(This is why I'm not in charge of things, mind.)
I don't see how the RTFM mentality and what you call "laid back" mentality are compatible.
Imo, Arch is one of the more severe/strict distros and communities.
Guess it's all perception.
To people who are socially sensitive it can be very stressful to work with these folks. When I say laid-back I figure I mean that it is more tolerant/friendly to autistic behaviour. The low standard for social skills brings in a lot of people who do productive work, at the expense of the perception of people who don't work well with autistic types. More men and boys are autistic (or close to it) than women and girls, so you'll see an even bigger split here than usual.
Basically, this domain name is typical autistic weeaboo trash (in keeping with the weeaboo handle). It's obviously not a literal endorsement of child trafficking; probably a morsel of dark humour which is more offensive than humorous if you're sensitive; or perhaps it's a tool for his work at NCMEC.
Emotional sensitivity is effectively a cancer to these communities, because a large portion of the members are incapable of it. If it takes hold in the Arch Linux community, it could collapse almost entirely.
HN has a lot of sensitive/agreeable people, so (understandable) outrage in this thread has cost me ~50 karma. It's a matter of personality, whether you see this as a sign of a healthy community, or possibly the end of an era.
Seems like this guy has a history of being a grade too abrasive for different communities. I understand why he sounds so upset in his response here.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-it-s-diffe...
The only imaginable purpose of this domain name was to elicit exactly the reaction that he got, and/or to cause emotions in people that don't complain. Such an intent to inflict emotional harm is also not consistent with what is commonly thought of as autism, especially not if it succeeds. Indeed, autism is almost defined by an inability to sense others' emotions, and therefore also to influence then.
If anything, this behaviour resembles sociopathy more closely.
We could have the same scenario with smart alecks committing code that has "fun" var and function names.
So it is okay to remove stuff just because somebody was offended? Why nobody is banning Rammstein concerts then? I'm pretty sure many people will find band's name offencive.
Yep.
Because they choose not to. Each venue, organisation, or city which lawfully has influence over such events has the right to refuse. Neither case is "banning".
2001: "Rammstein were unable to play their show yesterday at the Astoria in London due to significant restrictions to their stageshow and pyrotechnics. The band feel it would be unfair to their fans, to see a show that would have become highly compromised. If these issues can be resolved the band promises to return to the UK later in the year for live shows. Rammstein apologize for letting their fans down due to a problem which was out of their hands"
Bands get to name themselves how they like. Concert venues get to decide whether they care about the name.
"Loli" is a reference to underage girls, usually in a sexual context. Some people will be offended by this, and it's up to any organisation whether they want to be associated with this.
Similarly, if you tell someone "smhost" is offensive, and describe _why_ and _how_ it's offensive, it's up to them to decide whether they want to continue to be associated with it, or if they want to change.
If someone gets offended, you look and say "Why were they offended". Ask yourself if it's reasonable, if the case is that the name is referencing trafficking underage girls then you might think, OK, maybe this is a joke, but it is something that a reasonable person might get offended by and if you want to foster a professional atmosphere then you would change it.
I think if you went to the the arch maintainers and asked them to change the name pacman because you were traumatised by nightmares of the game pacman as a child they would tell you to get lost. However, that isn't really what is happening here.
(I like to imagine all the children telling their parents they were going to London to "study with ISIS" causing huge parental conniptions until the penny dropped.)
> But it would be a bit distasteful to use it as a new name. Especially if you use it intentionally with the intent of causing offence.
I think that your second sentence is an important qualification. I almost wished that they'd stuck with the name, just to emphasise that a bunch of terrorist asshats don't get to dictate what words others can use; I think that such a useage would have been (very mildly) heroic rather than offensive.
At least in my original post, a key part of my argument is that no-one is requiring alucard to change the name of the mirror. The only question is whether the mirror will be listed. Thus, I think it is analogous to asking whether I would remove a link to ycombinator.com from a page I controlled if I were offended by the URL, or if I might try to hide posts from smhost if I were offended by his or her handle; and either of those seems like a reasonable response (even if taking offense itself would clearly be unreasonable).
Let me reword this then. Why should an entity remove something from their listings when the offended entity can remove it from the local listing on its machine? The thing is - in the first case we are talking about public lists available for everybody. Why should the majority of users be left without and additional source of distribution (for example)?
But yes, obviously it's up to Arch maintainers wether they want this to be there or not.
I think the complaint is quite petty, and it doesn't really solve any problems. Approximately nobody is going to have a worse opinion of Arch Linux because of the content of a url in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist, and it's basically a waste of time to address this as an issue.
It's just as much of a waste of time to defend it. Arch has hundreds of mirrors and dozens come and go every month. Dropping one takes less time than it took me to reply to you here.
If by "defend" you mean "not spend more money on registering yet another domain", then I'd say it's worth defending. A hundred dollars is worth at least a few emails, especially if it is at the expense of a productive community member, on behalf of some anonymous whiner.
PS, domain names on non-egregious TLDs are 5-10 bucks a year.