That's not a website you would normally want to go anywhere near. It is a forum where stalkers and creeps go to obsess over and make fun of the lives of people who aren't public figures.
It's also a website with a culture of methodically archiving people's behavior, whether you agree with how it gets used or not. I agree with freedom of speech, but also I do think people ought to be held accountable for the things they say and do.
I'd be awfully hesitant to trust factual claims made by people who speak and behave as that site's users do. Nothing I've seen from them suggests a willingness to scruple at fabricating evidence.
On the contrary, Kiwis are meticulous about verifying and preserving evidence. Posting information about someone without third-party archive links or some other way to verify what you're saying will result in you, at best, being politely reminded to post verification. If it's verified that you were intentionally posting false information to stir up drama, you will likely be banned and maybe even have your own thread made about you with all of your dirty laundry proudly on display.
Yes, Kiwis dox and mock people and say gamer words, and that sort of edgi boi behavior isn't for everyone. But the information it collects is rarely inaccurate.
This is such a strange response. Byuu's two posts later in the thread contain several corrections, particularly on their alleged cartridge hoarding behavior. It invalidates the claims of the original post while not denying any of the evidence was true. A well sourced Wikipedia article can still be biased. The presence of sources isn't mutually exclusive with bias.
I'm increasingly becoming convinced Wikipedia is a toxic garbage dump. The Wii U article states that it had the fewest game releases of any Nintendo console. I tried adding the words "…since the Virtual Boy" to turn that into a factually correct statement and it got reverted. I don't have the time to get into a slapfight with another editor about facts, so the incorrect statement remains. Whatever.
One of the biggest problems is that anyone can make up the same username anywhere online and use it in false flag attempts to harm someone's reputation and the dramaqueens at Kiwifarm don't care as long as it's "verified" by their very ambiguous standards, something which has happened there before many times.
>to stir up drama
Ironic since the whole product they're selling there is drama and invoking it not only on their own boards but elsewhere.
Certain slurs against a person's race or sexuality. They came to be called "gamer words" as a meme after PewDiePie dropped one while playing a game of PUBG live on stream.
There used to be a banner in that site that said that white-knighting was not allowed. I understood that to mean that if someone posted something refuting another post that was criticizing that person they would get banned. I would agree with you if kiwifarms was a truly free site that aimed to stay objective but this does not seem to be the case.
They're the kind of people who try to make themselves sound reasonable by saying some of their members are also part of vulnerable communities, then turn around and call people "spergs" as an insult and let it slide.
In the end, all that matters to them is if they get a good laugh out of it, as it always has been.
I mean, yeah, I'm pretty sure that byuu has done some things he regrets in life, including content he's posted online.
That's hardly unusual for people who've been on the internet for a long time, and is something that we as a society are going to have to learn to deal with better than we do at the moment. People change, and dredging up stuff that people posted years ago is more than a little bit sad, and deeply unedifying for everyone.
I'd never heard of Kiwi Farms before today and, honestly, I could cheerfully have gone my whole life without knowing about it.
I started reading the thread, then skimmed the responses further down and was, basically, appalled. This website truly does plumb the depths of mental depravity. It's a cesspool of lazy, warped, corrupted thinking.
As such, I would regard any perspective on byuu shared on that site as highly suspect, and I certainly wouldn't use it as a yardstick by which to assess him as a human being.
Right: I think it might be time to go and disinfect my eyes and my brain.
Yeah - everyone says dumb things at one point or another. Maybe some of the callout is warranted, but collating every possible embarrassing thing someone has said is too much.
I would like to point out that byuu's recent response to that thread was composed and dignified: https://kiwifarms.net/threads/byuu-byuu_nyan-setsunakun0.430.... As someone with who wasn't familiar with the drama I came away with the impression that byuu handled it rather well in the end (and also has grown as a person thanks to it).
It does make me wonder if from the perspective of PR and reducing further trolling posting a calm, eloquent and self-deprecating defense is better or worse than not responding at all. What would you do if you had a Kiwi Farms thread with your embarrassing posts, some very old?
(Throwaway because I don't want a link to Kiwi Farms in my post history.)
I clicked that link expecting to be horrified and was still shocked by the first thing I glanced at. Thanks for linking, but I wouldn't advise anyone to click it. It's not worth it.
Hey it could be worse, imagine having a link to your own KF thread in a frontpage HN article. Now that's a bad look ^-^;
Referring to GP, of course. I appreciate the link to my reply. For any folks here that read the post, please also read my reply if you don't mind. For folks who don't read the thread at all, just note that this is about me saying dumb things online, mostly when I was a young adult. I haven't actually done anything heinous nor are there substantiated allegations to that effect.
Specifically, my reason for stepping down is because in spite of doing my best to change and better myself, my mere presence was still dragging down the other developers working on my emulators, and my friends were starting to get dragged into things because of their association with me. They went rather easy on me on KF, but there's another 289 pages of this on 4chan. It got to a point where someone there was compiling a list of my friends' real names, photographs, and where they lived. A friend of mine suffered an anxiety attack when I replied to them on social media. Another was fearful enough to delete her Twitter account.
I can handle criticism and admit my mistakes, but I can't handle other people paying the price for them. I feel personally responsible for that, because I am. If I had behaved more professionally, this wouldn't have happened. So it's on me.
