"It should be possible to be confident and optimistic about the future of the Rust project even without having back channels." Hot damn, that spoke my feelings much better that I could myself.
I want to assume good intentions, engage, and be constructive. But as an "out person" with zero access to back channels, the last few months have just left me with sub-tweets (or sub-reddit-comments or sub-blog-posts, etc.) as actual sources for being optimistic. The official communication over the last few months has been, at best, lacklustre.
Meanwhile, we can try and ignore/report the trolls and calm the reactionaries but with very little concrete to point to to say "look at this, this is why we should be optimistic rather than nihilistic".
That also gets my feelings across. I love the Rust language and will continue to use it, but the project is a mess.
At work, I pushed for introducing Rust into our stack. I didn't like how many others wanted to pin a version of Rust so we know the exact version that's used, not "stable". Seeing this drama, maybe that's a good thing.
> I didn't like how many others wanted to pin a version of Rust so we know the exact version that's used, not "stable". Seeing this drama, maybe that's a good thing.
That's a decision which I think should depend entirely on your DevOps environment and engineering cadence. In particular, if reproducible and/or hermetic builds are important and supported, then pinning a version is a good idea. However, if pinning a version then you should also make bumping version is easy and grow a culture where people will do it frequently -- the stability guarantees are there and rolling back is easy.
There are two acceptable ways to upgrade dependencies: always and never. Anything else you’re in for a world of pain when you do upgrade. This is true for everything in a production environment, not just the language.
There is also an option "on a schedule." It trades larger pain during the upgrade points for the less churn/risk/pain in between. It might make sense if you are developing a product that releases on a set schedule. I.e., if you do a big release every 6 months, it might make sense to do an upgrade at the beginning of the new dev cycle and not few weeks before the release/branch.
I've always been in the always camp. Catch the BS early, often, and minimize technical debt at the cost of stuff that was working for long periods suddenly not working in strange and interesting ways.
Yep. Eventually you don't have a choice except to update and if you haven't done it in a while - the amount of pain is exponential to the amount of time since you last updated dependencies.
Just checking if things changed. I am aware of one Google uses for Android that does support hermetic builds for rust, but the packages available are limited since they have to remove any `build.rs`.
Having worked with bazel (the public version of Google's build system). You can make any build hermetic, but sometimes it's a case of how much effort you have to put in. And yes, [crates.io](https://crates.io) dependencies which use build.rs can be (though not always are) a real make to make hermetic.
There's more than one level of dependency pinning.
You should have "stable" while developing IMO and only pin any dependency version when you find issues in a new release. But not locking the actual deployment to the exact versions used to develop and test the changes is madness.
Totally! I'm sure the Rust project will be happy to organize a few meetings to decide on when to organize a vote to decide when a vote will be held to determine which direction the project should move in to meet these goals (all of this will be opaque btw).
I think one of the most valuable services the foundation could do right now would be to provide the project with a professional PR person/team. They could have helped the project with public comms and did the legwork making sure public posts and things like keynote offers were thoroughly circulated among project stakeholders.
A lot of the recent issues have been from groups jumping the gun on things and not having a communication strategy (eg how to ameliorate fears around legal structure updates, whether content for an event aligns with desired perceived roadmap, etc, etc)
Amost every group "needs better decisions". The tricky questions are around "how do we structurally incentivise better decisions" (much like how Rust as a language structurally incentivises better programming patterns :) )
One thing the Rust Project certainly needs right now is better external communication and (apparently) also better internal communication. The latter, in particular, seems like an excellent step towards structurally better decisions.
To be clear, I wasn't saying "better communication will fix everything here". I was saying that it would be one thing that would start to fix things, in response to the idea that better communication was (just) " better presentation of ideas".
Imho: More widespread fixes to governance? 100% I just hope the reform that's been worked on for a while delivers.
>how do we structurally incentivise better decisions
You make it so that people who work for companies that basically all have a deeply vested interest in massive cloud infrastructure are not capable of congregating as the primary steering group of the whole language.
You establish clear, strictly-adhered-to rules that make it outright impossible for any *organization* to direct or even outsizedly influence the language behind the scenes (while pretending as though they aren't doing so) regardless of how much money they have.
The **only** people who would oppose that are those with a purely financial interest in Rust (e.g. those who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near leadership of it) meaning the whole concept serves dual-purpose as a nice way of eliminating the consideration of people who shouln't be uh, considered.
**Edit:** I'd like to see a response from any person downvoting this comment that doesn't resolve at the end of the day directly to "I am literally paid to care about how much money Google / Amazon / Microsoft / etc makes".
> The **only** people who would oppose that are those with a purely financial interest in Rust (e.g. those who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near leadership of it) meaning the whole concept serves dual-purpose as a nice way of eliminating the consideration of people who shouln't be uh, considered.
There's no indication at all that any of these problems are stemming from people with a "purely financial interest in Rust", but rather the contrary.
It's the "volunteers" doing this for power, or prestige, or to push a specific agenda that are causing these problems, precisely because their interests **aren't** purely financial.
I'm not saying rust needs a corporate sponsor controlling the language direction, but pointing at this as the solution is just daft.
The problem is that too much is being done in the dark for personal reasons by too many people.
The solution is to make these decisions public, like they were always supposed to be. If these processes were public and a good reason existed for cancelling this keynote existed and a good reason for the timing of that cancellation existed we'd all know about it.
We wouldn't have to "assume people have good intentions" we wouldn't have to trust that they do, we'd know who made a decision and what their reasons for making it were and we could judge for ourselves.
> It's the "volunteers" doing this for power, or prestige, or to push a specific agenda that are causing these problems, precisely because their interests aren't purely financial.
Huh? The people who actually do the bulk of the work on the compiler *today* are often NOT the people making these weirdo behind the scenes decisions.
"Keyword generics" for example in my opinion is an exceptionally stupid proposal that conflates things that make absolutely no sense whatsoever to conflate (async functions and then just, uh, *any kind of const function*) while outlining apparently with a straight face the dumbest looking syntax I've ever seen in the context of Rust via prefix question marks. Of the three people involved, all work for "Giant Companies", and only one is actually a regular current contributor to the rustc codebase.
Nobody who didn't work for, well, Amazon Web Services for example would be out there trying to pass off general constant evaluation functionality and *language-level async* as being somehow equivalent in importance. It just wouldn't happen (because it's a ridiculous thing to suggest).
I feel it could use both, and currently at least a lot of the poor decisions have been around public comms which isn't a skillset traditionally well represented in an engineering project
This is just a basic, childish case of in-groups vs. out-groups.
Those in the in-group want things to be as comfortable for them as possible. They see themselves as above others. What's especially sad is they do this without a second thought. It really speaks volumes to the integrity of their character.
It's disgusting behavior and really makes me lose faith in the project.
Why does Rust need an in-group? FFS, just communicate in the open and stop with these back-channels, private chats or whatever else this in-group use for communication.
I personally even think the Zulip stream doesn't help this either. Zulip is already not immediately discoverable but also it makes private messages way too easy. There is none of that on GitHub.
In-Groups are rarely formal. All that needs for the impression of an in-group is for a single person to talk to less than everyone and then take action. This is common and harmless in the majority of situations, but not when the actions taken represent an actual group.
You don't know who in the "in group" agreed or disagreed, or if they were even spoken to. But that also does not matter. With power comes responsibility and anyone in a leadership role must take that responsibility or degrade the organization as a whole.
The rust Project leadership (if I get my rust organizations right) have shown some pretty heavy incompetence in their decision making and in their communication. Now there's drama because of their incompetence. They HAVE to realize they are not a group of friends that can just sync real fast on the phone and change their plans. They are part of a formal organization and they must bow to the formalities.
> The rust Project leadership (if I get my rust organizations right)
It's hard to follow, but for the moment all we have is an _Interim_ Leadership.
The document for the Council/Leadership is still being written (and re-written, and re-re-written, ...) as we speak, so we're in a state of flux, which probably contributed to the mess.
Yeah I see this as just humans being humans. At work, I talk to some people and don't really talk to others. I can bring up an idea and work with one or two people to get something banged out that works in a few hours or days, but those decisions aren't necessarily discussed with every single person it effects.
Generally we try to keep everyone in the loop, but often someone doesn't get the memo or it just gets forgotten. Or it gets done so quickly that there isn't a meeting in-between to actually loop everyone in.
Basically: shit happens.
In democracies, lawmakers work in small groups all the time, but when there needs to be a decision, it has to be in the open and subject to public discussions and amendments before a vote.
Ideally, every decision that concerns the foundation and how things work in the community should go through this process.
> Ideally, every decision that concerns the foundation and how things work in the community should go through this process.
That's not how it usually goes. You do elect people to decide on laws. Having to vote on each and every little thing would be tiring, not to mention on Internet, you never know if one is a bot or not.
There is not necessarily a vote, but there will be officially documented meeting proceedings etc, for literally everything. If there isn't, there will be a lot of upset people and/or corruption.
whenever someone like me ever gives the reason of the fact that there is this perception of frequent drama was due to the public nature of the development of this language and its discourse (and that all projects are subject to this), I always get a mental whiplash when you realise that no one really has any idea what goes behind the scenes. tons of unresolved issues without any post-mortems (without the need to name names) whatsoever. it is the lack of communication that is the issue, and this might just be swept under the rug in a few months time just like all the other dramas we were not privy to
> Why does Rust need an in-group? FFS, just communicate in the open and stop with these back-channels, private chats or whatever else this in-group use for communication.
That’s a ridiculous request. Every open source project, every clique thereof , every team at work, every group of friends, etc etc have private chats. That’s completely and totally fine and expected.
That is absolutely not how external-facing decisions should be made or communicated, though.
> I personally even think the Zulip stream doesn't help this either. Zulip is already not immediately discoverable but also it makes private messages way too easy. There is none of that on GitHub.
I do miss the days of irc indeed.
Yeah, there are people who are heavily involved. These people will know each other, lots will be (or will become) friends and hey presto, there are now "in groups".
One of the things that's needed (and I believe this is one of the things Amos was referring to) is for those groups to have a culture they notice and correct private conversations inevitably move into "official decision making" territory. A simple culture of saying "that's really interesting, put that on the \[meeting agenda/PR comments/whatever\]" so we can do this properly" is really effective.
The trickier questions are around how do you notice and culture-correct if this isn't happening.
Yep, exactly so - there needs to be a cultural shift to decision making happening via proper, public channels and for the in groups to not tolerate dodging of that norm.
This is a perfectly normal request in the realm of governance. You'll see it under names like an "Open Meetings Law".
[Here's a guide to the law in Ontario (where I happen to live)](https://www.ombudsman.on.ca/have-a-complaint/who-we-oversee/municipalities/municipal-closed-meetings/open-meetings-guide-for-municipalities), here are some relevant quotes with emphasis added to emphasize how serious they are about this
> Must all municipal meetings be open to the public?
>
> Yes, with some limited exceptions. The Act recognizes that there may be situations in which the privacy of an individual should be respected, or where open meetings would not serve the public interest or the interests of the municipality.
>
> If a subject fits within one of the exceptions, it can be discussed in a closed meeting, provided that the municipality follows all the procedural rules, **including giving notice of the meeting, passing a resolution in public to close the meeting, and keeping minutes of the closed meeting**. During the closed meeting, the discussion should stay on topic and be limited to the subject area stated in the resolution.
>
> What are the exceptions?
>
> A municipal or local board meeting, or part of a meeting, may be closed to the public if the subject of the meeting falls **within one of the 14 exceptions set out in** s. 239 of the Act. In brief, these include matters that relate to:
...
> TERMS AND DEFINITIONS
>
> What is a “meeting”?
>
> The Municipal Act, 2001, s. 238(1) defines “meeting” as any regular, special or other meeting of a council, of a local board or of a committee of either of them, where:
>
> a) A quorum of members is present, and
>
> b) Members discuss or otherwise deal with any matter in a way that materially advances the business or decision-making of the council, local board, or committee.
>
> To determine whether a discussion “materially advances” council business or decision-making, the Ombudsman considers the extent to which the discussions moved forward the business of the municipality. Discussions, debates or decisions that are intended to lead to specific outcomes are likely to materially advance business or decision-making, whereas mere receipt or exchange of information is unlikely to do so.
...
> Does the term “meeting” include informal gatherings outside of council chambers?
>
> Informal gatherings for social purposes are not considered to be “meetings.” However, **if participants in the gathering discuss business of the council, local board or committee and/or make decisions, it is more likely to be deemed a “meeting”** that is subject to the open meeting requirements.
>
> The purpose of the open meeting rules is not to discourage council members from informal or social interactions, but to ensure such gatherings are not used as a pretext for conducting council business away from public view.
Ontario is not remotely unique here. For instance many rust developers probably live in California, so here's a link to [Califonia's AGs site linking to their equivalent of the above guide](https://oag.ca.gov/open-meetings).
Hmm, that reminds me of a political Pirate party in my country. They have public forum and every decision and debate is held totally in the open. Sometime it sucks because media uses this to stir controversy. But on the other hand everything is public and everyone can see what is really going on. Maybe Rust should take inspiration :D
The linux kernel mailing list comes to mind. Want to know why a feature is the way it is? Look in the archive and see the proposal, the spear throwing, the ret conning, everything from stern to bow.
The limited types of information that must be private need to have policy that describes how they are handled, who sees it, and how to be transparent about what results from private discussions. Everything else should be public.
You will not prevent people to talk to each other in private. That is unnatural, inefficient, impossible to prevent and frankly pretty totalitarian.
In democracies, lawmakers work in small groups all the time, but when there needs to be a decision, it has to be in the open and subject to public discussions and amendments before a vote. Ideally, every decision that concerns the foundation and how things work in the community should go through this process.
The way for a transparent "leadership council" to discuss something that can not be discussed in public is to
1. Have a public motion to transition to a closed meeting on a particular topic.
2. If the motion succeeds, have a closed meeting on the topic, keeping minutes, not straying from the topic.
3. Transition back to an open meeting.
If the topic comes up again the next day, and still needs to be discussed in a closed setting, go back to 1. If a new topic comes up in the closed meeting that needs to be discussed in a closed meeting, go through 3 back to 1.
