So we should seeks to impose political purity tests on open-source software?
Contribution of open code is independent of the contributor’s social, political, or private views. Attempting to filter contributors through a political lens creates an "intellectual monoculture" which is less robust and less efficient than one that evaluates output based on technical rigor alone.
This polemic is to marginalize disruptive, contrarian, or independent-minded competitors.
So which one is it: don't care about politics, or care to preserve intellectual multiculture?
Part of the issue is that we don't have intellectual multiculture. We have a ton of noise, and some tiny bits of reputable signal drowned out in it. This is a new problem, that requires new solutions, and I wouldn't presume to know what they are.
>This polemic is to marginalize disruptive, contrarian, or independent-minded competitors.
If your disruptive, contrarian and "independent-minded" view is that immigration is destroying the white race and "Gypsies" should be shot in the street like dogs, and you openly support neo-nazi groups and their agenda, and you use terms like "woke mob" unironically, then you should be marginalized. Intellectual culture loses nothing of value with your exclusion, and I seriously doubt the technical rigor of software development will suffer either.
I, an open-source developer and contributor, am always looking forward to working together with a nazi to contribute to society!
Even Claude told the guy he's racist af and won't have anything to do with his blog post. What is expected from an actual decent human being to do when faced with the unfortunate event of working with him?
This post does not feel like it was made in good faith. The general premise ends up being:
- Matz is nice -> DHH / Tobias are "not nice" -> Ruby is doomed (because of two not nice people, also perhaps because of AI)
I think if they had focused perhaps on DHH (DHH's writings have been very polarizing), and also dropped the AI bit at the end, they might have had a stronger point, but Tobias ends up being judged guilty by the author almost purely through association:
> [...] Lütke doesn’t say anything nearly as incendiary as DHH, but the actions of the company he controls tell their own story, and his posts on X, the Everything App, document his turn to the right, along with all the crypto and AI stuff you’d expect to go along with it.
The author ends with a hope that a fork of rails will happen, quoting a user on mastodon:
> [...] we're building a community to execute a bigotry-free #Rails fork [...]
Here's my issue: let's imagine the author gets exactly what they want. Rails is forked, the fork becomes more used than rails, the community is saved!
The problem is that this forked code now becomes two things: a product of software (what it was before), and a product of ideology.
When a piece of software now also represents an ideology, people that want to contribute (but are not coders) end up contributing to the ideology instead. E.g. in this case, they'll try to help define what constitutes a bigot, find potential bigots in the community to root them out, things of that nature. When the "easy" bigots are found and removed, the work does not stop -- the definition of what is a bigot changes, and new bigots are found.
To be clear, the above happens regardless of ideology -- it's just human nature (See: Levari et al., Science, 2018). For example, many people on Reddit who claimed it had gotten too left-wing/right wing tried to create their own social media platform, only to realize that targeting an ideology as their main differentiator ended up eventually only attracting the people who are so deep in that ideology that it pushed away anyone casual.
He compared an entire race to wild animals that were, according to him, rightfully brought to full extinction in the middle ages.
What does he need to state in order for his ramblings to not be referred to by euphemisms? Call for concentration camps and gas chambers? Or will this also be an 'edgy' blog post? A 'spicy' tweet?
DHH was not the point of my comment (in fact, I said if the author had focused on him they'd have more of a point), so this unfortunately feels needlessly attackative.
There are 2 kinds of smart successful people out there: those who realize that they have great instincts/intelligence in an area, and those who think that because of that, they now have great instincts/intelligence in all areas.
The latter are your Elon Musks, Jordan Petersons and DHHs. This is incredibly idiotic. You get deeply successful in your expertise, get used to feeling smart, and start thinking that other topics are just like that. But the processes that lead you to that successful place are not the same everywhere.
Yes, you can go from developing a web framework with great DX to developing an operating system with great DX - the new challenge will start slow and slowly pick up as you're learning. But something like politics has very little fundamental overlap with any of that. You have to consider way more factors, because politics is literally, by definition, about people. Politics is in many ways about stepping outside of your own lived experiences and opinions to understand the lives of others, not just solve an aesthetics/DX/UX problem you perceive on your side, like it is with OSS.
So now you're barely scratching the surface of this new topic, but you're driven by influencers' opinions out there who tell very selective stories (basically lie) and exude aesthetics of intelligence, and you're yourself starting to indulge in the same vibes, like a college kid who thinks they're being deep. All because you've been conditioned most of your life that you're smart and people look up to your opinions. But you're just like everybody else on this one: misled the same way as every other audience member of bad faith influencers. Only now you've developed a huge audience of your own based on something completely different.
(This wasn't possible before btw, when media was gate-kept. You couldn't gain audience on one thing, then with that audience switch into all kinds of nonsense and have your audience follow you everywhere. Today you can.)
I can hope that people can grow out of this, but given how some of the aforementioned persons are already old, and so much of their life has been people looking up to them, I understand why that may be impossible.
I think this is called "maladaptive behavior" in psychology. You point to bad incidents, find your favorite common factor that makes it easy to categorize the incidents in one bucket, and avoid that entire bucket.
"I got pooped on by a duck 3 times, so I'm scared of all creatures who have webbed feet, and they're all to be removed."
"I stepped in dog poop 3 times, so I hate all creatures with fur, and they're all to be removed."
So we should seeks to impose political purity tests on open-source software?
