Here in Belgium some investigative journalists have been reporting on Cofnas since his appointment in March. They recently translated one of their pieces to English and made it available for non-subscribers (click on ‘Lees alleen dit artikel gratis’ to close the pop-up):

https://apache.be/2026/03/05/self-declared-race-realist-nathan-cofnas-receives-appointment-ugent

The UGent philosophy department is also not without controversy. Maarten Boudry, a former employee there, is one of the main people in this country pushing ‘climate realism’, ‘concerns about Islam’ and ‘cultural marxism was a Nazi conspiracy theory but right now we itnis actually happening in our institutions’. He’s very buddy buddy with Steven Pinker and likely trying to get more international reach.

Apart from that, plagiarism issues never make news headlines because they happen very often at universities. The only cases I’m aware of are Arday and Claudine Gay. Probably because they have a political skin color.

I have been looking into the mentioned clique for some time now and I share the concerns of the author. It does not take a lot of digging to learn that, for them, an interest in low level performance goes hand in with a far right worldview. Apparently it is where you end up if you are an “indepenent thinker”. Two examples:

• In the Odin 1.0 video, Bill shares his bookcase. Below the programming books I can see “The Strange Death of Europe” and “The Madness of the Crowds”. On the lobsters thread about the announcement, Abner Coimbre shared an archived version of the mentioned private video. Apparently “unions” = “communism”.
• This is the blog of one of the organizers of the Better Software Conference. Very interesting reading list this guy has. The other organizers share likeminded views on xitter. Everyone praising the conference wants you to know that it is a complete coincidence the conference consists almost solely of white dudes.

Any tips on managing the guy-urge to assume good faith? I know what to expect of “contrarian thinkers” but there is always that fish-brain saying “Well, you don’t know a lot about the topic. And who knows, the vibes you feel could be wrong and you could even broaden your worldview” (spoilers: it doesn’t broaden). So much time and energy wasted by trying to dig nuggets of gold out of piles of dung.

One of my old teachers would send documents to the class with various pieces of information. They were a few years away from retirement and never really got word processors. They would start by putting important stuff in bold. But some important things were more important than others. They got put in bold all caps. Sometimes, information was so critical it got put in bold, underline, all caps and red font colour. At the time we made fun of the teacher, but I don’t think I could blame them. They were doing the best they could with the knowledge of the tools they had at the time.

Now, in the files linked above I saw the word “never” in all caps, bold all caps, in italics and in a normal font. Apparently, one step in the process is mandatory. Are the others optional? This is supposed to be a procedure to be followed to the letter with each step being there for a reason. These are supposed computer-savvy people

CRITICAL RULE: You can ONLY run release_steps.py for a repository if release_checklist.py explicitly says to do so […] The checklist output will say “Run script/release_steps.py {version} {repo_name} to create it”

I’ll admit I did not read the scripts in detail but this is a solved problem. The solution is a script with structured output as part of a pipeline. Why give up one of the only good thing computers can do: executing a well-defined task in a deterministic way. Reading this is so exhausting…

Lots of stuff to think about.

I’d recommend stepping outside of the Algol world for a little bit. […] Instead, deliberately force yourself to use a Smalltalk, a Forth, a Lisp, an ML, or a Prolog; solve one or two problems in them over a period of about one month per language.

A few years ago I messed around with Racket and I forgot I had some fun with that. Thanks for the reminder. On some level I feel like Lisp should mesh well with my brain but I never got anything of substance done. Maybe time to try again. Possibly another dialect or something else entirely from your list. Thanks for the paper. It looks interesting!

This is your call. Personally I’ve found that I can be blunt with evidence and technical claims while empathizing with the difficulty of understanding those claims, and this still allows for fruitful technical discussions.

This is something I often need to remind myself of. Sensitivity is something that comes easily to me and although throughout the years I have found a kind of strength within it, it has its drawbacks. Generally, the less “in real time” a discussion takes place, the better I can manage it.

Yeah, Blow in some way deserves his own thread.

The Dutch part was a bit of hyperbole on my part. It’s something I have seen a few times on the orange and red sites. Someone is a dick and others defend them by gesturing vaguely to different cultural norms. Almost every time a variant appears on “Did you know that, for example, the Dutch are very direct”. My Dutch colleagues and in-laws have taught me that Dutch directness is more like not being afraid to call out assholes in public. Either that or making a sale. They are excellent salespeople.