I though the "seppuku" line was hyperbole, but there it is in black and white.

So, no the comment is not tantamount to saying "I disagree with these ideas". It is possible to disagree with an idea that is not horribly bad. It is possible to disagree with an idea that is quite smart, just with a trade off I dont prefer.

Lol, did the perpetrators commit seppuku after the illegitimate DAO fork?

That said, a lawyer really should've reviewed it and told them a contract isn't the place for jokes.

Maybe it's just because I'm in my 40s, but I want my job to be boring.

39 members of Heaven’s Gate drank phenobarbital and died, believing this would allow them to escape Earth on the Hale-Bopp comet.

900 members of the People’s Temple (Jim Jones) drank cyanide-laced koolaid (actually FlavorAid) and died. That’s where the phrase “drink the koolaid” came from.

This would by itself be enough to start packing all your office things into a cardboard box.

> Chancellor Adolf Hitler today proclaimed the arrival of the Nazi millennium, predicting that the next 1,000 years would not witness another revolution in Germany.

When the document went out on that Friday in March, employees were told to commit to the principles in the mandate by Monday or quit their jobs, according to the lawsuit brought by Kayleen Fulton, a Boulder woman who was fired from the Ethereum Foundation after she led employee resistance to the suicide pledge."

.. wow. When your employer starts posting like Yukio Mishima of course you sue them. I have a new entry in "most unprofessional thing I've ever seen". And no, using the "should not be taken seriously" defense is also hugely unprofessional.

I would at least want hazard pay added to my contract if my job description was to include such a role.

...well, except the fact that they fire people over it, and don't listen to concerns where people don't feel comfortable with some of the clauses. Yeah at this point this crossed into a cult behavior and is unacceptable. But the problem here is not memes, at least for me.

Well she was too effective at organizing a resistance. Can't have that.

The pattern that’s currently in tech already existed (and continues to exist) in the world of finance. Tech is just its latest expression.

At least the AI death cults are offering a doomsday scenario which is somewhat plausible. A little more iffy on the details then straightforwards nuclear Armageddon perhaps, but not dismissable out of hand. And compared to traditional human perversions, afaik they haven't gotten much further than summer of love type stuff, just with a bit more of a pessimistic twist. They have nothing on an average crackhouse.

Overall, I think it all qualifies as a pretty fun and interesting weirdness on the scale of human experience, which regularly goes much...much darker than a bunch of kids living in sharehouses and worrying about the future.

  haunts Silicon Valley.

>again, something of a banal observation, but i think contributing to the general feeling of powerlessness and rage in america today is the extent to which our elites engage in such flagrant, grotesque, even performative contempt for the rest of america

>i don't exactly think andrew carnegie loved the little guy exactly--he was, at best, the good cop to frick's bad cop--but he at least put on the appearance of charity, decorum, civic-mindedness

>meanwhile today's elites mostly seem interested in apocalypse bunkers and sex cults and getting real jacked on testosterone and ranting about the woke mind virus

>regarding the rest of us as, at best, hogs bound for the slaughter, and not even particularly hiding it

https://bsky.app/profile/sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com/pos...

Are people seriously believing the Ethereum Foundation is looking for its members to commit suicide in case they don't publish full source-code? :P Either I'm massively misreading what the outrage is about, or I think this is the point I stop understanding how the world works. Are people taking that image seriously???

I mean, you've no doubt spent the last 10 years hearing about 4chan and donald trumps connection.

Just because something _could_ be considered some kind of satire, assuming we should all default to that interpretation basically dissolved the social system everywhere.

"its just a joke bro" is not a useful critical thinking skill.

No, what is the connection?

This is like the typical nonsense when you're negotiating with a company where their actual practice has diverged from their standard contracts. You point something out, and the response comes back "that's just boilerplate, we don't enforce that." OK, that's cool. If you don't enforce it then you can take it out of the contract. At no point is my response ever to say "OK, I trust you, I'll sign as-is." Even if I do trust them.

Contacts are still contracts even if you put pictures in it. You definitely don't understand how the world works if you don't get that.

- The money is significantly better than my other options

- I believe the company not to be serious about the suicide clause

- I believe the suicide clause to be non-binding in any jurisdiction that applies to myself or the foundation

- I didn't believe the company / foundation would take my refusal to kill myself at a later time as a license to have me killed

The last one is a bit out there, but in the world of crypto, you can never be too sure.

