Julia: a post-mortem

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I think that people reading this thread should be aware of some deceptive behavior going on here:

For context, @dariush-bahrami is the person who became upset when a thread they started the other day was rate-limited in order to keep the discussion from getting too heated, and eventually closed, when it did become too heated. Since then he appears to be on a bit of a mission to bring negative attention to the project.

Sock puppetry is generally considered bad in internet forums for reasons that are quite well demonstrated here: sock puppets tend to be used by people to make it appear that more people agree with them than actually do, when, in fact, it is just one person dishonestly amplifying their own voice. In this case, the sock puppetry was fairly easy to detect using information available to admins (which is exactly why it’s available to them).

In addition to this deceptive behavior on Discourse, there is more. The recently posted article “https://hackernoon.com/is-julia-a-misuse-of-free-software-in-the-name-of-open-source-wy20354r” which tries to “cancel” Julia’s discourse moderators for, um, moderating, is also very likely written by @dariush-bahrami using the alias “Henning Rousseau”. How can I tell this? When you copy a link from Discourse, your user name is embedded in the link you get. Guess what user name is embedded in the Discourse links in that article? You guessed it: @dariush-bahrami. I have saved the current content of the article here since it seems likely to get “fixed” once I post this. It is possible that Henning Rousseau is a real “free software activist” as his bio says, and that @dariush-bahrami sent him these links, and he decided to write this article using those links. In that case, however, Mr Rousseau is not much of an online activist since his entire internet presence consists of this one article published yesterday. It seems far more likely that Henning Rousseau is a fake person invented yesterday as an alias under which @dariush-bahram could publish a critical article about Julia.

Of course, none of this chicanery invalidates the points that are made in this thread or in the article. Fake people can make valid points. I should also point out that Chris von Csefalvay, the author of the article linked in @mashgholam’s (aka @dariush-bahrami) original post here, is very much a real person and not a sock puppet. So please read what they say and see if you agree or not. It does, however, only seem fair that people reading this should be aware that they are being manipulated into believing that more people are agreeing with these positions than actually are.

@dariush-bahrami and @SadeghPouriyan, in case you were not already aware: sock puppetry is not acceptable here, especially for the clear purpose of deceiving people. Please stop.

p.s. I suspect that the faces [1] [2] [3] used for these three fake identities are made by a GAN, but they’re pretty good and low resolution, which makes it a bit hard to tell. Anyone know how to detect GAN generated faces?

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