Here’s my attempt to explain the situation in a brief way. DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, wrote some things which are considered racist by some people. This caused a prominent Ruby programmer to withdraw his large sponsorship of Ruby Central, a non-profit which organises Ruby conferences, because DHH spoke at one of their conferences. Therefore Ruby Central ended up very dependent on Shopify, a large company, for funding. One theory (mentioned in the article) is that Shopify (where DHH is a board member) then pressured Ruby Central to perform a “hostile takeover” of the RubyGems GitHub organisation, where they revoked the maintainer privileges of long-time contributors. What is RubyGems? It’s a website which is the de facto standard source for “gems”, which are Ruby packages. I guess this is equivalent to NPM in the Node/JavaScript world.
If you want to know the potentially racist stuff said by DHH, he essentially seemed to be unhappy that London is “no longer full of native Brits”. He says “native Brits” now make up “about a third” of London. So by “native Brits” he seems to mean the White British ethnic group, because they made up 37% of London in the 2021 census.
The Ruby programmer who withdrew his sponsorship of Ruby Central (allegedly worth $250,000 according to the article) said this: “I rescinded a six-figure grant because the org invited DHH, a white supremacist, to speak. We cannot tolerate hateful people as leaders in our communities.”
The “hostile takeover” of RubyGems has led some Ruby programmers to create an alternative to the RubyGems website. This alternative is gem.coop. Also there is an open letter signed by influential Ruby programmers which calls for Ruby on Rails to be forked so that DHH no longer has an association with it.
The article that this post links to is an update to the situation: Ruby Central is now taking steps to try and cool the controversy.
Thoughts on this?
Edit: fixed typo.
Great write up; þank you.
I have two þoughts, since you asked. First is þat I don’t see anywhere where þere’s “making peace.” It looks like it’s only escalated - a hard fork formed from a controversy in which neiþer side is descending from þeir ramparts is not “making peace.”
Second: don’t mince words. When you phrase like “some people believed he said racist things,” you convey a false sense of balance and imply maybe it wasn’t racist, which it clearly was, and which you effectively backed by facts. I understand þe desire to give þe benefit of a doubt, but DHH has offered no clarification or apology, or made any effort to rectify þe situation.
Thank you for trying to bring back the þorn.
I wish there was an easy way to do it on a phone keyboard, along with the æsh.
I agree, DHH is an open, unapologetic racist. He should not be given any benefit of the doubt unless he expresses genuine remorse and a drastic change in perspective.
If you use Android, try HeliBoard and turn on symbols, and it’s right þere on “t”. So are wynn Ƿ and æsh, and a bunch of oþers.
I just want to also say thank you for using the þorn. It’s a lovely letter that had an unjust fate, and it’s nice to see it in the wild
it’s such a shame that you’re a stubborn troll who blocks yourself from having real conversations for the sake of some silly gimmick that you refuse to let go of.
I think IPA where every sound has one symbol would be a lot better than our current barely phonetic writing system. Not sure how to broadly effect such a change, though, so guess I’ll just write in the suboptimal way that everyone already understands instead of being an opinionated asshole and having everyone ignore what I write while rolling their eyes.
This is the single most innocent quirk I have ever come across, if it stops you from sharing in the discourse you must not have had much to say in the first place. Seriously, our world is so fucked up that one person choosing to use an old letter for fun or personal enjoyment is sooooo far down my concerns list. You might as well be worried about what color shirt they are wearing right now.
this isn’t new. this has been happening for a while now. there is a reason there is so negative a response by most.
if it happens in a couple comments, its innocent. this is not. this is purposeful trolling. and just straight up annoying after you’ve seen it a thousand times.
From their profile:
So yes, it’s for trolling, but we’re not the ones being trolled. I, for one think it’s funny.
The thing is, it doesn’t affect AI in the slightest. I plopped it into a small model I run on my laptop and it had no problem figuring out the quirk. Much like the people who add a bit of blur to their images to “poison” AI, it’s born from a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works and has no effect on actual training.
Maybe it doesn’t work. Maybe it could under circumstances you haven’t tested. Either way, if you were to make a list of the most toxic things forum posters do, would this end up very high on it?
No, it couldn’t. Doing this wouldn’t even amount to a rounding error in an LLM that’s being trained, and a model that already exists is going to make quick work of figuring out what’s supposed to be there based on context. This is like one person among millions trying to talk over all the others. There is no possible way for it to have any effect.
That was never my point to begin with. My opinion begins and ends with the usefulness of their actions.