As someone that was just curious about what sort of drama was going on I think you responded well and if it's made you a better person there isn't anything to feel bad about.
I have seen stuff from you pop up on here from time to time that I found impressive and cool. I hope you still find motivation to do cool and impressive things and share them with the world even if you are closing this chapter of your journey.
My god the people in that thread are deranged. I don’t know you, but damnit you did something that 100% of the other losers in that thread failed to do- you changed history for the better through your code.
Creating, and more importantly, maintaining, a major open source project takes guts, skill, and tenacity. Take a deep breath, tell yourself “good job” and know deep down that you’ve accomplished something that only an infinitesimally small number of people on this earth are able to achieve.
Losers gonna lose, I guess. You’re not a loser. You don’t owe those losers anything, least of all your time.
Apologizing to internet trolls is a zero sum game.
If you enjoy working on it, and others enjoy using your work, keep doing it and just ignore the idiots on the internet, they'll eventually get bored and go find someone more interesting to harass.
I did have just that: won't dig it up. I also have a friend who's an odd character, sometimes far from well, but who's also a Kiwi poster. They sought me out and warned me, "This is happening. Do not respond, do not get sucked into it, let it subside".
I think that was wise advice. There's a temptation to be like 'wait, no, I'm cool: let me show how I'm basically cool with this' and it'll play well to some extent but there's a limit. In a place like that you are not there to demonstrate your coolness: either you're trying to 'show them' (bad attitude) or you're offended and angry that they are slighting you (worse attitude!)
We are all basically 'lolcows' and 'cool people' at the same time. Trying to post a defense against being a lolcow shows a kind of arrogance that the whole site is set up to exploit: best to just not respond, and not to be too judgemental or offended. I try to do stuff that doesn't belong on Kiwi Farms and is not worthy of their attention. I try to be a very uninteresting, dried-up, unrewarding lolcow :)
Ah Kiwifarms... you see though, they often err on the side of whatever is the most juicy. They’re infamous for taking tenuous bits of evidence to paint a horrible picture of someone. They are also masters at omitting things that would hurt this case, even if it’s the very next sentence in a paragraph.
Now on one hand, a lot of the subjects on kiwifarms are in fact not the type of people anyone would want to defend; many of them really are horrible people. And, you could argue that what kiwifarms does is not a big deal, since it’s just archiving what people say.
But then, I think it highlights one of the things people hate about the internet. Which is to say, the looming record. Everything someone has ever said or defended might be archived somewhere, to be picked apart endlessly. The thing is, most of the time, more time is spent picking apart and dissecting text than was spent originally writing it. (Could it some day be these comments in this thread being archived and weaponized? Maybe.)
I think byuu’s reply underscores all of that.
But even moreso, it underscores something more sinister, imo. Byuu never left a shred of evidence about his sexuality anywhere, which is because he is asexual. However, he is accused of pedophilia for defending comic books. Now there are enough pornographic comic books in this world to find at least one that’ll make anyone’s skin crawl, but it is still just ink on paper. Even if you still think it should be banned, I don’t see how you could possibly, with good conscience, accuse someone of potentially being a pedophile over your position on this issue, especially knowing Japanese culture surrounding this phenomenon. There is no need to make bad analogies to defend this position. It is a logical leap of epic proportions to suggest not wanting to censor comics fantasizing about something is somehow advocating for the thing they fantasize about.
Byuu gave up his position, which was a smart thing to do nowadays, as this non-sense idea that being anti-censorship makes you a pedophile is actually pervasive in both left and right leaning circles nowadays. I know some people think I’m exaggerating here, but the battle has been rather vicious against online artists, who in the west have in many cases stopped posting pornography altogether to avoid stepping on glass, and there’s a ton of pressure being put on Patreon and its payment processors to the point where Patreon now claims officially that you can no longer post illustrated pornography with anime-style features[1].
I think it is, at best, scummy behavior to go and take someone’s opinion on this subject and use it to extrapolate on how they might be a predator in real life. Of course, something also common with both Kiwifarms and with the left-leaning internet is guilt by association. So god help you if you are friends with anyone who has a banned opinion.
There are other preposterous logical conclusion jumps than just this one too! I don’t think any of them are as vicious because they are easier to call out as bullshit because you won’t be unilaterally shat on for defending pedophilia when doing so. In byuu’s case, though, I think this was the most egregious one.
All in all, what Kiwifarms claims to do and I believe even what they think they do seems like it would not be all that bad; it almost seems a bit journalistic on its face. But as usual, the devil is in the details.
Throwaway account for many reasons that are already obvious if you read this far. I am not mortified of being outed or anything, as I really do stand by my opinions, but I suspect there would be very little benefit to standing by it with my own name in this day and age. :(
Whatever it is, it wouldn't shock me if he were being too hard on himself. I have seen him comment here for instance, and I do not follow the scene at all, but many of those were interesting comments.
I am only skimming the linked article elsewhere in the thread and it seems too hard on him too.
(For those who don't know, Byuu is a member here and will likely see comments in this thread.)
