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Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

marcan.st

921–930 of 1001 posts

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#921

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my understanding as well, as soon as the node exclusivity dropped they were ballpark equal. Many ARM SOC are designed to run on battery only so the wireless packages and low power states are better, my AMD couldn't go below 400mhz. But yeah the "Apple M hardware is miles and leagues away" hypetrain was just a hypetrain. Impressive and genuinely great but not revolutionary, at best incremental. I hope to be abl…

> But yeah the "Apple M hardware is miles and leagues away" hypetrain was just a hypetrain. Impressive and genuinely great but not revolutionary, at best incremental. Compared to the incremental changes we've seen the previous 10 years before it arrived on AMD/Intel space, it was revolutionary.

Was Intel switching from the Pentium 4 to the Core architecture considered revolutionary at the time? Was AMD's bulldozer architecture? I don't recall.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#922
post #870
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then entertain his question and tell us what is? In this particular case, Hector himself with the blog post hints at it, but a lot of damage has been done already: "I am working on personal issues currently, I'd like to step back for a while and will not be contributing. Thank you, all". > Bringing up people’s attention to the matter to finally somehow resolve the situation Not everything has a clear and fast resol…

> Not everything has a clear and fast resolution. I think Hector's team were hoping the resolution to be "Shut up everyone, we're doing Rust now, this is all merging in and that's that.!". But it could have been "Shut up everyone, we're not doing Rust any longer". They would have been even more upset saying "this is a leadership failure, they're on the wrong side of history" and so on. I'd argue that we're basically…

> which gives the not-so-great precedent that invoking social media was actually more effective at getting some sort of response than the technical debate that he actually said he wants. So now, the status quo is that someone with the power to completely block any progress towards actually including any amount of Rust in the kernel will presumably continue to do so, but Linus still is sticking to the line that we can have "technical debate" about it even though the outcome is predetermined to end in failure.

It's true but sort of assumes that Linus is an automaton, like a corporation: if you threaten with a social media drama, then he'll respond. The problem is that it feels he was forced to respond, and he didn't really like kernel devs being part of the social media drama. So he responded, so in a strange way, he emerged as the calm voice of reason. And it left a long unpleasant memory in the community regarding it.

> it will just cause more frustration in the long run than simply ending acknowledging the reality of the current situation.

Sadly, I think that's what will happen.

> I'd argue that we're basically at the point where that _is_ what the de facto policy is, except without it being actually stated.

It does seem that way, I agree with you, but I think this made it worse as you highlighted already. So it was an uphill road, but now the hill got steeper and taller. Another way this could have played out is Hector wrote a blog post saying "I am having personal issues, I am frustrated, I am stepping down". Let people figure out more details. But getting into a public spat with Linux devs was not productive for his and his team's goals. He hurt his team (Rust + Asahi) more than he helped in the end.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#923
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the opinions they don't agree with exist on Hacker News, and they do (check the dead comments in just about any thread where Asahi Linux comes up) then it isn't an unfair assessment at all. What is the "it" that you're insisting they "deal with," here? What is the "drama?" Also what value does bigotry, homophobia and transphobia have in open discourse that it must be preserved? None of that is on topic for Hacker…

This wasn't even my point [1], but I'll go there. Turn the other cheek. Ignore it. It's 2025 we're learning lessons from USENET all over again and having to reign in the over-sensitive, disregulated behavior of some people. I'm gay, on the spectrum, and my wife is trans. What certain people in "my" community do from places of relative comfort makes life for those of us in more moderate / conservative-leaning places w…

I would like to first acknowledge the feelings of what I read to be anger, frustration & pain you expressed in your comment. (If I've misinterpreted what you've written, I am open to reading further clarification if that's something you felt like investing effort into.)

While my life experience has been different to yours, from what you've written about how you've been treated by others in your community, as a consequence of who you are, it seems understandable to me that you might experience those feelings--and, even if they didn't seem understandable to me, it is more important to me that you feel heard and your feelings acknowledged as valid and not dismissed.

I hope I have been able to communicate that intent effectively.

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At the risk of falling into the stereotype traps of "straight white male thinks every rhetorical invitation is a literal invitation for him to say what he thinks" & "straight-splaining" I did want to provide an answer to the question in the last sentence here:

> "As another anecdote, when I talk to my friends about Rust, the subject of "drama" frequently comes up. Why is that? Suddenly my work becomes harder for an entirely unrelated and unmerited reason. That's just me as an LGBT person - imagine how straight people feel."

