I see what you mean. I don't think it's racist though if you're classifying artists by their style, to classify those that focus on painting black people with that kind of style as such. Because you're classifying the style, not the artists' skin color (and there's logically a correlation between black artists and artists that focus on depicting black people).
You could argue maybe that using the letter "n" could be seen as racist. It's a US centric view however, in other places n would be fine (n for negro in Spanish for example)
For all I know automatic might be super racist, I'm just playing devils advocate, and I like to assume the best of in people.
I think the main problem here is that people are enjoying the witch hunt too much, and this prevents them from weighting up alternative explanations that aren't as dramatic.
My first assumption on encountering a table field with a standalone "n" would be that it's an abbreviation of "no". So I'm surprised people are assuming so strongly here that this is instead code for a racist word. This is quite a harsh accusation, given the lack of evidence.
It will be quite embarrassing all round if this just turns out to be a run-of-the-mill copyright strike, or similar.
Fine. But you don't have to go with your first assumption.
If, say, the guy had made mods smirking at the George Floyd protests, had made skin-color mods, and had also said "no comment" when asked what the 'n' and 'c' tags represented, would you still go with your first assumption?
That he's clearly more than a little racist isn't enough for me to defend nuking the guy's account without warning or explanation. But it is enough to make me think twice about blindly downloading and running the guy's code (which also downloads a lot of stuff).
Who knows what other norms of basic decency this anonymous person from 4chan would violate.
Edit: apparently all the git pulling and bash+curling happens during install, and not fully automatically afterwards. It does not strictly speaking self-update.
> My first assumption on encountering a table field with a standalone "n" would be that it's an abbreviation of "no". So I'm surprised people are assuming so strongly here that this is instead code for a racist word. This is quite a harsh accusation, given the lack of evidence.
So I loaded up A111, selected the 'n' category, and ran a few pictures using random artists from said category.
The results were all black. The category itself is actually useful to me, now that I know it exists — I use the AI to generate illustrations for my fanfiction, and getting non-white, non-asian outputs is difficult at best — but labelling it "n" is, uh, suspicious.
In combination with everything else, I don't think there's really any doubts about his thought process here. :(
Playing advocate to your advocate: Then why have the category as n when all (?) others are full words or even multiple? And they are all in English, black comes to mind first for black.
Regarding the content: That would still be a questionable classification, but even more so for someone like "RETNA (Marquis Lewis)" who rarely ever seems to depict people.
All in all it’s very sketchy, though one could probably construct ways it’s not racist, and it might not even be racist, though I doubt it.
Maybe RETNA is mislabeled, and the general idea is to group artists with a "black style".
I think the most likely scenario is that automatic's trying to group that style, which is fair and the purpose of those categories after all, and him coming from 4chan is no stranger to the n word, so that's what came to his mind.
And you still don't see how that could be considered racist, like you said in your previous comment? How "him coming from 4chan is no stranger to the n word" might be inconsistent with you "assuming the best of people."?
It was 100% random. I'm surprised from a reddit thread that somebody else mentioned this Mati as a counter example as well, so maybe the one I randomly picked was an outlier, or maybe because of the csv "layout" that one stood out more to me and to other people.
Edit: As eyko pointed out below, these are not in the 'n' category. So I searched for people in that category, and all the ones I checked turned out to have been black (other than Mati Klarwein).
Yeah. Did some digging, apparently the user stated that "n and c are no comment" [1]. From context its not clear whether they don't want to comment, or if the characters literally stand for "no comment". But to me it seems the former: it appears it's not necessarily about the author, but what the art depicts. C seems to be children.
Again, there’s more alleged than just the “n” thing; screenshots of Rimworld titled “Auschwitz”, modding the game by race, mockery of the George Floyd protests.
Sometimes we infer things from a combination of evidence.
Which ironically is how white people during the Jim Crow era in the south decided guilt vs innocence of black people accused of crimes. No real evidence just assumptions of circumstances based off of the person's skin color.
Circumstantial evidence is real evidence. People get convicted over it regularly.
People in the Jim Crow era were convicted without evidence, or had exonerating evidence hidden by racist law enforcement and prosecutors. It’s hardly the same.
On the off-chance that you're arguing in good faith: No.
Circumstantial evidence becomes compelling only when there's a lot of it, all in one direction, without exonerating or at least contradictory evidence of some kind.
If you have white robes with pointy hats, a noose, and a Confederate flag in your closet, I'm very comfortable assuming certain facts about you. If you can come up with a good explanation - perhaps you're an actor in a play about the civil rights era - I'm prepared to shift that conclusion, but "nuh uh, this doesn't prove anything!" isn't a compelling response to it.
If I found out that someone had a KKK outfit and a noose hidden at their home, yes I would also expect an good explanation for why they had that.
But if I found out that a black person had a picture of a white person on his computer under the "C" drive, I wouldn't assume that he named the drive "C" for cracker, and wouldn't expect him to prove the "real reason" his drive was named "C"
> But if I found out that a black person had a picture of a white person on his computer under the "C" drive, I wouldn't assume that he named the drive "C" for cracker, and wouldn't expect him to prove the "real reason" his drive was named "C"
Agreed!
If, however, all the other drives were named "Photos" and "Recipes" and other descriptive terms, leaving only the C drive as a letter, that'd be interesting. Even more interesting if it's a bunch of photos of white people, and nothing much else on said C drive. If that same person had previously criticized civil rights issues, and was cagey about why they have the one oddly-named drive (https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/xl8bj2/com...), and had a history of putting out racially-focused mods for a game, we might begin to get outright suspicious.
This is what circumstantial evidence is all about; more than one data point leading to a reasonable conclusion. You seem to want to redefine it to a single data point, which giving it's been explained several times now, I have to assume (circumstantial again!) is playing dumb intentionally.
Well I have to assume based on the evidence that you have presented here that you made your mind up on the guilt of this person first, then started looking for evidence to back up your case.
> Which ironically is how white people during the Jim Crow era in the south decided guilt vs. innocence of black people accused of crimes.
Civil vs. Criminal cases have different levels of guilt. Further, this isn't either, but a private company and its TOS. It's perfectly reasonable to hold different standards for different situations. I would hope that we hold a higher standard for criminal activity. What GitHub did was very much use the powers conservatives have fought long and hard to maintain.
> Sometimes we infer things from a combination of evidence.
People seem unable to do this. They want to see all of these examples as unrelated things that coincidentally can all be considered racist by wokies. To me, it's a case of walking and swimming and talking like a duck.
> A possible reason are the apparently racist game mods he'd also been creating on the same account, including removing any non-white characters from Rimworld and a mod called 'peaceful protests' which is seemingly criticizing the valid upset about George Floyd's murder by the state.
> ...a mod called 'peaceful protests' which is seemingly criticizing the valid upset about George Floyd's murder by the state.
If that that's the ban reason, it's pretty Orwellian. There was a lot of severe property destruction (e.g. arson) during those protests, some of which was indisputably committed by people aligned with the protests. They were complicated events, with peaceful and violent parts. They were only one or the other when seen through a blinkered political orthodoxy.
I’ve never heard of GitGud.io, so I took a look at their home page/login page. Wow a lot of those claims are bad:
> Free - Yes, totally free for any user or group
Such claims are invariably false. Or, stated most generously, heavily misleading, because of limitations. And that’s even ignoring the common “it became popular and we realised what we were offering wasn’t sustainable so we’re charging or limiting sharply or shutting down” result.
> Fast - One of the fastest git hosting services
Holistically, I’d say this isn’t even possible if you’re using GitLab. Significant parts of GitLab are very slow. And as for GitGud.io at present, well, that repository’s URL is consistently taking about ten seconds to send the first byte of the response, and even HEAD / takes more than five seconds to issue a 302 redirect to /users/sign_in.
> Highly available - average uptime of 99.83% ¹
Look, “highly available” is a vague term, but for this kind of service I’d expect it to mean three nines at the very least, probably four, and to mean an architecture and upgrade deployment mechanism significantly different from GitLab’s, where upgrades are disruptive.
Also, their actual status page is currently saying 91.16% for the last 24 hours (2h7m of downtime), which is already more than two months’ downtime budget even at 99.83%.
> Reliable - We have never lost any data, unlike other services
You also probably haven’t dealt with any of the scale-related issues that have caused data loss in said Other Services.
>Such claims are invariably false. Or, stated most generously, heavily misleading, because of limitations.
Can you explain your issue with this? GitGud.io has been operating for over 8 years with only free accounts and without any paid setup. Historically we've been supported by user donations, but I now also pay out of pocket, a relatively trivial amount since my main job is being a DevOps engineer for a CDN & cloud company, for server resources and upgrades for GitGud.io and we have plans to launch SaaS products that will completely offset any GitGud.io costs.
>>Fast - One of the fastest git hosting services
>Holistically, I’d say this isn’t even possible if you’re using GitLab. Significant parts of GitLab are very slow. And as for GitGud.io at present, well, that repository’s URL is consistently taking about ten seconds to send the first byte of the response, and even HEAD / takes more than five seconds to issue a 302 redirect to /users/sign_in.
GitGud.io has historically been fast. Currently we just finished an upgrade of the main node last week from an 8-core Epyc to a 64-core Epyc, plus 2-3x more available memory and we have not had enough traffic to adjust this. This event helped us tune GitLab better to our new resources. And yes, as someone who has been working with GitLab for over 8 years, I know exactly how slow and bloated it is, but you must also understand that GitLab.com itself spent years being constantly down or hardly loading in comparison. Different scales of "users", but GitGud.io still has 41,000 users and close to 15,000 repositories. You'd be hard pressed to find many other GitLab instances publicly usable that big. We could utilize Gitea or something lighter, but GitLab offers a lot of features and Gitea didn't exist when we started.
>> Highly available - average uptime of 99.83% ¹
>Look, “highly available” is a vague term, but for this kind of service I’d expect it to mean three nines at the very least, probably four, and to mean an architecture and upgrade deployment mechanism significantly different from GitLab’s, where upgrades are disruptive.
>Also, their actual status page is currently saying 91.16% for the last 24 hours (2h7m of downtime), which is already more than two months’ downtime budget even at 99.83%.
Yes, cause currently we currently took the host node down 12 hours ago for a couple of hours in a planned hardware upgrade maintenance to install new 40g NICs, SSDs, etc. Overall the average is decent, and this line harkens back to the days when GitLab.com was down daily. We run on our own bare metal colo servers, not magically appearing cloud instances.
>> Reliable - We have never lost any data, unlike other services
>You also probably haven’t dealt with any of the scale-related issues that have caused data loss in said Other Services.
Their scale outs should have made it harder to lose data, not the other way around. We've also have ran a fairly large file/media sharing site in the form of Imgur with dozens of TBs of user uploaded media scaled across several servers, and we didn't lose data there. Fact is, we haven't lost any data and that's our track record so far over the past 8 years. I think that's worth of some note.
Either way, while the homepage claims are eyebrow raising for you, I don't see how this matters much for a service that is charging $0 for Git repo hosting. We make $0 for any user who decides to utilize us. If we wanted to charge for GitGud.io access and it's GitLab CI runner access, we could. There's nothing stopping us from doing that. But even if we disappeared tomorrow, the fact is that Git is naturally decentralized. The original creators and the clones exist somewhere.
We exist as an alternative to other services that suspend accounts on a whim and an easy solution for those that don't want to setup or...
for context: AUTOMATIC1111 created and maintains (maintained?) an extremely popular and active web ui for stable diffusion. Beast-mode maintainer.
Even after the debacle w stability.ai (who, to their great credit, I believe, normalized discord chatroom relations rapidly), that’s a string of bad luck for this community keystone of the nascent txt2img technological tranche.
Whatever the eventual steady state of this matter, I hope this person isn’t burning out in the process.
“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer // The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…”
Looking at the Reddit thread about this, there was some arguably racist stuff going on in his repo which could've been related to this suspension. I'm not sure whether this is the right way to handle such things (banning those specific repo's might be better), but it would be somewhat understandable.
It's a weight system, { } are also used. You can use as many or as little as you want to rank them in terms of importance. Some people use a number system, but it gets messy.
If this is about racist shit I’ll be the first to admit that’s a shame. It’d be better if the judgment of that was handed down by the community- if it indeed is the case - rather than obscure tos maneuvering, but, well, we don’t exactly live in the most perfect of all worlds. That said I believe in the capacity for people to not be like how they used to be, and, furthermore, my opinion on why this is happening isn’t any more authoritative than anyone else’s speculation, I guess, so… who knows? Some other comments seem to suggest it’s just part of the dsl/grammar for the ui- it’s something I have not explored myself much
People in other threads are saying it’s because he helped make a mod for a game where you can make all the characters white. Which is apparently enraging.
