There is a lot of tension that the report seeks to either minimize or avoid. It’s also just really hard to express it in a report like this because there’s no real place for it if the goal is to look professional.
I think the RubyGems fiasco was a result of unresolved tensions. People chose not to be adults about and resolve the issues respectfully. IMHO, I think one of the main problems is that nobody was willing to spin up a core foundation to own critical infrastructure to the Ruby community which remains a problem.
I cannot find the blogposts I remember reading, but recall that there were some bad feelings about Ruby Together and Arko’s leadership of it before it was merged with Ruby Central. It appears these feelings never went away which is made very clear by the way that key Shopify engineers started posting after Ruby Central took over the RubyGems GitHub org [1].
Now combine this with dhh’s right-wing political posts and behavior, his extremely close relationship with the founder of Shopify (dhh is on the board of Shopify), a key Ruby Central donor pulling critical funding because he did not want his money going towards giving dhh more attention and you’re left with Ruby Central effectively being controlled by Shopify (which, as far as I can tell is still the situation) because that’s where all of its funding comes from now.
Frankly, the biggest thing this entire fiasco has shown me is that a lot of us are still a bunch of idiotic teenagers. Integrity and maturity is in short supply where it is needed the most.
> I cannot find the blogposts I remember reading, but recall that there were some bad feelings about Ruby Together and Arko’s leadership of it before it was merged with Ruby Central.
IMHO, Ruby Central keeps trying to find a way to frame all of this in a good light, but it seems like they keep falling flat. They tried doing filtered Q&A avoiding all the obvious questions that people hostile to what happened would ask, temporarily providing transparency reports that didn’t really say much. It all felt like very incompetent damage control.
I think they were hoping that handing it off to the Ruby core team would allow them to move on, but that requires ownership of their failings or at least actions that demonstrate that they will be better moving forward and none of that has happened.
From what I can tell, this story is primarily about personalities. The community essentially ended up with several factions, but I’ll try to explain this without it degenerating into the schoolyard fighting that it appears to be.
1. Ruby Central is the surviving Ruby non-profit that another Ruby non-profit, Ruby Together merged with. This is where part of the legal ambiguity/dispute comes from that will make sense in (2).
2. RubyGems (the code, GitHub repo, etc) and RubyGems.org are two separate things. RubyGems code appears to not have been legally transferred in the merger. RubyGems.org is run by Ruby Central, but this transfer is also extremely muddy.
3. For reasons in dispute, Ruby Central seized the GitHub repos of RubyGems. It is not clear they have the legal or ethical right to do this (based on the evidence, I believe they do not and they have committed theft).
4. Ruby Central has made various noises about the need to do this for security and other things despite the extremely sloppy nature of the takeover.
5. Ruby Central then “gave” RubyGems to the Ruby core team without resolving anything in what appears to be an attempt to try and end the controversy.
Don’t worry Peter Thiel will help change that after he destroys the functionality of most of the global economy since he’s basically asserted that New Zealand is his break glass refuge.
What basis was there to sink several smaller south-american boats in the course of the past months? Alleged drug smuggling, which is not punishable by death afaik, and they still murdered those people.
It did not raise $110 billion. According to their own SEC filings $35 billion of Amazon’s funding is contingent on “(i) OpenAI meeting specified milestones, and (ii) OpenAI directly or indirectly consummating an initial public offering or direct listing of equity securities in the United States”
The problem is that there is no hard evidence anywhere to actually prove this.
I’m going to avoid whether or not AI productivity gains are real, but all the “data” I have seen affirming this is black box observations or vibes.
Even your evidence is just conjecture. You’re proposing that they’re going to be successful cutting their workforce like this because AI is such a boon.
The Financial Times ran an article [1] the other week with a title saying that AI is a productivity boost and then the article basically spends a bunch of words talking about how the signs are looking good that AI is useful! Then mentions that all of this is inherently optimistic and is not necessarily indicative of an actual trend yet.
> While the trends are suggestive, a degree of caution is warranted. Productivity metrics are famously volatile, and it will take several more periods of sustained growth to confirm a new long-term trend.
IMHO, at the moment it is not possible to separate trends from AI being an actual game changer vs. AI being used as a smoke screen to launder layoffs for other reasons. We are in a bubble for sure and the problem is that it’s great until it’s not. Bar Kokhba was considered the messiah…until everyone was slaughtered and the Romans depopulated Judaea. Oops.
I just posted the hard evidence (the actual numbers). The company is going to produce 5-6X the revenue with a similar number of employees as they had 6-7 years ago before the overhiring boom.
But I guess we'll just have to defer to the AI experts at...the Financial Times...and their emotional vibes of the situation instead.
The future is not evidence? I don’t understand what you’re saying.
> The company is going to produce 5-6X the revenue with a similar number of employees as they had 6-7 years ago before the overhiring boom.
That’s not evidence. That’s a belief. I’m not disagreeing they overhired, but this statement contains no evidence that reducing the size of the company like this is going to yield the same or greater profits.
This really depends on how a state structures this, but “county courthouse” is not necessarily a meaningful statement. The judiciary is a state function and it has been delegated to county for purposes of logistics. In larger states, each county gets to set its own court rules, fee schedules, etc. because it would be maddening otherwise. They still ultimately answer to the state judiciary.
Iowa is small enough that it looks like the Iowa Judicial Branch just runs everything directly. Every county seat in Iowa has a courthouse, but the county probably doesn’t really have any control of it.
My guess is that the sheriff had an ego and may not have wanted a finding against him.
I think the RubyGems fiasco was a result of unresolved tensions. People chose not to be adults about and resolve the issues respectfully. IMHO, I think one of the main problems is that nobody was willing to spin up a core foundation to own critical infrastructure to the Ruby community which remains a problem.
I cannot find the blogposts I remember reading, but recall that there were some bad feelings about Ruby Together and Arko’s leadership of it before it was merged with Ruby Central. It appears these feelings never went away which is made very clear by the way that key Shopify engineers started posting after Ruby Central took over the RubyGems GitHub org [1].
Now combine this with dhh’s right-wing political posts and behavior, his extremely close relationship with the founder of Shopify (dhh is on the board of Shopify), a key Ruby Central donor pulling critical funding because he did not want his money going towards giving dhh more attention and you’re left with Ruby Central effectively being controlled by Shopify (which, as far as I can tell is still the situation) because that’s where all of its funding comes from now.
Frankly, the biggest thing this entire fiasco has shown me is that a lot of us are still a bunch of idiotic teenagers. Integrity and maturity is in short supply where it is needed the most.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/rmfranca.bsky.social/post/3lz7alpob...