If the author's theory were true and social media dynamics were indeed compressing the Overton window, wouldn't these sorts of "the Overton window is way too wide" posts be exactly the reaction one would expect to it on social media? Thinking that extremism is running rampant is what it feels like to be the thought police from the inside.
I think both you and the commenter you responded to are misreading the article. I read it as 'hey, currently everyone on social media is discussing $latest US political news, posting over-directed short-form content, etc., so you posting a family photo, a photo of your favourite plant, sharing a favourite song, or a passage of a book you're reading would be considered odd, weird, despite being a completely normal thing to do and many people used to do regularly.'
Really? I don't, and self-censor in tune with that. shrug
Also how many of the posts you see hit the front pages or become viral? Are you sure they aren't shunned and ostricised by not being awarded comments/likes/shares?
I agree. This is exemplified by social media’s constant refrain to join “the conversation.” The subtext is you joining in to talk about what’s relevant, which, of course, ends up being the current talking points of the world/your niche.
In this way, social media can be almost unbearably lonely for me. So many people corralled to talk about that which gets them Internet Points. But they seem like they’re right there.
Concrete example is I’m trying to learn how to build a tone for djent metal, which is a highly syncopated guitar sound that needs special considerations from your signal chain to achieve a distorted, highly staccato (at times) clear tone. I find a lot of discussion when it was fresh (2010-2015) but have difficulty getting much discussion on it nowadays because it’s not seen as fresh. Is it because it is somewhat niche? Absolutely. But even the people that are into it are much less enthused. It’s like the info has to be dug up vs being easily passed around.
Yeah the fact that that statement got so much pushback in the comments sort of speaks for itself. I think in some cases, exposure to other views (or caricatures of them) is being confused with a widening Overton window in one's own group.
> The "police state" is the one ensuring your family's safety. In our modern societies, we have outsourced the monopoly on violence to the police state, so that we can focus on work and hobbies, and that comes at the expense of trusting the state and holding it accountable through democracy.
My family is approximately infinitely more likely to be considered a "perpetrator" of a crime internet deanonymization will be used to prosecute (piracy, bad opinions, dealing in the wrong kind of crypto coins, ordering the wrong kind of chemicals from India) than to be a "victim" in our own estimation, so at least in this particular domain the "police state" is only ensuring the interests of some others, at the expense of my family's safety (which they could and would directly compromise using the violence they have monopolised).
> Curios how liberal you'd be with the criminal who'd wronged you. Mercy towards criminals is a crime towards their victims.
Most societies that we would consider worth living in hold up the principle that matters of justice should be decided by the impartial and uninvolved. If the victim's feelings should determine the punishment, what would stop any petty theft and spicy insult (for the vast majority of countries where those are considered crimes) from being answered with the death penalty?
>Most societies that we would consider worth living in hold up the principle that matters of justice should be decided by the impartial and uninvolved
Please, don't twist my words, I never said the victim should be the judge. I asked how would the victim feel if criminality had safe spaces where they could avoid justice because they feel like the law is unfair with them.
>If the victim's feelings should determine the punishment
In "most societies that we would consider worth living" as per your words, the victim's feelings are always taken into account in court that determines sentencing. Case in point, men and women get disproportionate sentences in the west for the exact same crime, like sexual abuse for instance.
A lot of the kinds of crimes we're discussing here are things like being homosexual in the Middle East, where there is no victim, only a transgression imagined by religious nuts.
Yes, it's good that those people have a place to go. Happy Pride.
>A lot of the kinds of crimes we're discussing here are things like being homosexual in the Middle East
Not sure why you had to go make that parallel but it really isn't. You can control yourself from committing crimes, you can't control yourself from being born gay.
The statement's recent place in the public consciousness is largely because it was used as a pro-police slogan against the BLM/"police abolition" movement in the US. The Rust community, being overwhelmingly progressive, is already sensitive about supposed dogwhistles, as well as words that cause them negative associations, in computing (in the vein of "master"->"main" renamings); having that slogan used as a metaphor for keeping out changes that they want in a technical debate would be felt by some of them as an open taunt or provocation.
Hah, maybe Ted Ts'o is a savvier political operator than I took him for. Invoking a seemingly innocuous (to the mainstream) phrase with heavy undercurrents (to a minority) just to trigger their ire and making them seem unreasonable to any outsider is a great strategy if you have as yet been unsuccessful refuting the central arguments for Rust in the kernel on technical grounds.
...except I figure that at least in the US (where most of the people who can exert pressure on Linux development are located), the phrase's use in this capacity is actually fairly widely known. (It even takes up a significant part of the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line)
It seems more likely to me that he used it out of a lack of political savvy than out of an excess of it, and that the pressure will now mount and he will be forced to make an apology or resign outright. It's unlikely that activists would take ignorance as an excuse, since they tend to consider ignorance of social justice conflicts to be a moral failing in itself.
I’m from the US. I had no idea “the thin blue line” carried any negative baggage with it.
Though to be fair, I tend to assume that everything has baggage with someone somewhere, since I’ve worked with people (middle aged white men, to be clear) who managed to be offended on other people’s behalf with nearly anything I said. For example, I never learned how to refer to women: saying any of ladies, girls, guys, or women, got me in hot water. I quit that job before I ever learned the secret, non sexist way to speak of or address women.
So, while I’m not surprised a middle aged white dude is upset by “the thin blue line”, I do have a natural inclination to sympathize with whoever used it.