But like, it’s racist if I want to modify a single player game to make the players white? And even if it is I wish people would just butt out. Seems like a bunch of busybodies policing behavior. It’s just gotten crazy and is really dumb at this point. Are we going to have to have a “free speech GitHub” run by Elon Musk too? How did the internet turn into such a snooze fest where every edgelord has to be sanded down to be safe and snuggly so nobody gets hurt?
I remember my wife got banned from the Sims mod community for asking if there was a mod that’d let her simulate Craster’s Keep from Game of Thrones. She likes telling bizarre stories through electronic media. If she wanted to tell that story in Rimworld (which like, I don’t play Rimworld so just guessing) she’d need a mod to make the skin tones match up. Uh oh is that racist now?
> Prior to its use as an antisemitic label or identifier, ((( screen name ))) had been used in online communities such as AOL to indicate that a user was "cyberhugging" the user with the specified screen name.
Or that using the ok finger gesture briefly was career ending because 4chan openly declared a psyop to see if they could bait social media into declaring it a white supremacist symbol. Worked like a charm and hysteria abounded for a couple of months before the next hysteria was birthed and that one quickly forgotten. Unfortunately, some people who don't keep up with the day-to-day changes in what's considered unacceptable communication, got labeled as racist for making the ok sign even though there was no ill intent or even knowledge that anyone now considered it a taboo gesture.
So this is where I don't know what to think - I'm overseas and don't exactly have my finger on the pulse of alt-right culture. I only knew it after it was co-opted by Nick Fuentes and his circle so I don't know if it was:
1. 4chan tries to say it means "White Power"
2. the news pick this up and runs with it
3. actual white nationalists started using it
or
1. 4chan tries to say it means "White Power"
2. actual white nationalists started using it
3. the news reports that white nationalists are using it
News orgs can be easily fooled into reporting ridiculous fake shit and backfiring - like the whole "teens eating tide pods" thing causing a few teens and boomers to actually try eating them - so both are possible, I'd suspect that the latter is more likely though.
But it’s telling that the ADL at first refused to add it to their list of hate-signs, and then (according to wikipedia, after all I only heard of all this today) reversed their stance 2 years later. And almost all usage of the sign getting someone into trouble have also been 2019+ (again, from the wiki list).
Yeah I think the important thing is regardless of the origin, or the order of events ... it is now sometimes used by white nationalists.
However I don't think that on its use on its own would cause a mob to mass report your account or anything. It's not so self-evidently a sign of hate as a hakenkreuz or the nazi salute would be, it's just worth remembering that in some rare situations it could be poorly received.
Always use the OK sign (to mean OK), even if someone else uses it to mean something else. Use it aggressively, always, relentlessly, as protest against bigotry and against language policing.
If you're going to use it "aggressively, always, relentlessly" then you may have to brace yourself for the occasions when you use it to someone from Brazil (where it's said to be a gesture along the lines of the middle finger) or with black-bloc counter-protestors near a nazi rally, or any other context where it's considered hateful or just generally rude. The Brazilian may just think you're an asshole. The black bloc guys will assume you are with the nazis who just hospitalised their friend...
This is what's important - it's not banned, it's not going to get you jailed. It's just going to land you in a tricky situation if you use it where it's going to be interpreted as a hate symbol.
Every day we all must suffer fools, or those who choose violence to support their views, or both. Our choice as peaceful, civilized, thoughtful people is whether we choose to let them win. Violence and thoughtlessness are the enemy, no matter which side indulges.
It's mainly the media. While there was probably some far right groups/people who decided to go along first, the "association" of the OK sign with white supremacists was popularized by the medias
I don’t know, I still have questions. I was told exactly this in 2002 by my Southern good ol boy social studies teacher.
According to him, it was a sign that KKK members in his town used to signal group membership to one another. In his telling the three extended fingers meant KKK, and they would tuck the thumb and index finger in their belt or waistband.
Either he was making it up then and it’s a complete coincidence his story matches the 4chan story 15 years later, which is also made up; or there’s a kernel of truth to it, and this guy was letting us in on some weird aspect of racist subculture that made its way to the mainstream in 2017. These people had so many other weird customs (like calling themselves wizards and dragons), I don’t see why secret hand signals are out of the question.
Like it or not, Pepe did get co-opted by a weird alt-right subculture, so while it later got reclaimed, for a while there was a good chance posting Pepe meant you were aligned with the alt-right or incel culture. There's an entire documentary on the artist behind it and what happened called "Feels Good Man" it's really quite good: https://www.feelsgoodmanfilm.com/
That felt pretty isolated to US bubbles, though. I had never even heard of it until 3 or so years ago, and on Twitch, Pepe was used throughout it all, including in LBTGQI+ channels.
Yeah that interpretation didn't permeate every community, it's good to hear it was always well received on Twitch. I do recommend the doc though, it sounds like you'd enjoy it :)
I remember very well that Pepe was used by all sides until some article on the Hillary Clinton's campaign website in 2016 that associated it with Trump and then suddenly you couldn't use it for anything with being labelled white supremacist
It's not surprising at all for the Hillary campaign to have completely misjudged and misunderstood something in an attempt to engage with online or youth culture.
I'm reminded of her awkward "I'm just chillin ... in Cedar Rapids!" vine
What happened was that journalists wrote articles claiming that Pepe was an alt-right symbol. But this was never based in fact, it was simply a misunderstanding by journalists ignorant of internet culture. The alt-right made a lot of Pepe memes because Pepe memes were popular at the time when Trump's campaign was taking off.
The problem is that when journalists make mistakes, it becomes fact, true or not.
They aren't. If we just go about doing our thing such as using triple parentheses to mean hugs and the OK symbol to mean OK and the country's flag to mean reasonable love of home and country, then they'll find some other symbol. By making a big deal about what those people get up to and so avoiding them, we cede these beautiful, powerful symbols to assholes. Don't do it. It's the ceding that ruins them.
I argue they're ruined by people not parsing context (whether deliberately or otherwise).
Back when the alt-right "Electric Boogaloo" thing was going on, one article I think hit the nail on the head saying something "If you want to wear a Hawaiian shirt, go for it. Just maybe think twice about accessorizing with body armor and assault rifles." The point being that just because some nut jobs make a point of wearing Hawaiian shirt under their militia get-up doesn't poison Hawaiian shirts. Context matters.
This string has legitimate uses and also offensive uses. Context decides which one it is.
On further investigation (see reddit) there also seems to be a CSV file with artist names in the repo. Black artists have a string 'n' in some unspecified column. I can't check myself if this might mean something else, eg. if other ethnicities also have this string... but there are some suspicious things going on in a that repo for sure. More than just the parentheses.
I read through the Reddit thread and they seem to be focused on the letter n being tagged on certain names (they claim is stands for the n word with strong racist meaning.)
Later someone points out that there is another artist who paints mostly darker skin tones who also has the n identifier.
I can, immediately and without effort, see why this might be added. As a way to force representation in output. This is, to me, akin to paint which lets you pick a color (let's go with purple) for skin.
The Rimworld mod cited apparently comes with an "all white, all black, and all yellow" version. The only version mentioned by the angry folks is the white one.
n: There are also black artists tagged that way who seem to very rarely depict people at all. And both the white and 1+ of the n-tagged black artists depicted some non-black people.
Rimworld: It was whites only at first, black only got added later and then integrated.
Personally I would not call any of the actions racist. The first one can be a legitimate use case with an incredibly poor choice of identifier (or incredibly good in at least one scenario). The mod being updated kind of argues for itself.
I think I will see on the side of caution and call it ignorance instead of malice.
The scenario is one where the n is completely harmless and the purported(on Reddit) word was nowhere in the mind when being typed.
Seems like the kind of thing GitHub should reach out to people about before acting on. At least where there is any (even farfetched) possible explanation.
Those other "damning" examples are still idiotic and misguided.
TL/DR he made a "white only", "black only" and "yellow only" mods for NPCs in some game and somebody apparently misinterpreted a tag in an artists list file.
Interesting. Maybe I was fooled by some deliberate outrage machine. I only read about the "white only" mod. Not the other two. Talk about cherry-picking...
The silver lining of this bullshit is that this again underscores how important critical thinking is.
I'm not disagreeing with you. To be clear: I find any of those mods to be distasteful, pointless and potentially harmful.
What makes me sad is the amount of effort needed to figure out A) why could github have banned this account, B) knowing that, do I feel this is fair or an over-reaction
I planned to use this repo professionally, so getting to the bottom of this is important to me. Instead of clarity, there's outrage and selective reporting; I couldn't find anything conclusive so far.
Consider this: if an American might want to see a game/movie/whatever where the NPC population representative of America, a Russian/Chinese might want to enjoy a game where where it is representative of Russia/China.
If that is distasteful or harmful then so are Netflix adaptations.
I can imagine that porn with animals (even cartoons) might be disgusting to some people. There is a reason why bestiality is quite high in the list of social taboos.
You can spare me your snarky remarks. I was not aware that these keywords specified a negative prompt, but I still think that you even have to specify to a diffusion model that you would like your bestiality pornography without children in it is disgusting.
Parenthesis are used for increasing the weights of some terms. See how he uses single, double or triple parenthesis on different words. It has nothing to do with the triple parenthesis jew thing.
I have no frigging idea even triple parentheses are unspeakable now.
Just ran
rg '\(\(\(.*\)\)\)'
in my projects directory and found many instances authored by me. Guess I should prioritize fixing these, or next time I'm the target of some controversy, someone will use these as evidence of my antisemitism.
Well if there was a person called "disfigured feet" who was Jewish, and you always referred to their name in triple-parens (and for some reason you repeatedly tweeted a bunch of Jewish people, always with the triple-parens) then yes this would be an good indication that you were using it as an anti-semitic dogwhistle.
However the GP was careful to note that context is important here. I've no idea about term weights in these AI prompts, but you seem to so if varying levels of parenthesis is common to denote a weight then you can simply say so without the snark.
Context is important in theory, but it certainly didn’t stop dijit from deciding that (((disfigured feet))), which they did not quote, was “pretty disgusting”.
In this climate, it takes one Twitter personality with a lot of followers to tweet out a “look at this racist” tweet with very vague references to your crimes, and that’s it, you’re a racist to a huge number of people who will probably never look beyond that single tweet. Good luck convincing 20% of them that you’re in fact innocent afterwards.
Edit: Years ago when I was part of a high profile open source project, I was once privately accused of being intolerant towards trans people. It happened after I sharply criticized some trans person's backwards-incompatible PR (which later proved to be pretty bad after being merged despite objections). I had no idea of the person's gender before the accusation, nor did I care after learning about it; they were simply an Internet handle to me. I also never used slurs towards any group. Looking back I'm just glad I wasn't shamed publicly.
I have no idea who this "dijit" is, if you're upset with them you should tweet at them. I'm talking about a handful of people on HN pretending not to know that if you were to refer to me as "(((smcl)))" somewhere you are making the statement "hey smcl, I know you're Jewish. I want you to know that, and I want my little alt-right friends to know that too..."
edit: ok so digit is one of the people further down the thread, I'm not good with names
edit2: To respond to your edit, that sucks and I sympathise. I think this is an unfortunate side effect of the fact that when you're on the internet you're now exposed to thousands of different people who don't already know what kind of person you are, who misread and misinterpret remarks or who might have just had a shitty day and want to take it out on someone. Hell I'm one of those left-liberal, pro-lgbtq+, pro-feminist guys and I've had experience like yours very recently. I'd replied to a comment on FB where someone complained that some public works project cost X million euros, and said that non-engineers like us don't tend to have a good idea what such projects should cost - got a very angry reply along the lines of "Oh just because I'm a girl I get scared around big numbers? Girls can't do maths or engineering? ...". I had no idea what their gender was, the name was "Alex" and their profile pic was some anime or something :) It happens, it's frustrating and somewhere in my city there's a girl called Alex who either thinks I'm some misogyny bro or feels a bit silly for flying off the handle at me. It's the internet, [shrug] what can you do :)
There's no reasonable, understandable way to see (raised long fluffy tail), (((detailed face))), (((detailed amber eyes))), (((disfigured feet))), ((extra limbs)), (((water marks))), ((captions)), ((text)), (((feral))) and come away with "I guess it's that Twitter thing". Really, no, let's not cast away all reason just to taste the sweet fruit of outrage.
Ok someone mistook these things on GitHub for antisemitism - that was an error. However other people wondered what the triple parens meant, and you mocked the idea that right wingers use it with a wink and a nudge to identify Jewish people.
1. Each set of parentheses adds 10% to the weighting of the term in a stable diffusion prompt
2. That particular term is in the negative prompt, signaling the model to avoid inclusion of matches for that in the produced images.
