@mecayotl, in my view, your post and the consequences of it, is a worse poison that that of the actions by Ken.
Please take your time and mental energy to answer these questions truthfully:
- What gap was it you think Ken saw and was trying to fill? (A C++ and Go implementation of Reticulum already exists and is actively being used)
- Why is it OK that a person (Ken in this example), starts Claude with an initial message stating:
"You owe the reference fidelity at exactly two boundaries: The wire. ... The behavior. ... Between those two boundaries, the model is yours."
- Ken makes the machine copy RNS and gives it free reign to design the whole thing to its own confused liking, he hides his tracks and do not give attribution - Claiming this project is his own doing. Why do you endorse this behavior?
- Why is it OK for Ken to market his Prns implementation as 89x faster than Reticulum, when it was a 100% false claim? (As Mark shows in his detailed description of the matter)
- Why it is OK to market Prns as "Enforced and Audited" on his website, encouraging users to switch to his "Complete" implementation?
- Where exactly in Mark's posts is he bullying Ken? I fail to see it.
In your post you endorse these actions, a pat on the back to a person for behaving very, very badly. What right did Ken have, to steal 10+ years of work - And make fake market hype about his superior Reticulum implementation in his own name, and for "the greater good of humanity"? Tell me honestly, what right did he have to do this? You defend him so you must have a reason.
It sounds like you say: Awwww, but Ken had good intentions, he is a good boy, give him some slack, he means well deep down...
With the behavior that he shows, I say BS to that pat on the back crap! If we cannot call awful behavior awful, if we cannot call a bad job a bad job - We loose something very precious and our human race will degrade rapidly! When I behave badly or if I do a bad job at something, I want people to tell me, so that I can improve and grow as a human and actually learn something in the process.
Just the fact alone that Ken's project was heavily marketed (he was asking for money!) by "the fact" that his implementation was 89x faster than the RNS, puts him in the category of people unfit to handle a project like this.
Whether this was intentional or not is besides the point (as Mark already wrote himself).
IF it was intentional -> It reveals him as a deliberate bad actor
IF it was unintentional -> It reveals an immense laziness and unwillingness to review his LLM generated code. If he did not even review his test setup on which he based his marketing on, how many other catastrophic code sections lurks in the 637,000-lines of rust code?
I know I am not fit to start a project like this, and I am fine with this. If you want to develop take it seriously, if you want to be a user enjoy and play and build small things in your community.
I think a lot of people forget something here:
This is not a game engine, this is not a hobby project - This is infrastructure!
The only people that seems to take this fact serious is Mark + a few others.
These machines, these LLM's, are the most powerful tool the human hand/consciousness has ever wielded. They have immense capacity to produce amazing results - And immense capacity to produce a heap on nonsensical nonsense. Mark's impressive use of an LLM to compose a coherent and to the point analysis of Prns was in the first of these categories, Prns itself is in the latter.
Let's not try to dress it up in good intentions, this is how evil will win in the end. Actions are actions, no matter the intention behind.
And your are right, there is not centralized power in Zen. But for the Zen mentality to exist and to be taken to heart, we as the community needs to remove the noise (aka Prns in this instance).
As for the rest of us reading this: support Mark the way he supports the network - not by shouting louder, but by checking the evidence in your own words, with your own effort. That is all any of us can do, and it is more than enough to keep this community vibrant and alive.
I myself is ashamed of staying quiet for so long - It is time we, the users of this state of the art communication tech - Starts to make our voices heard. The line should not be held merely by the few people involved in development and who make actual projects with Reticulum. We the users have a voice as well, let us use it and keep this community and this forum rigid and honest.