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Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

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Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#151

Post by mrmondo »

ealexhudson wrote: post #108
smcleod wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not the only one, he may be brash at times but god damn we need him and maybe we need his brash anti-bullshit meter too.

Being able to call out bullshit doesn't mean having to curse it out. All Linus needs to do is say something like "I don't understand why this is here, and I'm not merging it until I do", rather than "They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense". The latter is not a technical argument, and it doesn't provide accuracy or clarity about next steps. "So somebody isn't telling the truth here. Som…

If you’re worried about ‘cursing’ and you seriously think that it’s something important in the scope of this discussion around security and the grand scale of negligence afoot, I believe you may need to re-evaluate your values.

In fact, the idea that you’re even bringing up such minor language at such a time really disappoints me.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#152

Post by icelancer »

ealexhudson wrote: post #108
smcleod wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not the only one, he may be brash at times but god damn we need him and maybe we need his brash anti-bullshit meter too.

Being able to call out bullshit doesn't mean having to curse it out. All Linus needs to do is say something like "I don't understand why this is here, and I'm not merging it until I do", rather than "They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense". The latter is not a technical argument, and it doesn't provide accuracy or clarity about next steps. "So somebody isn't telling the truth here. Som…

>> Being able to call out bullshit doesn't mean having to curse it out.

Here we go.

>> All Linus needs to do is say something like

And all you need to do is be that nice and be as brilliant as Linus is.

Oh, it's harder to be that smart than it is to be that nice? Maybe consider that for people as highly gifted as Linus, it actually isn't.

What you take for granted as normal behavior isn't always normal to others, especially those at the outliers of skill and intelligence.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#154

Post by [deleted] »

eps wrote: post #119
ewi_ wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to believe that one of the reasons Linus has that kind of reaction is because of the scope and impact his decisions and this kind of patches can have on people all around the world. This is a very specific situation, in which the advices in Sandya's article may not apply. However, I fail to see how Sandya's observations are BS. A code review is a place to improve code and oneself, and there's a pretty large…

In many cases it's not a patch that is a problem, it's the submitter and their approach/mindlessness/laziness/ethics that led to the patch being of an unacceptable quality. If you are trying to fix a watch and someone comes and suggest to hit it with a hammer, there's really not much place for being "respectful" with an answer.

[deleted]

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#155

Post by icelancer »

txdv wrote: post #140
sannee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Intel is a platinum member of the Linux Foundation, which means they donate >=500k$ per year.

Ah, if they stopped now, imagine the PR nightmare.

They won't, for so many more reasons beyond the PR nightmare.

Linus yelling at a former rep of Intel isn't enough to cause them to do something that stupid.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#156

Post by mschuster91 »

lucb1e wrote: post #94
onion2k wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not fooling anyone. They are fooling the content filters some corporate services use to block emails though.

I suspect it has more to do with the American culture. Every time I watch something American, be it a TV show or YouTube from a big name, things are constantly bleeped out or you notice they don't mention swear words. It's super annoying - either accept it and stop beeping, or stop swearing all the fucking time. It's also not as if you have no idea what that beep meant.

> It's super annoying - either accept it and stop beeping

IIRC the beeping at least of four-letter-words has to be done to avoid higher PG-ratings and/or fines from the FCC. Not much to do there.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#157

Post by mrmondo »

icelancer wrote: post #152
ealexhudson wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to call out bullshit doesn't mean having to curse it out. All Linus needs to do is say something like "I don't understand why this is here, and I'm not merging it until I do", rather than "They do literally insane things. They do things that do not make sense". The latter is not a technical argument, and it doesn't provide accuracy or clarity about next steps. "So somebody isn't telling the truth here. Som…

>> Being able to call out bullshit doesn't mean having to curse it out. Here we go. >> All Linus needs to do is say something like And all you need to do is be that nice and be as brilliant as Linus is. Oh, it's harder to be that smart than it is to be that nice? Maybe consider that for people as highly gifted as Linus, it actually isn't. What you take for granted as normal behavior isn't always normal to others, esp…

Thank you for saying what I couldn’t put into words.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#158

Post by fareesh »

From what I understand of meltdown and spectre, they use a side channel attack to figure out CPU cache values after some speculative execution has been done. Can it not be solved by ensuring that the CPU either clears or purposefully does not cache memory that is read during speculative execution?

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#159

Post by mseebach »

mrmondo wrote: post #21
Valmar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Management can seriously make or break a company in various ways. It sucks... :/

Could not agree more, unfortunately I’ve seen the latter more often than the former. When you find good management it is truly inspiring however.

There's some bias to this, though. Good management is much more "everything and everybody just seemingly by if self seems to be more or less in the right place" and less "Steve Jobs screaming at everybody about rounded corners and then everybody realising five years later that this is actually a much bigger deal than everbody except Jobs saw at the time" -- in other words, pretty invisible.

Re: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

#160

Post by mcv »

azernik wrote: post #111
bashcoder wrote: post #30

The most striking thing here is that Linus has apparently dismissed incompetence as a rational explanation. Yes, he is often brash, but usually he is accusing someone of sheer stupidity. He does not do that here. Linus alleges that we are being lied to - that we don’t know the full story, nor Intel’s motives. Furthermore, we are left to wonder if Microsoft is also being fed “bullshit” patches, and if they may be less…

He's quite clear about his theory as to Intel's motives: > The whole IBRS_ALL feature to me very clearly says "Intel is not serious about this, we'll have a ugly hack that will be so expensive that we don't want to enable it by default, because that would look bad in benchmarks". > So instead they try to push the garbage down to us. And they are doing it entirely wrong, even from a technical standpoint."

That bit sounds to me like Intel is trying to pull a "Volkswagen": have it perform better in benchmarks than in real life (when hopefully secure execution will be enabled).
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