(I preface the following with an acknowledgement that it's bullshit that you have had to deal with the impact of this rather than the predominantly straight white males who don't want to be made to feel uncomfortable.)

TL;DR:

FWIW, from my perspective as a straight white male I feel the subject of "Public Interpersonal Conflict" attributed to Rust is directly related to values rightfully espoused/embodied by the Rust project/community/language that are at odds with values held by other groups.

Specifically, groups consisting of predominantly straight white males believe that the comfort of predominantly highly skilled straight white males should be prioritized over the physical well-being of other humans; and, also over the security and stability of the software other humans use.

They are also unlikely to agree with this characterization.

Unlike the above group however, rather than targeting resentment at the people whose physical well-being is at risk I choose to direct my resentment at the predominantly straight white males who choose to dismiss important issues as unimportant "drama" because they resent being "made" to think about issues that impact people other than themselves.

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For anyone who disagrees with my characterization I would point out that we do not know what other contributions Alan Turing may have contributed beyond "Turing Completeness" & "the Turing Test" to current in-demand fields such as AI if he hadn't been persecuted for not being a straight white male.

I would also remind them the ARM CPU attached to that unified memory on which they're running their latest AGI & LLM models is thanks to another person some people in the present day think should be persecuted for daring to exist.

But equally people shouldn't have to trade advancements in the field of Computer Science for the right to exist without persecution.

----

I will acknowledge that its entirely understandable to want to avoid the associated discomfort because from personal experience it is very uncomfortable to have to re-evaluate one's place & responsibility in the world after a lifetime of being told something different.

----

The other ~2,500 words I wrote on the topic was certainly more nuanced but pretty much said the same thing with more beating around the bush with additional personal context.

For any straight white males who may be confused why someone might think as I do, all I can say is that time spent reading/listening to this (unfortunately, archived) resource is likely to be worthwhile, if temporarily uncomfortable: https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Geek_Feminism_Wiki

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#924

One aspect of all of this which I haven't seen directly addressed[0] is the question of what might be going on with Torvalds and the Rust Foundation from a longer term, dare I say "political" standpoint. Torvalds seems to usually position himself as a kind of anti-political, code-is-code type, but then, perhaps there's more to him and to this story? There's an awful lot of money and power associated with operating sy…

I've heard "Linus Torvalds has refused to decide whether to accept or reject Rust, and this is a leadership failure". Maybe I'm don't know the situation enough, but I think he's not deciding because he has no idea. The "wrong" option may create far more consequences than the "right" one (so he can't e.g. flip a coin) but he has no idea which is "right". Torvalds has spent so long working with C, even if he went out o…

> "but ensure that all future Rust compatibility issues are handled by Rust developers"

But how? One of these:

- The C developer needs to know enough Rust to know which changes will affect Rust, contact the Rust developers and explain the change and wait. Extra work and delay they do not want.

- The C developer does not need to know any Rust, but must be doing Rust builds, and if something breaks then contact the Rust developers and explain the change and wait. Extra work and delay they do not want.

- The C developer needs to explain every change to the Rust developers in case it might break, before they can do it. Extra work they do not want.

- The C developer ignores Rust, and the Rust developers must work with unpredictable shifting sands. This works for a while and the Rust codebase becomes larger and new Rust developers join. This is an unstable configuration. The larger the Rust codebase, the more disruptive any change could be and the new Rust developers will feel the changes are malicious, capricious, and will demand this stops and the changes are planned and communicated and the ground stabilises, or they get fed up and quit. Leading back to one of the above points - C developers either need to maintain the abandoned Rust code, or they need to do extra work of tracking, coordinating, explaining, running changes through another team and waiting for them, extra work they do not want, or they can't make certain changes in the C code base, a limitation they don't want.

Rust developers saying "we will do all the work" isn't enough because of the meta-work of organising and communicating the work.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#925

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there any particular reason it couldn't have been done in C? I'm having a little trouble believing these claims

Rust is just a better and more productive language than C (I guess this is a subjective statement, but obviously they would think so and I would agree with them). Nobody ever claimed that it's impossible to write these drivers in C -- C is "Rust-complete" in the sense that you could in theory write a compiler that translates any Rust program to C. They're just claiming that Rust allowed them to write much higher-qual…

You used an awful lot of words to say "dunno."