Also, regardless of whether I would sign, I think it's in pretty poor taste and a bright amber flag (but not quite a red flag) if an employer thinks this is a funny or acceptable thing to put into a contract.

It's also in very poor taste and reeks of coercion to send out a manifesto or mandate like this on a Friday and expect people to sign or agree by Monday or lose their jobs. They likely wouldn't be able to have it reviewed by a lawyer over the weekend if they chose to do so.

How is this in any way NOT a red flag? In what universe is this a neutral signal about the health of an organization that manages a significant amount of capital?

> It's also in very poor taste and reeks of coercion to send out a manifesto or mandate like this on a Friday and expect people to sign or agree by Monday or lose their jobs. They likely wouldn't be able to have it reviewed by a lawyer over the weekend if they chose to do so.

In sum total, "this sounds very very bad but not necessarily a red flag". Absurd.

If it doesn't matter, it shouldn't be in the contract. I don't tend to have a lot of drafting power in employment contracts, but pushing back on meaningless contract provisions is a lot easier than pushing back on substantive ones.

It's at least worth getting them on the record, in writing, as 'we absolutely insist on this (bullshit) contract provision being in here, it is required for your continued employment'.

You wouldn’t say “Dogs are mammals. Therefore mammals are not mammals.”

The text of the first amendment only asserts that "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging the freedom of speech", so signing away your ability to speak isn't in conflict with the Constitution.

you sure as shit can of your own volition and/or with a private company

And they often will drive millions and millions of dollars of crypto toward these ventures, often anonymously.

You have to read these kinds of things in the context of the target audience, which is very real.

Source: I made it out.

Don't say it isn't so!? The community founded on circumventing existing financial structures are anti-authority? Next you're gonna tell me anarchists don't like individual leaders, or that socialists care about healthcare.

Source: I suppose also "made it out" although it wasn't hard, I left my job, like any other industry. Worth knowing as well that the cryptocurrency ecosystem isn't nearly as "internally" aligned as some people want you to believe, there is a large range in weirdness in the ecosystem, not just what parent above shared.

There's an irony embedded in both positions. Everyone cares about government, anarchists care about overthrowing the existing government in order to replace it with their own version. Similarly, everyone cares about healthcare, socialists care about other people paying for their healthcare.

But that's the thing; they aren't. They just want to be the authority.

Whatever solution we come up with, will work against all sources of warming or environmental damage. Although if one of those measures is banning Bitcoin mining, I wouldn't complain about it.

Alright we will see how long that lasts. If they want to enforce their “contracts” they will need a court (i.e. an authority) to order the opposite party to abide by their contract and if they don’t, police (i.e. an authority) will force them to court and enforce what the court says.

Bitcoin originally imposed this idea on payments, and Ethereum attempts to create this computational contract system for the non monetary consideration of contracts (the harder half of the contract).

There's a big difference between anti-authority and a-hole, knee-jerk opposition defiance disorder, but even if you're right wouldn't the people being asked to sign this contract be the last people to do so?

No, this is a legal document. You need to rip subculturally-driven context out of your mind and read it as a legal document.

Contract law is surprisingly reasonable, typically focused on enforcing what people expect to be enforced and not standing on weird arcane rituals

I suspect a good lawyer could get someone out of a "breach of contract" suit by arguing their client reasonably believed that what they had signed was not actually a contract since it was decorated like a DnD manual and included an obligation to commit seppuku...

The people who actually control Ethereum are client dev teams. There are two groups, one for the execution layer that runs code and the other for the consensus layer that handles the actual blockchain part. No proposal can get marked as stable and entered into an official hard fork unless they approve it.

The foundation has no say over these decisions. In fact they decided not to make their own consensus client on purpose, to make sure everyone is running non EF controlled code after the merge. And they do everything they can to encourage client diversity. It's not perfect but you can't compare it to Tezos or Polygon where one company runs everything.

Oh see it was just a joke - a joke, get it? ha ha, see by watching how many employees were complaining, we retracted it - just a "joke", right? after we put it out there saying nothing whatsoever and demanding a yes/no loyalty pledge.

it was boundary testing. this company should go out of business.

