Unpublished Slashdot Submission Dragged Into Reddit Drama About C++ Paper's Title 61
Reddit's moderators drew some criticism after "locking" a discussion about C++ paper/proposal author Andrew Tomazos. The URL (in the post with the locked discussion) had led to a submission for Slashdot's queue of potential (but unpublished) stories, which nevertheless attracted 178 upvotes on Reddit and another 85 comments. That unpublished Slashdot submission was also submitted to Hacker News, where it drew another 38 upvotes but was also eventually flagged.
Back on Reddit's C++ subreddit (which has 300,000 members), a "direct appeal" was submitted to the moderators to unlock Reddit's earlier discussion (drawing over 100 upvotes). But there's one problem with this drama, as Slashdot reader brantondaveperson pointed out. "There appears to be no independent confirmation of this story anywhere. The only references to it are this Slashdot story, and a Reddit story. Neither cite sources or provide evidence." This drew a response from the person submitting the potential story to Slashdot: You raise a valid point. The communication around this was private. The complaint about the [paper's] title, the author's response, and the decision to expel were all communicated by either private email, on private mailing lists or in private in-person meetings. These private communications could be quoted by participants in said communications. Please let us know if that would be sufficient.
The paper had already drawn some criticism in a longer blog post by programmer Izzy Muerte (which called it "a fucking cleaned up transcript of a ChatGPT conversation".) It's one of six papers submitted this year by Tomaszos to the ISO's "WG21" C++ committee. Tomazos (according to his LinkedIn profile) is "lead programmer" of videogame company Fury Games (founded by him and his wife). It also shows an earlier two-year stint as a Google senior software engineer.
There were two people claiming direct knowledge of the situation posting on Reddit. A user named kritzikratzi posted: I contacted Andrew Tomazos directly. According to him the title "The Undefined Behavior Question" caused complaints inside WG21. The Standard C++ Foundation then offered two choices (1) change the paper title (2) be expelled. Andrew Tomazos chose (2).
A Reddit user Dragdu posted: He wasn't expelled for that paper, but rather this was the last straw. And he wasn't banned from the [WG21] committee, that is borderline impossible, but rather the organization he was representing told him to fuck off and don't represent them anymore. If he can find different organization to represent, he can still attend... Tomazos has been on lot of people's shit list, because his contributions suck... He decided that the title is too important to his ViSiOn for the chatgpt BS submitted as a paper, and that he won't change the title. This was the straw that broke the camel's back and his "sponsor" told him to fuck off....
There was also some back-and-forth on Hacker News. bun_terminator: r/cpp mods just woke up, banning everyone who question... this lunatic behavior.
(Reddit moderator): We did not go on a banning spree, we banned only one person, you. After removing the comment where 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.
Back on Reddit's C++ subreddit (which has 300,000 members), a "direct appeal" was submitted to the moderators to unlock Reddit's earlier discussion (drawing over 100 upvotes). But there's one problem with this drama, as Slashdot reader brantondaveperson pointed out. "There appears to be no independent confirmation of this story anywhere. The only references to it are this Slashdot story, and a Reddit story. Neither cite sources or provide evidence." This drew a response from the person submitting the potential story to Slashdot: You raise a valid point. The communication around this was private. The complaint about the [paper's] title, the author's response, and the decision to expel were all communicated by either private email, on private mailing lists or in private in-person meetings. These private communications could be quoted by participants in said communications. Please let us know if that would be sufficient.
The paper had already drawn some criticism in a longer blog post by programmer Izzy Muerte (which called it "a fucking cleaned up transcript of a ChatGPT conversation".) It's one of six papers submitted this year by Tomaszos to the ISO's "WG21" C++ committee. Tomazos (according to his LinkedIn profile) is "lead programmer" of videogame company Fury Games (founded by him and his wife). It also shows an earlier two-year stint as a Google senior software engineer.
