Anduril banned from recruiting on NixOS forums

Everything vaguely anti-Trump/Putin gets flagged here now.

Does the flagging hide it from any feeds, though?

To each their own, but if I was running a job forum, I would also be reluctant to provide ad space to companies building instruments of death and pushing regressive politics. Is this really baffling to you?

> If you don’t want your software used for things you don’t approve of, don’t give it away for free.

They aren't stopping, or even trying to stop, Anduril from using it, though.

Your comment has changed substantially from its initial version.

For the latest version: I think Anduril knows who they're looking for and how to get those people. This commercial, for example, is quite deliberate in filtering out the people they don't want https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXQrci3Wff8

The idea being that you wield so much more power than your enemies, and have so much knowledge of their movements, that they are not an actual threat to you, and their knowledge of this prevents them from actually committing violence? And that force can be used to stop them from committing violence before they actually get the chance to hurt you?

I'm not trying to pull a gotcha, I'm legitimately curious to see if that is an inaccurate framing.

edit: my comment no longer makes sense after the parent comment was edited, the original talked about how after being on both sides, they've seen how tech can be an effective deterrent

It's not so much the mission, as it is Anduril, and despite the fallability of taking an early survey of comments, I'd wager a good set are communicating something similar.

>still those new players cannot recruit a broader base of folks.

to be fair this comment from the thread after the author clarified that non-citizens can apply sums the situation up:

"Would you be willing to assist the United States in an invasion/annexation of Greenland? As a Danish citizen, I think it would be slightly counterproductive to work for a company that may potentially invade me in the coming future."

I would actually sleep better if the PR damage is big enough so that the recruitment base shrinks until the risk of invading a free and democratic ally is off the table

[flagged]

I think they are very different situations. Automattic (and their leadership) used their power over the WordPress open source project as a weapon in a legal dispute with a major competitor.

What has Anduril done? Tried to sponsor some conference. Post a job ad on a project forum dedicated to that purpose - both are activities which, in the general case, the project welcomes - and then project members object, not because of anything they’ve done in the project itself, but because they don’t like the industry Anduril is in, who its customers are, etc

Seems to me like completely different situations. The WordPress situation makes Automattic look bad in my eyes, while the Anduril situation makes NixOS look bad in my eyes

Basecamp / DHH are maybe also good candidates for that list.

Original post as follows (edit: I have no affiliation with this company, I am just reposting what they wrote):

Anduril Industries is hiring NixOS engineers to work on electromagnetic warfare products. This is a unique opportunity to use Nix at a large scale in an embedded setting. Anduril has adopted Nix at large and we use IOG’s generously maintained Haskell.nix project to build all of our Haskell code and ship it to thousands of customer assets across the globe. If you have Nix/NixOS/Nixpkgs experience and are interested in any of:

Embedded Linux Cross compilation Haskell Radio systems Enterprise CI/CD FPGAs please do drop me a line at travis@anduril.com, as well as submitting your application to our online portal here: Job Application for Embedded NixOS Engineer, EW at Anduril Industries . To tackle a few common questions:

Yes, Anduril is an American defense technology company. We build weapons systems for the United States and its allies. This is an on-site role at Anduril headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. Our team is building software for hardware products, so physical presence in our RF lab is often required throughout the course of software development and testing. Remote work would only be considered for candidates with something extraordinary to offer to our team. I’d be happy to answer any other questions in the thread below.

To oversimplify and only pick one aspect:

If you have this ansible:

  - package:
      state: present
      name:
        - foo
        - bar
        - baz

    packages = with pkgs; [
      foo
      bar
      baz
    ]

[0] I mean, insofar as packages are ever "installed" in nix. But for our purposes using that word is fine.

[1] Generally. Like, nothing prevents you from creating a python virtualenv or dropping config files around or coloring outside the lines in other ways, but using the system in the straightforward idiomatic way does leave you with everything encoded in a single config.

If you have an ansible playbook that runs "apt-get install docker" you'll get a different version over time, even with no changes to your playbook.

With nix, every package version change, every single diff, is a git commit which you can roll back and track a breakage to.

If you want, you can run your own apt repos, pin all your apt package versions, etc and make ubuntu a little more reproducible, but it's hard to do it. The system fights against you.

yaml also sucks, and nix is a better language.

Use whatever you want.

Difficult to summarize, but the short answer is: immutability, reproducibility, and reversibility (i.e. you can revert/de-revert almost any change instantly).

It's on another level, as compared to Ubuntu, but it's also much more intrinsically demanding.

And lately it has unfortunately become a culture war battleground.

NixOS is infrastructure-as-code, for real this time.

(The downside is that now you have to write code.)

> Good, private corporations should not be allowed to leverage a public utility like this as their advertisement soapbox.

It’s a jobs subforum. It exists literally for corporations to advertise job opportunities to relevant and likely interested communities.

You do realize that corporate contributions power a huge chunk of the free software ecosystem, yes?