TechTakes

this is a great first post, and it touches on a lot of things I've struggled with as well.

there's a concerted effort on several fronts to grant fascist interests an unassailable position within community-oriented software projects; that effort is usually backed by powerful corporate interests, as you've already seen with DHH and the takeover of RubyGems. simultaneously with that, and nearer to my own heart, the long-running project to make NixOS and nixpkgs unworkable for anyone but corporate and military interests has gone fully mask-off and started coordinating and talking openly about their plans to make Nix fully a fascist project. I have a longer piece I'll be posting tonight about this situation which I can link if there's interest, but in short: this is a coordinated attack, and it uses methods that have been tried and have succeeded many times. programming communities are being turned into fascist pipelines for many of the same reasons the fascists targeted punk and furry communities, but thanks to being founded on horseshit cyberlibertarian principles and unexamined conservatism masquerading as engineering, our open source and educational communities are uniquely primed for takeover.

for the fascists, of course, any sufficiently isolated community will do. the health of the community and its projects don't matter; the fascists are fine with communities that cannibalize their own and technology that barely works or doesn't work at all. the quality of nixpkgs has dropped sharply since the fascists kicked out the skilled marginalized people keeping the project alive, and every project started by fascists I can think of has been broken and worthless. the fascists don't care: they're here to weaponize a community in both the metaphorical and the very literal senses, and whether or not anything of value is left once they're done is of no concern to them. the isolation works in their favor: it lets them employ all their usual tricks to turn a community on itself. that those tricks were eventually beaten by large parts of the punk and furry communities means there's hope in fighting off these assholes -- but most likely the changes that need to occur will happen in new communities, founded under better principles.

from your post, it seems you've immunized yourself against the game development to fascist pipeline, which is very lucky. you now know what dogwhistles and tricks to expect from most of the fascists you'll run into in programming communities. I saw that Corbin recommended picking up functional programming or a non-Algol-derived language in a sibling comment and from an educational perspective I can recommend that, but unfortunately a lot of functional programming communities tend to be either utterly pro-AI (because they think they're going to inherit Lisp's prestige) or are being pushed towards fascism (look for weirdos who aren't mathematicians obsessing over how pure lambda calculus is and you'll see the red flags) -- if you want a fresh abyss to stare into, search our instance for posts about Urbit if you want to see our efforts at documenting one of the earliest attempts at entryism into functional programming. of course almost any functional language (other than Urbit) will be more rewarding to learn than whichever reactionary Go-but-memory-unsafe language these guys wanted you to learn as an attempt to isolate you further.

while I have no general solutions to what's happening right now, there's a few actions I'm taking that I hope will lead to better things:

• from now on, my software will all be very queer, very political, and utterly poisoned against corporate exploitation.
• while it's not always practical to switch off of these fuckheads' software immediately (our instance still runs on NixOS, great lock-in they've got going), remember how often we've been told that software communities run on advocacy. these fuckheads don't deserve your advocacy or your labor. as far as is practical, give them the opposite. kill the evangelist in your head.
• healthier communities exist, and they're worth our time. they're not large, but you'll meet some of the most gifted people imaginable there -- and all of them most likely have an experience or two similar to yours.

for that last bullet point, I can recommend the better parts of Mastodon -- avoid the tech instances like the plague and focus in on the queer ones with techy users. our instance also has an attempt at a homegrown tech community organized around healthier principles called FreeAssembly, which never quite got off the ground because the fascist takeover of the Nix project happened right after it launched, and then ahaha everything else happened after that, and I never got the chance to kick off that community properly. I still recommend Mastodon because it's established, but if you'd like the same experience as here but in a community more oriented towards posting about personal projects or programming in general, FreeAssembly might be worth a try. I'm finally finishing some of the software I meant to post about way back when we started FreeAssembly, and I'll be writing those up for that community fairly soon.

Where are the places to discuss the systemic issues in tech and have non-judgemental discussions on solving problems? For the first part, this place has been pleasant to lurk for the past years. For the second part, I’m not so sure.