For those wondering why - hands and feet are typically the bits that are usually rendered wrong. You can get a lovely face, body, spaceship, etc - but the odds of getting six+ fingers or toes is very high with most models. Common to point that out to the AI, at this stage in the game.
Yes, but that's not the point. Some people seem to think that the three parentheses are an antisemitic dog-whistle and cannot believe it could be used for something else like setting weights in a prompt.
The context is literally that parenthesis are token weight multipliers, so he's multiplying the importance of "disfigured feet" to the negative prompt by 1.1 three times. There are even other tokens in there that he multiples with less than three layers of parenthesis
Or getting annoyed at people who are constantly trying to think of new woke dogwhistles, trying to find "hate speech" in anything (remember Pepe, the OK sign or donglegate?)
Sounds rather conspiratorial and paranoid, like a psychosis; not to mention your incitement and implicit violation of the international human right to free expression and American supreme law protecting free speech.
Do you engage in discussion with white supremacists or their victims/targets? Do you use triple parenthesis all the time while describing other people?
If none of the above, then what you are doing is the equivalent of making irrelevant noise.
Triple parentheses have been _extremely widely_ used by the far right for a dozen years. It's a daily occurence on 4chan, especially from /pol/, as well as being a favorite from various forums like Stormfront.
Now, there's a slight difference between you writing a comment that goes `This calculates the size of the universe (((note: absolutely fix this it runs in O(n^n))))`, and you going `goddamn I hate (((them)))` in forums swimming in white supremacists.
You are not being persecuted. If anything, hate on the far right using the dumbest fucking signals to try to "blend in".
So it seems the actual reason for the suspension is that Automatic had a mod for the colony-sim game RimWorld that disables certain skin colors from appearing in the game.
If you're not familiar, these sorts of mods are near universally made for racist dogwhistling; they're the "barely passable but not really" version of mods that would straight up whitewash non-white characters. The entire debacle started a couple of years ago iirc with the game Stardew Valley, which has non-randomized unique characters and someone made a mod to iirc whitewash the black characters that the game has (straight up just respriting them to look white).
The mod was pulled from both Steam and Nexus if I recall, and a few weeks later you saw these sorts of "one skin color only" mods appear in games with a heavy focus on randomized character creation (the uploaders of these mods also usually try to say it's not racist by uploading multiple variations such as a mod that disables all white skin colors; this is just flimsy excuses, which becomes apparent when you look at the activity stats for these mods). Modding sites aren't very reliable on taking action on them, so it's the loophole used to still get away with doing racist shit.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them were made just to troll people, like the time where 4chan briefly made some morons think OK sign is some racist/white nationalist thing
Well, y'know then Poe's Law[0] kicks in. Repeating racist dogwhistles but doing it "to own the libs" is y'know, still repeating racist dogwhistles. I can totally understand a company like GitHub for purely cynical money reasons not wanting to be affiliated with that sort of thing even if it's ironic (which, Poes Law, I have no reason to believe is the case with Automatic).
As for the OK sign thing; that was a case of "4chan sliced a bunch of older pictures together of Trump and his ilk making an OK-sign" (which yeah, it's a common hand gesture, wow). The kinda strange thing is that it resulted in a sort of self-perpetuating effect; you had in part the media falling for the prank, but at the same time, those very same Trump supporters started doing the OK-hand deliberately to indicate what political "team" they belonged on.
It fell out of favor with those Trump supporters after a bit (because y'know, it was just a trend and trends defined solely by "trolling the libs" don't tend to last; eventually "the libs" catch on and they need something new).
Basically doing something ironically can make the people whose behavior you're emulating think they're in good company. Unless you take it to straight up absurdist levels (no Nazi will ever use Springtime for Hitler as propaganda), that will always happen.
Stuff like being clear about it being made to mock (as with Poes Law, which suggests things like the /s sarcasm marker) or extreme absurdity (Springtime) helps avoid that.
RimWorld is a single player game. They're upset about people making modifications that affect .. literally no one else? What a strange world to live in.
Well, nobody is upset over it except GitHub cuz y'know, it's still pretty blatantly racist.
GitHub probably doesn't want to be seen hosting that shit because they're a company with business agreements and other businesses tend to start side-eyeing you and leaving you for competitors if you don't take action when people report racist stuff to you. (Usually because not cleaning that stuff up tends to be indicative of worse problems not being actioned on). GitHub in specific has a pretty nasty skeleton in the closet that they would really rather not have attention drawn to (their ICE contract, which has cost them several other contracts and has typically cost them about a third of their workforce every time it gets renewed), so they tend to be far more proactive in cleaning up that sort of thing.
Their TOS probably has a line forbidding this sort of mod from being uploaded and someone probably just filed a report to GitHub about it breaking their TOS or someone from their T&S team happened to find it while checking up on Automatics repositories.
I feel like one thing that should at least be mentioned is that when they uploaded the "White only" mod in september 2018, they also uploaded an equivalent "black only" mod on the same day, followed a few days later by a "yellow only" one after "popular request", something that arguable could be used by people who roleplay in rimworld
All contained basically the same few lines of code that skew the number distribution for the "RandomMelanin" method in the game.
All three are still available on the Steam workshop, although it seems like the functionality of all 3 mods was merged into the "White only" mod, which now provides a slider that lets you select the range instead of hardcoding it, and that is the only source code that remained on their github. This is the only mod of the three that was actively updated for new versions of the game so that has an impact on the statistics as well.
Why describe this as whitewashing if 2 of the 3 mods changed all the skin colors to something other than white? Just dont see how you can come to this conclusion from 1 all black mod, 1 all yellow mod, and 1 all white mod.
Whitewashing is what happened with Stardew Valley and my mention of it is just a small bit of history to explain where these sorts of mods come from.
The RimWorld mods aren't whitewashing, they're just problematic and when you take in the broader context of the history of these sorts of mods (not to mention the history of these RimWorld mods on the Steam workshop, as another commenter pointed out, they started with the all white mod and only uploaded the all black and all yellow mods later), are pretty clearly racist.
i will never forget when in my interview process there, they wanted me to go through a 3 hours session with their diversity manager.. I just gave up from the process.
the whole thing was just a waste of time.. I had some technical test, then I was invited for some interviews, then I had some more rounds, including with the future manager, which approved me, but then they changed my process (from github us, to github uk) and they wanted to start again the whole set of interviews including the diversity one.. then I just found something better.
Did you miss that the child stuff is explicitly mentioned as negative prompt (which I assume is used to let the network know that you don't want those traits in the output image)?
Even after gaining the context that triple parentheses are antisemitic, I thought it very unusual that someone would see identifying "detailed face" as Jewish to be racist.
The suspension was lifted on appeal. Terms like “disfigured” were in the negative prompt to make appearance less likely, and the parentheses were to add or reduce weight of certain terms. I’m amused, but baffled, to see it brought up here at all—it should have nothing at all to do with any of this.
> Looking at the Reddit thread about this, there was some arguably racist stuff going on in his repo
That may or may have been warranted but these days "some arguably racist stuff" is a too vague description to be meaningful to act on, or pass judgement by on its own.
Do you have the link to the relevant reddit-thread for better context?
If it was just one of those examples, sure. But there are multiple things that are 'arguably racist' combined with apparent activity on 4chan, I'd say it doesn't seem just coincidental.
We don't know whether this has anything to do with the suspension though, everything that's being written is all just theories.
There is about 42% of population which do not support George Floyd protests. White mode is also not really racist: at least it is less racists than certain members of US government.
However, he is based in Russia and that changes everything.
As for 4chan activity, how on earth can anything there be attributed to anyone ? It's a anonymous messaging board. I can go there and claim that I'm the prince of Wales and start making egregious statements.
Did he add the 'n' tag or did he just accept a PR with changes made to artists.csv ?
That's quite a important distinction.
As for the mods, I have no problem with those, he made the WhiteOnly mod as a response to existing mods which removed white people, and I can't argue against the George Floyd riots being anything but peaceful.
The very first version of this file, authored by him, already included the 'n', only on artists that are either black or draw black people in art.
But sure, look at the guy that has dozens of red flags that all scream white supremacy and brush it off with "lol george floyd protests were violent tho".
Did he create the artists.csv file himself, or did he copy it from somewhere ?
This eagerness to attribute racism and 'white supremacy' to people has made the accusation pointless IMO.
I think the BlackLivesMatter movement was a big scam that fueled riots which cost people lives and a ton of economic damage while riding on a wave of legitimate but overblown criticism of police violence. Am I a white supremacist now ?
Was reading the Reddit thread and noticed this was said about the 'n' tag:
>Out of 3041 artists in the file 16 of them are tagged as 'n', and a further 8 >tagged as 'c' (no idea what it means either).
> Alain Laboile,0.67634284,c
> Julie Blackmon,0.72862685,c
> William-Adolphe Bouguereau,0.618265,c
> Bapu,0.6122084,c
> Robert Irwin,0.58078,c
> Cassius Marcellus Coolidge,0.5805516,c
> Dr. Seuss,0.5597466,c
> Henning Jakob Henrik Lund,0.5147134,c
Another uses also wrote:
>I don’t think they marked black artists with an n as you seem to be claiming. >There are also white artists marked with a c, like Julie Blackmon. Also I found >a german white artist Mati Klarwein who has an n in the dataset.
I can't say for sure where they got the data from, but the initial commit of the file, including all the categories, was by them[1].
I'm not even saying a ban was necessary in this case, just that the question is not about someone else implanting data, but the repository owner themselves.
Apart from that I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the author had racist intentions in their GitHub activity too. At least when it comes to their Steam activity there are indications that range from dubious to extremely clear racism.
First of all there is the "White Only" mod for RimWorld[2], which seems a bit unsavory, but who knows. Then the question of why the "Black Only" mod[3] has an image of a black person with a spear in the African Savannah, whereas the "White Only" one has a group of white people standing happily on a planet in modern clothing. (The "Yellow Only" mod[4] has an image of Emperor Taishō)
Most condemning in my eyes is the fact that their Steam profile[5] shows that at some point their nickname was "Remember the six gorillion" (click on the little arrow next to their current name to see previous iterations). This is clearly an anti-Semitic, or at least Holocaust-denying reference.[6]
Looks like relying on a centralised github isn't the most reliable choice. It's convenient, but if you don't want to be held ransom by Microsoft's decisions, then a self hosted repository has to be the way forwards.
I know you're joking, but what I suppose would need to happen is for someone to also come up with ways to do federated code discovery, search, browsing and ways to show off contributions. For issues and PRs there's mailing lists, but it seems the young uns are appalled by that, so maybe that too.
Gitea and forks exist, Fossil is also a plausible alternative although it seems not everyone likes its workflow. Maybe discovery could be handled simillar to Mastodon through ActivityPub, I think it wouldn't even be too hard to integrate into existing Git code forges.
Awesome, this could change the status quo of code forges. Also tangentially related, but just the fact that Forgejo is self hosting gives me more confidence in it than Gitea (which is on GitHub LOL), hopefully both projects share any improvements between each other.
The problems are not discoverability, but servers. GitHub is mainly successful because they simply offer services for free, and maintain them well. Most other features they offer is just a bonus. Though, at this point the weight of their accumulated fame, features and repos is also a reason for continuation, as long as they behave well enough.
It's strange isn't it how people keep inventing distributed systems such as the internet itself, and yet money/politics/laziness entices people to use a centralised resource with all the problems that go with that.
How do we know how to trust it without a central entity looking over its quality OR the next best thing such as provide usage statistics and community tools like an issue tracker etc.
Linux's model of trusting people seems to work for them. Github doesn't guarentee quality - the primary developer(s) were always the artiber of quality. There are also various projects managing issue tracking inside or alongside git, or git alternatives that integrate an issue tracker.
Yeah, but the problem is that if you have some project running on someone's server, how do you find the issues related to that project if they are not on that same server and managed by that same project owner?
If there is a security issue with some project on GitHub, then you can ask GitHub to look at it and they will take the project down. This cannot be done with projects running on someone's web server.
At some point, someone will (re)discover the Linux Kernel development model again and announce that chatting over a mailing list, reporting bugs over (self-hosted) Bugzilla and sending patches via mail is the best thing since sliced bread ;)
sourcehut has some pretty major ui stumbles IMO, particularly the unlinked nature of a project, eg: Get from https://git.sr.ht/~tsileo/microblog.pub to the ticket list. The ticket writing interface is pretty lackluster, mostly because its stuffed over the side and previewing shrinks the interface each time.
Pretty sure its an intentional, or at least a side effect, of the component nature of srht's codebase (afaik), where each part is a separate service. The rest is from its no/minimal-js design.
I don't make it, so I'm not saying it must be changed, but I find it annoying to use at best, and doubt I am alone. But they're probably not targeting me so ...
