I stopped reading at the point he described Basecamp as having imploded.
Can we please at least try to be a little more objective in how we use language?
You may agree or disagree with what Basecamp, now 37signals, did but the company did not “implode”.
Many of their employees - one third - did disagree with what they did and chose to leave.
Was their leaving a protest? Well, maybe. But IIRC they were offered very generous severance terms, which would have made that choice much easier to make and so perhaps robs it of some of its value as a protest.
And what about the company? Well, as far as I can tell, they seem to be doing fine. They’re offering junior devs, was it 125k or 150k US fully remote? Somewhere in that ballpark anyway. And just about anywhere within a certain range of time zones. That’s not a sign of a company that’s struggling.
I have read DHH’s blog post about London, and I am a Brit, so think I can offer a somewhat qualified point of view here. DHH is correct about the demographic changes in London over the past decades, but he’s absolutely wrong to cast Tommy Robinson (aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) as some kind of good faith activist standing up for the rights of ordinary British folks. The guy is a criminal and a low-life grifter. I can’t even really call him a fascist because I’m not convinced he really believes a word he’s saying. So I’ll stick with con-artist.
Back to the post: the most charitable interpretation I can put on it is that DHH simply hasn’t done his homework on Robinson. Is that an accurate characterisation? I honestly don’t know.
And this type of person seems to be exactly why Ruby Central did what it did: To save the projects from being misused as protest tools by histrionic people that make sweeping derogatory remarks about other people whose benign opinions they dislike.
I am not affiliated with either “side” so I allow myself this small outburst of my own because I see no receipts and the tone of this blog post set the stage for it.
This is the decay of the current political discourse.
World views that disparage human beings where previously condemned but the overton window slowly shifted the topic of eg. "degenerates" back into the public. Even though we are thankfully not quite there to talk openly about a final solution (that time might come!).
It started with "edgy humor" and ambigous statements and slowly increased in misantrophy and number.
Ofc it is predominantly the political right that, openly or indirectly, revolves around conservative identity politics and in turn is more susceptible to disgust driven out-group biases.
But this behaviour can be seen on the political left too. As a reaction to the right communicating in dog whistles, they got kind of conditioned on it too and that is IMO the prime motivator of this blog post.
Jared White could have done a better job by collecting more examples of such "hate speech" but to be pedantic here, DHH -- like any reasonable person -- should avoid ambiguity and take a big step back from any ambiguous public communication or at least clarify.
When this open, clear and construstive communication doesnt happen, you can observe stuff like this. Name calling and blame around "banalities". Its just the surfacing part of a bigger conflict, which can be hard to pin point since one side is (intentionally) ambiguous/evasive/ignorant.
Reading DHHs quoted X post is a good example of deteriorating communication:
> @dhh: While the rest of the tech world has mostly moved on from the nonsense of the early 2020s, there are still a few ardent ideologues fighting the last war on Reddit, believing that ridiculous accusations like “nazi” and “fascist” still carry any weight
I wouldnt put a text together, where (1) i am not adressing the other sides concerns, (2) frame them negatively and (3) normalize allegations, others take very serious (nazi, fascism) as wheightless when i am in charge of managing (and uniting) a community. This is a serious red flag.
Sounds rather dramatic. For some reason, the rails community seem to have some drama going on every few years. Wish nodejs or golang would have this kinda thing. I'd be shocked though. I think it is fairly easy to see that the ruby eco-system seems somewhat politically charged.
So making a switch like this can never happen perfectly. You will always have people hurt. The changes do make RubyGems more secure, right? Feelings are hurt, but no software is in danger.
“First-world problems” shouldn’t be seen as an insult, but a celebration! Hurraaaay, I have ascended from the daily toils and tribulations of a life in the third world, so my worries may now include slow laundry machines and air conditioning, not starvation or failed states [party confetti emoji]
What this guy feels about that:
I regret to say I am unable to support an organization which seems unable to publicly disavow a man who has demonstrated numerous times to be a racist, homophobe, transphobe, fatphobe, ableist white nationalist who is now apparently cheering on death via starvation in third world countries
It's too much. I don't have the patience for this. The complaint is so out of left field I have to assume DHH and the RubyCentral guys are right.
"the drama never ends" because people like the author continually attempt to induce it, by doing things like demanding a guest at a tech talk be uninvited because of their non-tech views.
I don't really understand the outrage either. If he was planning on including his political views in the speech, that's something else, but I personally don't give much of a fuck about the political views of anyone, especially wouldn't use it to inform my technology choices.
It seem impossible for some people to allow anyone with dissenting views to their own to even exist anymore, pretty sad set of affairs.
What's the old quote? "Your right to swing your fist ends at the other guys nose?" Perhaps we'd all do better keeping that in mind.
