NixOS is electing a committee that will elect the new governing body and design its systems.
One popular proposal is for this committee to consist of five people, of which two are intersectionally marginalized. (That is, marginalized in at least two ways) That is, of course, a quota.
Aaron Hall, who objects to all of this, has arrived.
I value fairness and treating everyone equally regardless of their class status. I would be wary of any statements that make some users feel they will be treated less preferentially to others due to their class status, sowing distrust and conflict.
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It’s a meta comment about distrust and conflict. There has been several comments made on this thread about privileging some people over others. We’re on the internet. Nobody knows who is what class. I suggest we not make those kinds of comments because they are controversial and will lead to arguments and distrust in the broader community if users think they will be treated unfairly because their class is being unprivileged.
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I know everyone looks at statements that privilege some over others and thinks they are sketchy. (In what way are they privileged? How does that work? Does that mean we get suboptimal decision making so that some class-privileged person can have a seat of responsibility and privilege?)
Nix is very cutting edge, and we’d like to see more diversity. Diversity will come with growth. Controversy will stifle growth. These kinds of statements are going to cause controversy and conflict, stifling the growth that will result in diversity. Instead you may be able to rope in tokens of diversity, but you won’t actually achieve real organic diversity because the growth just isn’t there.
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Can you explain what did you put in place to obtain that diversity, can you qualify a bit that diversity? I’m looking at statements like “There was BIPOC”, etc. Also, how did you measure that diversity?
We grew. We advertised on Meetup.com. We let companies know we existed so they could host us. We let colleges know we existed so students could find us. We were open to everyone. We made every effort to help everyone who was trying to help themselves.
One of the things we did that helped: We treated people fairly. We did not talk about elevating anyone with privilege over others because of their class.
Who? Black (native, island, African), White (European, Russian, native (all ethnicities)), Asian (Korean, Chinese), Islanders, Native American, Transgendered, very old, very young. etc.
I’m highlighting this because it’s a reoccurrence of the discussion Jon Ringer kept having in apparent bad faith.
“yo chat gpt can you regurgitate some arguments about why our selection policy shouldn’t have DEI quotas kthxbye”
I don’t know about you but for me growths are a medical emergency
My personal opinions. Note that I’m not on the NixOS zulip, or a user of NixOS:
- Of course some people are going to be excluded from the committee: it’s 5 people.
- I’ve seen some groups become surprisingly diverse by accident but the groups were generally still run by white men.
- The minorities in groups I was in usually ended up in positions where they had to do emotional labor or damage control for the white men who made the decisions.
- The white men in groups I’ve been in usually behaved in ways that, to me, implied massive affinity bias. It was possible to shake them from that without dehumanizing them or being rude, but I had to actually be in the room.
- That doesn’t make them inherently bad people. Or maybe it kind of does, but only in a conditional sense – that is, if integrating the group they’re in suddenly makes them stop being bad people, then it is a really good idea to do that.
With regard to this specific proposal:
- OK, with a quota of 2, you have three seats that white men are allowed to have.
- If you really need there to be 5 white men, increase the size of the committee to 7. Now you have 5 white male seats, the same as you would if this proposal were not adopted.
- If this is still objectionable to you, then your apparent problem with the quota system is not that it excludes white men.
I am possibly being unfair – it seems like what Aaron wants is “there should be 5 people on the committee, not all of them should be white men, but that should happen by accident without needing to be set in stone on the Zulip.”
This seems vacuous to me: the whole purpose of the Zulip is not to create a selection process – it’s to select a committee one time and then hand over power to that committee. There’s, therefore, little distinction between “deciding to vote for X” and “setting a quota limiting the outcomes.” There is no process external to the Zulip by which an outcome could happen by accident.
And to say the obvious: I think it’s very unlikely a group consisting of 5 white men would have been selected on merit alone. So I would personally be likely to veto any such group based on that. Saying it’s a quota offers a fig leaf to people with implicitly biased selection criteria – mentally I am saying “of course you picked five fucking clones of yourself. Denied.”
I don’t want to give this more oxygen than it deserves by making a separate post, but Jon Ringer has finally exhausted Reddit.
HE DID IT!
Given the pattern of timing/comments/profiles here, I suspect that delroth monitors jonringer117’s reddit account and then brigaded this submission, channelling his army of paid actors, bots and followers. I highly suspect he brigaded Jon’s PR as well (when was the last time you saw 133 emoji reactions in a GitHub PR?), using this Mastodon post.
holy fuck that thread has all of my favorite flavors of garbage. it’s fucking amazing how effective Jon’s posts are as a demonstration of the toxicity from folks in positions of power (and Jon definitely treated release manager like his own tiny little fiefdom) the open letter talked about. all this and I’m pretty sure his suspension from the Nix community is still only temporary; I’m hoping something’s been done to make it more permanent, cause there’s no reason Jon should be allowed back under any circumstances.
(when was the last time you saw 133 emoji reactions in a GitHub PR?)
