Reading Windschuttle's "Fabrication of Aboriginal History" along with the heavily critical responses in "Whitewash" was a fascinating intellectual exercise. I went in quite neutral on the issue and came out convinced that, while there are some factual issues in Winschuttle's account, the thrust of his argument was correct and that Australian history was in deep trouble as a discipline. The essays in Whitewash show all the weaknesses described in the article above - they are filled with motivated reasoning by people who are very strongly constrained in the conclusions they are able to reach, both by ideology and by social pressures from their peers.
C2 was an incredible place at its peak - I was lucky to have started my career while the community was still (only just) functional. Looking back, it's hard to over-state how formative my time on C2 was - not only did I learn a lot about pattern languages, and coding, but the Wiki idea and the way the community operated is something I still think about today.
C2 was a utopian vision of well-informed, kind, co-operative people working together in a radically open and egalitarian way. And it really did work, for a while. Unfortunately, the reasons why C2 ultimately died have been obscured by a well-meaning process of pruning that I think is meant to remove the "bad stuff" and leave only the "good stuff" for posterity. This is a shame, because the truth really is instructive - a few very prolific, toxic, borderline delusional people started dominating the wiki to the extent that more reasonable contributors just moved on. The C2 community started with an assumption that everyone could be reasoned with, and tried to handle the situation kindly and rationally. It was amazing to see the damage a very small number of people - basically just two - could do to a whole community of hundreds of well-meaning but naive people. It got to the point where there were pages dedicated to trying to think about the problems these people posed, with endless discussions about the paradox of tolerance and handling things through openness and kindness, and small factions arguing for permanent bans. Ultimately I think both badd actors _were_ banned, but by then it was too late - all the air was sucked out of the community. Watching the death of C2 unfold really darkened my view about the prospects of truly open societies, and deeply informed work that I've done on building communities since.
Today, nearly all signs of the way this devastation played out have been erased from history. If you search for the names of the malignant characters there are a few mentions here and there, but there's no way to piece together the true sequence of events. I think an important part of C2's story, and one that is more relevant today than ever, has been lost as a consequence. I'm sure Ward has the full edit history of the wiki around, and I think he should publish it, complete and unvarnished, so we can study it and learn from it.
I had never heard of her, but decided to take a look at her content to try to tease together some part of her story. I sensed from the coverage that something was being elided here, and I was right.
It's clear she struggled with depression and some sort of compulsion to live in public in a painful, raw way, pretty much all her adult life. Like many people in her circumstances, she had a love-hate relationship with an audience that often abused her, but was also the source of her income. It's also clear that all of this took a turn for the worse recently. Less than a year ago she posted this rambling, semi-coherent rant that has since been scrubbed from her blog:
In it, she speaks about her history of mental illness, body dysphoria and attempted suicide. She also says some things about gender dysphoria: she objects to the fact that affirmation is the only treatment offered, is scornful of neo-pronouns, hints that she feels her non-binary children have been swept up in a social contagion, and praises the bravery of de-transitioners. Needless to say, people did not take this kindly, as the comments on her Instagram around this time shoes:
She was subjected to an enormous torrent of self-righteous abuse by her fanbase in the wake of this. Podcasts were made, Reddit threads savaged her, Twitter did its sociopathic thing, and it dragged on for weeks and weeks.
I'm not saying her fanbase bullied her to death. But I am saying that the way she was treated surely didn't help.
We chose sqlx for a SQLite based project because it provides a reasonable async interface, and our experience has not been great. Development momentum has been poor, PRs and issue reports are languishing, the developer is unresponsive to ergonomic and technical feedback, sqlite doesn't seem to be a priority, and the fundamental mechanism for compile-time query validation is very, very flawed. As our project has become more important to us, we've become more and more tempted to write our own SQLite library (maybe forking some parts of sqlx).
I'm not talking about free speech absolutism. What I'm describing here is a specific US-centered cultural phenomenon - thin-skinned, hypocritical tribalism that has turned people against each other, where every conversation that strays outside of narrow doctrinaire bounds, however innocuous or well-intentioned, might be reported on by a remorseless army of cruel snitches ever hungry to find some way to elevate themselves by destroying others. It's the very opposite of being kind or considerate, and, having seen its effects on colleagues, I can't imagine anything more damaging to "team morale". Freddie De Boer has a pungent phrase for this - "planet of cops" - and his essay is worth reading:
I feel focus on the first amendment gives people of this bent cover: it lets them exert incredible power over speech in every practical way, while claiming that free speech is intact because there's no violation of the constitution. The fact that we need to clearly rebut people like this is exactly one of the reasons why I feel over-indexing on the constitution is unhelpful.
The US constitution protects controversial speech, in the sense that government punishment is not meted out to people who step out of line. The limits of this are immediately apparent when you ask if people functionally have the ability to speak freely from within US institutions of academia, journalism, or large corporations. I work with colleagues in all of these from all over the world, and nobody is more afraid of saying the wrong thing and having their lives ruined than Americans. The fear is palpable and ever-present. So again, how successful has the first amendment really been here? The frequent response to this is "freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences", which is exactly the kind of legalistic attitude we have to get away from. Real freedom of speech means exactly the ability to say controversial things without suffering disproportionate harm, and I just don't think the US is doing markedly better than the rest of the free world on this front.
