Is this anything but a fit of pique on the part of the maintainer of the mirror? It seems that the maintainer is mainly saying "because I have done many good things, no-one is allowed to complain about anything I do." It seemed that the notification was polite and professional, and made very clear that it involved no personal judgement, only a response to user demand. (The free-speech issue seems to be a red herring; no-one is, as far as I can tell, denying his right to name his mirror as he pleases. As the saying goes, "free speech is the right to say whatever you please, but not the right to have anyone listen.")
To be honest, if I was the Arch people, I'd boot him from the project just for the ridiculous self-preening nature of that email. And also for calling himself "Alucard".
You'd be making a huge mistake, and if I were at a higher station than you when you did that, I would be very close to booting you if could be argued as a net good or neutral to do so.
Why would I be making a huge mistake? They are clearly incapable of behaving professionally and, since the whole thrust of that thread is "Arch wants to behave professionally", booting them would align with that perfectly.
Maybe the laid-back, results oriented nature of Arch Linux is what got it here. The IRC and mailing list are openly hostile to people who do not read the manual, and yet it has consistently been the best goddamn Linux distro on the planet earth for the solid five years I've used it. It is on the backs of people like this that Arch Linux was built, and if that laissez faire atmosphere deteriorates, I suspect the productivity will deteriorate with it.
I know what you're getting at, and that's fair from one perspective.
To people who are socially sensitive it can be very stressful to work with these folks. When I say laid-back I figure I mean that it is more tolerant/friendly to autistic behaviour. The low standard for social skills brings in a lot of people who do productive work, at the expense of the perception of people who don't work well with autistic types. More men and boys are autistic (or close to it) than women and girls, so you'll see an even bigger split here than usual.
Basically, this domain name is typical autistic weeaboo trash (in keeping with the weeaboo handle). It's obviously not a literal endorsement of child trafficking; probably a morsel of dark humour which is more offensive than humorous if you're sensitive; or perhaps it's a tool for his work at NCMEC.
Emotional sensitivity is effectively a cancer to these communities, because a large portion of the members are incapable of it. If it takes hold in the Arch Linux community, it could collapse almost entirely.
HN has a lot of sensitive/agreeable people, so (understandable) outrage in this thread has cost me ~50 karma. It's a matter of personality, whether you see this as a sign of a healthy community, or possibly the end of an era.
Seems like this guy has a history of being a grade too abrasive for different communities. I understand why he sounds so upset in his response here.
side note: autism may not be quite so imbalanced by gender. it's diagnosed in males more often, but the diagnostic criteria were established by observing males and autism presents differently in females. there are suspected to be a lot of undiagnosed ones.
These could be two ways to say the same thing. The relevant aspect of it is the one which is simply diagnosed, and thus noticeable. If it is not apparent, it is not relevant in this case.
The reply by this developer is full of sarcasm, a literary devise commonly thought to be hard for people on the autism spectrum to understand, let alone practice to such an extend.
The only imaginable purpose of this domain name was to elicit exactly the reaction that he got, and/or to cause emotions in people that don't complain. Such an intent to inflict emotional harm is also not consistent with what is commonly thought of as autism, especially not if it succeeds. Indeed, autism is almost defined by an inability to sense others' emotions, and therefore also to influence then.
If anything, this behaviour resembles sociopathy more closely.
It's a random person offering to host a mirror. He isn't affiliated, and havent contribute in any other way to the project. There is nothing to boot here.
I think the point here is that a) he did everything right b) he did nothing wrong and c) it doesn't really matter what characters go into the name.
I think the complaint is quite petty, and it doesn't really solve any problems. Approximately nobody is going to have a worse opinion of Arch Linux because of the content of a url in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist, and it's basically a waste of time to address this as an issue.
> it's basically a waste of time to address this as an issue.
It's just as much of a waste of time to defend it. Arch has hundreds of mirrors and dozens come and go every month. Dropping one takes less time than it took me to reply to you here.
> It's just as much of a waste of time to defend it.
If by "defend" you mean "not spend more money on registering yet another domain", then I'd say it's worth defending. A hundred dollars is worth at least a few emails, especially if it is at the expense of a productive community member, on behalf of some anonymous whiner.
