Here’s my attempt to explain the situation in a brief way. DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, wrote some things which are considered racist by some people. This caused a prominent Ruby programmer to withdraw his large sponsorship of Ruby Central, a non-profit which organises Ruby conferences, because DHH spoke at one of their conferences. Therefore Ruby Central ended up very dependent on Shopify, a large company, for funding. One theory (mentioned in the article) is that Shopify (where DHH is a board member) then pressured Ruby Central to perform a “hostile takeover” of the RubyGems GitHub organisation, where they revoked the maintainer privileges of long-time contributors. What is RubyGems? It’s a website which is the de facto standard source for “gems”, which are Ruby packages. I guess this is equivalent to NPM in the Node/JavaScript world.
If you want to know the potentially racist stuff said by DHH, he essentially seemed to be unhappy that London is “no longer full of native Brits”. He says “native Brits” now make up “about a third” of London. So by “native Brits” he seems to mean the White British ethnic group, because they made up 37% of London in the 2021 census.
The Ruby programmer who withdrew his sponsorship of Ruby Central (allegedly worth $250,000 according to the article) said this: “I rescinded a six-figure grant because the org invited DHH, a white supremacist, to speak. We cannot tolerate hateful people as leaders in our communities.”
The “hostile takeover” of RubyGems has led some Ruby programmers to create an alternative to the RubyGems website. This alternative is gem.coop. Also there is an open letter signed by influential Ruby programmers which calls for Ruby on Rails to be forked so that DHH no longer has an association with it.
The article that this post links to is an update to the situation: Ruby Central is now taking steps to try and cool the controversy.
Thoughts on this?
Edit: fixed typo.
The thing is, it doesn’t affect AI in the slightest. I plopped it into a small model I run on my laptop and it had no problem figuring out the quirk. Much like the people who add a bit of blur to their images to “poison” AI, it’s born from a fundamental misunderstanding of how AI works and has no effect on actual training.
Maybe it doesn’t work. Maybe it could under circumstances you haven’t tested. Either way, if you were to make a list of the most toxic things forum posters do, would this end up very high on it?
No, it couldn’t. Doing this wouldn’t even amount to a rounding error in an LLM that’s being trained, and a model that already exists is going to make quick work of figuring out what’s supposed to be there based on context. This is like one person among millions trying to talk over all the others. There is no possible way for it to have any effect.
That was never my point to begin with. My opinion begins and ends with the usefulness of their actions.