??? jfc
literally every time there’s some ridiculous PR that catches social wind you get to see this. hell, you can often see this on comments in such PRs. it’s almost like a site that lends itself well to social characteristics might have social expressions by social humans? but only almost! something like that would clearly be impossible to use.
fucking hell, these cunts. always fucking projection.
by my own count it happens roughly twice monthly now, as the enshittification, commercialization, and fascist takeover of the open source commons picks up its pace. the instances that come to mind are whenever Mozilla pushes LLM bullshit into their projects, the couple of large projects that announced they’re going to stop being open source (taking all their contributors’ code with them, of course), and a bunch of threads related to the xz backdoor. and in almost every case, there’s some shithead with an agenda sitting there fabricating reasons why the 100+ people who found the thread on github must not actually represent public opinion, somehow.
though that’s not saying vote manipulation doesn’t happen; look at the fucking weirdos still downvoting anything critical of Jon in that linked reddit thread, for example. that doesn’t look like a natural traffic pattern to my eye. like you said, it’s always projection.
also Jon keeps phrasing it as him being “banned from upstream”; given that Aux has made it clear he’s not welcome and a lot of Lix’s community promises are based around preventing people like Jon from joining and causing damage, I wish him luck with the weird shitty commercial Nix fork he seems to be hinting at
fucking hell, zulip is painful to scroll through on mobile. this is one of the most broken lazy loading implementations I’ve ever seen.
I feel like you’re in disagreement with me but instead of disagreeing with logic or evidence you are raising it to a meta level so you can shut me down.
aaron’s stunning logic and evidence, excerpted from a way too long post:
My education is in political science (BS, FSU) and business (BS, FSU, and MBA, UWF), and I’ve nearly completed an MS in Computer Science at UWF.
I was an elected moderator on Stack Overflow where I worked mostly behind the scenes to calm the community and build cooperation, permanently cure problematic contributors and reduce the incidences of moderators becoming the story.
I’ve been an organizer of meetups and clubs, most notoriously as a co-organizer of the NYC Python meetup group, holding free weekly office hours for over a year, and most recently as president of the AI club at UWF.
so this fuckhead’s evidence is that he never personally saw any diversity issues completing his entry-level CS degree and running the AI club at the university of west fucking florida or when he “worked” as a Stack Overflow moderator, but you wouldn’t know his work, he somehow calmed the community and built cooperation invisibly behind the scenes
it’s unfortunate that the Nix discourse and zulip (and probably github too, I haven’t checked) is flooded with shit exactly like this. it’s a great way to sap the energy from a movement, and I fear that’s exactly what’s going on.
Aaron notably doesn’t comment on governance. “Some marginalized people attended some meetings of the group” implies to him that the system is inclusive.
it’s kind of amazing how many open source spaces I’ve left after the organizers have said some vacuous shit like that — no problems recognized, no changes needed, just “we’re already inclusive because marginalized folks are interested in what we’re doing (and a lot of them don’t have a choice but to engage with us)”. folks like Aaron never bring examples or anecdotes of how they’ve helped marginalized folks — because they haven’t.
zulip
This name screams thing that already exists but worse. I can’t imagine saying “zulip” as part of a serious conversation.
Why do people do this?
What do you mean? Zulip wasn’t really a clone of anything originally, it was an attempt to make an application like Zephyr but for web clients, and predates Slack for instance. Unless you’re talking about IRC, where I don’t think either IRC or Zulip is particularly better or worse than the other.
speaking of relitigating shit, all of Jeff’s posts are suspicious as fuck, and I’m hoping he’s not given a position of any actual power in Aux (though he’s certainly not the only one seemingly aiming for one today)
Oh look, another person saying “I know nothing, explain it to me” again and again and again while strongly advocating a specific position.
Jake appears to be politely telling him “lol no” unless I’m reading that thread wrong
I believe you’re right, but several more folks seem to be trying shit, and I hope that Jake stays strong in spite of the influx
I suspect at some point Jake is going have to just tell several people to fuck off
jeffy appears to be afflicted by logorrhea, and it leaves me feeling pre-exhausted
“logorrhea”: Greek for “writes like wet shit”
New developments – someone proposes “OK, what if we’re in irreconcilable difference with the racists?” and two people pile on to say (respectively) “Well, we’ll have to find (vaguely specified) ‘workarounds’” and “Well, we can’t kick them out, that would be a disaster.”
A third person points out that some of the people in the thread are opposed to quotas but implied they would support quotas if we made an applicant list first (and allowed for the possibility that only white men would appear on the list, rendering the quota system moot) – so we should do that.
Specifically – nat418 sez:
I believe that we live in a society in which some classes of people are exploited by others, and that the acknowledgement of this reality—let alone measures to remediate it—are often percieved as “unfair” or “conflictual” by members of the exploiting classes. I think the real conflict is already ongoing, we are enmeshed within it, and that if we want to live as honorable and dignfied persons we must take up the cause of justice and the common good.
nim65s:
I personally agree with @nat-418 here, but I acknowledge some others do not, and I don’t think one side could convince the other. I also don’t think we can compromise: this is a boolean question. Therefore, to find a consensus, I think we should explore workarounds.
nat418 sez:
What workarounds? Seems like if we can’t agree on basic matters like “marginalized groups should be represented” then we should simply part ways.
tmarkov:
This is a very non-obvious statement.
The goal of the mix community is ultimately to make nix and NisOS as good as possible.
Parting ways is a huge negative for the ecosystem overall. If it is unavoidable, I guess I’ll personally leave all other consideration aside and advocate for whatever would cause the least amount of people splitting off whatever it might be.
Colin:
i’m not confident that’s pinpointing a hard disagreement. my read of this thread is:
- marginalized individuals should be represented.
- representation is better maximized by composing a diverse assembly from available applicants, rather than within the process by which we obtain applicants.
- uncertainty around how “hard” this requirement is; how critical is representation within assembly composition to ensuring representation in its downstream processes; hypotheticals in what to do if there aren’t enough applicants with which to form a diverse assembly.