Corporations put out all sorts of fluff. If employees took it seriously then everyone working at facebook should have a VR helmet on their head 24/7.

Peanuts. It is still the rich that spend the most in illegal things from bribes, tax evasion, etc. even for countries trying to avoid international sanctions.

The bigger the more they profit from crime and lack of accontability.

Like, seriously, what the hell? Did he get jealous of all the attention the Zizians were getting or something?

Just take the money and funnel it into useless already rich people that do crap like this and are incapable of doing anything useful

LLMs are helpful to regular people from the start with the ChatGPT launch.

This is insane. Is this something like a judgment or reverse loyalty test? “If you sign something like this, you’re too dumb to stay?”

Very curious is this pattern of infantilization and sensitive tech orgs and companies. It seems to have started around the dotcom boom-bust period. I remember when Google first came out with "Do no evil" and the primary colors and the whole cute cartoons, and all sorts of red flags went up for me. I truly wonder if somewhere the type of cognitive high performer coupled with requirement for being effectively chumps/controlable arrived at this formula.

I would nope the fuck out at that alone. That's some "billion year contract" cultist shit right there.

I remember asking about the Crockford License's clause "This software should be used for Good, not Evil" in my Noogler training. And then having Chris DiBona need to tell me "for the purposes of this particular license, Google is Evil". Because the problem is that "good" and "evil" could mean anything in a court of law; they are 100% up to the jury to decide. And so any sane firm that wants to limit its risk and stick to predictable areas of law will not use them.

Yes, it's pretty clear to me that ritual seppuku is not meant to be taken literally. Juries are instructed to consider the text of the contract carefully though: do you have confidence that 12 people chosen at random will reach the same interpretation you do?

The first time I sat on a jury, all of my idealism about juries went out the window.

The (very serious criminal case) jury I was on was encouraged to report anything like that to the bailiff, who would relay it to the judge.

There's no avoiding defenestration.

For what it's worth, I probably could have wriggled out of jury service on medical grounds but made sure to do the opposite.

In the UK, lawyers do not get to pick and choose jurors; jurors are entirely random. The only way a juror can be 'excused' is if it turns out they are related to the defendent or something.

There are some people - oftentimes very literate people - that mistake having no opinion for being stupid. It's very far from that. Oftentimes being neutral and keeping your mouth shut is the smartest thing you can do. There's frequently a popular image of someone who is smart as someone who is very quick to form judgments and articulate them with little information; this can be a useful skill in certain situations but is the opposite of what our legal system wants in a juror.

Having a degree is not an attribute that you can be dismissed "for cause" for, and the attorneys have a limited number of preremptory challenges available. At least in my area, where > 50% have college degrees, if they tried to strike everyone with a college degree they wouldn't have a jury pool left.

They're selecting for neutrality. What both lawyers and the judge all want to see is someone who doesn't have an opinion on the case before it begins. That neutrality could be a product of them being easily swayed by arguments, or it could be someone who is coldly logical and makes a decision purely based on the evidence presented.

I watched about 65 people get dismissed, and what they all had in common was they were visibly emotional before the trial had even begun. That is what gets you dismissed. Meanwhile, about half the folks in the jury box didn't even realize that the fact that we were still sitting in the jury box meant we would probably be serving on the jury, we were still like "Oh, I'm probably going to get dismissed because I'm X kind of person and the lawyers aren't going to want X kind of person." If you can think of it that dispassionately, you are the type of person the lawyers want.

The person was the oldest or second oldest in the room. I don't think that was a coincidence.

(I was definitely not the oldest in the room - I think I was like the 2nd or 3rd youngest.)

May I ask in which state?

In every state I've been on a jury, the foreman was chosen by the other jurors.

The person was the oldest or second oldest in the room. I don't think that was a coincidence.

This was never the case in any of the juries I was on.

MA is the outlier a lot of the times when it comes to court law it seems.

It's hard to believe there are still people who think having a witness take the stand in their own defense is a good thing. The only trial I've been in where that happened, the witness did what every defense attorney fears: he made things worse for himself than they were before (and things were pretty bad: it took us less than half an hour to convict).

How do you know this, when in the previous sentence you admitted:

I have never been called for jury duty

I've been on juries three times so far. The lawyers absolutely did not filter for people who could likely be swayed.

Or perhaps you confused "people who are likely to be swayed" with "people who have an open mind."