It's also pretty slow, not sure if it has global hosting.
I do very much appreciate that it doesn't try to gamify anything, I wish I could disable gh from tracking follows/stars/stats - I can greasemonkey them away but I still know they exist, which leaves me the temptation to check. Strictly a personal issue but it still exists.
I don't think it's intended and I'm failing to reproduce the issue you mentioned in Firefox 108. Maybe report a bug to the mailing list?
> The ticket writing interface is pretty lackluster...
I think this simplicity is intentional, and as an old folk, I actually dig that look. Having almost no JS around (I failed to find any so far) is also nice from my point of view.
Being composed a lot of parts feels chunky sometimes, but being able to compose projects out of repos, and having free-hanging repos without projects is also a great plus from my point of view. It fits how I work perfectly.
> It's also pretty slow, not sure if it has global hosting.
It's currently hosted in a single server in the US, but it will be moved to Europe (Netherlands I assume) to a more powerful infrastructure, so the speed will recover.
At the end of the day, while it's not perfect, it's perfect for me, my mindset and philosophy today. I'm a happy paying customer. Also Drew listens feedback and answers frankly, which I like a lot.
> SourceHut as a solution to centralized censorship is...ironic.
It's not a solution to a centralized censorship. You can self-host it if you want.
> SourceHut literally bans anything blockchain/crypto related from their platform.
It's their platform, they can decide what to do with it. However, I support SourceHut's view on this, because I also didn't see anything useful came out of blockchain/cryptocurrency scene.
Moreover, you can send your project in for vetting if you are so sure that it's something really beneficial. The ban is not a curtain / we'll ban you no matter what variety.
To directly cite:
> We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support. [0]
If GitHub can suspend accounts because of "links on wiki led to sites that contained pictures that didn't align with github's values"[0] (as we have seen with AUTOMATIC1111 [1]), Source Hut can reject service to anyone they want. It's their business and their decision.
At least the owner (Drew) is direct and honest about it.
We, as consumers have the right to not make business with companies which we don't like, too. I have left GitHub over Copilot issue for example.
If you don't agree with views or ToS of Source Hut, don't use it. It's that simple.
Yeah, sure, but I was just letting other consumers know Drew's position, so they could make their decision about whether to use it or not. I didn't even pass judgment on it in my comment. I made it a simple statement of fact.
> I didn't even pass judgment on it in my comment.
That's of course true, however only putting SourceHut into the picture like that creates an unintended insinuation[0], like only SourceHut is doing such things.
Any and every company will make such decisions about their users, regardless of their size. We all need to keep that in mind.
I just wanted to balance your comment, actually. Not to imply that you're pointing fingers or something.
On the other hand, I'd rather know who made the decision about an outcome involving me, rather than getting canned e-mail replies churned out by corporate machinery.
> On the other hand, I'd rather know who made the decision about an outcome involving me, rather than getting canned e-mail replies churned out by corporate machinery.
First someone will have to buy GitHub from Microsoft and we will have to write a bunch or articles about how it is bad for someone to be able to control source code.
I think if you’re doing racist stuff, you should expect that the owner of the platform you’re doing it on will probably not like that and find a way to kick you off.
The user is probably not a card carrying neo-nazi, but I’m sorry this is 2023, how on Earth can people still expect not to get called for juvenile 4chan-level trolling like this?
GitHub will have removed this because they don't want to be seen hosting racist shit on their platform. They don't want that because as it turns out the vast majority of the population isn't on board with racism, so not doing so would empower their competitors, hurt their brand and affect their bottom line. It's the same with Disney (the "oh a black little mermaid!?" stuff) and all the other the other ultimately banal things that get people frothing at the mouth about corporations going "woke" - it's not a conspiracy, it's not about politics, it's simply bad business to appear welcoming to hateful or bigoted people.
That said, I personally think it should be difficult to be racist, homophobic, transphobic and the like online. I'm not engaging in debates, posting outraged tweetstorms or trying to get anyone doxxed/fired/cancelled when I see some anonymous edgelord throwing the n-bomb around or calling for LGBTQ+ friends to be killed. I'm just going to quietly report the post and move on.
No you're right, there's not going to be a mass exodus because of one mod. However if GitHub became known as the 8chan of git where anything goes, that would likely cause a slow decline that would be difficult to turn around. The way you prevent that is by drawing a line and saying that if someone crosses that line they're gone. I guess they've deemed this user to have crossed the line.
Whenever I see "virtue signalling" or "free speech" mentioned regarding tech companies like GitHub, Facebook, Twitter etc it's usually someone pretending they don't understand how companies work (and ironically doing their own little form of virtue signalling). Companies want to make money. You don't make money by pissing off the population. GitHub seem to have decided that allowing a user they've deemed as questionable is going to piss off more people than kicking that user off. If you don't like it and want to exercise your freedom of speech and/or signal that you're more virtuous than the rest of us then you are welcome to self-host or try out GitLab, BitBucket, sr.ht or CodeBerg.
Right but proper reaction to that is sending a message of "hey this repo breaks TOS because X Y and Z". You get the author chance to explain (if it is genuine misunderstanding, which will happen just due to culture differences and some moderators being, well, utterly incompetent) or fix their attitude, or remove their stuff.
And in case of someone discussing it, like here, there is no need to guess and dig if the reason is given plainly by the moderator and points directly to the offense. Instead of speculation you get people look at it and just go "oh, yeah, that's fair" and move on.
Yeetus deletus of everything, including unrelated things, because you broke TOS point which we don't even tell you how did you break it (which is pretty fucking common with any big tech, regardless of the reason, even if reason is just "triggered some heuristics in our system") is not okay.
Github has the right to remove any account it wants because terms of service generally allow that kind of stuff without repercussions (though they need to explain why in certain legislations by law).
However, if Github is actively curating content, that means they're also responsible for the stuff they do leave up. The argument that a company isn't legally responsible for its users content relies heavily on the company having little control over said content.
This direct influence is what got the thepiratebay guys and the megaupload guys arrested, or at least what made the case persuable enough to put effort into it.
Id it's true that Github is actively removing account that post things they deem as racist, then I will judge Github on any older content on the platform not taken down. There is a lot of weird shit on Github that's apparently okay if a stupid mod for a video game is considered as a reason to refuse service to someone.
Companies are free to choose what they do and do not host, but that freedom is a double edged sword.
I agree with what you're saying. I don't like racist/homophobic/transphobic behavior but I find it hard to reconcile that with free speech. And I think they only way you can change someone's mind is by allowing free speech and engaging in conversations with them to try to change their minds. Banning them would just make them look for other channels to communicate and find like minded people and their bad ideas will never be challenged.
You mentioned the "black little mermaid" and it's hard not to draw a parallel between a mod in a game that allows you to change the skin color of a character and the "woke" media race swapping well known characters like the little mermaid, Triss from the Witcher, Achilles, etc.
> I find it hard to reconcile that with free speech
I don't know what to say - if you're expecting "free speech" somewhere that has a big TOS you agreed to which doesn't say "hey this is the free speech zone, go nuts!" then you are in for a shock.
The Little Mermaid is an film for kids. Kids aren't "woke" - the only people who care about the skin colour of a fictional character in an animated film are adults. If someone's upset because they see a black person, they might want to take a deep breath and think really hard about what's really bothering them.
> And I think they only way you can change someone's mind is by allowing free speech and engaging in conversations with them to try to change their minds
... if the person you are engaging with is open to having their mind changed. If you ever tried that with online trolls, you would quickly find out that's not really going to happen when person on the other side doesn't want that and can just decide to waste as much of your time as they can.
This entire industry is built on exploiting both workers and consumers. If you think you have a say, you do not, unless your say does not impact the business model. The TOS is designed to be a middle finger to your face.
> "It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter." - Nathaniel Borenstein
Released at least two years after the original WhiteOnly mod:
"Edit 26-mar-2020: finally, the injustice has been corrected: all races are welcome! You can choose the range of skin colors you want in mod settings."
Part of the reason why I moved away from Github all my essential 'infra' repos and only keep 'portfolio' repos in there which I want to show to potential employers.
How is this news when we all know git is decentralized? News at 11: company enforces their own TOS. Github is about as useful as a brand of kleenexes. If y'all didn't want this you wouldn't have used your damn pull request software to host your code.
It maters since decentralization is not a silver bullet. There is always some main repo, and it is hard to change it, or even just inform people about change. If you want other people to participate in your project then hosting it on biggest/most popular service reduces entry barrier
If this really is about racism, as some people are suggesting, it makes me wonder how equitably such TOS-rules would be applied in other cases.
For example, if Linus Torvalds turned out to be a racist or sexist or homosexist or transexist, would his Linux repository (https://github.com/torvalds/linux) be hammered? Would he be removed from the Linux project somehow?
Hopefully - in the very unlikely case Torvalds or anybody else was deliberately uploading content of that sort.
This doesn't seem a remotely comparable case though (deliberate uploading of offensive content in the delisted repo vs - say - unwoke opinion/comments, or whatever the example of LT is supposed to evoke), if the reasons mooted in other comments are correct.
Creator? Sure. The user account maintaining and updating it? No. Racism is just one thing, there is a ton of other undesirable beahviors like cp, fascism, swatting, participating or supporting acts of violence against strangers without provocation, participating in a spam/phish/malware campaign, backdooring code the list goes on. You are still free to host your own git repo on your own servers.
Good point, I agree it's not comparable to what has been alleged in this case.
I used Linus just as an example of a very high-profile and widely beloved open source leader, to contrast this relatively unknown developer.
Though, now I think on it, some of the words he used in the past on the mailing list are considered "-ism" level offensive by some people today: "dumb", "retarded", etc.
Hopefully no cancellations incoming for these historical word-mishaps.
Really? "dumb" and "retarded" are considered "-ism" level offensive? What about retroactive abortion and the like? Is it so easy to trigger cancellation nowadays?
That is indeed true. One of my alts there (like out of 25 at the moment, subject matter per acct) got permabanned sitewide for calling into question the business name and property ownership for a mental health nonprofit that has "ARC" in its name.
The "ARC" acronym stands for 'Association for Retarded Citizens', back when "retarded" was a clinical definition. It's now defunct. But those names still live on in property deeds and corporation names. https://thearc.org/about-us/history/ has the history of this name.
But Reddit.. egads, I have no clue what they're trying to accomplish. Maybe they're trying to clean themselves up from anything that even smells bad. If you want to speak about 'questionable topics', you have to use onomatopoeia to even talk about it (like, wee-tod-did , seggsual, unalive). I'm personally thinking of just abandoning reddit over their slow-boiling the frog, if you will.
1. If Linus did a hard-right turn and was doing the right-wing news tour doing transphobic shit, MS and GitHub wouldn't bat an eye
2. If Linus kept a repo of anti-trans poetry or some shit on his GitHub, then yeah he'd quite possibly get booted off
This isn't about GitHub being against what they think "AUTOMATIC1111" as a person believes, this is just about what they had on GitHub, and whether GH considered it against their TOS.
Now there's a thought. Maybe what finally resolves the gender imbalance in tech will be the reveal of Linus' secret stash of radfem verse.
A penguin draped in suffragette colours becomes the new mascot. Women across the globe join the open source movement in droves. JK Rowling writes a bestselling guide to Linux kernel development.
Or if one of thousands contributors happened to be?
We already had developer (of Drupal[1]) cancelled over their private BDSM kink (that isn't even illegal, which racism is), what stops some random moderator for deciding he's the saviour of the world and banning random repos just because a contributor might've been questionable?
GitHub can ban your account if you violated their TOS, but I don't think they can/will ban the repo if one of the contributor might be questionable, you can fake commit history anyway. Perhaps they may ask the contributors to change git history if the contributor for a commit is really freaking them out for some reason? I have no idea.
Probably. Just checkout how much fallout RMS generates when sharing his opinion outside software domain. It will be always weird, to kick original autor from project, but it happens from time to time.
There's some (instinctive?) criticism of Microsoft/GitHub here but as others have pointed out, the maintainer appears to be uploading racist content. If that's the case, it's a clear boot.
The material proof of the allegations are so tenuous at this point that I'm way more concerned about...well, that we are about to ban the letter 'n' because it ca_ be i_terpreted as racist.
For what is worth, I thi_k we should all grow a thicker ski_ a_d be ready to defe_d the thi_gs that matter, like our right to express freely without havi_g to watch our words for the _ext time somebody somewhere may take offe_se with what we say.
Whatever side you are on in this debate of "should GitHub decide what is good and bad" I think most people would agree that they really should quote a specific violation of specific TOS when they close your account. This should be the norm, as opposed to the current situation in which you are left wondering what the hell was problematic that some GitHub employee disagrees with.