> Shan Cureton and Ruby Central, as of June 10, knew DHH was already weaponizing his return to RailsConf to attack his enemies, because I was the one who shared this information with them.
Mike Perham has been quite vocal on microblogs, and he pulled 250k/year funding from RubyCentral, which is why Shopify is the main sponsor now. AFAIK, he pulled his funding for reasons related to DHH.
The article did not live up to the title and shifts focus to DHH and his political tweets, which is totally irrelevant of RubyCentrals hostile takeover
What is even weirder is that towards the end, after all of the pie throwing, the author ends with "I am done. I am done with this drama." and suggests building a separate ecosystem for Ruby from the ground up
I can barely take the article serious at this point. I am afraid the author caused more damage and confusion than good, if anything, this might even make people feel like what RubyCentral did was right
> DHH would be platformed—and ironically at the very conference he was asked not to keynote in 2022 seemingly as a result of Basecamp’s politically-charged implosion which led to a third of the entire company resigning in protest.
That's a funny way to say that he asked for people to refrain from politics when they're at work and a third of the company said no and left, I really struggle to see this in a bad light. I don't have beefs on this whole discussion and only sporadically follow DHH blog posts, I think the main conflict people are having with his views is that work is not just work anymore, people are expected to share a vision, to have the same cliques, to live the same live, work became for some people what family, church or the local community used to be for most before that. See for example https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/the-company-isnt-a-family-... or his book "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work".
I was talking to a friend who worked in the US and the UK about the culture differences, and he mentioned how the US leaned more towards a family culture where the UK was more of a pub culture. On a family you feel required to cope with whatever bs is thrown at you because you're supposed to stick together. On a pub the more off putting you are the more chances people are not gonna talk to you.
I read through this and got to this bit. The first paragraph is DHH. The second paragraph is the author's interpretation.
>> “First-world problems” shouldn’t be seen as an insult, but a celebration! Hurraaaay, I have ascended from the daily toils and tribulations of a life in the third world, so my worries may now include slow laundry machines and air conditioning, not starvation or failed states
> I regret to say I am unable to support an organization which seems unable to publicly disavow a man who has demonstrated numerous times to be a racist, homophobe, transphobe, fatphobe, ableist white nationalist who is now apparently cheering on death via starvation in third world countries.
The quote clearly doesn't "cheer on death via starvation". Given that, I'm extremely doubtful about the author's other claims that DHH is a fatphobe, homophobe, thisphobe, thatphobe.... If the author can be this silly and/or dishonest about something he himself quotes, then why should I trust anything else he says?
Calling this "hateful to therapists" is just ridiculous. DHH is arguing that there are good alternatives to therapy! There is nothing remotely close to hate in the whole article.
Maybe DHH is actually a total Nazi - I'd never heard of the guy till today. What we can clearly see is that Jared White is either a liar or an idiot.
I'm sorry to see this sort of nonsense still thriving, and it is 100% right that it should have been left behind. More than that - people who slander others deserve to be shamed themselves.
This is unrelated to Ruby and the author is against free speech because he wants to professionaly censor someone because of his work-unrelated opinions.
Plus there are perfectly valid reasons to prefer some categories of people over others. It has nothing to do with hate or fascism, it's only natural.
I'm a DINK (double-income no kids) and I don't feel the hate of DDH, I only see someone who thinks it's worthwhile to be a parent and it's a dead end not to be. It's technically true and you can't argue against that anyway.
The only direct quote from DHH in the article seems to be this, which is quoted as being offensive (?):
> “First-world problems” shouldn’t be seen as an insult, but a celebration! Hurraaaay, I have ascended from the daily toils and tribulations of a life in the third world, so my worries may now include slow laundry machines and air conditioning, not starvation or failed states
How is this offensive? Seems like a nothing burger.
I don't know anything about this topic other than what was in this post.
> I regret to say I am unable to support an organization which seems unable to publicly disavow a man [...] who is now apparently cheering on death via starvation in third world countries.
I do not understand how such conclusion could be drawn, I even started asking myself how any of this was related to the current issue with RubyCentral and RubyGems?
I really had no idea of DHH's politics and I read through the linked posts and, while I don't agree with a bunch of what DHH said, none strike me as excessively extreme. Worth debating? Sure. Worth protesting? Less sure.
I will say DHH's post on Trump's return is like reading something from an alternate universe (https://world.hey.com/dhh/mega-a0f62cd4). What optimism was there in Trump's second campaign? Trump promised exactly what he's doing: retribution, tariffs, self-dealing and corruption, accelerating climate change, etc. I'm curious DHH's assessment of the past ~9 months and how it matches with his original "optimism".
Yeah I came here to say this, if the author somehow understood that this is cheering for starving children, I believe he has some comperhension issues.
Hate to break it to you but, sample size of 9, my entire friend group talks like this. We're all in our 30s.