Domains don't cost hundreds of dollars if you really don't care about the name. You can find some for $5 a year for one which nobody needs to remember/type.
Nobody is forcing the person in question to host an arch mirror. Being included in the official mirror list does not come without rules and if one of these rules is "don't have a shitty domain name", I don't see the problem.
PS, domain names on non-egregious TLDs are 5-10 bucks a year.
Pissing on people who spend their hard earned cash and precious mortal time on serving your community is a great way to ruin it. I hope nobody ever has to deal with your leadership.
I don't see the value in punishing community members for the high crime of being autistic weeaboos.
I've created and managed many communities. Kicking people out for being rude isn't a thing that's ever in question and "giving back" to the community (no matter how) doesn't shield you from that. The person there got their mirror removed because the domain name is purposefully in bad taste. What else did you expect?
Alucard, the person in question, is someone who spends his "hard earned cash" trying to push the boundaries of every community he's a part of, just so he can get kicked out and complain about "SJWs" (keybase @alucard, look him up). I personally don't give a fuck, but people whose work solely exists just to stir shit up are never healthy for a community and you shouldn't be surprised when they're removed.
Maybe you think like that as well; maybe you, too, think all speech should be allowed in every community ever, with no boundary whatsoever. Maybe you think there's a speech-police armada out to get you, watching everything you write and analyzing it to send "anonymous complaints" when something's deemed too offensive.
What actually happened: Someone saw a fucked up URL in the mirrorlist, probably looked it up to make sure it wasn't serving malware, then reported the incident on the forum. An arch dev saw that and basically said "nope, not dealing with that nonsense" and removed the mirror.
This is clearly a person who has many many domains.
Creating a public mirror requires very little time. I created the NYU arch mirror in under an hour. All you need is a server, bandwidth, and a cronjob.
The guy claims he is making an ISP, if so he likely has servers and bandwidth to spare.
I'm tempted to say it could've been a provocation planned for some time. The original name for the mirror was cuntflaps: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/51870 and only changed after a request.
> involved no personal judgement, only a response to user demand
So it is okay to remove stuff just because somebody was offended? Why nobody is banning Rammstein concerts then? I'm pretty sure many people will find band's name offencive.
So... do you mind answering the second part then?
Will they change ycombinator.com to something else if somebody is offended? Or will you change your "smhost" if I'm gonna tell you it offends me?
Because they choose not to. Each venue, organisation, or city which lawfully has influence over such events has the right to refuse. Neither case is "banning".
e.g. Rammstein have been refused on safety grounds before now.
2001: "Rammstein were unable to play their show yesterday at the Astoria in London due to significant restrictions to their stageshow and pyrotechnics. The band feel it would be unfair to their fans, to see a show that would have become highly compromised. If these issues can be resolved the band promises to return to the UK later in the year for live shows. Rammstein apologize for letting their fans down due to a problem which was out of their hands"
Bands get to name themselves how they like. Concert venues get to decide whether they care about the name.
"Loli" is a reference to underage girls, usually in a sexual context. Some people will be offended by this, and it's up to any organisation whether they want to be associated with this.
Similarly, if you tell someone "smhost" is offensive, and describe _why_ and _how_ it's offensive, it's up to them to decide whether they want to continue to be associated with it, or if they want to change.
You're arguing from a "it can't be right in any case without being right in all cases". This is a judgement call where they think it's likely to cause more damage to their brand than benefit. It's their brand, they get to make that judgement, whether they are right or wrong.
To be fair to the parent comment I don't think it's equivalent.
If someone gets offended, you look and say "Why were they offended". Ask yourself if it's reasonable, if the case is that the name is referencing trafficking underage girls then you might think, OK, maybe this is a joke, but it is something that a reasonable person might get offended by and if you want to foster a professional atmosphere then you would change it.
I think if you went to the the arch maintainers and asked them to change the name pacman because you were traumatised by nightmares of the game pacman as a child they would tell you to get lost. However, that isn't really what is happening here.
In Oxford a lot of things are named after "Isis". Isis is the local name for the River Thames, presumably named after the Egyptian Godess. We should not change that name, just because it is used by a terorist group. But it would be a bit distasteful to use it as a new name. Especially if you use it intentionally with the intent of causing offence. Nuance matters.