The corporation may benefit from having unclear moderation policies, but this is not in the best interests of the users. If you don't agree, consider the possibility that the corporation's political views may change and your own beliefs could then be subject to moderation instead of those of "the other side."
I had a newly-created GitHub account banned when I uploaded a Scrabble word list to it as a Gist. Turns out it included various slur words and their systems picked this up automatically.
Although they didn't immediately specify the reason for the ban, to their credit the GitHub support person did explain what had happened when I appealed and the ban was lifted.
I am not talking about the current situation. I am saying that it should not be legal for companies to refuse to server a customer without giving a clear reason why they do so. Unless you think it would be fine, for example, for corporations to refuse serving minorities citing their TOS?
If it's not a right, does that mean GitHub could ban every black user if they wanted to? I doubt it. Could they ban every Russian (or people of specific nationality in general)? Can they ban everybody sharing an idea?
Our legal system is really expensive, not sure if it is a good alternative to this. And perhaps you can hire a lawyer to sue them when they ban you, they will have to explain the exact TOS violation in the court I think?
Imagine if we used the same logic for law enforcement. "We can't tell you what's illegal because that would help bad actors. Also, not knowing the law is not a defence for violating it."
Tech companies hate citing the actual TOS violations because if they did, people might follow them to the letter and then the tech company wouldn't have a justification to ban them. They love having a system where they can arbitrarily declare anything and anyone to be in violation of the terms of service and not have to back it up with an actual citation. Some on HN in that past have said this is ok because people who are bad can figure out ways to abide by the terms of service while also still being bad people, so the arbitrary nature of enforcement is a feature, not a bug.
Of course is is a feature to them. This is honestly like being in an abusive relationship where you never know if you're going to get praised or beaten up, so you always have to be on high alert.
I helped run a fairly large gaming forum for many years. You either have broad rules or ten thousand very specific ones no one can ever hope to understand.
“You violated the ‘don’t be a dick’ rule too many times” isn’t much different than that. We found it regularly necessary, and that giving specific examples and number of times counterproductive.
"Edit 26-mar-2020: finally, the injustice has been corrected: all races are welcome! You can choose the range of skin colors you want in mod settings."
I'm not sure I see how that was well intentioned? The developer releases a mod that removes non-white people from the game, and then two years later releases two other mods that "equalize" the situation by removing all races except one. I struggle to see what evidence of good intentions you're seeing in that quote.
Need to call this bullshit by its name: Microsoft killing their competition. They had just released their own version of stable diffusion in bing a moment ago and now they ban the biggest competition from GitHub.
I don't believe they didn't know what they are doing. They definitely have statistics about repo usage and the guy suspending him definitely knew that it's one of the most popular repos out there.
Microsoft don't deserve the benefit of doubt here. This is a warning to anyone who competes with Microsoft in an open source project. Move elsewhere.
They literally got nothing to lose and they can just go "oops, we saw X in the repo and banned by mistake".
There's just no way this is a mistake. I don't believe for a second their internal review systems don't have any safeguards against banning extremely popular repositories without manual oversight, because they must have these safeguards. Other open source repos probably get spurious reports commonly.
These systems always have popularity thresholds for manual oversight because as something gets popular, it gets false reports. It's just fact of life.
Any manual oversight would easily recognize what's going on and would never ban extremely popular repo for a random transgression of its creator in other repo. Not without consulting a manager.
They can ban the offending repo. They are either extremely incompetent or malicious, either way I'm totally avoiding GitHub from now on. Absolutely disgusting behavior.
“Edit 26-mar-2020: finally, the injustice has been corrected: all races are welcome! You can choose the range of skin colors you want in mod settings.”
> - Put black people and artists who draw black people in a category/folder called "n".
this doesn’t really mean anything.
> - Is allegedly also anti-semitic but I don't think the "((()))" thing is proof of that.
besides using () for weights what other proof do you have for your public accusation?
> Just a racist being banned.
love these kinds of conclusions drawn from conjectures.
I don't really see how that Steam link is supposed to be helping their case here... Yeah sure, you can change the settings on the mod called "Whites Only", and we are supposed to be like "oh, ok, I guess thats fine then"?
Makes me wonder if OpenAI via its microsoft connection is pulling strings behind the scenes (less believe conspiracies than that has turned out true in the twitter saga)
Adding my own n=1 anecdote here - a member contributing to an open source project I'm involved in, who had a few repositories on GH with extensions to that project but no other notable 'negative' activity, had gotten a permanent suspension from GitHub a few years ago for responding to a mildly abusive issue report on the main project with the well-known 'Navy SEALs copypasta'... the abuser then reported them and their account - including their helpful and invaluable extension repositories - was nuked, while the abuser then could continue to abuse under both the original account and various other aliases.
They left the community shortly after, likely in part fueled by the way an abuser got their GitHub account destroyed while the abuser pretty much remained unscathed.
This seems to be the real issue. Not that if the judgement is incorrect or correct, but there is no real effort to even make judgements that aren't just generated by some simple script.
I'm not sure what is worse, the kindergarten level drama around this project that I never heard before today, or some of the low effort comments I'm seeing here scrolling the page.
Regardless of what the author of the repo did or did not do, I think that deleting his account and everything in it is a failure on the part of github and warrants a policy change. There's lots of good knowledge contained in the issues and discussions hosted on the webui repo all of which are now lost or very hard to find. Even papers coming from big companies have directly used the repo as reference[1].
I was personally playing around with prompt2prompt and reading issues when the ban happened and now I can no longer find the most recent comments, I still had the url but the internet archive only has a copy from back in october, and finding this specific discussion will be hard again since it will be pruned from search engines.
IMO github should've put the repo in read-only mode, if they want their social features to be taken seriously they can't be removing discussions and comments that people that have contributed that have nothing to do with the infraction. What's the point of hosting discussions if there's a chance they'll be nuked later just because the original author of the repo did shitty things.
Agreed. This is social media style moderation being applied to a website that is more similar to infrastructure or a library. If I were a member of a private, professional library* and a colleague was found to hold racist views or had submitted a racist paper, I would still find it unacceptable to see that all of their books and papers had been indiscriminately pulled off the shelves overnight. In fact, such a thing would be unthinkable.
* Do such things exist? I'm just trying to keep the example out of the public or academic spheres.
> This is social media style moderation being applied to a website that is more similar to infrastructure or a library.
I don't know anything about the immediate situation here but calling GitHub "infrastructure" is not accurate. I know every man and his dog hosts their repos there but GitHub is a private company (owned by Microsoft!) and is not obliged to host things that it thinks will make it look bad.
Private companies can be treated as infrastructure, and of course private companies are free to operate in a way that reduces faith in their reliability.
But wouldn’t you agree that if I run a private professional library, I have the right to add or remove books by any (legal) process I deem appropriate?
> Do such things exist?
I sorta do this; I have a small collection of historical programming languages texts that I make available to my students and anyone else interested. It’s not really a membership kind of thing tho.
> But wouldn’t you agree that if I run a private professional library, I have the right to add or remove books by any (legal) process I deem appropriate?
Of course. I don't think this is a question of freedom of speech or anything like that. I think this is about how Github should moderate its content in a way that is best for its users and its business. Making a Twitter profile or a YouTube channel disappear is categorically different in my mind from making a GitHub repository disappear and I think GitHub should want for me to feel that way. If I don't, it changes how and how much I use the service.
> Making a Twitter profile or a YouTube channel disappear is categorically different in my mind from making a GitHub repository disappear and I think GitHub should want for me to feel that way.
I agree it's categorically different but not in the way you mean. From your other post, I understand that you view Twitter and YouTube as social media, and they are distinct from software infrastructure like GitHub.
The way I see it, all three are social networks, but what make GitHub distinct from the other two is that it's backed by git. So if GitHub wants to ban me, I can easily move my code to any number of services. Which, honestly if you're relying on GitHub as infrastructure, you should have a backup plan anyway for if/when it goes down.
I didnt read the full thing but the point is, is any code worth less because it’s author is making some statements that in the eyes of some people would not be not acceptable? Who decides that?
I think this is the point where github ceases to be of use as a platform to host code, since at any point they could come down on you, and in succession break hundreds of other programs that would have dependencies on the “banned” code, etc…
Personally it would've been better to take down the offending repos and at least give a warning to the author before doing this.
Now all knowledge is lost. Not the code, but there were discussions, tutorials, and what not.
I don't know who Auto is or what he did in practice that led to the violation (yes, I read about those mods): my qualms with the repo were due to its questionable licensing, which is, however, allowed by GH. After all, I can use something without agreeing with the author's moral views.
And yes, this again, even if one agrees with the suspension, shows the danger of centralized platforms when they become so large (although they are convenient).
Stealthily introducing malware to your repositories (and distributing it on npm) is A-OK, absolutely no action taken when it happened last year with node-ipc, so I'm really curious to see what the rationale was in this case, for it doesn't get much worse than that. Some more fraudulent accusations of code theft? I don't buy it from the Copilot company, and the mods/racism allegations couldn't possibly be it, it'd make GH look irresponsible and definitely not a trustworthy place to host any project on.
making a white only rimworld mod is worse than distributing malware now I guess. Next move is they'll ban the account of everybody who complained about there being black dwarves, hobbits and elves in Rings Of Power.
This has me thinking about a 1-seat GH enterprise license for my personal repos.
I can't risk all my issues disappearing into nothingness, and I can't imagine myself using a different platform. GH is muscle memory for me these days.
Would also be nice to know Microsoft can't arbitrarily scan my works for dangerous competitive elements.
github has kicked people off the platform for using the verb "retard" in a mathematical sense. And they upheld it when escalated to a chief something-or-other.
Anything github does the burden of proof is definitely on them.
499 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 324 ms ] threadupdate: Gitgud repo created here : https://gitgud.io/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui
(Gitgud seems to be really slow)
Further update : Account was suspended due to "TOS violations" : https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/103uwx1/au...
Mati Klarwein
You could argue maybe that using the letter "n" could be seen as racist. It's a US centric view however, in other places n would be fine (n for negro in Spanish for example)
For all I know automatic might be super racist, I'm just playing devils advocate, and I like to assume the best of in people.
My first assumption on encountering a table field with a standalone "n" would be that it's an abbreviation of "no". So I'm surprised people are assuming so strongly here that this is instead code for a racist word. This is quite a harsh accusation, given the lack of evidence.
It will be quite embarrassing all round if this just turns out to be a run-of-the-mill copyright strike, or similar.
If, say, the guy had made mods smirking at the George Floyd protests, had made skin-color mods, and had also said "no comment" when asked what the 'n' and 'c' tags represented, would you still go with your first assumption?
That he's clearly more than a little racist isn't enough for me to defend nuking the guy's account without warning or explanation. But it is enough to make me think twice about blindly downloading and running the guy's code (which also downloads a lot of stuff).
Who knows what other norms of basic decency this anonymous person from 4chan would violate.
Edit: apparently all the git pulling and bash+curling happens during install, and not fully automatically afterwards. It does not strictly speaking self-update.
So I loaded up A111, selected the 'n' category, and ran a few pictures using random artists from said category.
The results were all black. The category itself is actually useful to me, now that I know it exists — I use the AI to generate illustrations for my fanfiction, and getting non-white, non-asian outputs is difficult at best — but labelling it "n" is, uh, suspicious.
In combination with everything else, I don't think there's really any doubts about his thought process here. :(
Regarding the content: That would still be a questionable classification, but even more so for someone like "RETNA (Marquis Lewis)" who rarely ever seems to depict people.
All in all it’s very sketchy, though one could probably construct ways it’s not racist, and it might not even be racist, though I doubt it.
I think the most likely scenario is that automatic's trying to group that style, which is fair and the purpose of those categories after all, and him coming from 4chan is no stranger to the n word, so that's what came to his mind.
Even if I think that's the most likely situation, I give him the benefit of the doubt, that's what I meant.
* Bill Jacklin
* Hiroshi Sugomoto
* Josef Albers
* David Teniers the Younger
None of them are black.
Edit: As eyko pointed out below, these are not in the 'n' category. So I searched for people in that category, and all the ones I checked turned out to have been black (other than Mati Klarwein).
Howardena Pindell,0.7686921,n Mati Klarwein,0.7066092,n Barkley L. Hendricks,0.69986427,n Carrie Mae Weems,0.6645416,n Barkley Hendricks,0.6883637,n Yinka Shonibare,0.68256056,n Zanele Muholi,0.58554715,n Kehinde Wiley,0.66218376,n RETNA (Marquis Lewis),0.47963,n Wangechi Mutu,0.6394607,n Kadir Nelson,0.5669006,n Amadou Opa Bathily,0.5536976,n Juliana Huxtable,0.5364195,n Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy,0.49445248,n Teophilus Tetteh,0.46064255,n Bruce Onobrakpeya,0.42588046,n
Looking through that file, I can't think of a single charitable interpretation for that categorization.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/xl8bj2/aut...
