In short, a hostile takeover forced by Shopify through Ruby Central.
It was sparked after Ruby Central chose to platform an extremist figure prominently for their last RailsConf against the wishes of the sponsors, losing them a lot of sponsorship money, as well as community support.
This is a little glib, you dropped "Entirely" because you know multiple first hand accounts are actually worth something. If you want to argue the credibility of those accounts, then please be specific about it.
So you critisize Joel because he worked at Shopify. He pointed that out when he wrote the article.
Let's add here that YOU also worked at Shopify, until recently.
IF we are going to be critical, then let's be complete here.
I actually think there is a lot of validity to the statement made that Shopify is NOT a neutral party here. We can dispute how much Shopify was involved, but to assume "all is unsubstantiated" while not even disclosing one's own work at Shopify, feels super-strange here.
> It was sparked after Ruby Central chose to platform an extremist figure prominently for their last RailsConf
This is so incredibly one-sided that it misleads more than it informs.
The person they are talking about is DHH. Inviting the creator of Rails to speak at RailsConf – a conference for Rails – is not the outlandish behaviour this comment makes it sound like.
Agreed. There is a lot of conflation of statements that are not directly connected.
The whole DHH argument, for instance, as well as some people having a vendetta about him, is not, or not directly, related to the hostile take-over of rubygems.org. There is a slight partial overlap, but it is a separate discussion (even if DHH was involved with the take-over via Shopify because he does not like Arko or Shopify wanting more power-control to bully the independent developers at rubygems.org with more corporate rules and restrictions; and, by the way, DHH never mentions Arko's name, but even this is a separate discussion still. For instance I specifically do not care about rails nor DHH really, but the hostile take-over was a complete no-go. Ruby Central really pissed off too many people here and unfortunately there are still many open questions that ruby-core has to think about. I am not necessarily saying all came with malicious intent, because I think there is an english language barrier too in regards to Hiroshi Shibata, but even then it may be better to have someone with better knowledge about the english language in charge of gems; there seems to be some strange disconnect or translation going on between english, into japanese and japanese culture, and it is super-confusing.)
Interesting, I only knew who he was through his "Leaving the cloud" serie of posts.
I am just trying to draw a parallel between the two to try to understand its broader ideology. So some might say both big cities like London and hyperscaler like AWS are:
- very expensive and have become unaffordable for many actors
- limit your freedom to scale and accommodate a very broad range of guests
- under massive surveillance and control
where the comparison stops is:
- AWS offers pretty good security but London is not (and hasn't for a long time)
- It is pretty easy to get kicked out of AWS if you do not follow the rule or pay
NYC has roughly the same stats - 40% of the residents there are foreign-born. This is more to do with low birth rates by natives, so population growth in NYC and London is entirely driven by immigration. The biggest problem is that it's too expensive for most people to have and raise kids in major cities.
What was more troubling to me was that he called the Tommy Robinson rallies "heartwarming". TR was a member of an explicitly fascist, white nationalist party. The rallies were full of signs calling for death to Muslims. Or, in the same blog post, his disproven claims of migrant gang r*pes. On top of that, he has written some really vile things about transgender people.
I would like to go to a tech conference and focus on Ruby, not politics. I'd like to leave my identity home and discuss software engineering and interesting technical ideas. DHH has made that impossible.
> I suspect these "really vile things" will turn out to be not so vile (like JKR)
"Not so vile" things like spreading lies about a female Olymics Boxer's gender, calling her terrible names, and inciting her online followers to harass her? She not only bullies transgender individuals but also targets other women who don't meet her own standards of femininity. If you have no problems with people like that, no wonder you can't fathom why the Ruby community has trouble accepting similar people with open arms.
Evidence for thee, but not for me? You write with such authority on this topic, yet you insist on demanding evidence for even the most basic knowledge surrounding it.
Consider what this conversation was actually about - a male sexual predator, caught pleasuring himself in the showers attached to a girls' changing room, who claimed, when caught, to have a female gender identity:
Setting aside that you're passing claims from a far-right troll as facts, that still doesn’t make it acceptable to equate trans women with sexual predators, both morally and logically. Or are you suggesting that if you can find one male sexual predator, it justifies equating all males with predators? I have a feeling you’d be up in arms about that.