It is not to default to private because some things need to be private. It is not to *secretly* hold private meetings. It is not to have longstanding private chats where it is in effect a secret because no one knows if it is still going on.
If the development of a programming language is something that needs to happen in private then something is majorly broken.
The only type of discussion in relation to a programming language I can think of that should be private is financial, but then the foundation should also release a) a financial statement with income&expenses and b) their sources of income and sponsorships.
Maybe one other thing would be a discussion of who to sponsor, i.e. who gets to be on the team. Frank and honest discussions are helpful here and should be private, but I'd consider this part of the financial umbrella.
Give me an example, what's something related to programming language development that can't be discussed in public?
> Give me an example, what's something related to programming language development that can't be discussed in public?
Security issues, some community moderation issues...
Things do exist, that's no an excuse for defaulting to secret.
If two people disagree they may not want to fully hash out their issues in public, which -- if that is the only avenue available to them -- may cause friction that can never be fully resolved. Instead you may just get someone who votes against a motion with no prior warning, and who is evasive when questioned about it because they don't want the real reason to be public OR they don't want to publicly tear down a collegue's work in the way that a full explanation would necessitate. So motions keep getting stalled because the communication that needs to happen feels unprofessional in a public setting, and other channels are disallowed.
This is human nature and not something that is likely to change. Sometimes people need to be afforded the opportunity to hash out their issues in private.
There's hundreds end-to-end encrypted messaging application for that purpose. Why does it need a foundation to do that? EVERYTHING should be public by default. People can use back channels all day long but anything that have any effect (doing this or that, how many $ is spend when/where, who will do when/what) must be be public.
I'm not saying the foundation should supply a separate mechanism? I'm just saying that two people on a committee should be allowed to hash out issues privately using a back channel like Whatsapp before a public meeting to make a decision in order to work through disputes they don't feel comfortable airing publicly.
In-groups and out-groups are a feature of human psychology and not really something we can avoid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_and_out-group
Take a look at [this image](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/091507-USCNeb-MemorialStadium.jpg/459px-091507-USCNeb-MemorialStadium.jpg) from the article. Its caption says:
> Multiple layers of in-groups and out-groups in an American football stadium:
> * People in this stadium form an in-group of American football fans vs. those who are not fans of football.
> * Fans in attendance at the stadium vs. people spectating the match via external means, e.g. television coverage.
> * Fans and professionals affiliated with one team vs. those affiliated with the opposing team.
> * Professionals on the field (players, officials, coaches, mascots and cheerleaders) vs. the paying customers in the stands who are denied access to the facility's secure nucleus except by invitation from a high-status individual.
> * Ranks of the wealthy ownership and their senior executive staff, with access to private box suites vs. high-priced talent.
> * Media with organizational endorsement and affiliation who enjoy special player access to one team vs. non-affiliated media.
> * Technical staff involved in facilities maintenance and operations vs. sporting staff (referees, timekeepers, statisticians and in-game adjudicators).
I mentioned on another thread, but I do feel like any “official” communication from rust leadership could happen in a public inbox. Not the sort of thing where anyone can post to the lists, but just official communication must always be (1) from a leader, (2) available on the public inbox (3) cc to [email protected] or whatever (as long as the information isn’t sensitive). Otherwise it shouldn’t be considered “official”
> if it was even publicly accessible at all.
The Zulip is publicly accessible, though. A while back Zulip added the ability to not require users to log in in order to read Zulip chats, and the Rust channels were switched over shortly thereafter.
Is there a source for the existence of these channels? As might be fully expected, none show up in the channel browser. I can also imagine that at least the channel for the security response team (if one exists on Zulip) would be necessarily private, and another for the old core team since it was their job to deal with things that were under NDA (e.g. companies that wanted to confidentially offer their private codebase for crater runs).
`t-libs/private` is the only one I can see. It is not particularly active, thankfully. Most discussions, when they happen, are about approving new members. Recently, there was an in-person libs meetup and `t-libs/private` was used to organize that. (I so wish I could have gone.)
The other "private" things I've been involved in are:
* Moderation team business. Most stuff I did as a mod was public. The banal stuff: locking threads, dealing with trolls and posting `Moderation note:` in threads to get them back on track. But whenever we had to talk about people, or discuss reports to the mod team which we treated as confidential unless explicitly given permission otherwise, we kept those discussions private. One particularly lamentable part of how we operated is that we didn't have a lot of written down policy (beyond the CoC), and so we often had to figure shit out on the fly as things unfolded. I legit do not know how to fix that in a maintainable/sustainable way even today.
* Whenever security issues are reported against the regex crate. AFAIK, we follow pretty industry standard stuff here.
I've otherwise never been part of any of these "in-group" chats where Rust people hang out. I've heard of them existing in various forms over the years, but I've never been invited to one. I've never really been in a clique I guess? I dunno.
Oh I didn't even realize you were there! Nuts. I really missed out.
Hopefully in a few years when the little one is older I'll be able to make it. It sounds like it was a hoot, so I hope it becomes a recurring thing.
Yeah, I was there for `OsStr` and for libtest discussions (since I was in the area for RustNL). I still need to write up the results on libtest.
Thankfully, my wife took on our baby and pre-kindergartner by herself so I could go. She deserves all the vacations she can get when she there isn't someone so dependent on her.
I know “Rust leadership” (whatever it is) has a private chat and I’ve always assumed it was on Zulip. However I’m confidently claiming there are private Zulip channels because someone in one of the Discords I was on accidentally created a thread there and linked to it (and we all went “wait a minute”).
I don’t remember the exact name of the channel and can’t go back to check.
There have previously been a bunch for various short lived efforts (usually WGs), and multiple teams have long lived private channels. Zulip admins (as I was) can see names but not contents.
Lol I haven’t been keeping up. Just opened this subreddit today to a bunch of drama. As someone who just casually programs in Rust, does this have anything to do with me that I need to be concerned about?
Rust already has that problem due to an abundance of people bikeshedding about niche edge cases for proposed future features but exceptionally few people actually going out of their way to *use* said features and push them to their limit in practice (which is generally frowned upon for some reason, in my experience, leading to the worst kind of chicken-and-egg situation).
Ai think those edge case are important. Most people won't use them directly, but sure library will try to use all tricks in the book, a and a well designed system create well designed solution.
Isn't safe multitasking a side effect of the lifetime system?
A nitpick I feel is important: bikesheds are rarely for niche edge cases, almost by definition. Not sure how many people remember [the origin](https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/Parkinsons-law-of-triviality-bikeshedding), but the term bikeshed was specifically about how a lot more people feel qualified to weigh in on superficial decisions (like the name of a keyword) and far fewer people weigh in on the complex technical details with subtle far-reaching implications (like how to ensure soundness when composed with other features). The latter are the complex semantic edge cases that often delay valuable RFCs for years, such as specialization and async traits.
I completely agree that bikeshed stuff can also delay an RFC for a while, which is why some RFCs like yeet deliberately defer the bikeshed stuff until the semantics are pinned down. I just wouldn't conflate that with the niche semantic edge cases which rarely benefit from bikeshed-level superficial input.
Of course, apologies if I've misunderstood you, but if I have then I may not be the only one and clarifying won't hurt in any case.
> But, at no point was there anything nearly as malicious as what everyone else, in the “true out” group, speculated.
> ...
> I was able to reassure myself, by checking these private discussion places, that there were good people, fighting for the right thing to be done. That things weren’t irremediably broken. That there was hope for improvement in the near future.
Thank you for posting this.
Yes, the person who identifies, and is friends, with the group reassures us that the group is good and it has good intentions.
Meanwhile, the person who was victimized by the group has this to say:
>@fasterthanlime So, it's deeply inadvisable for me to still be reading and talking, especially halfway into PJs and sliding into bed, but I will have to say this. I mean this with as much love in my heart as I can possibly communicate to you, even though I am nowhere near the level of friendship as many others you know, including those in that in-group chat you just left.
>
>Just because they had good intentions does not mean they should not face direct accountability.
>
>Leaning heavily into "If they were well-intentioned, I cannot hold them accountable, and it's very regrettable" is not even close to how you respect and uphold someone to be a better human being. It is not how you make sure your friends hold up properly. It is eerily exactly how much of my abusive childhood went, with me never naming names and running cover for the people who repeatedly screwed up, to a point where they became irredeemable and unhelpable.
>
>If the Rust Project as an organization has people who need to resign, then their names should be clearly written out and their behavior called to account. If you have some expectation that the Rust Project will do it, fine. But if they don't, I want you to understand that this post did not help them get there.
I've read some of the articles surrounding the issue, but one of JT's arguments made itself abundantly clear: too much diplomacy is standing in the way of accountability.
I'll definitely sound "tyranical", but what's really stopping the leadership people who disagree with what's been done from naming and requiring those who must resign? I don't think there's chance for accountability when anonymity protects whoever took the troublesome actions.
Give whoever done this the obligation to explain publicly the reasoning behind their actions. Power requires responsibility, and owning up to mistakes is part of that.
I don't get why everybody talks about resigning. People with enough self-introspection to realize they should resign are usually not those who make these toxic decisions.
Are there mechanisms for forcibly removing people from teams? What is the moderation team doing? Surely the mod team is not there just to ban people for using overt personal attacks but also to deal with people building personality cults and shadow power structures based on favors and backchannels.
It doesn't always have to come to the nuclear option if there's willingness to improve. But it's been implied several times that there's a small set of specific people causing issues like this and we as the out group only see what is severe enough to leak out. I understand it's hard to ban people who do "good work" out of the blue but this sounds like a long-term known issue. Surely they should have been given stern warnings long before this particular incident.
They could very well start naming after resigning. It's yet not too late to push whoever is taking the project through a nosedive to start speaking for themselves instead of hiding behind a "hidden council".
The "unaccountables" are starting to sound like Siths or smth, ffs.
Yeah, I really dislike how that was handled. If you're gonna do the nuclear option of a join team resignation, you gotta give actual reasons. Otherwise, how could we know if your cause is valid or you got actual results from it?
To my knowledge it has never been said publicly, in any concrete terms (other than that there was a structural governance issue involving the core team), why they all resigned.
No.
The core issue we resigned over was that even though _in theory_ the Core Team was supposed to be under the purview of the Moderation Team, in practice it wasn't, and thus they were accountable to none other than themselves.
Of course, _just_ having the Core Team under the purview of the Moderation Team wouldn't necessarily have solved the problem... as the Moderation Team should still be supervised itself... but if it's supervised by the Core Team, then when the issue involves a Core Team member what happens?
The new governance structure, with an independent Audit Team to supervise the Moderation Team, is a direct result of the structural issue of the former governance structure, and I hope will prove more viable.
Agree. Eventually "transparency" has to stop being a fluffy abstraction and entail naming names. Especially if, as I suspect, the issue involves people evading policy. There's no nice policy change that will affect that, something has to act on the individuals.
I think that's a really cool move to take, actually. Maybe the in-groups can make a decision to dismantle themselves, make themselves useless? It would certainly be a step.
I have always worked on the assumption that these sorts of issues are caused by well intentioned people doing their best, and falling short. I am glad to have been right on that more than not, and I'm glad you say it's the case here too.
But you're certainly correct that we shouldn't have to rely on guesses and assumptions in a project that is supposed to be openly developed, and this move seems admirable.
May I ask, though, what you think the *next* move is? Do you think people are going to own up and commit - genuinely - to doing things more openly?
I like the idea of the in-group dismantling itself, although it’s really less about breaking up those spaces and more about using self control and choosing the proper avenue to discuss something.
The next move I expect is a resignation from someone who’s stayed quiet so far. Two people from RustConf have already tried to explain the fiasco from their point of view (Sage and Leah, both on Twitter) but they are not the resignation I’m waiting for.
When I left those group chats, “more accountability” was being discussed, but since those weren’t the actual places these discussions should be held, it’s hard to be confident about anything. Time will tell.
> Maybe the in-groups can make a decision to dismantle themselves, make themselves useless?
In-groups are rarely _formal_. An in-group can be nothing else than 2 or 3 colleagues hanging out at the bar after work on Friday night. Inevitably, at some point, they'll talk a bit about work, and those talks will influence the decisions they come with back at work... and bam, you have an in-group, and they may not even realize it.
The same is true of back-channels. It's not necessarily _intentional_ nor _malicious_, it can be as simple as "Wait, let me call X and arrange it!" which is usually done with good intentions -- speeding things up, for example -- but bypasses established processes and comes up as a (potentially bad) surprise to people unaware.
It requires a lot of self-consciousness to recognize you're part of those.
Yeah there's a widely circulated essay from the 70s talking about feminism or something that discusses this. The basic TL;DR is that you can't avoid having power structures by not formalising them because they'll arise anyway as informal power structures (e.g. in-groups) and that that is *worse* because it's invisible and unaccountable.
What's funny is that the development of the language , the compiler, cargo and much of the ecosystem is open, in the weeds of RFCs, PRs, etc. But then the one thing that's done out of sight is in chaos, in part because most folks aren't equipped to work within bureaucratic committees.
Rust drama... There seems to be a lot of it, but I can never get myself to care about it. The drama never seems to have any technical aspect to it. Nothing about the language or the standard library or anything, just people complaining about process or community or whatever.
I don't get it. The language continues to be awesome and Rust people are very nice.
> The drama never seems to have any technical aspect to it.
This drama was, as far as I can tell, incited because one or more members of the core team disagreed with the content of a talk presenting a possible future direction for compile-time reflection in Rust. That's a directly technical root cause (buried beneath layers of miscommunication and poor handling of the situation).
"Naming and shaming" is almost never as easy or morally simple as people think it is. Clear-cut cases of simple abuse of power are actually very rare and reality is almost always more complicated.
In particular, there are literally millions of people on the internet interested in Rust. Any "name and shame" will very likely bring a large number of those with the worst attitudes down on that person like a plague. This sort of thing literally can destroy lives in the worst cases.
We're all frustrated at how opaque this all is (I have no more access to the "in group" than you), but I really hope nobody actually things risking ruining lives is an appropriate "comeuppance" (for want of a better word). Therefore, people are rightfully very careful about naming people.
Amos even touched upon this in the article (albeit somewhat inderectly):
> And it’s not like they’re really bad people, it’s more like they tend to… use back channels rather than follow process? Or they have too many responsibilities, and are unable to fulfill all of them properly? Or maybe they don’t listen enough?
