It makes the case for local models even more urgent.
Between ClosedAI not giving me GPT4 API access, and how effective it is at medical diagnosis(The AMA is going to ban it after it kills 1 person, just watch); we need local models.
I can't wait until the silent majority stops being silent and throws out CoC and their people from projects. It is seriously a toxic thing that creates debates over stuff where there is no need for it to be a debate to begin with.
But if you speak up you're a pedo… I wrote on a debian mailing list a while ago, when they wanted to sign against rms.
I didn't address all the accuses against him, just the one about being ableist, and how as a disabled person I don't think non-disabled people should decide just to push their agenda.
Anyway, I got some thanks in private, for speaking up, but nobody publicly replied.
Also, Stallman is clearly a neurodivergent individual, so shouldn't we at least try to be accepting and inclusive of that, too (within limits, of course) instead of jumping on every awkwardly worded remark and interpreting that in the most negative possible way? "Assume good faith" etc.
I wrote a "Stallman is not a good leader, but he's not a transphobic ableist monster" article and I got more feedback over email and Twitter PM than everything else I've written combined.
On HN it was flagged after a brief discussion shrug. I think it upset both the pro- and anti-Stallman people because I do think we're better off without Stallman, but not for the reasons in that ridiculous letter. For all his failings, I do think he's a good person.
Most people do not assume good faith, especially online. Depending on the person, they will often go directly for the least charitable interpretation possible. The goal isn't to be humans together, it's to win.
Because you can gauge it by how many people complain vs how few people push it through. It’s a tiny minority of people who are zealots about a CoC which is why I intentionally exclude them from my project especially the absolute disaster covenant code of conduct made by a poser on a power trip
I have been away from hacker news for about 2 to 3 years and quite frankly I am shocked that this place is still having this same tired argument whereas outside it seems to be an accepted fact of life that having rules surrounding the conduct of project participants is in fact a good thing.
> outside it seems to be an accepted fact of life that having rules surrounding the conduct of project participants is in fact a good thing.
I think this talks past concerns.
"Just kick out the rude people" is probably a good thing. "Just kick out the people the admins don't like" is probably a bad thing (or at least isn't as impartial as the former).
With sections like "In addition, violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them" it really seems the intention of the rules goes above/beyond "rules for the space where project participants communicate in".
That is intentional, as I believe that these discussions attract rules lawyers who I feel are missing the point.
If the people running the project enforce rules in bad faith, a CoC like the Contributors Code of Conduct is not materially different from an informal list of bullet-point rules, or even an tacit "Don't be a jerk."
I don't know anything about your social circles, but my experience suggests that people learned to mostly ignore it until it happens to touch them. Until that point they just indicate their real thoughts in private groups. The argument repeats itself here, because the forum is pseudo-anonymous and lends itself to a 'private group' image despite not really being one.
<< conduct of project participants is in fact a good thing.
The problem is that the specific phrase "Code of Conduct" has been dragged into a culture war. And if the problem is the parlance, the solution is to just call it something different, like "Conduct Policy", "Rules", or something similar.
It might seem trite, but in my experience using a different name seems to shut off the part of some folks brain who automatically assume said rules will be enforced in bad faith.
Your assertion here that a code of conduct could get dragged into a culture war directly contradicts your previous assertion that there is no war outside of HN.
Rules getting enforced in bad faith as people coalesce power in their sphere is a story as old as human history. Why would you argue that we have an exception in this case?
> Your assertion here that a code of conduct could get dragged into a culture war directly contradicts your previous assertion that there is no war outside of HN.
Whoops, ya got me! :)
In all seriousness, there's no contradiction. The phrase "Code of Conduct" was part of a culture war, but in my experience the conversation outside of places like Hacker News has shifted significantly in recent years. Reading this thread was like stepping into a time machine, and not in a pleasant or nostalgic way.
Well to be honest I don't. But I am guessing because it's stupid and meaningless and usually that won't prevail in the end. People may be tricked into it for a while but when they see the true power play that are in place they will quickly come to hate it.