There were two people claiming direct knowledge of the situation posting on Reddit. A user named kritzikratzi posted: I contacted Andrew Tomazos directly. According to him the title "The Undefined Behavior Question" caused complaints inside WG21. The Standard C++ Foundation then offered two choices (1) change the paper title (2) be expelled. Andrew Tomazos chose (2).
A Reddit user Dragdu posted: He wasn't expelled for that paper, but rather this was the last straw. And he wasn't banned from the [WG21] committee, that is borderline impossible, but rather the organization he was representing told him to fuck off and don't represent them anymore. If he can find different organization to represent, he can still attend... Tomazos has been on lot of people's shit list, because his contributions suck... He decided that the title is too important to his ViSiOn for the chatgpt BS submitted as a paper, and that he won't change the title. This was the straw that broke the camel's back and his "sponsor" told him to fuck off....
There was also some back-and-forth on Hacker News. bun_terminator: r/cpp mods just woke up, banning everyone who question... this lunatic behavior.
(Reddit moderator): We did not go on a banning spree, we banned only one person, you. After removing the comment where 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.
Yeah... no, let's not do this (Score:4)
Let's not do this. Not here, nor anywhere.
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Srsly? I figured they were just griping over the fact that the language casually permits undefined behavior and they didn't want it rubbed in their faces because they still haven't accepted the fact that C++ is the new COBOL.
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On the contrary, Rust is completely defined. What is it that you want out of a spec? Things that can't be changed even after you've realized they're broken anti-patterns? Here's C++ in a nutshell:
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/s... [xkcd.com]
They all exist within one language whose very name is a now-discredited anti-pattern. Go, Python and Rust deliberately removed the ++ operator because it's a common source of bugs (go technically has it, but defines it as a statement rather than an operator.) One of Bjarne Stroustru
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C++ is partially defined.
Rust is not defined, it is implemented.
Words have meanings: if you don't understand them, you expose your ignorance.
Maybe I'm just not caffeinated enough... (Score:5, Insightful)
I read through that entire summary, but I still have no idea what this is actually about.
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Been a while since Slashdot got involved in internet drama, though.
Feels nice.
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Ya... agreed.
The last one that was fun was Tuttle OK and CentOS. Those were the days.
The Unpublished Submission (Score:4, Informative)
suntzu3000 [slashdot.org] writes:
Andrew Tomazos, a long-time contributor to the ISO C++ standards committee, recently published a technical paper titled The Undefined Behavior Question [open-std.org]. The paper explores the semantics of undefined behavior in C++ and examines this topic in the context of related research. However, controversy arose regarding the paper's title.
Some critics pointed out similarities between the title and Karl Marx's 1844 essay On The Jewish Question [marxists.org], as well as the historical implications of the Jewish Question [wikipedia.org], a term associated with debates and events leading up to World War II. This led to accusations that the title was "historically insensitive."
In response to requests to change the title, Mr. Tomazos declined, stating that "We cannot allow such an important word as 'question' to become a form of hate speech." He argued that the term was used in its plain, technical sense and had no connection to the historical context cited by critics.
Following this decision, Mr. Tomazos was expelled from the Standard C++ Foundation, and his membership in the ISO WG21 C++ Standards Committee was revoked.
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Me: Should I learn Rust now or brush up on modern C++? /reads this about paranoid Leftists running C++/
Me:
Me: Well that settles it.
It appears that the White House warning about unsafe languages has driven the C++ community mad.
This installment is just the latest example.
I don't even care technically. A safe subset of C++ would have been welcome by almost everybody. Like I haven't had to update codebases a dozen times to get warning-free compiles. 95% of those warnings were legit too.
"Asking tough question
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Right, that's a great example. 'The X Question' is a common phrase to describe political issues of the day, usually those that would involve great change. Just because one side of some of those questions became strongly accepted ("The Woman Question" in early feminism, "The Negro Question" during emancipation) does not mean any such phrase is offensive. It's used in a technical sense.
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I am reminded of "The million dollar question", and that makes me upset because millionaires shouldn't exist, because capitalism is evil.