The new (~2014?) English Language school in Greenwich was called ISIS. Up until ~2016, anyway. Huge big flashy signs it had, too.
(I like to imagine all the children telling their parents they were going to London to "study with ISIS" causing huge parental conniptions until the penny dropped.)
> But it would be a bit distasteful to use it as a new name. Especially if you use it intentionally with the intent of causing offence.
I think that your second sentence is an important qualification. I almost wished that they'd stuck with the name, just to emphasise that a bunch of terrorist asshats don't get to dictate what words others can use; I think that such a useage would have been (very mildly) heroic rather than offensive.
> So... do you mind answering the second part then? Will they change ycombinator.com to something else if somebody is offended? Or will you change your "smhost" if I'm gonna tell you it offends me?
At least in my original post, a key part of my argument is that no-one is requiring alucard to change the name of the mirror. The only question is whether the mirror will be listed. Thus, I think it is analogous to asking whether I would remove a link to ycombinator.com from a page I controlled if I were offended by the URL, or if I might try to hide posts from smhost if I were offended by his or her handle; and either of those seems like a reasonable response (even if taking offense itself would clearly be unreasonable).
>The only question is whether the mirror will be listed.
>I would remove a link to ycombinator.com from a page I controlled
Let me reword this then. Why should an entity remove something from their listings when the offended entity can remove it from the local listing on its machine? The thing is - in the first case we are talking about public lists available for everybody. Why should the majority of users be left without and additional source of distribution (for example)?
But yes, obviously it's up to Arch maintainers wether they want this to be there or not.
Not quite. It's actually used to refer to anime characters that have the physical characteristics of young girls. You know, weeaboo territory stuff. The theme has become increasingly prevalent in anime as of late.
The history of the 2-syllable word "loli" to refer to prepubescence is pretty interesting. Of course, it began as the Lolita of Nabokov's book. Some decades later, Japanese street fashion then co-opted this term to refer to a coquettish fashion style with Victorian motifs; for an analogy you might consider it similar to how steampunk wears and reinterprets the outward look of mechanical automatons.
I don't quite get the original choice of naming outside of perhaps the lack of awareness of cultural subtleties and connotations that underlie cultural appropriation, but it is apt, since choosing to dress in such a way is a voluntary choice to want to be seen and viewed as a (perfect) and very youthful doll more as something to be admired from a distance than to be interacted with—perhaps the notion of sexual immaturity was seen to reinforce Victorian prudishness and vice versa. The way things get verbally abbreviated in Japanese is that they tend to be abbreviated into abbreviations of 2-mora or 4-mora, roughly corresponding to 2 syllables or 4 syllables. Hence Lolita was quickly abbreviated to loli in casual speak.
From there, the usage of the word loli further evolved in Japanese anime-related media. "loli" probably started off as a not-very-common archetype of female character who looked like the idealized lolita dresser—a doll-like prepubescent person with "refined" manners. Perhaps with influence from the original meaning of Lolita, at some point loli was generalized into the (by now common) prepubescent female character archetype in anime-related media, regardless of whether or not the Victorian-motifed dresses accompanied it.
Loli is a term used to describe young girls (short form of lolita - "a slang term for a sexually attractive, seductive or precocious young girl" (c) wiki)
And here is the admin's original request to use a mirror with the name mirror.cuntflaps.me where the loli.forsale mirror was ultimately accepted, https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/51870
> like working for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
Am I right in saying that this guy works for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (presumably in Portugal)? Because for some reason it seems particularly weird to me that someone in that organisation would find that domain name amusing. Maybe it is some kind of professional gallows humour?
some people who contribute to open source projects are really nice and considerate people, and some are dicks. When someone makes significant contributions, people tolerate a bit of dickish behavior and shrug it of as the behavior of a slightly eccentric genius. But for everyone else, people won’t put up with your shit. If you want people to accept your contributions, be nice, and don’t be a dick.
> some people who contribute to open source projects are really nice and considerate people, and some are vaginas. When someone makes significant contributions, people tolerate a bit of vaginaish behavior and shrug it of as the behavior of a slightly eccentric genius. But for everyone else, people won’t put up with your shit. If you want people to accept your contributions, be nice, and don’t be a vagina.