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#926

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is most certainly not politically charged language. It's an anodyne statement referring to being a small force keeping bad things from happening. That's all.

While words change and it rapidly escalated over the last 10 years, it's been about police brutality/misconduct for at least 50 years now. Using phrases whose meaning you're unaware of is generally risky behavior. Trying to claim it meant something other than what the common lexicon says it means is just asinine.

Maybe instead of assuming that the person who used the phrase intentionally wanted to politically charge their message with 50 years of US-centric baggage, it would be safer to assume that they were unaware of the political context and/or made a mistake. Or, you know, ask the person to clarify what they meant before jumping to conclusions.

Why this is being brought up in a discussion about Linux is beyond me. Context and nuance matter.

Tangentially: this is a problem with "cancel culture" in general. The mob is willing to lynch people at the mere mention of something they find objectionable. That's what's asinine.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#927

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It must be said that from an outsider's point a view, in quite a few aspects it very much sounds like a cult. Get an HN article about C++, and you can be certain the comment section is going to deteriorate at some point into a religious war mentioning Rust. Get an article about Rust, and there is going to be drama in the comments. As a programmer that could potential consider Rust, it is off-putting.

I get the opposite experience, never saw those comments chiming in Rust everytime another programming language is mentioned or pushing in to rewrite everything into Rust, but I get comments complaining about such invisible forces.

This has been my experience too. There were a couple of years (like 2016-2018) where I saw a handful of people pushing the RIIR line, but I've seen many more people for many more years complaining about how those RIIR people are everywhere. Any time there's an article on Phoronix that mentions Rust, the trolls come out in droves to whine about how toxic the Rust community is and how they make everything political, while the only people in those threads making anything political are the anti-Rust trolls themselves.

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#928
post #183
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the top of the page: > Hi! It looks like you might have come from Hacker News. > Asahi Linux developers are frequent targets of abuse on Hacker News. Despite our pleas, the moderators have not taken effective action to improve the situation. > Overtly hateful content is often flagged on HN and not immediately visible. Unfortunately, when a comment is flagged and killed, its child subthread is not. That preserves t…

seconded. even if it was completely true criticism, which it categorically is not, putting up a half-page banner is extremely gauche and immature. saying things like "an organized attempt to destroy lives, including of developers in our communities" is patently not true. trolls get flagged. honest nice people who don't agree with you aren't trying to destroy anything and nor do they hate you.

I'm unsure whether the most charitable reading of your comment is to assume you missed that these linked phrases exist on the original site but were not included in the text copied into the comment above, or something else:

* "bad actors" links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms

* "destroy lives" links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Suicides_of_harassm...

While you may be correct that initial "trolls get flagged", the statement on the Asahi site agrees that while the initial comment may be flagged & killed, the other comments in the subthread are still indexed, visible & tend not to get moderated/flag:

"Unfortunately, when a comment is flagged and killed, its child subthread is not. [...] but the reduced moderation activity enables abuse to continue. Although you don't see those threads, search engines do."

Based on other remarks about the content of such subthreads it seems surprising to claim that follow-on comments are made by "honest nice people".

I'm as much of a fan of adverbs as the next person but using words like "categorically", "extremely" & "patently" doesn't seem to leave much room for nuance of interpretation when written by someone who I'd have assumed was a third party observer?

While I could understand someone describing JWZ's HN-tailored "banner" (I wouldn't suggest researching this if anyone is not already familiar) gauche and immature, it feels like somewhat of a stretch in relation to a plain text message who last sentence starts with "Please".

Re: Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

#930

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s not ok. Then entertain his question and tell us what is? Bringing up people’s attention to the matter to finally somehow resolve the situation is his last resort, after spending years trying to upstream even trivial patches. You can eat your cake and have it too - you can’t say you want rust in the kernel and then sabotage any upstreaming efforts

Your assumption is that others owe it to him to have this situation resolved in a way he finds acceptable.

I don't think that they owe it to him, but I do think it's shitty to string people along for several years without merging their code, often refusing to even review their code, without giving any technical reasons and while behind the scenes straight-up conspiring to sabotage their efforts.

I mean, that's the kind of abusive dynamic I'd expect from a horrible corporation: stringing along underpaid or unpaid interns for several years and refusing to hire them at the end of it without giving any actual feedback.

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