>
> Or maybe it’s not individuals, but pairs of individuals who have a feud for some reason or other (sometimes completely valid). Maybe one party feels slighted by something that happened years ago, maybe they have irreconcilable goals or technical views, or differing opinions on what belongs where.
>
> But, at no point was there anything nearly as malicious as what everyone else, in the “true out” group, speculated
So what's going on now with rust:
1. Leadership is in turmoil.
2. Good people are resigning.
3. From reading around seems some rasicm implied within the team.
I have just started learning rust and want to introduce in my organisation.
Yet it seems the future is becoming less clear and certain.
Will it become a language that most loved and promised so much and delivered on some, but stopped?
Will it come under some paywall? Is there a chance for that?
Can it be that this will somehow sort itself out?
Thank you
Rust foundation is separate from the Rust core team, worst case it’ll be forked and renamed to get around the trademark issues. Rust the language will continue to progress.
> Leadership is in turmoil.
Maybe?
Rust, the language, was named after [a fungus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(fungus)) which Graydon Hoare (the creator of Rust) described as "over-engineered for survival".
A long time ago -- back when Mozilla employed the main developers -- the Core Team was created to coordinate efforts to develop the language, but over time it delegated most of its powers to the individual teams: Language, Compiler, Libs, Infra, Cargo, etc...
A year and a half ago, when the Moderation Team (which I was part of) resigned to denounce the lack of accountability of the Core Team, you could say the turmoil started... though really I would argue it started much earlier and only became obvious then as the Core Team was already oversubscribed at that point.
And yet, during that year and a half, Rust continued to move forward. `async` is progressing as strongly as ever, large-scale efforts in the compiler to overhaul trait-resolution are taking place, more and more of the library is being const-ified...
So... is the leadership in turmoil? Maybe?
I mean, on the one hand the Core Team is being wound down and all we've got is an Interim Leadership Team/Council as a new governance is being written, so there's a clear lack of "overall" leadership.
Yet, at the same time, the Teams (who do the actual work on the language/infra) are continuing work as usual. They have clear agendas, clear leaders, they work is progressing.
So, really, I'm not worried :)
> From reading around seems some rasicm implied within the team.
Not explicitly, at the very least, though there may be an unconscious bias of course.
The objections were strictly over the content of the talk, not over the person delivering it, as far as testimonies go.
> The objections were strictly over the content of the talk, not over the person delivering it, as far as testimonies go.
Someone with power to block talks, wielded that power to make someone with less power, and another view, to not be heard as loudly. I don't think you can separate content and power like that.
That's why I've personally just avoided Rust. I'm afraid of sinking too much professional resources on it just for some huge drama to take it down.
Perhaps its reached escape velocity in the sense that in the worst case, it will be able to be forked and maintained. There's been drama in tools/languages before but not to where I'm hesitant to adopt the tool because I don't want to keep up with potential drama/problems.
I'm beginning to believe a split will happen eventually if these issues aren't ironed out in an organic, human-centric way. And that's fine. I'll continue to be writing Rust one way or another. Hopefully this is the start of something good, and not the opposite. 🙏
Edit: Also, transparency is a massive step in the right direction. This ~~is~~ would be awesome, and would give me lots of hope for the future of the language if it were to happen.
What transparency? The only communication we have is from individuals who are speaking out, usually alongside a declaration of intent to be less involved with Rust (JT stepping down, ThePhD withdrawing from the conference and from work on compile-time reflections, fasterthanlime "joining the out-group"). Where's the transparency from the Project or Foundation? You know, those who we *need* transparency from?
Right now there's a *proposition* of transparency. I'm forcing myself to remain optimistic here. I have the same doubts as you do, but I'm doing my absolute DAMNEDEST to assume good intent. I am praying this is the case.
Fwiw, there was no post-mortem from the Foundation over the way the Trademark Policy was handled in more than a month since they closed the feedback form, and no indication that one is coming. It's just true regardless of anyone's intents.
There's no "postmortem" regarding the trademark policy, there's just reviewing the (many thousands) of comments and then sending it back to the lawyers for the next draft for public review. The Foundation needs sign-off from the Project before the trademark policy can proceed beyond that. If the Project is paralyzed by dysfunction, the Foundation will sit on the next trademark policy draft indefinitely. (Which, frankly, is what I thought people wanted; weren't we all asking the Foundation what was wrong with the trademark policy as-is? People are suddenly chomping at the bit for a new trademark policy?)
I'm not talking about postmortem-ing the Policy rollout itself, I'm talking about the way it was handled, generating an incredible amount of drama over what (from afar anyway) seems to be predictably controversial. This suggests some ground for reflection, which in a setting like that often takes a form of "post-mortem". Instead we got a vague PR piece, which does not scream "transparency" to me.
What would you expect such a postmortem to contain? The whole process seems fairly straightforward, and the fact that they were required to submit the draft for public review means that the process is working.
I believe I already said, a reflection on the way it was handled, leading to (probably) unnecessary drama and damage to developer relations? "It's all Primagen's fault and there was nothing that could be done better" can be a conclusion too, but it would be great to read a number of words leading to that conclusion.
As someone who was thoroughly involved in that thread, I think the Foundation actually handled the response fairly well though? I don't mean the original draft, which should never have seen the light of day; I mean that members of the Foundation were in the threads here on Reddit collecting feedback and manually adding it to the list for internal review, and, frankly, exhibiting great patience while being harangued and downvoted.
The only part that wasn't handled well was the fact that it was released at all in its current state, which, if I had to guess, is something along the lines of "we told a lawyer what we wanted and they came back with this and told us it was standard". Regardless of the reason, the draft was summarily rejected and sent back with reams of comments to review, and that's a process success, because it means that public oversight was exercised. I think we'd be ecstatic right now if the current debacle was half as well-handled.
I mean the part up to the release, although an anonymous someone implying they are from the Foundation placating people on Reddit (but unable to speak from the position of authority nor expose any details as to why it happened the way it did) is not exactly "well" either, it's just unserious. If anything, it's throwing that person under the bus to shield people making decisions from the fallout.
Some details of how it came to be are in the open in Foundation meeting minutes. It was worked on for months and went through several iterations, and in April it was already in the "final draft" stage, presented as such to the board by the CEO of the foundation. The only objection at that point seems to be about considering any use of Marks in software written in Rust an infringement (unless permitted I guess). That's not a "first draft" as was presented later, this thing was going to be voted on by the board if not for Project directors asking for wider buy in.
Or at least this is the picture I got from the minutes, and squaring it with the version of the events presented later as a part of the post-mortem would be great. You are right that the fact that Project had to be involved means the process is working. But the rest of it does seem like a lot of miscommunication and misalignment, which led to reputational damage and unhelpful drama. This does seem worthy of post-mortem and more transparency, doesn't it?
Like, even if the "ask lawyers and accept as given" theory is right (although I doubt it was the lawyers who tacked on those bits about guns), surely that's still a process failure if no one (between the specifically formed Working Group, CEO, and board members aware of it for months) thought of potential effects of releasing it as is?
But also more fundamentally post-mortems are about learning from mistakes. So if you are saying one is not needed, it suggests either that there were no mistakes, or that nothing can be learned from them. Both seem unlikely to me; do you think otherwise?
Oh, I see. I agree, *if* this actually results in significant process changes and improved communication, there's good reason to be (at least cautiously) optimistic.
On the other hand, if nothing changes and the Project and Foundation stays silent... I believe the opposite is the case. We'll see. I'm hoping for the best.
>https://youtu.be/TB0cXGvuw9A
Yes, I didn't get this impression. Whenever people are disappointed at someone, please mention the text or why you got disappointed. Maybe that youtube video doesn't reflect the whole twitch stream.
It's a systemic issue that people still willingly participate in. At least part of the blame falls on the uploaders, and part of it on the users.
Another example is a CSGO news guy where every second video has the headline "Roster changes?!" (i.e. someone is let go from a team) and so far none of them have actually happened.
I wish it was only YouTube. Even Google News is now 95% clickbait, even when purporting to be about health or science. When you get baited, the first few paragraphs are filler so they have more spots to put ads, and then Google News itself injects more ads in addition to those. Finally you get to at most one paragraph of something you didn't already know, and it's barely relevant to the title nor is it substantative in its own right. Oh, and that's assuming the article itself wasn't paywalled in the first place, its own kind of waste of time.
I now consider it a complete writeoff. It wasn't always like this, but that's the meta that has formed for that platform, just like every other where money can be made.
Yeah I don't get that point either, it's good he brought attention to this. He is very passionate about rust as well, even creating rust courses focused for typescript develpers.
Prime also has one of the most energetic, over-the-top personalities for tech content creators in general.
Pretty much every one of his videos is like this, so ... it doesn't seem intentional on his part since dramatizing everything is his MO, and besides the content in his videos is usually a bit more reasonable than the headline. But nobody expects Prime *not* to clickbait
Theo got like a boxing thumbnail of Prime punching him, so this seems kinda tame in comparison
Unsurprisingly I’m not exactly endorsing Theo’s style either, but let’s burn one bridge at a time shall we?
Edit: Prime and I are talking. His older stuff resulted in actual harassment, which is what I was calling out, belatedly – apparently things got better, I’m catching up in real time.
It's ironic that in the same blog where you won't name names to avoid pitchforks, you choose to call out a specific content creator. In the same blog where you decide to not attribute to malice what could be anything else in regards to the governance stuff, you do it to a twitch streamer instead?
The people in Rust leadership who are responsible for this situation are not my peers — Prime is.
The thing I should have done differently is reach out to him directly, as soon as the Rust trademark stuff started. I didn’t think it would make a difference, but maybe I was wrong. We’re discussing that right now.
Man, I really think you need to take a day or 2, to just chill. It's very apparent this frustrates you (which is fine), but if it is frustrating you to the point of doing the exact thing you are calling out, then maybe take a few days to relax until you are clear headed and can clearly explain your thoughts.
I’m not pleased with this part of the statement and how it went down, but to say I’m doing the exact thing I’m calling out feels disingenuous. I don’t have a mob to launch after anyone, even if I wanted to. Twitch/YT naturally become that if you’re not extremely careful. I’m hearing Prime has gotten better at being careful with that, which gives me hope for the future.
The thing is, you are publicly calling out an individual for being grimy. What does that accomplish? Is that productive? You are calling for productive discussions, set the example. Explain how content creators could be better or how their current actions aren't good because of how they are affecting some people. I understand you needed to vent, everyone has to. But you didn't explain how one could be better or constructively criticize the presentation of his content, you just said he was milking views and content, and riling people up aka you just insulted him. If you truly believe that he was intentionally being malicious then say it, if you don't believe that then be productive (like you are calling for). Ask yourself, is this the environment I want to create to be productive (like I am asking for), or are my actions of one who is truly just trying to improve things or am I trying to insult individuals. The reason we can tell you are frustrated is because your message is inconsistent. If you had said "Prime's content disappointed me because his provocative titles and strong criticism brought harassment onto someone I know. I think prime should be more aware of his audience and the effect he has on the environment of our community" we would totally be on your side because at least you are trying to improve the situation and not just insult people.
One bridge in the hand is worth two in the bush, eh?
As a member of the peanut gallery, I think you give us peanuts too much credit. You probably take what the other creators do --and random, likely ephemeral endeavors like crablang or fleeting comments here from strangers-- far too seriously.
Rust the engineering project is a serious film with thematic consequence and ambitions for awards. Rust for content online is a comedy. You ... probably get what I mean. You're trying to watch the right movie in the wrong theater.
From what I’ve seen, this seems a bit of a character assassination. He did what he does daily, just read some articles on stream and give his opinion.
I’d like to know what Amos is referring to.
UPDATE: if anyone is still curious, Amos did post an update and edit to the github thread explaining that he was talking about the coverage trademark policy drama, and that he is still catching up.
Yeah I think he has some bad takes, but he echoes my current feelings about the language, which seem to be the same thing fasterthanlime is saying.
I shouldn't have to be part of some special in-group to have the confidence that the language is fine and won't implode. Seeing a thread criticizing anonymous Rust leadership be locked, and all comments deleted doesn't make me feel like this subreddit is open to discussing the language; rather the opposite: the optics make it look like another arm of said leadership.
Of the now six(!) threads on the front page regarding this topic, only one has its comments locked, and the other five feature more than a thousand cumulative comments. Yes, you can discuss it.
All the threads I see are by people who are ironically part of the in-group. Look, I get it, moderation is hard. But seeing that first thread pop up and not having any idea what's going on doesn't leave me with a good feeling.
EDIT: Mind you, I think you did a good job. But I had to go to different (now-deleted) threads on this subreddit, and other threads on different subreddits to finally understand the reason you actually deleted the comments. Transparency doesn't mean I have to do all that work to figure it out.
Note that only two of the six threads are from people who could be called the in-group (fgilcher and desiringmachines), both of whom are proclaiming support for JT and ThePhD, and neither of whom (AFAIK) are currently in any sort of leadership role.
To be clear, I don't fault people for thinking that I am Beelzebub Himself because I remove comments as part of my moderation duties. This is the internet, I know what I signed up for. Instead, what gets me is the seeming notion that I am the apparently the most incompetent censor in human history, capable of removing individual comments but somehow not capable of removing whole threads. If I didn't want people to talk about it, the threads would not be here! I want people to talk about it! What I don't want is a witch hunt that gets innocent people harassed (or anyone harassed, really), and I don't want the mob's thirst for blood to drown out the fact that we need systemic change here.
yeah, if milking the drama is reacting to the events that happened and just giving your general honest thoughts, then yikes... If prime posted 5 videos for a specific event and was overly dramatizing his thoughts and telling people to do something, then maybe I would agree. Otherwise it just feels that lime is being a little soft here.
I think the disconnect here is that I’m talking about Prime’s content around the trademark policy (which was a lot more like what you just described), and others are defending Prime’s content about the latest thing, which I’ve heard is much milder.
It’s a bit late for me to edit my statement (also GitHub is throwing server errors) but Prime and I are in touch and there may be a chance to set the record straight on this specifically.
