The last few times I've seen technical groups kick someone out over racism, including anti-semitism, they picked one point where the person kept doubling down after a very long history of borderline rule following behavior that was clearly malicious. I would be very surprised to see if this was different.
While I agree in principle that we can't allow the word question to be destroyed by hate speech, there are always assholes who ride up to some line to be dicks to someone using whatever the boundaries of the rules are. I want to know what happened here and if that was the case.
There has to be extra context here. There is no way we’re getting the full picture. If it really is just as simple as including “question” in the title of a paper then there is some serious mismanagement occurring.
The article clearly has gaps simply by not being an hour long read on the Atlantic, one obvious gap is that it doesn't seem to have a statement from the person removed after they were removed.
> one obvious gap is that it doesn't seem to have a statement from the person removed after they were removed.
I think the article is written by the person that was removed. It is lacking any statement of the standard foundation who removed him. No such statement exists, even on the internal committee mailing list it is just an "fyi, that person is no longer on the committee" without any reasons.
I can piece something together from his previous behavior on the committee mailing list, but that information is not public and I'm not at liberty to share.
You should know better than to take the word of an anonymous comment and call it fact. Andrew T. (the guy in question) gave this statement on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gynl1v/c_stan... The rumors surrounding him appear to have originated from https://izzys.casa/2024/11/on-safe-cxx/ What we know is that he was asked to change the title after people complained, and he pushed back on that, knowing it would result in him being kicked out. He views himself as standing up for his moral principles. He also wants the public attention, since he was the one who posted the story to Reddit on /r/cpp. It honestly makes me sad to watch a guy who went to Stanford and worked at Apple and Google get involved with drama like this.
Why would he not post about his own banishment over such BS? When people feign offense to get their colleagues banned over such innocent words as "question" in the title of a paper, why should anyone bend over and accept such authoritarian influence? Someone has to push back on the tyranny of the crybully.
>It honestly makes me sad to watch a guy who went to Stanford and worked at Apple and Google get involved with drama like this.
So, these people are indoctrinated to cow in the face of censorship based on insanity. Got it.
Not a word about the insanity expressed in that blog though, huh? Perhaps that is why the dude is being harassed over basic English words all of a sudden? It seems to me that this Andrew fellow is not the one starting drama, and he's refusing to be bullied by people who are dealing in rumors and inventing new thought crimes to charge him with. I wouldn't wish this level of censorship even on people who hate me.
Most people haven't had any genuine exposure to the cultures that exist on the extreme ends of the political spectrum. You would have to be familiar with them to understand what emotions that dredges up, otherwise you're going to be terribly confused by this. However understanding is not a requisite for diplomatic communication with other cultures. An international standards committee that wants to represent the interests of all groups needs to take this kind of thing seriously. When any group of people complains that's usually enough, although ideally it's better to know them all well enough to avoid this kind of thing in the first place.
>An international standards committee that wants to represent the interests of all groups needs to take this kind of thing seriously.
Perhaps, but perhaps there are times where the "extreme ends of the political spectrum" are actually muckrakers who use feigned offense as a tool for eliminating people they just don't like for petty reasons. People can be offended for any number of reasons but somehow certain arbitrary causes of offense are deemed worthy of action.
Political correctness is like a cheat code in the minds of certain people. I don't think the blogger who posted the complaint is actually offended. Although he may appear to be quite neurotic, he fits the profile of an agitator. Such people often claim things are offensive on behalf of demographics that they do not even belong to. This is speculation on my part of course, but I have seen this play out so many times that I'm sick of it.
She's very much an agitator. However the C++ leaders aren't trying to avoid offending anyone. They're trying to do something even more difficult which is not making anyone feel uncomfortable. That paper's title makes people think about things they'd rather not think about instead of C++. Normal people would just read it, feel distracted, and then say nothing, which is unfortunate, since I'm sure Andrew would have much preferred to hear it from them instead of being publicly criticized by an activist.
