woulf be technically correct to say you were falsely accused of being late to a few meeting and were then fired, that isn't correctly relaying the relevant information about why you were fired.
I have no information about whether this is what happened, but I think this is what the GP was trying to express about the information we have as it was presented.
Not saying I'd agree with it even with the whole story, I don't know, but I am dubious of this being the full story, because in fact communities are not _that_ crazy.
this kind of shenanigans overall, the climate of this, has been pervasaive for a decade now, and it's gotten ridiculous. everybody defending this is coping, optics-wise anybody who hears about this in passing is going to think it's absurd/insane/stupid and won't look into it further. another own goal.
stuff like this, alongside all the unethical business practices of groups like google, is why the tech industry is gonna be targeted hard by conservatives in the political sphere.
you certainly don't do yourself any favors!
"t-there has to be more to it, there's no way they're this stupid" no, people don't care, surface impression will be: roll eyes "those fucking woke idiots are up to more idiot woke shit again"
dumbarse americans and americanised westerners overall, making a cult/religion out of everything, even "progressives" have become a cult, it's so offputting to anybody outside the sphere who's been alive long enough to know better.
this is all predicated on eye for an eye tier nonsense.