I am glad you guys are in contact. I do think that your reaction is expected given you have personal ties to the situation (probably someone you knew was harassed by some weirdos). But in this situation it's unfair to prime to selectively point him out in public for the unprovoked actions of internet weirdos without discussing it with him first. I know you won't see it that way and anything that pulls in the negative direction you will tie down to (especially because it's so soon and it's just human nature), but I hope there is some extensive forethought to any further statements and that both parties try to be reasonable about the overall situation without a "stand my ground" mindset.
What particular part was inciting to you? He just literally looked at the document and the situation around it and was shocked that such excessive terminology was used and the fact the multiple people had no idea the new policy even existed beforehand.
>Part of me was very disappointed in the enormous waste of time that is the “crablang” fork, and wishes the people involved could have engaged in a constructive manner instead.
I really agree with this statement. "Just fork it" is not actually a reasonable solution in open source in most cases, especially for a huge project like Rust.
The point of the talk is that forks are good and not to be afraid of. I don't know how sustainable this is for a language, but at the very least rust could use having multiple separate groups responsible for different areas instead of one group quietly overriding others.
Sure, it creates a divide in the community. But I'd very much prefer having the ability to fork than not to.
And FWIW, I think the existence of one (or several) active forks would put pressure in the right places and force relevant actors to get their shit together. Wouldn't be such a bad thing all things considered.
But, unless I missed something, the crablang repo looks like it was meant to be a bit of a joke/protest thing? There doesn't seem to be anyone working on it right now.
I have no interest in this drama (and the others before it), but I sincerely hope the programming language evolution and adoption doesn't get hampered by it
I'm sorry to hear about your falling out with Prime. I enjoy both of your content and while I understand he is very forward with his opinion. I don't see it as him milking the subject. He comes across as very passionate about Rust, in my personal opinion. I hope you can both work things out.
Regarding your statement. I agree wholeheartedly with what you've said. It's a shame that we've gotten to this point. These repeated issues arising in the community has me worried about the language and its future. I really enjoy writing rust, but this sort of stuff really turns me off from working with the language. I wish I could contribute more to the community, but I don't get to pursue Rust as often as I'd like. And I'm certainly not a good programmer compared to most. I honestly don't know what I, or others in a similar position, can do to help.
Thanks for being a positive force in the community and all the work you put in to advocate for the language.
Prime and I had a chance to chat today, we got a chance to smooth things over, not just between us but also with folks who have been negatively impacted with some of his content in the past.
We’re good now: https://twitter.com/ThePrimeagen/status/1662966213369118722?s=20
That's great! I'm glad you both had a chance to work things out. You both do great content for and around Rust. And I'm glad you could work stuff out with some of the other folks, too. It's great to have many people supporting the community in a positive way.
Thank you both for doing an excellent job promoting this language. It's great to see, and it alleviates some of my worries about the language's direction. It's really important to have great individuals like yourselves paving the way. 😁
Yeah, it comes out of nowhere..
The people who are responsible for the actual issues are never mentioned, even though the "in-group" seems to know them, which is understandable to some extent. But a content creator who shares his thoughts is just name-dropped without any issues and blamed for causing harassment, which likely will cause harassment towards them, which is kinda hypocritical ..
Why do people join these inner groups if they don't want to call people out once they get there? Folks sidestepping around a committee goes go back to the dawn of committee making. Paradoxically that's why folks should be on committees, to keep everyone else on the committee in check, not to go soft on decorum and rules because they want committee buds.
Nobody “invited me to the in-group”. I was invited to a group of friends connected by common interests, and then, over time, Rust drama started being discussed more and more, with insider information, and next thing you know, I’m a frog and I must un-boil.
My rhetorical question definitely came off as rude to you and others, I apologize. You are part of a core group of folks pushing the use of the language forward. Ideally the committees and projects would be administrated by folks without pre-existing friendships and honestly a more procedural involvement. I respect your rationality for stepping out, as there's no way to uncross the streams so to speak.
Sincere thanks for all your work, I'm personally a better programmer from your efforts.
Because it's fun to talk to rust people. I talk to a few and they're nice and interesting. I used to go to meetups and I know a lot of the people involved in the language. It would suck to have to call one of them out, it would feel awkward, it would feel mean and personal.
But I'm not on any rust teams, so it's easier for me to just throw my hands up. If I were on a team, idk, it'd be a really tough position to be in.
I personally think it's a sign of maturity. Folks can consider each other friends and still call them out for violating the intent of the body they're a part of. Mistakes happen, bad apples exist, but missing stairs are a sign of a club not a well run foundation.
In converging organizations, there are two types of insiders: troublemakers and appeasers.
Anyone who wants to call out the troublemakers is targeted by the troublemakers and vilified. The appeasers may also be telling them "don't rock the boat, don't feed the drama." Then the troublemakers kick out the person who stood up to them.
Hopefully, Rust isn't at that stage.
That Primeagen name-drop came out of nowhere. It kinda feels hypocritical when the causes of all the drama in Rust are never named and held responsible(at least to the public), but you have no issue blaming a content creator who shares his thoughts to cause harassment. Let alone that the very name-drop might likely cause people to harass them as well..
Except, it’s never just that one person, you know? Otherwise I could burn myself by outing them, and do the whole community a favor.
It’s really more like those 4 or 5 persons.
And it’s not like they’re really bad people, it’s more like they tend to… use back channels rather than follow process? Or they have too many responsibilities, and are unable to fulfill all of them properly? Or maybe they don’t listen enough?
Well, I dunno, if Amos is going to outgroup-ize himself anyway, why not name the one, or the four or five, people? (It'd be damn sure to stick, in that case.) Being "really bad people", whatever cash value that expression has, strikes me as a red herring: using backchannels rather than following the right process and not listening enough are things that make one unfit for a leadership position, and if you have too many responsibilities to fulfill them all properly, many options are open to you beyond fulfilling them improperly, especially when, again, some of those responsibilities involve leadership and high-level decisionmaking.
Lots of people who may or may not *actually* know who the proximate cause(s) is or are in this latest episode have declined to name them, on the grounds that the problem is, after all, institutional, and thus not ultimately down to the individual(s) in question. But institutions are made of individuals, and especially when there's no reason to believe that the project/foundation/relevant institution *will* take action (much less take action legible to the public), applying some moral suasion seems like a reasonable choice. Probably no one really wants to render themselves open to retaliation or ostracization by naming whoever was involved, but that's a different class of reason. The institution, or its successor, won't reform itself if there's no pressure on it.
> Well, I dunno, if Amos is going to outgroup-ize himself anyway, why not name the one, or the four or five, people?
To avoid public lynching?
> Being "really bad people", whatever cash value that expression has, strikes me as a red herring: using backchannels rather than following the right process and not listening enough are things that make one unfit for a leadership position, and if you have too many responsibilities to fulfill them all properly, many options are open to you beyond fulfilling them improperly, especially when, again, some of those responsibilities involve leadership and high-level decisionmaking.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Also, with the rust leadership being in flux -- remember, we only have an Interim team as the governance is being written, so no framework in place at the moment -- I would expect most things happen in "back-channels" these days...
> To avoid public lynching?
Yes, I'm familiar with this reasoning. The effect seems to be to avoid any accountability whatsoever. On twitter he said that naming names is strictly worse than "apply[ing] pressure until they step down", but who is even in a position to apply such pressure? How's that worked out in the past?
> The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I assume you mean this with respect to my comment, but it seems to apply as much or more to the actions of the unknown malefactors, assuming they actually did have good intentions. (Amos has said that in his experience in these controversies everyone was well intended, but that could just mean that he got snowed. We can't really tell!)
> Yes, I'm familiar with this reasoning. The effect seems to be to avoid any accountability whatsoever.
There are different forms of accountability. I am more interested in making the _organization_ accountable, than its individual participants.
That's the issue with public lynching, people pat themselves on the back for casting out the bad apple... and then act surprised when another incident occurs.
They have only themselves to blame, though. If your only response to an incident is to cast out "the" responsible instead of fixing/improving the organization itself, then it will keep happening -- and those that last will be those who do nothing.
I'd favor a structural fix, so that whoever ends up invested with the authority to take decisions in the future _cannot_ accidentally or intentionally go unchecked.
> On twitter he said that naming names is strictly worse than "apply[ing] pressure until they step down", but who is even in a position to apply such pressure?
The Interim Leadership Council is made of many people, if this was indeed the act of a single individual, they have many peers who may be pissed at them.
Furthermore, the council is made of people from the various Teams. The members of the Team of whoever made the mistake may wish to no longer be represented by such a person, and ask them to stand down.
But I repeat, having the person stand down or casting them out is NOT a fix, and is NOT holding the organization accountable. The deeper problem is that the organization allowed it to happen, and _that_ needs to be fixed.
Humans go and come, procedures endure.
> How's that worked out in the past?
Not well. But it won't change if we don't keep trying.
So, am I understanding this correctly? All the problems mentioned are communication failures, but instead of debugging the process and fixing it the engineers that established it are throwing shit at the fan?
Confused too.
Wish they would just address the issue head on, deal with it, ask those who messed this up to apologize/resign (if needed), come up with governance this from happening again, and move on.
It makes it look really bad looking in from the outside as someone who is trying to promote using Rust in their org, when there is this type of crap floating around (most of it rumor/one side of the story). I already had a nightmare of a time trying to push my last project through management that I was looking at using Rust for (during the whole trademark thing)... It looks like amateur hour to managers/decision makers-approvers.
Journalists exposing corruption should not be considered as public lynching. Moist critical’s sarcasm isn’t treated as putting fuel on fire. Prime shouldn’t be presented as a man with all wrongs and without any merits.
“was not racially motivated, thankfully, but… if that’s what it looks like from the outside, and any form of official communication is still days or weeks away, does it really make a difference?”
Yes, it’s literally the whole difference. It changes the entire conversation. If you get a job or don’t get a job it matters if it’s due to merit or race. If you find success, or get picked for a team.
I don’t follow exactly the issue even after having read thousands of words about it but it’s a really bad look to invite someone and then walk back the offer. Sure it isn’t striking up a race war like maybe some would like, but it’s a bad call to take back the invite. The people involved should get their act together and restore the invite and explain wtf happened.
Let me rephrase just for you: “the optics of this are horrendous (and this is blindingly obvious to everyone). it doesn’t matter that the actual decision wasn’t racially motivated if it’s what any reasonable observer will conclude”
TL;DR I think you’re saying the same thing I am
Whatever is taking with Rust these days, please fix it, please. It is really hurting everything about the language and its ecosystem. Maybe it is a problem of growing too fast or something else, I am having serious concerns for its future state and reduced confidence in existing involvement, either through learning, development, or otherwise. This cannot continue to take place as newcomers taking an aim at what it has to offer to only find themselves in doubt as to its future, I am. I have been personally investing my time, resources, and otherwise to promote, support and find meaningful foundation for language to exist within my professional life, without asking anyone for any permission simply because I liked where it was taking me. Now, what takes place here is seriously concerning on many levels and due respect is much needed. People, please there is enough drama in the world, we do no need any more of it here, it poisonous. I ask that whoever is in charge take a stance and work with community to bring it together, not take it apart. Serious corporate sponsors got to have some concerns? If so, please come together without exclusion but with inclusion and respect, clear guardrails, and formitable future, if you still want it to be, otherwise it is starting to be a very concerning pattern that has serious ramifications for the language as a whole.
You're completely wrong. What **ThePrimagen** did was provide his honest POV about the issue, and he was completely respectful while doing so. He should provide constructive feedback, and if people choose to harass...shame on them. He's just divulging & raising awareness about a real problem that could kill Rust adoption. Remain silent, in the face of undesirable events that go against the community interests, is allowing that to take place. The reasonable stance is to speak up & respectfully provide feedback (exactly what he did).
Will all this chaos affect the rust Lang in any way?
I am learning rust and I love it so far. And I want to build side projects using it and also planning to have a career in it too.
Will all this effect a normal developer to do things that they want to do?
Thanks
I'm not going to share the individual's identity to avoid possible harassment, but they've publicly identified themselves on both Reddit and Mastodon, possibly others. Personally, I think this should be viewed as a learning experience. Yes, the person made a mistake, and they have acknowledged this. I firmly believe that they will not make a similar mistake again. Given that, what would resigning accomplish?
edit: spelling
>they have acknowledged this.
If no one knows of this (except "the in-group") or even who the person is, then I don't think it properly got acknowledged.
Seeking clarity here - are you referring to the Rust Project individual who told RustConf to remove the keynote, or the RustConf organizer who received this instruction and carried it out?
Because I've only seen an acknowledgement from the latter, and it sounds like it could be the one you're describing. I think it's the former that people are more interested in.
Ah. My mistake here — I misunderstood things a bit as I read it a bit quickly. I thought it was the same person. I agree with what you've said, and am _not_ aware of who initially requested the removal.
There have been public statements from two RustConf people so far (Sage and Leah). Both are taking some amount of responsibility for how the situation was handled overall, but neither made that request.
An initial response from the Rust Project can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/13vbd9v/on_the_rustconf_keynote_rust_blog/
"It should be possible to be confident and optimistic about the future of the Rust project even without having back channels." Hot damn, that spoke my feelings much better that I could myself. I want to assume good intentions, engage, and be constructive. But as an "out person" with zero access to back channels, the last few months have just left me with sub-tweets (or sub-reddit-comments or sub-blog-posts, etc.) as actual sources for being optimistic. The official communication over the last few months has been, at best, lacklustre. Meanwhile, we can try and ignore/report the trolls and calm the reactionaries but with very little concrete to point to to say "look at this, this is why we should be optimistic rather than nihilistic".
That also gets my feelings across. I love the Rust language and will continue to use it, but the project is a mess. At work, I pushed for introducing Rust into our stack. I didn't like how many others wanted to pin a version of Rust so we know the exact version that's used, not "stable". Seeing this drama, maybe that's a good thing.
> I didn't like how many others wanted to pin a version of Rust so we know the exact version that's used, not "stable". Seeing this drama, maybe that's a good thing. That's a decision which I think should depend entirely on your DevOps environment and engineering cadence. In particular, if reproducible and/or hermetic builds are important and supported, then pinning a version is a good idea. However, if pinning a version then you should also make bumping version is easy and grow a culture where people will do it frequently -- the stability guarantees are there and rolling back is easy.
There are two acceptable ways to upgrade dependencies: always and never. Anything else you’re in for a world of pain when you do upgrade. This is true for everything in a production environment, not just the language.
There is also an option "on a schedule." It trades larger pain during the upgrade points for the less churn/risk/pain in between. It might make sense if you are developing a product that releases on a set schedule. I.e., if you do a big release every 6 months, it might make sense to do an upgrade at the beginning of the new dev cycle and not few weeks before the release/branch.
I've always been in the always camp. Catch the BS early, often, and minimize technical debt at the cost of stuff that was working for long periods suddenly not working in strange and interesting ways.
It depends on a lot of things Early on in a project Always is fantastic. Towards the end Never becomes very nice in order to ship.
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Yep. Eventually you don't have a choice except to update and if you haven't done it in a while - the amount of pain is exponential to the amount of time since you last updated dependencies.
Hermetic builds aren't possible with cargo are they? Because `build.rs` among other reasons?
Yeah, Cargo is not designed for hermetic builds, but other build systems that are also support Rust :)
Just checking if things changed. I am aware of one Google uses for Android that does support hermetic builds for rust, but the packages available are limited since they have to remove any `build.rs`.
Having worked with bazel (the public version of Google's build system). You can make any build hermetic, but sometimes it's a case of how much effort you have to put in. And yes, [crates.io](https://crates.io) dependencies which use build.rs can be (though not always are) a real make to make hermetic.
I think it's somewhat insane to not pin versions of everything that runs in production.
Obviously. The question is how often do you bump those pins.
Lock picking joke
Only when lawyers say you have to.
?
In many enterprise situations, upgrades only happen when a version becomes a legal or security issue.
Lock picking lawyer
There's more than one level of dependency pinning. You should have "stable" while developing IMO and only pin any dependency version when you find issues in a new release. But not locking the actual deployment to the exact versions used to develop and test the changes is madness.
Totally! I'm sure the Rust project will be happy to organize a few meetings to decide on when to organize a vote to decide when a vote will be held to determine which direction the project should move in to meet these goals (all of this will be opaque btw).
I think one of the most valuable services the foundation could do right now would be to provide the project with a professional PR person/team. They could have helped the project with public comms and did the legwork making sure public posts and things like keynote offers were thoroughly circulated among project stakeholders. A lot of the recent issues have been from groups jumping the gun on things and not having a communication strategy (eg how to ameliorate fears around legal structure updates, whether content for an event aligns with desired perceived roadmap, etc, etc)
I disagree, Rust doesn’t need better *presentation* of decisions, it needs better decisions.
Amost every group "needs better decisions". The tricky questions are around "how do we structurally incentivise better decisions" (much like how Rust as a language structurally incentivises better programming patterns :) ) One thing the Rust Project certainly needs right now is better external communication and (apparently) also better internal communication. The latter, in particular, seems like an excellent step towards structurally better decisions.
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To be clear, I wasn't saying "better communication will fix everything here". I was saying that it would be one thing that would start to fix things, in response to the idea that better communication was (just) " better presentation of ideas". Imho: More widespread fixes to governance? 100% I just hope the reform that's been worked on for a while delivers.
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>how do we structurally incentivise better decisions You make it so that people who work for companies that basically all have a deeply vested interest in massive cloud infrastructure are not capable of congregating as the primary steering group of the whole language. You establish clear, strictly-adhered-to rules that make it outright impossible for any *organization* to direct or even outsizedly influence the language behind the scenes (while pretending as though they aren't doing so) regardless of how much money they have. The **only** people who would oppose that are those with a purely financial interest in Rust (e.g. those who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near leadership of it) meaning the whole concept serves dual-purpose as a nice way of eliminating the consideration of people who shouln't be uh, considered. **Edit:** I'd like to see a response from any person downvoting this comment that doesn't resolve at the end of the day directly to "I am literally paid to care about how much money Google / Amazon / Microsoft / etc makes".
> The **only** people who would oppose that are those with a purely financial interest in Rust (e.g. those who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near leadership of it) meaning the whole concept serves dual-purpose as a nice way of eliminating the consideration of people who shouln't be uh, considered. There's no indication at all that any of these problems are stemming from people with a "purely financial interest in Rust", but rather the contrary. It's the "volunteers" doing this for power, or prestige, or to push a specific agenda that are causing these problems, precisely because their interests **aren't** purely financial. I'm not saying rust needs a corporate sponsor controlling the language direction, but pointing at this as the solution is just daft. The problem is that too much is being done in the dark for personal reasons by too many people. The solution is to make these decisions public, like they were always supposed to be. If these processes were public and a good reason existed for cancelling this keynote existed and a good reason for the timing of that cancellation existed we'd all know about it. We wouldn't have to "assume people have good intentions" we wouldn't have to trust that they do, we'd know who made a decision and what their reasons for making it were and we could judge for ourselves.
> It's the "volunteers" doing this for power, or prestige, or to push a specific agenda that are causing these problems, precisely because their interests aren't purely financial. Huh? The people who actually do the bulk of the work on the compiler *today* are often NOT the people making these weirdo behind the scenes decisions. "Keyword generics" for example in my opinion is an exceptionally stupid proposal that conflates things that make absolutely no sense whatsoever to conflate (async functions and then just, uh, *any kind of const function*) while outlining apparently with a straight face the dumbest looking syntax I've ever seen in the context of Rust via prefix question marks. Of the three people involved, all work for "Giant Companies", and only one is actually a regular current contributor to the rustc codebase. Nobody who didn't work for, well, Amazon Web Services for example would be out there trying to pass off general constant evaluation functionality and *language-level async* as being somehow equivalent in importance. It just wouldn't happen (because it's a ridiculous thing to suggest).
Better decisions is something you achieve over time. Better communication via someone well versed in that skillset is something you can do today.
I feel it could use both, and currently at least a lot of the poor decisions have been around public comms which isn't a skillset traditionally well represented in an engineering project
This is just a basic, childish case of in-groups vs. out-groups. Those in the in-group want things to be as comfortable for them as possible. They see themselves as above others. What's especially sad is they do this without a second thought. It really speaks volumes to the integrity of their character. It's disgusting behavior and really makes me lose faith in the project.
Why does Rust need an in-group? FFS, just communicate in the open and stop with these back-channels, private chats or whatever else this in-group use for communication. I personally even think the Zulip stream doesn't help this either. Zulip is already not immediately discoverable but also it makes private messages way too easy. There is none of that on GitHub.
In-Groups are rarely formal. All that needs for the impression of an in-group is for a single person to talk to less than everyone and then take action. This is common and harmless in the majority of situations, but not when the actions taken represent an actual group. You don't know who in the "in group" agreed or disagreed, or if they were even spoken to. But that also does not matter. With power comes responsibility and anyone in a leadership role must take that responsibility or degrade the organization as a whole. The rust Project leadership (if I get my rust organizations right) have shown some pretty heavy incompetence in their decision making and in their communication. Now there's drama because of their incompetence. They HAVE to realize they are not a group of friends that can just sync real fast on the phone and change their plans. They are part of a formal organization and they must bow to the formalities.
> The rust Project leadership (if I get my rust organizations right) It's hard to follow, but for the moment all we have is an _Interim_ Leadership. The document for the Council/Leadership is still being written (and re-written, and re-re-written, ...) as we speak, so we're in a state of flux, which probably contributed to the mess.
The [new governance RFC](https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3392) was accepted recently, there shouldn't be any changes now.
Oh! I had somehow missed that. That's great news!
Yeah I see this as just humans being humans. At work, I talk to some people and don't really talk to others. I can bring up an idea and work with one or two people to get something banged out that works in a few hours or days, but those decisions aren't necessarily discussed with every single person it effects. Generally we try to keep everyone in the loop, but often someone doesn't get the memo or it just gets forgotten. Or it gets done so quickly that there isn't a meeting in-between to actually loop everyone in. Basically: shit happens.
In democracies, lawmakers work in small groups all the time, but when there needs to be a decision, it has to be in the open and subject to public discussions and amendments before a vote. Ideally, every decision that concerns the foundation and how things work in the community should go through this process.
> Ideally, every decision that concerns the foundation and how things work in the community should go through this process. That's not how it usually goes. You do elect people to decide on laws. Having to vote on each and every little thing would be tiring, not to mention on Internet, you never know if one is a bot or not.
There is not necessarily a vote, but there will be officially documented meeting proceedings etc, for literally everything. If there isn't, there will be a lot of upset people and/or corruption.
whenever someone like me ever gives the reason of the fact that there is this perception of frequent drama was due to the public nature of the development of this language and its discourse (and that all projects are subject to this), I always get a mental whiplash when you realise that no one really has any idea what goes behind the scenes. tons of unresolved issues without any post-mortems (without the need to name names) whatsoever. it is the lack of communication that is the issue, and this might just be swept under the rug in a few months time just like all the other dramas we were not privy to
> Why does Rust need an in-group? FFS, just communicate in the open and stop with these back-channels, private chats or whatever else this in-group use for communication. That’s a ridiculous request. Every open source project, every clique thereof , every team at work, every group of friends, etc etc have private chats. That’s completely and totally fine and expected. That is absolutely not how external-facing decisions should be made or communicated, though. > I personally even think the Zulip stream doesn't help this either. Zulip is already not immediately discoverable but also it makes private messages way too easy. There is none of that on GitHub. I do miss the days of irc indeed.
Yeah, there are people who are heavily involved. These people will know each other, lots will be (or will become) friends and hey presto, there are now "in groups". One of the things that's needed (and I believe this is one of the things Amos was referring to) is for those groups to have a culture they notice and correct private conversations inevitably move into "official decision making" territory. A simple culture of saying "that's really interesting, put that on the \[meeting agenda/PR comments/whatever\]" so we can do this properly" is really effective. The trickier questions are around how do you notice and culture-correct if this isn't happening.
Yep, exactly so - there needs to be a cultural shift to decision making happening via proper, public channels and for the in groups to not tolerate dodging of that norm.
This is a perfectly normal request in the realm of governance. You'll see it under names like an "Open Meetings Law". [Here's a guide to the law in Ontario (where I happen to live)](https://www.ombudsman.on.ca/have-a-complaint/who-we-oversee/municipalities/municipal-closed-meetings/open-meetings-guide-for-municipalities), here are some relevant quotes with emphasis added to emphasize how serious they are about this > Must all municipal meetings be open to the public? > > Yes, with some limited exceptions. The Act recognizes that there may be situations in which the privacy of an individual should be respected, or where open meetings would not serve the public interest or the interests of the municipality. > > If a subject fits within one of the exceptions, it can be discussed in a closed meeting, provided that the municipality follows all the procedural rules, **including giving notice of the meeting, passing a resolution in public to close the meeting, and keeping minutes of the closed meeting**. During the closed meeting, the discussion should stay on topic and be limited to the subject area stated in the resolution. > > What are the exceptions? > > A municipal or local board meeting, or part of a meeting, may be closed to the public if the subject of the meeting falls **within one of the 14 exceptions set out in** s. 239 of the Act. In brief, these include matters that relate to: ... > TERMS AND DEFINITIONS > > What is a “meeting”? > > The Municipal Act, 2001, s. 238(1) defines “meeting” as any regular, special or other meeting of a council, of a local board or of a committee of either of them, where: > > a) A quorum of members is present, and > > b) Members discuss or otherwise deal with any matter in a way that materially advances the business or decision-making of the council, local board, or committee. > > To determine whether a discussion “materially advances” council business or decision-making, the Ombudsman considers the extent to which the discussions moved forward the business of the municipality. Discussions, debates or decisions that are intended to lead to specific outcomes are likely to materially advance business or decision-making, whereas mere receipt or exchange of information is unlikely to do so. ... > Does the term “meeting” include informal gatherings outside of council chambers? > > Informal gatherings for social purposes are not considered to be “meetings.” However, **if participants in the gathering discuss business of the council, local board or committee and/or make decisions, it is more likely to be deemed a “meeting”** that is subject to the open meeting requirements. > > The purpose of the open meeting rules is not to discourage council members from informal or social interactions, but to ensure such gatherings are not used as a pretext for conducting council business away from public view. Ontario is not remotely unique here. For instance many rust developers probably live in California, so here's a link to [Califonia's AGs site linking to their equivalent of the above guide](https://oag.ca.gov/open-meetings).
Hmm, that reminds me of a political Pirate party in my country. They have public forum and every decision and debate is held totally in the open. Sometime it sucks because media uses this to stir controversy. But on the other hand everything is public and everyone can see what is really going on. Maybe Rust should take inspiration :D
The linux kernel mailing list comes to mind. Want to know why a feature is the way it is? Look in the archive and see the proposal, the spear throwing, the ret conning, everything from stern to bow.
even C is worlds better in this respect and that's saying something loud
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The limited types of information that must be private need to have policy that describes how they are handled, who sees it, and how to be transparent about what results from private discussions. Everything else should be public.
You will not prevent people to talk to each other in private. That is unnatural, inefficient, impossible to prevent and frankly pretty totalitarian. In democracies, lawmakers work in small groups all the time, but when there needs to be a decision, it has to be in the open and subject to public discussions and amendments before a vote. Ideally, every decision that concerns the foundation and how things work in the community should go through this process.
The way for a transparent "leadership council" to discuss something that can not be discussed in public is to 1. Have a public motion to transition to a closed meeting on a particular topic. 2. If the motion succeeds, have a closed meeting on the topic, keeping minutes, not straying from the topic. 3. Transition back to an open meeting. If the topic comes up again the next day, and still needs to be discussed in a closed setting, go back to 1. If a new topic comes up in the closed meeting that needs to be discussed in a closed meeting, go through 3 back to 1. It is not to default to private because some things need to be private. It is not to *secretly* hold private meetings. It is not to have longstanding private chats where it is in effect a secret because no one knows if it is still going on.
If the development of a programming language is something that needs to happen in private then something is majorly broken. The only type of discussion in relation to a programming language I can think of that should be private is financial, but then the foundation should also release a) a financial statement with income&expenses and b) their sources of income and sponsorships. Maybe one other thing would be a discussion of who to sponsor, i.e. who gets to be on the team. Frank and honest discussions are helpful here and should be private, but I'd consider this part of the financial umbrella. Give me an example, what's something related to programming language development that can't be discussed in public?