I don't know, I live in one of the most woke countries on earth most likely so I have some experience in speaking out. I have only ever lost like one job over it and I always speak my mind about matters like this.
I think people are afraid when there is no reason to be. If you lose your job, just get a new one it's not like it's hard in the tech sector anyway.
It seems you know a lot about what the silent majority wants, given they're apparently silent.
What would you replace it with? And what is the stuff being debated? I thought a code of conduct (or any form of "rules") was to prevent debates, avoid ambiguity, and clearly outline what is and isn't allowed in a community. (or outside one, which I do have a problem with. One of the rules of my forums, alongside an all-encompassing "don't be a dick", is a rule saying you shouldn't take drama from other sites to ours.)
> a rule saying you shouldn't take drama from other sites to ours
The inverse is also a problem, and it's the one addressed by that type of rule. Taking drama from this site to other sites. If someone has pre-existing beef with someone else in your community, it's not ok if they bring that to your site, sure. But if Joe gets on Sally's nerves on-site, it's fine if she sends him a direct email filled with all sorts of flavorful harassment over it? And it's fine cause she stepped one inch over the border before doing it? Nah, they're both problems.
I watch elixir from a distance and don't have that much practical experience in it but this looks like it's too hard to read in order to be that useful imo.
At least I wouldn't use it mostly because of the paranthesis and I really do hope that it's going to be optional if it were to be implemented. I do write code in typed languages on a daily basis but I do think it's overrated especially here on HN. I like that Elixir is dynamically typed and I think that it's just something that's not really in fashion at the moment but it will come around, eventually.
I like dynamic typing too which, contrary to popular belief, doesn't mean I don't care about types. I may start using this when it is released, though, we shall see. Otherwise, don't worry, it will definitely be optional. Elixir is all about backward compatibility and not changing too much. There's an often-uttered reminder when proposals come up on the Elixir forums that there is very little chance there will ever be a v2.0. Anything's possible, of course, but it would be years away.
There is already a grest swedish cloud peovider called GleSYS. They are 100% running on renewable energy and the have an awesome control panel to control your servers. I only wish that they had more hosted solutions like digital ocean.
Other than that, there is hetzner which I also use and is very good and probably the cheapest cloud provider out there. Then there is the french ovh.
An aspect of this that some people find problematic is that many employers use these services to do background checks on individuals before hiring. Background checks are of course customary for some positions, in which case official police records will be retrieved with the candidate's knowledge or consent. For positions where background checks haven't historically been customary, these services will often be used instead, since they are much faster and cheaper in terms of administration, don't require consent and don't notify the candidate that they have been used, and (at least in the past) show offenses that no longer show up in the official records.
Yes, people can look you up and threaten you and that has happened to me more than once now.
Criminals use it a lot which is increasingly a large problem due to the mass immigration that has sky-rocketed violent crimes in our country. They also use it to hijack peoples identity (haven't happened to me), since the social security number is available to everyone.
I have tried Liveview and I have looked at alternatives and I have to say that even if I don't use Phoenix or Elixir on daily basis, Liveview is easily the best out there.
The developer experience is great and Phoenix is just a great framework. The speed in which one can create stuff is mind blowing which is going to be the biggest pull factor into the language imo. My main issue is that Elixir is great for a lot of hard problems but for the easy, common problems it is lacking a lot in libraries and so on. It also has a high learning curve.
Although it is probably just going to get better in time the learning curve will probably not.
IME a lot of the learning curve is functional programming, shortly followed by OTP. If you've ever worked with a functional language picking up on the OTP abstractions (eg. GenServer) is a small hill to climb in order to become effective on a day-to-day basis.
That said, with every new language comes idioms, tools and libraries that one has to learn, but this is true for all languages.
True and honestly, as an experienced developer it wasn't that huge of a step to start coding in Elixir. It's just that I (at least) is still thinking in an object-oriented way even when I'm working in Elixir because that is what I am used to.
