- Basically, yes.
It is murkier as the involvement of some of the original creators in Ruby Central is there, so there are claims to being the original copyright holder applicable to some areas by a very small number of individuals, none of which who are the newly added maintainers, or Ruby Central as a whole entity.
- My point is that he chose to communicate the way he did; it is poorly thought out and extremely difficult to accept as an explanation.
Objective tests you yourself can perform.
1) How much of the publication talks about himself? Why is that relevant?
2) How much does it directly provide links, context, history? Can you find the opposing point of view directly linked from it, or is it omitted?
3) From reading the content, does this person represent the board, or not? Do they make any conflicting claims that are difficult to both be true at the same time?
4) A coup d'etat is a "a sudden, violent, and unlawful seizure of power from a government"
Were the people who lost access acting as a governing body? Was the loss of access sudden and unexpected? Did the loss of access follow any of the rules of the governing group? Did the loss of access harm individuals?
With the answers to the above, reflect on the following:
Why would someone write about themselves, their experience, etc for 6 paragraphs? Would you say it is clear they have only been appointed since Jan 2025? Or are they trying to establish themselves as an authority? If they are not attempting to appeal to authority, why is it relevant?
Did they actually apologise? If so, to who? Is it specific? Does it clearly articulate what the person did, admit fault, recognise harm? Or is there downplaying of impact, vague language, downplaying of involvement?
Does it characterise the contrary point of view in a way that trivial uses the concerns? Are the conversations "emotional" or is it implied the people experiencing the negative act are? Is the author emotional?
If you were the person or people affected, would you accept this explanation? If you were the person taking these actions, would you explain why like this? Why or why not?
I strongly encourage you to do this exercise, putting aside feelings or initial responses even if you think I am wrong.
- It's not just one person.
Between the initial removal of access, then giving it back after explaining it was a mistake; the people involved started a conversation about governance to clarify/fix things.
https://github.com/rubygems/rfcs/pull/61
The conversation terminated because the majority of those people then had their access revoked again.
When weighing the facts here; which group or claimant has the most evidence for their claims? The technical folks with lots of commits over many years, or the treasurer of an organisation who says the impetus for this was a "funding deadline" so all access had to be seized?
- It's such a weird thought process to have gone through, to write this. The sentiments expressed are basically:
"I WANT to apologize ... that I feel awful."
"How can you possibly talk to someone about changing access, when multiple people tell you no, you are wrong?! A coup is the only way!"
"Because funding deadline, we executed a coup, which will keep everyone safe from hostile actors... Taking over accounts and access"
- What an insane thing to say! But also... how insane is it that I agree with you based on objective reality? Can you imagine seriously saying that 20-30 years ago? 1984's doublethink/doublespeak always seemed over the top, yet we are at a point particularly recently where the anti cancel culture sentiment has lead to... proposals to curb undesirable speech, cancelling people... which in turn is undesirable because it criticises a propagandist's undesirable speech with his own post death quotes in a lot of cases and bristles when accused of sane washing. Or that this won't matter in a few more news cycles as we lurch brokenly into the next phase of dystopia.
I wonder how many historical parallels exist and what the outcomes were; IE https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_colors_(Japan) - which I think lead to a flourishing of clothing design for commoners. Like will we see massive social change in two or three generations hence as a rejection of the current hysteria? Will history books record the silliest parts that now seem quaint with a little distance, IE War on Christmas? Mission accomplished? WMDs that didn't exist? Etc etc.
- I strongly disagree with the premise of the article and content being reiterated here by a number of commenters.
An incredibly common pattern is a maintainer thinking they know better in an area they are inexperienced in, and rejecting change because they don't like the sound of something or are unable to see past their cultural biases.
We know this by another name - not invented here.
Common, practical areas this occurs in boring open source business CRUD applications:
- Address models aren't thought out. "Why would anyone want geocoding? What addresses don't fit the US style?"
- Phone numbers get modelled as plain strings and all of a suddenly "but changing them to be standardised is really hard"
- Company, brand, account structures rarely add URLs or links to external datasets. What possible use is a wikidata ID?
- Why would I put in vCard/CSV/Schema.org/any other import/export?
All of these areas are often ancillary to the primary purpose of whatever the application is, so get rejected out of hand.
But the use cases they enable for users - who don't use the application in isolation - are then completely blocked.
- Map, route or visualise spatial data mashed up with other datasets. Send people to remote locations without formal addresses.
- Hook up phone systems to make your system run for teams with centralisation, integrate SMS based messaging, etc.
- Join to public datasets to understand more about your customers (food safety, licencing registers, corporate entity registers, contract management systems, etc)
A typical maintainer is going to say "wait, what; my accounting system is all about finance, none of this is relevant!"; but they miss out on what users really want in many cases: interoperability or data portability.
The problem is the maintainer's frame is in their world view; and if they aren't dogfooding their project they aren't running into their users problems - how likely is it the maintainer is the BI analyst, or the low level data entry person, or from a country where QR code payment is the norm, or a million other considerations?
- For a wild alignment of timing - https://www.jezebel.com/we-paid-some-etsy-witches-to-curse-c... - published September 8.
- This is a kind of nuts take; - Senior engineer - Uses tools for non trivial undertaking - Didn't find value in it
Your conclusion from that is "but they are doing it wrong", while also claiming they are saying things they didn't say (0 net benefits, useless, etc).
Do you see how that might undermine your point? That you feel they haven't take the time to understand the tools, but you didn't actually read what what wrote?
