site banner
PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14450 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

In the beginning, the C programming language was created, and there was much rejoicing. C is perhaps the single most influential language in the history of computing. It was "close to the hardware"*, it was fast*, it could do literally everything*. *Yes, I am simplifying a lot here.

But there were a few flaws. The programmer had to manage all the memory by himself, and that led to numerous security vulnerabilities in applications everywhere. Sometimes hackers exploited these vulnerabilities to the tune of several million dollars. This was bad.

But it's not like managing memory is particularly hard. It's just that with complex codebases, it's easy to miss a pointer dereference, or forget that you freed something, somewhere in potentially a million lines of code. So the greybeards said "lol git gud, just don't make mistakes."

The enlightened ones did not take this for an answer. They knew that the programmer shouldn't be burdened with micromanaging the details of memory, especially when security is at stake. Why is he allowed to call malloc without calling free?* The compiler should force him to do so. Better yet, the compiler can check the entire program for memory errors and refuse to compile, before a single unsafe line of code is ever run. *Actually memory leaks aren't usually security issues but I'm glossing over this because this post is already long.

They had discovered something profound: Absent external forces, the programmer will be lazy and choose the path of least resistance. And they created a language based on this principle. In C, you may get away with not checking the return value of a function that could error. In Rust, that is completely unacceptable and will make the compiler cry. The path of least resistance in C is to do nothing, while the path of least resistance in Rust is to handle the error.

That's what makes Rust a better programming language. And I have to agree with the zealots, they are right on this.

...So I have to be disappointed when they're not.

Rust seems to keep popping up in the news in the past couple of months. In November, a bug in Rust code deployed by Cloudflare took down their infrastructure, and half the Internet with it. (Why Cloudflare even has a monopoly on half the Internet is a controversial topic for another time.) The cause? A programmer didn't handle the error from a function.

Well that's technically not true, they did. It's just that calling .unwrap(), a function which will immediately abort the application on error, counts as "handling" the error. In other words, the path of least resistance is not to actually handle the error, but to crash. I argue that this isn't a better outcome than what would have happened in C, which would also be to crash. Sure, the crash won't be a segfault in Rust, but that doesn't matter if half the Internet dies.

This month, a CVE was filed in the Rust part of the Linux kernel, and it turned out to be a memory corruption vulnerability, ironically enough. "But how could this happen?" Rust has these things called unsafe blocks that let you do unsafe memory operations, closer to what you would be allowed to do in C (though granted, I have heard convincing arguments that unsafe Rust is still generally safer than C). So the path of least resistance is not to do things the safest way, but to just surround everything in unsafe if you get tired of fighting the borrow checker.

I hear the same pitch all the time from Rust advocates. "C is unsafe, programmers are too fallible, we must use a language that forces good code." They consistently blame the language, and don't blame the programmer. So how did they react to the above incidents? Did they blame the programmer, or the language?

"Oh, you just shouldn't use unwrap like that." "Duh, don't use unsafe, it's obviously unsafe." Sound familiar? They're blaming the programmer. Even Null of Kiwi Farms had this take on his podcast.

If I was one of them, I would throw my hands up and admit that the language didn't have guardrails to prevent this, so if I would blame C in a universe where the incidents happened in equivalent C code, then I should blame Rust here. But then, I wouldn't be a Rust zealot. I'd just be a Rust kinda-supporter. I'd have to carefully consider the nuances of the language and take into account various factors before forming an opinion. Oh no, the horror! And if I went the other way and blamed the programmer, it wouldn't be long before I'd have this nagging feeling that I'm just like a C-nile greybeard, telling the programmers to git gud, and at that point, there seems to be less of a point to using Rust if we just assume that programmers are infallible.

It's a Catch-22, in other words.

To be clear, I'm not saying that these incidents alone mean Rust is a bad choice for anything, ever. I'm not saying Cloudflare or Linux shouldn't use Rust. I'm not telling people what they should or shouldn't use. I'm just pointing out the double standards. Rust people can attack C all day using one set of (IMO, entirely justified) standards, but when they are confronted with these incidents, they suddenly switch to another set of standards. Or to put it more clearly, they have a motte and bailey. Motte: "Rust can't prevent shitty programmers from writing shitty code." Bailey: "C is unsafe, because of all the memory unsafe code people have written, and we should rewrite everything in Rust to fix all of it!"

So, I woodwork, and to keep the fear of merciless spinning metal teeth in me, I frequently watch woodworking safety videos. It's humbling listening to these woodworkers with 30 years experience talk about the time they accidentally fed their thumb through the tablesaw, or the heel of their hand through the jointer, or the tip of their pinky through the router.

99% of the stories start the same way. "I just had to make one more cut." They were in a rush, they were tired, they'd ticked off nearly every item on their todo list for the long day, and suddenly they realize they need one more piece rip cut. There is a safe way to do it, but they are so tired, and so exhausted, and they've done this so many times, they do it the unsafe way figuring it won't be a problem.

It turns out to be a big fucking problem.

Now woodworking is a physical as well as a mental task. There will be physical signs to your exhaustion and wavering judgement. If it's a hobby, you can just decide it's time to hang it up that day. If it's not, I guess that's why people lose thumbs.

A lot of these bugs in Rust code that keep going viral are stupid. But they also stink of a programmer utterly and thoroughly tapped out fighting the borrow checker. So mentally exhausted at the endless walls put up between the simple task they have to do that they've been working through one by one, that at the end of 8 hours their judgement is so impaired they decide "Fuck it, it's just one line of code, it doesn't need to be safe."

I do wonder if we'll start to see more and more problems with Rust code. Not problems caused by negligence, but problems caused by sheer exhaustion. Negligence can be fixed. Exhaustion I'm less certain about.

A lot of these bugs in Rust code that keep going viral are stupid. But they also stink of a programmer utterly and thoroughly tapped out fighting the borrow checker. So mentally exhausted at the endless walls put up between the simple task they have to do that they've been working through one by one, that at the end of 8 hours their judgement is so impaired they decide "Fuck it, it's just one line of code, it doesn't need to be safe."

This isn't the way safety people think. They think the problem is not that people are tired of fighting their burdensome safety measures and so bypass them; they think the problem is that it's possible to bypass their safety measures, and so see this as reason to put in more controls.

That's not my objection to Rust -- Rust was created by and is controlled by my Culture War enemies, who inject their beliefs into their actions a lot more than even Richard Stallman ever did. But it is an objection to Rust.

Sounds almost like you're advocating SafeStart: Coding Edition.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats