once again I fucking hate dtolnay for blocking reflection in rust so that his macro work doesn't become obsolete

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@aud working on it

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] right? me too, maybe. If...

[jonny@neuromatch.social]

@hipsterelectron
@aud
Can I get a link to some context for this beef?

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] oh, well, I know I've ranted about it somewhere (I really need to keep a link to that handy), but the quick tl;dr is that ThePhD received a grant to investigate/implement reflection in Rust and was later asked to give a keynote speech at RustConf about it. dtolnay, who should not have been involved at all, worked behind the scenes to get them taken off as a keynote speaker.

Except no one would fess up who did it for ages. When it eventually came out it had been dtolnay, he told a bunch of lies about both his interactions, intentions, actions, and the actual technical nature of the work itself. ThePhD wrote a rebuttal but basically everyone involved on the core team and foundation of Rust protected dtolnay's stupid racist ass and let him make sure this work never came to fruition.

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@aud @jonny i asked the rustconf twitter account twice this year if he was still involved, no response

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] it caused a big "drama", to put it mildly. It can be hard to find reliable information about it because A. the team/foundation/etc covered up dtolnay's involvement and it was until someone leaked it months later that it was known dtolnay had been involved, B. everyone on the team/foundation was like "no no, we know for sure it wasn't racism that led to this action being taken and we totes regret the action", C. dtolnay's 'reasons' were put up on a gist that he's since taken down and are basically a bunch of horseshit. He 'felt' that it shouldn't have been a keynote and straight up lied about non-existent interactions with ThePhD (if I remember correctly), amongst other things...

... and because of racism being involved, a lot of people just naturally side against ThePhD, spreading fud about them. It's fucked up. I'm trying to find something that summarizes it that isn't fucking y combinator's fansite talking shit about ThePhD for being upset by it.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] here's a good little quote from whitequark (who was, in fact, the person who finally said dtolnay was involved)

https://lobste.rs/s/sgoshm/serde_is_no_longer_shipping_precompiled#c_5cye7q

dtolnay does a lot of shit to keep himself relevant. I forgot about the weird pre-compiled blob shit he was trying to push.

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@aud @jonny well my problem with steve klabnik is that he'll go on the oxide podcast and not trash dtolnay for being a racist, nor use his cachet to remove him from the community, but to imply the precompiled blob he added because cargo is a trash build tool and has no way to make build scripts less sneaky or add provenance for built artifacts was the reason not to trust tolnay. steve's build tool that steve made that shouldn't even be a build tool at the same time as it is a package manager because it sucks at it is being used to avoid confronting tolnay for being a manipulative racist shitbag

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] Found the archive.org link for his 'apology'

https://web.archive.org/web/20240407202025/https://gist.github.com/dtolnay/7f5da4bf057b7c6d0d00c6bed3060b96

Keep in mind, a lot of what he says here is not true. It's him covering his ass.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] jesus, what a mess.

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@aud @jonny just all of the problems with rust tied up in a neat little bow. klabnik loves to start witch hunts against people using unsafe until they leave rust forever like the actix-web guy but won't push out the racist he only knows how to make assertions about how people are making unsafe code

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@aud @jonny he calls himself a communist btw but does he ever speak out against defense contractors? really need people in rust to stop cosplaying as radicals because they work on a programming language

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@aud @jonny there are several people i like working on rust who do speak out about this sort of thing (not dtolnay though or he'd be gone). but i'm waiting until dtolnay just becomes this absurd john de goes character from scala (jdg is doing rust now btw) and i have to leave the language i love again

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] fucking jesus

I would also like to add that, in the aftermath of all this, I saw people talking about how rust was too important to let little things like toxic pieces of shit holding positions of power and actively excluding people 'hold it back'.

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] I use it with great hesitation (only because it's the 'correct' tool for what I'm doing) for precisely this set of reasons. It's good to have memory safety; fantastic even. But these people are horrible.

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@aud @jonny well it is less tolerant of nazis than scala so that is a plus but the corporatization embodied by the rust foundation is a trajectory that makes me very uneasy

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@aud @jonny memory safety has been done more than once and it can be done again

[aud@fire.asta.lgbt]

@[email protected] @[email protected] and on days like today (two days into a migraine, still unemployed, probably leaving tech forever due to A. bigotry, and B. war profiteers) I just don't have the patience to put up with the fucking hagiography these fuckers are given at every goddamn opportunity. Their misdeeds hidden, rewritten, or deleted.

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@aud @jonny ..............................................

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@aud @jonny on a related note the way they couch their clear contempt for free software and embrace of microsoft with reference to attacking anyone who cares about it as a stallman defender is incredibly upsetting. it's not fighting back against stallman when you refuse to make it easier for distro packagers to package rust codebases and along with the way dtolnay continues to be allowed in the community it doesn't make me feel like the rejection of free software is because they care about doing better