Hi Byuu. You don't know me, but I've been a fan of your work since the early days of bsnes. I've also seen at least some of your "detractors'" criticisms, while lurking. (My "favorite" was that you don't know enough math to emulate the 3D graphics of the N64, because you didn't stay in school. I didn't know they taught how to write SNES emulators in school either... Maybe I was sick that day.)
Anyway... Please don't be too hard on yourself. I think you're more mature than most(?) of your critics, and more importantly, you've made several comments and actions that make me think you have a genuine desire to self-improve.
Social graces seem to come more naturally to some people than others. The rest of us have to work it out for ourselves. You're a smart person, so I know you can do this if you devote the time to it. Of course, thinking of yourself as smart tends to be an obstacle, and the journey tends to start where you least expect it.
If you'll allow me to give a word of caution, avoid distractions. Spend some time by yourself pulling back from people online, and not writing code either. There are problems in life that no amount of code can help. If you really want to solve this, don't get too caught up in exploring Tokyo either. :)
I'm sorry if bsnes/higan hasn't made you happy, but if you still have some energy left, I know you can find a way to get what you really want out of life.
Working on bsnes and higan were the things that made me most happy. Well, bug hunting was of course stressful but the joy of fixing a bug and seeing new games running was always well worth it! I'm definitely going to miss it a lot.
It was everything else that was a problem. If I could have just been left alone to code in peace and without all these pesky health and work issues, I'd be very happy to continue.
I think I still have a ways to go on the self-improvement, but it's hit a point where I think I need a few months' break to go at it offline, and maybe let my hands rest a while from typing so much. I ended up coming back to things the last two bouts of depression, so we'll see.
> Working on bsnes and higan were the things that made me most happy.
What about this work made you happy? What was the reward? You might be able to capture it in a different way.
I don’t get the sense that it was something to do with making the people who used your emulators happy, per se, so probably “solving someone’s problem and seeing them light up” isn’t going to do it for you.
I’d guess that helping to conserve other artistic expressions [to ensure people can experience them the same way they did on the original hardware, long after you’re gone] would make you happy? Especially if you could use your specialized knowledge and experience to do so, in a way where it’s not necessarily true that anyone else would have come along to do the same thing if you hadn’t done it.
Perhaps you could volunteer in a consulting/advisory capacity for some of the Archive.org software-library preservation projects? Not so much programming, as pointing out the pitfalls in the architectural decisions of what other people are programming. Like a software security consultant, but for “ensuring the original work is conserved and reproduced with 100% fidelity” instead of “ensuring nobody can exploit the software.”
> What about this work made you happy? What was the reward?
It's like a really complicated puzzle. I have this game that's not working, and I have this 2 GiB trace log of millions of lines of CPU instructions and registers. I have to sort through it to understand where things went wrong. Sometimes it's obvious and takes five minutes, sometimes it takes two weeks and is mind-bending (like a loop reading from a non-existent I/O register that only breaks because eventually a DMA transfer occurs in between cycle instructions that fetches the correct value onto the data bus, which stays persistent through to the next cycle that compares the value read to finally break said loop.)
I really enjoyed over-architecting the code, and I would build these massively elaborate (read: slow) designs to handle the most ridiculous edge cases (like stacking Game Genie cartridges one after another recursively. It's an incredibly inefficient way of getting more cheat code slots, but you can do it on real hardware, and so I wanted to preserve that experience.)
> I don’t get the sense that it was something to do with making the people who used your emulators happy
That of course brought me joy as well. The tone of the farewell post aside, 98% of people throughout my time in emulation have been absolutely wonderfully supportive. It's meant the world to me.
> in a way where it’s not necessarily true that anyone else would have come along to do the same thing if you hadn’t done it.
I'm under no delusions of granduer, these were "just video games", but I definitely had the sense that if I didn't do this, no one else would. The SNES was a large part of my childhood, and I had the skill and time to do this, so I went for it.
> . If you really want to solve this, don't get too caught up in exploring Tokyo either. :)
Why?
The way I see it, detaching yourself from your routine environment for a while, disconnecting from everything toxic or anchoring, and instead rediscovering who you are and what you want - in an environment that has no preconceptions or preconceived expectations of you - is a great way to find what matters to you and who you can be, how you can express who you are and how you feel.
Not to mention that working abroad is a great opportunity that is very much different depending on age and personal status, so I do hope he makes the best of it, and really discovers the beauty of Japan and its culture and people.
"If you really want to solve this". Exploring Tokyo is awsome and something I want to do at some point in my own life, but like anything else it can also be a form of escapism.
I totally feel the "I hate that my only talent is computer programming." I am in the exact same boat. I really don't even like the career anymore, other than the money, which I would trade in a heart-beat for a stable job that allowed more leisure time and made OK money.
I worked extremely hard on a start-up for half of my 20s and I ended up with basically nothing to show for it. Employers do not seem that interested in my start-up, they want "People with experience scaling large systems." Whoops.
Now I'm sending out my CV and I'm not getting many bites.
Please please dont be hard on yourself. I actually "wasted" my 20s (and most of my 30s) in startups and "learning". But employers really dont care for this (I am in a FAANG hiring committee) and are no different than recruiters who care more for nothing more than the latest buzz words ("scaling distributed systems"). What is worse is even startups who are meant to value diversity/breadth of skills are doing the same.