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what the actual fuck are these people thinking? if we cannot have rational conversations using plain language what hope is there?
Re:Maybe I'm just not caffeinated enough... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a small NGO called "The Standard C++ foundation" https://isocpp.org/about [isocpp.org] . One director is Stroustrup, one funder is Microsoft. Andrew Tomazos is a programmer paid by them to work on the C++ standard. Tomazos wrote a paper entitled "On undefined behavior question".
The paper is the transcript of a conversation with ChatGPT, where he asks questions like "give examples of UB in C++", "how should C++26 answer The Question" https://wg21.link/p3403 [wg21.link]
(My opinion is) the paper is an obvious piece of shit. Ways to make it a good paper necessarily include modifying the title (e.g. "A conversation with chatGPT about ..."). Other things would be needed IMO, such as include a discussion about the factual accuracy of what ChatGPT said, or a human-produced bibliographical review; but at a minimum modifying the title is required, because right now it is obviously incomplete and misleading.
Tomazos probably has some specific controversial ideas about what C++26 should look like, and as he found an unexpected support from the answers of ChatGPT, he sought to try and convince the ISO committee that his opinions are correct.
He posted the ChatGPT conversation to the ISO committee. The Standard C++ Foundation found the whole thing to be an embarrassment. He declined the option to modify the the title, and got fired. He still can attend the ISO committee, if he finds another employer ready to support him.
I only read a small bit. I did not try understand the part where reddit is involved.
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Tomazos wrote a paper entitled "On undefined behavior question".
Actually entitled The Undefined Behavior Question [open-std.org].
I'm beginning to think that some people's need to appear slighted are making them see offenses that aren't really there. I'm leaving it up to the reader as to whether I think C++ needs more work or I'm being anti-Semitic. Go ahead. You have two opportunities.
Thank you. (Score:3)
I skimmed the summary too and was like 'wtf', it's a bunch of drama with no details. Yours is much clearer.
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The explanation (Score:1, Troll)
Someone submitted a paper [open-std.org] with the title "The Undefined Behavior Question". It talks about about whether an undefined behaviour in the C++ language should affect the visible results of previous code; ie - whether undefined behaviour should have visible side effects. (I think, it's pretty... um... well, let's just say that's the impression I got.)
The title was thought to be too close to "The Jewish Question", a hot topic of debate in the 19th and 20th century, culminating in Nazi Germany with the "Final Solu
Re: The explanation (Score:2)
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Re:Maybe I'm just not caffeinated enough... (Score:4, Interesting)
The short thing is that people are using the C++ committee as a popularity contest, focusing on cliques and clans, with emotional arguments trying to carry the day rather than technical arguments. One person tried to use ChatGPT to maximize his personal popularity/power, but it didn't work. All this does not bode well for C++. Here's a quote from the main link:
"These people...are typically some of the most insufferable people on this planet, and they will find any pedantic excuse to say they are right from the mathematical perspective, and they have to be right using facts and logic when in reality they’re just finding any excuse to not take someone’s work seriously."
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Interesting that the C++ committee is so well-versed on Marx the they would even know to make the connection.
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No it's not "interesting". I instantly saw it like that because it's really fucking well known. Don't pretend that it isn't and the committee are somehow Marxists (as that somehow matters) for spotting something that's obvious.
Anyway someone had a private word and he chose that full to die on, and die on that hill he did.
See the thing is if you write something with unintended connotations, that's fine. If you are told about them and insist on sticking to them, then they are no longer unintended. You at that
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See the thing is if you write something with unintended connotations, that's fine. If you are told about them and insist on sticking to them, then they are no longer unintended.
Well, by that standard the Smurfs is also just communist propaganda.