You will feel like an intellectual titan.

https://youtu.be/-C-JoyNuQJs?t=2386

    Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company -- I don't want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I'll just say their initials -- IBM [laughter] saying that they want to use something I wrote.

    Because I put this on everything I write, now. They want to use something that I wrote in something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give them a special license for that?

    Of course. So I wrote back -- this happened literally two weeks ago -- "I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

    [laughter and applause]

    And the attorney wrote back and said: "Thanks very much, Douglas!"

They can enforce that all employees adhere to FOSS principles or would be subject to termination. Many for profit companies have the exact opposite policy.

I'd draw your attention to last year's article... "Employee commits suicide after MongoDB fired her during mental health leave" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46403128 (for any wondering, it went to arbitration - https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/62342462/Surman_et_... )

They blew up their only defence, which is to claim it's not meant seriously, by firing employees who refused to commit to the message of the document.

Getting fired for refusing to be the victim of a crime is... well I'm not a lawyer but I think that's pretty damning for the EF.

Legal documents are perfectly literal, and no place for satire. There is a reason lawyerese is so perfectly dry and lifeless.

Good to see they've successfully expanded the scope since, and lifted the restrictions on the purposes for which they could be considered evil.

Everyone's happy and no one can fault you.

Sarcasm, irony, or hyperbole are all fine in a joke. Less so in a binding document someone is required to sign to keep their healthcare and income.

This is obviously a joke, not a legally binding "suicide pledge". Signing this is a culture fit test and did its job at filtering out people like this Karen.

And sure, they can have that conversation in court. But my understanding is that this contract (that was never signed) is not even what the parties are arguing about in this case. It is a piece of evidence presented to discredit the Ethereum foundation and makes for a good news article.

> Fulton, who had earned a salary of $195,000 in her role at the Ethereum Foundation, sued for disability discrimination, retaliation, interference with her rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act, unfair employment practices and related claims. Her lawsuit notes that the Ethereum Foundation “does not hire or pay its United States staff in its own name,” but instead uses employer-of-record service companies.

You're looking at this from the wrong direction. The suicide pledge is clearly unenforceable.

"We put jokes in our contracts" invites questions about which other provisions are subtler ones.

If employees were told they were to agree to seppuku for violation of a company principle during an onboarding meeting, would it be any different?

You can't have both.

Cryptocurrency is not a serious thing, the people behind it have demonstrated this time and time again.

Good question.

As someone who long ago briefly worked for a company that turned out to be mostly staffed by Scientologists (1990s EarthLink, before the MindSpring merger), I'd have noped out before the suicide pact thing, when reading this:

> Outlining leadership’s vision for the foundation for the next 1,000 years

Culty is not cute.

1. If you take an anime image with three cats and a cute girl about a Source Seppeku License seriously, you have no place in any job that requires thinking. There are many jobs that are beneficial to society that don't require thinking, in fact most of them are more beneficial than working in crypto. There's no shame in admitting that you're better suited to be a janitor or a garbageman or something that is rote but valuable.

2. The Ethereum Foundation is, very obviously, not a serious company. I'd have reservations about Microsoft behaving like this but you signed up to work for a fucking cryptocurrency foundation. They can be as deeply unserious as they like; being unserious is the entire point. If you were perhaps expecting something serious it's for the best to part ways with an unserious company, there's an obvious culture misfit.

So, by walking back and removing this pledge from the document, isn't that "removal of any part of this license"? I guess that we're about to find out what the pledge really means now that the authors have violated it.

You go first!

Anyone in a position of power knows that. It’s fucked up, and that’s the kind of dynamic the workplace is built upon.

except Fulton did not "make a stink" but only pointed it out, if Bastian Aue wanted to not continue rewarding those who actually make the stink, he should have fired whoever was involved with inserting the offensive memes and imagery into legal documents... this reflects very poorly on the Ethereum Foundation... any small sized team of cryptographers can recreate effective competition in this space, especially aided with LLMs.

I wounder what this guy would think of unions...

Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't be a rat and actually follow your words no matter how profitable it is to break it and, you know, be sure to pledge your life for it. If you say you make it for public good, then do it and never lie. While I understand the discomfort, I don't understand why people are so protective about being thieves and liars. In theory such a pledge must never affect you if you behave like a proper human being.