Drew DeVault's blog

Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Prusa is a 3D printer manufacturer which has a long history of being admired by the 3D printing community for high quality, open source printers. They have been struggling as of late, and came under criticism for making the firmware of their Mk4 printer non-free.¹

Armin Ronacher uses Prusa as a case-study in why open source companies fail, and uses this example to underline his argument that open source needs to adapt for commercial needs, namely by adding commercial exclusivity clauses to its licenses – Armin is one of the principal proponents of the non-free Functional Source License. Armin cites his experience with a Chinese manufactured 3D printer as evidence that intellectual property is at the heart of Prusa’s decline, and goes on to discuss how this dynamic applies to his own work in developing a non-free license for use with Sentry. I find this work pretty interesting – FSL is a novel entry into the non-free license compendium, and it’s certainly a better way to do software than proprietary models, assuming that it’s not characterized as free or open source. But, allow me to use the same case study to draw different conclusions.

It is clear on the face of it that Prusa’s move to a non-free firmware is unrelated to their struggles with the Chinese competition – their firmware was GPL’d, and the cited competitor (Bambu) evidently respects copyleft, and there’s no evidence that Bambu’s printers incorporate derivatives of Prusa’s firmware in a manner which violates the GPL. Making the license non-free is immaterial to the market dynamics between Prusa and Bambu, so the real explanation must lie elsewhere.

If you had asked me 10 years ago what I expected Prusa’s largest risk would be, I would have simply answered “China” and you would have probably said the same. The Chinese economy and industrial base can outcompete Western manufacturing in almost every manufacturing market.² This was always the obvious vulnerability in their business model, and they absolutely needed to be prepared for this situation, or their death was all but certain. Prusa made one of the classic errors in open source business models: they made their product, made it open source, sold it, and assumed that they were done working on their business model.

It was inevitable that someday Chinese manufacturers would undercut Prusa on manufacturing costs. Prusa responded to this certainty by not diversifying their business model whatsoever. There has only ever been one Prusa product: their latest 3D printer model. The Mk4 costs $1,200. You can buy the previous generation (at $1,000), or the MINI (from 2019, $500). You can open your wallet and get their high-end printers, which are neat but fail to address the one thing that most users at this price-point really want, which is more build volume. Or, you can buy an Ender 3 off Amazon right now for $180 and you’ll get better than half of the value of an Mk4 at an 85% discount. You could also buy Creality’s flagship model for a cool $800 and get a product which beats the Mk4 in every respect. China has joined the market, bringing with them all of the competitive advantages their industrial base can bring to bear, and Prusa’s naive strategy is causing their position to fall like a rock.

Someone new to 3D printing will pick up an Ender and will probably be happy with it for 1-2 years. When they upgrade, will they upgrade to a Prusa or an Ender 5? Three to five years a customer spends in someone else’s customer pipeline is an incredibly expensive opportunity cost Prusa is missing out on. This opportunity cost is the kind of arithmetic that would make loss leaders like a cheap, low-end, low-or-negative-margin Prusa printer make financial sense. Hell, Prusa should have made a separate product line of white-labeled Chinese entry-level 3D printers just to get people on the Prusa brand.

Prusa left many stones unturned. Bambu’s cloud slicer is a massive lost opportunity for Prusa. On-demand cloud printing services are another lost opportunity. Prusa could have built a marketplace for models & parts and skimmed a margin off of the top, but they waited until 2022 to launch Printables – waiting until the 11th hour when everyone was fed up with Thingiverse. Imagine a Prusa where it works out of the box, you can fire up a slicer in your browser which auto-connects to your printer and prints models from a Prusa-operated model repository, paying $10 for a premium model, $1 off the top goes to Prusa, with the same saved payment details which ensure that a fresh spool of Prusa filament arrives at your front door when it auto-detects that your printer is almost out. The print you want is too big for your build volume? Click here to have it cloud printed – do you want priority shipping for that? Your hot-end is reaching the end of its life – as one of our valued business customers on our premium support contract we would be happy to send you a temporary replacement printer while yours is shipped in for service.

Prusa’s early foothold in the market was strong, and they were wise to execute the way they did early on. But they absolutely had to diversify their lines of business. Prusa left gaping holes in the market and utterly failed to capitalize on any of them. Prusa could have been synonymous with 3D printing if they had invested in the brand (though they probably needed a better name). I should be able to walk into a Best Buy and pick up an entry-level Prusa for $250-$500, or into a Home Depot and pick up a workshop model for $1000-$2000. I should be able to bring it home, unbox it, scan a QR code to register it with PrusaConnect, and have a Benchy printing in less than 10 minutes.

Chinese manufacturers did all of this and more, and they’re winning. They aren’t just cheaper – they offer an outright better product. These are not cheap knock-offs: if you want the best 3D printer today it’s going to be a Chinese one, regardless of how much you want to spend, but, as it happens, you’re going to spend less.

Note that none of this is material to the license of the product, be it free or non-free. It’s about building a brand, developing a customer relationship, and identifying and exploiting market opportunities. Hackers and enthusiasts who found companies like Prusa tend to imagine that the product is everything, but it’s not. Maybe 10% of the work is developing the 3D printer itself – don’t abandon the other 90% of your business. Especially when you make that 10% open: someone else is going to repurpose it, do the other 90%, and eat your lunch. FOSS is great precisely because it makes that 10% into community property and shares the cost of innovation, but you’d be a fool to act as if that was all there was to it. You need to deal with sales and marketing, chase down promising leads, identify and respond to risks, look for and exploit new market opportunities, and much more to be successful.

This is a classic failure mode of open source businesses, and it’s Prusa’s fault. They had an excellent foothold early in the market, leveraging open source and open hardware to great results and working hand-in-hand with enthusiasts early on to develop the essential technology of 3D printing. Then, they figured they were done developing their business model, and completely dropped the ball as a result. Open source is not an “if you build it, the money will come” situation, and to think otherwise is a grave mistake. Businesses need to identify their risks and then mitigate them, and if they don’t do that due diligence, then it’s their fault when it fails – it’s not a problem with FOSS.

Free and open source software is an incredibly powerful tool, including as a commercial opportunity. FOSS really has changed the world! But building a business is still hard, and in addition to its fantastic advantages, the FOSS model poses important and challenging constraints that you need to understand and work with. You have to be creative, and you must do a risk/reward assessment to understand how it applies to your business and how you can utilize it for commercial success. Do the legwork and you can utilize FOSS for a competitive advantage, but skip this step and you will probably fail within a decade.

I sourced this information from Armin’s blog post, but it didn’t hold up to a later fact check: the Mk4 firmware seems to be free software. It seems the controversy here has to do with Prusa developing its slicer software behind closed doors and doing occasional source-code dumps, rather than managing a more traditional “bazaar” style project. ↩︎
That said, there are still vulnerabilities in the Chinese industrial base that can be exploited by savvy Western entrepreneurs. Chinese access to Western markets is constrained below a certain scale, for instance, in ways that Western businesses are not. ↩︎

Richard Stallman's political discourse on sex

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, has been subject to numerous allegations of misconduct. He stepped down in 2019, and following his re-instatement in 2021, a famous open letter was published in which numerous organizations and individuals from throughout the Free Software ecosystem called for his removal from the Free Software Foundation. The letter had no effect; Stallman remains a voting member of the FSF’s board of directors to this day and continues to receive numerous speaking engagements.

Content warning: This article discusses sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment, and all of the above with respect to minors, as well as the systemic normalization of abuse, and directly quotes statements which participate in the normalization of abuse.

This article presents an analysis of Stallman’s political discourse on sex with the aim of establishing the patterns that cause the sort of discomfort that led to Stallman’s public condemnation. In particular, we will address how Stallman speaks about sexual assault, harassment, consent, and minors in his discourse.