I think the hardest part is to let go of some of the old practices and embrace functional programming as much as you can.
I would like to work with elixir professionally but have yet to find an employer that uses it in production :)
Yeah, 100%. I'd say half or more of the Elixir devs I've hired had no Elixir experience before. I've found most people pick up the basics easily, and the language is super approachable.
What libraries are missing? So far, I've only missed having a library for interacting with Google Sheets. I got around that with a Lambda running Python. Everything else either had an Elixir library or there was no library in any language.
Well.. tons of specific libraries are obviously not there that exist in other languages that makes completing tasks faster.
And even if they do exist, the documentation is often very sparse or the library is not super actively maintained like in the big popular languages.
These are all stuff that obviously only get better with time and when people start working with elixir. It's not something that makes Elixir bad, it is just that you have to take that into account that when you want to do something very specific with an image or want that api wrapper for that api that isn't well known then you 'll have to implement it yourself instead of relying on some third party package.
I don't particularly care about Rust but one of the reasons I've hesitated to learn / use it was because the project seemed like it was led by woke people that pushed politics into the programming space which imo is completely unnecessary.
One thing I've learned by experience is that people who push their political agenda into everything is inherently toxic and will destroy everything they come in contact with.
There is no need for a Code of Conduct like so many programming projects have today, there is no need to have a "Black lives matter" banner on the framework website nor is there any need of supporting any other political cause unless it directly affects the project or the maintainers. If you start advocating for cause x there will always be people who rightfully will argue for cause y.
I'm sick and tired of general politics getting pushed into everything.
Politics is everywhere and everything. There is no chance of "keeping politics out of" anything. Making such a decision or rule is highly political too. This goes for sports, entertainment, culture, tech, open source..
The fact that there are "counterexamples" of successful projects that "thrive without involving politics and never had a CoC" isn't an argument to the contrary.
I get that there will be politics enough to go around and honestly I only think it strenghten my point. There is no need to bring in external politics since there is enough in the technical space alone.
I mean external politics, not "office politics". There is no meaningful way of separating any group of people working together (a company, an OSS project, whatever) and politics.
I understood that, I just think your arguments are bad.
> There is no chance of "keeping politics out of" anything. Making such a decision or rule is highly political too.
Of course there is and such a decision is not about general politics or highly political. It's a bit like saying forbidding smoking on school grounds will never make it go away so we should just let the kids smoke. In fact, I would argue that Rust already has a lot of political rules in the code of conduct.
Even if people will break the rules there is still value in creating such rules but that will obviously only work as long as the people making the rules also abide by them which is not the case in the Rust community (among many others). It's obvious that certain political views are prohibited while others are welcome.
I guess what I am disappointed in is the constant double standards. They can have "black lives matters" on their webpage but if I were to link to a anti-trans movement (just making an example) on their discord it wouldn't take long until I'm banned. Anti trans movements and black lives matter has nothing to do with most development projects, thus none should be pushed on their websites.
Sure, but just because the $FOO software project is happy to incorporate political views on User Freedoms vs Developer Freedoms, it doesn't mean that proselytsing some particular political candidate is welcome.
IOW, when people reject a particular political topic, you can't very well turn around and say "How dare you; you talk about free software, and that's political too!"
A community willing to engage in one political activity doesn't automagically open the door for every vocal minotiry to spam them until they cave.
Academic papers are usually written by a small group. But I imagine for large collaborations like papers from LHC and similar you'd have to deal with some of the same issues any major org. It comes at you very quickly. Can you hold an important meeting on the day 2 people of 100 are away because it's a religious holiday? What do you do about the fact that the Ukrainian guy refuses to work until the Russian guy is kicked out of the team?
And the research itself is of course interfacing with politics all the time whether they like it or not. Of course more in climate research or economics than in theoretical physics but it's still there.
I also find myself frequently questioning the labeling of things one doesn't like as "political".
Having a code of conduct that focuses on treating people w/ respect and discouraging personal attacks is not political, and it's strange to me that someone would label it as such.