I have seen some productive and/or informative discussions on solving problems, but only really in communities that don't solely exist online. I would suggest looking into local tech-related meetups and the details of the schedules of any conferences that you can physically attend; even in more tech-focused events there are sometimes 1 or 2 dedicated spaces for "people" problems. Depending on what the sociopolitical landscape around you looks like, unions and/or non-profits can also provide a place to discuss concretely solving problems.

In my experience, in-person contexts tend to provide the best opportunities to form acquaintances that will then be open to discussing these things, online or offline. I don't really know how to find online-first spaces that aren't corrupted by the current advertisement-based, profit-seeking incentive that underpins most online community infrastructure and directly leads to this "influencerization" of tech culture.

There isn't a way to solve problems without some value judgements. As long as there are Algol descendants and a lineage of C, there will be people with more machismo than awareness of systems, and they will always be patrician and sadistic in their language-design philosophy. Even left-leaning folks like Kelley (Zig) or DeVault (Hare) are not reasonable language designers; they might not be social conservatives but they aren't interested in advancing the art of programming. Zig's explicitly an attempt to iterate on C and C++ without giving up their core unsafety, while Hare is explicitly trying to travel decades back in time to fit onto a 1.41MiB floppy disk.

I'd recommend stepping outside of the Algol world for a little bit. Hare, Rust, Zig, Go, and Odin have — at least to me, and to a few other PLT folks — the same semantics; they're all built on C++'s memory model and fully inherit its unsafety. (Yes, safe Rust is a safe subset; no, most production Rust is not safe Rust.) Instead, deliberately force yourself to use a Smalltalk, a Forth, a Lisp, an ML, or a Prolog; solve one or two problems in them over a period of about one month per language. This is the only way to understand the computer without the lens of Algol. Also, consider learning a deliberately unpleasant language like Brainfuck or Thue to give yourself an alien toy model to prevent yourself from getting mind-locked over the industry's concerns. If you like reading papers, I'd suggest exactly one paper to cure Algol sickness, the Galois theory of algorithms.

Discussions on technology are excuses for dick-measuring and insulting people only to later claim that actually you are Dutch and it is in your culture to be an asshole.

This is your call. Personally I've found that I can be blunt with evidence and technical claims while empathizing with the difficulty of understanding those claims, and this still allows for fruitful technical discussions. (Also, I have the free time to be vindictive, to paraphrase Yet Another Apolitical Programmer.) I've found that GvR (Python, Dutch) doesn't really understand most of the criticisms I've brought to the table, even when I wrote them up for the Python core team, and that the design-by-committee process left multiple Python committee members with a deep contempt for anybody who actually has to use their language. I've also found that "Ginger" Bill (Odin, British) is completely unable to have a discussion on this basis as he is too busy negging, sapping, and otherwise playing rhetorical tricks in order to get his way. Unrelated: I also found that DeVault (American) was willing to be less of a sex pest when threatened with a ban, which is a useful trick for moderators to know; in general, being harsh-but-fair to DeVault seems to have pushed him further and further to leftism and public decency over time.

Also, sometimes people get removed from their communities! Walter Bright (D, American) was kicked out of the wider D community for generally having shitty politics in all arenas of life; the catalyst was likely some particularly transphobic remarks made a few years ago. Similarly, if Blow's Jai actually had anything interesting to contribute besides the soa and aos keywords then there would already be open-source knockoffs because Blow livestreams so many bigoted takes; arguably Odin is a Jai clone.

Blow the one who created Braid? (Because he has been known to be iffy for a while now (for example https://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/7kp08e/jonathan_blow_the_witness_braid_thinks_women_are/ ).

only to later claim that actually you are Dutch and it is in your culture to be an asshole.

This is such bullshit, our idea is that we are direct. We don't get that this comes off as being an asshole. If they use this as an excuse to be an asshole (which is a step worse than being an asshole by being direct), they are worse than a normal asshole. (Really hope it wasn't somebody I know).

And sadly I don't have any good help to offer. I don't know either. And the manifesto not blaming wider society, and the profit seeking/capitalist elements is a bit silly.

Missionary voice Have you tried Mastodon? That is where you find people like DeadSimpleTech and Baldur Bjarnason who think that corporate social media was always messed up and current web-development practices are a joke.

Good on ya for not letting the bastards steal your joy.