I think that it is important to acknowledge this behavior not as a series of isolated incidents, nor a conflict with Stallman’s “personal style”, but a pattern of behavior from which a political narrative forms, and draws attention to the fact that the meager retractions, excuses, and non-apologies from both Stallman and the Free Software Foundation as a whole fail to account for that pattern in a meaningful way.

The failure of the Free Software community to account for Richard Stallman’s behavior has a chilling effect. The norms set by our leadership influence the norms of our broader community, and many members of the Free Software community look to Stallman as a ideological and political leader. The norms Stallman endorses are harmful and deeply confronting and alienating to many people, in particular women and children. Should these norms be adopted by our movement, we risk creating a community which enables the exploitation of vulnerable people.

Let’s begin to address this by considering Stallman’s retraction of his comments in support of pedophilia. The following comment from Stallman in 2013 drew harsh criticism:

There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.

— stallman.org, 04 January 2013 “Pedophilia”

Following much of the criticism directed at Stallman, he had a number of “personal conversations” which reframed his views. Of the many comments Stallman has made which drew ire, this is one of the few for which a correction was made, in September 2019:

Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.

Through personal conversations in recent years, I’ve learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.

— stallman.org, 14 September 2019 “Sex between an adult and a child is wrong”

This statement from Stallman has been accepted by his defenders as evidence of his capitulation on pedophilia. I argue that this statement is misleading due to the particular way Stallman uses the word “child”. When Stallman uses this word, he does so with a very specific meaning, which he explains on his website:

Children: Humans up to age 12 or 13 are children. After that, they become adolescents or teenagers. Let’s resist the practice of infantilizing teenagers, by not calling them “children”.

— stallman.org, “Anti-glossary”

It seems clear from this definition is that Stallman’s comments are not a capitulation at all. His 2019 retraction, when interpreted using his definition of “children”, does not contradict most of Stallman’s past statements regarding sex and minors, including his widely criticized defenses of many people accused of sexual impropriety with minors.

Stallman’s most recent direct response to his criticism underscores this:

It was right for me to talk about the injustice to Minsky, but it was tone-deaf that I didn’t acknowledge as context the injustice that Epstein did to women or the pain that caused.

— fsf.org, April 12, 2021, “RMS addresses the free software community”

Stallman qualifies his apology by explicitly re-affirming his defense of Marvin Minsky, which is addressed in detail later in this piece. Stallman’s doubling-down here is consistent with the supposition that Stallman maintains the view that minors can have sexual relationships with adults of any age, provided that they aren’t “children” – in other words, provided they’re at least 13 or 14 years old.

Stallman cares deeply about language and its usage. His strange and deliberate usage of the word “children” is also found many times throughout his political notes over the years. For example:

It sounds horrible: “UN peacekeepers accused of child rape in South Sudan.” But the article makes it pretty clear that the “children” involved were not children. They were teenagers.

— stallman.org, 30 April 2018 “UN peacekeepers in South Sudan”

Here Stallman again explicitly distinguishes “teenagers” from children, drawing this distinction especially in the context of sexual relationships between adults and minors. Stallman repeats this pattern many times over the years – we see it again in Stallman’s widely criticized defense of Cody Wilson:

Cody Wilson has been charged with hiring a “child” sex worker. Her age has not been announced, but I think she must surely be a teenager, not a child. Calling teenagers “children” in this context is a way of smearing people with normal sexual proclivities as “perverts”.

— stallman.org, 23 September 2018 “Cody Wilson”

And once more when defending Roy Moore:

Senate candidate Roy Moore tried to start dating/sexual relationships with teenagers some decades ago.

He tried to lead Ms Corfman step by step into sex, but he always respected “no” from her and his other dates. Thus, Moore does not deserve the exaggerated condemnation that he is receiving for this. As an example of exaggeration: one mailing referred to these teenagers as “children”, even the one that was 18 years old. Many teenagers are minors, but none of them are children.

The condemnation is surely sparked by the political motive of wanting to defeat Moore in the coming election, but it draws fuel from ageism and the fashion for overprotectiveness of “children”.

— stallman.org, 27 November 2017 “Roy Moore’s relationships”

Ms. Corfman was 14 at the time Roy Moore is accused of initiating sexual contact with her; Moore was 32 at the time. Here we see an example of him re-iterating his definition of “children”, a distinction he draws especially to suggest that an adult having sex with a minor is socially acceptable.

Note that Stallman refers to Ms. Corfman as Moore’s “date”. Stallman’s use of this word is important: here he normalizes the possibility that a minor and an adult could engage in a healthy dating relationship. In this statement, Stallman cites an article which explains circumstances which do not resemble such a normalized dating experience: Moore isolated Corfman from her mother, drove her directly to his home, and initiated sexual contact there.

Note also that the use of the phrase “step by step” in this quotation is more commonly referred to as “grooming” in the discourse on child sexual exploitation.

Stallman reaches for similar reasoning in other political notes, such as the following:

A British woman is on trial for going to a park and inviting teenage boys to have sex with her there. Her husband acted as a lookout in case someone else passed by. One teenager allegedly visited her at her house repeatedly to have sex with her.

None of these acts would be wrong in any sense, provided they took precautions against spreading infections. The idea that adolescents (of whatever sex) need to be “protected” from sexual experience they wish to have is prudish ignorantism, and making that experience a crime is perverse.

— stallman.org, 26 May 2017, “Prudish ignorantism”

The woman in question, aged 60, had sex with her husband, age 69, in a public space, and invited spectators as young as 11 to participate.

Stallman has also sought to normalize adult attraction to minors, literally describing it as “normal” in September 2018:

Calling teenagers “children” encourages treating teenagers as children, a harmful practice which retards their development into capable adults.

In this case, the effect of that mislabeling is to smear Wilson. It is rare, and considered perverse, for adults to be physically attracted to children. However, it is normal for adults to be physically attracted to adolescents. Since the claims about Wilson is the latter, it is wrong to present it as the former.

— stallman.org, 23 September 2018, “Cody Wilson”

One month prior, Stallman made a statement which similarly normalized adult attraction to minors, and suggests that acting on this attraction should be acceptable to society, likening opposition to this view to homosexual conversion therapy:

This accords with the view that Stendhal reported in France in the 1800s, that a woman’s most beautiful years were from 16 to 20.

Although this attitude on men’s part is normal, the author still wants to present it as wrong or perverted, and implicitly demands men somehow control their attraction to direct it elsewhere. Which is as absurd, and as potentially oppressive, as claiming that homosexuals should control their attraction and direct it towards to the other sex. Will men be pressured to undergo “age conversion therapy” intended to brainwash them to feel attracted mainly to women of their own age?

— stallman.org, 21 August 2018, “Age and attraction”

A trend is thus clearly seen in Stallman’s regular political notes, over several years, wherein Stallman re-iterates his position that “adolescents” or “teenagers” are distinct from “children” for the purpose of having sex with adults, and normalizes and defends adult attraction to minors and adults who perform sexual acts with minors. We see this distinction of the two groups, children and adolescents, outlined again on his “anti-glossary”, which still published on his website today, albeit without the connotations of sex. His regular insistence on a definition of children which excludes adolescents serves such that his redaction of his controversial 2013 comment serves to redact none of the other widely-condemned comments he has made since.

Stallman has often written political notes when people accused of sexual impropriety, particularly with minors, appear in the news, or appear among Stallman’s social circle. Stallman’s comments generally downplay the abuse and manipulate language in a manner which benefits perpetrators of abuse. We see this downplaying in another example from 2019:

Should we accept stretching the terms “sexual abuse” and “molestation” to include looking without touching?

I do not accept it.