Contribution of open code is independent of the contributor’s social, political, or private views. Attempting to filter contributors through a political lens creates an "intellectual monoculture" which is less robust and less efficient than one that evaluates output based on technical rigor alone.
This polemic is to marginalize disruptive, contrarian, or independent-minded competitors.
So which one is it: don't care about politics, or care to preserve intellectual multiculture?
Part of the issue is that we don't have intellectual multiculture. We have a ton of noise, and some tiny bits of reputable signal drowned out in it. This is a new problem, that requires new solutions, and I wouldn't presume to know what they are.
> political purity tests
eg “Are you a racist?”
>This polemic is to marginalize disruptive, contrarian, or independent-minded competitors.
If your disruptive, contrarian and "independent-minded" view is that immigration is destroying the white race and "Gypsies" should be shot in the street like dogs, and you openly support neo-nazi groups and their agenda, and you use terms like "woke mob" unironically, then you should be marginalized. Intellectual culture loses nothing of value with your exclusion, and I seriously doubt the technical rigor of software development will suffer either.
I, an open-source developer and contributor, am always looking forward to working together with a nazi to contribute to society!
Even Claude told the guy he's racist af and won't have anything to do with his blog post. What is expected from an actual decent human being to do when faced with the unfortunate event of working with him?
This post does not feel like it was made in good faith. The general premise ends up being:
- Matz is nice -> DHH / Tobias are "not nice" -> Ruby is doomed (because of two not nice people, also perhaps because of AI)
I think if they had focused perhaps on DHH (DHH's writings have been very polarizing), and also dropped the AI bit at the end, they might have had a stronger point, but Tobias ends up being judged guilty by the author almost purely through association:
> [...] Lütke doesn’t say anything nearly as incendiary as DHH, but the actions of the company he controls tell their own story, and his posts on X, the Everything App, document his turn to the right, along with all the crypto and AI stuff you’d expect to go along with it.
The author ends with a hope that a fork of rails will happen, quoting a user on mastodon:
> [...] we're building a community to execute a bigotry-free #Rails fork [...]
Here's my issue: let's imagine the author gets exactly what they want. Rails is forked, the fork becomes more used than rails, the community is saved!
The problem is that this forked code now becomes two things: a product of software (what it was before), and a product of ideology.
When a piece of software now also represents an ideology, people that want to contribute (but are not coders) end up contributing to the ideology instead. E.g. in this case, they'll try to help define what constitutes a bigot, find potential bigots in the community to root them out, things of that nature. When the "easy" bigots are found and removed, the work does not stop -- the definition of what is a bigot changes, and new bigots are found.
To be clear, the above happens regardless of ideology -- it's just human nature (See: Levari et al., Science, 2018). For example, many people on Reddit who claimed it had gotten too left-wing/right wing tried to create their own social media platform, only to realize that targeting an ideology as their main differentiator ended up eventually only attracting the people who are so deep in that ideology that it pushed away anyone casual.
> DHH's writings have been very polarizing
He compared an entire race to wild animals that were, according to him, rightfully brought to full extinction in the middle ages.
What does he need to state in order for his ramblings to not be referred to by euphemisms? Call for concentration camps and gas chambers? Or will this also be an 'edgy' blog post? A 'spicy' tweet?
DHH was not the point of my comment (in fact, I said if the author had focused on him they'd have more of a point), so this unfortunately feels needlessly attackative.
There are 2 kinds of smart successful people out there: those who realize that they have great instincts/intelligence in an area, and those who think that because of that, they now have great instincts/intelligence in all areas.
The latter are your Elon Musks, Jordan Petersons and DHHs. This is incredibly idiotic. You get deeply successful in your expertise, get used to feeling smart, and start thinking that other topics are just like that. But the processes that lead you to that successful place are not the same everywhere.
Yes, you can go from developing a web framework with great DX to developing an operating system with great DX - the new challenge will start slow and slowly pick up as you're learning. But something like politics has very little fundamental overlap with any of that. You have to consider way more factors, because politics is literally, by definition, about people. Politics is in many ways about stepping outside of your own lived experiences and opinions to understand the lives of others, not just solve an aesthetics/DX/UX problem you perceive on your side, like it is with OSS.
So now you're barely scratching the surface of this new topic, but you're driven by influencers' opinions out there who tell very selective stories (basically lie) and exude aesthetics of intelligence, and you're yourself starting to indulge in the same vibes, like a college kid who thinks they're being deep. All because you've been conditioned most of your life that you're smart and people look up to your opinions. But you're just like everybody else on this one: misled the same way as every other audience member of bad faith influencers. Only now you've developed a huge audience of your own based on something completely different.
(This wasn't possible before btw, when media was gate-kept. You couldn't gain audience on one thing, then with that audience switch into all kinds of nonsense and have your audience follow you everywhere. Today you can.)
I can hope that people can grow out of this, but given how some of the aforementioned persons are already old, and so much of their life has been people looking up to them, I understand why that may be impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
[flagged]
I think this is called "maladaptive behavior" in psychology. You point to bad incidents, find your favorite common factor that makes it easy to categorize the incidents in one bucket, and avoid that entire bucket.
"I got pooped on by a duck 3 times, so I'm scared of all creatures who have webbed feet, and they're all to be removed."
"I stepped in dog poop 3 times, so I hate all creatures with fur, and they're all to be removed."