> Most people haven't had any genuine exposure to the cultures that exist on the extreme ends of the political spectrum. You would have to be familiar with them to understand what emotions that dredges up, otherwise you're going to be terribly confused by this.
Out towards the ends of the political spectrum, the prevailing "culture" uses such weird terminology that normal people can't let that affect their -- our (hopefully ) -- use of language. If we did, we couldn't say anything, because in some weird sect's nutjob language pretty much any word can mean something horrible. Which this kerfluffle illustrates perfectly. Giving in on this now sets a precedent that in the end will lead to language being wholly co-opted by rabid extremists on both ends of the spectrum.
> An international standards committee that wants to represent the interests of all groups needs to take this kind of thing seriously.
No. Or well, yes: It needs to seriously fight against bullshit like this, lest it soon will have to censor out every second word in the very standards it promulgates.
That's what they want. International institutions actually go out of their way to recruit people from different backgrounds, specifically so those people will warn them whenever they're about to embarrass themselves in front of other cultures. For example, the word "byte" might rub French people the wrong way, because it sounds like a slang word they use for male genitalia. The word "poke" is another one to avoid, since it resembles Indonesian and Malaysian slang for female genitalia. Never name your variables foo and bar if you plan to share your code with Nordic countries, because it can be confused with slang for excrement. There's a very long list of words and phrases like this. However most people needn't worry about this, since they're not actively engaging with other cultures.
> Never name your variables foo and bar if you plan to share your code with Nordic countries, because it can be confused with slang for excrement.
Eeh... Where did you get this from? Neither "foo" nor "bar" sound like slang for excrement in any Nordic language I know. And I'm native in one, near-native proficient in another, and the two largest remaining are very similar to the first. Are you talking about Icelandic, Saami, or Faroese?
The English word “byte” doesn’t really sound similar to the French word “bite”, and even if it did, it’s very unlikely a French person would be offended.
So this person is infamous for submitting ChatGPT generated WG papers.
Then he was blamed for "question" title, he refuse to change the title, his sponsor cut the tie.
I don't know. I'm deeply worrying about brain drain on C++ standard committee.
I was a C++ committee member once. They failed to understand the importance of char8_t, thinking char is enough. Then, they depends on locale on std::format. I quit for I lost hope on C++.
You can't expel members from SC/WG but this is... what are they doing?
The author of the paper is not competent in the subject matter.
A compiler can make assumptions that behavior is well defined, and it can also identify situations where it is confirmed undefined.
All of that reasoning happens before runtime.
For instance, and unreachable assertion works by invoking undefined behavior. What identified by the function-call-like syntax unreachable().
If we have:
S; unreachable();
then, ostensibly, it looks as if statement S is something that happens at run time before the unreachable construct is executed. (S is a simple statement which passes control to whatever follows; it does not hide a go to).
And so we could naively argue that undefined behavior cannot travel backward in time. Of course S must successfully execute, and only then can things go haywire due to the undefined behavior of unreachable.
But that's not the way it works. The compiler is looking at this before runtime. The compiler is free to assume that behavior is well defined. That's what makes unreachable work: if the program's behavior is well defined, it must be that the unreachable statement is never reached. Which implies that S is never executed. If S is never executed, it can just be deleted.
If S and the unreachable statement are deleted, but control ends up there anyway, the program will go haywire. And it will go haywire without producing the effects of S. So in effect undefined behavior has gone backwards into S, so to speak in naive language.
Logical reasoning over code while translating it does not follow runtime chronology. It follows chains of inferences.
As it is based on my C paper, I can comment on this. While the compiler reasons at translation-time the question is whether an operation that UB is allowed to affect previous observable behavior at run-time. We looked at this and came to the conclusions that 1) the wording of the C standard never really allowed this (but the C++ standard did), 2) it is completely useless for worthwhile optimizations, 3) examples where compilers exploited this intentionally turned out to be buggy, 4) it makes UB even more dangerous. So we made sure the C standard clarifies that UB can not travel backwards in in time.