— stallman.org, 11 June 2019 “Stretching meaning of terms”

Stallman is writing here in response to a news article outlining accusations of sexual misconduct directed at Ohio State athletics doctor Richard Strauss. Strauss was accused of groping at least 177 students between 1979 and 1997 during routine physical exams, accusations corroborated by at least 50 members of the athletic department staff.

In addition to Stallman’s regular fixation of the use of the word “children” with respect to sex, this political note also draws our attention to the next linguistic fixation of Stallman I want to question: the use of phrases like “sexual abuse” and “sexual assault”. The term “sexual assault” also appears in Stallman’s “Anti-glossary”:

Sexual assault: The term is applied to a broad range of actions, from rape on one end, to the least physical contact on the other, as well as everything in between. It acts as propaganda for treating them all the same. That would be wrong.

The term is further stretched to include sexual harassment, which does not refer to a single act, but rather to a series of acts that amounts to a form of gender bias. Gender bias is rightly prohibited in certain situations for the sake of equal opportunity, but that is a different issue.

I don’t think that rape should be treated the same as a momentary touch. People we accuse have a right to those distinctions, so I am careful not to use the term “sexual assault” to categorize the actions of any person on any specific occasion.

— stallman.org, “Anti-glossary”

Stallman often fixates on the term “sexual assault” throughout his political notes. He feels that the term fails to distinguish between “grave” and “minor” crimes, as he illustrated in 2021:

“Sexual assault” is so vague that it makes no sense as a charge. Because of that term, we can’t whether these journalists were accused of a grave crime or a minor one. However, the charge of espionage shows this is political persecution.

— stallman.org, 21 July 2021, “Imprisonment of journalists”

I would like to find out what kind of crimes Stallman feels the need to distinguish along this axis. His other political notes give us some hints, such as this one regarding Al Franken’s sexual misconduct scandal:

If it is true that he persistently pressured her to kiss him, on stage and off, if he stuck his tongue into her mouth despite her objections, that could well be sexual harassment. He should have accepted no for an answer the first time she said it. However, calling a kiss “sexual assault” is an exaggeration, an attempt to equate it to much graver acts, that are crimes.

The term “sexual assault” encourages that injustice, and I believe it has been popularized specifically with that intention. That is why I reject that term.

— stallman.org, 30 July 2019, “Al Franken”

Stallman also wrote in 2020 to question the use of the phrase again:

In the US, when thugs¹ rape people they say are suspects, it is rare to bring them to justice.

I object to describing any one crime as “sexual assault” because that is vague about the severity of the crime. This article often uses that term to refer to many crimes that differ in severity but raise the same issue. That may be a valid practice.

— stallman.org, 12 August 2020, “When thugs rape people they say are suspects”

In the article Stallman cites in this political note, various unwelcome sexual acts by the police are described, the least severe of which is probably molestation.

More alarmingly, Stallman addresses his views on the term “sexual assault” in this 2017 note, affording for the possibility that a 35-year-old man could have had consensual sex with an 11-year-old girl.

Jelani Maraj (who I had never heard of) could be imprisoned for a long time for “sexual assault”. What does that concretely mean?

Due to the vagueness of the term “sexual assault” together with the dishonest law that labels sex with adolescents as “rape” even if they are willing, we cannot tell from this article what sort of acts Maraj was found to have committed. So we can’t begin to judge whether those acts were wrong.

I see at least three possibilities. Perhaps those acts really constituted rape — it is a possibility. Or perhaps the two had sex willingly, but her parents freaked out and demanded prosecution. Or, intermediate between those two, perhaps he pressured her into having sex, or got her drunk.

— stallman.org, 13 November 2017, “Jelani Maraj”

Another article by Stallman does not explicitly refer to sexual assault, but does engage in a bizarre defense of a journalist who was fired for masturbating during a video conference. In this article Stallman fixates on questions such as whether or not the genitals being in view of the webcam was intentional or not, and suggests that masturbating on a video call would be acceptable should the genitals remain unseen.

The New Yorker’s unpublished note to staff was vague about its grounds for firing Toobin. Indeed, it did not even acknowledge that he had been fired. This is unfair, like convicting someone on unstated charges. Something didn’t meet its “standards of conduct”, but it won’t tell us what — we can only guess. What are the possibilities? Intentionally engaging in video-call sex as a side activity during a work meeting? If he had not made a mistake in keeping that out of view of the coworkers, why would it make a difference what the side activity was?

— stallman.org, November 2020, “On the Firing of Jeffrey Toobin”

Finally, Stallman elaborated on his thoughts on the term most recently in October 2023. This note gives the clearest view of Stallman’s preferred distinction between various sexual crimes:

I warned that the stretchable term “sexual assault”, which extends from grave crimes such as rape through significant crimes such as groping and down to no clear lower bound, could be stretched to criminalize minor things, perhaps even stealing a kiss. Now this has happened.

What next? Will a pat on the arm or a hug be criminalized? There is no clear limit to how far this can go, when a group builds up enough outrage to push it.

— stallman.org, 15 October 2023, “Sexual assault for stealing a kiss”

From Stallman’s statements, we can refine his objection to the term “sexual assault”, and sexual behaviors generally, to further suggest that the following beliefs are held by Stallman on the subject:

Groping and molestation are not sexual assault, but are crimes
Kissing someone without consent is not sexual assault, furthermore it is not wrong
Masturbating during a video conference is not wrong if you are not seen doing so
A 35-year-old man having sex with an 11-year-old girl does not constitute rape, nor sexual assault, but is in fact conscionable

The last of these may be covered under Stallman’s 2019 retraction, even accounting for Stallman’s unconventional use of the word “children”.

Stallman’s fixation on the term “sexual assault” can be understood in his political notes as having the political aims of eroding the meaning of the phrase, questioning the boundaries of consent, downplaying the importance of agency in intimate interactions, appealing for the defense of people accused of sexual assault, and arguing for sexual relationships between minors and adults to be normalized. In one notable case, he has used this political angle to rise to the defense of his friends – in Stallman’s infamous email regarding Marvin Minsky, he writes the following:

The injustice [done to Minsky] is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X.

(…)

The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex.

We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.

I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term “sexual assault” in an accusation.

— Excerpt from Selam G’s recount of Stallman’s email to MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory mailing list, September 2019. Selam’s quotation has been corroborated by other sources. Minsky is, in this context, accused of having had a sexual encounter with a minor facilitated by convicted child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. The original accusation does not state that this sexual encounter actually occurred; only that the minor in question was instructed to have sex with Minsky. Minsky would have been at least 75 years old at the time of the alleged incident; the minor was 16.

There is an important, but more subtle pattern in Stallman’s statements that I want to draw your attention to here: Stallman appears to have little to no understanding of the role of power dynamics in sexual harassment, assault, and rape. Stallman appears to reject the supposition that these acts could occur without an element of outwardly apparent violent coercion.

This is most obviously evidenced by his statements regarding the sexual abuse of minors; most people understand that minors cannot consent to sex even if they “appear willing”, in particular because an adult in this situation is exploiting a difference in experience and maturity to manipulate the child into sexually satisfying them – in other words, a power differential. Stallman seems to reject this understanding of consent in his various defenses of people accused of sexual impropriety with minors, and in cases where the pretense of consent cannot be easily established, he offers the perpetrator the benefit of the doubt.

We can also find an example of Stallman disregarding power dynamics with respect to adults in the following political note from 2017:

A famous theater director had a habit of pestering women, asking them for sex.

As far as I can tell from this article, he didn’t try to force women into sex.

When women persistently said no, he does not seem to have tried to punish them.

The most he did was ask.

He was a pest, but nothing worse than that.

— stallman.org, 29 October 2017, “Pestering women”

In this case we have an example of “quid pro quo”, a kind of sexual harassment which weaponizes power dynamics for sexual gratification. This kind of sexual harassment is explicitly cited as illegal by Title VII of the US Civil Rights Act. A lack of competence in this respect displayed by Stallman, whose position in the Free Software Foundation board of directors requires that he act in a manner consistent with this law, is alarming.