Do you think I'm doing that because I hate a group of people that are called a derogatory word that begins with r?
Sometimes we infer things from a combination of evidence.
People in the Jim Crow era were convicted without evidence, or had exonerating evidence hidden by racist law enforcement and prosecutors. It’s hardly the same.
Circumstantial evidence becomes compelling only when there's a lot of it, all in one direction, without exonerating or at least contradictory evidence of some kind.
If you have white robes with pointy hats, a noose, and a Confederate flag in your closet, I'm very comfortable assuming certain facts about you. If you can come up with a good explanation - perhaps you're an actor in a play about the civil rights era - I'm prepared to shift that conclusion, but "nuh uh, this doesn't prove anything!" isn't a compelling response to it.
But if I found out that a black person had a picture of a white person on his computer under the "C" drive, I wouldn't assume that he named the drive "C" for cracker, and wouldn't expect him to prove the "real reason" his drive was named "C"
Agreed!
If, however, all the other drives were named "Photos" and "Recipes" and other descriptive terms, leaving only the C drive as a letter, that'd be interesting. Even more interesting if it's a bunch of photos of white people, and nothing much else on said C drive. If that same person had previously criticized civil rights issues, and was cagey about why they have the one oddly-named drive (https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/xl8bj2/com...), and had a history of putting out racially-focused mods for a game, we might begin to get outright suspicious.
This is what circumstantial evidence is all about; more than one data point leading to a reasonable conclusion. You seem to want to redefine it to a single data point, which giving it's been explained several times now, I have to assume (circumstantial again!) is playing dumb intentionally.
Civil vs. Criminal cases have different levels of guilt. Further, this isn't either, but a private company and its TOS. It's perfectly reasonable to hold different standards for different situations. I would hope that we hold a higher standard for criminal activity. What GitHub did was very much use the powers conservatives have fought long and hard to maintain.
People seem unable to do this. They want to see all of these examples as unrelated things that coincidentally can all be considered racist by wokies. To me, it's a case of walking and swimming and talking like a duck.
If that that's the ban reason, it's pretty Orwellian. There was a lot of severe property destruction (e.g. arson) during those protests, some of which was indisputably committed by people aligned with the protests. They were complicated events, with peaceful and violent parts. They were only one or the other when seen through a blinkered political orthodoxy.
> Free - Yes, totally free for any user or group
Such claims are invariably false. Or, stated most generously, heavily misleading, because of limitations. And that’s even ignoring the common “it became popular and we realised what we were offering wasn’t sustainable so we’re charging or limiting sharply or shutting down” result.
> Fast - One of the fastest git hosting services
Holistically, I’d say this isn’t even possible if you’re using GitLab. Significant parts of GitLab are very slow. And as for GitGud.io at present, well, that repository’s URL is consistently taking about ten seconds to send the first byte of the response, and even HEAD / takes more than five seconds to issue a 302 redirect to /users/sign_in.
> Highly available - average uptime of 99.83% ¹
Look, “highly available” is a vague term, but for this kind of service I’d expect it to mean three nines at the very least, probably four, and to mean an architecture and upgrade deployment mechanism significantly different from GitLab’s, where upgrades are disruptive.
Also, their actual status page is currently saying 91.16% for the last 24 hours (2h7m of downtime), which is already more than two months’ downtime budget even at 99.83%.
> Reliable - We have never lost any data, unlike other services
You also probably haven’t dealt with any of the scale-related issues that have caused data loss in said Other Services.
>>Free - Yes, totally free for any user or group
>Such claims are invariably false. Or, stated most generously, heavily misleading, because of limitations.
Can you explain your issue with this? GitGud.io has been operating for over 8 years with only free accounts and without any paid setup. Historically we've been supported by user donations, but I now also pay out of pocket, a relatively trivial amount since my main job is being a DevOps engineer for a CDN & cloud company, for server resources and upgrades for GitGud.io and we have plans to launch SaaS products that will completely offset any GitGud.io costs.
>>Fast - One of the fastest git hosting services
>Holistically, I’d say this isn’t even possible if you’re using GitLab. Significant parts of GitLab are very slow. And as for GitGud.io at present, well, that repository’s URL is consistently taking about ten seconds to send the first byte of the response, and even HEAD / takes more than five seconds to issue a 302 redirect to /users/sign_in.
GitGud.io has historically been fast. Currently we just finished an upgrade of the main node last week from an 8-core Epyc to a 64-core Epyc, plus 2-3x more available memory and we have not had enough traffic to adjust this. This event helped us tune GitLab better to our new resources. And yes, as someone who has been working with GitLab for over 8 years, I know exactly how slow and bloated it is, but you must also understand that GitLab.com itself spent years being constantly down or hardly loading in comparison. Different scales of "users", but GitGud.io still has 41,000 users and close to 15,000 repositories. You'd be hard pressed to find many other GitLab instances publicly usable that big. We could utilize Gitea or something lighter, but GitLab offers a lot of features and Gitea didn't exist when we started.
>> Highly available - average uptime of 99.83% ¹
>Look, “highly available” is a vague term, but for this kind of service I’d expect it to mean three nines at the very least, probably four, and to mean an architecture and upgrade deployment mechanism significantly different from GitLab’s, where upgrades are disruptive. >Also, their actual status page is currently saying 91.16% for the last 24 hours (2h7m of downtime), which is already more than two months’ downtime budget even at 99.83%.
Yes, cause currently we currently took the host node down 12 hours ago for a couple of hours in a planned hardware upgrade maintenance to install new 40g NICs, SSDs, etc. Overall the average is decent, and this line harkens back to the days when GitLab.com was down daily. We run on our own bare metal colo servers, not magically appearing cloud instances.
>> Reliable - We have never lost any data, unlike other services
>You also probably haven’t dealt with any of the scale-related issues that have caused data loss in said Other Services.
Their scale outs should have made it harder to lose data, not the other way around. We've also have ran a fairly large file/media sharing site in the form of Imgur with dozens of TBs of user uploaded media scaled across several servers, and we didn't lose data there. Fact is, we haven't lost any data and that's our track record so far over the past 8 years. I think that's worth of some note.
Either way, while the homepage claims are eyebrow raising for you, I don't see how this matters much for a service that is charging $0 for Git repo hosting. We make $0 for any user who decides to utilize us. If we wanted to charge for GitGud.io access and it's GitLab CI runner access, we could. There's nothing stopping us from doing that. But even if we disappeared tomorrow, the fact is that Git is naturally decentralized. The original creators and the clones exist somewhere.
We exist as an alternative to other services that suspend accounts on a whim and an easy solution for those that don't want to setup or...
for context: AUTOMATIC1111 created and maintains (maintained?) an extremely popular and active web ui for stable diffusion. Beast-mode maintainer.
Even after the debacle w stability.ai (who, to their great credit, I believe, normalized discord chatroom relations rapidly), that’s a string of bad luck for this community keystone of the nascent txt2img technological tranche.
Whatever the eventual steady state of this matter, I hope this person isn’t burning out in the process.
and all that jazz..Lurking GitHub employees.. give us the verdict..!
e.g. might it apply some weighting to the phrase?
Additionally, I wonder, looking at that prompt, maybe he was banned for beastiality.
But like, it’s racist if I want to modify a single player game to make the players white? And even if it is I wish people would just butt out. Seems like a bunch of busybodies policing behavior. It’s just gotten crazy and is really dumb at this point. Are we going to have to have a “free speech GitHub” run by Elon Musk too? How did the internet turn into such a snooze fest where every edgelord has to be sanded down to be safe and snuggly so nobody gets hurt?
I remember my wife got banned from the Sims mod community for asking if there was a mod that’d let her simulate Craster’s Keep from Game of Thrones. She likes telling bizarre stories through electronic media. If she wanted to tell that story in Rimworld (which like, I don’t play Rimworld so just guessing) she’d need a mod to make the skin tones match up. Uh oh is that racist now?
Why are all the nice things ruined by bigots.
edit: Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_gesture#White_power_symbol
Seems like they managed to have white power fans actually adopt it.
1. 4chan tries to say it means "White Power"
2. the news pick this up and runs with it
3. actual white nationalists started using it
or
1. 4chan tries to say it means "White Power"
2. actual white nationalists started using it
3. the news reports that white nationalists are using it
News orgs can be easily fooled into reporting ridiculous fake shit and backfiring - like the whole "teens eating tide pods" thing causing a few teens and boomers to actually try eating them - so both are possible, I'd suspect that the latter is more likely though.
But it’s telling that the ADL at first refused to add it to their list of hate-signs, and then (according to wikipedia, after all I only heard of all this today) reversed their stance 2 years later. And almost all usage of the sign getting someone into trouble have also been 2019+ (again, from the wiki list).
However I don't think that on its use on its own would cause a mob to mass report your account or anything. It's not so self-evidently a sign of hate as a hakenkreuz or the nazi salute would be, it's just worth remembering that in some rare situations it could be poorly received.
This is what's important - it's not banned, it's not going to get you jailed. It's just going to land you in a tricky situation if you use it where it's going to be interpreted as a hate symbol.
What you do with this information is up to you.
According to him, it was a sign that KKK members in his town used to signal group membership to one another. In his telling the three extended fingers meant KKK, and they would tuck the thumb and index finger in their belt or waistband.
Either he was making it up then and it’s a complete coincidence his story matches the 4chan story 15 years later, which is also made up; or there’s a kernel of truth to it, and this guy was letting us in on some weird aspect of racist subculture that made its way to the mainstream in 2017. These people had so many other weird customs (like calling themselves wizards and dragons), I don’t see why secret hand signals are out of the question.
I'm reminded of her awkward "I'm just chillin ... in Cedar Rapids!" vine
The problem is that when journalists make mistakes, it becomes fact, true or not.
They aren't. If we just go about doing our thing such as using triple parentheses to mean hugs and the OK symbol to mean OK and the country's flag to mean reasonable love of home and country, then they'll find some other symbol. By making a big deal about what those people get up to and so avoiding them, we cede these beautiful, powerful symbols to assholes. Don't do it. It's the ceding that ruins them.
Back when the alt-right "Electric Boogaloo" thing was going on, one article I think hit the nail on the head saying something "If you want to wear a Hawaiian shirt, go for it. Just maybe think twice about accessorizing with body armor and assault rifles." The point being that just because some nut jobs make a point of wearing Hawaiian shirt under their militia get-up doesn't poison Hawaiian shirts. Context matters.
This string has legitimate uses and also offensive uses. Context decides which one it is.
The impact is overwhelming power transfer to racists.
This makes sense given the skewed overlay of people who are now "social justice warriors" that were once incredibly prejudice clowns.
This reddit link posted elsewhere gives a more damning view, aside from the triple parentheses: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/103upr6/co...
I'd guess this was enforced by someone reading a corporate policy that said "if you see triple parentheses, it's hate speech, ban the account".
On further investigation (see reddit) there also seems to be a CSV file with artist names in the repo. Black artists have a string 'n' in some unspecified column. I can't check myself if this might mean something else, eg. if other ethnicities also have this string... but there are some suspicious things going on in a that repo for sure. More than just the parentheses.
It is not exclusively applied to any skin color either.
Later someone points out that there is another artist who paints mostly darker skin tones who also has the n identifier.
I can, immediately and without effort, see why this might be added. As a way to force representation in output. This is, to me, akin to paint which lets you pick a color (let's go with purple) for skin.
The Rimworld mod cited apparently comes with an "all white, all black, and all yellow" version. The only version mentioned by the angry folks is the white one.
Does anyone know the truth of the matter above?
Rimworld: It was whites only at first, black only got added later and then integrated.
Personally I would not call any of the actions racist. The first one can be a legitimate use case with an incredibly poor choice of identifier (or incredibly good in at least one scenario). The mod being updated kind of argues for itself.
I think I will see on the side of caution and call it ignorance instead of malice.
The scenario is one where the n is completely harmless and the purported(on Reddit) word was nowhere in the mind when being typed.
Seems like the kind of thing GitHub should reach out to people about before acting on. At least where there is any (even farfetched) possible explanation.
I don't know how you would validate this but it doesn't seem unreasonable.
The silver lining of this bullshit is that this again underscores how important critical thinking is.
What makes me sad is the amount of effort needed to figure out A) why could github have banned this account, B) knowing that, do I feel this is fair or an over-reaction
I planned to use this repo professionally, so getting to the bottom of this is important to me. Instead of clarity, there's outrage and selective reporting; I couldn't find anything conclusive so far.
If that is distasteful or harmful then so are Netflix adaptations.
