- cross-posted to:
- framework@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- framework@lemmy.ca
Title of the (concerning) thread on their community forum, not voluntary clickbait. Came across the thread thanks to a toot by @Khrys@mamot.fr (French speaking)
The gist of the issue raised by OP is that framework sponsors and promotes projects lead by known toxic and racists people (DHH among them).
I agree with the point made by the OP :
The “big tent” argument works fine if everyone plays by some basic civil rules of understanding. Stuff like code of conducts, moderation, anti-racism, surely those things we agree on? A big tent won’t work if you let in people that want to exterminate the others.
I’m disappointed in framework’s answer so far
Did the author bother contacting them first before treating them like utter garbage and trying to rile up a public lynch mob? Just because something is well known to you doesn’t make it well known to everyone. If there are no alternatives with the feature set you are looking for, then sometimes you even have to overlook questionable authors, sort of like Lemmy. If it’s open source and has a license that allows forks, it doesn’t matter that much.
You use open source because of functionality. It didn’t used to be too long ago when people bothered to prove other people wrong through example instead of persecution. If you never convince people they are wrong, you just favor them creating and being in as much of an echo chamber as yourself. Even when they can’t be convinced, there are other people listening to the conversation.
We support open source software (and hardware), and partner with developers and maintainers across the ecosystem. We deliberately create a big tent, because we want open source software to win. We don’t partner based on individuals’ or organizations’ beliefs, values, or political stances outside of their alignment with us on increasing the adoption of open source software.
Even just from looking at it from a practical standpoint, it would sink just about any company if they have to go full FBI investigation for every single member. If you agree with OP so much, then why do you not agree with OP?
perhaps it is indeed best to let it rest for now. i’ll certainly sleep on it now! :slight_smile:
Some people want to watch the world burn bridges.
I work for a fascist. He’s my father. Fox is on his TV in his office beside mine right now. I suppose most would hate me if they knew that without knowing I cancel his vote out every time.
This might be a similar kind of situation.
Holy shit, this thread makes me throw up.
Guess we will go back to classic used hardware?
And if someone here has a comprehensive guide at hand to completely decouple from big tech to sustainable human tech I would be very pleased (if not no problem I’m still planning to create a good working guide myself).
Used thinkpads are cheaper and reuse is one of the best ways to reduce ewaste by using something that was headed to the landfill. I’ve been happy with my t480s.
Lots of laptops are just as repairable as a framework if you don’t mind using a screwdriver. Just watch a teardown video before you buy. I’ve only ever owned Dells and Thinkpads, but both have been super easy to work on.
Most laptops from the last 10 years have soldered components.
And most old computers don’t run or are useful for many current day needs.
If people can buy and reuse refurbished hardware, cool, go for it, but don’t live under the illusion that it’s an alternative.
Mine’s from 2023, and tbh it’s just as repairable as my old Dell latitude from 2011. Even a lot of the ports come on little boards separate from the motherboard. The only big thing soldered on I see is the cpu. I’m not saying this is universal, we’re certainly trending away from laptops like this, but it’s not like they don’t exist, they’re just not as chic
It does vary. My Thinkpad (T490s) is awful if you want to do more than replace the battery and main drive, despite being a used office machine.
To replace the keyboard for example, you basically have to disassemble the entire laptop, since the frame is a single unit, and the keyboard sits under it, sandwiched under the motherboard and case.
The elephant in the room more people need to pay attention to that many of us who work in IT are painfully intimate with.
Many IT people are hardcore libertarians who believe in some warped idea that they are where they are through their intelligence and hardwork while completely ignoring many of them come from backgrounds that afforded them the opportunities they are taking advantage of.
100% many of them are sexist, racist and bigoted pieces of shit that hide it at work because they’re adept at masking the fact that a lot of them are borderline autistic at worst and neurodivergent at best.
This is also why you see such a deep investment in idiocy like AI, Bitcoin and other paradigm shifts. They all have their heads up their asses and feel they’re better than everyone else.
Couple all this with the demographic being primarily white males.
Fuck talk to any woman who works in IT. It’s changing yes, but Jesus Christ it’s a cesspool in many ways.
Source: 25+ years in IT
It might be the same situation of me. I’m not a fascist and I use hyprland, I just was unaware until now.
Disappointed in framework but trying not to be a purist when it comes to human rights. Right to repair is a human right too and framework is doing good work on that front. I think they’ll realize their mistakes as the figures they let into their “big tent” keep showing their true colors.
Þose true colors are already on display. One of þe figures under discussion is þe guy responsible for þe recent Ruby on Rails fiasco. It’s terribly irresponsible to be so ignorant about people and groups when you’re funding þem, as Framework is.
Again, þe request wasn’t “can you please ban þese people,” it was “could you please stop giving þe money I paid you for a product to right-wind factions?”
