I would have expected such a resignation after two weeks time to see whether the organization would improve their decision making process
Perhaps the person has already seen enough to decide this was the last straw.
Why I Left Rust
71–80 of 880 posts
Re: Why I Left Rust
#72I would have expected such a resignation after two weeks time to see whether the organization would improve their decision making process
You are maybe missing the context that the organisation is already many months deep into attempting to improve their decision making process
Re: Why I Left Rust
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't been to a conference in years because of COVID, but I've been to plenty mainly web and Python related before. Almost all of them had keynote speakers, who received a prominent spot, usually in the morning and on multi-tier conferences the only talk scheduled at that time slot. Based on content of most of those talks the expectation was to take a wider or deeper or just different look at our fields and not m…
I'm not saying the process was brilliant, but there's a difference between "the organizers were chaotic, didn't have their shit together, and need to do better" and "the organizers intentionally acted cruelly in an act of racist vindictiveness out of sheer malice". That's really my main objection to this post; and in the context of the accusations it makes the change of title is not really a big deal, or so it seems…
> “the organizers intentionally acted cruelly in an act of racist vindictiveness out of sheer malice“
The characterisation of those actions as vindictive seems accurate, but I don’t think the blog post is stating that the actions were racist, rather that it was a missed opportunity to represent the wider population at rustconf.
Whether you think that’s good or tokenisation is a separate matter, the point is that the article is not claiming that downgrading the speaker was racism.
Re: Why I Left Rust
#74Is this the same group who conjured up that _top-notch_ trademark policy? If so, how would the community go about removing them?
Re: Why I Left Rust
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar things might happen in other communities but Rust drama seems much more visible, and this isn't because of HN bias - the foundation having weird guidelines, controversy around governance, prominent people in the community badmouthing other languages in bad faith, now this. It's quite ugly.
I also think part of it is rust’s unique and complex governance model. Python, Go, C++, Ruby and Nodejs all had (mostly) a single leader who was in charge of the project for the first few years and who set the tone for the decisions which came after. If there was drama like this in Python, Guido would step in and that would have been that. Rust has no leader - and as far as I can tell, it never had a leader. Rust is…
How ironic that Rust should have the most problems arising as a result of shared ownership.
Perhaps they should consider a model where the entity has a single logical owner and requests to change its state are made by passing messages to that owner…
Re: Why I Left Rust
#76I love Rust but the ideological posturing and swathes of people who in their hearts are grifters is truly disappointing. Framing a technical presentation you disagree with as "making you uncomfortable" in highly manipulative fashion definitely deserves to be called out in public.
Indeed it should not be surprising that the community (leadership) who from the outside seems among the most concerned with codes of conduct, inclusion and so on, is actually not so virtuous at all. I am all for many of the stated goals of "woke" or whatever you want to call them, but it is really reminiscent of the politician who wants to ban porn but has his entire computer filled with it.
Everyone has similar character flaws, but insecurities and cognitive dissonance make some need to virtue signal because they fear the crowd will think they are intolerant and their brain can't deal with the fact they might have some lizard brain thoughts from time to time. To deal with this they go to the extent of branding themselves "good person walking here", uh, sorry: "allies".
Re: Why I Left Rust
#77Wait. Let me get this straight.
Someone is an expert in this field.
They're asked to speak at RustConf after a leadership vote.
They've also written an article about reflection in Rust - a purely technical thing that is already pretty widely disliked conceptually. (EDIT: the talk was about this, but it's also compile time reflection and came with the usual disclaimer that it was not representative of any of the Rust team's viewpoints or support)
Rust members were "uncomfortable" with this purely technical viewpoint - not their behavior, personal beliefs, or even their demographic?
And then they pushed them out of the conference behind leadership's back?
Did I miss something? This is indeed really childish behavior.
EDIT: oh. It's not even reflection, it's compile time reflection. As in, it's not the next Java but instead something that might actually be very useful for the language if done correctly.
https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023
> The sudden reversal smacks of shadowy decisions that are non-transparent to normal contributors like myself. It is a brutal introduction to the way the Rust Project actually does business that is not covered by its publicly-available Procedures and Practices and absolutely not at all mentioned in its Code of Conduct.
Agreed. The Rust project needs to stamp this out before it begins to fester. This is incredibly stupid behavior coming from what is being regarded as the next C++.
Come on, Rust committee. Let's grow up here, shall we?
Re: Why I Left Rust
#78I've been to plenty of conferences over the years, and I never really knew who was a "keynote speaker" or "only" a "speaker". Does anyone pay attention to this? You give a talk. People show up. They clap at the end. Does it really matter what some title on some conference website is? The communication was perhaps a bit more confusing and hectic than it should have been, but does that really matter? Is that really a b…
The people who don't think this is a big deal are either lacking some empathy or don't understand how conferences work. The equivalent situation is something like being warmly invited to a wedding, which you accept. The bride and groom then spend time gushing over how great it is that you'll be there, telling everyone they know, insisting that you book tickets right away. Later, you're told you can only come to the c…
It's up to you how you deal with stuff like this: you either turn everything in to a big drama or you just accept that these things are a part of life and can happen because the universe is a chaotic place. It's not like they lost their job or something; it's just a 2-day event.
If adding some perspective makes me "lacking empathy" then so be it, but I resent the accusation. We can also turn that around: the organisers are essentially being called a bunch of cruel racist assholes here, all without any real evidence. I bet that's fun after an honest mistake, miscommunication, or mismatch of expectations. If we want to talk empathy then no is coming off well here.
Re: Why I Left Rust
#79I haven't seen anyone bring this up, so I will.
I read through the original blog post from JeanHeyd[1] and in no way do they mention anything related to being a person of color, why then does JT associate it with that? I have no idea about the inner workings of the rust leadership team and who they are even, but from the timeline described and from the original post, there's nothing the could be related to that. JeanHeyd is a technical expert and not a token, I feel like introducing the issue of being "a person of color" (as if white is not a color, but whatever) is strange IMO and also needs to be called out. I respect and enjoy JT's work and learned a lot from them, but this is also something that should not be just mentioned casually. If JeanHeyd was invited or their talk demoted because of the color of their skin then there's totally different conversation to be had (and a totally different kind of accountability).
This behavior is disrespectful _regardless_ of the skin color of the expert! It doesn't change it one bit.
Just because they're not white shouldn't afford them any special treatment, and I say that as a non-white person. Merit is what counts, treating experts with affordance to their biology is patronizing at the very least.
My two cents.
1: https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023
Re: Why I Left Rust
#80What's up with all the petty drama in the Rust community.. is it uniquely problematic?
No, open source is just like this now. I think it's a confluence of factors: 1) Open source is more about interpersonal collaboration than it ever has been. The lone hacker throwing tarballs -- or patches -- over the fence is dead. Open source projects now more closely resemble "real world" software projects: a team of engineers using collaborative tools, working toward a defined shared vision with management and ove…
[dead]