I have identified this blindness to power dynamics as a recurring theme in Stallman’s comments on sexual abuse, be it with respect to sexual relationships between minors and adults, managers and subordinates, students and teachers, or public figures and their audience. I note for the reader that Stallman has held and currently holds several of these positions of power.

In addition to his position as a voting member of the Free Software Foundation’s Board of Directors, Stallman is still invited to speak at events and conferences. Stallman’s infamous rider prescribes a number of his requirements for attending an event; most of his conditions are relatively reasonable, though amusing. In this document, he states his preference for being accommodated in private, on a “spare couch”, when he travels. At these events, in these private homes, he may be afforded many opportunities to privacy with vulnerable people, including minors that, in his view, can consent to having sex with adults.

In summary, Stallman has a well-documented and oft-professed set of political beliefs which reject the social and legal norms regarding consent. He is not simply quietly misled in these beliefs; rather he advocates for these values using his political platform. He has issued no meaningful retractions of these positions or apologies for harm caused, and has continued to pursue a similar agenda since his return to the FSF board of directors.

This creates a toxic environment not only in the Free Software Foundation and in Stallman’s direct purview, but in the broader Free Software movement. The free software movement is culturally poisoned by our support of Stallman as our ideological leader. The open letter calling for Stallman’s removal received 3,000 signatures; the counter-letter in support of Stallman received 6,876 before it stopped accepting submissions.

Richard Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985, and has performed innumerable works to the benefit of our community since then. We’ve taken Stallman’s views on software freedom seriously, and they’ve led us to great achievements. It is to Stallman’s credit that the Free Software community is larger than one man. However, one’s political qualifications to speak about free software does not make one qualified to address matters of sex; in this respect Stallman’s persistence presents as dangerous incompetence.

When we consider his speech on sex as a discourse that has been crafted and rehearsed methodically over the years, he asks us to consider him seriously, and so we must. When we analyze the dangerous patterns in this discourse, we have to conclude that he is not fit for purpose in his leadership role, and we must acknowledge the shadow that our legitimization of his discourse casts on our community.

Stallman consistently refers to police officers as “thugs” in his writing; see Stallman’s Glossary. ↩︎

Can I be on your podcast?

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am working on rousing the Hare community to get the word out about our work. I have drafted the Hare evangelism guidelines to this effect, which summarizes how we want to see our community bringing Hare to more people.

We’d like to spread the word in a way which is respectful of the attention of others – we’re explicitly eschewing unsolicited prompts for projects to consider writing/rewriting in Hare, as well as any paid sponsorships or advertising. Blog posts about Hare, videos, participating in (organic) online discussions – much better! And one idea we have is to talk about Hare on podcasts which might be interested in the project.

If that describes your podcast, here’s my bold request: can I make an appearance?

Here are some mini “press kits” to give you a hook and some information that might be useful for preparing an interview.

The Hare programming language

Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime. It is well-suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high performance tasks.

Hare has been in development since late 2019 and today has about 100 contributors.

Official website
Source code & development resources
“Introducing the Hare programming language”, video, 2022
GPLv3, MPL 2.0, MIT

Hare’s official mascot, Harriet. Drawn by Louis Taylor, CC-0

The Ares operating system

Ares is an operating system written in Hare which is under development. It features a micro-kernel oriented design and runs on x86_64 and aarch64. Its design is inspired by the seL4 micro-kernel and Plan 9.

A picture of a ThinkPad running Ares and demonstrating some features

Himitsu: a secret storage system

Himitsu is a secure secret storage system for Unix-like systems. It provides an arbitrary key/value store (where values may be secret) and a query language for manipulating the key store.

Himitsu is written in Hare.

Interested?

If any of these topics are relevant for your podcast and you’d like to talk about them, please reach out to me via email: sir@cmpwn.com

Thanks!

On "real name" policies

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Some free software projects reject anonymous or pseudonymous contributions, requiring you to author patches using your “real name”. Such projects have a so-called “real name” policy; Linux is one well-known example.¹

The root motivations behind such policies vary, but in my experience the most often cited rationale is that it’s important to establish the provenance of the contribution for copyright reasons. In the case of Linux, contributors are asked to “sign-off” their commits to indicate their agreement to the terms of the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO), which includes clauses like the following:

The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I have the right to submit it under the open source license indicated in the file.

To some extent, the DCO serves as a legal assertion of copyright and an agreement to license a work under given copyright terms (GPLv2 in the case of Linux). This record also means that the author of the code is accountable in case the copyright is challenged; in the case of an anonymous or pseudonymous contributor you’re shit out of luck. At that point, liability over the disagreement would likely fall into the hands of the maintainer that accepted the contribution. It is reasonable for a maintainer to ask a contributor to assert their copyright and accept liability over the provenance of their code in a legally meaningful and accountable form.

The possibility that someone may have something useful to offer to a free software project, but is not comfortable disclosing their name for any number of reasons, is a reasonable supposition. A maintainer whose “real name” policy is challenged on this basis would also be reasonable in saying “I feel for you, but I cannot agree to accept legal liability over the provenance of this code, nor can I communicate that risk to end-users who acquire code under a license that may or may not be valid as such”.

“Real name” policies are controversial in the free software community. I open with this perspective in an attempt to cool down the room. Those who feel marginalized by “real name” policies often skew young, and many treat matters such as copyright and licensing with disdain. Moreover, the problem tends to inflame deeply hurtful sentiments and raise thorny matters of identity and discrimination, and it’s easy to construe the intent of the policymakers as the intent to cause harm. The motivations behind these policies are reasonable.

That said, intent or otherwise, these policies can cause harm. The profile of the contributor who is comfortable using their “real name” is likely to fall more narrowly into over-represented demographics in our community; enforcing a real-name policy will ostracize some people. Those with marginalized identities tend to be less comfortable with disclosing their “real name”. Someone who has been subject to harassment may not be comfortable with this disclosure, since it offers more fuel to harassers keeping tabs on their activities. The use of a “real name” also confers a gender bias; avoiding a “real name” policy neatly eliminates discrimination on this basis. Of course, there are also many falsehoods programmers believe about names which can present in the implementation of such a policy.

There is also one particular problem which has been at the heart of conflict surrounding the use of “real-name” policies in free software: transgender identities. A transgender person is likely to change their name in the process of assuming their new identity. When this happens, their real name changes. However, it may or may not match their legal name – some trans people opt to change it, others don’t; if they do it is a process that takes time. Meanwhile, addressing a trans person by their old name, or “deadname”, is highly uncomfortable. Doing so deliberately, as a matter of policy or otherwise, is a form of discrimination. Many trans people experience deliberate “deadnaming” as a form of harassment in their daily lives, and institutionalizing this behavior is cruel.

The truth is, managing the names of participants is more challenging than anyone would like. On the one hand, names establish accountability and facilitate collaboration, and importantly, credit the authors of a work for services performed. On the other hand, names are highly personal and deeply affecting, and their usage and changes over time are the subject of important consideration at the discretion of their owner. A complicating factor is that handling names properly introduces technical problems which must be overcome.

To embrace the advantages of “real name” policies – establishing provenance, encouraging accountability, fostering a social environment – without causing harm, the approach I have settled on for my projects is to use the DCO to establish provenance and encourage contributors to sign-off and participate under the identity they feel most comfortable with. I encourage people to utilize an identity they use beyond the project’s walls, to foster a social environment and a connection to the broader community, to establish accountability, and to ensure that participants are reachable for further discussion on their work. If a contributor’s identity changes, we make every effort to support this change in contemporary, future, and historical use.