But would I trade my breadth of knowledge and learning. Nope. Would I try to become a one-trick-pony? Not at all. Do I still code - Yep totally but on things I care about and enjoy rather than on a yet-another-engagement-driver while also building up on other hobbies.
Also where are you based? DM me if you are looking at roles in the bay-area. (Unfortunately as much as Id hate to see it die, leetcode is unavoidable at a FAANG interview :) ).
I'll believe byuu cares about preserving history when he's stopped blocking the Wayback Machine from archiving his site.
Edit: The good work someone has done is no excuse for anything.
> The problem is that the internet is not like any other time in human history: everything we ever say and do gets recorded and indexed, all readily available to anyone curious, for all of time. This is new, and it's something that society has not really adapted to yet. I think we will reach that point in a generation or two. But right now, it seems impossible to be forgiven for our past mistakes. They all add up and weigh us down like an albatross around our necks. Stay around on the internet long enough, and it will eventually crush even the best of us.
> I could go back and read the things written about me from 2015 by people I've since made peace with and anger myself again. But that's not who they are today: that's who they were.
> People change. I'm embarrassed myself seeing how I've acted in the past. I don't stand behind much of my old writing, some of it literally decades old now. I've been online since I was a teenager; obviously not everything has aged well. You don't have to forget the past, but you have to be willing to give people second chances in life.
Like all perfectionists, he's found that he's not always happy with his past self. He wants an undo button for reality. He knows he can't have it but is still unable to accept it. Even now.
Same. It seems he's also blocking other archiver tools by showing "Please click the button below to enter byuu.org: [I am not a robot button]": https://archive.vn/NYreE
Wanting to preserve art† (which people make with an expectation that it will be shared and preserved, even after their death), and waiting to preserve every detail about the minutiae of people’s lives, are very different wants.
Certainly, cultural anthropologists wish we had more preservation of life-minutiae, because it would make their own jobs easier; but most people don’t agree. Meanwhile, basically everyone agrees we should be preserving art.
† Where by “art”, I mean works made in lasting media. The preservation of performance art is... divisive, to say the least.
I removed the archive.is check, and requested the entire site to be crawled, which is now done. The entire site is mirrored here: http://archive.is/byuu.org
I also sent an e-mail to the archive.org staff requesting the exclusion to be removed.
I hope this will satisfy your request, and that you can sympathize with why I chose not to do this until retiring.
Excellent! Though it seems there is still a user-agent check in place -- visiting your site with an archivebot user-agent just shows "403 Forbidden".
The emulator design articles you've written are interesting and valuable, and I'm glad that they will be preserved for future emulator developers to read.
Oh, sorry I forgot I also had user-agent checks in the code, good catch! archive.is checking was based on IP ranges, since they spoof their user agents as Chrome and use proxies. I removed that too now. All that should be left is a noindex tag on the 1,200 individual game pages at byuu.org/preservation (which I'm told is very important for web indexers; they're all auto-generated thin-content pages.) I believe both archive.is and archive.org ignore noindex anyway, and the full databases are on GitHub at icarus/Database. We should be all good now, but let me know if you find any other issues please.
I don't know how long it'll take for archive.org to remove the exclusion. Requesting it originally took a couple weeks. But they have my approval to start indexing it all again in any case.
I've already paid up for the next year of hosting, so the site should hopefully remain online at least that long, but I might not pay for it forever in the possible event I don't return, so if folks want it mirrored in even more places, now is the time.
Thank you for everything you've accomplished. The world is immeasurably richer because of you and everyone who helped make these accurate emulators a reality.
Good luck, byuu! Your emulation work is an inspiration. :) I'm jealous of your Tokyo move - I tried last year but failed to secure a work visa (only time being a college dropout has actually hurt me).
I think an important facet of open source is portraying the right expectations.
I feel like I have an inverse problem to the one the author describes. Personally I work on projects for a really long time in private, not having to worry about dealing with other people since everything is done by me only, and wonder how I should eventually portray the project to the public. My motivation to do things shifts wildly from week to week, and I can spend months at a time on one single project and suddenly just stop cold one day as if it never happened. I keep wondering how that's compatible with involving yourself with the community, if they'll wonder where I'm at a month from now. In my case the project is specifically meant for contribution for other people or it won't take off (a mod system) so it feels inevitable I'd have to do it some day. But I don't know if I can keep it up after it's announced without getting burnt out by interacting with people, and delivering on the things I want to accomplish. I'm reminded of the author of uBlock Origin specifically refusing donations for this reason, to ensure he feels no sense of responsibility to "make good" on what people give him. He also mentions the same motivation issue.
I have at one point been in a spot where I've worked on something with a similar amount of zeal for months on end, literally every single day, then dropped it out of nowhere, then had someone come up to me and ask me to finish it with them, and then literally being unable to get myself to write more code. Like, I was sitting at the screen, doing nothing at all for hours, unable to bring myself to care. Even though this person reached out to me personally over one of my projects, which had never happened before in my life, and I liked their company! Part of me still wanted it to be finished too. But I just didn't feel like it anymore. I feel a lot of guilt over that, still. So I know I have been in that spot before.