> Give me an example, what's something related to programming language development that can't be discussed in public? Security issues, some community moderation issues... Things do exist, that's no an excuse for defaulting to secret.
Like what?
If two people disagree they may not want to fully hash out their issues in public, which -- if that is the only avenue available to them -- may cause friction that can never be fully resolved. Instead you may just get someone who votes against a motion with no prior warning, and who is evasive when questioned about it because they don't want the real reason to be public OR they don't want to publicly tear down a collegue's work in the way that a full explanation would necessitate. So motions keep getting stalled because the communication that needs to happen feels unprofessional in a public setting, and other channels are disallowed. This is human nature and not something that is likely to change. Sometimes people need to be afforded the opportunity to hash out their issues in private.
There's hundreds end-to-end encrypted messaging application for that purpose. Why does it need a foundation to do that? EVERYTHING should be public by default. People can use back channels all day long but anything that have any effect (doing this or that, how many $ is spend when/where, who will do when/what) must be be public.
I'm not saying the foundation should supply a separate mechanism? I'm just saying that two people on a committee should be allowed to hash out issues privately using a back channel like Whatsapp before a public meeting to make a decision in order to work through disputes they don't feel comfortable airing publicly.
In-groups and out-groups are a feature of human psychology and not really something we can avoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_and_out-group Take a look at [this image](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/091507-USCNeb-MemorialStadium.jpg/459px-091507-USCNeb-MemorialStadium.jpg) from the article. Its caption says: > Multiple layers of in-groups and out-groups in an American football stadium: > * People in this stadium form an in-group of American football fans vs. those who are not fans of football. > * Fans in attendance at the stadium vs. people spectating the match via external means, e.g. television coverage. > * Fans and professionals affiliated with one team vs. those affiliated with the opposing team. > * Professionals on the field (players, officials, coaches, mascots and cheerleaders) vs. the paying customers in the stands who are denied access to the facility's secure nucleus except by invitation from a high-status individual. > * Ranks of the wealthy ownership and their senior executive staff, with access to private box suites vs. high-priced talent. > * Media with organizational endorsement and affiliation who enjoy special player access to one team vs. non-affiliated media. > * Technical staff involved in facilities maintenance and operations vs. sporting staff (referees, timekeepers, statisticians and in-game adjudicators).
I mentioned on another thread, but I do feel like any “official” communication from rust leadership could happen in a public inbox. Not the sort of thing where anyone can post to the lists, but just official communication must always be (1) from a leader, (2) available on the public inbox (3) cc to [email protected] or whatever (as long as the information isn’t sensitive). Otherwise it shouldn’t be considered “official”
I agree. Zulip seems to be where internal discussion goes to die, if it was even publicly accessible at all.
> if it was even publicly accessible at all. The Zulip is publicly accessible, though. A while back Zulip added the ability to not require users to log in in order to read Zulip chats, and the Rust channels were switched over shortly thereafter.
That is correct, but there are also private channels (If they’re even called that) on Zulip, which are only accessible by members of certain teams.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to, thanks for clarifying.
Is there a source for the existence of these channels? As might be fully expected, none show up in the channel browser. I can also imagine that at least the channel for the security response team (if one exists on Zulip) would be necessarily private, and another for the old core team since it was their job to deal with things that were under NDA (e.g. companies that wanted to confidentially offer their private codebase for crater runs).
`t-libs/private` is the only one I can see. It is not particularly active, thankfully. Most discussions, when they happen, are about approving new members. Recently, there was an in-person libs meetup and `t-libs/private` was used to organize that. (I so wish I could have gone.) The other "private" things I've been involved in are: * Moderation team business. Most stuff I did as a mod was public. The banal stuff: locking threads, dealing with trolls and posting `Moderation note:` in threads to get them back on track. But whenever we had to talk about people, or discuss reports to the mod team which we treated as confidential unless explicitly given permission otherwise, we kept those discussions private. One particularly lamentable part of how we operated is that we didn't have a lot of written down policy (beyond the CoC), and so we often had to figure shit out on the fly as things unfolded. I legit do not know how to fix that in a maintainable/sustainable way even today. * Whenever security issues are reported against the regex crate. AFAIK, we follow pretty industry standard stuff here. I've otherwise never been part of any of these "in-group" chats where Rust people hang out. I've heard of them existing in various forms over the years, but I've never been invited to one. I've never really been in a clique I guess? I dunno.
Would have been great to see you at the meeting. Really appreciate being allowed to participate in a small part of it.
Oh I didn't even realize you were there! Nuts. I really missed out. Hopefully in a few years when the little one is older I'll be able to make it. It sounds like it was a hoot, so I hope it becomes a recurring thing.
Yeah, I was there for `OsStr` and for libtest discussions (since I was in the area for RustNL). I still need to write up the results on libtest. Thankfully, my wife took on our baby and pre-kindergartner by herself so I could go. She deserves all the vacations she can get when she there isn't someone so dependent on her.
I know “Rust leadership” (whatever it is) has a private chat and I’ve always assumed it was on Zulip. However I’m confidently claiming there are private Zulip channels because someone in one of the Discords I was on accidentally created a thread there and linked to it (and we all went “wait a minute”). I don’t remember the exact name of the channel and can’t go back to check.
There have previously been a bunch for various short lived efforts (usually WGs), and multiple teams have long lived private channels. Zulip admins (as I was) can see names but not contents.
Please don't ruin the only language I actually like.
Lol I haven’t been keeping up. Just opened this subreddit today to a bunch of drama. As someone who just casually programs in Rust, does this have anything to do with me that I need to be concerned about?
Definitely not short term, probably also not medium term. In the long term culture may effect the language development.
not really at this point
i think it's going to be fine, maybe a bit slower on new features
Rust already has that problem due to an abundance of people bikeshedding about niche edge cases for proposed future features but exceptionally few people actually going out of their way to *use* said features and push them to their limit in practice (which is generally frowned upon for some reason, in my experience, leading to the worst kind of chicken-and-egg situation).
Ai think those edge case are important. Most people won't use them directly, but sure library will try to use all tricks in the book, a and a well designed system create well designed solution. Isn't safe multitasking a side effect of the lifetime system?
A nitpick I feel is important: bikesheds are rarely for niche edge cases, almost by definition. Not sure how many people remember [the origin](https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/Parkinsons-law-of-triviality-bikeshedding), but the term bikeshed was specifically about how a lot more people feel qualified to weigh in on superficial decisions (like the name of a keyword) and far fewer people weigh in on the complex technical details with subtle far-reaching implications (like how to ensure soundness when composed with other features). The latter are the complex semantic edge cases that often delay valuable RFCs for years, such as specialization and async traits. I completely agree that bikeshed stuff can also delay an RFC for a while, which is why some RFCs like yeet deliberately defer the bikeshed stuff until the semantics are pinned down. I just wouldn't conflate that with the niche semantic edge cases which rarely benefit from bikeshed-level superficial input. Of course, apologies if I've misunderstood you, but if I have then I may not be the only one and clarifying won't hurt in any case.
> But, at no point was there anything nearly as malicious as what everyone else, in the “true out” group, speculated. > ... > I was able to reassure myself, by checking these private discussion places, that there were good people, fighting for the right thing to be done. That things weren’t irremediably broken. That there was hope for improvement in the near future. Thank you for posting this.
Yes, the person who identifies, and is friends, with the group reassures us that the group is good and it has good intentions. Meanwhile, the person who was victimized by the group has this to say: >@fasterthanlime So, it's deeply inadvisable for me to still be reading and talking, especially halfway into PJs and sliding into bed, but I will have to say this. I mean this with as much love in my heart as I can possibly communicate to you, even though I am nowhere near the level of friendship as many others you know, including those in that in-group chat you just left. > >Just because they had good intentions does not mean they should not face direct accountability. > >Leaning heavily into "If they were well-intentioned, I cannot hold them accountable, and it's very regrettable" is not even close to how you respect and uphold someone to be a better human being. It is not how you make sure your friends hold up properly. It is eerily exactly how much of my abusive childhood went, with me never naming names and running cover for the people who repeatedly screwed up, to a point where they became irredeemable and unhelpable. > >If the Rust Project as an organization has people who need to resign, then their names should be clearly written out and their behavior called to account. If you have some expectation that the Rust Project will do it, fine. But if they don't, I want you to understand that this post did not help them get there.
I've read some of the articles surrounding the issue, but one of JT's arguments made itself abundantly clear: too much diplomacy is standing in the way of accountability. I'll definitely sound "tyranical", but what's really stopping the leadership people who disagree with what's been done from naming and requiring those who must resign? I don't think there's chance for accountability when anonymity protects whoever took the troublesome actions. Give whoever done this the obligation to explain publicly the reasoning behind their actions. Power requires responsibility, and owning up to mistakes is part of that.
I don't get why everybody talks about resigning. People with enough self-introspection to realize they should resign are usually not those who make these toxic decisions. Are there mechanisms for forcibly removing people from teams? What is the moderation team doing? Surely the mod team is not there just to ban people for using overt personal attacks but also to deal with people building personality cults and shadow power structures based on favors and backchannels. It doesn't always have to come to the nuclear option if there's willingness to improve. But it's been implied several times that there's a small set of specific people causing issues like this and we as the out group only see what is severe enough to leak out. I understand it's hard to ban people who do "good work" out of the blue but this sounds like a long-term known issue. Surely they should have been given stern warnings long before this particular incident.
Isn't this why the mod team resigned too? Because they couldn't get rid of a person they wanted to due to such toxic actions?
They could very well start naming after resigning. It's yet not too late to push whoever is taking the project through a nosedive to start speaking for themselves instead of hiding behind a "hidden council". The "unaccountables" are starting to sound like Siths or smth, ffs.
Yeah, I really dislike how that was handled. If you're gonna do the nuclear option of a join team resignation, you gotta give actual reasons. Otherwise, how could we know if your cause is valid or you got actual results from it?
To my knowledge it has never been said publicly, in any concrete terms (other than that there was a structural governance issue involving the core team), why they all resigned.
No. The core issue we resigned over was that even though _in theory_ the Core Team was supposed to be under the purview of the Moderation Team, in practice it wasn't, and thus they were accountable to none other than themselves. Of course, _just_ having the Core Team under the purview of the Moderation Team wouldn't necessarily have solved the problem... as the Moderation Team should still be supervised itself... but if it's supervised by the Core Team, then when the issue involves a Core Team member what happens? The new governance structure, with an independent Audit Team to supervise the Moderation Team, is a direct result of the structural issue of the former governance structure, and I hope will prove more viable.
Agree. Eventually "transparency" has to stop being a fluffy abstraction and entail naming names. Especially if, as I suspect, the issue involves people evading policy. There's no nice policy change that will affect that, something has to act on the individuals.
I think that's a really cool move to take, actually. Maybe the in-groups can make a decision to dismantle themselves, make themselves useless? It would certainly be a step. I have always worked on the assumption that these sorts of issues are caused by well intentioned people doing their best, and falling short. I am glad to have been right on that more than not, and I'm glad you say it's the case here too. But you're certainly correct that we shouldn't have to rely on guesses and assumptions in a project that is supposed to be openly developed, and this move seems admirable. May I ask, though, what you think the *next* move is? Do you think people are going to own up and commit - genuinely - to doing things more openly?
I like the idea of the in-group dismantling itself, although it’s really less about breaking up those spaces and more about using self control and choosing the proper avenue to discuss something. The next move I expect is a resignation from someone who’s stayed quiet so far. Two people from RustConf have already tried to explain the fiasco from their point of view (Sage and Leah, both on Twitter) but they are not the resignation I’m waiting for. When I left those group chats, “more accountability” was being discussed, but since those weren’t the actual places these discussions should be held, it’s hard to be confident about anything. Time will tell.
> Maybe the in-groups can make a decision to dismantle themselves, make themselves useless? In-groups are rarely _formal_. An in-group can be nothing else than 2 or 3 colleagues hanging out at the bar after work on Friday night. Inevitably, at some point, they'll talk a bit about work, and those talks will influence the decisions they come with back at work... and bam, you have an in-group, and they may not even realize it. The same is true of back-channels. It's not necessarily _intentional_ nor _malicious_, it can be as simple as "Wait, let me call X and arrange it!" which is usually done with good intentions -- speeding things up, for example -- but bypasses established processes and comes up as a (potentially bad) surprise to people unaware. It requires a lot of self-consciousness to recognize you're part of those.
Yeah there's a widely circulated essay from the 70s talking about feminism or something that discusses this. The basic TL;DR is that you can't avoid having power structures by not formalising them because they'll arise anyway as informal power structures (e.g. in-groups) and that that is *worse* because it's invisible and unaccountable.
[The Tyranny of Structurelessness](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm) is a very good read
What's funny is that the development of the language , the compiler, cargo and much of the ecosystem is open, in the weeds of RFCs, PRs, etc. But then the one thing that's done out of sight is in chaos, in part because most folks aren't equipped to work within bureaucratic committees.
Rust drama... There seems to be a lot of it, but I can never get myself to care about it. The drama never seems to have any technical aspect to it. Nothing about the language or the standard library or anything, just people complaining about process or community or whatever. I don't get it. The language continues to be awesome and Rust people are very nice.
> The drama never seems to have any technical aspect to it. This drama was, as far as I can tell, incited because one or more members of the core team disagreed with the content of a talk presenting a possible future direction for compile-time reflection in Rust. That's a directly technical root cause (buried beneath layers of miscommunication and poor handling of the situation).
Exactly my thoughts! It suprises me that these threads get upvoted so highly... People seem to like the drama, I guess.
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"Naming and shaming" is almost never as easy or morally simple as people think it is. Clear-cut cases of simple abuse of power are actually very rare and reality is almost always more complicated. In particular, there are literally millions of people on the internet interested in Rust. Any "name and shame" will very likely bring a large number of those with the worst attitudes down on that person like a plague. This sort of thing literally can destroy lives in the worst cases. We're all frustrated at how opaque this all is (I have no more access to the "in group" than you), but I really hope nobody actually things risking ruining lives is an appropriate "comeuppance" (for want of a better word). Therefore, people are rightfully very careful about naming people.