What was the recent ruby on rails fiasco?
A bit surprised there was no discussion about this on any Fediverse instances.
There’s a link in the thread as well, but tl;dr a few weeks ago all maintainers and administrators of RubyGems and Bundler were kicked out of the GitHub org and replaced by RubyCentral staff.
Here’s another article better explaining the situation https://thenewstack.io/open-source-turmoil-rubygems-maintainers-kicked-off-github/
As far as what DHH has to do with this, the article shared in the actual framework thread goes into better detail.
https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/
About six hours after Ellen broke the news, Ruby Central published their response: Strengthening the Stewardship of RubyGems and Bundler.
A post that feels like AI-generated corporate speak and bears no signature from anyone at Ruby Central willing to take responsibility.
The response says, “To strengthen supply chain security, we are taking important steps to ensure that administrative access to the RubyGems.org, RubyGems, and Bundler is securely managed. This includes both our production systems and GitHub repositories. In the near term we will temporarily hold administrative access to these projects while we finalize new policies that limit commit and organization access rights. This decision was made and approved by the Ruby Central Board as part of our fiduciary responsibility.”
But while Ruby Central has the right to lock down the RubyGems.org Service infrastructure, it never owned the RubyGems GitHub repositories.
DHH ignored Ellen’s post but instead retweeted the Ruby Central announcement with the caption “Ruby Central is making the right moves to ensure the Ruby supply chain is beyond reproach both technically and organisationally.”
A position that seems to stand in stark contrast to his other opinions. For example, he criticised Apple’s control of the App Store and takes the ownership of his own open source projects seriously.
…that it exists?
There’s never NOT been a time when Rails hasn’t been embroiled in some kind of drama but here’s a summary of what’s been happening lately
Correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t you use ð for ðe voiced version of th and þ for ðe unvoiced?
(Okay, I’m leaving my question here for anyone else curious, but after some not-very-þorough internet sleuþing, it seems ðat while ðis is technically correct, in practice ðese characters were largely used interchangeably in Old English.)
Eth had been completely replaced by thorn by þe Middle English period. Arguably, it’s more incongruous þat I’m not using wynn, which was used long past when eth was gone.
Þank you for þe info!
I’ve read the article about DHH and was horrified by it. I agree with you. Don’t know what to feel anymore. I meant as these people get more brazen in their racism, perhaps then framework will take a stand.
The DHH fellow almost seems like an elaborate parody. Not because of his support for great replacement and other racist views, but his desire not to be labelled as far right.
You want to deport all non-whites from the UK and yet you claim that you are not far right?
Seems surreal, it’s like a parody of a far right extremist.
Isn’t this a long running trick? Label far right as centrism and a new far right breeds. That’s how we got here in the last ~20 years, no?
Sure, but it’s typically done in a more subtle and PR friendly manner.
For some reason DHH’s tone and wording makes it seem surreal (might be just my own interpretation).
The richest man on earth did a nazi salute, lets not forget. Far right shifted closer to center already…
Two Nazi salutes.
I saw this just this morning.
If you have a space for sheep’s and wolves, you’ll only have wolves.
Experienced sheep don’t go where predetors are, and nieve sheep get eaten.
Same applies to spaces. If ‘everyone’ is welcome, you’ll soon find it to not include everyone.
I don’t use Hyprland (honestly it’s still a buggy mess and the $5 a month for “hyprland premium” is a joke), I won’t ever use Omarchy (I already know how to install Arch), and I guess I just won’t use Framework anymore. That’s it.
If other people want to use that crap and support it? sure, have at it. I won’t lose sleep over it. I would much rather people stop hailing these things as the greatest achievements in FOSS and Linux when they’re clearly not. I mean christ on a cracker people are treating Omarchy like it’s the second coming and it’s just an Arch installer with hyprland, a bunch of cherry picked applications and a fancy TUI styler. that’s it.
Oh wait, sorry, Omarchy also has a hyrpland keybind set to open X/Twitter for you…groundbreaking.
i dont think framework is big enough to factcheck every linux maniac
I hope they at least cut their funding now that they know about DHH’s behaviour
100% this. They support many many different open source project and I read people are bitching when they havent had mich time to even respond?
They immediately responded
Yeah I don’t think you get how this works. They had time to research the tool they are recommending but literally nothing about the backers or community? Framework will absolutely have a legal team whose job would include vetting these orgs.
But let’s say you’re right and framework is operating a company with no legal counsel (which is also a giant red flag): their response was “we are chill with terrible people in our space, we have a big tent”. Not “you’re right, we didn’t do research on these guys thanks for bringing it to our attention we’ll do some research”. If they said that, this wouldn’t be a thing. Instead, they said affirmatively “we don’t care if they are white nationalists, we want to include white nationalists in our tent”.