As an example, there are plenty of racist things a black only mod enables.
Yellow only I would use if I still liked The Simpsons and played the game in question.
"
...including removing any non-white characters from Rimworld
You should also mention there are two counterpart mods called "black only" and "yellow only"
"
In what ways? All I can see is some furry porn stuff. Explicit and not my fetish, but what parts are disgusting?
I’d say it’s an odd choice, except there are also plenty of others.
I always thought that was just, you know, a Tuesday on Animal Planet?
In the end though, I blame Disney.
Yuck.
If you find that yucky, you need help.
Parenthesis are used for increasing the weights of some terms. See how he uses single, double or triple parenthesis on different words. It has nothing to do with the triple parenthesis jew thing.
Just ran
in my projects directory and found many instances authored by me. Guess I should prioritize fixing these, or next time I'm the target of some controversy, someone will use these as evidence of my antisemitism.Thanks, I learned something new today.
However the GP was careful to note that context is important here. I've no idea about term weights in these AI prompts, but you seem to so if varying levels of parenthesis is common to denote a weight then you can simply say so without the snark.
In this climate, it takes one Twitter personality with a lot of followers to tweet out a “look at this racist” tweet with very vague references to your crimes, and that’s it, you’re a racist to a huge number of people who will probably never look beyond that single tweet. Good luck convincing 20% of them that you’re in fact innocent afterwards.
Edit: Years ago when I was part of a high profile open source project, I was once privately accused of being intolerant towards trans people. It happened after I sharply criticized some trans person's backwards-incompatible PR (which later proved to be pretty bad after being merged despite objections). I had no idea of the person's gender before the accusation, nor did I care after learning about it; they were simply an Internet handle to me. I also never used slurs towards any group. Looking back I'm just glad I wasn't shamed publicly.
edit: ok so digit is one of the people further down the thread, I'm not good with names
edit2: To respond to your edit, that sucks and I sympathise. I think this is an unfortunate side effect of the fact that when you're on the internet you're now exposed to thousands of different people who don't already know what kind of person you are, who misread and misinterpret remarks or who might have just had a shitty day and want to take it out on someone. Hell I'm one of those left-liberal, pro-lgbtq+, pro-feminist guys and I've had experience like yours very recently. I'd replied to a comment on FB where someone complained that some public works project cost X million euros, and said that non-engineers like us don't tend to have a good idea what such projects should cost - got a very angry reply along the lines of "Oh just because I'm a girl I get scared around big numbers? Girls can't do maths or engineering? ...". I had no idea what their gender was, the name was "Alex" and their profile pic was some anime or something :) It happens, it's frustrating and somewhere in my city there's a girl called Alex who either thinks I'm some misogyny bro or feels a bit silly for flying off the handle at me. It's the internet, [shrug] what can you do :)
I'm a person on HN. I didn't know that.
It's pretty esoteric, and that's coming from someone who's APL-curious.
But then, I don't spend any of my time reading alt-right or anti-alt-right blogs.
Slightly lacking in taste, but you do you
Context does matter.
It makes (((PERFECT))) sense that a person with a foot fetish would want an accurate foot.
However, we live in a world with so many people that anything (and I truly mean anything) will be taken as offensive by at least one person.
QED.
Get.A.Life.People.
Do you engage in discussion with white supremacists or their victims/targets? Do you use triple parenthesis all the time while describing other people?
If none of the above, then what you are doing is the equivalent of making irrelevant noise.
Now, there's a slight difference between you writing a comment that goes `This calculates the size of the universe (((note: absolutely fix this it runs in O(n^n))))`, and you going `goddamn I hate (((them)))` in forums swimming in white supremacists.
You are not being persecuted. If anything, hate on the far right using the dumbest fucking signals to try to "blend in".
If you're not familiar, these sorts of mods are near universally made for racist dogwhistling; they're the "barely passable but not really" version of mods that would straight up whitewash non-white characters. The entire debacle started a couple of years ago iirc with the game Stardew Valley, which has non-randomized unique characters and someone made a mod to iirc whitewash the black characters that the game has (straight up just respriting them to look white).
The mod was pulled from both Steam and Nexus if I recall, and a few weeks later you saw these sorts of "one skin color only" mods appear in games with a heavy focus on randomized character creation (the uploaders of these mods also usually try to say it's not racist by uploading multiple variations such as a mod that disables all white skin colors; this is just flimsy excuses, which becomes apparent when you look at the activity stats for these mods). Modding sites aren't very reliable on taking action on them, so it's the loophole used to still get away with doing racist shit.
As for the OK sign thing; that was a case of "4chan sliced a bunch of older pictures together of Trump and his ilk making an OK-sign" (which yeah, it's a common hand gesture, wow). The kinda strange thing is that it resulted in a sort of self-perpetuating effect; you had in part the media falling for the prank, but at the same time, those very same Trump supporters started doing the OK-hand deliberately to indicate what political "team" they belonged on.
It fell out of favor with those Trump supporters after a bit (because y'know, it was just a trend and trends defined solely by "trolling the libs" don't tend to last; eventually "the libs" catch on and they need something new).
Basically doing something ironically can make the people whose behavior you're emulating think they're in good company. Unless you take it to straight up absurdist levels (no Nazi will ever use Springtime for Hitler as propaganda), that will always happen.
Stuff like being clear about it being made to mock (as with Poes Law, which suggests things like the /s sarcasm marker) or extreme absurdity (Springtime) helps avoid that.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Ridiculous.
GitHub probably doesn't want to be seen hosting that shit because they're a company with business agreements and other businesses tend to start side-eyeing you and leaving you for competitors if you don't take action when people report racist stuff to you. (Usually because not cleaning that stuff up tends to be indicative of worse problems not being actioned on). GitHub in specific has a pretty nasty skeleton in the closet that they would really rather not have attention drawn to (their ICE contract, which has cost them several other contracts and has typically cost them about a third of their workforce every time it gets renewed), so they tend to be far more proactive in cleaning up that sort of thing.
Their TOS probably has a line forbidding this sort of mod from being uploaded and someone probably just filed a report to GitHub about it breaking their TOS or someone from their T&S team happened to find it while checking up on Automatics repositories.
All contained basically the same few lines of code that skew the number distribution for the "RandomMelanin" method in the game.
All three are still available on the Steam workshop, although it seems like the functionality of all 3 mods was merged into the "White only" mod, which now provides a slider that lets you select the range instead of hardcoding it, and that is the only source code that remained on their github. This is the only mod of the three that was actively updated for new versions of the game so that has an impact on the statistics as well.
This is mod as in modification, not as in moderator.
Its problematic. Maybe racist. But whitewashing?
The RimWorld mods aren't whitewashing, they're just problematic and when you take in the broader context of the history of these sorts of mods (not to mention the history of these RimWorld mods on the Steam workshop, as another commenter pointed out, they started with the all white mod and only uploaded the all black and all yellow mods later), are pretty clearly racist.
I think they have proved beyond shadow of doubt that they are not
> [...] nsfw [...] on all fours [...] balls [...] penis between paws [...]
He got banned for sex prompting?
> [...] disfigured face, missing eyes, missing limbs [...] 2 toes, 3 toes [...]
Okay, okay... maybe GitHub isn't the place for popularising gore porn generators, but...
> [...] child, young [...]
Ah.
Thank you for clarifying.
I've used my ignorance as an opportunity for others to better interpret this also.
AUTOMATIC had nothing to do with that prompt. A user from the Furry Diffusion Discord wrote it and I was suspended from reddit for posting it here (NSFW): https://www.reddit.com/r/FurAI/comments/y2l9o5/want_a_ride_m...
The suspension was lifted on appeal. Terms like “disfigured” were in the negative prompt to make appearance less likely, and the parentheses were to add or reduce weight of certain terms. I’m amused, but baffled, to see it brought up here at all—it should have nothing at all to do with any of this.
That may or may have been warranted but these days "some arguably racist stuff" is a too vague description to be meaningful to act on, or pass judgement by on its own.
Do you have the link to the relevant reddit-thread for better context?
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/103upr6/co...
If it was just one of those examples, sure. But there are multiple things that are 'arguably racist' combined with apparent activity on 4chan, I'd say it doesn't seem just coincidental.
We don't know whether this has anything to do with the suspension though, everything that's being written is all just theories.
However, he is based in Russia and that changes everything.
https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/103vsm2/we...
As for 4chan activity, how on earth can anything there be attributed to anyone ? It's a anonymous messaging board. I can go there and claim that I'm the prince of Wales and start making egregious statements.
That's quite a important distinction.
As for the mods, I have no problem with those, he made the WhiteOnly mod as a response to existing mods which removed white people, and I can't argue against the George Floyd riots being anything but peaceful.
But sure, look at the guy that has dozens of red flags that all scream white supremacy and brush it off with "lol george floyd protests were violent tho".
This eagerness to attribute racism and 'white supremacy' to people has made the accusation pointless IMO.
I think the BlackLivesMatter movement was a big scam that fueled riots which cost people lives and a ton of economic damage while riding on a wave of legitimate but overblown criticism of police violence. Am I a white supremacist now ?
>Out of 3041 artists in the file 16 of them are tagged as 'n', and a further 8 >tagged as 'c' (no idea what it means either).
> Alain Laboile,0.67634284,c > Julie Blackmon,0.72862685,c > William-Adolphe Bouguereau,0.618265,c > Bapu,0.6122084,c > Robert Irwin,0.58078,c > Cassius Marcellus Coolidge,0.5805516,c > Dr. Seuss,0.5597466,c > Henning Jakob Henrik Lund,0.5147134,c
Another uses also wrote:
>I don’t think they marked black artists with an n as you seem to be claiming. >There are also white artists marked with a c, like Julie Blackmon. Also I found >a german white artist Mati Klarwein who has an n in the dataset.
I'm not even saying a ban was necessary in this case, just that the question is not about someone else implanting data, but the repository owner themselves.
Apart from that I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the author had racist intentions in their GitHub activity too. At least when it comes to their Steam activity there are indications that range from dubious to extremely clear racism. First of all there is the "White Only" mod for RimWorld[2], which seems a bit unsavory, but who knows. Then the question of why the "Black Only" mod[3] has an image of a black person with a spear in the African Savannah, whereas the "White Only" one has a group of white people standing happily on a planet in modern clothing. (The "Yellow Only" mod[4] has an image of Emperor Taishō)
Most condemning in my eyes is the fact that their Steam profile[5] shows that at some point their nickname was "Remember the six gorillion" (click on the little arrow next to their current name to see previous iterations). This is clearly an anti-Semitic, or at least Holocaust-denying reference.[6]
[1]https://github.com/AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui/comm...
[2]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=15187...
[3]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=15188...
[4]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=15205...
[5]https://steamcommunity.com/id/no-sry
[6]https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/six-gorillion
If MS doesn’t set up tribunals for these types of things, it will just be abused to take down stuff.
[1] https://forgejo.org/ [2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59
If there is a security issue with some project on GitHub, then you can ask GitHub to look at it and they will take the project down. This cannot be done with projects running on someone's web server.
Pretty sure its an intentional, or at least a side effect, of the component nature of srht's codebase (afaik), where each part is a separate service. The rest is from its no/minimal-js design.
I don't make it, so I'm not saying it must be changed, but I find it annoying to use at best, and doubt I am alone. But they're probably not targeting me so ...
It's also pretty slow, not sure if it has global hosting.
I do very much appreciate that it doesn't try to gamify anything, I wish I could disable gh from tracking follows/stars/stats - I can greasemonkey them away but I still know they exist, which leaves me the temptation to check. Strictly a personal issue but it still exists.
I don't think it's intended and I'm failing to reproduce the issue you mentioned in Firefox 108. Maybe report a bug to the mailing list?
> The ticket writing interface is pretty lackluster...
I think this simplicity is intentional, and as an old folk, I actually dig that look. Having almost no JS around (I failed to find any so far) is also nice from my point of view.
Being composed a lot of parts feels chunky sometimes, but being able to compose projects out of repos, and having free-hanging repos without projects is also a great plus from my point of view. It fits how I work perfectly.
> It's also pretty slow, not sure if it has global hosting.
It's currently hosted in a single server in the US, but it will be moved to Europe (Netherlands I assume) to a more powerful infrastructure, so the speed will recover.
At the end of the day, while it's not perfect, it's perfect for me, my mindset and philosophy today. I'm a happy paying customer. Also Drew listens feedback and answers frankly, which I like a lot.
SourceHut bans anything blockchain/crypto related from their platform.
It's not a solution to a centralized censorship. You can self-host it if you want.
> SourceHut literally bans anything blockchain/crypto related from their platform.