Language changes. The construction "what's up" and its extension "what's up with ..." didn't become widely accepted until Bugs Bunny brought it into the mainstream, and yet you use it as naturally as anything else at the beginning of your message.
I don't know that it's particularly constructive to dish on this post purely on that account.
dak89|5 months ago
mvdtnz|5 months ago
bartread|5 months ago
Can we please at least try to be a little more objective in how we use language?
You may agree or disagree with what Basecamp, now 37signals, did but the company did not “implode”.
Many of their employees - one third - did disagree with what they did and chose to leave.
Was their leaving a protest? Well, maybe. But IIRC they were offered very generous severance terms, which would have made that choice much easier to make and so perhaps robs it of some of its value as a protest.
And what about the company? Well, as far as I can tell, they seem to be doing fine. They’re offering junior devs, was it 125k or 150k US fully remote? Somewhere in that ballpark anyway. And just about anywhere within a certain range of time zones. That’s not a sign of a company that’s struggling.
I have read DHH’s blog post about London, and I am a Brit, so think I can offer a somewhat qualified point of view here. DHH is correct about the demographic changes in London over the past decades, but he’s absolutely wrong to cast Tommy Robinson (aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) as some kind of good faith activist standing up for the rights of ordinary British folks. The guy is a criminal and a low-life grifter. I can’t even really call him a fascist because I’m not convinced he really believes a word he’s saying. So I’ll stick with con-artist.
Back to the post: the most charitable interpretation I can put on it is that DHH simply hasn’t done his homework on Robinson. Is that an accurate characterisation? I honestly don’t know.
csmattryder|5 months ago
[deleted]
simianparrot|5 months ago
I am not affiliated with either “side” so I allow myself this small outburst of my own because I see no receipts and the tone of this blog post set the stage for it.
AlexeyBelov|5 months ago
Then why are you carrying water for exclusively one "side"?
throwawayqqq11|5 months ago
World views that disparage human beings where previously condemned but the overton window slowly shifted the topic of eg. "degenerates" back into the public. Even though we are thankfully not quite there to talk openly about a final solution (that time might come!).
It started with "edgy humor" and ambigous statements and slowly increased in misantrophy and number.
Ofc it is predominantly the political right that, openly or indirectly, revolves around conservative identity politics and in turn is more susceptible to disgust driven out-group biases.
But this behaviour can be seen on the political left too. As a reaction to the right communicating in dog whistles, they got kind of conditioned on it too and that is IMO the prime motivator of this blog post.
Jared White could have done a better job by collecting more examples of such "hate speech" but to be pedantic here, DHH -- like any reasonable person -- should avoid ambiguity and take a big step back from any ambiguous public communication or at least clarify.
When this open, clear and construstive communication doesnt happen, you can observe stuff like this. Name calling and blame around "banalities". Its just the surfacing part of a bigger conflict, which can be hard to pin point since one side is (intentionally) ambiguous/evasive/ignorant.
Reading DHHs quoted X post is a good example of deteriorating communication:
> @dhh: While the rest of the tech world has mostly moved on from the nonsense of the early 2020s, there are still a few ardent ideologues fighting the last war on Reddit, believing that ridiculous accusations like “nazi” and “fascist” still carry any weight
I wouldnt put a text together, where (1) i am not adressing the other sides concerns, (2) frame them negatively and (3) normalize allegations, others take very serious (nazi, fascism) as wheightless when i am in charge of managing (and uniting) a community. This is a serious red flag.
philipallstar|5 months ago
jemiluv8|5 months ago
veltas|5 months ago
pmdr|5 months ago
dncornholio|5 months ago
mijoharas|5 months ago
All the maintainers quit, including the single security engineer. The code is now unmaintained. There's a good argue that security has been reduced.
renewiltord|5 months ago
“First-world problems” shouldn’t be seen as an insult, but a celebration! Hurraaaay, I have ascended from the daily toils and tribulations of a life in the third world, so my worries may now include slow laundry machines and air conditioning, not starvation or failed states [party confetti emoji]
What this guy feels about that:
I regret to say I am unable to support an organization which seems unable to publicly disavow a man who has demonstrated numerous times to be a racist, homophobe, transphobe, fatphobe, ableist white nationalist who is now apparently cheering on death via starvation in third world countries
It's too much. I don't have the patience for this. The complaint is so out of left field I have to assume DHH and the RubyCentral guys are right.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|5 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
IncreasePosts|5 months ago
cyberpunk|5 months ago
It seem impossible for some people to allow anyone with dissenting views to their own to even exist anymore, pretty sad set of affairs.