I keep working at my current projects though, regardless of the amount of progress. It's just an interesting hobby right now, if a somewhat obsessive one. I'm always reminded of the portrayal of Robert Graysmith in the film Zodiac, where he explains he does so much investigation into the titular case "because nobody else will." That's exactly how I feel with my long-term projects. Perhaps byuu felt the same at some point. Maybe that attitude is what got me this far all along.
Still, so many times I feel like I'm just grasping at straws or not making the progress I want. But giving it to the community leaves a sense of obligation if I have these goals that are still left unfulfilled, which I easily end up imagining worst-case leading into whatever drama of "such and such project not doing what it envisions." And of course I will never expect someone to pick up the torch, tempting as it feels. They could, but in the end it's their choice, and I have no right to obligate them.
This thought bothers me a lot. What reminded me of this in relation to the article specifically was the author's mention of wishing he could just code in peace without all the extra baggage surrounding the project and other things in his life he describes. Currently I would describe myself as "coding in peace," it being closed-source at the moment, and I'm wondering if I'll end up getting myself into all that someday. Then again, the alternative feels like wandering aimlessly in this solitary coding marathon for months on end at a glacial rate of progress, not quite knowing if my designs or implementations are the "right" way to advance the project, which feels equally troublesome. I don't feel smart (or perhaps arrogant) enough to believe that outright. And also, wasn't I supposed to use this thing if it does get finished? Otherwise why spend so long coding it up at all?
I give you my word, they've had a go at me online since 1998. I'm not worried about criticism directed my way. I mostly deserved it anyway.
But they went after my friends. Someone on an imageboard compiled a list of my friends' real names, photographs they had posted, locations where they lived ... really creepy stuff.
I'm stepping down because I don't want my personal friends and the dozens of volunteers who helped develop my emulators caught in the crossfire.
Byuu, your code base is awesome and I've been studying it a lot lately. I'm not programming emulators, I'm studying your architectural design more than anything. Your passion and dedication really shows. Best of luck in your future.
I've also had bouts of RSI and it can really be frustrating, especially when what you do shapes so much of how one thinks of oneself, and that starts to whittle away.
Thank you kindly! The structural design aspects of programming was one of my favorite parts. I may've gone a bit too far in the final releases of higan with the reference-counted tree to describe system states (specifically serializing the tree is quite involved), but I'm still really happy with the result ^-^;
Hopefully a respite from coding in my spare time will help my hands recover a bit.
It's truly been an honor! I've always greatly appreciated the links to my articles shared here, and the discussions with everyone on these and other submissions on the site.
I'm hoping to return one day when things settle down a bit in my life. Hopefully when that day comes I'll have some great new things to share. Until then, take care everyone!
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadYes, Kiwis dox and mock people and say gamer words, and that sort of edgi boi behavior isn't for everyone. But the information it collects is rarely inaccurate.
EDIT: For what it's worth, it looks like Byuu posted in his own thread last month taking accountability for some of his bad behavior and got a mostly warm response from the Kiwis. https://kiwifarms.net/threads/byuu-byuu_nyan-setsunakun0.430...
So the evidence is still true, then? And the paragraph at the top of the OP states that it is slightly out of date.
> A well sourced Wikipedia article can still be biased.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/978/
I'm increasingly becoming convinced Wikipedia is a toxic garbage dump. The Wii U article states that it had the fewest game releases of any Nintendo console. I tried adding the words "…since the Virtual Boy" to turn that into a factually correct statement and it got reverted. I don't have the time to get into a slapfight with another editor about facts, so the incorrect statement remains. Whatever.
Contributing to Wikipedia is unfortunately hard to navigate, with a lot of social trickery required just to get blatant incorrect information fixed.
One of the biggest problems is that anyone can make up the same username anywhere online and use it in false flag attempts to harm someone's reputation and the dramaqueens at Kiwifarm don't care as long as it's "verified" by their very ambiguous standards, something which has happened there before many times.
>to stir up drama
Ironic since the whole product they're selling there is drama and invoking it not only on their own boards but elsewhere.
what words are those?
This forum seems focused on hate and trying to harm people.
Even 4chan /b/ is friendlier.
In the end, all that matters to them is if they get a good laugh out of it, as it always has been.
That's hardly unusual for people who've been on the internet for a long time, and is something that we as a society are going to have to learn to deal with better than we do at the moment. People change, and dredging up stuff that people posted years ago is more than a little bit sad, and deeply unedifying for everyone.
I'd never heard of Kiwi Farms before today and, honestly, I could cheerfully have gone my whole life without knowing about it.
I started reading the thread, then skimmed the responses further down and was, basically, appalled. This website truly does plumb the depths of mental depravity. It's a cesspool of lazy, warped, corrupted thinking.
Wikipedia has a pretty good overview of what you're getting into there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
As such, I would regard any perspective on byuu shared on that site as highly suspect, and I certainly wouldn't use it as a yardstick by which to assess him as a human being.
Right: I think it might be time to go and disinfect my eyes and my brain.
It does make me wonder if from the perspective of PR and reducing further trolling posting a calm, eloquent and self-deprecating defense is better or worse than not responding at all. What would you do if you had a Kiwi Farms thread with your embarrassing posts, some very old?