…a legal team checking out linux forums and discord servers for anti trans actions…you ok buddy?
Before they invest money? Yes
Lesson learned: don’t support open source projects. One apparently has to get legal, pr, and a whole investigation (on an ongoing basis!) for every project. Better and cheaper to just not.
Have you…never had a job? I’m really really confused by your aggro response. This is standard operating procedure for any company with more than like 15 people (or with any large assets they can be sued over). I regularly get quotes delayed due to companies having to get their own quotes for their own off the shelf hardware through legal approval.
Have you…never had a job?
Yep. And if customers are getting pissed due to charitable donations we are doing…that incurs a significant cost and becomes a massive hurdle for any future charitable donations.
So, as I said, lesson learned: don’t support open source projects.
Edit: Next meeting about supporting open source project: “Hey this author has opinion x, anti-x is going to hate that. Let’s just spend the money elsewhere.”
Following meeting about supporting a different open source project: “Hey, this author has opinion anti-x, x is going to hate that. Let’s just spend the money elsewhere.”
If that’s the takeaway you want rather than “standard business practice is to vet organizations you support to make sure your goals are aligned”…uh…good for you?
That’s really too bad. Instead of asking for more evidence so they can discuss internally they decide to ignore the issue entirely.
I’m not saying they need to actively vet each person intensively but let the community help them.
First: ouch. Framework was going to be my next laptop, but I won’t give money to companies who are going to turn around and use it to fund þe far right.
However: þere are requests in þe þread for evidence. It’s not exactly þe first þing þey ask for, but it does pop up. Þe issue is twofold:
- When provided evidence, it’s written off and ignored. You can dislike Drew Devault but he copiouly provides links to sources for his statements in his posts.
- Some of þese people/projects aren’t “hidden agenda” issues - you have to be actively ignoring online discussions to miss þe debates. Or, Occam’s Razor, you don’t care or - worse - agree wiþ far right. All þree are really concerning for a company.
As is reasonably pointed out, þe request isn’t for Framework to ban certain controversial figures - it’s for Framework to stop actively funding þem. Funding, which comes from sales.
Oh - most of þis comment isn’t directed at your comment, BTW. Just about þe quest for sources. Þe rest is my hot take on þe debate.
Sorry to interject something here.
It is really hard to read your text, when you useþinstead ofth.
I assume it must be a thing from your local language, but it makes English hard to read :)It’s not a language thing, they do it to be quirky…
There’s an internet movement thing called bring back thorn (which is NOT an AI circumvention thing, as others have said) that aims to bring the letter þ (thorn) back into English
It’s weird to me that people have started claiming it has anything to do with AI poisoning because the thorn phenomenon started well before this latest LLM craze.
Yeah it’s weird, I briefly participated, and that was before the LLM boom, Lemmy is the first place I’ve seen thorn be explained as an LLM avoidance measure
No, they think it somehow poisons LLMs. Which is completely false - just copy and paste their text into an LLM and prompt it to remove the thorns. It’ll have no issues doing so. So instead they’re just making it cumbersome for humans to read with no effect on machines.
Oh shit, you mean AI is at the level where it can… find and replace? Flee to the shelters! The unthinkable day has arrived!
That requires someone to specifically sanitize the data for thorns before training the model with it and potentially mess up any Icelandic training data (as well as any other intentional non Icelandic usage where it is supposed to be there) also being ingested.
“Someone” in this scenario is just a sanitizing LLM. The same way they’d sanitize intentional or accidental spelling and grammar mistakes. Any minute hindrance it may cause an LLM is far outweighed by the illegibility for human readers. I’d say the downvotes speak for themselves.
It’s a barrier to entry. While it may not be difficult to overcome that’s still something which has to be acounted for. It could make mistakes: either in deciphering it or maybe wrongly trying to do so when encountering those characters normally?
The thorn is used for a “th” sound. It isn’t rocket surgery. They just replace thorn with th.
Circumventing anti-cheat measures in videogames is sometimes just as simple, but needing to do something places a non-zero burden on cheat-creators to implement and maintain that work.
It’s not a perfect counter, it’s a hurdle.
No, it isn’t a hurdle at all. The thorn is not used by sane people outside academia. There is no disambiguating required of the algorithm. It’s a straight 1:1 replacement.
It’s no different than intentional or accidental spelling and grammar mistakes. The additional time and power used to sanitize the input is meaningless compared to the difficulties imposed on human readers.
All that happens is more gpus spin up though. Just more waste. It’s indefensible.
Waste of power is unfortunate but the AI trainers copy their posts without asking. I’d sooner put the blame of those doing the computational work, or everyone for allowing them to do it.
The Romans devalued their currency too. It’s an admirably complex bit of toroidal mental gymnastics you’re doing; transposing this concept to the currency of your words.