A change to Linux policy earlier this year refines their approach to alleviate the concerns raised in this article. ↩︎

Going off-script

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There is a phenomenon in society which I find quite bizarre. Upon our entry to this mortal coil, we are endowed with self-awareness, agency, and free will. Each of the 8 billion members of this human race represents a unique person, a unique worldview, and a unique agency. Yet, many of us have the same fundamental goals and strive to live the same life.

I think of such a life experiences as “following the script”. Society lays down for us a framework for living out our lives. Everyone deviates from the script to some extent, but most people hit the important beats. In Western society, these beats are something like, go to school, go to college, get a degree, build a career, get married, have 1.5 children, retire to Florida, die.

There are a number of reasons that someone may deviate from the script. The most common case is that the deviations are imposed by circumstance. A queer person will face discrimination, for instance, in marriage, or in adopting and raising children. Someone born into the lower class will have reduced access to higher education and their opportunities for career-building are curtailed accordingly; similar experiences follow for people from marginalized groups. Furthermore, more and more people who might otherwise be able to follow the script are finding that they can’t afford a home and don’t have the resources to build a family.

There are nevertheless many people who are afforded the opportunity to follow the script, and when they do so, they often experience something resembling a happy and fulfilling life. Generally this is not the result of a deliberate choice – no one was presented with the script and asked “is this what you want”? Each day simply follows the last and you make the choices that correspond with what you were told a good life looks like, and sometimes a good life follows.

Of course, it is entirely valid to want the “scripted” life. But you were not asked if you wanted it: it was just handed to you on a platter. The average person lacks the philosophical background which underpins their worldview and lifestyle, and consequently cannot explain why it’s “good”, for them or generally. Consider your career. You were told that it was a desirable thing to build for yourself, and you understand how to execute your duties as a member of the working class, but can you explain why those duties are important and why you should spend half of your waking life executing them? Of course, if you are good at following the script, you are rewarded for doing so, generally with money, but not necessarily with self-actualization.

This state of affairs leads to some complex conflicts. This approach to life favors the status quo and preserves existing power structures, which explains in part why it is re-enforced by education and broader social pressures. It also leads to a sense of learned helplessness, a sense that this is the only way things can be, which reduces the initiative to pursue social change – for example, by forming a union.

It can also be uncomfortable to encounter someone who does not follow the script, or even questions the script. You may be playing along, and mostly or entirely exposed to people who play along. Meeting someone who doesn’t – they skipped college, they don’t want kids, they practice polyamory, they identify as a gender other than what you presumed, etc – this creates a moment of dissonance and often resistance. This tends to re-enforce biases and can even present as inadvertent micro-aggressions.

I think it’s important to question the script, even if you decide that you like it. You should be able to explain why you like it. This process of questioning is a radical act. A radical, in its non-pejorative usage, is born when someone questions their life and worldview, decides that they want something else, and seeks out others who came to similar conclusions. They organize, they examine their discomfort and put it to words, and they share these words in the hope that they can explain a similar discomfort that others might feel within themselves. Radical movements, which by definition is any movement which challenges the status quo, are the stories of the birth and spread of radical ideas.

Ask yourself: who are you? Did you choose to be this person? Who do you want to be, and how will you become that person? Should you change your major? Drop out? Quit your job, start a business, found a labor union? Pick up a new hobby? Join or establish a social club? An activist group? Get a less demanding job, move into a smaller apartment, and spend more time writing or making art? However you choose to live, choose it deliberately.

The next step is an exercise in solidarity. How do you feel about others who made their own choices, choices which may be alike or different to your own? Or those whose choices were constrained by their circumstances? What can you do together that you couldn’t do alone?

Who do you want to be? Do you know?

The forbidden topics

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There are forbidden topics in the hacker community. One is sternly reprimanded for bringing them up, by their peers, their leaders, and the community at large. In private, one can expect threats and intimidation; in public, outcry and censorship. The forbidden topics are enforced by the moderators of our spaces, taken off of forums, purged from chat rooms, and cleaned up from GitHub issues and mailing lists; the ban-hammers fall swiftly and resolutely. My last article to touch these subjects was removed from Hacker News by the moderators within 30 minutes and landed several death threats in my inbox. The forbidden topics, when raised, are met with a resounding, aggressive dismissal and unconditional condemnation.

Some years ago, the hacker community possessed near-unanimous praise for the ideals of free speech; the hacker position was generally that of what we would now understand as “radical” free speech, which is to say the kind of “shout ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater” radical, but more specifically the kind that tolerates hate speech. The popular refrain went, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. Many hackers hold this as a virtue to this day. I once held this as a virtue for myself.

However, this was a kind of free speech which was unconsciously contingent on being used for speech with which the listener was comfortable. The hacker community at this time was largely homogeneous, and as such most of the speech we were exposed to was of the comfortable sort. As the world evolved around us, and more people found their voice, this homogeneity began to break down. Critics of radical free speech, victims of hate speech, and marginalized people of all kinds began to appear in hacker communities. The things they had to say were not comfortable.

The free speech absolutists among the old guard, faced with this discomfort, developed a tendency to defend hate speech and demean speech that challenged them. They were not the target of the hate, so it did not make them personally uncomfortable, and defending it would maintain the pretense of defending free speech, of stalwartly holding the line on a treasured part of their personal hacker ethic. Speech which challenged their preconceptions and challenged their power structures was not so easily acceptable. The pretense is dropped and they lash out in anger, calling for the speakers to be excluded from our communities.

Some of the once-forbidden topics are becoming less so. There are carefully chalked-out spaces where we can talk about them, provided they are not too challenging, such as LGBTQ identities or the struggles of women in our spaces. Such discussions are subject to careful management by our leaders and moderators, to the extent necessary to preserve power structures. Those who speak on these topics are permitted to do so relatively free of retaliation provided that they speak from a perspective of humility, a voice that “knows its place”. Any speech which suggests that the listener may find themselves subject to a non-majority-conforming person in a position of power, or even that of a peer, will have crossed the line; one must speak as a victim seeking the pity and grace of your superiors to be permitted space to air your grievances.

Similarly, space is made for opposition to progressive speech, again moderated only insofar as it is necessary to maintain power structures. Some kinds of overt hate speech may rouse a response from our leaders, but those who employ a more subtle approach are permitted their voice. Thus, both progressive speech and hate speech are permitted within a carefully regulated framework of power preservation.

Some topics, however, remain strictly forbidden.

Our community has persistent and pervasive problems of a particular sort which we are not allowed to talk about: sexual harassment and assault. Men who assault, harass, and even rape women in our spaces, are protected. A culture of silence is enforced, and those who call out rape, sexual assault, or harassment, those who criticise they who enable and protect these behaviors, are punished, swiftly and aggressively.

Men are terrified of these kinds of allegations. It seems like a life sentence: social ostracization, limited work opportunities, ruined relationships. We may have events in our past that weigh on our conscience; was she too drunk, did she clearly consent, did she regret it in the morning? Some of us have events in our past that we try not to think about, because if we think too hard, we might realize that we crossed the line. This fills men with guilt and uncertainty, but also fear. We know the consequences if our doubts became known.

So we lash out in this fear. We close ranks. We demand the most stringent standards of evidence to prove anything, evidence that we know is not likely to be there. We refuse to believe that our friends were not the men we thought they were, or to confront that we might not be ourselves. We demand due process under the law, we say they should have gone to the police, that they can’t make accusations of such gravity without hard proof. Think of the alleged perpetrator; we can’t ruin their lives over frivolous accusations.

For victims, the only recourse permitted by society is to suffer in silence. Should they speak, victims are subject to similar persecutions: they are ostracized, struggle to work, and lose their relationships. They have to manage the consequences of a traumatic experience with support resources which are absent or inadequate. Their trauma is disbelieved, their speech is punished, and their assailants walk free among us as equals while they are subject to retaliatory harassment or worse.