If you are looking for an inclusive gender-neutral variant, "ass" is probably the best. Although I tend to avoid such language in general as it comes across as immature and detracts from an otherwise valid argument. I'm all for freedom of speech, but I'm also for inclusive language. My satirical response was really just to draw attention to that.
Personally I could care less. It's a gag that I'm sure some people do find amusing.
But their response is what gets me. Boo hoo, free speech is dead because you don't want ostencibly-pedophilic jokes associated with your software.
I say if you're committed to an off-color joke or gag, this is a terrible attempt to save face. Just apologize with authenticity and go more subtle. Don't turn it into another *gate or whatever the hell.
Of course, I'm only indifferent because nobody got hurt. A similar but genuinely terrible situation would be the Python Pantyshot debacle...
That's just a type of response the author could come up with based on leftist social currencies. He needs to respond in a matter which reflects values of the people who are currently opposing him.
> I say if you're committed to an off-color joke or gag, this is a terrible attempt to save face. Just apologize with authenticity and go more subtle. Don't turn it into another *gate or whatever the hell.
Exactly, and this is so obviously a troll.
Look at the original feature request to even add the mirror:
I can't make up my mind how much this is freedom of speech (and offend, which is never a reason for censorship in my book) and how much this is just being annoying.
I argued in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14846562), but hope you won't mind my repeating here, the (tried but true) trope that free speech guarantees only the right to say what you want, not to have anyone listen. Not disseminating someone else's speech is not the same thing as suppressing it.
The email of the author comes from a domain where one can find this gem on one of subpages:
"Unless its some illegal faggot shit, I will always store your loli pics, anon."[1]
I don't appreciate people putting their personalities (whether I generally appreciate their personality or not) into software. The project you are creating is, or should be, an intellectual endeavor and it serves no technical purpose to push your personality onto users. What's more, it lessens your credibility - if you don't understand not to put your personality into your project then I question what bigger mistakes you are making as well. It's the same reason I wouldn't trust savings to a banker wearing a clown costume, it's not about me hating clowns, they can be a clown in private all they want, just don't make a clown out of your own software.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't put personality in it, just that intrinsically the product doesn't need it so if you strive to make it great then don't burden your users with noise.
It serves a purpose if it's to cater to a user who appreciates that.
You could argue that software displaying "Good Morning, <name>!" every first run of the day serves no technical purpose, and judging by the tone of your comment, it makes that software inferior and the developer who decided to include this feature - to be of ill mind and immature.
I like to say that seriousness, like fear, will make us do and say stupid things if we let it take over us.
For one thing you are using exclamation point. However your example isn't really pushing personality onto users, some polite playfulness can be welcome. An example of what I had in mind that isn't in itself of poor taste but would still be unwelcome at least to me would be if somebody was pushing their metal subculture into their spreadsheet software for no apparent reason.
82 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] thread(This is why I'm not in charge of things, mind.)
I don't see how the RTFM mentality and what you call "laid back" mentality are compatible.
Imo, Arch is one of the more severe/strict distros and communities.
Guess it's all perception.
To people who are socially sensitive it can be very stressful to work with these folks. When I say laid-back I figure I mean that it is more tolerant/friendly to autistic behaviour. The low standard for social skills brings in a lot of people who do productive work, at the expense of the perception of people who don't work well with autistic types. More men and boys are autistic (or close to it) than women and girls, so you'll see an even bigger split here than usual.
Basically, this domain name is typical autistic weeaboo trash (in keeping with the weeaboo handle). It's obviously not a literal endorsement of child trafficking; probably a morsel of dark humour which is more offensive than humorous if you're sensitive; or perhaps it's a tool for his work at NCMEC.
Emotional sensitivity is effectively a cancer to these communities, because a large portion of the members are incapable of it. If it takes hold in the Arch Linux community, it could collapse almost entirely.
HN has a lot of sensitive/agreeable people, so (understandable) outrage in this thread has cost me ~50 karma. It's a matter of personality, whether you see this as a sign of a healthy community, or possibly the end of an era.
Seems like this guy has a history of being a grade too abrasive for different communities. I understand why he sounds so upset in his response here.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-it-s-diffe...