Anyways, it's clear that you're intent on dehumanizing others, even creating a new account for the sole purpose of saying the most vile things, so I'll stop replying here.
The reason that this male sexual predator was allowed to use the female changing room and showers is because he claimed to have a female gender identity.
This illustrates the safeguarding risk in allowing males to use female spaces on the basis of simply saying that they identify as female. It ends up with situations like this: a registered sex offender pleasuring his erect penis in a shower area that young girls are using, and a reluctance of the authorities to stop him and file charges because they're in the thrall of policy that deems self-declared gender identity to be unquestionable.
> are you suggesting that if you can find one male sexual predator, it justifies equating all males with predators
For the purposes of safeguarding, yes. This is much of the reason why we have female-only spaces in the first place, as a preventative against male predation.
Not all males are predatory, but one can be quite sure that the subset of males who disregard and ignore women's and girls' boundaries are. Including the sex offender being discussed in that Twitter conversation. And any other male who demands access to female spaces.
Oh sorry I thought you were talking about DHH. I've been trying to find a link to something awful that he's said but nobody has one.
And as for that incident, "spreading lies" is clearly an exaggeration. That boxers gender is at best debatable. She's clearly on the awkward boundary between genders that sport (and society in general) doesn't really know how to deal with.
> literally equating trans women with sexual predators
Not what she was saying. She was calling out an only-true-scotsmen argument.
Shame on you for promoting libel by spreading unverified claims as fact. Have you even paused to consider what it's like for those on the receiving end of such harmful lies? Or do you, like JKR, revel in it even more after you've thought about it?
The evidence indicates that Khelif is male, with male physiological advantage, and therefore should never have been competing in women's boxing. And it is a matter of record that Khelif withdrew from the Eindhoven Cup rather than take the sex verification tests required to compete.
That proposed lawsuit mentioned in your BBC article near the end of 2024 went nowhere, by the way. How could it? The facts show there was no libel.
I'm not. It's true that I dislike Ruby and prefer everyone would abandon it, but that's orthogonal to the issue we're discussing. In fact I'm saying that the Ruby community is being stupid and shooting themselves in the foot by characterizing relatively mainstream right wing views as "extremism".
If I was being disingenuous I should really encourage this schism!
> It
Dunno if you're a native English speaker or not but the normal way to refer to someone of unknown gender is "they". "It" is offensive.
This doesn't preclude extreme. Not commenting on whether the community's is shooting themselves in the foot or not, just that the reason provided is not a good one for believing so.
> If I was being disingenuous I should really encourage this schism!
I do not think that you are necessarily being disingenuous but misunderstanding the difference of opinion in this way actually seems to encourage said schism.
You have misunderstood why people use the term "extremism".
> Mainstream views can't be extreme by definition.
Of course they can; mainstream views can't be uncommon by definition. Extreme doesn't strictly mean uncommon (not even in a political context), it is also used to mean "high degree", which can include distance from political centrism but can also include, e.g., frustration or flavor of cookie. To give another example, various online "challenges" like the "ice bucket challenge" are extreme but were also relatively mainstream when they were commonly performed and posted online; the term "ice bucket challenge" is still mainstream and the challenge itself is extreme (in fact, the reason it's called a "challenge" is because it is extreme).
Thinking there's too many immigrants might be mainstream (it currently is) but whether or not it's extreme depends on the degree to which it's believed. If it's believed to a high degree (such as "immigration is the worst thing about the capital city of this nation") by a large number of people then it is an extreme mainstream view by definition.
> various online "challenges" like the "ice bucket challenge" are extreme
Ok I think you just have a very abnormal (extreme even?) definition of the word "extreme".
In a political context it literally means "far from the norm". His views are not far from the norm, as much as you might hate that. (I'm not a huge fan either but I'm not going to distort reality to make myself feel better.)
> In a political context it literally means "far from the norm".
No, this is simply what you want it to mean, keeping in mind you're trying to tell other people what they mean with their word choice. Extreme views can be normal and mainstream and typical. There are many normalized-but-extreme views in current mainstream politics.
> Ok I think you just have a very abnormal (extreme even?) definition of the word "extreme".
Pouring a bucket of ice water on your head to bring attention to something is extreme. Like, it's over-the-top and exaggerated. You can disagree but that's kinda moot: someone isn't strictly wrong that it's extreme, you just disagree. You still didn't address the greater point that extreme, as it's being used, is orthogonal to mainstream.