(Throwaway because I don't want a link to Kiwi Farms in my post history.)
https://twitter.com/Kampidh/status/1234029776144175110
(it's G-rated, don't worry.)
> Fwiw I think your fursona is adorable.
Thank you very much ^-^
Referring to GP, of course. I appreciate the link to my reply. For any folks here that read the post, please also read my reply if you don't mind. For folks who don't read the thread at all, just note that this is about me saying dumb things online, mostly when I was a young adult. I haven't actually done anything heinous nor are there substantiated allegations to that effect.
Specifically, my reason for stepping down is because in spite of doing my best to change and better myself, my mere presence was still dragging down the other developers working on my emulators, and my friends were starting to get dragged into things because of their association with me. They went rather easy on me on KF, but there's another 289 pages of this on 4chan. It got to a point where someone there was compiling a list of my friends' real names, photographs, and where they lived. A friend of mine suffered an anxiety attack when I replied to them on social media. Another was fearful enough to delete her Twitter account.
I can handle criticism and admit my mistakes, but I can't handle other people paying the price for them. I feel personally responsible for that, because I am. If I had behaved more professionally, this wouldn't have happened. So it's on me.
I have seen stuff from you pop up on here from time to time that I found impressive and cool. I hope you still find motivation to do cool and impressive things and share them with the world even if you are closing this chapter of your journey.
Creating, and more importantly, maintaining, a major open source project takes guts, skill, and tenacity. Take a deep breath, tell yourself “good job” and know deep down that you’ve accomplished something that only an infinitesimally small number of people on this earth are able to achieve.
Losers gonna lose, I guess. You’re not a loser. You don’t owe those losers anything, least of all your time.
If you enjoy working on it, and others enjoy using your work, keep doing it and just ignore the idiots on the internet, they'll eventually get bored and go find someone more interesting to harass.
I think that was wise advice. There's a temptation to be like 'wait, no, I'm cool: let me show how I'm basically cool with this' and it'll play well to some extent but there's a limit. In a place like that you are not there to demonstrate your coolness: either you're trying to 'show them' (bad attitude) or you're offended and angry that they are slighting you (worse attitude!)
We are all basically 'lolcows' and 'cool people' at the same time. Trying to post a defense against being a lolcow shows a kind of arrogance that the whole site is set up to exploit: best to just not respond, and not to be too judgemental or offended. I try to do stuff that doesn't belong on Kiwi Farms and is not worthy of their attention. I try to be a very uninteresting, dried-up, unrewarding lolcow :)
Now on one hand, a lot of the subjects on kiwifarms are in fact not the type of people anyone would want to defend; many of them really are horrible people. And, you could argue that what kiwifarms does is not a big deal, since it’s just archiving what people say.
But then, I think it highlights one of the things people hate about the internet. Which is to say, the looming record. Everything someone has ever said or defended might be archived somewhere, to be picked apart endlessly. The thing is, most of the time, more time is spent picking apart and dissecting text than was spent originally writing it. (Could it some day be these comments in this thread being archived and weaponized? Maybe.)
I think byuu’s reply underscores all of that.
But even moreso, it underscores something more sinister, imo. Byuu never left a shred of evidence about his sexuality anywhere, which is because he is asexual. However, he is accused of pedophilia for defending comic books. Now there are enough pornographic comic books in this world to find at least one that’ll make anyone’s skin crawl, but it is still just ink on paper. Even if you still think it should be banned, I don’t see how you could possibly, with good conscience, accuse someone of potentially being a pedophile over your position on this issue, especially knowing Japanese culture surrounding this phenomenon. There is no need to make bad analogies to defend this position. It is a logical leap of epic proportions to suggest not wanting to censor comics fantasizing about something is somehow advocating for the thing they fantasize about.
Byuu gave up his position, which was a smart thing to do nowadays, as this non-sense idea that being anti-censorship makes you a pedophile is actually pervasive in both left and right leaning circles nowadays. I know some people think I’m exaggerating here, but the battle has been rather vicious against online artists, who in the west have in many cases stopped posting pornography altogether to avoid stepping on glass, and there’s a ton of pressure being put on Patreon and its payment processors to the point where Patreon now claims officially that you can no longer post illustrated pornography with anime-style features[1].
I think it is, at best, scummy behavior to go and take someone’s opinion on this subject and use it to extrapolate on how they might be a predator in real life. Of course, something also common with both Kiwifarms and with the left-leaning internet is guilt by association. So god help you if you are friends with anyone who has a banned opinion.
There are other preposterous logical conclusion jumps than just this one too! I don’t think any of them are as vicious because they are easier to call out as bullshit because you won’t be unilaterally shat on for defending pedophilia when doing so. In byuu’s case, though, I think this was the most egregious one.
All in all, what Kiwifarms claims to do and I believe even what they think they do seems like it would not be all that bad; it almost seems a bit journalistic on its face. But as usual, the devil is in the details.
Throwaway account for many reasons that are already obvious if you read this far. I am not mortified of being outed or anything, as I really do stand by my opinions, but I suspect there would be very little benefit to standing by it with my own name in this day and age. :(
[1] https://twitter.com/waero_re/status/1238408555507539968
I am only skimming the linked article elsewhere in the thread and it seems too hard on him too.