Victims have no recourse which will satisfy men. Reporting a crime is traumatic, especially one of this nature. I have heard many stories of disbelief from the authorities, disbelief in the face of overwhelming evidence. They were told it was their fault. They were told they should have been in a different place, or wearing something else, or should have simply been a different person. It’s their fault, not the aggressor’s. It’s about what they, the victim, should have done differently, never mind what the perpetrator should have done differently. It’s estimated that less than 1% of rapes end with the rapist in jail¹ – the remainder go unreported, unprosecuted or fail after years of traumatic legal proceedings for the victims. The legal system does not provide justice: it exacerbates harm. A hacker will demand this process is completed before they will seek justice, or allow justice to be sought. Until then, we will demand silence, and retaliate if our demands are not met.

The strict standards of evidence required by the justice system are there because of the state monopoly on violence: a guilty verdict in a crime will lead to the imprisonment of the accused. We have no such recourse available in private, accordingly there is no need to hold ourselves to such standards. Our job is not to punish the accused, but rather to keep our communities safe. We can establish the need to take action to whatever standard we believe is sufficient, and by setting these standards as strict as the courts we will fail to resolve over 99% of the situations with which we are faced – a standard which is clearly not sufficient to address the problem. I’m behind you if you want to improve the justice system in this regard, but not if you set this as a blocker to seeking any justice at all. What kind of hacker puts their faith in authority?

I find the state of affairs detestable. The hypocrisy of the free speech absolutist who demands censorship of challenging topics. The fact that the famous hacker curiosity can suddenly dry up if satisfying it would question our biases and preconceptions. The complicity of our moderators in censoring progressive voices in the defense of decorum and the status quo. The duplicitous characterization of “polite” hate speech as acceptable in our communities. Our failure to acknowledge our own shortcomings, our fear of seeing the “other” in a position of power, and the socially enforced ignorance of the “other” that naturally leads to failing to curtail discrimination and harassment in our communities. The ridiculously high standard of evidence we require from victims, who simply ask for our belief at a minimum, before we’ll consider doing anything about their grievance, if we could even be convinced in the first place.

Meanwhile, the problems that these forbidden topics seek to discuss are present in our community. That includes the “polite” problems, such as the conspicuous lack of diversity in our positions of power, which may be discussed and commiserated only until someone suggests doing something about it; and also the impolite problems up to and including the protection of the perpetrators of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and, yes, rape.

Most hackers live under the comfortable belief that it “can’t happen here”, but it can and it does. I attended a hacker event this year – HiP Berlin – where I discovered that some of the organizers had cooperated to make it possible for multiple known rapists to participate, working together to find a way to circumvent the event’s code of conduct – a document that they were tasked with enforcing. One of the victims was in attendance, believing the event to be safe. At every hacker event I have attended in recent memory, I have personally witnessed or heard stories of deeply problematic behavior and protection for its perpetrators from the leadership.

Our community has problems, important problems, that every hacker should care about, and we need the bravery and humility to face them, not the cowardice to retaliate against those who speak up. Talk to, listen to, and believe your peers and their stories. Stand up for what’s right, and speak out when you see something that isn’t. Demand that your leaders and moderators do the right thing. Make a platform where people can safely speak about what our community needs to do right by them, and have the courage to listen to them and confront yourself.

You need to be someone who will do something about it.

Edit: Case in point: this post was quietly removed by Hacker News moderators within 40 minutes of its submission.

Criminal Justice System statistics, RAINN ↩︎

Hyprland is a toxic community

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hyprland is an open source Wayland compositor based on wlroots, a project I started back in 2017 to make it easier to build good Wayland compositors. It’s a project which is loved by its users for its emphasis on customization and “eye candy” – beautiful graphics and animations, each configuration tailored to the unique look and feel imagined by the user who creates it. It’s a very exciting project!

Unfortunately, the effect is spoilt by an incredibly toxic and hateful community. I cannot recommend Hyprland to anyone who is not prepared to steer well clear of its community spaces. Imagine a high school boys’ locker room come to life on Discord and GitHub and you’ll get an idea of what it’s like.

I became aware of the issues with Hyprland’s community after details of numerous hateful incidents on their Discord came to my attention by way of the grapevine. Most of them stem from the community’s tolerance of hate: community members are allowed to express hateful views with impunity, up to and including astonishing views such as endorsements of eugenics and calls for hate-motivated violence. Such comments are treated as another act in the one big inside joke that is the Hyprland community – the community prefers not to take itself “too seriously”. Hate is moderated only if it is “disruptive” (e.g. presents as spam), but hate presented with a veneer of decorum (or sarcasm) is tolerated, and when challenged, it’s laughed off as a joke.

In one particular incident, the moderators of the Discord server engaged in a harassment campaign against a transgender user, including using their moderator privileges to edit the pronouns in their username from “they/she” to “who/cares”. These roles should be held by trusted community leaders, and it’s from their behavior that the community’s culture and norms stem – they set an example for the community and define what behaviors are acceptable or expected. The problem comes from the top down.

Someone recently pitched a code of conduct – something that this project sorely needs – in a GitHub issue. This thread does not have much overt hate, but it does clearly show how callous and just plain mean the community is, including its leadership (Vaxerski is the original author of Hyprland). Everything is a joke and anyone who wants to be “serious” about anything is mercilessly bullied and made fun of. Quoting this discussion:

I think [a Code of Conduct] is pretty discriminatory towards people that prefer a close, hostile, homogeneous, exclusive, and unhealthy community.

First of all, why would I pledge to uphold any values? Seems like just inconveniencing myself. […] If I’d want to moderate, I’d spend 90% of the time reading kids arguing about bullshit instead of coding.

If you don’t know how to behave without a wall of text explaining how to behave online then you shouldn’t be online.

I am not someone who believes all projects need a code of conduct, if there exists a reasonable standard of conduct in its absence – and that means having a community that does not bully and harass others for expressing differing points of view, let alone for simply having a marginalized identity.

I would have preferred to address these matters in private, so I reached out to Vaxry in February. He responded with a lack of critical awareness over how toxicity presents in his community. However, following my email, he put out a poll for the Discord community to see if the community members experienced harassment in the community – apparently 40% of respondents reported such experiences. Vaxry et al implemented new moderation policies as a result. But these changes did not seem to work: the problems are still present, and the community is still a toxic place that facilitates bullying and hate, including from the community leaders.

Following my email conversation with Vaxry, he appeared on a podcast to discuss toxicity in the Hyprland community. This quote from the interview clearly illustrates the attitude of the leadership:

[A trans person] joined the Discord server and made a big deal out of their pronouns [..] because they put their pronouns in their nickname and made a big deal out of them because people were referring to them as “he” [misgendering them], which, on the Internet, let’s be real, is the default. And so, one of the moderators changed the pronouns in their nickname to “who/cares”. […] Let’s be real, this isn’t like, calling someone the N-word or something.

Later he describes a more moderated community (the /r/unixporn discord server) as having an environment in which everyone is going to “lick your butthole just to be nice”. He compared himself to Terry Davis, the late operating system developer whose struggles with mental illness were broadcast for the world to see, citing a video in which he answers a phone call and refers to the person on the phone by the N-word “ten times” – Vaxry compares this to his approach to answering “stupid questions”.

It really disappoints me to see such an exciting project brought low by a horribly mismanaged community of hate and bullying. Part of what makes open source software great is that it’s great for everyone. It’s unfortunate that someone can discover this cool project, install it and play with it and get excited about it, then join the community to find themselves at the wrong end of this behavior. No one deserves that.