But I guess I can link to a dictionary so you can see that I have a pretty normal (and mild) definition of the word in question. I hope you don't cherry-pick definition 1c, ignoring definitions 1a and 1b, which are, of course, valid.
Maybe 4 is the best definition, seeing as it gives "the extreme political left" as an example usage. It's not obvious to me how "advanced and thoroughgoing" means "not mainstream", though. I wouldn't mind an explanation.
What baffles me is how they have $41k in expenses monthly for so few users. I'd love to see a breakdown of what in their infrastructure is eating up so much money.
Pure speculation, but AFAIK they provided benefits like health insurance to their staff, so even if they weren't offering high salaries I bet a sizable % of that monthly cost is personnel and associated costs.
They put their money (and investors' money) where their mouth was and actually ran a co-op instead of relying heavily on freelancers or cheap outsourced labor. It's unfortunate that doing that hampers sustainability, though.
(Roughly $94k annually per employee as detailed in the 2023 financial update—low for Silicon Valley but high for co-ops / small community sites / "small tech")
I think that's the pretax salary number? (they said "pay", and it was CoL adjusted from their starting $80k target salary in ~2021). They estimated their fully loaded cost in the same update as around $108k per employee (gave total payroll expenses as $36k monthly for four full-time employees). They said in a different update they were using a QSEHRA, which seems to have a cap of $11k per employee, so presumably that covers most of the difference? But maybe I'm just interpreting that completely wrong. I remember they posted about their healthcare coverage woes at one point but I don't remember the details.
That all being said, I don't think this is a huge indictment of Cohost—they had a solid 4 years, and in all likelihood they'd have had to close up sooner if their personal financial situations were more precarious. But a situation where making less than $94k is "precarious" is a very tough one to be trying to starta new social media company in.
It turns out that when you actually pay money to people for their work, it is expensive. That is because the value provided by the labor of humans is, in fact, valuable. However, if you instead just exploit people and take advantage of them, lots of things can be really, really cheap. In fact, they can be so cheap it'd be insane not to take advantage of, some might say...
I'm not sure what happened, the original link worked for me at first but then it started redirecting to the site that was overwhelmed rather than serving the cached content.
Another very interesting point here is, nobody seems to have read the actual post, and gone on about cheap shots against "women" as if were some general object you can collect together.
Like the post explores fictosexualism, the escapism of an AI girlfriend/boyfriend, the general agreed upon sense that its a coping strategy, taking a strange turn into true crime and AI characters, summarizing with that this "AI gf/bf craze" is going to continue to be a minority of people, but that instead this will develop (author's claim) into a sort of erotica, similar to romance novels, and that "romance scams" on places like Instagram may become common.
Like there are like 7 or 8 different subjects one could have a great discussion about from this post alone. Yet we talk about how you can meet a man in VR, how men are bad (?), and that women are in hetro relationships when men are not. It's a strange deviation from the rather intellectual nature of Hacker News.
That no one actually read the post is a much broader problem of HN's unfortunately. In my experience it's just not a concern of moderation's either as it would require them to read every single post.
I think the key point here is actually from the first paragraph.
> HashiCorp’s CEO predicted there would be “no more open source companies in Silicon Valley” unless the community rethinks how it protects innovation.
Open source is literally a license to give the power to the people, the community, such that we allow anyone to contribute and give back. It is not a tool to "protect (your) innovation". It is a very self oriented move built on the greed inherent in capitalism. Basically the opposite of open source and tangentially copyleft.
I think a lot of people forget, especially the newer generations, that open source is not some "good boy points" or graceful gesture you do to others. It's not about you doing a "kind gesture" to the community, open source is a political move to use copyright law against itself to give the ownership right to anyone. Many seem to look past that, and try to seek out a middle ground between "my innovation" and getting the usage/praise from having the code be labelled as open-source. You can even see the Hashicorp CEO misuse the open-source label pretty regularly.
Doing some math on the example courses (300 points for a 45 min course) and the requirement of gaining 50 000 points, that's a whopping 333 hours of just courses.
It was sparked after Ruby Central chose to platform an extremist figure prominently for their last RailsConf against the wishes of the sponsors, losing them a lot of sponsorship money, as well as community support.
https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/
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