Interesting! I didn't know they were the same person, but coming from a queer perspective, I'm inclined to just treat people as they ask to be treated. If someone is doing impressive work, I think it's important to respect the way they want to be treated, even if it's non-traditional.

Why do we care?

Ashai Linux is obviously a high-IQ effort and we are very fortunate they are motivated to work on this instead of something else (like ML)

I actually don’t care, and I think the community is better off being explicitly welcoming of folks of all kinds.

Because it's creepy and weird? TempleOS and ReiserFS were also both impressive high IQ efforts but that doesn't make the personal antics of their primary developers off topic for discussion.

Your obsession with how people decide to present themselves is what's creepy and weird.

HideousKojima is right. It is creepy and weird. Not that it matters, I just care that he keeps pumpin' out the goods. He could walk around town dressed like Count Dracula, for all I care. I'm never going to meet him.

Sometimes you just gotta separate the art from the artist.

I love your work on Dolphin (I recognized your name before even pulling up your profile) but... no. Emulator devs, people who work on low level reverse engineering like Hector Martin, and other hacker types like them often live in a weird bubble of weirdness. You do you, man, just don't expect normal people to treat your bizarre personal behavior as normal. Especially when it's stuff done loudly and publicly.

Some parts of the programming community has always embraced counterculture/things the public sees as bizzare. Surprise surprise, it's also the part that spends a lot more on the computer than even the already addicted average programmer. So they tend to be godly at the craft compared to us lesser mortals that still maintain some normal social behaviour and they can produce amazing stuff like this. Be thankful for it.

You can be thankful for the work done and still think marcan acts weird and is off-putting with his "asahi" vtuber persona.

We knew you could, but you might as well not. Even if you don't see the empathy angle, who benefits from alienating people who do amazing work for free?

Even if you restrict his work to technology, it might be a wash at best.

Wasn't he one of those leading the charge in getting Cloudflare to drop a site due to bullying allegations? I think I'd rather have Cloudflare be neutral than have a few Linux drivers for new MacBooks a couple of years sooner than otherwise.

> Wasn't he one of those leading the charge in getting Cloudflare to drop a site due to bullying allegations?

Yikes, is this true? That would be wild - do you have sources?

I didn't follow the saga as closely as I should have, perhaps, given the gravity. But this* didn't take long to find, only shortly preceding the issue.

* https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1409176583433179137

But I don't see it as alienating. Marcan seems an intelligent person so he knows that his vtuber persona is weird. I suppose other people noticing and commenting on it is something he likes or even encourages. It's like... people who dye their hair green, or who wear thick golden chains or teeth grills. They want the attention.

As someone who is weird along many dimensions, I do expect people to treat harmless weirdness as normal. Expanding the set of acceptable behaviors to encompass all harmless ones is an important part of social progress.

Maybe consider that the loudness you resent is the result of reflexivity, and in a world where no-one would flip an eyelid over such persona creation and whatnot, there would only be the loudness you'd mistakenly perceive.

I'm wondering if you call authors using pen names "weird".

If I ever at all did youtube videos of anything at all, I would more likely than not adopt some persona (and give it a weird accent to boot) so it would distinctly be not "me".

What’s “normal”? You?

Oh, heavens no. But I'm self aware enough (and socially well adjusted enough) to have a decent idea of what is and isn't normal, and I don't pretend that my abnormal behaviors are in fact normal.

People have used pen names all the time.

Look at you, HideousKojima. What's your real name? Why do you pretend to be this online alias? Is it normal to hide your identity and interact as if you were someone else?

It's generally considered poor form to have a pseudonymous alias that interacts with your "real" account while pretending to be a separate person.

Take it with as much grains of salt as you want: IMO we're watching anime eat the world, Just like software did. Anime style audio-visual stimuli are synthetic data with human and its sexual drive in loop, now also connected with Internet mob judgement system like Twitter for a decade or so. Instagram style beauty filters and Diffusion ML models are no technical match, as their feedback loops are much longer, more constricted by ideologisms as well as by physicality.

Some platforms like TikTok and App Store had been fighting to un-realize the shift but that's only been delaying eventuality. We are already seeing increasingly beautified Tim Cook, anthropomorphized Earth, and two Chinese anime games on Apple presentations last year, there's only going to be more.

Bruh there's a huge difference between murdering your wife and being a vtuber. The latter has never hurt anyone.

People mostly care that he wants to censor anyone mentioning it.

Streisand effect basically.

V-tubers in general are very strange, and attract fanbases of strange individuals. A sort of natural attraction.

Is...that Hector Martin's vtuber persona? I was under the impression that they were different people.

There is some evidence to that effect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35237006

(Note that I'm not necessarily endorsing any specific views about this, just linking to a past discussion.)

It almost certainly is. But it's never been officially confirmed and I doubt Hector ever would as it was never his intention.

How would you suggest that people treat them?

because it’s fun