I agree the title of the paper is unfortunate. I do not believe the author was intentionally trying to send an antisemitic message, but I do not know him well (I corresponded with him about his other paper)
and when A is reachable, the compiler can not remove A even if it sees at compile-time that B has UB when executed. This is the case in C but not in C++.
If A is not reachable, the code will never be executed at run-time, so while there is no UB at run-time this is irrelevant as the code can simply be removed anyway because it is not reachable. For "unreachable()" the question is tricky and I think this might need to be clarified specifically.
It's not tricky though. Unreachable invokes UB. It's something like the most canonically reduced version of B that we can write.
(Because unreachable is meant to be used in certain ways, implementations can give it relevant diagnostic powers. But all it means "please make the spot in the program have no defined behavior").
If the implementation cannot remove A on grounds of B being undefined, then you need an awkward special case for when B is the unreachable gizmo.
It is tricky because it not specified simply as UB - at least in C. And the question is whether this specification is already the special case or not, and even if we want this special case or rather only the diagnostic.
> The author of the paper is not competent in the subject matter.
Yeah, sure, quite possible (I have no idea). But then he needs to be kicked out explicitly for not being competent in the subject matter. Because kicking him out (at least ostensibly) for a ridiculous made-up language issue sets the precedent that people can -- should? -- be kicked out for ridiculous made-up language issues.
I mmean... Isn't that the point of this whole thing? Which makes your technical qu-- well, sure, perhaps your quite valid technical issues, but in the context of him being kicked out ostensibly for some totally different and definitely invalid "reason", a quibble -- isn't your point then rather irrelevant to the actual point of the discussion?
About 20 years ago, I suggested in comp.language.c++ on USENET that the committee's refusal to take memory safety seriously constituted material support of terrorism. That really got some people upset, and the posting was removed from USENET, which is hard to do.
Now, of course, C++ is frantically trying to become memory-safe, with heavy pressure from the cybersecurity parts of the US government.
Has anybody even read Marx's 1844 essay in recent years? When the USSR went down, the Stanford bookstore had a sale - "All Communism 80% off".
The 19th century was "The age of questions"[1], a book subtitled "Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond".
The Schleswig-Holstein question [2] was a border dispute between Denmark and Germany, and was a big deal from about 1806 to WWI. That's probably the most famous of the "questions" because there were several wars over it over a long period.
"On the slavery question" is a famous speech by Sen. John Calhoun (D-SC) made in 1850.[3] That's part of the run-up to the American Civil War. (Or the War of Northern Aggression, for those below the Mason-Dixon line.)
"On the bullion question" is a famous speech by Sir John Sinclair made in 1811.[4] It's about the gold standard for money.
Nobody has a unique claim for "On the (whatever) Question". It's historical, but once widely used, terminology.
> Andrew Tomazos submitted P3403, a paper titled “The Undefined Behavior Question” (which HOOBOY man we’re just knocking it out of the fucking park with possible anti-semitic dog whistles today aren’t we?)
Riiiight. To be fair apart from that their criticism of Tomasoz seems relatively justifiable, if unnecessarily angry. Tomasoz has said that "almost noone" has ever written anything productive in Rust, which is a stupid thing to say. And he thinks ChatGPT is on par with humans now, which is also pretty obviously untrue.
This is one of the most toxic blogs I’ve ever read - so much swearing, vile hate while criticizing various persons they dislike, rambling incoherence. Wow.
And their specific criticisms of the contributor this post is discussing, are very mild but full of personal attacks and expletives?
The entire article is a lot of name calling for many C++WG members for sexual harassers, rapists, hate speakers etc.
It argues that C++WG made various mistakes and full of incompetent members by presenting various seemingly technical topics but it's so random and unorganized it's hard to follow.