That's an interesting way of framing a position: "I think X and all the obvious counter-examples that might prove me wrong are irrelevant.", "Why are they irrelevant?", "Because I just said they are!".
Anyway, you're equivocating around the meaning of "politics". Yes, everything involving people is political in some sense. But that isn't the sense people here are talking about.
I just preempted the usual answer "look at X, they don't have a lot of politics and they seem to be doing OK" because it's such an obvious non-argument that it shouldn't even need explaining.
> the project seemed like it was led by woke people that pushed politics into the programming space which imo is completely unnecessary
You’re not wrong, to a degree, but avoiding the language because of this is exactly the wrong take. Instead, if more people use it these sentiments are diluted and approach the median. IMO by even caring about this at all in your language decisions, you’re engaging in the exact same kind of game as those people are.
> IMO by even caring about this at all in your language decisions, you’re engaging in the exact same kind of game as those people are
Well, that is becaused I feel forced into it. I wouldn't care about the maintainers political views unless they pushed it down my throat at every opportunity they get.
I feel it is a sound economical choice not to support orgs and people who are toxic or actively work against you and your interests. I vote with my wallet when it comes to products and services but when it comes to languages I vote with my time and knowledge. I choose another programming language instead, it's not like there isn't any options out there.
What if I would have picked Rust? Then I would have to get a new domain for my website, I would feel unwelcome in the community because I don't share their political opinions and likely other things that is yet to come. Nah, I'd rather go with people and projects that don't do this kind of crap which I don't have time for honestly.
Honestly how much does their political stance affect your work?
Using a programming language is 99.9% technical work. As long as they don't go out of their way e.g. to make rustc compile your project wrong if you have files with political content with opposing orientation on your computer, how does any of that matter?
It shouldn’t be a problem if you just use the language. It does become something you should be mindful of if you want to get more involved, e.g. contribute to core, maintain high profile libraries, give talks at conferences, etc.
As a team member of another high profile project, I have had the pleasure of being accused (thankfully privately) of being intolerant towards trans people because I was very vocal about a change breaking backwards compatibility. Apparently the person behind the change is trans; I only learned about that when I was accused. A decade into woke politics I still have no idea why I should give a single shit about which bathroom they go in or who they choose to sleep with or whatever. But some people won’t hesitate to weaponize this crap when given the chance, and disappointingly, they can often amass a big cheering crowd, or should I say lynching mob.
> Honestly how much does their political stance affect your work?
Since I do not use Rust, not at all. But if I were this policy would affect me. For example, I had a domain with "rust" in it. I let it expire, since I decided not to use Rust which now seems like a great choice. I am also soon going to be a gun owner. Also, if I were to use Rust I would probably join a user group now required to adopt their CoC and a bunch of other things.
The main issue with people pusing politics in programming is a sign of a possibly unstable project since in my experience and by looking at the trademark policy it appears it was completely right. Restricting speech and adding a gun policy is just wtf. It is a clear indication that the project is run by people that have very specific political agendas that they're trying to push onto a programming project that has nothing to do with them.
I don't get it, sure it's nice to have quick actions in Slack but the types of content I write in Slack/Teams are not usually stuff I care so deeply about that I need to get the help of an AI to improve it really. If I really want something to be improved by an AI I can just pop over to OpenAI's portal and do it there.
It's just short messages, back and forth and I thought that was kind of the point of chat apps? This feature would be more useful in say, an email client where the communication is more often more formal.
That is your workflow. Many places have replaced email with Slack. For DMs people might not care how good the message is but for public channels where there are many recipients I am sure people care about the quality of their message.
The fact that it might be more beneficial in an email client I don't think is relevant for Slack as a company.
The problem with RxJS is that it feels like Node did in the beginning. It's hard as eff to figure out where the system goes, what happens when, in what order etc.
Sure they have a great product which is better than most competitors but now they try and use their new money to prohibit others of making progress.
I really hope regulators doesn't get fooled by this old trick. Fuck OpenAI.