Oh? How successful do you think the US constitutional mechanism has really been in protecting free speech? And by "free speech" here, I mean exactly the broader sense, not constrained by a narrow constitutionalist view. To take one facet of the question, consider the World Press Freedom Index:
The country I live in (New Zealand) has no constitutional free speech guarantees, and ranks 11th. The US ranks 42nd, behind East Timor, Jamaica, Slovakia, South Africa, and many other places I imagine your average American would not associate with free speech. Now, I have quibbles with the way the Press Freedom Index is assembled, and it only captures one narrow (but important) aspect of what we care about when we speak about free speech. That notwithstanding, my question to you is this: scanning down that list of countries, does it perhaps occur to you that the US may have something to learn from us, rather than the other way round?
Sorry, but this is just the kind of narrow parochialism I'm complaining about. I said "the vast majority of the world", and I stand by that - the idea that ordinary people in China, India, Africa, the Pacific and so on give one iota of a damn about US law is completely absurd. Furthermore, this attitude is a fantasy even within the Anglosphere - I live in New Zealand, and I bet not one person in 100 could give me a clear statement of what rights the 1st amendment guarantees and what its limits are, beyond the barest outline.
My heart sinks when I see this sort of parochial US-centric definition of free speech. The vast majority of the world is not protected by and has no interest in US constitutional rights. The principles of free speech are universal, much more important and much broader than the US constitution. There are many ways to foster and promote free speech that has nothing to do with US law. Yes, we're often discussing US companies when this topic comes up, but you should realise that people outside the United States are not covered by US constitutional guarantees, and US companies don't treat us like we are. We must foster a discussion where the principles of free speech are seen to be important outside of this narrow, legalistic, US-centered sense.
This is a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" question. It depends on the developer workstation, which file they're currently working on, etc. That said, we're talking about incremental compile times here, not total project from-scratch compile times. A lag of a few seconds really makes a difference to developer comfort - I'd say, when it's an issue, we're talking about rust-analyzer responsiveness (mainly due to cargo check on save, which can be disabled) of a 3-8 seconds, and delays in running unit tests of 5-20 seconds. I work on a super beefy ThreadRipper monster so I'm less affected, but colleagues on under-powered laptops suffer a lot.
While there was some stink around his departure, he's not one of the contributors I'm concerned about here. I'm thinking more of people working on deep technical issues around the language and type system.
I don't want to list specific contributors here. We often have no information on why people left the project - there might be all sorts of personal factors. I will say that my broader sentiment - that Rust's momentum has slowed, that it's not delivering on its commitments in a timely way, that there are concerns about it's ability to deliver in future - has been expressed publicly by high profile past core contributors:
This is absolutely a pain point for us, working on a very large Rust project. In particular, incremental compile times are absolutely critical for developer comfort, and by far the most common complaint working on our codebase is that developer tooling, IDEs and running unit tests is slow. We've done everything that can reasonably be done - splitting the project into crates, using mold as a linker (the single biggest improvement), etc. Without a really big improvement to incremental compile, we will have a continuing drag on our development momentum.
This sounds great, but I don't think Rust has the complement of highly skilled core developers needed to tackle something this ambitious. I'm a close observer of the Rust project, and my impression is that Rust's core development team has been hollowed out over the past few years - there's been a string of quiet departures, which sadly included some of the most powerful contributors. The Rust project is quite secretive and opaque about its internal politics, so I don't know if there's any unified reason for the attrition, and I don't think it's useful to try to read the tea leaves. At this point, I'm just keen to be reassured that Rust has the momentum to complete things like async and shore up holes in the type system on a reasonable timescale.
I'm very interested in this area, but I've never been able to get a handle on what's going on in this particular project. There's no coherent explanation of the technical aspects, no documentation, hours and hours of rambling videos, the repository linked from the site is an unstructured grab-bag that revealed nothing enlightening after 15 minutes of rooting around in it. There's also a lot of far-fetched, hubristic ideas and mumbo-jumbo that doesn't pass the sniff test for me. I get whiffs of Terry Davis-style outsider art.
On the other hand, he seems to have an academic pedigree and has presented at serious conferences, so it might be that there's something interesting here that I'm missing. I just can't tell - if anyone else is more enlightened, I'd be interested to hear about it.
The more interesting question is how long it will be until we have open, freely available models that are competitive with closed models. It's now clear that everything is going to be disrupted by generative AI - we haven't even begun to think through the consequences. I would much rather have a world where everyone has unfettered access to these capabilities, even if the risks of societal disruption are extreme, than have them controlled by the tech princelings of Silicon Valley.
We urgently need to fund efforts to create the technology to train and publish open models in a distributed way.
I followed the stoush between DeLong and Graeber closely, and my strong impression is that Graeber was thin-skinned, vengeful, often inaccurate and unable to stand criticism. DeLong was a bit trolly, but nothing a competent, stable writer shouldn't have been able to handle. This impression is also borne out by my own reading of Graeber's work, and his reprehensible actions as a working academic:
Obviously people need to make up their own mind, but I do hope that they'd read what Singal actually writes and not base their opinion on a mean-spirited, vengeful hit-piece like this.
Almost nobody who reads this but doesn't already know who Jesse Singal is will bother to do the mountains of reading needed to figure out the reality, so I feel that I need to provide a counterpoint. I'm quite familiar with Singal, and my reading is that he's judicious, fair, scrupulous, compassionate, but willing to explore touchy issues in a way that triggers his critics. We need more like him, and I encourage people who are interested enough to take a look and come to their own conclusions.
https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/1876492058/ref=dbs_a_de...
https://www.amazon.com/Whitewash-Windschuttles-Fabrication-A...