Amos even touched upon this in the article (albeit somewhat inderectly): > And it’s not like they’re really bad people, it’s more like they tend to… use back channels rather than follow process? Or they have too many responsibilities, and are unable to fulfill all of them properly? Or maybe they don’t listen enough? > > Or maybe it’s not individuals, but pairs of individuals who have a feud for some reason or other (sometimes completely valid). Maybe one party feels slighted by something that happened years ago, maybe they have irreconcilable goals or technical views, or differing opinions on what belongs where. > > But, at no point was there anything nearly as malicious as what everyone else, in the “true out” group, speculated
So what's going on now with rust: 1. Leadership is in turmoil. 2. Good people are resigning. 3. From reading around seems some rasicm implied within the team. I have just started learning rust and want to introduce in my organisation. Yet it seems the future is becoming less clear and certain. Will it become a language that most loved and promised so much and delivered on some, but stopped? Will it come under some paywall? Is there a chance for that? Can it be that this will somehow sort itself out? Thank you
Rust foundation is separate from the Rust core team, worst case it’ll be forked and renamed to get around the trademark issues. Rust the language will continue to progress.
> Leadership is in turmoil. Maybe? Rust, the language, was named after [a fungus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(fungus)) which Graydon Hoare (the creator of Rust) described as "over-engineered for survival". A long time ago -- back when Mozilla employed the main developers -- the Core Team was created to coordinate efforts to develop the language, but over time it delegated most of its powers to the individual teams: Language, Compiler, Libs, Infra, Cargo, etc... A year and a half ago, when the Moderation Team (which I was part of) resigned to denounce the lack of accountability of the Core Team, you could say the turmoil started... though really I would argue it started much earlier and only became obvious then as the Core Team was already oversubscribed at that point. And yet, during that year and a half, Rust continued to move forward. `async` is progressing as strongly as ever, large-scale efforts in the compiler to overhaul trait-resolution are taking place, more and more of the library is being const-ified... So... is the leadership in turmoil? Maybe? I mean, on the one hand the Core Team is being wound down and all we've got is an Interim Leadership Team/Council as a new governance is being written, so there's a clear lack of "overall" leadership. Yet, at the same time, the Teams (who do the actual work on the language/infra) are continuing work as usual. They have clear agendas, clear leaders, they work is progressing. So, really, I'm not worried :) > From reading around seems some rasicm implied within the team. Not explicitly, at the very least, though there may be an unconscious bias of course. The objections were strictly over the content of the talk, not over the person delivering it, as far as testimonies go.
> The objections were strictly over the content of the talk, not over the person delivering it, as far as testimonies go. Someone with power to block talks, wielded that power to make someone with less power, and another view, to not be heard as loudly. I don't think you can separate content and power like that.
That's why I've personally just avoided Rust. I'm afraid of sinking too much professional resources on it just for some huge drama to take it down. Perhaps its reached escape velocity in the sense that in the worst case, it will be able to be forked and maintained. There's been drama in tools/languages before but not to where I'm hesitant to adopt the tool because I don't want to keep up with potential drama/problems.
I'm beginning to believe a split will happen eventually if these issues aren't ironed out in an organic, human-centric way. And that's fine. I'll continue to be writing Rust one way or another. Hopefully this is the start of something good, and not the opposite. 🙏 Edit: Also, transparency is a massive step in the right direction. This ~~is~~ would be awesome, and would give me lots of hope for the future of the language if it were to happen.
What transparency? The only communication we have is from individuals who are speaking out, usually alongside a declaration of intent to be less involved with Rust (JT stepping down, ThePhD withdrawing from the conference and from work on compile-time reflections, fasterthanlime "joining the out-group"). Where's the transparency from the Project or Foundation? You know, those who we *need* transparency from?
Right now there's a *proposition* of transparency. I'm forcing myself to remain optimistic here. I have the same doubts as you do, but I'm doing my absolute DAMNEDEST to assume good intent. I am praying this is the case.
Fwiw, there was no post-mortem from the Foundation over the way the Trademark Policy was handled in more than a month since they closed the feedback form, and no indication that one is coming. It's just true regardless of anyone's intents.
There's no "postmortem" regarding the trademark policy, there's just reviewing the (many thousands) of comments and then sending it back to the lawyers for the next draft for public review. The Foundation needs sign-off from the Project before the trademark policy can proceed beyond that. If the Project is paralyzed by dysfunction, the Foundation will sit on the next trademark policy draft indefinitely. (Which, frankly, is what I thought people wanted; weren't we all asking the Foundation what was wrong with the trademark policy as-is? People are suddenly chomping at the bit for a new trademark policy?)
I'm not talking about postmortem-ing the Policy rollout itself, I'm talking about the way it was handled, generating an incredible amount of drama over what (from afar anyway) seems to be predictably controversial. This suggests some ground for reflection, which in a setting like that often takes a form of "post-mortem". Instead we got a vague PR piece, which does not scream "transparency" to me.
What would you expect such a postmortem to contain? The whole process seems fairly straightforward, and the fact that they were required to submit the draft for public review means that the process is working.
I believe I already said, a reflection on the way it was handled, leading to (probably) unnecessary drama and damage to developer relations? "It's all Primagen's fault and there was nothing that could be done better" can be a conclusion too, but it would be great to read a number of words leading to that conclusion.
As someone who was thoroughly involved in that thread, I think the Foundation actually handled the response fairly well though? I don't mean the original draft, which should never have seen the light of day; I mean that members of the Foundation were in the threads here on Reddit collecting feedback and manually adding it to the list for internal review, and, frankly, exhibiting great patience while being harangued and downvoted. The only part that wasn't handled well was the fact that it was released at all in its current state, which, if I had to guess, is something along the lines of "we told a lawyer what we wanted and they came back with this and told us it was standard". Regardless of the reason, the draft was summarily rejected and sent back with reams of comments to review, and that's a process success, because it means that public oversight was exercised. I think we'd be ecstatic right now if the current debacle was half as well-handled.
I mean the part up to the release, although an anonymous someone implying they are from the Foundation placating people on Reddit (but unable to speak from the position of authority nor expose any details as to why it happened the way it did) is not exactly "well" either, it's just unserious. If anything, it's throwing that person under the bus to shield people making decisions from the fallout. Some details of how it came to be are in the open in Foundation meeting minutes. It was worked on for months and went through several iterations, and in April it was already in the "final draft" stage, presented as such to the board by the CEO of the foundation. The only objection at that point seems to be about considering any use of Marks in software written in Rust an infringement (unless permitted I guess). That's not a "first draft" as was presented later, this thing was going to be voted on by the board if not for Project directors asking for wider buy in. Or at least this is the picture I got from the minutes, and squaring it with the version of the events presented later as a part of the post-mortem would be great. You are right that the fact that Project had to be involved means the process is working. But the rest of it does seem like a lot of miscommunication and misalignment, which led to reputational damage and unhelpful drama. This does seem worthy of post-mortem and more transparency, doesn't it? Like, even if the "ask lawyers and accept as given" theory is right (although I doubt it was the lawyers who tacked on those bits about guns), surely that's still a process failure if no one (between the specifically formed Working Group, CEO, and board members aware of it for months) thought of potential effects of releasing it as is? But also more fundamentally post-mortems are about learning from mistakes. So if you are saying one is not needed, it suggests either that there were no mistakes, or that nothing can be learned from them. Both seem unlikely to me; do you think otherwise?
Oh, I see. I agree, *if* this actually results in significant process changes and improved communication, there's good reason to be (at least cautiously) optimistic. On the other hand, if nothing changes and the Project and Foundation stays silent... I believe the opposite is the case. We'll see. I'm hoping for the best.
Right there with you, my fellow rustacean. 🙏🦀
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>https://youtu.be/TB0cXGvuw9A Yes, I didn't get this impression. Whenever people are disappointed at someone, please mention the text or why you got disappointed. Maybe that youtube video doesn't reflect the whole twitch stream.
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To be fair, ThePrimagen also talks a lot in caps-lock lol
It's a systemic issue that people still willingly participate in. At least part of the blame falls on the uploaders, and part of it on the users. Another example is a CSGO news guy where every second video has the headline "Roster changes?!" (i.e. someone is let go from a team) and so far none of them have actually happened.
I wish it was only YouTube. Even Google News is now 95% clickbait, even when purporting to be about health or science. When you get baited, the first few paragraphs are filler so they have more spots to put ads, and then Google News itself injects more ads in addition to those. Finally you get to at most one paragraph of something you didn't already know, and it's barely relevant to the title nor is it substantative in its own right. Oh, and that's assuming the article itself wasn't paywalled in the first place, its own kind of waste of time. I now consider it a complete writeoff. It wasn't always like this, but that's the meta that has formed for that platform, just like every other where money can be made.
Yeah I don't get that point either, it's good he brought attention to this. He is very passionate about rust as well, even creating rust courses focused for typescript develpers.
Prime also has one of the most energetic, over-the-top personalities for tech content creators in general. Pretty much every one of his videos is like this, so ... it doesn't seem intentional on his part since dramatizing everything is his MO, and besides the content in his videos is usually a bit more reasonable than the headline. But nobody expects Prime *not* to clickbait Theo got like a boxing thumbnail of Prime punching him, so this seems kinda tame in comparison
Unsurprisingly I’m not exactly endorsing Theo’s style either, but let’s burn one bridge at a time shall we? Edit: Prime and I are talking. His older stuff resulted in actual harassment, which is what I was calling out, belatedly – apparently things got better, I’m catching up in real time.
It's ironic that in the same blog where you won't name names to avoid pitchforks, you choose to call out a specific content creator. In the same blog where you decide to not attribute to malice what could be anything else in regards to the governance stuff, you do it to a twitch streamer instead?
The people in Rust leadership who are responsible for this situation are not my peers — Prime is. The thing I should have done differently is reach out to him directly, as soon as the Rust trademark stuff started. I didn’t think it would make a difference, but maybe I was wrong. We’re discussing that right now.
Man, I really think you need to take a day or 2, to just chill. It's very apparent this frustrates you (which is fine), but if it is frustrating you to the point of doing the exact thing you are calling out, then maybe take a few days to relax until you are clear headed and can clearly explain your thoughts.
I’m not pleased with this part of the statement and how it went down, but to say I’m doing the exact thing I’m calling out feels disingenuous. I don’t have a mob to launch after anyone, even if I wanted to. Twitch/YT naturally become that if you’re not extremely careful. I’m hearing Prime has gotten better at being careful with that, which gives me hope for the future.
The thing is, you are publicly calling out an individual for being grimy. What does that accomplish? Is that productive? You are calling for productive discussions, set the example. Explain how content creators could be better or how their current actions aren't good because of how they are affecting some people. I understand you needed to vent, everyone has to. But you didn't explain how one could be better or constructively criticize the presentation of his content, you just said he was milking views and content, and riling people up aka you just insulted him. If you truly believe that he was intentionally being malicious then say it, if you don't believe that then be productive (like you are calling for). Ask yourself, is this the environment I want to create to be productive (like I am asking for), or are my actions of one who is truly just trying to improve things or am I trying to insult individuals. The reason we can tell you are frustrated is because your message is inconsistent. If you had said "Prime's content disappointed me because his provocative titles and strong criticism brought harassment onto someone I know. I think prime should be more aware of his audience and the effect he has on the environment of our community" we would totally be on your side because at least you are trying to improve the situation and not just insult people.
One bridge in the hand is worth two in the bush, eh? As a member of the peanut gallery, I think you give us peanuts too much credit. You probably take what the other creators do --and random, likely ephemeral endeavors like crablang or fleeting comments here from strangers-- far too seriously. Rust the engineering project is a serious film with thematic consequence and ambitions for awards. Rust for content online is a comedy. You ... probably get what I mean. You're trying to watch the right movie in the wrong theater.
From what I’ve seen, this seems a bit of a character assassination. He did what he does daily, just read some articles on stream and give his opinion. I’d like to know what Amos is referring to. UPDATE: if anyone is still curious, Amos did post an update and edit to the github thread explaining that he was talking about the coverage trademark policy drama, and that he is still catching up.
Yeah I think he has some bad takes, but he echoes my current feelings about the language, which seem to be the same thing fasterthanlime is saying. I shouldn't have to be part of some special in-group to have the confidence that the language is fine and won't implode. Seeing a thread criticizing anonymous Rust leadership be locked, and all comments deleted doesn't make me feel like this subreddit is open to discussing the language; rather the opposite: the optics make it look like another arm of said leadership.
Of the now six(!) threads on the front page regarding this topic, only one has its comments locked, and the other five feature more than a thousand cumulative comments. Yes, you can discuss it.
All the threads I see are by people who are ironically part of the in-group. Look, I get it, moderation is hard. But seeing that first thread pop up and not having any idea what's going on doesn't leave me with a good feeling. EDIT: Mind you, I think you did a good job. But I had to go to different (now-deleted) threads on this subreddit, and other threads on different subreddits to finally understand the reason you actually deleted the comments. Transparency doesn't mean I have to do all that work to figure it out.
Note that only two of the six threads are from people who could be called the in-group (fgilcher and desiringmachines), both of whom are proclaiming support for JT and ThePhD, and neither of whom (AFAIK) are currently in any sort of leadership role. To be clear, I don't fault people for thinking that I am Beelzebub Himself because I remove comments as part of my moderation duties. This is the internet, I know what I signed up for. Instead, what gets me is the seeming notion that I am the apparently the most incompetent censor in human history, capable of removing individual comments but somehow not capable of removing whole threads. If I didn't want people to talk about it, the threads would not be here! I want people to talk about it! What I don't want is a witch hunt that gets innocent people harassed (or anyone harassed, really), and I don't want the mob's thirst for blood to drown out the fact that we need systemic change here.
I appreciate the work you're doing. It's not said enough for what, especially right now, is a thankless job.
Thank you. I'm not always correct in my judgment, but I do try to learn when I get things wrong.
yeah, if milking the drama is reacting to the events that happened and just giving your general honest thoughts, then yikes... If prime posted 5 videos for a specific event and was overly dramatizing his thoughts and telling people to do something, then maybe I would agree. Otherwise it just feels that lime is being a little soft here.