Absolutely unhinged rant accusing everyone of being some kind of Nazi or sexual predator. Seeing the "content warning" and design of the page should already be enough to know exactly what to expect about what you are about to read, and what kind of person wrote it.
Is making note of the fact that an individual was convicted of raping a child now the same as "accusing everyone of being some kind of Nazi or sexual predator"?
Do you have some information that would lead to doubt on Arthur's conviction?
Can you elaborate on what "sort of person" means exactly? Is that just to refer to people who point out that someone in a community has raped a child, been convicted of raping a child and is on a sex offenders register? Or some other category?
I think it's troubling that so many people in the replies are seemingly more offended over some swear words than the literal rape of a child.
Sex offender information is public so we can keep those people far away from children. There aren't any children on the C++ standards committee. You can actually be criminally prosecuted if you use someone's status to harass or injure them. So the organizers weren't really protecting him, they were protecting themselves.
and r/cpp mods just woke up, banning everyone who question (am I still allowed to use that word?) this lunatic behavior. For context: A week ago, someone out for blood put out a slander article referencing this amongst other things.
edit: After going on a banning spree, foonathan nuked the thread with "I am not going to deal with this on a Sunday". Nice
Hey, u/ss99ww. We did not go on a banning spree, we banned only one person, you. After removing the comment we're you insulted someone, I checked your history, noticed that you did not meaningfully participate in r/cpp outside this thread, and decided to remove someone from the community who'd only be there to cause trouble.
(And for the record, we barely removed any comments, just the ones that directly insulted people.)
> Interesting that you did not choose to voice your opinions using your main accounts on that community then.
I'd love to, but reddit and cpp keep banning/suspending accounts - so I can't! Funny how that works isn't it?
> Nah, that was just the comment I used to get to your profile. I banned you for insulting someone.
That is not true. Here is the message:
> Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/cpp because your comment violates this community's rules. You won't be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.
4. After noticing your lack of contributions to r/cpp, I decided you are just someone who causes moderation trouble without contributing useful technical insights, so I decided to ban you. That's why the above comment is listed in your ban reason. If you had posted the slur on an account with actual history in r/cpp and no previous removed comments, I would not have banned you.
Edit: 5. Reddit administrators have now removed your comment as well.
> I banned you, so I like to think I'm an authority on why you were banned.
Seems logical... (But when you think about it, it presupposes that you know and admit to yourself your actual motivations.)
FWIW, as a rather occasional redditor and having read through several pages linked from here (including much of that ultra-weird "HOOBY... dogwhistle!" blog post where the whole thing may have originated), to me you're coming off as more of a censorious ban-happy "PC SJW woke" gatekeeper than bun_terminator as a ban-worthy AH. (FWIW, every cent you paid for it.)
> Interesting that you did not choose to voice your opinions using your main accounts on that community then
Yes, it's interesting that someone opted to use an alternate account to discuss a contentious issue on a platform rife with censorship and deplatforming.
Why does it so often seem that the people complaining about censorship are the ones punching down?
Why is it so often someone's right to complain and make problems for others but never concern about people's right to be tolerated when they're being decent humans?
Either people need to be banned who insult others and use slurs and those who maliciously push right up against the rules, or they will bully people out. Look at modern X/Twitter allowing hate speech has pushed out advertisers and something like half of the users?
This is basic Paradox of Tolerance stuff, decent people aren't Banning anyone for pointing out actual arguments like discussing if "question" is okay, asking for extra context if this guy did something else or if this is council overreach. But people complaining about wokeness, DEI, diversity hires, or other technically allowable but obviously hostile nonsense are clearly just trying to attack other people and often in ways that are racist dog whistles. If people insist on being hostile up to the amount allowable by the rules instead of just trying to get along then the rules need to keep changing and adjusting and of course the people who are willfully choosing to be assholes will scream "censorship". Before teaming up with someone complaining about censorship be sure they're actually at risk of censorship and not just trying to use Free Speech as a shield to hurt others.