Hi Byuu. You don't know me, but I've been a fan of your work since the early days of bsnes. I've also seen at least some of your "detractors'" criticisms, while lurking. (My "favorite" was that you don't know enough math to emulate the 3D graphics of the N64, because you didn't stay in school. I didn't know they taught how to write SNES emulators in school either... Maybe I was sick that day.)
Anyway... Please don't be too hard on yourself. I think you're more mature than most(?) of your critics, and more importantly, you've made several comments and actions that make me think you have a genuine desire to self-improve.
Social graces seem to come more naturally to some people than others. The rest of us have to work it out for ourselves. You're a smart person, so I know you can do this if you devote the time to it. Of course, thinking of yourself as smart tends to be an obstacle, and the journey tends to start where you least expect it.
If you'll allow me to give a word of caution, avoid distractions. Spend some time by yourself pulling back from people online, and not writing code either. There are problems in life that no amount of code can help. If you really want to solve this, don't get too caught up in exploring Tokyo either. :)
I'm sorry if bsnes/higan hasn't made you happy, but if you still have some energy left, I know you can find a way to get what you really want out of life.
Thanks for your incredible effort, and godspeed.
It was everything else that was a problem. If I could have just been left alone to code in peace and without all these pesky health and work issues, I'd be very happy to continue.
I think I still have a ways to go on the self-improvement, but it's hit a point where I think I need a few months' break to go at it offline, and maybe let my hands rest a while from typing so much. I ended up coming back to things the last two bouts of depression, so we'll see.
Thanks for the kind words, take care as well!
What about this work made you happy? What was the reward? You might be able to capture it in a different way.
I don’t get the sense that it was something to do with making the people who used your emulators happy, per se, so probably “solving someone’s problem and seeing them light up” isn’t going to do it for you.
I’d guess that helping to conserve other artistic expressions [to ensure people can experience them the same way they did on the original hardware, long after you’re gone] would make you happy? Especially if you could use your specialized knowledge and experience to do so, in a way where it’s not necessarily true that anyone else would have come along to do the same thing if you hadn’t done it.
Perhaps you could volunteer in a consulting/advisory capacity for some of the Archive.org software-library preservation projects? Not so much programming, as pointing out the pitfalls in the architectural decisions of what other people are programming. Like a software security consultant, but for “ensuring the original work is conserved and reproduced with 100% fidelity” instead of “ensuring nobody can exploit the software.”
It's like a really complicated puzzle. I have this game that's not working, and I have this 2 GiB trace log of millions of lines of CPU instructions and registers. I have to sort through it to understand where things went wrong. Sometimes it's obvious and takes five minutes, sometimes it takes two weeks and is mind-bending (like a loop reading from a non-existent I/O register that only breaks because eventually a DMA transfer occurs in between cycle instructions that fetches the correct value onto the data bus, which stays persistent through to the next cycle that compares the value read to finally break said loop.)
I really enjoyed over-architecting the code, and I would build these massively elaborate (read: slow) designs to handle the most ridiculous edge cases (like stacking Game Genie cartridges one after another recursively. It's an incredibly inefficient way of getting more cheat code slots, but you can do it on real hardware, and so I wanted to preserve that experience.)
> I don’t get the sense that it was something to do with making the people who used your emulators happy
That of course brought me joy as well. The tone of the farewell post aside, 98% of people throughout my time in emulation have been absolutely wonderfully supportive. It's meant the world to me.
> in a way where it’s not necessarily true that anyone else would have come along to do the same thing if you hadn’t done it.
I'm under no delusions of granduer, these were "just video games", but I definitely had the sense that if I didn't do this, no one else would. The SNES was a large part of my childhood, and I had the skill and time to do this, so I went for it.
> I'd be very happy to continue.
I would guess that the new maintainers of your projects stand a fair chance of considering your pull requests!
Why?
The way I see it, detaching yourself from your routine environment for a while, disconnecting from everything toxic or anchoring, and instead rediscovering who you are and what you want - in an environment that has no preconceptions or preconceived expectations of you - is a great way to find what matters to you and who you can be, how you can express who you are and how you feel.
Not to mention that working abroad is a great opportunity that is very much different depending on age and personal status, so I do hope he makes the best of it, and really discovers the beauty of Japan and its culture and people.
I worked extremely hard on a start-up for half of my 20s and I ended up with basically nothing to show for it. Employers do not seem that interested in my start-up, they want "People with experience scaling large systems." Whoops.
Now I'm sending out my CV and I'm not getting many bites.
But would I trade my breadth of knowledge and learning. Nope. Would I try to become a one-trick-pony? Not at all. Do I still code - Yep totally but on things I care about and enjoy rather than on a yet-another-engagement-driver while also building up on other hobbies.
Also where are you based? DM me if you are looking at roles in the bay-area. (Unfortunately as much as Id hate to see it die, leetcode is unavoidable at a FAANG interview :) ).
Edit: The good work someone has done is no excuse for anything.
> The problem is that the internet is not like any other time in human history: everything we ever say and do gets recorded and indexed, all readily available to anyone curious, for all of time. This is new, and it's something that society has not really adapted to yet. I think we will reach that point in a generation or two. But right now, it seems impossible to be forgiven for our past mistakes. They all add up and weigh us down like an albatross around our necks. Stay around on the internet long enough, and it will eventually crush even the best of us.