It's their platform, they can decide what to do with it. However, I support SourceHut's view on this, because I also didn't see anything useful came out of blockchain/cryptocurrency scene.
Moreover, you can send your project in for vetting if you are so sure that it's something really beneficial. The ban is not a curtain / we'll ban you no matter what variety.
To directly cite:
> We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support. [0]
[0]: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
Just distribute it to many hosts, and you're done. Post-commit hooks on one server can do that with no effort.
A TV company built a CDN like that. They pushed the data to Git, and it propagated in a fanning out fashion.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33418598
At least the owner (Drew) is direct and honest about it.
We, as consumers have the right to not make business with companies which we don't like, too. I have left GitHub over Copilot issue for example.
If you don't agree with views or ToS of Source Hut, don't use it. It's that simple.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34262598
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34257818
That's of course true, however only putting SourceHut into the picture like that creates an unintended insinuation[0], like only SourceHut is doing such things.
Any and every company will make such decisions about their users, regardless of their size. We all need to keep that in mind.
I just wanted to balance your comment, actually. Not to imply that you're pointing fingers or something.
On the other hand, I'd rather know who made the decision about an outcome involving me, rather than getting canned e-mail replies churned out by corporate machinery.
[0]: https://xkcd.com/641/
This is a great point.
The user is probably not a card carrying neo-nazi, but I’m sorry this is 2023, how on Earth can people still expect not to get called for juvenile 4chan-level trolling like this?
Maybe we should instead ban those who call out this stuff or describe it in malicious ways...
That said, I personally think it should be difficult to be racist, homophobic, transphobic and the like online. I'm not engaging in debates, posting outraged tweetstorms or trying to get anyone doxxed/fired/cancelled when I see some anonymous edgelord throwing the n-bomb around or calling for LGBTQ+ friends to be killed. I'm just going to quietly report the post and move on.
People still buy Nestle and they do far worse shit.
People have no problem supporting corporations that do business with racist regimes.
Claiming somehow people (other than some virtue signalling) would start migrating in droves to gitlab because there is a mod for rimworld is insane.
Whenever I see "virtue signalling" or "free speech" mentioned regarding tech companies like GitHub, Facebook, Twitter etc it's usually someone pretending they don't understand how companies work (and ironically doing their own little form of virtue signalling). Companies want to make money. You don't make money by pissing off the population. GitHub seem to have decided that allowing a user they've deemed as questionable is going to piss off more people than kicking that user off. If you don't like it and want to exercise your freedom of speech and/or signal that you're more virtuous than the rest of us then you are welcome to self-host or try out GitLab, BitBucket, sr.ht or CodeBerg.
And in case of someone discussing it, like here, there is no need to guess and dig if the reason is given plainly by the moderator and points directly to the offense. Instead of speculation you get people look at it and just go "oh, yeah, that's fair" and move on.
Yeetus deletus of everything, including unrelated things, because you broke TOS point which we don't even tell you how did you break it (which is pretty fucking common with any big tech, regardless of the reason, even if reason is just "triggered some heuristics in our system") is not okay.
However, if Github is actively curating content, that means they're also responsible for the stuff they do leave up. The argument that a company isn't legally responsible for its users content relies heavily on the company having little control over said content.
This direct influence is what got the thepiratebay guys and the megaupload guys arrested, or at least what made the case persuable enough to put effort into it.
Id it's true that Github is actively removing account that post things they deem as racist, then I will judge Github on any older content on the platform not taken down. There is a lot of weird shit on Github that's apparently okay if a stupid mod for a video game is considered as a reason to refuse service to someone.
Companies are free to choose what they do and do not host, but that freedom is a double edged sword.
This is an entirely incorrect reading of Section 230.
You mentioned the "black little mermaid" and it's hard not to draw a parallel between a mod in a game that allows you to change the skin color of a character and the "woke" media race swapping well known characters like the little mermaid, Triss from the Witcher, Achilles, etc.
I don't know what to say - if you're expecting "free speech" somewhere that has a big TOS you agreed to which doesn't say "hey this is the free speech zone, go nuts!" then you are in for a shock.
The Little Mermaid is an film for kids. Kids aren't "woke" - the only people who care about the skin colour of a fictional character in an animated film are adults. If someone's upset because they see a black person, they might want to take a deep breath and think really hard about what's really bothering them.
... if the person you are engaging with is open to having their mind changed. If you ever tried that with online trolls, you would quickly find out that's not really going to happen when person on the other side doesn't want that and can just decide to waste as much of your time as they can.
> "It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter." - Nathaniel Borenstein
"Edit 26-mar-2020: finally, the injustice has been corrected: all races are welcome! You can choose the range of skin colors you want in mod settings."
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=15187...
[1] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=15188...
For example, if Linus Torvalds turned out to be a racist or sexist or homosexist or transexist, would his Linux repository (https://github.com/torvalds/linux) be hammered? Would he be removed from the Linux project somehow?
This doesn't seem a remotely comparable case though (deliberate uploading of offensive content in the delisted repo vs - say - unwoke opinion/comments, or whatever the example of LT is supposed to evoke), if the reasons mooted in other comments are correct.
And in this case, we aren't just talking about the creator, the allegations are about the actual content being hosted.
The dude was pretty racist, good work by GH employees: https://web.archive.org/web/20221013110023/https://github.co...
I used Linus just as an example of a very high-profile and widely beloved open source leader, to contrast this relatively unknown developer.
Though, now I think on it, some of the words he used in the past on the mailing list are considered "-ism" level offensive by some people today: "dumb", "retarded", etc.
Hopefully no cancellations incoming for these historical word-mishaps.
The "ARC" acronym stands for 'Association for Retarded Citizens', back when "retarded" was a clinical definition. It's now defunct. But those names still live on in property deeds and corporation names. https://thearc.org/about-us/history/ has the history of this name.
But Reddit.. egads, I have no clue what they're trying to accomplish. Maybe they're trying to clean themselves up from anything that even smells bad. If you want to speak about 'questionable topics', you have to use onomatopoeia to even talk about it (like, wee-tod-did , seggsual, unalive). I'm personally thinking of just abandoning reddit over their slow-boiling the frog, if you will.
1. If Linus did a hard-right turn and was doing the right-wing news tour doing transphobic shit, MS and GitHub wouldn't bat an eye
2. If Linus kept a repo of anti-trans poetry or some shit on his GitHub, then yeah he'd quite possibly get booted off
This isn't about GitHub being against what they think "AUTOMATIC1111" as a person believes, this is just about what they had on GitHub, and whether GH considered it against their TOS.
A penguin draped in suffragette colours becomes the new mascot. Women across the globe join the open source movement in droves. JK Rowling writes a bestselling guide to Linux kernel development.
We already had developer (of Drupal[1]) cancelled over their private BDSM kink (that isn't even illegal, which racism is), what stops some random moderator for deciding he's the saviour of the world and banning random repos just because a contributor might've been questionable?
* [1] https://www.theregister.com/2017/03/29/drupal_dev_banished/
It ought to be clarified though.
For what is worth, I thi_k we should all grow a thicker ski_ a_d be ready to defe_d the thi_gs that matter, like our right to express freely without havi_g to watch our words for the _ext time somebody somewhere may take offe_se with what we say.
The corporation may benefit from having unclear moderation policies, but this is not in the best interests of the users. If you don't agree, consider the possibility that the corporation's political views may change and your own beliefs could then be subject to moderation instead of those of "the other side."
Although they didn't immediately specify the reason for the ban, to their credit the GitHub support person did explain what had happened when I appealed and the ban was lifted.
I suspect this ends up being impractical, due to helping the bad actors too much.
I think moderation being so inconsistent/unclear is mostly because moderation is difficult.
You should do your business elsewhere if you don't agree with GitHub TOS
I'm really curious where the line is drawn.
Somehow states get by, despite letting criminals know what they did wrong.
Sure, people probing you to see what they can get away with is annoying, but in the long run, it's far more "impractical" to have opaque justice.
But we should not be okay with them doing that.
Most folks prefer the former.
They can and will censor anything that they arbitrarily consider to be a brand risk.
https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/
Working to move all my decades of open source work and communities off GitHub in the coming months to self hosted Gitea.
"Edit 26-mar-2020: finally, the injustice has been corrected: all races are welcome! You can choose the range of skin colors you want in mod settings."
I don't believe they didn't know what they are doing. They definitely have statistics about repo usage and the guy suspending him definitely knew that it's one of the most popular repos out there.
Microsoft don't deserve the benefit of doubt here. This is a warning to anyone who competes with Microsoft in an open source project. Move elsewhere.
I know we all love a good M$ conspiracy theory but this one is far too silly.
There's just no way this is a mistake. I don't believe for a second their internal review systems don't have any safeguards against banning extremely popular repositories without manual oversight, because they must have these safeguards. Other open source repos probably get spurious reports commonly.
These systems always have popularity thresholds for manual oversight because as something gets popular, it gets false reports. It's just fact of life.
Any manual oversight would easily recognize what's going on and would never ban extremely popular repo for a random transgression of its creator in other repo. Not without consulting a manager.
Did they? I thought that was chatgpt variant.
- Made a mod removing all non-white characters in a video game.
- Put black people and artists who draw black people in a category/folder called "n".
- Is allegedly also anti-semitic but I don't think the "((()))" thing is proof of that.
I don't think there is anything Micro$ofty going on. Just a racist being banned.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=15187...
“Edit 26-mar-2020: finally, the injustice has been corrected: all races are welcome! You can choose the range of skin colors you want in mod settings.”
> - Put black people and artists who draw black people in a category/folder called "n".
this doesn’t really mean anything.
> - Is allegedly also anti-semitic but I don't think the "((()))" thing is proof of that.
besides using () for weights what other proof do you have for your public accusation?
> Just a racist being banned.
love these kinds of conclusions drawn from conjectures.
You can call it immature, I sure would, but still we can't have 'rules for thee'
They left the community shortly after, likely in part fueled by the way an abuser got their GitHub account destroyed while the abuser pretty much remained unscathed.
I was personally playing around with prompt2prompt and reading issues when the ban happened and now I can no longer find the most recent comments, I still had the url but the internet archive only has a copy from back in october, and finding this specific discussion will be hard again since it will be pruned from search engines.
IMO github should've put the repo in read-only mode, if they want their social features to be taken seriously they can't be removing discussions and comments that people that have contributed that have nothing to do with the infraction. What's the point of hosting discussions if there's a chance they'll be nuked later just because the original author of the repo did shitty things.
[1] ctrl+f automatic1111 on https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00704
* Do such things exist? I'm just trying to keep the example out of the public or academic spheres.
I don't know anything about the immediate situation here but calling GitHub "infrastructure" is not accurate. I know every man and his dog hosts their repos there but GitHub is a private company (owned by Microsoft!) and is not obliged to host things that it thinks will make it look bad.
Have a nice day!
But wouldn’t you agree that if I run a private professional library, I have the right to add or remove books by any (legal) process I deem appropriate?
> Do such things exist?
I sorta do this; I have a small collection of historical programming languages texts that I make available to my students and anyone else interested. It’s not really a membership kind of thing tho.
Of course. I don't think this is a question of freedom of speech or anything like that. I think this is about how Github should moderate its content in a way that is best for its users and its business. Making a Twitter profile or a YouTube channel disappear is categorically different in my mind from making a GitHub repository disappear and I think GitHub should want for me to feel that way. If I don't, it changes how and how much I use the service.
I agree it's categorically different but not in the way you mean. From your other post, I understand that you view Twitter and YouTube as social media, and they are distinct from software infrastructure like GitHub.
The way I see it, all three are social networks, but what make GitHub distinct from the other two is that it's backed by git. So if GitHub wants to ban me, I can easily move my code to any number of services. Which, honestly if you're relying on GitHub as infrastructure, you should have a backup plan anyway for if/when it goes down.
I didnt read the full thing but the point is, is any code worth less because it’s author is making some statements that in the eyes of some people would not be not acceptable? Who decides that?
I think this is the point where github ceases to be of use as a platform to host code, since at any point they could come down on you, and in succession break hundreds of other programs that would have dependencies on the “banned” code, etc…
Now all knowledge is lost. Not the code, but there were discussions, tutorials, and what not.
I don't know who Auto is or what he did in practice that led to the violation (yes, I read about those mods): my qualms with the repo were due to its questionable licensing, which is, however, allowed by GH. After all, I can use something without agreeing with the author's moral views.
And yes, this again, even if one agrees with the suspension, shows the danger of centralized platforms when they become so large (although they are convenient).
I can't risk all my issues disappearing into nothingness, and I can't imagine myself using a different platform. GH is muscle memory for me these days.
Would also be nice to know Microsoft can't arbitrarily scan my works for dangerous competitive elements.
Anything github does the burden of proof is definitely on them.