Rather hilariously, even ChatGPT suggests that unless an author straight up admits their intentions, you can't know for sure: Unless Peyo, the Belgian creator of The Smurfs, left a secret manifesto, it’s safe to say this theory is more of a fun interpretation than a serious critique. I tend to agree with the LLM in this case - until Neuralink can read minds (and maybe not require such an invasive installation procedure), we'll just h
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Clearly the move was intended to tweak Marxists by embarrassing them.
Re:Hahaha (Score:4, Informative)
I doubt it. With current events, someone's brain dredged up the phrase "the Jewish Question" they vaguely remembered from high school and, a little Googling later, came up with Marx.
"The {Noun} Question" was a fairly popular construction for a while and hasn't entirely gone out of style. There are lots of them: "The Woman Question," "The Negro Question," "The Eastern Question," "The Indian Question," "The God Question," "The National Question," 'The Gender Question," basically pick a noun.
The phrase "the Jewish question" was around long before Marx. He wasn't even the first one to use it as the title of an essay. The reason Marx's title is "On the Jewish Question is because it's a reply to an essay actually titled "The Jewish Question."
It was pretty neutral until "The National Questions" became super important to Europeans. Then the Nazis adopted it as the thing "The Final Solution" was a solution to.
Sounds like ... (Score:2, Funny)
Don't post drivel like this (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously. This is pure garbage. Who cares what's going on at Reddit. If I cared, I'd be over there. I'm sure there had to be something better to post then this.
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Hehe, it's like an infomercial - "Wait, there's more ..."
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The thundering herds over in R-land are a bit (okay, a lot) dimmer. While the herds at HN are a bit more elitist and overconfident while hiding a few gems. At least here, there's a tradition of vocal expression, sensible moderation, and not being insta-perma-deplatformed for not professing complete agreement with the one pre-approved ideology. R-land tends to give power to Wikipedia-editor, power-hungry know-nothings and fickle, ideologically-conformist children masqu
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The kind of people who trawl the web in search of something to get offended with, on behalf of some oppressed minority.
You hit the nail on the head [imgur.com].
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Hey Far Left: What's With All the Cartoons? [substack.com]
Do you actually think in 2D, or do you just not have real people to complain about?
This seems like garbage (Score:1)
It's just idiot drama. I'd love more activity on Slashdot, but not with unnewsworthy crap.
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WTF is going on? (Score:2)
Where is the story? Is there a story? Is the story that someone is having an internet argument about something that never made it to Slashdot? Like really WTF is this incoherent psychobabble?
This has got to be the most dysfunctional summary of what sounds like a dysfunctional story I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Re:WTF is going on? (Score:4, Funny)
Where is the story? Is there a story?
I take it the story is that /. had a brief brush with relevancy for a hot minute.
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ihaveafeelingthenextannoyinglazytrendis peoplewritingwithoutspaces becausetheyalreadygaveup oncapitalizationspellinggrammarpunctuationandwordchoice
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What is the question (Score:2)
Should undefined operations be allowed to affect observable operations that happen before them
I'm a little out of it, but what exactly is that talking about?
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The C++ standard is extremely literal about undefined behavior being undefined. A program that triggers undefined behavior is not guaranteed to do anything. A simple example along the lines of that question is: A program contains a function that has a side effect (say, I/O) and later triggers undefined behavior (say, a null pointer dereference). The undefined behavior means that the "happens-before" side effect might not ever occur. The question asks whether C++ should keep that level of undefinedness.
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What is the argument, though? Who has such strong opinions about what happens when you hit a null pointer dereference? It sounds like bike shedding. As long as you can get the debug output, why does it matter?
Evidence for actions elsewhere... (Score:2)
Almost seems like Reddit needs to offer ways to review actions like this.
A place to find blocked/removed things, and the reasons behind the actions (and who did it, etc). No, Reddit cannot be assumed to deal with all cases that need this (meaning on their own, and in secret).
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Don't feed the trolls. (Score:2)
Giving this 'discussion' credit by posting it here is just feeding the trolls, to put it nicely. Slashdot should show some editorial abilities instead whatever this is. It ain't news.
TL;DC (Score:2)