> I could go back and read the things written about me from 2015 by people I've since made peace with and anger myself again. But that's not who they are today: that's who they were.
> People change. I'm embarrassed myself seeing how I've acted in the past. I don't stand behind much of my old writing, some of it literally decades old now. I've been online since I was a teenager; obviously not everything has aged well. You don't have to forget the past, but you have to be willing to give people second chances in life.
Like all perfectionists, he's found that he's not always happy with his past self. He wants an undo button for reality. He knows he can't have it but is still unable to accept it. Even now.
Certainly, cultural anthropologists wish we had more preservation of life-minutiae, because it would make their own jobs easier; but most people don’t agree. Meanwhile, basically everyone agrees we should be preserving art.
† Where by “art”, I mean works made in lasting media. The preservation of performance art is... divisive, to say the least.
I removed the archive.is check, and requested the entire site to be crawled, which is now done. The entire site is mirrored here: http://archive.is/byuu.org
I also sent an e-mail to the archive.org staff requesting the exclusion to be removed.
I hope this will satisfy your request, and that you can sympathize with why I chose not to do this until retiring.
The emulator design articles you've written are interesting and valuable, and I'm glad that they will be preserved for future emulator developers to read.
I don't know how long it'll take for archive.org to remove the exclusion. Requesting it originally took a couple weeks. But they have my approval to start indexing it all again in any case.
I've already paid up for the next year of hosting, so the site should hopefully remain online at least that long, but I might not pay for it forever in the possible event I don't return, so if folks want it mirrored in even more places, now is the time.
I feel like I have an inverse problem to the one the author describes. Personally I work on projects for a really long time in private, not having to worry about dealing with other people since everything is done by me only, and wonder how I should eventually portray the project to the public. My motivation to do things shifts wildly from week to week, and I can spend months at a time on one single project and suddenly just stop cold one day as if it never happened. I keep wondering how that's compatible with involving yourself with the community, if they'll wonder where I'm at a month from now. In my case the project is specifically meant for contribution for other people or it won't take off (a mod system) so it feels inevitable I'd have to do it some day. But I don't know if I can keep it up after it's announced without getting burnt out by interacting with people, and delivering on the things I want to accomplish. I'm reminded of the author of uBlock Origin specifically refusing donations for this reason, to ensure he feels no sense of responsibility to "make good" on what people give him. He also mentions the same motivation issue.
I have at one point been in a spot where I've worked on something with a similar amount of zeal for months on end, literally every single day, then dropped it out of nowhere, then had someone come up to me and ask me to finish it with them, and then literally being unable to get myself to write more code. Like, I was sitting at the screen, doing nothing at all for hours, unable to bring myself to care. Even though this person reached out to me personally over one of my projects, which had never happened before in my life, and I liked their company! Part of me still wanted it to be finished too. But I just didn't feel like it anymore. I feel a lot of guilt over that, still. So I know I have been in that spot before.
I keep working at my current projects though, regardless of the amount of progress. It's just an interesting hobby right now, if a somewhat obsessive one. I'm always reminded of the portrayal of Robert Graysmith in the film Zodiac, where he explains he does so much investigation into the titular case "because nobody else will." That's exactly how I feel with my long-term projects. Perhaps byuu felt the same at some point. Maybe that attitude is what got me this far all along.
Still, so many times I feel like I'm just grasping at straws or not making the progress I want. But giving it to the community leaves a sense of obligation if I have these goals that are still left unfulfilled, which I easily end up imagining worst-case leading into whatever drama of "such and such project not doing what it envisions." And of course I will never expect someone to pick up the torch, tempting as it feels. They could, but in the end it's their choice, and I have no right to obligate them.
This thought bothers me a lot. What reminded me of this in relation to the article specifically was the author's mention of wishing he could just code in peace without all the extra baggage surrounding the project and other things in his life he describes. Currently I would describe myself as "coding in peace," it being closed-source at the moment, and I'm wondering if I'll end up getting myself into all that someday. Then again, the alternative feels like wandering aimlessly in this solitary coding marathon for months on end at a glacial rate of progress, not quite knowing if my designs or implementations are the "right" way to advance the project, which feels equally troublesome. I don't feel smart (or perhaps arrogant) enough to believe that outright. And also, wasn't I supposed to use this thing if it does get finished? Otherwise why spend so long coding it up at all?
After a while this cycle of thinking wear...
But they went after my friends. Someone on an imageboard compiled a list of my friends' real names, photographs they had posted, locations where they lived ... really creepy stuff.
I'm stepping down because I don't want my personal friends and the dozens of volunteers who helped develop my emulators caught in the crossfire.
I've also had bouts of RSI and it can really be frustrating, especially when what you do shapes so much of how one thinks of oneself, and that starts to whittle away.
Hopefully a respite from coding in my spare time will help my hands recover a bit.
It's truly been an honor! I've always greatly appreciated the links to my articles shared here, and the discussions with everyone on these and other submissions on the site.
I'm hoping to return one day when things settle down a bit in my life. Hopefully when that day comes I'll have some great new things to share. Until then, take care everyone!