Hey. I was banned from types.pl for having interviewed at the NSA 13 years ago, when I was 20 years old. I'm grateful for a new home on mathstodon.
While I strongly appreciate the good-natured support from many of you, I am very unhappy with anyone who is going after the types.pl moderators personally for this and not just respectfully discussing the situation, and I'm personally extremely sorry if my Tweet inspired any of those actions. If I see this at all I will be escalating to SIGPLAN CARES. (The moderators include very junior students, and the instance was not intended to be what it became.)
In a recent post I mentioned working with the department of defense as faculty. I mean that in two capacities: (1) receiving DARPA grants for verification work, and (2) organizing a workshop through the department of defense on the security risks of generative AI for code. I am always public about this with students, and I always ask students before funding them on DARPA grants, making it clear I will source funding elsewhere if the student strongly opposes defense funding.
This is the kind of thing I wanted to discuss after seeing Oppenheimer; I'm a bit bummed that instead I got banned for a post about something that happened 13 years ago, when I was not in the PL community at all, and basically lived under a rock with respect to everything except math, Dance Dance Revolution, and competitive running.
I also recognize that server admins can make and enforce their own rules. I still wish I could have just received notice to port my account so that I could have kept my followers.
Anyways, hi, please help me rebuild my friend network here.
I mentioned in that post that the war in Ukraine had changed my views about my ties with the department of defense in my capacity as faculty. This is true. I used to feel very torn about accepting any money from the department of defense for my verification work, or giving the department of defense advice about anything related to my research area of expertise, but recently I have been a lot less torn because of this war. My point with the previous post was that maybe feeling a lot less torn is shortsighted on my part. Maybe this was obvious to a lot of people, but it wasn't obvious to me.
@TaliaRinger I think it is indeed a little shortsighted but it is important we have a venue where it’s possible to talk about it ;-)
(Meaning, i don’t think Ukraine is a good reason to change one’s mind about defense funding; but generally, i do not have a problem a priori with defense funding and it matters a lot what you are actually doing.)
@jonmsterling @TaliaRinger I I’m a staunchly anti-war libertarian and am WELL aware of the shit show that is the last 70+ years of American foreign policy but like…I also have friends who serve in the National Guard and doing work that could result in them being less likely to die because of bad equipment or planning is something that I would be proud to contribute to
@jonmsterling @TaliaRinger there aren’t clear cut answers here, and as Jon says it matters what specifically your work is being used for.