I empathise with Vaxry. I remember being young, smart, productive… and mean. I did some cool stuff, but I deeply regret the way I treated people. It wasn’t really my fault – I was a product of my environment – but it was my responsibility. Today, I’m proud to have built many welcoming communities, where people are rewarded for their involvement, rather than coming away from their experience hurt. What motivates us to build and give away free software if not bringing joy to ourselves and others? Can we be proud of a community which brings more suffering into the world?

My advice to the leadership begins with taking a serious look in the mirror. This project needs a “come to Jesus” moment. Ask yourself what kind of community you can be proud of – can you be proud of a community that people walk away from feeling dejected and hurt? Yours is not a community that brings people joy. What are you going to do about it?

A good start will be to consider the code of conduct proposal seriously, but a change of attitude is also required. My inbox is open to any of the leaders in this project (or any other project facing similar problems) if you want to talk. I’m happy to chat with you in good faith and help you understand what’s needed and why it’s important.

To members of the Hyprland community, I want each of you to personally step up to make the community better. If you see hate and bullying, don’t stay silent. This is a community which proclaims to value radical free speech: test it by using your speech to argue against hate. Participate in the community as you think it should be, not as it necessarily is, and change will follow. If you are sensitive to hate, or a member of a marginalized group, however, I would just advise steering clear of Hyprland until the community improves.

If the leadership fails to account for these problems, it will be up to the community to take their activity elsewhere. You could set up adjacent communities which are less toxic, or fork the software, or simply choose to use something else.

To the victims of harassment, I offer my sincere condolences. I know how hard it is to be the subject of this kind of bullying. You don’t deserve to be treated like this. There are many places in the free software community where you are welcome and celebrated – Hyprland is not the norm. If you need support, I’m always available to listen to your struggles.

To everyone else: please share this post throughout the Hyprland community and adjacent communities. This is a serious problem and it’s not going to change unless its clearly brought to light. The Hyprland maintainers need to be made aware that the broader open source community does not appreciate this kind of behavior.

I sincerely hope that this project improves its community. A serious attitude shift is needed from the top-down, and I hope for the sake of Vaxry, the other leaders, and the community as a whole, that such change comes sooner rather than later. When Vaxry is older and wiser, I want him to look back on the project and community that he’s built with pride and joy, not with regret and shame.

Vaxry has published a response to this post.

I was also privately provided some of the enusing discussion from the Hyprland Discord. Consider that this lacks context and apply your grain of salt accordingly.

I apologise to Vaxry for interrupting their rest, and wish them a speedy recovery.

Here is a plain text log which includes some additional discussion.

AI crap

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There is a machine learning bubble, but the technology is here to stay. Once the bubble pops, the world will be changed by machine learning. But it will probably be crappier, not better.

Contrary to the AI doomer’s expectations, the world isn’t going to go down in flames any faster thanks to AI. Contemporary advances in machine learning aren’t really getting us any closer to AGI, and as Randall Monroe pointed out back in 2018:

What will happen to AI is boring old capitalism. Its staying power will come in the form of replacing competent, expensive humans with crappy, cheap robots. LLMs are a pretty good advance over Markov chains, and stable diffusion can generate images which are only somewhat uncanny with sufficient manipulation of the prompt. Mediocre programmers will use GitHub Copilot to write trivial code and boilerplate for them (trivial code is tautologically uninteresting), and ML will probably remain useful for writing cover letters for you. Self-driving cars might show up Any Day Now™, which is going to be great for sci-fi enthusiasts and technocrats, but much worse in every respect than, say, building more trains.

The biggest lasting changes from machine learning will be more like the following:

A reduction in the labor force for skilled creative work
The complete elimination of humans in customer-support roles
More convincing spam and phishing content, more scalable scams
SEO hacking content farms dominating search results
Book farms (both eBooks and paper) flooding the market
AI-generated content overwhelming social media
Widespread propaganda and astroturfing, both in politics and advertising

AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO₂ emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. They might keep humans in the loop to help with tagging content, seeking out the cheapest markets with the weakest labor laws to build human sweatshops to feed the AI data monster.

You will never trust another product review. You will never speak to a human being at your ISP again. Vapid, pithy media will fill the digital world around you. Technology built for engagement farms – those AI-edited videos with the grating machine voice you’ve seen on your feeds lately – will be white-labeled and used to push products and ideologies at a massive scale with a minimum cost from social media accounts which are populated with AI content, cultivate an audience, and sold in bulk and in good standing with the Algorithm.

All of these things are already happening and will continue to get worse. The future of media is a soulless, vapid regurgitation of all media that came before the AI epoch, and the fate of all new creative media is to be subsumed into the roiling pile of math.

This will be incredibly profitable for the AI barons, and to secure their investment they are deploying an immense, expensive, world-wide propaganda campaign. To the public, the present-day and potential future capabilities of the technology are played up in breathless promises of ridiculous possibility. In closed-room meetings, much more realistic promises are made of cutting payroll budgets in half.

The propaganda also leans into the mystical sci-fi AI canon: the threat of smart computers with world-ending power, the forbidden allure of a new Manhattan Project and all of its consequences, the long-prophesied singularity. The technology is nowhere near this level, a fact well-known by experts and the barons themselves, but the illusion is maintained in the interests of lobbying lawmakers to help the barons erect a moat around their new industry.

Of course, AI does present a threat of violence, but as Randall points out, it’s not from the AI itself, but rather from the people that employ it. The US military is testing out AI-controlled drones, which aren’t going to be self-aware but will scale up human errors (or human malice) until innocent people are killed. AI tools are already being used to set bail and parole conditions – it can put you in jail or keep you there. Police are using AI for facial recognition and “predictive policing”. Of course, all of these models end up discriminating against minorities, depriving them of liberty and often getting them killed.

AI is defined by aggressive capitalism. The hype bubble has been engineered by investors and capitalists dumping money into it, and the returns they expect on that investment are going to come out of your pocket. The singularity is not coming, but the most realistic promises of AI are going to make the world worse. The AI revolution is here, and I don’t really like it.

Flame bait

I had much more inflammatory article drafted for this topic under the title "ChatGPT is the new techno-atheist's substitute for God". It makes some fairly pointed comparisons between the cryptocurrency cult and the machine learning cult and the religious, unshakeable, and largely ignorant faith in both technologies as the harbingers of progress. It was fun to write, but this is probably the better article.

I found this Hacker News comment and quoted it in the original draft: “It’s probably worth talking to GPT4 before seeking professional help [to deal with depression].”

In case you need to hear it: do not (TW: suicide) seek out OpenAI’s services to help with your depression. Finding and setting up an appointment with a therapist can be difficult for a lot of people – it’s okay for it to feel hard. Talk to your friends and ask them to help you find the right care for your needs.

Hello from Ares!

Wed, 09 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am pleased to be writing today’s blog post from a laptop running Ares OS. I am writing into an ed(1) session, on a file on an ext4 filesystem on its hard drive. That’s pretty cool! It seems that a lot of interesting stuff has happened since I gave that talk on Helios at FOSDEM in February.

The talk I gave at FOSDEM was no doubt impressive, but it was a bit of a party trick. The system was running on a Raspberry Pi with one process which included both the slide deck as a series of raster images baked into the ELF file, as well as the GPU driver and drawing code necessary to display them, all in one package. This was quite necessary, as it turns out, given that the very idea of “processes” was absent from the system at this stage.