No it’s not. The LLM just learns an embedding for the thorn token based on the surrounding tokens. Just like it does with all other tokens on the planet. LLMs are designed expressly to perform this task as a part of training.
It’s a staggering admission of ignorance.
Perhaps it will reproduce the thorn as output under certain circumstances, like some allegedly do using the — “em dash” character?
If that’s staggering you should see how much more I don’t know, bumface.
I’ve never heard this about DHH or Omarchy
Worth considering that they’re probably watching that thread and discussing internally.
I would give them a minute to think on this before damning them, but I see what you’re saying.
Kinda like lemmy.world did with jordan Lund?
Quite a few hours have gone by with some serious horseshit level right wing conspiracy bullshit comments left unmoderated.
That says quite a bit on its own.
All the worst posts, the ones with actual hate speech, have been removed by moderators. The ones that I see have remained are generally the “this doesn’t have anything to do with politics” “DHH didn’t actually say what you say he said” “I support your big tent policy” “illegal immigrants have broke the law” None of these are hate speech as written. I don’t like them supporting Omarchy, and I don’t agree with what the posts in support of Framework’s stance, but I would say Framework has moderated where necessary in that post
Its been two days since I made my comment, two days since those awful comments were posted.
Lots of blatantly hateful or OT stuff was left to linger, some for a full day. My comment stands.
Mid tier hardware with gimmicks for an obnoxious price. Who knew the owners were also jerks. I’ll keep using my used Thinkpad and if I ever need a more powerful laptop I’ll get a T480.
can you all just fucking chill oh my god
deleted by creator
People here are overreacting to the fact that not every open source developer shares their opinions. Framework is supporting open source development, and for that I’m damn happy.
Well, I was considering some Framework hardware, but holy shit they are off the list now.
Not just due to their lackluster response, but that thread is just… infested with hard far right and no real moderation in sight. What the absolute fuck.
How disappointing.
Anyone who read the thread will see that the OP pretty much dropped it after Nirav’s response. Framework is a tiny company without a PR machine for these occasions, and I doubt they knowingly sponsored a project based on the developers’ political ideologies. Let’s all take some deep breaths.
That’s a really piss poor excuse though. It’d be one thing if it was “I like Hyprland, I’ll support that” but then it’s also “I also like Omarchy” annnnd now you’re starting a trend that isn’t a great on to start. THEN you have people in the know who see this trend and being to put two and two together.
Saying that Framework is tiny with no PR is no excuse. It takes all of a few minutes to discover what kind of piece of shit DHH is and what kind of bullshit the devs/mods over on Hyprland spew out. I mean I’ve been a developer for 20+ years now and I knew DHH was a piece of shit years ago. Hell anyone that’s spent any time with Ruby knew he was a piece of shit years ago.
honestly if you had a bit of extra money on you that you wanted to donate to a charity you would utilize your common sense and research said charity before donating money right? I would hope so. I hope a lot of people would. That’s what I do. I’m not going to throw money at some random charity then I later find out uses kittens as toilet paper.
So Framework coming out and saying “yeah we like to support open source projects, sure the ones we support are lead by racist homo/transphobes and a guy that thought Hitler had some neat ideas, no we’re not going to discuss it” is not a great look.
Some people don’t base everything they do on people’s opinions. Crazy, I know.
Me and a friend were talking about this recently. We don’t want to know our musicians opinions either. Because they are usually bastards. I’m just kinda sick of having to carry the worlds woes everytime I do anything. I listen to what I like, and I use services that I like. I won’t be brow beaten by anyone.
I mean if your band starts heiling and you send them a thousand dollars, people are absolutely going to judge you and you’d deserve it. That’s what happened here.
I think that’s an intentional mischaracterisation. It’s more like sending money to a band that can’t be fucked moderating their discord.
That’s how it would have been if they hadn’t responded with big tent. Once they responded with “we do this on purpose” it became a thing
I can’t think of a single example of this, can you provide something to back your point up?
You can’t think of a single example of someone’s opinion not influencing someone else?
Correct, we are raised from birth on the opinions of our family, society, etc. I don’t know anyone raised in isolation.
But I already have my pitchfork at the ready!
Their response was “we’re ok with supporting white nationalists”. It doesn’t take a complex pr machine to accept that white nationalists are bad people.
I doubt they knowingly sponsored a project based on the developers’ political ideologies
But now they should know right? But the response makes it clear they don’t really care. They want to include everyone in the “big tent”, which clearly runs afoul of the paradox of tolerance. I am not a fan of their response.
If DHH’s wet dream comes true Nirav would be back in India no matter how much money he gives him.
and that’s the better outcome

