The secret is not to refer to woman or man. They are all persons, and the gender they have, has nothing to do with their qualifications or fitness for the job.
I like and use Rust as a language but if you look at the way the foundation and community manages itself maybe it indeed would be best to keep it out of the kernel if this childish behavior comes with it.
It's as predictable as it is concerning how much the Rust community has hitched its wagon to the US progressive movement. Is this an attempt to remove an adversary in an engineering debate by appealing to a political alliance? Or an attempt to remove a political adversary by appealing to engineering arguments? Either way, both politics and engineering are bound to suffer for it.
How does it not? His resignation is a direct reaction to the circumstances surrounding the resignation of a core Rust-in-the-kernel personality over an argument about Rust in the kernel, and as the article points out his primary area of activity is another project (Rusticl) to introduce Rust into core Linux infrastructure (Mesa).
> "no one will be forced to use Rust in the Kernel"
Is this true, though? One reason for this altercation seems to be the basic circumstance that in Linux kernel development, if there is a dependency between two pieces of code A and B, the responsibility to keep B consistent with changes to A lies, in order, with anyone proposing patches to A, the subsystem maintainer for A, and finally the subsystem maintainer for B. If B is Rust code, such as a binding, then that's potentially up to 3 people who don't want to use Rust being forced to use Rust.
They're not "forced to use Rust". They are maybe forced to work with Rust developers of whichever subsystem needs to be updated, but that would always have been the case with the C developers of whichever subsystem needs to be updated too.
I don't think that is a correct interpretation. As I understand it, Linux does not have a notion of someone being obliged to help facilitate a patch, especially if it's not the narrow case of a maintainer and a patch to the subsystem they are in charge of. What do you do if you are a C developer modifying system A, your change has implications for system B which includes Rust code, and none of the Rust developers involved with B care to volunteer time to draft the necessary changes to Rust code for you?
The same situation of course also arises between C-only subsystems, but then the natural solution is that you have to go and understand system B well enough yourself that you can make the necessary changes to it and submit them as part of your patch. In that situation you are "forced to use C", but that's a free square because you are always forced to use C to contribute to Linux code.
>They're not "forced to use Rust". They are maybe forced to work with Rust developers of whichever subsystem needs to be updated
So if the maintainer of subsystem X can be forced to work with the rust developers of their own subsystem, then that rust developer just got promoted to co-maintainer with veto power. Effectively that's what they'd be, right? I can see why maintainers might not like that. Especially if they don't think the rust dev is enough of a subject matter expert on the subsystem.
If a subsystem C developer makes a change and introduces a bug in another driver or subsystem (also written in C) as a result, then you would expect them to be able to help at least insofar as explaining what they changed.
I've been in a spot kinda like this. I've maintained C++ with python interfaces. In my case I wrote both. I know how interlocked the changes were. If I touched code that was exposed to the python, I updated the python interface and the consumers of that python interface.
It was nothing like making changes that cut across into another developer's C++ code (hell, I would even update their python interfaces/consumers too). That was temporary coordination. The python part was much more frequent and required much more detailed understanding of the internal APIs, not just the surface.
Having someone else responsible for the python part would have come at a huge cost to velocity as the vast majority of my changes would be blocked on their portion. It's ridiculous to imply it's equivalent to coordinating changes with another subsystem.
It's absolutely not true, it's one of the lies being told by Rust 4 Linux people. The end goal is absolutely to replace every last line of C code with Rust, and that's what they will openly tell you if you speak to them behind closed doors. That's why there is always an implicit threat directed at the C maintainers about job loss or "being on the right side of history". The Rust 4 Linux people are absolutely attempting a hostile takeover and nobody should believe a word that comes out of their mouths in public mailing lists when they are contradicting it so consistently behind closed doors.
I do wonder if Linus is actually opposed to Rust in the kernel, but for whatever reason thinks that he can't afford to openly ban it or do anything beyond deniably letting it be obstructed by maintainers. The Rust language project and community are political and politically savvy in ways that few other open-source infrastructure projects are - it seems conceivable that if he declared against it, this might result in personal attacks and pressure on key backers/sponsors that would endanger his position or Linux itself.
I think you are making a mistake in assuming that the social dynamics around censorship in China are fundamentally that different from the ones around censorship in the US or other countries.
You could similarly argue that it is "funny" how every US business that builds something that can move around information must be knowledgeable about statistics that break down criminality or IQ by census race, or biological sex differences, or all manners of other "forbidden" information - but of course as members of the same social stratum as the people involved in such businesses in the US, we are not actually that worried about the possibility that our fellow tech elites will see the information they were supposed to censor and come in droves to want to introduce slavery or the Handmaid's Tale world or whatever. We consider the "forbidden" information merely wrong, evil, misguided or miscontextualised, and broadly trust our peers to see it in the same way. The real danger is instead if some other people, parts of the scary masses we don't have a good grasp of, are exposed to those memes and are misled into drawing conclusions that we know to be inappropriate, or at least unacceptable.
It's easy to imagine that a Chinese LLM wrangler would feel much the same: trustworthy, well-adjusted people know about Tiananmen Square and the Uyghurs anyway but understand that this information has to be seen in context and is prone to be interpreted in problematic ways, but who knows what would happen if we allowed uneducated and naive people to be exposed to it, and be led astray by cynical demagogues and foreign agitators?