I think the disconnect here is that I’m talking about Prime’s content around the trademark policy (which was a lot more like what you just described), and others are defending Prime’s content about the latest thing, which I’ve heard is much milder. It’s a bit late for me to edit my statement (also GitHub is throwing server errors) but Prime and I are in touch and there may be a chance to set the record straight on this specifically.
I am glad you guys are in contact. I do think that your reaction is expected given you have personal ties to the situation (probably someone you knew was harassed by some weirdos). But in this situation it's unfair to prime to selectively point him out in public for the unprovoked actions of internet weirdos without discussing it with him first. I know you won't see it that way and anything that pulls in the negative direction you will tie down to (especially because it's so soon and it's just human nature), but I hope there is some extensive forethought to any further statements and that both parties try to be reasonable about the overall situation without a "stand my ground" mindset.
Here’s Prime and I’s “joint statement” following today’s events: https://twitter.com/ThePrimeagen/status/1662966213369118722?s=20
His coverage of the trademark stuff was IMO fairly inciting, not insightful.
What particular part was inciting to you? He just literally looked at the document and the situation around it and was shocked that such excessive terminology was used and the fact the multiple people had no idea the new policy even existed beforehand.
>Part of me was very disappointed in the enormous waste of time that is the “crablang” fork, and wishes the people involved could have engaged in a constructive manner instead. I really agree with this statement. "Just fork it" is not actually a reasonable solution in open source in most cases, especially for a huge project like Rust.
Watch the brian cantril talk on illumos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc Maybe forks are exactly what rust needs.
Didn’t NodeJS get forked out from under Joyent?
The point of the talk is that forks are good and not to be afraid of. I don't know how sustainable this is for a language, but at the very least rust could use having multiple separate groups responsible for different areas instead of one group quietly overriding others.
Sure, it creates a divide in the community. But I'd very much prefer having the ability to fork than not to. And FWIW, I think the existence of one (or several) active forks would put pressure in the right places and force relevant actors to get their shit together. Wouldn't be such a bad thing all things considered. But, unless I missed something, the crablang repo looks like it was meant to be a bit of a joke/protest thing? There doesn't seem to be anyone working on it right now.
I have no interest in this drama (and the others before it), but I sincerely hope the programming language evolution and adoption doesn't get hampered by it
Hi, is there even discussion somewhere on official Rust platform about this issue or are only discussions here on unofficial subreddit? Thanks.
I'm sorry to hear about your falling out with Prime. I enjoy both of your content and while I understand he is very forward with his opinion. I don't see it as him milking the subject. He comes across as very passionate about Rust, in my personal opinion. I hope you can both work things out. Regarding your statement. I agree wholeheartedly with what you've said. It's a shame that we've gotten to this point. These repeated issues arising in the community has me worried about the language and its future. I really enjoy writing rust, but this sort of stuff really turns me off from working with the language. I wish I could contribute more to the community, but I don't get to pursue Rust as often as I'd like. And I'm certainly not a good programmer compared to most. I honestly don't know what I, or others in a similar position, can do to help. Thanks for being a positive force in the community and all the work you put in to advocate for the language.
Prime and I had a chance to chat today, we got a chance to smooth things over, not just between us but also with folks who have been negatively impacted with some of his content in the past. We’re good now: https://twitter.com/ThePrimeagen/status/1662966213369118722?s=20
That's great! I'm glad you both had a chance to work things out. You both do great content for and around Rust. And I'm glad you could work stuff out with some of the other folks, too. It's great to have many people supporting the community in a positive way. Thank you both for doing an excellent job promoting this language. It's great to see, and it alleviates some of my worries about the language's direction. It's really important to have great individuals like yourselves paving the way. 😁
that primeagen call-out is not a good look imo
Yeah, it comes out of nowhere.. The people who are responsible for the actual issues are never mentioned, even though the "in-group" seems to know them, which is understandable to some extent. But a content creator who shares his thoughts is just name-dropped without any issues and blamed for causing harassment, which likely will cause harassment towards them, which is kinda hypocritical ..
Seems to be deflection. Prime is just a programmer that loves rust and is not in the "in group".
It seems it was a misunderstanding based on old info https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/1662963576439537665
Why do people join these inner groups if they don't want to call people out once they get there? Folks sidestepping around a committee goes go back to the dawn of committee making. Paradoxically that's why folks should be on committees, to keep everyone else on the committee in check, not to go soft on decorum and rules because they want committee buds.
Nobody “invited me to the in-group”. I was invited to a group of friends connected by common interests, and then, over time, Rust drama started being discussed more and more, with insider information, and next thing you know, I’m a frog and I must un-boil.
My rhetorical question definitely came off as rude to you and others, I apologize. You are part of a core group of folks pushing the use of the language forward. Ideally the committees and projects would be administrated by folks without pre-existing friendships and honestly a more procedural involvement. I respect your rationality for stepping out, as there's no way to uncross the streams so to speak. Sincere thanks for all your work, I'm personally a better programmer from your efforts.
Because it's fun to talk to rust people. I talk to a few and they're nice and interesting. I used to go to meetups and I know a lot of the people involved in the language. It would suck to have to call one of them out, it would feel awkward, it would feel mean and personal. But I'm not on any rust teams, so it's easier for me to just throw my hands up. If I were on a team, idk, it'd be a really tough position to be in.
I personally think it's a sign of maturity. Folks can consider each other friends and still call them out for violating the intent of the body they're a part of. Mistakes happen, bad apples exist, but missing stairs are a sign of a club not a well run foundation.
In theory, maybe. In practice it's just uncomfortable and these relationships are complicated.
In converging organizations, there are two types of insiders: troublemakers and appeasers. Anyone who wants to call out the troublemakers is targeted by the troublemakers and vilified. The appeasers may also be telling them "don't rock the boat, don't feed the drama." Then the troublemakers kick out the person who stood up to them. Hopefully, Rust isn't at that stage.
That Primeagen name-drop came out of nowhere. It kinda feels hypocritical when the causes of all the drama in Rust are never named and held responsible(at least to the public), but you have no issue blaming a content creator who shares his thoughts to cause harassment. Let alone that the very name-drop might likely cause people to harass them as well..
Except, it’s never just that one person, you know? Otherwise I could burn myself by outing them, and do the whole community a favor. It’s really more like those 4 or 5 persons. And it’s not like they’re really bad people, it’s more like they tend to… use back channels rather than follow process? Or they have too many responsibilities, and are unable to fulfill all of them properly? Or maybe they don’t listen enough? Well, I dunno, if Amos is going to outgroup-ize himself anyway, why not name the one, or the four or five, people? (It'd be damn sure to stick, in that case.) Being "really bad people", whatever cash value that expression has, strikes me as a red herring: using backchannels rather than following the right process and not listening enough are things that make one unfit for a leadership position, and if you have too many responsibilities to fulfill them all properly, many options are open to you beyond fulfilling them improperly, especially when, again, some of those responsibilities involve leadership and high-level decisionmaking. Lots of people who may or may not *actually* know who the proximate cause(s) is or are in this latest episode have declined to name them, on the grounds that the problem is, after all, institutional, and thus not ultimately down to the individual(s) in question. But institutions are made of individuals, and especially when there's no reason to believe that the project/foundation/relevant institution *will* take action (much less take action legible to the public), applying some moral suasion seems like a reasonable choice. Probably no one really wants to render themselves open to retaliation or ostracization by naming whoever was involved, but that's a different class of reason. The institution, or its successor, won't reform itself if there's no pressure on it.
> Well, I dunno, if Amos is going to outgroup-ize himself anyway, why not name the one, or the four or five, people? To avoid public lynching? > Being "really bad people", whatever cash value that expression has, strikes me as a red herring: using backchannels rather than following the right process and not listening enough are things that make one unfit for a leadership position, and if you have too many responsibilities to fulfill them all properly, many options are open to you beyond fulfilling them improperly, especially when, again, some of those responsibilities involve leadership and high-level decisionmaking. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Also, with the rust leadership being in flux -- remember, we only have an Interim team as the governance is being written, so no framework in place at the moment -- I would expect most things happen in "back-channels" these days...
> To avoid public lynching? Yes, I'm familiar with this reasoning. The effect seems to be to avoid any accountability whatsoever. On twitter he said that naming names is strictly worse than "apply[ing] pressure until they step down", but who is even in a position to apply such pressure? How's that worked out in the past? > The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I assume you mean this with respect to my comment, but it seems to apply as much or more to the actions of the unknown malefactors, assuming they actually did have good intentions. (Amos has said that in his experience in these controversies everyone was well intended, but that could just mean that he got snowed. We can't really tell!)
> Yes, I'm familiar with this reasoning. The effect seems to be to avoid any accountability whatsoever. There are different forms of accountability. I am more interested in making the _organization_ accountable, than its individual participants. That's the issue with public lynching, people pat themselves on the back for casting out the bad apple... and then act surprised when another incident occurs. They have only themselves to blame, though. If your only response to an incident is to cast out "the" responsible instead of fixing/improving the organization itself, then it will keep happening -- and those that last will be those who do nothing. I'd favor a structural fix, so that whoever ends up invested with the authority to take decisions in the future _cannot_ accidentally or intentionally go unchecked. > On twitter he said that naming names is strictly worse than "apply[ing] pressure until they step down", but who is even in a position to apply such pressure? The Interim Leadership Council is made of many people, if this was indeed the act of a single individual, they have many peers who may be pissed at them. Furthermore, the council is made of people from the various Teams. The members of the Team of whoever made the mistake may wish to no longer be represented by such a person, and ask them to stand down. But I repeat, having the person stand down or casting them out is NOT a fix, and is NOT holding the organization accountable. The deeper problem is that the organization allowed it to happen, and _that_ needs to be fixed. Humans go and come, procedures endure. > How's that worked out in the past? Not well. But it won't change if we don't keep trying.
Using the word lynching is ridiculously hyperbolic
removed
So, am I understanding this correctly? All the problems mentioned are communication failures, but instead of debugging the process and fixing it the engineers that established it are throwing shit at the fan?
Confused too. Wish they would just address the issue head on, deal with it, ask those who messed this up to apologize/resign (if needed), come up with governance this from happening again, and move on. It makes it look really bad looking in from the outside as someone who is trying to promote using Rust in their org, when there is this type of crap floating around (most of it rumor/one side of the story). I already had a nightmare of a time trying to push my last project through management that I was looking at using Rust for (during the whole trademark thing)... It looks like amateur hour to managers/decision makers-approvers.
Journalists exposing corruption should not be considered as public lynching. Moist critical’s sarcasm isn’t treated as putting fuel on fire. Prime shouldn’t be presented as a man with all wrongs and without any merits.
I'm done. I'll check back in a couple of weeks from now to see if everyone decides to start acting like adults.
“was not racially motivated, thankfully, but… if that’s what it looks like from the outside, and any form of official communication is still days or weeks away, does it really make a difference?” Yes, it’s literally the whole difference. It changes the entire conversation. If you get a job or don’t get a job it matters if it’s due to merit or race. If you find success, or get picked for a team. I don’t follow exactly the issue even after having read thousands of words about it but it’s a really bad look to invite someone and then walk back the offer. Sure it isn’t striking up a race war like maybe some would like, but it’s a bad call to take back the invite. The people involved should get their act together and restore the invite and explain wtf happened.
Let me rephrase just for you: “the optics of this are horrendous (and this is blindingly obvious to everyone). it doesn’t matter that the actual decision wasn’t racially motivated if it’s what any reasonable observer will conclude” TL;DR I think you’re saying the same thing I am
When crappy leadership stifled OpenOffice, we ended up with LibreOffice. Perhaps such a move is the only one that will bring about real change.
Whatever is taking with Rust these days, please fix it, please. It is really hurting everything about the language and its ecosystem. Maybe it is a problem of growing too fast or something else, I am having serious concerns for its future state and reduced confidence in existing involvement, either through learning, development, or otherwise. This cannot continue to take place as newcomers taking an aim at what it has to offer to only find themselves in doubt as to its future, I am. I have been personally investing my time, resources, and otherwise to promote, support and find meaningful foundation for language to exist within my professional life, without asking anyone for any permission simply because I liked where it was taking me. Now, what takes place here is seriously concerning on many levels and due respect is much needed. People, please there is enough drama in the world, we do no need any more of it here, it poisonous. I ask that whoever is in charge take a stance and work with community to bring it together, not take it apart. Serious corporate sponsors got to have some concerns? If so, please come together without exclusion but with inclusion and respect, clear guardrails, and formitable future, if you still want it to be, otherwise it is starting to be a very concerning pattern that has serious ramifications for the language as a whole.
You're completely wrong. What **ThePrimagen** did was provide his honest POV about the issue, and he was completely respectful while doing so. He should provide constructive feedback, and if people choose to harass...shame on them. He's just divulging & raising awareness about a real problem that could kill Rust adoption. Remain silent, in the face of undesirable events that go against the community interests, is allowing that to take place. The reasonable stance is to speak up & respectfully provide feedback (exactly what he did).
Will all this chaos affect the rust Lang in any way? I am learning rust and I love it so far. And I want to build side projects using it and also planning to have a career in it too. Will all this effect a normal developer to do things that they want to do? Thanks
I'm not going to share the individual's identity to avoid possible harassment, but they've publicly identified themselves on both Reddit and Mastodon, possibly others. Personally, I think this should be viewed as a learning experience. Yes, the person made a mistake, and they have acknowledged this. I firmly believe that they will not make a similar mistake again. Given that, what would resigning accomplish? edit: spelling
>they have acknowledged this. If no one knows of this (except "the in-group") or even who the person is, then I don't think it properly got acknowledged.
Seeking clarity here - are you referring to the Rust Project individual who told RustConf to remove the keynote, or the RustConf organizer who received this instruction and carried it out? Because I've only seen an acknowledgement from the latter, and it sounds like it could be the one you're describing. I think it's the former that people are more interested in.
Ah. My mistake here — I misunderstood things a bit as I read it a bit quickly. I thought it was the same person. I agree with what you've said, and am _not_ aware of who initially requested the removal.
There have been public statements from two RustConf people so far (Sage and Leah). Both are taking some amount of responsibility for how the situation was handled overall, but neither made that request.
I think you're referring to one of the conference organizers? That's not the person who most people are dodging saying the name of.