What's the old quote? "Your right to swing your fist ends at the other guys nose?" Perhaps we'd all do better keeping that in mind.
wg0|5 months ago
What's that about? Who are DHH enemies here?
whstl|5 months ago
https://mastodon.xyz/@mperham
Alifatisk|5 months ago
What is even weirder is that towards the end, after all of the pie throwing, the author ends with "I am done. I am done with this drama." and suggests building a separate ecosystem for Ruby from the ground up
I can barely take the article serious at this point. I am afraid the author caused more damage and confusion than good, if anything, this might even make people feel like what RubyCentral did was right
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
mtrovo|5 months ago
That's a funny way to say that he asked for people to refrain from politics when they're at work and a third of the company said no and left, I really struggle to see this in a bad light. I don't have beefs on this whole discussion and only sporadically follow DHH blog posts, I think the main conflict people are having with his views is that work is not just work anymore, people are expected to share a vision, to have the same cliques, to live the same live, work became for some people what family, church or the local community used to be for most before that. See for example https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/the-company-isnt-a-family-... or his book "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work".
I was talking to a friend who worked in the US and the UK about the culture differences, and he mentioned how the US leaned more towards a family culture where the UK was more of a pub culture. On a family you feel required to cope with whatever bs is thrown at you because you're supposed to stick together. On a pub the more off putting you are the more chances people are not gonna talk to you.
IncreasePosts|5 months ago
AOE9|5 months ago
mijoharas|5 months ago
Essentially, he is posting articles[1] saying he wants fewer non-white people in London.[2].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303111
[1] https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45303305
whstl|5 months ago
Which sucks because there is real fascism in some parts of society. But DHH? I have no idea.
edent|5 months ago
dash2|5 months ago
>> “First-world problems” shouldn’t be seen as an insult, but a celebration! Hurraaaay, I have ascended from the daily toils and tribulations of a life in the third world, so my worries may now include slow laundry machines and air conditioning, not starvation or failed states
> I regret to say I am unable to support an organization which seems unable to publicly disavow a man who has demonstrated numerous times to be a racist, homophobe, transphobe, fatphobe, ableist white nationalist who is now apparently cheering on death via starvation in third world countries.
The quote clearly doesn't "cheer on death via starvation". Given that, I'm extremely doubtful about the author's other claims that DHH is a fatphobe, homophobe, thisphobe, thatphobe.... If the author can be this silly and/or dishonest about something he himself quotes, then why should I trust anything else he says?
I then went and checked one of his links to DHH, which he describes as being "hateful to therapists". Here, check it yourself: https://world.hey.com/dhh/building-competency-is-better-than...
Calling this "hateful to therapists" is just ridiculous. DHH is arguing that there are good alternatives to therapy! There is nothing remotely close to hate in the whole article.
Maybe DHH is actually a total Nazi - I'd never heard of the guy till today. What we can clearly see is that Jared White is either a liar or an idiot.
I'm sorry to see this sort of nonsense still thriving, and it is 100% right that it should have been left behind. More than that - people who slander others deserve to be shamed themselves.
dominicrose|5 months ago
Plus there are perfectly valid reasons to prefer some categories of people over others. It has nothing to do with hate or fascism, it's only natural.
I'm a DINK (double-income no kids) and I don't feel the hate of DDH, I only see someone who thinks it's worthwhile to be a parent and it's a dead end not to be. It's technically true and you can't argue against that anyway.
pmdr|5 months ago
Maro|5 months ago
> “First-world problems” shouldn’t be seen as an insult, but a celebration! Hurraaaay, I have ascended from the daily toils and tribulations of a life in the third world, so my worries may now include slow laundry machines and air conditioning, not starvation or failed states
How is this offensive? Seems like a nothing burger.
I don't know anything about this topic other than what was in this post.
Alifatisk|5 months ago
> I regret to say I am unable to support an organization which seems unable to publicly disavow a man [...] who is now apparently cheering on death via starvation in third world countries.
I do not understand how such conclusion could be drawn, I even started asking myself how any of this was related to the current issue with RubyCentral and RubyGems?
Keyframe|5 months ago
3D30497420|5 months ago
I will say DHH's post on Trump's return is like reading something from an alternate universe (https://world.hey.com/dhh/mega-a0f62cd4). What optimism was there in Trump's second campaign? Trump promised exactly what he's doing: retribution, tariffs, self-dealing and corruption, accelerating climate change, etc. I'm curious DHH's assessment of the past ~9 months and how it matches with his original "optimism".
sto11z|5 months ago
IncreasePosts|5 months ago
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
KevinMS|5 months ago
[deleted]
HuwFulcher|5 months ago
[deleted]
PikachuEXE|5 months ago
mosura|5 months ago
[deleted]
javawizard|5 months ago
Language changes. The construction "what's up" and its extension "what's up with ..." didn't become widely accepted until Bugs Bunny brought it into the mainstream, and yet you use it as naturally as anything else at the beginning of your message.
I don't know that it's particularly constructive to dish on this post purely on that account.