> Why does it so often seem that the people complaining about censorship are the ones punching down?
You mean, pushing down and saying people should be banned... like you?
[Either people need to be banned who insult others and use slurs and those who maliciously push right up against the rules, or they will bully people out. Look at modern X/Twitter allowing hate speech has pushed out advertisers and something like half of the users?]
The fact is that you are just using the notion of 'paradox of tolerance' as a tool for defending your prefered kind of censorship, in the same mischievous way you say people use the notion of free speech "as a shield to hurt others". Is this or you are not being mischievious, so I think it would be polite to also admit the very probable possibility that those people claiming that their free speech is being violated may also have something to say on the topic, instead of just assuming they are being malicious and that they are "punching down" on others (or similar things).
Don't you think doing that would be more productive?
Not sure this _is_ a huge issue. As someone who's not involved it just seems like standard issue interpersonal drama that happens on every committee, board etc and to every tech project from time to time.
eg in linux, git exists because of the Larry McEvoy Bitkeeper drama, there was the Eric S Raymond kernel build config drama, there were numerous Reiserfs and devfs dramas, etc etc etc. In the gnu/fsf world we have had the recent guy leaves because he doesn't like the fact that treesitter is the standard c++ mode drama, you had the emacs vs xemacs dramas, numerous "RMS intervenes to prevent people having an intermediate representation in the GCC compiler" dramas, etc etc. The list is incredibly long. People fight and lose political battles. They leave some committee that most people don't care about. Nothing really important is affected in any way.
Here as someone who was not involved it seems both sides are a bit unreasonable, and some guy has left the standards committee as a result. Really doesn't seem like you complaining about how reddit mods have responded to your posting there has any relevance here.
You were clearly banned for the comment where you used offensive slurs in reference to the author of a previously discussed blog post. I was happy to report the comment.
It would be better to judge the whole thing if you quoted the word instead of going "the word I used". If you get flagged for quoting here, at least we will learn a valuable lesson.
While the title could indeed be a reference to the 4chan "The xxx question" meme (e.g., "The femboy question"), which is derived from "The Jewish question," it's not clear if that was the author's actual intention, and even if it was, most uses of the meme (see the femboy example) are not facially antisemitic and at worst are just examples of edgelord humor.
It looks like C++ is finally succumbing to entryism, meaning it will no longer serve as a sane alternative to Rust.
It is literally the first time I heard the "femboy question" phrase. You can literally insert any noun here and have the phrase used already. Whatever, a "bear" let's say:
The fact that people associate such unrelated phrases with one another on the basis of their grammatical similarity just speaks of them, not of the author.
> it's not clear if that was the author's actual intention
The paper[1] doesn't appear to have any other connections to the book/response/memes. A clear distinction is that the UB paper very directly and prominently states the question, rather than cloaking it in allusion or having a lengthy preface trying to contextualize it.
1. Person publishes a thing with a title including the word “Question”
2. People say this title has some resonance to do with the Nazi genocide and ask him to change it
3. He refuses to change it
5. He gets expelled from the committee
You see the missing piece? Unlike the title, the body text doesn’t say he was expelled for the title or even for refusing to change it. It says he refused to change the title and then later was expelled. I could see a hypothetical situation in which he was totally in the right to refuse to change the title but acted like such a jerk in the ensuing debate that they fired him from the committee. We just don’t know. Imagine I publish a thing, my employer ask me to change the title, I say no, then the next time I go to work I steal all the furniture and they fire me. It would have the same pattern as the facts in the article.
Personally it seems very strange to fire him for using the word “Question” (if that’s what they did) but it also seems very strange for him to choose to die on that hill and not change the word if people find it really provocative (if that is what he did). “On the effects of undefined behaviour” seems a much better title than the one he chose for example. So it seems we’re lacking context here.
