What it is
It's an annotated rebuttal page, published 10 Sep 2026. It reproduces in full a short essay by pluie (Leah Amelia Chen), "Don't Give Them the Time of Day," posted 9 Sep 2026, under its CC BY-SA licence, and surrounds it with line-by-line commentary attacking it.
The page's metadata and clock give the author away: it's srid (Sridhar Ratnakumar), one of the three people pluie's essay names. So this is a response from the accused, not a neutral analysis.
The essay being annotated
pluie's argument, in brief: DHH's Omarchy project may adopt Nix; DHH is influential and (in pluie's view) politically objectionable; people previously banned from the Nix community — Jon Ringer and srid — are using the moment to regain standing. The correct response is not to argue with them, because engagement feeds attention, which is the resource they want. Instead: ignore them, don't ban them from
using Nix (that would prove their persecution narrative and violate the licences anyway), and win the internal narrative before the 2026 Steering Committee election.
The page's argument against it
Three overlapping critiques:
1. The psychological frame. The page reads the essay through Richard, an Australian writer (d. 2024) behind "actualism." His key concept is the
social identity: a psychological construct society installs over the instinctual self, containing a conscience or "guardian" that polices on the group's behalf and speaks as "we." Every "we must" in the essay is tagged as the guardian talking. Related terms it applies:
psychic web (projection, introjection, gaslighting),
peasant mentality (resentment of the influential),
victimology. Richard's list of ten identity types is turned into a bingo card scored against pluie's public writing.
2. The hypocrisy ledger. A table of the essay's claims against what its own linked sources say. Examples: the essay says Ringer was suspended for bad-faith debate, but the linked moderation notice describes his language as civil and unobjectionable; the essay says srid insists queer identities aren't real, but the linked page says srid will use preferred pronouns; the essay calls "woke" an alt-right coinage, when it's Black American English predating that by decades. Plus the structural one: a 1,300-word essay telling people not to feed trolls, naming the trolls, published the week before an election.
3. The hacker-ethic scorecard. Steven Levy's tenets from
Hackers (1984) — unlimited access, information should be free, mistrust authority, judge people by their work — scored against the essay and Nix's Code of Conduct. Nearly all marked as failed. The claimed inversion: open source succeeded by asking what you built; the essay asks what you are and whose side you're on.
It closes by "giving the time of day" — a live clock, three of pluie's sentences answered in Richard's ornate style with dictionary footnotes for words like
ultracrepidarian and
tergiversation, and a direct address suggesting pluie investigate the fear rather than the enemy.
How to read it
The receipts-checking is the strongest part and is verifiable — you can follow the links and see whether the captions match the sources. The actualism framing is the weakest as argument: it's an unfalsifiable lens. Once "social identity" explains everything a person writes, any reply from pluie would also be the guardian talking, which means the frame can't lose. It's also aimed asymmetrically — Richard's categories would apply just as readily to the author's own grievance.
Worth knowing that both parties are participants in a long, bitter governance fight in the Nix/NixOS project going back to 2023 (moderation bans, a constitutional assembly, a Steering Committee). Neither this page nor the essay is a disinterested account of it, and the page doesn't pretend otherwise.
, caffeine, and a smudge of estradiol. (candidate statement, home page.)"
x 9 
