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Abuse is indefensible

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Re: Abuse is indefensible

#161

Post by tptacek »

snomad wrote: post #94

I didn't find this rant abusive. Once worked for a law firm in a high stress industry - some of those lawyers were abusive, woah nelly. Also, have a brother who was in army, you can't even imagine the language of he and his friends. This is child's play and someone who ultimately cares about delivering a quality end product who was offended by someone taking away from that mission. And his point was right, the code w…

"the code was bad and shoehorned into a magical one size fits all solution"

Can you explain what you mean by this?

"Not idiomatically appropriate for the kernel" and "bad" are very different concepts.

There's an interesting phenomenon happening where people are retconning Linus's objection to this code into a value judgement on the code itself. I'm curious whether that's what you're doing, or whether you have a grounded argument to back up your assertion that the code was, as you chose to put it, "bad".

Re: Abuse is indefensible

#162

Post by x1024 »

enneff wrote: post #152
x1024 wrote: post #148

So which is it? Does ranting have a huge impact that keeps people out, or does it "not have the power"? And if it's powerless, why are you so eager to censor it, then? Also, why don't you keep in your lane and only oppress the Go community with your code of conduct? There's no need to also invade Linux.

It is both. It means the only people who stick around are those who can tolerate the childishness. This certainly reduces the number of capable people that are willing to contribute to the project. I don't care much how Linus acts since I don't work with him. Some people try to emulate him and I sometimes come into contact with them; that's not great for me, but far be it from me to tell Linus how to act on his own m…

If I have to choose between Linus yelling at me and you censoring any official discussion channels, I'd go with Linus every time.

Now why don't you go back to your locked threads and enjoy the silence?

Re: Abuse is indefensible

#163

Post by nabla9 »

tptacek wrote: post #145
nabla9 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506823 I suspect that this is generational/cultural issue. Abusive is codified and differentiation between "abusive language" and actual abuse is lost from people. >This clearly is abusive language, and would not be tolerated in most professional teams, Assuming that some people can differentiate between "abusive language" and actual abuse, is it possible t…

An argument over the semantics of the word "abuse" will be unproductive. It's just abusive in a technical sense. I think on most well-managed teams in the US software industry, if you were a staff programmer, you could get away with a rant like this just once; you'd be warned, and if you did it again, you'd be dismissed. Obviously, if you were the manager, you could rant like this as much as you wanted. But then that…

>Obviously, if you were the manager, you could rant like this as much as you wanted.

I think you would be surprised what happens in boardrooms and how bad heated discussions between CTO or CEO can look for outsiders.

I understand that if you are managing code monkeys whose lifehood is in your hands, you must behave differently because there is huge power imbalance. But workplace where everyone is competitive individual (top level corporate, professional sports teams, hacker culture) can work well with people who test each other constantly.

Re: Abuse is indefensible

#164

Post by tptacek »

nabla9 wrote: post #163
tptacek wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An argument over the semantics of the word "abuse" will be unproductive. It's just abusive in a technical sense. I think on most well-managed teams in the US software industry, if you were a staff programmer, you could get away with a rant like this just once; you'd be warned, and if you did it again, you'd be dismissed. Obviously, if you were the manager, you could rant like this as much as you wanted. But then that…

>Obviously, if you were the manager, you could rant like this as much as you wanted. I think you would be surprised what happens in boardrooms and how bad heated discussions between CTO or CEO can look for outsiders. I understand that if you are managing code monkeys whose lifehood is in your hands, you must behave differently because there is huge power imbalance. But workplace where everyone is competitive individu…

I'm a startup founder (wincing), since ~1999. I've seen a board member ejected for talking like this.

But if you're talking about the board of, like, AB InBev, I dunno!

There are people who get away with it, and there are cultures that are fine with it, but my guess is that about 80% of the time, your ability to rant like this is a function of the social status hierarchy. In a Lord Of The Flies sense.

I'd be uncomfortable working on a team that allowed it, because my thought would be: we're not really allowed to talk to each other this way, and the day I piss someone higher-status off will be the day one of my rants is used as an excuse to manage me out of the team.

Re: Abuse is indefensible

#165

Post by enneff »

x1024 wrote: post #162
enneff wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is both. It means the only people who stick around are those who can tolerate the childishness. This certainly reduces the number of capable people that are willing to contribute to the project. I don't care much how Linus acts since I don't work with him. Some people try to emulate him and I sometimes come into contact with them; that's not great for me, but far be it from me to tell Linus how to act on his own m…

If I have to choose between Linus yelling at me and you censoring any official discussion channels, I'd go with Linus every time. Now why don't you go back to your locked threads and enjoy the silence?

I find it flattering that you try to deflect from your embarrassment by talking about me. :-)

Re: Abuse is indefensible

#166

Post by raverbashing »

tptacek wrote: post #153
raverbashing wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's also the issue of limited compiler support for that feature Maybe broken is too strong a word I agree

overflow_usub is the code that gets called when your compiler doesn't support __builtin_usub_overflow (Linus opposes both the function and the intrinsic, of course).

True, however how it is used in this case leads to unnecessary opacity

(I'm referring to the || mtu Sometimes 'smart code' is not necessarily better

(I'm open to disagreement, though)

Re: Abuse is indefensible

#167

Post by anonbanker »

unfamiliar wrote: post #2

I've read a few of Linus' rants and been on the fence, but this one does seem to have crossed some sort of line into being unnecessarily abusive, and to add to that, unclear communication. The rewritten version really does emphasise a much better approach. Linus's rant doesn't read like it was written by... a stable person. I was in full agreement with the article up until this: >Of the many things I could say about…

If you've been paying attention to Mozilla post-Eich, it's overrun with social justice warriors now. the JWZ's are long gone, since replaced by the Apparatchik[0]. Thankfully, the Servo side of things still has competent engineers.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik

Re: Abuse is indefensible

#168

Post by tptacek »

raverbashing wrote: post #166
tptacek wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

overflow_usub is the code that gets called when your compiler doesn't support __builtin_usub_overflow (Linus opposes both the function and the intrinsic, of course).

True, however how it is used in this case leads to unnecessary opacity (I'm referring to the || mtu Sometimes 'smart code' is not necessarily better (I'm open to disagreement, though)

Just to be clear: I don't think Linus is wrong (I'm also not qualified to judge that). From what I can tell, he's like, 52.5% right.

What's more interesting to me is how low-stakes this issue is. Gizmodo wrote an article about it, but really, if you understand kernel C, do you even give a shit about this code? Linus could have said "we're not using GCC builtin overflow intrinics", just like that, one line no punctuation, and the issue would have been settled.

But look at this thread at the number of people who extrapolated from Linus' rant that this code was bad, ruinous, unsafe, "one size fits all" (still scratching my head about that), &c. How many of Linus' defenders actually know what he's ranting about? It looks to me like: not many.

What's funny is, you actually do seem like you know what he's talking about, and even you overshot the mark with "broken". :)

Re: Abuse is indefensible

#169

Post by anonbanker »

A Social Justice Warrior from Mozilla makes a blog post about a project he doesn't contribute to, in order to comment about tone.

I can't wait until all these people fork the kernel. I bet it'll have literally double the amount of commits from these javascript programmers, finally able to peacefully contribute.

Re: Abuse is indefensible

#170

Post by JustSomeNobody »

tptacek wrote: post #142
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife and I are both software engineers, so I'm particularly sensitive to this topic. However, this even through me for a loop as to why it was mentioned.

Me too. Like, I think I agree with this post? But I'm not sure it's the best illustration of the phenomenon, or even a good one.

Yeah, it's just... awkward.
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