The only imaginable purpose of this domain name was to elicit exactly the reaction that he got, and/or to cause emotions in people that don't complain. Such an intent to inflict emotional harm is also not consistent with what is commonly thought of as autism, especially not if it succeeds. Indeed, autism is almost defined by an inability to sense others' emotions, and therefore also to influence then.
If anything, this behaviour resembles sociopathy more closely.
We could have the same scenario with smart alecks committing code that has "fun" var and function names.
I think the complaint is quite petty, and it doesn't really solve any problems. Approximately nobody is going to have a worse opinion of Arch Linux because of the content of a url in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist, and it's basically a waste of time to address this as an issue.
It's just as much of a waste of time to defend it. Arch has hundreds of mirrors and dozens come and go every month. Dropping one takes less time than it took me to reply to you here.
If by "defend" you mean "not spend more money on registering yet another domain", then I'd say it's worth defending. A hundred dollars is worth at least a few emails, especially if it is at the expense of a productive community member, on behalf of some anonymous whiner.
PS, domain names on non-egregious TLDs are 5-10 bucks a year.
I don't see the value in punishing community members for the high crime of being autistic weeaboos.
Alucard, the person in question, is someone who spends his "hard earned cash" trying to push the boundaries of every community he's a part of, just so he can get kicked out and complain about "SJWs" (keybase @alucard, look him up). I personally don't give a fuck, but people whose work solely exists just to stir shit up are never healthy for a community and you shouldn't be surprised when they're removed.
Maybe you think like that as well; maybe you, too, think all speech should be allowed in every community ever, with no boundary whatsoever. Maybe you think there's a speech-police armada out to get you, watching everything you write and analyzing it to send "anonymous complaints" when something's deemed too offensive.
What actually happened: Someone saw a fucked up URL in the mirrorlist, probably looked it up to make sure it wasn't serving malware, then reported the incident on the forum. An arch dev saw that and basically said "nope, not dealing with that nonsense" and removed the mirror.
Creating a public mirror requires very little time. I created the NYU arch mirror in under an hour. All you need is a server, bandwidth, and a cronjob.
The guy claims he is making an ISP, if so he likely has servers and bandwidth to spare.
So it is okay to remove stuff just because somebody was offended? Why nobody is banning Rammstein concerts then? I'm pretty sure many people will find band's name offencive.
Yep.
Because they choose not to. Each venue, organisation, or city which lawfully has influence over such events has the right to refuse. Neither case is "banning".
2001: "Rammstein were unable to play their show yesterday at the Astoria in London due to significant restrictions to their stageshow and pyrotechnics. The band feel it would be unfair to their fans, to see a show that would have become highly compromised. If these issues can be resolved the band promises to return to the UK later in the year for live shows. Rammstein apologize for letting their fans down due to a problem which was out of their hands"
Bands get to name themselves how they like. Concert venues get to decide whether they care about the name.
"Loli" is a reference to underage girls, usually in a sexual context. Some people will be offended by this, and it's up to any organisation whether they want to be associated with this.
Similarly, if you tell someone "smhost" is offensive, and describe _why_ and _how_ it's offensive, it's up to them to decide whether they want to continue to be associated with it, or if they want to change.
If someone gets offended, you look and say "Why were they offended". Ask yourself if it's reasonable, if the case is that the name is referencing trafficking underage girls then you might think, OK, maybe this is a joke, but it is something that a reasonable person might get offended by and if you want to foster a professional atmosphere then you would change it.
I think if you went to the the arch maintainers and asked them to change the name pacman because you were traumatised by nightmares of the game pacman as a child they would tell you to get lost. However, that isn't really what is happening here.
(I like to imagine all the children telling their parents they were going to London to "study with ISIS" causing huge parental conniptions until the penny dropped.)
> But it would be a bit distasteful to use it as a new name. Especially if you use it intentionally with the intent of causing offence.
I think that your second sentence is an important qualification. I almost wished that they'd stuck with the name, just to emphasise that a bunch of terrorist asshats don't get to dictate what words others can use; I think that such a useage would have been (very mildly) heroic rather than offensive.