- From: https://ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf (sample size: 1x company, n=24, lots of limitations discussed at end of paper)
"When people did resume work on the same day, it took an average length of time of 25 min. 26 sec (sd=54 min. 48 sec.). This may seem like a relatively short amount of time, but it is also important to consider that before resuming work, our informants worked in an average of 2.26 (sd=2.79) working spheres. Thus, people’s attention was directed to multiple other topics before resuming work. This was reported by informants as being very detrimental. In some cases, the physical or desktop environment is restructured, which makes it more difficult to rely on cues to reorient one to their interrupted task. For example, a blinking cursor at the end of the last typed word can enable one to immediately reorient to that document, whereas if other windows have been opened, it can be hard to remember even which document had been worked on."
And "We found a trend that showed more externally interrupted working spheres are resumed on the same day (53.3%) compared to internally interrupted working spheres (47.6%), X2 (1)=2.97, p<.09. Externally interrupted working spheres are resumed on the average in a shorter time (22 min. 37 sec., sd=53 min. 52 sec.) than internally interrupted working spheres, (29 min. 1 sec., sd=55 min. 43 sec.), t(987)=1.92, p<.055."
So no, it does not say 23 minutes and 15 seconds in that paper.
But to say: "the paper never goes into details regarding the recovery time between finishing the interruption and getting back to the original task." is flat out incomplete, because they are reading the followup paper to the original work in isolation; and haven't considered that a number of reports summarized the findings of that (22 m 37s) as "about 23 minutes". The way it is written implies the research is all wrong, rather than more accurately stating "I can't find the exact source of a quote but it's broadly 22-23 minutes, not 23m15s afaict".
There is also some irony in "ctrl+f", "23" being explained as the methodology for review on the topic of attention span for complex tasks...
- Politely, I disagree. It means you are in a context where the risk aversion is high, everyone keeps their head down.
Done right, you can be a disruptor, for what are very benign or proven changes outside of the false ecosystem you are in.
I recommend these changes are on the level of "we will allow users to configure a most used external tool on a core object, using a URI template" - the shock, awe, destruction is everyone realizing something is a web app and you could just... If you wanted... Use basic HTML to make lives better.
Your opponents are then arguing against how the web works, and you have won the framing with every employee that has ever done something basic with a browser.
You might find this level of "innovation" silly, but it's also representative of working in the last few tiers of a distribution curve - the enterprise adopters lagging behind the late adopters.
- More or less? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG is fairly neutral. As someone in userland at the time on the other side of it, it was all a bit nuts.
IE we got new standards invented out of thin air - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Guides/Mic... - which ignored what hundreds had worked on before, which seemed to be driven by one person controlling the "standard" making it up as they went along.
Microformats and RDFa were the more widely adopted solutions at the time, had a lot of design and thought put into them, worked with HTML4 (but thrived if used with xhtml), etc etc.
JSON-LD/schema.org has now filled the niche and arguably it's a lot better for devs, but imagine how much better the "AI web UX" would be now if we'd just standardised earlier on one and stuck with it for those years?
This is the main area where I saw the behaviour on display, where I interacted most. So the original comment feels absolutely in line with my recollections.
I love bits of HTML5, but the way it congealed into reality isn't one of them.
- To a degree re ads on pages, but why didn't big business end up publishing all of their products in JSON-LD or similar? A lot did, to get aggregated, but not all.
- ChatGPT etc does an OK job at SPARQL generation. Try something like "generate a list of all supermarkets, including websites, country, description" and you get usable queries out.
In a much, much more limited way, this is what I was dabbling with with alltheprices - queries to pull data from wikidata, crawling sites to pull out the schema.org Product and offers, and publish the aggregate.
- > There was also a project called TypedRuby, largely a passion project of an engineer working at GitHub. After a few weeks of evaluation, it seemed that there were enough bugs in the project that fixing them would involve a near complete rewrite of the project anyways.
There's 6 open bugs and 4 closed ones. This seems like either it's throwing shade or they didn't bother lodging bug reports upstream.
- I would encourage you to go and read more about triples/asserting facts, and the trust/provenance of facts in this context. You are basically saying "it's impossible to make basic claims" in your comment, which perhaps you don't realize
- JSON LD is alive and kicking.
- Oh, great re swimming pools - solar detection is another one on my list to have a go at.
I feel like a lot of the pushback here is an idea that OSM can grow from hand mapping; but as someone with 60k changesets over a decade... no amount of human volunteer enthusiasm is to the point that it can "solve" mapping at a global scale to the standards that make the map data overwhelmingly useful.
I feel we need a scalable framework for importing and maintaining data: ways to annotate the quality, sources, where to report bugs in the data source, and guidance to consumers. Ie if I want to query "businesses of type X" "mapped by humans within the last year", I can sort of do that with "check date".
But who knows how many of those attributes are accurate, or if the mapper who checked only checked one aspect (name/location)? Would it be better to ingest alltheplaces opening hours to maintain this data automatically, every month?
Would it be better as a data consumer if I could filter to only certain sources I trust? Or I could use data - even if the polygons aren't perfect or similar, even with known limitations like "poi inferred by AI".
- Wait. Is this why twitter got rebranded; a billionaires pissing match and brand confusion?
How do you "safely push for change" in private if your executive leadership display sociopathic or narcissistic behaviors, where they expressly do not care about the harm they inflict on others?
Polls show that about a quarter of employees see something unethical, and half don't report it because they think nothing will happen OR they will be retaliated against.
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/648770/unethical-behavior-g...
This means that individuals who are doing misdeeds perceive there are no consequences. Part of your role is to surface that there are consequences; and you bringing them up now is far less expensive than a lawsuit later.
We know this pattern of behaviour is not beneficial - in the context of NPD the worst version of this is becoming an enabler - https://www.choosingtherapy.com/narcissistic-enablers/
While you can absolutely choose your battles and there are some things that are ultimately harmful for you and achieve no great outcome; you are not a leader if you do not advocate for your team when obviously unjust things occur.