C++ Standards Contributor Expelled for 'The Undefined Behavior Question'

https://slashdot.org/submission/17330375/c-standards-contributor-expelled-for-the-undefined-behavior-question

by jamesy0ung • 2 years ago

94 84 2 years ago

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

foonathan6• 2 years ago

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.)

bun_terminator8• 2 years ago

I participated for r/cpp for a very large number of years, including quite a number of high-impact posts - just not with that account.

And would you be so kind to actually link to the comment you banned me for? This is it, for everyone to see and judge:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1gyiwwc/c_standards_co...

seanhunter3• 2 years ago

I’m not sure complaining on HN about being banned from a subreddit makes much sense.

bun_terminator8• 2 years ago

I think it's important context that this huge issue is being silenced on the largest c++ community

vasama• 2 years ago

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.

bun_terminator8• 2 years ago

It was clearly not - as it was not the comment referenced in the ban. That - again - is an objective truth.

It word in the other comment was also not a slur, but - surprise surprise - the objective truth, again.

fithisux• 2 years ago

Paranoia

neerd• 2 years ago

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.

taylorius• 2 years ago

Those were my thoughts exactly - though it is 2024, and I have a sinking feeling it could be just as the article states.

sqeaky4• 2 years ago

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.

readthenotes12• 2 years ago

Another comment pointed us to

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gynl1v/commen...

dfhgfhgfhgfhjk• 2 years ago

Madness.

_zagj3• 2 years ago

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.

dvfjsdhgfv3• 2 years ago

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:

https://www.ywcamv.org/blog-newsroom/blog/2023/12/13/ywca-mv... (And this is from a reputable organization, not an individual.)

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.

voxgen• 2 years ago

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] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2024/p34...

_zagj3• 2 years ago

My point was that at worst it was just some edgelord humor.

Bancakes2• 2 years ago

ISO considered harmful.

seanhunter3• 2 years ago

This slashdot article has a big gap in 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.

dvfjsdhgfv3• 2 years ago

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.

kbenson• 2 years ago

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.

Bancakes2• 2 years ago

Is it dying on a hill or is it keeping up healthy boundaries and standing your ground?

CRConrad6• 2 years ago

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.

sqeaky4• 2 years ago

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.

Animats• 2 years ago

Sigh.

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.

[1] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.23943/978140089021...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleswig%E2%80%93Holstein_que...

[3] https://www.milestonedocuments.com/images/content/handouts/J...

[4] https://archive.org/details/sirjohnsinclairs00sinciala/page/...

readthenotes12• 2 years ago

You could entitle your post "On the 'On the Question' Question"

thom• 2 years ago

This appears to be the source of the backlash:

https://izzys.casa/2024/11/on-safe-cxx/

yunohn• 2 years ago

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?

IshKebab• 2 years ago

To save anyone else the time:

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.

Idiots all round.

UltraSane2• 2 years ago

"which HOOBOY man we’re just knocking it out of the fucking park with possible anti-semitic dog whistles today aren’t we"

No. Absolutely not. No reasonable person would consider the title to be that.

rep_lodsb• 2 years ago

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.

wtfwhateven• 2 years ago

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.

AlexeyBelov2• 2 years ago

What kind of a person wrote it?

ezoe2• 2 years ago

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.

It doesn't make sense at all.

fargle• 2 years ago

while not the direct subject of this issue, that blog post is completely unhinged.

as a sibling comment said: "idiots all around".

or perhaps simply extremely bad at interpreting and handling social skills and emotions.

rep_movsd• 2 years ago

Wow - I cant think anyone would spend such a long time on how everyone but themselves is wrong.

It started out interesting, but was simply a long rambling text where there seems to be no point

dcminter• 2 years ago

...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.

kazinator3• 2 years ago

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.

uecker3• 2 years ago

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)

kazinator3• 2 years ago

Observable behavior is a formal concept: a normative term in ISO C.

If statement S has observable behavior, then that may not be removed by an optimization.

But if S is declared as not being reached, does it still have observable behavior?

Is my example considered a case of UB affecting prior observable behavior? Why or why not?

CRConrad6• 2 years ago

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?

steveklabnik• 2 years ago

What actually happened: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1gynl1v/c_stan...

ezoe2• 2 years ago

It's even more hard to believe.

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?

jart6• 2 years ago

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.

wakawaka282• 2 years ago

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.

The rumors surrounding him appear to have originated from https://izzys.casa/2024/11/on-safe-cxx/

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.

josefritzishere• 2 years ago

I feel like I read a book missing chapters in the middle.

jrochkind1• 2 years ago

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.

fche• 2 years ago

this fact may not in fact be a fact

idisagree• 2 years ago

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.

vitaut• 2 years ago

More context: https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1h0ximn/comment/lz7j2r...

icohen2000• 2 years ago

Now I know the real reason professors don't release solutions for the final. What would they title the doc?

C++ Standards Contributor Expelled for 'The Undefined Behavior Question'

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