Some parts of the programming community has always embraced counterculture/things the public sees as bizzare. Surprise surprise, it's also the part that spends a lot more on the computer than even the already addicted average programmer. So they tend to be godly at the craft compared to us lesser mortals that still maintain some normal social behaviour and they can produce amazing stuff like this. Be thankful for it.
We knew you could, but you might as well not. Even if you don't see the empathy angle, who benefits from alienating people who do amazing work for free?
Even if you restrict his work to technology, it might be a wash at best.
Wasn't he one of those leading the charge in getting Cloudflare to drop a site due to bullying allegations? I think I'd rather have Cloudflare be neutral than have a few Linux drivers for new MacBooks a couple of years sooner than otherwise.
I didn't follow the saga as closely as I should have, perhaps, given the gravity. But this* didn't take long to find, only shortly preceding the issue.
But I don't see it as alienating. Marcan seems an intelligent person so he knows that his vtuber persona is weird. I suppose other people noticing and commenting on it is something he likes or even encourages. It's like... people who dye their hair green, or who wear thick golden chains or teeth grills. They want the attention.
As someone who is weird along many dimensions, I do expect people to treat harmless weirdness as normal. Expanding the set of acceptable behaviors to encompass all harmless ones is an important part of social progress.
Maybe consider that the loudness you resent is the result of reflexivity, and in a world where no-one would flip an eyelid over such persona creation and whatnot, there would only be the loudness you'd mistakenly perceive.
I'm wondering if you call authors using pen names "weird".
If I ever at all did youtube videos of anything at all, I would more likely than not adopt some persona (and give it a weird accent to boot) so it would distinctly be not "me".
Look at you, HideousKojima. What's your real name? Why do you pretend to be this online alias? Is it normal to hide your identity and interact as if you were someone else?
Take it with as much grains of salt as you want: IMO we're watching anime eat the world, Just like software did. Anime style audio-visual stimuli are synthetic data with human and its sexual drive in loop, now also connected with Internet mob judgement system like Twitter for a decade or so. Instagram style beauty filters and Diffusion ML models are no technical match, as their feedback loops are much longer, more constricted by ideologisms as well as by physicality.
Some platforms like TikTok and App Store had been fighting to un-realize the shift but that's only been delaying eventuality. We are already seeing increasingly beautified Tim Cook, anthropomorphized Earth, and two Chinese anime games on Apple presentations last year, there's only going to be more.
Ashai Linux is obviously a high-IQ effort and we are very fortunate they are motivated to work on this instead of something else (like ML)