Much has changed since that talk. The system I am writing to you from has support for processes indeed, complete with fork and exec and auxiliary vectors and threads and so on. If I run “ps” I get the following output:

mercury % ps
1 /sbin/usrinit dexec /sbin/drv/ext4 block0 childfs 0 fs 0
2 /etc/driver.d/00-pcibus
3 /etc/pci.d/class/01/06/ahci
4 /etc/driver.d/00-ps2kb
5 /etc/driver.d/99-serial
6 /etc/driver.d/99-vgacons
7 /sbin/drv/ext4 block0
15 ed blog.md
16 ps

Each of these processes is running in userspace, and some of them are drivers. A number of drivers now exist for the system, including among the ones you see here a general-purpose PCI driver, AHCI (SATA), PS/2 keyboard, PC serial, and a VGA console, not to mention the ext4 driver, based on lwext4 (the first driver not written in Hare, actually). Not shown here are additional drivers for the CMOS real-time clock (so Ares knows what time it is, thanks to Stacy Harper), a virtio9pfs driver (thanks also to Tom Leb for the initial work here), and a few more besides.

As of this week, a small number of software ports exist. The ext4 driver is based on lwext4, as I said earlier, which might be considered a port, though it is designed to be portable. The rc shell I have been working on lately has also been ported, albeit with many features disabled, to Mercury. And, of course, I did say I was writing this blog post with ed(1) – I have ported Michael Forney’s ed implementation from sbase, with relatively few features disabled as a matter of fact (the “!” command and signals were removed).

This ed port, and lwext4, are based on our C library, designed with drivers and normal userspace programs in mind, and derived largely from musl libc. This is coming along rather well – a few features (signals again come to mind) are not going to be implemented, but it’s been relatively straightforward to get a large amount of the POSIX/C11 API surface area covered on Ares, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to port ed(1).

There’s still quite a lot to be done. In the near term, I expect to see the following:

A virtual filesystem
Pipes and more shell features enabled, such as redirects
More filesystem support (mkdir et al)
A framebuffer console
EFI support on x86_64
MBR and GPT partitions

This is more of the basics. As these basics unblock other tasks, a few of the more ambitious projects we might look forward to include:

Networking support (at least ICMP)
Audio support
ACPI support
Basic USB support
A service manager (not systemd…)
An installer, perhaps a package manager
Self-hosting builds
Dare I say Wayland?

I should also probably do something about that whining fan I’m hearing in the background right now. Of course, I will also have to do a fresh DOOM port once the framebuffer situation is improved. There’s also still plenty of kernel work to be done and odds and ends all over the project, but it’s in pretty good shape and I’m having a blast working on it. I think that by now I have answered the original question, “can an operating system be written in Hare”, with a resounding “yes”. Now I’m just having fun with it. Stay tuned!

Now I just have to shut this laptop off. There’s no poweroff command yet, so I suppose I’ll just hold down the power button until it stops making noise.

The rc shell and its excellent handling of whitespace

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post is a response to Mark Dominus’ “The shell and its crappy handling of whitespace”.

I’ve been working on a shell for Unix-like systems called rc, which draws heavily from the Plan 9 shell of the same name. When I saw Mark’s post about the perils of whitespace in POSIX shells (or derived shells, like bash), I thought it prudent to see if any of the problems he outlines are present in the shell I’m working on myself. Good news: they aren’t!

Let’s go over each of his examples. First he provides the following example:

for i in *.jpg; do
	cp $i /tmp
done

This breaks if there are spaces in the filenames. Not so with rc:

% cat test.rc
for (i in *.jpg) {
	cp $i subdir
}
% ls
a.jpg   b.jpg  'bite me.jpg'   c.jpg   subdir   test.rc
% rc ./test.rc 
% ls subdir/
a.jpg   b.jpg  'bite me.jpg'   c.jpg

He gives a similar example for a script that renames jpeg to jpg:

for i in *.jpeg; do
  mv $i $(suf $i).jpg
done

This breaks for similar reasons, but works fine in rc:

% cat test.rc  
fn suf(fname) {
	echo $fname | sed -e 's/\..*//'
}

for (i in *.jpeg) {
	mv $i `{suf $i}.jpg
}
% ls 
a.jpeg   b.jpeg  'bite me.jpeg'   c.jpeg   test.rc
% rc ./test.rc  
% ls 
a.jpg   b.jpg  'bite me.jpg'   c.jpg   test.rc

There are other shells, such as fish or zsh, which also have answers to these problems which don’t necessarily call for generous quoting like other shells often do. rc is much simpler than these shells. At the moment it clocks in at just over 3,000 lines of code, compared to fish at ~45,000 and zsh at ~144,000. Admittedly, it’s not done yet, but I would be surprised to see it grow beyond 5,000 lines for version 1.0.¹

The key to rc’s design success in this area is the introduction of a second primitive. The Bourne shell and its derivatives traditionally work with only one primitive: strings. But command lines are made of lists of strings, and so a language which embodies the primitives of the command line ought to also be able to represent those as a first-class feature. In traditional shells a list of strings is denoted inline with the use of spaces within those strings, which raises obvious problems when the members themselves contain spaces; see Mark’s post detailing the errors which ensue. rc adds lists of strings as a formal primitive alongside strings.

% args=(ls --color /) 
% echo $args(1) 
ls
% echo $args(2) 
--color
% echo $#args 
3
% $args 
bin   dev  home  lost+found  mnt  proc  run   srv      swap  tmp  var
boot  etc  lib   media       opt  root  sbin  storage  sys   usr
% args=("foo bar" baz) 
% touch $args 
% ls 
 baz  'foo bar'

Much better, right? One simple change eliminates the need for quoting virtually everywhere. Strings can contain spaces and nothing melts down.

Let me run down the remaining examples from Mark’s post and demonstrate their non-importance in rc. First, regarding $*, it just does what you expect.

% cat yell.rc
#!/bin/rc
shift
echo I am about to run $* now!!!
exec $*
% ls *.jpg
'bite me.jpg'
% ./yell.rc ls *.jpg
I am about to run ls bite me.jpg now!!!
'bite me.jpg'

Note also that there is no need to quote the arguments to “echo” here. Also note the use of shift; $* includes $0 in rc.

Finally, let’s rewrite Mark’s “lastdl” program in rc and show how it works fine in rc’s interactive mode.

#!/bin/rc
cd $HOME/downloads
echo $HOME/downloads/`{ls -t | head -n1}

Its use at the command line works just fine without quotes.

% file `{lastdl} 
/home/sircmpwn/downloads/test image.jpg: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01,
aspect ratio, density 1x1, segment length 16, baseline, precision 8,
5000x2813, components 3

Just for fun, here’s another version of this rc script that renames files with spaces to without, like the last example in Mark’s post:

#!/bin/rc
cd $HOME/downloads
last=`{ls -t | head -n1}
if (~ $last '* *') {
	newname=`{echo $last | tr ' \t' '_'}
	mv $last $HOME/downloads/$newname
	last=$newname
}
echo $HOME/downloads/$last

The only quotes to be found are those which escape the wildcard match testing for a space in the string.² Not bad, right? Like Plan 9’s rc, my shell imagines a new set of primitives for shells, then starts from the ground up and builds a shell which works better in most respects while still being very simple. Most of the problems that have long plagued us with respect to sh, bash, etc, are solved in a simple package with rc, alongside a nice interactive mode reminiscent of the best features of fish.

rc is a somewhat complete shell today, but there is a bit more work to be done before it’s ready for 1.0, most pressingly with respect to signal handling and job control, alongside a small bit of polish and easier features to implement (such as subshells, IFS, etc). Some features which are likely to be omitted, at least for 1.0, include logical comparisons and arithmetic expansion (for which /bin/test and /bin/dc are recommended respectively). Of course, rc is destined to become the primary shell of the Ares operating system project that I’ve been working on, but I have designed it to work on Unix as well.

Check it out!

Also worth noting that these line counts are, to some extent, comparing apples to oranges given that fish, zsh, and rc are written respectively in C++/Rust, C, and Hare. ↩︎
This is a bit of a fib. In fact, globbing is disabled when processing the args of the ~ built-in. However, the quotes are, ironically, required to escape the space between the * characters, so it’s one argument rather than two. ↩︎