I'm not sure if you are being serious or not. If the former, there are two problems with the "employer": (1) finding a problem where there is none, (2) firing a person for sticking to the common sense rather that giving in to meaningless accusations.
It seems like you are assuming quite a bit about 2.
I think what GP was getting at is that is something along the lines of if you were accused of misconduct, and in being called into your manager's office for them to ask you about it you behaved unprofessionally enough they no longer thought you were a good fit for the company regardless of whether the accusation was true, they are entirely justified in wanting to end employment. A falsehood can reveal a separate truth about someone.
E.g. Someone falsely says you are always late to group meetings for a group project, and in being questioned you start throwing out racial slurs. Whether you were late is now a lesser issue, and while you woulf be technically correct to say you were falsely accused of being late to a few meeting and were then fired, that isn't correctly relaying the relevant information about why you were fired.
I have no information about whether this is what happened, but I think this is what the GP was trying to express about the information we have as it was presented.
Maybe nobody can see the missing piece because there isn't one? Your whole scenario requires making up some additional incident. The more economical alternative is to go with the pieces we do have. A old medieval monk I've heard of recommended for that and against your way.
This seems insane. I think there must be part of the story we're not hearing.
Not saying I'd agree with it even with the whole story, I don't know, but I am dubious of this being the full story, because in fact communities are not _that_ crazy.
haha, keep getting weirder, tech industry, nothing can save you from the coming regulation, inquiries, arbitration and/or lawsuits and other forms of attack due in part to people becoming rapidly fatigued by this bs where everything is bad faith and nobody can speak freely anymore without being assumed the worst of.
this kind of shenanigans overall, the climate of this, has been pervasaive for a decade now, and it's gotten ridiculous. everybody defending this is coping, optics-wise anybody who hears about this in passing is going to think it's absurd/insane/stupid and won't look into it further. another own goal.
stuff like this, alongside all the unethical business practices of groups like google, is why the tech industry is gonna be targeted hard by conservatives in the political sphere.
you certainly don't do yourself any favors!
"t-there has to be more to it, there's no way they're this stupid" no, people don't care, surface impression will be: roll eyes "those fucking woke idiots are up to more idiot woke shit again"
dumbarse americans and americanised westerners overall, making a cult/religion out of everything, even "progressives" have become a cult, it's so offputting to anybody outside the sphere who's been alive long enough to know better.
this is all predicated on eye for an eye tier nonsense.
...according to alleged victim. Without more independent information or at least the other side's take this is just "aggrieved person is aggrieved" and ragebait.
> jump into wild nonsense conspiracy theory or extreme bigotry.
Did they? The commenter was referring to "Simple Sabotage Field Manual", by the CIA. It's a very commonly cited list of actions to take, or that someone would take, to impede the effectiveness of an organization.
The commenter was not saying "CIA did it, and birds aren't real".
Yeah appealing to that book is literally conspiracy nonsense when you're talking about a group of engineers trying to do good engineering. That appeal fundamentally means that there are people trying to actively sabotage a thing, that by itself is a conspiracy theory particularly when you consider that much of the standards committee has been doing standardization work for ages, and all of them are experienced engineers focused on engineering.
Prima facie claiming that people who are joining an optional group that puts out optional rules that companies can opt into implementing for the sake of sabotaging something in such an esoteric way is complete conspiracy nonsense.
Edit - LOL, step one of my conspiracy and get a PhD and work at a company for 10 years using a programming language so I can get someone kicked off an optional committee! Brilliant plan, no notes!!!
It is a valid comparison to expose the similarity of one thing that someone thinks is reasonable to another thing that everyone should recognize is not.
While I agree in principle that we can't allow the word question to be destroyed by hate speech, there are always assholes who ride up to some line to be dicks to someone using whatever the boundaries of the rules are. I want to know what happened here and if that was the case.