At least in my original post, a key part of my argument is that no-one is requiring alucard to change the name of the mirror. The only question is whether the mirror will be listed. Thus, I think it is analogous to asking whether I would remove a link to ycombinator.com from a page I controlled if I were offended by the URL, or if I might try to hide posts from smhost if I were offended by his or her handle; and either of those seems like a reasonable response (even if taking offense itself would clearly be unreasonable).
Let me reword this then. Why should an entity remove something from their listings when the offended entity can remove it from the local listing on its machine? The thing is - in the first case we are talking about public lists available for everybody. Why should the majority of users be left without and additional source of distribution (for example)?
But yes, obviously it's up to Arch maintainers wether they want this to be there or not.
I don't quite get the original choice of naming outside of perhaps the lack of awareness of cultural subtleties and connotations that underlie cultural appropriation, but it is apt, since choosing to dress in such a way is a voluntary choice to want to be seen and viewed as a (perfect) and very youthful doll more as something to be admired from a distance than to be interacted with—perhaps the notion of sexual immaturity was seen to reinforce Victorian prudishness and vice versa. The way things get verbally abbreviated in Japanese is that they tend to be abbreviated into abbreviations of 2-mora or 4-mora, roughly corresponding to 2 syllables or 4 syllables. Hence Lolita was quickly abbreviated to loli in casual speak.
From there, the usage of the word loli further evolved in Japanese anime-related media. "loli" probably started off as a not-very-common archetype of female character who looked like the idealized lolita dresser—a doll-like prepubescent person with "refined" manners. Perhaps with influence from the original meaning of Lolita, at some point loli was generalized into the (by now common) prepubescent female character archetype in anime-related media, regardless of whether or not the Victorian-motifed dresses accompanied it.
Somebody didn't like the joke about selling one.
Here is the original complaint, https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=227998
And here is the admin's original request to use a mirror with the name mirror.cuntflaps.me where the loli.forsale mirror was ultimately accepted, https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/51870
Am I right in saying that this guy works for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (presumably in Portugal)? Because for some reason it seems particularly weird to me that someone in that organisation would find that domain name amusing. Maybe it is some kind of professional gallows humour?
Sometimes known as "vested contributor". This is a problem people need to be aware of. It's probably a bad idea to tolerate poor behaviour.
http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/VestedContributor
But their response is what gets me. Boo hoo, free speech is dead because you don't want ostencibly-pedophilic jokes associated with your software.
I say if you're committed to an off-color joke or gag, this is a terrible attempt to save face. Just apologize with authenticity and go more subtle. Don't turn it into another *gate or whatever the hell.
Of course, I'm only indifferent because nobody got hurt. A similar but genuinely terrible situation would be the Python Pantyshot debacle...
Exactly, and this is so obviously a troll.
Look at the original feature request to even add the mirror:
https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/51870
You can see Pritz's hesitation at using "cuntflaps.me" as a mirror and his request to use a different name.
To which Alucard suggests "loli.forsale", instead.
So excuse the Arch maintainers for not allowing you to politicize their distribution, thereby polarizing their user base...
I argued in another thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14846562), but hope you won't mind my repeating here, the (tried but true) trope that free speech guarantees only the right to say what you want, not to have anyone listen. Not disseminating someone else's speech is not the same thing as suppressing it.
"Unless its some illegal faggot shit, I will always store your loli pics, anon."[1]
I don't appreciate people putting their personalities (whether I generally appreciate their personality or not) into software. The project you are creating is, or should be, an intellectual endeavor and it serves no technical purpose to push your personality onto users. What's more, it lessens your credibility - if you don't understand not to put your personality into your project then I question what bigger mistakes you are making as well. It's the same reason I wouldn't trust savings to a banker wearing a clown costume, it's not about me hating clowns, they can be a clown in private all they want, just don't make a clown out of your own software.
[1]https://safe.moe/faq
Plenty will find that attitude offensive. Like, who do you think you are telling people what their project should be.
You could argue that software displaying "Good Morning, <name>!" every first run of the day serves no technical purpose, and judging by the tone of your comment, it makes that software inferior and the developer who decided to include this feature - to be of ill mind and immature.
I like to say that seriousness, like fear, will make us do and say stupid things if we let it take over us.