@davidfetter@kolektiva.social
@aud@fire.asta.lgbt for those of us unfamiliar with the Rust ecosystem and its villains, would you be so kind as to describe, or point to a description of, what you're referring to here?
Asta [AMP]@aud@fire.asta.lgbt
@davidfetter@kolektiva.social Gonna need to make a website on this one, I think... looking through some links and reconstructing what I can here. I am linking to blogs and mastodon posts, but I think the person impacted (ThePhD) has made it pretty clear they've moved on so I'm not linking to it to so that anyone can comment...
First, dtolnay's character is... well, he's ex-Palantir, for one. While normally I don't think a past employer should necessarily always be held against someone... he's tried to hide it (and denies it) and his behavior re: Rust is rather controlling (there's a shipping binaries drama that predates "the keynote fiasco").
The tl;dr is that dtolnay worked to remove an invited keynote speaker (ThePhD) from discussing their work on reflection, which would deprecate a large amount of work dtolnay has done in Rust. ThePhD is Black; this is not irrelevant, unfortunately.
https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023 <- ThePhD's initial blog post about it.
The Rust team did not say who was responsible for doing this but it was clear 'something had gone wrong'. Fast forward a few months and whitequark lets slip who did it:
I agree that there are multiple intepretations possible and that yours also follows from the evidence available. The reason I think it’s reasonable to consider something deeper to be going on is: every single Rust controversy I’ve discussed with key Rust people had a lot more going on than was there on the surface. Case in point: dtolnay was also the one thus far unnamed by anyone speaking for the project person who was involved in ThePHD’s talk being downgraded from a keynote. If I see someone acting surreptitiously in one case I will expect that to repeat.(link here: https://archive.ph/VRQ0H)
At some point, dtolnay "responded" about it. In a gist that he later deleted. I'm getting a little sketchier on some of the details as time goes by, but I want to make it clear that his version of events is a lie and he is not a reliable narrator here.
https://archive.ph/Utaz1
ThePhD responded to this, for whatever it is worth, because dtolnay's stories is just... it's not even wrong, it's just false. He's lying about the timeline and how things were done.
https://pony.social/@thephd/111005164984251004
Whether dtolnay was being racist or not was discussed heavily in various places; he never came out and said "I am attempting to get this keynote speaker removed because they are Black and their work will deprecate mine" but they never do, of course. Him going behind backs, keeping his name secret, manipulating people at the team and the foundation to make this happen, lying about it when confronted... if he had a good reason, he wouldn't have done any of that.
To be really explicit, I am incredibly disappointed with the rust team in how they handled it. They only started talking about it in more depth once whitequark said it was dtolnay...
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